>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM. Think 20, 21 brought to you by IBM. >>Hello everyone. And welcome back to IBM. Think 20, 21, the virtual edition, the cubes continuous coverage. And we're excited to talk about people. How do you align people and technology? Of course, there's a lot of process in between. Those are the hard, hard things. Technology is sometimes easy. Amy Wright is here. She's managing partner of talent transformation at IBM, Amy. Great to see you. >>Thanks. Great to be here. And Dave, >>Yeah, you know, we love to talk tech and sometimes we kind of sweep the really hard stuff under the rug. And we talk about transformation. I mean, it's, it's ongoing. I mean, you think about the pandemic last year, it was sort of this forced March to digital. We had to transform overnight, you know, the vast majority of leaders. I think that in figures like close to 95, 96% say that they've accelerated their digital transformation by half a half a decade. Uh, and of course that was a lot of, it was like I say, it's a forced March, so it wasn't really planful, but now they've got time to plan about a digital first approach and how to deal with remote workers. I wonder if you could talk about the role that people play in that digital transformation, >>Right. Thanks, Dave. Uh, I'm happy to, you know, a lot of people think of digital transformation about being technology oriented. It's a total shift in tech and it is, but it really can't be successful with just tech. So you're right with the pandemic has done for digital transformation. Is it really, it pushed us to these technology extremes more than anyone could have anticipated, particularly with our ways of working, being remote. It also pushed us to extremes and highlighted the role that humanity play played plays will continue to play. So we've been pushed to reimagine jobs, push to re-imagine workplaces, uh, push to re-imagine, how technology can deliver this connected enterprise, um, you know, through, through virtual reality, um, and virtual working, wasn't really something that was accepted before, but now we've been, you know, forced to accept it, which is, which is really great for the digital transformation because it accelerated that. >>So the connected enterprise though, isn't really just working virtually it's these new levels of productivity and decision-making that are enabled by intelligent workflows and cloud and data. And so the technology is absolutely critically important, but automation doesn't have empathy. So it takes people to turn these insights that are brought to us through technology and automation. It takes people to turn them into action and it's that human technology partnership that's required for the digital transformation to get to that desired impact. So when you think about, when we think about people in the role they play and, uh, you know, the pivotal role they play truly, multi-part, it's kind of three parts. One is people are the ones that build tech. And so they influence whether or not the automation is going to work, whether it meets the needs of the enterprise, if it takes advantage of the latest thinking, um, and it fits, you know, it was irresistible. >>If you will. The second is the people use the technology to gain this meaningful insight and turn it into action. And then the third is the people are the ones that embed this tech change into culture. So that's actually sustainable. So to be able to drive this sustainable digital transformation, the people, it requires the people to make it happen. So if you look at healthcare, Dave, think about the dramatic shift in healthcare in the past year where doctors have shifted to telemedicine, nurses have shifted to using iPads as caregivers at the, you know, with their patients that not only required to shift in the tech, but an adoption of caregivers have a new way of working that again, couldn't have been successful unless they adopted an embedded and embedded a different way of working in a different culture in everything that they do. >>You know, what you said is really important, especially we talk a lot about what machines can do that people can't and what people can do that machines can't and you just nailed it with, with empathy. And, and when you think about to the remote work, I think prior to the pandemic, it was probably around 15, 16% of workers were remote. And when you, when we do, we do surveys with a partner ETR out in New York and they, they project based on the surveys that, that that's going to double, but somewhere between 33, 35%, but people don't really know when, when you talk to people, they go, Hey, I kind of like working at home. Other people say, I can't wait to get back to the office. So people obviously critical part of the digital transformation, but how do you think about creating those meaningful experiences at work, whether that's remote, part-time remote, you know, full-time back at work. >>So this is a really great, great question because I think our point of view on this has changed. So first of all, most enterprises we talk to will move back to some hybrid kind of environment. We're never going to be everybody back in the office. Again, that's, that's, that's not who we will be moving forward, but the expectations of employees have changed. Um, we all know that, you know, think about your consumer lives and, and how we experienced that personalized ex that, that, that personalization, when we go to buy something online, that's now bled over into the workplace. So the employees expect that exact same personalized experience at work, but it's now so much more than that. Now it's not only personalization, which, you know, obviously tech enables quite dramatically, but the experience is broader to look at a holistic relationship between the employer and the employee. >>That's a little bit less, it's less transactional. Like I do my job and my company pays me for doing this, this set of activities, but it's more supportive and integrated with their personal selves. So, you know, we did a recent study in which we, uh, looked at consumers and employees and their highest priority areas for the expectations that they now have for their employers is career and skill advancement opportunities with speed. Second is work-life balances that might take the form of what hours they worked, our ability to, um, you know, manage with what they're doing in their home with, with their families and children, uh, you know, their ability to be camera ready or not at all times of day and night and actually where they work from. So people are now working, not only at home, but they're moving to different cities and want that flexibility. >>And then third, a high area of priority now is ethics and values. So not only diversity equity inclusion, obviously critically important, but ways of working and meaningful and purposeful work. So when you look at all of those together, the employee experience has grown to be not only that of personalization, like we have an art consumer world that is, that is critically important, but now, um, it's all of these other things, as well. As a matter of fact, they become so important, Dave, that in our recent research, it shows that one in four employees will change employers in 2021, one in four, one in four will also change professions in 2021. And while about 75% of employers, companies believe that they are doing a good job of meeting the needs. These expanded needs of their employees, less than half of employees feel the same way. So there's a lot of work to be done. So you asked the question, why is this people experience so important? It's important because it's required for the digital transformation. And it's so much broader than what we used to think that it's now a competitive differentiator for employers as they try to not only achieve their digital transformation, but as their organizations disrupt over and over again, um, it's, it's a requirement in order to meet their meet their enterprises objectives. >>So it was a great, uh, great stats, Amy, to just put out there. I mean the career advancement, I think, I feel like it's always been there, but it's now much more front and center employees are more vocal about it, the work life balance, same thing. I mean, you're seeing some organizations, you know, a hundred hour weeks where we're revolting and then, you know, the ethics and values piece to me is one of the most interesting, I often joke Milton Friedman rolling over in his grave because he was the economist that said, Oh, it's just about shareholder value. That's it. And that's not anymore. Um, in fact, there's clearly a relationship between shareholder value in, in ESG and ethics and, and young people are very, very concerned about it. So here's the question who's accountable for making sure that you have a positive employee experiences occur. >>Yeah, really, really, really good question. And the thing is, this is what makes it so hard. There's not one group or one person it's actually all of us. And I know that answer sounds like a little bit like a cop out, but this is why it makes it so hard. Every leader's responsible for the employee experience, every manager is responsible for the employee experience. Every employee is actually not responsible for the experience of their teammates. And actually speaking up if the experience isn't using inclusiveness as a, as an example, if it's not inclusive, every experience, every employee has the responsibility to speak up. So some companies actually have employee experience leaders. Some companies have digital transformation leaders that embodies that, that, that includes that employee experience, but most actually start this journey through the, through the partnership between it and HR. So I teach responsible for this technology architecture, the cloud strategy, the data strategy, architectural framework, all those pieces that put together the foundation and the building brought blocks and the security that helped to Mo um, modernize this employee experience. >>And by the way, they're doing this at the same time where they're modernizing their entire way in which the it function operates. Um, so you got it. That's kind of setting the stage and the foundation for what's possible. And then you have HR who's operating as the steward of the employee experience that those people experiences, um, and putting them in place in a consistent and consistent and a positive way across the entire enterprise. So things like design thinking, um, that puts the employee at the center of the way we, um, architect and create these experiences using rapid iterative design principles with, again, with this, with the employee at the center, making that the cultural norm across the enterprise is a really big deal. So HR is usually in the lead on making that happen. But again, this is a cultural shift, not just I have a project, you know, I'll kind of have a project plan and here's, here's what I'm going to execute on leadership roles. >>So HR is, is the steward of leadership and those characteristics of leaders now are changing very dramatically to be more, even in a big enterprise, large global enterprise entrepreneurial transparent, co-creation really at the core of everything. So being transplant transparent with your teams and be able to co-create, um, you know, procreate for the future. So data and AI, we can use data. And I AI now to actually IM uh, uh, predict the impact that the workforce and the cultural will have on business results, predict attrition, predict what different work workforce design scenarios will look like to the supply chain, um, uh, predict the speed of hiring and how that will impact literally bottom line business results. So you said it right, when, when, when you talked about shareholder value, the P people is at the center of shareholder value now. So, um, our functions need to be modernized, but it's really this partnership between HR and it that's gonna be able to make it happen in a big way. >>It's interesting. I'm just thinking that AI as well, can be a Canary in a coal mine when there's potential problems. Um, and I love this transparency. That's critical. Co-creation so, Oh, okay. So tech is a key part of that, especially in terms of when you go from analog to digital, taking friction out of the system shows the employees that we're investing in, in your experience. Uh, but it's more than that. You're saying it's, it's cultural as it makes it so kind of fuzzy cultural it's it's it takes a village. So that's, that's part of what makes it so hard. How do you think about, you know, the journey? Where do you start and how do you keep iterating? You're never done in this, this world. Are you, >>Yeah, that's a question, uh, everybody's asking now, w w where do I start? So, as you said, this is very hard, um, and it's hard. One of the reasons it's hard is it's because it revolves culture. Um, it's not only about technology. They are hard. Technologies are harder in their own, right? It's not just about data, that's hard in its own, right? But once you involve technology, it makes, it makes it even even harder. And of course the people aspect, unless done very proactively and meaningfully, it can be kind of a wild card right on, who's going to adopt what, so where do you start? So, um, the way we like to think about, um, giving advice to enterprises, uh, regarding where this is, we've seen this work well is to pick a business problem. So what's a business problem that if you solved, you can actually make an impact, not only for your people, but for your people, but for the enterprise. >>So if you could pick a business problem and actually fix it, using data, using cloud, using people, experiences using a cultural shift, then you'll get that. Buy-in, you'll get the buy-in that, yes, we can do this. This is this, this is very doable. We can repeat, it's repeating PETA repeatable over and over again. And it has an impact on our culture. That's a great place to start. Okay. So then you say, if that's a place to start, how do we actually, there's got to be foundational things that have to be in place to make that work. So one of them is a consistency in data and the use of AI and the ability to make insights meaningful, you know, that come through data and AI. And the other part that's really important once you pick your business problem is the shift in the way of working the shifts so that, um, it can impact cultural, um, cultural change, uh, shifts so that there's co-creation with your people and there's transparency. >>So each one of these business problems and the way companies, uh, pick to fix them, they, they won't all work. And the way you get that trust and transparency with your people is as scary as it is to share with them what you're attempting to do and share with them how you're doing along the journey. And if it fails, okay, fails, you know, pick yourself back up and start again, that trust and transparency with your people. That's the way, that's the way we all make this cultural impact. So it, you know, kind of the, none of this is to be, to make sustainable change. We can all make short term change. We can do projects, but to make sustainable change. The humanity aspect has to come to life in these digital transformations. And that only comes to life with this cultural shift, >>Amy, right? You've thought about this a lot deep expertise in the area. Really appreciate your sharing it with our audience. And thanks for coming on the cube, Dave, my pleasure. All right. Keep it right there. But this is Dave Volante. You're watching IBM think 2021, the virtual, is it addition from the queue.

>>from >>around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage >>of IBM. Think 20 >>21 brought to you by IBM. >>Hello, I want to welcome back to IBM think 2021 the virtual edition. The cubes continuous coverage. And we're excited to talk about people. How do you align people and technology? Of course there's a lot of process in between. Those are the hard, hard things technology sometimes easy amy right is here. She's managing partner of talent transformation at IBM Amy great to see you. >>Thanks Great to be here Dave >>Yeah. You know we love to talk tech and sometimes we kind of sweep the really hard stuff under the rug and we talk about transformation. I mean it's it's ongoing. I mean you think about the pandemic last year was sort of this forced march to digital, we had to transform overnight. You know the vast majority of leaders I think that figures like close to 95 96 say that they've accelerated their digital transformation by half a half a decade. And of course that was a lot of it was like I say, it's a forced march, so it wasn't really planned fel but now they've got time to plan about a digital first approach and how to deal with remote workers. I wonder if you could talk about the role that people play in that digital transformation. >>All right, thanks. Dave I'm happy to, you know, a lot of people think of digital transformation about being technology oriented. It's a total shift in tech and it is but it really can't be successful with just tech. So you're right with the pandemic has done for digital transformation, Is it really it pushed us to these technology extremes more than anyone could have anticipated, particularly with our ways of working being remote. It also pushed us to extremes and highlighted the role that humanity played place, it will continue to play. So we've been pushed to reimagine jobs, pushed to reimagine workplaces, push to reimagine how technology can deliver this connected enterprise. Um you know, through through virtuality. Um and virtual working wasn't really something that was accepted before, but now we've been forced to accept it, which is which is really great for the digital transformation because it accelerated that. So the connected enterprise though isn't really just working virtually. It's these new levels of productivity and decision making that are enabled by intelligent workflows and cloud and data. And so technology is absolutely critically important. But automation doesn't have empathy. So it takes people to turn these insights that are brought to us through technology and automation. It takes people to turn them into action. And it's that human technology partnership that's required for the digital transformation to get to that desired impact. So when you think about, when we think about people in the role they play, and, you know, it's the pivotal role they play. It's really multi part, it's kind of three parts. one is people are the ones that build the tech and so they influence whether or not the automation is going to work, whether it meets the needs of the enterprise, if it takes advantage of the latest thinking, um and if it's, you know, it's irresistible if you will. The second is the people use the technology to gain this meaningful insight and turn into action. And then the third is the people are the ones that embed this tech change into culture, so that's actually sustainable. So to be able to drive this sustainable digital transformation the people, it requires the people to make it happen. So, if you look at health care, Dave think about the dramatic shift in health care in the past year, where doctors have shifted to telemedicine, nurses have shifted to using ipads as caregivers at the, you know, with their patients that not only required to shift in the tech, but an adoption of caregivers of a new way of working that again, could have been successful unless they adopted and embedded, embedded a different way of working in a different culture and everything that they do. >>You know what you said is really important. Especially we talk a lot about what machines can do that people can what people can do that machines can you just nailed it with empathy. And and when you think about to the remote work, I think prior to the pandemic, it was probably around 15 16% of workers were remote. And when you when we do we do surveys with the partner E. T. R. In new york. And the They project based on these surveys that that that's gonna double somewhere between you know, 33 35%. But people don't really know when when you talk to people like I kind of like working at home, other people say I can't wait to get back to the office. So people obviously critical part of the digital transformation. But how do you think about creating those meaningful experiences at work? Whether that's remote? Part time, remote? Full time back at work? >>So this is a really great great question because I think our point of view on this has changed. So first of all, most enterprises we talked to will move back to some hybrid kind of environment. We're never going to be everybody back in the office again. That's that's that's not who we will be moving forward. But the expectations of employees have changed. Um We all know that, you know, think about your consumer lives and and how we experience that personalized that that that personalization when we go to buy something online that's now bled over into the workplace. So the employees expect that exact same personalized experience at work. But it's now so much more than that now. It's not only personalization which you know, obviously tech enables quite dramatically, but the experience is broader to look at a holistic relationship between the employer and employee. That's a little bit less, it's less transactional. Like I do my job and my company pays me for doing this set of activities, but it's more supportive and integrated with their personal cells. So, you know, we did a recent study in which we looked at consumers and employees and their highest priority areas for the expectations that they now have for their employers is career and skill advancement opportunities with speed. Second is work life balance is that might take the form of what hours they work. Their ability to um you know, manage with what they're doing in their home with their families and Children, uh you know, their ability to be camera ready or not at all times of day and night and actually where they work from. So people are now working not only at home, but they're moving to different cities and want that flexibility. And then third, hi, area of priority now is ethics and values. So not only diversity, equity, inclusion, obviously critically important, but ways of working and meaningful and purposeful work. So when you look at all of those together, the employee experience has grown to be not only that of personalization, like we have in our consumer world, that is that is critically important, but now um it's all of these other things as well as a matter of fact, they become so important dave that in our recent research, it shows that one in four Employees will change employers in 2021, 1 and 41 and four will also change professions in 2021. And while about 75 of employers, companies believe that they are doing a good job of meeting the needs, these expanded needs of their employees, less than half of employees feel the same way. So there's a lot of work to be done. So you ask the question why is this? People experience so important? It's important because it's required for the digital transformation and it's so much broader than what we used to think that it's now a competitive differentiator for employers as they try to not only achieve their digital transformation but as their organizations disrupt over and over again. Um It's a requirement in order to meet their meet their enterprises objectives. >>So it was a great great stats and you just put out there in the career advancement. I think I feel like it's always been there but it's now much more front and center employees are more vocal about it. The work like balance, same thing. I mean you're seeing some organizations in 100 hour weeks were revolting and and then you know, the ethics and values piece to me is one of the most interesting I often joke Milton Friedman rolling over in his grave because he was, the economist said uh it's just about shareholder value, that's it and that's not anymore. In fact there's clearly a relationship between shareholder value and E. S. G. And and ethics and young people are very very concerned about it. So here's the question who's accountable for making sure that you have a positive employee experiences occur. >>Yeah. Really really really good question. And the thing is this is what makes it so hard. There's not one group or one person it's actually all of us. And I know that answer sounds like a little bit like a cop out. But this is why it makes it so hard. Every leader is responsible for the employee experience, every manager is responsible for the employee experience. Every employee is actually not responsible for the experience of their teammates. And actually speaking up if the experience isn't using inclusiveness as an example if it's not inclusive. Every experience every employee has the responsibility to speak up. So some companies actually have employee experienced leaders. Some companies have digital transformation leaders that embodies that that that includes that employee experience. But most actually start this journey through the through the partnership between I. T. And H. R. So I. T. Is responsible for this technology architecture, the cloud strategy, the data strategy architectural framework. All those pieces that put together the foundation and the building blocks and the security that helped to um modernize this employee experience and by the way they're doing this at the same time with their modernizing their entire way in which the function operates. Um So you got I. T. That's kind of setting the stage and the foundation for what's possible. And then you have HR. Who's operating as the steward of the employee experience that those people experiences um and putting them in place in a consistent and consistent in a positive way across the entire enterprise. So things like design thinking um that puts the employee at the center of the way we um architect and create these experiences using rapid iterative design principles. With again with this with the employee at the centre making that the cultural norm across the enterprise is a really big deal. So HR is usually in the lead on making that happen. But again this is a cultural shift, not just I have a problem, you know kind of a project plan and here's here's what I'm going to execute on leadership roles. So HR is the steward of leadership and those characteristics of leaders now are changing very dramatically to be more even in a big enterprise large global enterprise entrepreneurial transparent co creation really at the core of everything. So being transplant transparent with your teams and be able to co create um you know co create for the future. So data and ai we can use data and I ai now to actually in uh predict the impact that the workforce and the cultural will have on business results, predict attrition, predict what different work workforce design scenarios will look like to the supply chain um uh predict the speed of hiring and how that will impact literally bottom line business results. So you said it right when when when you talked about shareholder value, the people is at the center of shareholder value now. So our functions need to be modernized. But it's really this partnership between HR. And I. T. That's going to be able to make it happen in a big way. >>It's interesting. I'm just thinking that Ai as well can be a canary in a coal mine when there's potential problems. And I love this transparency. That's critical co creation. So, okay, so tech is a key part of that, especially in terms of when you go from analog to digital, taking friction out of the system shows the employees that we're investing in in your experience. But it's more than that you're saying it's it's cultural and as it makes its kind of fun cultural, it takes a village. So that's that's part of what makes it so hard. How do you think about, you know the journey, where do you start and and how do you keep iterating? You're you're never done in this this world, are you? >>Yeah, that's a question uh everybody's asking now is where do I start? So as you said, this is very hard and and and it's hard. One of the reasons it's hard, it's because it revolves culture. Um it's not only about technology, they are hard. Technologies are hard in their own right. It's not just about data that's hard in its own right. But once you involve technology it makes it makes it even even harder. And of course the people aspect unless done very pro actively and meaningfully, it can be kind of a wild card right on who's gonna adopt what. So where do you start? So um the way we like to think about um giving advice to enterprises regarding where this is, we've seen this work well is to pick a business problem. So what's a business problem that if you solved you can actually make an impact not only for your people but for your people but for the enterprise. So if you could pick a business problem and and actually fix it using data using cloud using people, experiences using a cultural shift, then you'll get that. Buy in, you get the buy in that. Yes we can do this, this is this this is very doable. We can repeat it, repeat peat, repeatable over and over again and it has an impact on our culture. That's a great place to start. Okay so then you say if that's a place to start, how do we actually, there's got to be foundational things that have to be in place to make that work. So one of them is a consistency in data and the use of AI and the ability to make insights meaningful, you know that come through data and AI. And the other part that's really important once you pick your business problem is the shift in the way of working the shift so that it can impact cultural, a cultural change, a shift so that there's co creation with your people and there's transparency so each one of these business problems and the way companies pick to fix them, they won't all work. And the way you get that trust and transparency with your people is as scary as it is to share with them what you're attempting to do and share with them, how you're doing along the journey. And if it fails, okay fails, you know, pick yourself back up and start again that trust and transparency with your people. That's the way that's the way we all make this cultural impact. So, you know, kind of the none of this is to be to make sustainable change. We can all make short term change, we can do projects but to make sustainable change, the humanity aspect has to come to life in these digital transformations and that only comes to life with this cultural shift. >>Amy right? You've thought about this a lot, deep expertise in the area, really appreciate your sharing it with our audience and thanks for coming on the cube. >>Dave my pleasure. >>All right, keep it right there. But this is Dave Volonte. You're watching IBM think 2021 the virtual edition from the Cube. >>Yeah. Mhm.

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston. This is an episode in the remote works, Citrix virtual series. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in our Palo Alto studio here on this ongoing leadership series that we've been doing, reaching out to people in the community to get their take on what's going on with the COVID situation, what are best practices, what can we learn and specifically today, really the whole new way to work, and working from home. And we're really excited to have two guests on for this segment. The first one is Amy Hayworth. She is the Chief of Staff for HR for Citrix, joining us from Florida. Amy, great to see. >> Great to see you, Jeff. >> And also Tamara McCleary, who's been on many, many times coming to us from Denver. She is a well respected speaker, you've probably seen her doing more speaking than anything else, and also the CEO of Thulium. Tamara, great to see you. >> Thank you, I'm so excited for this conversation. >> Well, let's just jump into it. So it's so funny and doing a little homework, Amy, I came across a Professional Change Management executive conference, 2015 and you were talking about building change management as a profession and working from home was part of that and that was like five years ago and things creep along and then we have a light switch moment where there's no time to plan, there's no time to think, there's no time to implement things, it's, everyone must now stay at home. And so, outside the human tragedy, that is the COVID situation, we're not going to really speak to that here. But from a business point of view, suddenly with no warning, everyone had to work from home. From someone who's been in the profession of trying to drive change management through a process over time, what does that do for you? How do you digest that suddenly oh my goodness, we've got this light switch moment which is a forcing function that may have never come, but now we have to go? I wonder what your take is. >> I think the thing that get me most excited about this light switch moment is it is showing all of us that we are capable beyond what we ever thought we were when it comes to change. We've been called to take a leap, and for much of my experience in the organizational change management field, we spend a lot of time talking about managing resistance and the pushback about change and there's even this thing that drives me crazy, which is change is hard. I don't know why we tell ourselves that message. And I think what this is showing us is that number one, change is inevitable, it's going to happen. There is very little control that we actually have, but also we are more resilient, more adaptable. We're capable of change than many of us knew that we were. And it is calling up for me, what do we need to put in place within organizations to cultivate resilience? Because one of the things I think this is making all of us very aware is how volatile the world actually is. And it's also laid bare where we are strong individually and able to cope and where we also may need to do a little bit of practice and some very intentional resilience building. Though I think the conversation around the whole change management field is about to change and my hope is that focus turns more to resilience than it is to managing change. >> It's interesting 'cause a lot of just the chatter that's out there, is about Zoom. Do I use Zoom? Do I not use Zoom? Is it secure? All this other, people like to jump into the technology piece. But really, we had your boss on the other day, Donna Kimmel, the EVP and Chief People Officer, Citrix and she broke it down into three buckets. Culture was number one, physical space is number two and digital space was number three. And I thought it was really interesting that she really leads with empathy and human factors and I think that it's easy to forget those, but bringing up simple things that not only are you working from home, but guess what, your kids are home too and your spouse is home too. And they have meetings and they have Zoom calls, they have to do it or the other dog is still running around and all the other kinds of distractions. So the human factors are so, so important. Tamara, one of your early keynotes about your early development was in your early career working with people who are at the end of their life. And I know it helped you develop an empathy and really a prioritization that I think a lot of people are probably getting today that maybe they haven't thought about, what is truly important, what is truly meaningful. And this again, is this forcing function to say let's pump the brakes a little bit, take a step back and think about what's really important and the human factors. Again, your take on this crazy situation. >> I think you're absolutely right Jeff, and the fact that really what this has done, to Amy's point, yes we are very capable of change, but we're mostly so resistant and unwilling to change. And it's not because we don't want to, it's because we fear what will happen if we do change. And sometimes it's like the devil you know is better than the devil you don't. And right now what has been forced upon us is to really think about critical issues. So when you're faced with a lack of toilet paper and uncertainty about your survival rate, you start to think about things in terms of say Maslow's hierarchy of needs. You're looking at that base level, that safety piece. And when people go to safety, they have really left that area of self actualization in what do I want to be, what do I want to do? And it's more about, oh no, what have I done? Do I like my life? I'm stuck here at home, wherever you're sheltering in place and am I really enjoying my life? Am I experiencing my life? And what we really have experienced through being forced to get on to video conferencing, how many of you out there are doing video conferencing like a billion times a day? We're being forced to really see each other as human beings. And that means whether you're the CEO or you're the EVP of global blah, blah, it doesn't matter. What matters is your dog is still barking, your child is still running around and needs something from you in that moment when you happen to be on a call. Because as we all know, with kids, when you say, I can't be bothered for the next 30 minutes, what do you think is going to happen? That's exactly the time when they need more grapes. So I think that what it does is it levels the playing field and it shows us all how human we are. It shows us our strengths as Amy pointed out, and it also shows us our communal frailty. >> So let's get into some of the specifics about what people are feeling. Citrix just commissioned this report put on by one pole, pretty timely, comes out in April, 2020, about working from home. And I think there was really some interesting stuff, still connectivity and bandwidth, still the biggest challenge that people have. Can I even get online, was the number one problem. And when they do, their wifi is slow and there's single sign on. All these things that we've been talking about for years and years and years. I mean, why, why Amy, have we still not gotten it done? It's fascinating to me that in 2020, we still have internet connectivity issues and people don't know how to turn on their microphone on their Zoom call, we're so far behind. >> Yeah, Jeff, I think what we're seeing is number one, it takes practice, then the need to be familiar with all these tools. I also have talked to many parents who first day of homeschool, my son tells me I can't call it homeschool 'cause it's different, it's virtual school, he says it's very different. But that first day, especially families with multiple children trying to get onto a Zoom call with their class, Heron is trying to work, possibly two parents in the house are connected. Our home WiFi networks just haven't taken this kind of load before, but very quickly I think we needed to realize as an organization that this is not work from home, this is working at home during the global pandemic and it is very different. So you mentioned that need to lead with empathy and to really understand what's going on, and I think that's so true and just that the humanness of what we've experienced, that one full research really talked about a few epic moments of mishap, whether it's taking a call from the garage, I have a colleague who would take from the car on the street, still sheltering in place, but the only quiet place to go to take a call. We have a legend in our Singapore office. There's a salesperson who made record numbers working from his garage for a month. So there are all sorts of heroics taking place to balance than in the midst of that when technology isn't acting as we would hope it would under normal circumstances, having to adjust quickly, whether that means staggering schedules, working through accommodations, teachers, however it needs to happen but I think the reality and the acceptance, going back to that humanness and empathy is that we all have to shift our mindset about what work means and even are at work. We've built up a lot of these polishished buttoned up personas and when we are able to actually let some of that down, I think what we're starting to see is connection on a much deeper level amongst teams and among colleagues. >> I'm just looking at the survey at how few people think that this is going to roll over into a little bit more of a permanent form. Only 37% think my organization in general will be more relaxed about remote working. I think staff will be allowed to work from home more regularly, 36%. We had Marten Mickos on and he ran MySQL before it got bought by Sun many moons ago. He talked that he had a distributed team from day one and he laughed. He said, "It's so much easier to fake it at the office, "to look busy versus when you're remote." As you just said Amy, you're only judged by your deliverables. And I thought it was so funny in your blog posts from earlier this year that when managers start managing by outcome and deliverable rather than assuming as good work's getting done because someone showed up at the office, I mean this is ridiculous that people are still judging things based on activity, not outcome. And we're even seeing now all these new tools that people are introducing in the marketplace. I can tell you how often your people are on Zoom and how many hours on the VPN. What are we measuring? We should be measuring outcomes and the piece that comes up over and over is trust. And if I can't trust you to deliver outcomes, I probably have a bigger problem than managing your day to day. Tamara, you see this all the time in terms of the trust and how important this is to relationships. >> I do and in fact our workforce at Thulium has always been a remote workforce. And for the way that I've built our organization is treat everybody like an adult and get your work done. And we do base everything upon productivity versus FaceTime. And I think that the reason some of these larger organizations have had this concept of show up having that FaceTime means that whoever gets there the earliest and leaves the latest somehow has been a better employee, it's not true. It is about productivity. And I think those wise organizations that look at how much they can save with the costs of like AC heat, the building cost, having a brick and mortar for everyone to come into it is very costly. And it's an old paradigm that a lot of middle managers have, which is this control piece. And that if the people are there in the office, they've got more control. And actually what we find is you don't need that control, especially when you look at the younger generational cohort coming up, how they have a totally different view of work. And we've talked a lot about the future of work and the gig economy, and what this COVID pandemic has done for us is to show us that actually work does get done at home. And in fact in some respects, more work gets done at home because it's harder to stop working when your work is happening right there at home. And so it does blur the lines and the boundaries between the work life than the home life. And so I think you get a lot more out of your employees when they work from home. >> It's funny, when Donna was on, she brought up a really interesting topic. She said, "Every time somebody pushes back on that, "can't be done from home." This job, this person, this type of task can't be done from home. The question should always be like, why? It almost sounds like when you move the whole cloud conversation that we've been tracking, went from, when should I move stuff to cloud, to why shouldn't you move to cloud? And it's not, does it work on a mobile, it should be mobile first. And now this conversation is moving this to, why can't somebody do it from home, as opposed to it has to be done from the office? So I think even just the relative flip of the context of setting up the question seems to be changing. That's why it surprised me that so few people think that it's going to go back. It clearly, especially as this goes on for a while, new behaviors become habits and they become normalized and hopefully, the senior management pays attention to the outcome and again, not this activity which is really not, that's not what you want people to do, you want them to actually get stuff done. >> Jeff and Amy, the other thing I was going to say is, Amy, when you look at the report that Citrix has put out, how many people are even going to be able to go back to work when kids aren't going back to school? And then we have summer, piggybacking onto that, so now you've got parents who have kids at home, what is that outlook? To me, it's not just this simple, okay, it's over, let's get back to work guys, because the rest of our life has completely shifted as well. >> That was actually my conversation today, is starting to really think about holistically when it comes to policies, programs, what are we putting in place for the summer? And not only that, but even some of our employees who have been alone through this, I think at the beginning, there was a very large shift on those who had children or elder care to think about. And at some point, at least in this half of the world, about last week, we really started to hear, worried about this person who's been alone by themselves in their apartment sheltering for over a month. So I think if they start to look at the variety of experiences people are having, really being sensitive to different personas in the organization, different needs, different emotions that are happening and we even start to think about, what does that mean to come back to work? And I know countries and organizations are being very cognizant about doing that. safely, in a very gradual  way of thinking about it, but it starts to get very, very complex very quickly and also from just let's do this well because there's a whole new set. Jeff, you bring up all new set of questions of employees asking, I wasn't allowed to work from home prior, I would like to do that more often now, new conversations with managers about, well, how are we going to measure results? There's a lot of work to be done between now and then, whatever what then is, to really ensure that we help everyone be successful. And I think the conversation we're having, it's likely not going to be one or the other. The new normal is not the old normal and we're not sure what it is but most likely, there's going to be some sort of hybrid working arrangement. Right now, the playing field is leveled and that in and itself is a very different work from home experience. What happens when it's hybrid again and there are some who are remote, some who are in the office, how do we make sure that it's equitable and all the voices have equal opportunity to chime in? Because when people are in the office and their colleague or two is remote, it's not a level of conversation in an organization. So whether that's establishing norms or really just starting to create behaviors where if one person's remote, then everybody's remote no matter if you're in the office or not, you dial in via go to meeting or whatever collaboration tool you're , so all sorts of things to think about, but I guess that is our ecosystem of work is going to change for sure. >> It was so funny in your blog posts, you talked a little bit about that as well. And one of the little paragraphs was, who gets to do it? It's like this binary decision, you can either work from home or you can't. And there's this whole second order impacts that we see on infrastructure, there's nobody in the trains or there's nobody on the freeways. You think, wow, we actually have a lot of freeways if everyone is not on them at the same time. So, begs a lot of questions are why is everybody driving to work at 8:30 in the morning to work on their laptop? Now clearly if you're in construction or service trades and you've got a truck and you got to go do something on site, they have to be there. But I think hopefully what this will do is help people as you're discussing, look at those who can. And even if it's one day a week, two days a week, one day a week, every couple of weeks. The impact on infrastructure, the impact on traffic, the environment, mental health, Amy, you talked about mental health, sitting in a car for an hour each way, every day certainly is not helping anybody feel better about themselves or get more work done. So I think there are so many benefits if you just look at it in the right context, focused on who can, not who can't and the how and the why and the enabler. But it's really interesting, we've talked a lot about the physical space and the cultural space. Imagine if this happened in 2006, before the iPhone came out, the smartphone. Think of the crazy amount of tools that we do have. I mean right now, we're talking and we spread out all over the country. So we're actually in a really fortunate space in terms of the digital infrastructure that we have in place to enable these things. And I know Citrix, you guys have been in the lead of supporting this forever, now even have a whole set up of resources, what's it called, the Citrix Remote Work Hub for people to get resource to figure out everything from the mental health to the WiFi connectivity, to all these other little things as Tamara said, how do you manage the kids and the dog and your significant other that also has Zoom meetings that they have to attend? So it's so many resources that people need to use and not feel uncomfortable that they're alone and could use a little bit of an assist. >> Absolutely well said. When this quickly became a forced experiment to work remote, Citrix has 30 years of history helping enable successful remote work in a secure way and the first thing that we wanted to do was be of service. So pulling together these resources has been a big project and we're so glad to be able to provide this tool set and we truly do hope that it makes this transition stronger, better, it will continue to grow and to evolve even as our own experiences evolve, new challenges arise, but we definitely want to keep it fresh and keep meeting the need that's out there, both internal for Citrix as much as in as long as we've been doing, we don't have it all figured out, we are learning too, this is unchartered territory for everyone, but also to take what we are learning and put it out there in a very transparent way. >> Right, I want to-- >> You know, I was-- >> Go ahead, Tamara. >> Sorry, but there was just something so crazy, Jeff, about the study that Citrix put out. And Amy, I wanted to bring this up to you because you said they're coworkers like, well, so-and-so lives alone, I wonder if they're okay or if they're lonely. But in the study, barely a quarter of the individuals reported any loneliness. I find that to be pretty shocking. >> It is shocking and I think it really speaks to how quickly those happy hours, the Zoom Happy Hours or the gatherings and some of the creativity that started to pop up, but yeah, you made a great point, Tamara, that was surprising and I'm curious if that will continue to be the case. (murmurs) >> But I guess maybe some of us when we got home, we were like, wow, this isn't so bad after all. And then can you imagine? So Jeff, if only 28% of people experienced any loneliness, imagine when you can have peace and quiet in your home again and still work. I think that this really is a lot more delicious than a lot of us anticipated it would be. And, what a grand social science experiment this has been! It's phenomenal. >> The fact that everyone is experiencing it at the same time globally just blows my mind. I was here for the earthquake, I was in Portland for Mount Saint Helens, I've been through a few little things here and there, but those are still regional, there's still a safe space, there's still people that don't have that story. Everyone, six or 7 billion people will have a where were you in March, 2020 story, which is fascinating. And then as you said, it's not only the work from home, there's no time to plan and no time to put infrastructure and, oh by the way, the kids are home too, and school is also from home. So in terms of an accelerant, it's just gasoline on the fire. But I want to jump in a little bit about one of the things you talked about Amy and you'll take camera 'cause you're doing it in your own company, and is in terms of establishing norms. I think people are maybe not thinking about the fact that they either need to establish new norms or they need to be very clear on the communication of what the norms are so that everybody is as you said Amy, feels comfortable in this new space because we have norms at work and now we have to have these new norms and there's all kinds of funny stuff going on in terms of we talked about dogs and kids, that this and that dressed, you're not dressed, you put makeup on, it's funny in the survey, do you take a shower? Only 30 some odd people take a shower every day, which I thought was kind of-- unexpected >> What about the shoe comment? Did you believe that, Jeff, where people actually would wear their shoes to their death? Well, I'll tell you, they didn't ask the women because the women would not be wearing high heels at home if they didn't have. >> They didn't specify which shoes, Tamara, they just said shoes. So maybe the more comfortable flats were the ones that were coming out. But I'm just curious on establishing social norms. Tamara, I'll let you go first, how did you establish them? Was it hard to do? Did they self self-generate and as a leader, do you have to police it or is it self policing? How's that working? And then Amy, from your point in terms of formal communication in a much bigger organization and being part of the HR office, one might say, isn't that already part of HR's charter? But how's that different now? Tamara, I'll let you go first. >> Sure, it's a great question because since we do have a remote workforce, one of the most salient things that I found to be critically important for productivity and collaboration and even cohesion and decreasing those silos between business unit is making sure that we form a community. And so what I mean by that is we have and always have had, we've been using video conferencing since before the pandemic and we have video conferencing meetings where video is on, so that's one of the parameters, is everybody needs to see everyone else's faces, and we have a morning kickoff meeting, an all hands meeting and then we have an end of week one as well and part of that piece, we call a standup where people either share something that's either a challenge within their workplace or with a customer or even in their own personal life, and then they end on something to celebrate because I think it's really important for us to cultivate that. But it really helps the teams to get to know one another. So just because someone in this business unit doesn't work with someone in this business unit, they know one another because of these team meetings that we have. And so I think creating a culture of positivity and collaboration versus competition and creating a culture where people feel a part of a team and a part of something bigger and where they see that their contribution makes a difference to the whole, creates a really delicious community that helps people feel valued at work. And I think with a remote workforce, you have got to pay attention to how you are creating that community and that feeling and sense of value to each and every individual within the organization. >> It's a very different kind of a challenge. Amy, your thoughts on more of a formal approach to establishing social norms to some of these big organizations, or do you treat it differently as a big organization or is it just a bunch of small little clusters of people that work together? >> I have so many thoughts on this, so I would love to have a two hour dialogue with both of you on this topic. Couple thoughts, there's implicit norms that develop organically, and then there's the explicit ones which for whatever reason we seem more hesitant to have very explicit conversations about norms. I don't know if people think it's tedious or something like that, I'm not sure, I haven't done that research yet. But in times of transition, it's so incredibly important just even for efficiency to add certainty, to make sure that everyone has the same message, same expectation to lean a little more heavily on the exquisite norms. Talking about how do we want to begin our meeting, let's reserve the first 10 minutes and just catch up like we would in the hallway. Some of that is a shift to how those meetings probably were happening two months ago. So making sure that everyone understands is that expectation and even little bit more of a warmup question. How's everybody feeling today? And even getting more specific, there is a couple of organizational gurus who I have been following quite a bit lately, Aaron Dignan and Rodney Evans, Aaron wrote a book called "Brave New Work" and they also have a podcast, but they really talk about the organization as an operating system. And when we look at norms, the norms are so much a part of that operating system and getting really clear about who does what here. There're things like how are not taken, how are we following up, in our current climate, who's checking on who? And so having some of those explicit conversations I think are incredibly important. And also for me with some of the work that I've been doing over the last six weeks is trying to harness goodness across the globe. So we have a group of site leaders who meet twice a week, their charge is to look after their location. So every location in the Citrix ecosystem that has more than 20 employees has a designated site leader during this time. And in bigger sites, they have pulled together committees, they're doing things that are local level to keep that site engaged, but what we're also looking to do is harness the best of the best. Some really amazing things, I did a radio calisthenic last night with our team in Tokyo. So something very true and personal to the Japanese culture but other sites, they're doing coffee chats and having drop-ins, celebrity guests, organizational leaders that are pretty high profile just popping in and out actively to have a very authentic Q&A conversations. There's some really inventive ideas to keep people engaged and also possibly establish new norm and I think that the question for me is, what do people like so much that they decide that it stays in place? When we do have of that thing and people are in the office more often, what level of connectivity will we keep? Even, will people start showering every day again? Some of these things, who knows what's going to happen? >> You make me want to go down to a to RNB and look in the meeting rooms at Intel, they used to have a very defined meeting, culture meeting, process meeting establishment, super efficient just like they're making chips. I wonder if they've changed a little bit in light of what's going on, but final note in terms of frequency and variety of communications. Both of you now have mentioned in the communications with your people and what you're hearing about is one is, you got to increase the frequency just period. And in fact, you might actually be communicating more frequently 'cause you don't necessarily chat all the time in the hallways when you're physically together. And the other thing that strikes me is the variety. It's not just the meeting, it's not just information exchange, it's touching base with community, it's establishing deeper relationships, it's doing some social things that, kind of the variety and the frequency of direct communication person to person, just not necessarily closer than six feet within one another has to go up dramatically, and is, as you're seeing in best practices in this new world. Amy, why don't you go first? >> I'm seeing a lot more Slack usage, we are an organization that has a multitude of tools to choose from, Slack being one of them, but highly engaged Slack community. The other thing that's become very clear as an insight is the more authentic the communication, the better. So our CEO, David Henshall has been doing video pieces and they had become increasingly more personal about whether it's his space where he exercises what he's doing for exercise, and the employee response has been deep appreciation for feeling several degrees more connected to our senior leadership. Other senior leaders on the team have profiled their own work from home antic in a very humorous way and so just finding inventive ways to leverage the communication vehicles we have, but at a level that is very true to the situation we're in and very human at their core. >> So Tamara, let me ask you a followup on that. You're big on social, it's a big part of your business helping other companies do better at social and engage in social, and it strikes me, especially in the real senior leadership ranks, there are those who tweet just to pick a platform, like Michael Dell, Sanjay Poonen, some CUBE alumni that you know, and then there's some that don't. And again, we talked about the contrast of IBM now, Ginny didn't tweet now, the new CEO announces it on LinkedIn. When you talk to CEOs and leaders about getting involved in social, I'm sure a lot of them that don't do it, just say the risk reward is not there, why am I going to expose some little personal tidbit of myself when the potential harm is great? But as we just heard from Amy, people like to know who the person is, people want to relate to who the person is. That's kind of part of the whole CUBE thing that we figured out a long time ago, is people are interested in the people that are behind the technology in the companies in the implementation. So how do you advise people, what do you see to convince them that, hey, it's actually in your best interest to show a little vulnerability, to show a little humanity, to maybe be scared sometimes and not necessarily have the right answer? How do you help coach them that these are good things, not bad things? >> It's so brilliant you brought this up, Jeff, because with the pandemic, a lot of the executives that were not on social media all of a sudden wanted to be on social media, and how do I do this, and how do I set up my thought leadership? Because this was a very primary mode of communication. And I think what we're seeing is that you do see a lot of the progressive CEOs and executive members on social media and then what you've outlined is there was a hesitancy by a lot of the CEOs who come from a different paradigm in which the hierarchal structure was such that they got to this level and why do I need to be on social media? And what we're seeing is that this push from the younger generational cohorts, which is they don't really see that hierarchal structure at all, and they want to be able to communicate with their CEO as much as they want to communicate with their manager. And when they can't, there is this distrust and you brought up the trust piece, which is huge. And I do know that a lot of global business leaders in highly regulated industries have been afraid, like in the financial services industry because there are a lot of rules and regulations. So I can understand and appreciate their hesitancy to be on social media, which is like a bit of the wild West. And you see those that are really pretty insulated from anything that they do, you can see like Elon Musk can tweet whatever he wants to tweet, and a lot of executives don't feel that they have that same sort of freedom. And so how we work with them, we work in the B2B and enterprise space is about what is it that you want to be known for? What is it that you're passionate about that would, Amy's point, be uplifting to those who not only work internally, your internal stakeholders, but to even your customers or those on the external, and stick to that? So no, you don't need to tweet about your political feelings, you don't need to tweet about sensitive subjects. We always say stay away from politics and religion, but you can absolutely establish a very authentic transparent, vulnerable thought leadership about the things that you care about. And we say pick three things. What three things do you want people to think of when you're not in the room? Pick three adjectives and then construct your editorial calendar, what you're doing on social media around how those three things are going to come to life. Through all of your email? Through your videos that you share with your community? And also what you're talking about on LinkedIn, Twitter and no, I'm not advising any of the executives to get on TikTok, but I do advise them to be on LinkedIn and Twitter. >> Matt Eastwood is starting to play with TikTok, so I don't know if you follow him on that, but he's a budding Casey Neistat. So I think he's getting into the TikTok thing, or even just TikTok edits, it's great. We could go on and on and on, and I really appreciate the time and it's just interesting again, pulling from Amy's blog post about leadership and you lead with trust, accountability, vulnerability, inclusion and communication. I think those are all human things and I think are so important. So final word, assuming things are going to get better in let's just say a year from now, we get back together and talk about how the new way to work has changed in a post COVID world, what do you hope that we'll be talking about that's different a year from now than we are today? Beyond obviously the COVID itself? Amy, you first. >> Wow. To narrow that down, I hope we are talking about how organizations have invested in helping our people find their strengths and feed with resilience and to understand what it is that helps them operate at their best, no matter what situation that you're in. >> That's great. Tamara? >> Me, Jeff, I'm going to hope that we are talking about the technology that's available a year from now that's going to help us have a much more immersive experience remotely working. So we'll be talking about hopefully things like the haptic internet, well that haptic interface with tactile internet and how AR, VR and mixed reality settings will help us as remote authors to feel like we're actually in meetings and having the same sort of experience that oftentimes we think we get only when we're at the building with everybody else. So I hope we're talking about how technology is really moving the needle forward to helping our remote workforce have that same experience and camaraderie and team building that they do in the physical space. >> Great. Well and again, there's this digital is different than physical, we're not together physically and we can't be right now, but we're together digitally. And so it's not the same, it's different, but there's a lot of good things about it too. So thank you both for taking the time, this has been a really great conversation. Amy, I agree with you, we could go for another couple of hours, but I think the crew would start throwing things at me. So I think we'll have to cut it off here. Thanks again and stay safe and really appreciate the time. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> Thank you. >> All right, thank you for tuning in, thanks for watching theCUBE, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to the Bellagio in Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. Day one of UiPath Forward III, hashtag UiPathForward. Elena Christopher is here. She's the senior vice president at HFS Research, and Elena, I'm going to recruit you to be my co-host here. >> Co-host! >> On this power panel. Jean Youngers here, CUBE alum, VP, a Six Sigma Leader at Security Benefit. Great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> Dave: And Amy Chandler, who is the Assistant Vice President and Director of Internal Controls, also from Security Benefit. >> Hello. >> Dave: Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Alright Elena, let's start off with you. You follow this market, you have for some time, you know HFS is sort of anointed as formulating this market place, right? >> Elena: We like to think of ourselves as the voice-- >> You guys were early on. >> The voice of the automation industry. >> So, what are you seeing? I mean, process automation has been around forever, RPA is a hot recent trend, but what are you seeing the last year or two? What are the big trends and rip currents that you see in the market place? >> I mean, I think one of the big trends that's out there, I mean, RPA's come on to the scene. I like how you phrase it Dave, because you refer to it as, rightly so, automation is not new, and so we sort of say the big question out there is, "Is RPA just flavor of the month?" RPA is definitely not, and I come from a firm, we put out a blog earlier this year called "RPA is dead. Long live automation." And that's because, when we look at RPA, and when we think about what it's impact is in the market place, to us the whole point of automation in any form, regardless of whether it's RPA, whether it be good old old school BPM, whatever it may be, it's mission is to drive transformation, and so the HFS perspective, and what all of our research shows and sort of justifies that the goal is, what everyone is striving towards, is to get to that transformation. And so, the reason we put out that piece, the "RPA is dead. Long live integrated automation platforms" is to make the point that if you're not- 'cause what does RPA allow? It affords an opportunity for change to drive transformation so, if you're not actually looking at your processes within your company and taking this opportunity to say, "What can I change, what processes are just bad, "and we've been doing them, I'm not even sure why, "for so long. What can we transform, "what can we optimize, what can we invent?" If you're not taking that opportunity as an enterprise to truly embrace the change and move towards transformation, that's a missed opportunity. So I always say, RPA, you can kind of couch it as one of many technologies, but what RPA has really done for the market place today, it's given business users and business leaders the realization that they can have a role in their own transformation. And that's one of the reasons why it's actually become very important, but a single tool in it's own right will never be the holistic answer. >> So Jean, Elena's bringing up a point about transformation. We, Stew Bennett and I interviewed you last year and we've played those clips a number of times, where you sort of were explaining to us that it didn't make sense before RPA to try to drive Six Sigma into business processes; you couldn't get the return. >> Jean: Right. >> Now you can do it very cheaply. And for Six Sigma or better, is what you use for airplane engines, right? >> Right. >> So, now you're bringing up the business process. So, you're a year in, how's it going? What kind of results are you seeing? Is it meeting your expectations? >> It's been wonderful. It has been the best, it's been probably the most fun I've had in the last fifteen years of work. I have enjoyed, partly because I get to work with this great person here, and she's my COE, and helps stand up the whole RPA solution, but you know, we have gone from finance into investment operations, into operations, you know we've got one sitting right now that we're going to be looking at statements that it's going to be fourteen thousand hours out of both time out as well as staff hours saved, and it's going to touch our customer directly, that they're not going to get a bad statement anymore. And so, you know, it has just been an incredible journey for us over the past year, it really has. >> And so okay Amy, your role is, you're the hardcore practitioner here right? >> Amy: That's right. >> You run the COE. Tell us more about your role, and I'm really interested in how you're bringing it out, RPA to the organization. Is that led by your team, or is it kind of this top-down approach? >> Yeah, this last year, we spent a lot of time trying to educate the lower levels and go from a bottom-up perspective. Pretty much, we implemented our infrastructure, we had a nice solid change management process, we built in logical access, we built in good processes around that so that we'd be able to scale easily over this last year, which kind of sets us up for next year, and everything that we want to accomplish then. >> So Elena, we were talking earlier on theCUBE about you know, RPA, in many ways, I called it cleaning up the crime scene, where stuff is kind of really sort of a mass and huge opportunities to improve. So, my question to you is, it seems like RPA is, in some regards, successful because you can drop it into existing processes, you're not changing things, but in a way, this concerns that, oh well, I'm just kind of paving the cow path. So how much process reinvention should have to occur in order to take advantage of RPA? >> I love that you use that phrase, "paving the cow path." As a New Englander, as you know the roads in Boston are in fact paved cow paths, so we know that can lead to some dodgy roads, and that's part of, and I say it because that's part of what the answer is, because the reinvention, and honestly the optimization has to be part of what the answer is. I said it just a little bit earlier in my comments, you're missing an opportunity with RPA and broader automation if you don't take that step to actually look at your processes and figure out if there's just essentially deadwood that you need to get rid of, things that need to be improved. One of the sort of guidelines, because not all processes are created equal, because you don't want to spend the time and effort, and you guys should chime in on this, you don't want to spend the time and effort to optimize a process if it's not critical to your business, if you're not going to get lift from it, or from some ROI. It's a bit of a continuum, so one of the things that I always encourage enterprises to think about, is this idea of, well what's the, obviously, what business problem are you trying to solve? But as you're going through the process optimization, what kind of user experience do you want out of this? And your users, by the way, you tend to think of your user as, it could be your end customer, it could be your employee, it could even be your partner, but trying to figure out what the experience is that you actually want to have, and then you can actually then look at the process and figure out, do we need to do something different? Do we need to do something completely new to actually optimize that? And then again, line it with what you're trying to solve and what kind of lift you want to get from it. But I'd love to, I mean, hopping over to you guys, you live and breathe this, right? And so I think you have a slightly different opinion than me, but-- >> We do live and breathe it, and every process we look at, we take into consideration. But you've also got to, you have a continuum right? If it's a simple process and we can put it up very quickly, we do, but we've also got ones where one process'll come into us, and a perfect example is our rate changes. >> Amy: Rate changes. >> It came in and there was one process at the very end and they ended up, we did a wing to wing of the whole thing, followed the data all the way back through the process, and I think it hit, what, seven or eight-- >> Yeah. >> Different areas-- >> Areas. >> Of the business, and once we got done with that whole wing to wing to see what we could optimize, it turned into what, sixty? >> Amy: Yeah, sixty plus. Yeah. >> Dave: Sixty plus what? >> Bot processes from one entry. >> Yeah. >> And so, right now, we've got 189 to 200 processes in the back log. And so if you take that, and exponentially increase it, we know that there's probably actually 1,000 to 2,000 more processes, at minimum, that we can hit for the company, and we need to look at those. >> Yeah, and I will say, the wing to wing approach is very important because you're following the data as it's moving along. So if you don't do that, if you only focus on a small little piece of it, you don't what's happening to the data before it gets to you and you don't know what's going to happen to it when it leaves you, so you really do have to take that wing to wing approach. >> So, internal controls is in your title, so talking about scale, it's a big theme here at UiPath, and these days, things scale really fast, and boo-boos can happen really fast. So how are you ensuring, you know that the edicts of the organization are met, whether it's security, compliance, governance? Is that part of your role? >> Yeah, we've actually kept internal audit and internal controls, and in fact, our external auditors, EY. We've kept them all at the table when we've gone through processes, when we've built out our change management process, our logical access. When we built our whole process from beginning to end they kind of sat at the table with us and kind of went over everything to make sure that we were hitting all the controls that we needed to do. >> And actually, I'd like to piggyback on that comment, because just that inclusion of the various roles, that's what we found as an emerging best practice, and in all of our research and all of the qualitative conversations that we have with enterprises and service providers, is because if you do things, I mean it applies on multiple levels, because if you do things in a silo, you'll have siloed impact. If you bring the appropriate constituents to the table, you're going to understand their perspective, but it's going to have broader reach. So it helps alleviate the silos but it also supports the point that you just made Amy, about looking at the processes end to end, because you've got the necessary constituents involved so you know the context, and then, I believe, I mean I think you guys shared this with me, that particularly when audit's involved, you're perhaps helping cultivate an understanding of how even their processes can improve as well. >> Right. >> That is true, and from an overall standpoint with controls, I think a lot of people don't realize that a huge benefit is your controls, cause if you're automating your controls, from an internal standpoint, you're not going to have to test as much, just from an associate process owner paying attention to their process to the internal auditors, they're not going to have to test as much either, and then your external auditors, which that's revenue. I mean, that's savings. >> You lower your auditing bill? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Well we'll see right? >> Yeah. (laughter) >> That's always the hope. >> Don't tell EY. (laughter) So I got to ask you, so you're in a little over a year So I don't know if you golf, but you know a mulligan in golf. If you had a mulligan, a do over, what would you do over? >> The first process we put in place. At least for me, it breaks a lot, and we did it because at the time, we were going through decoupling and trying to just get something up to make sure that what we stood up was going to work and everything, and so we kind of slammed it in, and we pay for that every quarter, and so actually it's on our list to redo. >> Yeah, we automated a bad process. >> Yeah, we automated a bad process. >> That's a really good point. >> So we pay for it in maintenance every quarter, we pay for it, cause it breaks inevitably. >> Yes. >> Okay so what has to happen? You have to reinvent the process, to Elena's? >> Yes, you know, we relied on a process that somebody else had put in place, and in looking at it, it was kind of a up and down and through the hoop and around this way to get what they needed, and you know there's much easier ways to get the data now. And that's what we're doing. In fact, we've built our own, we call it a bot mart. That's where all our data goes, they won't let us touch the other data marts and so forth so they created us a bot mart, and anything that we need data for, they dump in there for us and then that's where our bot can hit, and our bot can hit it at anytime of the day or night when we need the data, and so it's worked out really well for us, and so the bot mart kind of came out of that project of there's got to be a better way. How can we do this better instead of relying on these systems that change and upgrade and then we run the bot and its working one day and the next day, somebody has gone in and tweaked something, and when all's I really need out of that system is data, that's all I need. I don't need, you know, a report. I don't need anything like that, cause the reports change and they get messed up. I just want the raw data, and so that's what we're starting to do. >> How do you ensure that the data is synchronized with your other marts and warehouses, is that a problem? >> Not yet. >> No not yet! (laughter) >> I'm wondering cause I was thinking the exact same question Dave, because on one hand its a nice I think step from a governance standpoint. You have what you need, perhaps IT or whomever your data curators are, they're not going to have a heart attack that you're touching stuff that they don't want you to, but then there is that potential for synchronization issues, cause that whole concept of golden source implies one copy if you will. >> Well, and it is. It's all coming through, we have a central data repository that the data's going to come through, and it's all sitting there, and then it'll move over, and to me, what I most worry about, like I mentioned on the statement once, okay, I get my data in, is it the same data that got used to create those statements? And as we're doing the testing and as we're looking at going live, that's one of our huge test cases. We need to understand what time that data comes in, when will it be into our bot mart, so when can I run those bots? You know, cause they're all going to be unattended on those, so you know, the timing is critical, and so that's why I said not yet. >> Dave: (chuckle) >> But you want to know what, we can build the bot to do that compare of the data for us. >> Haha all right. I love that. >> I saw a stat the other day. I don't know where it was, on Twitter or maybe it was your data, that more money by whatever, 2023 is going to be spent on chat bots than mobile development. >> Jean: I can imagine, yes. >> What are you doing with chat bots? And how are you using them? >> Do you want to answer that one or do you want me to? >> Go ahead. >> Okay so, part of the reason I'm so enthralled by the chat bot or personal assistant or anything, is because the unattended robots that we have, we have problems making sure that people are doing what they're supposed to be doing in prep. We have some in finance, and you know, finance you have a very fine line of what you can automate and what you need the user to still understand what they're doing, right? And so we felt like we had a really good, you know, combination of that, but in some instances, they forget to do things, so things aren't there and we get the phone call the bot broke, right? So part of the thing I'd like to do is I'd like to move that back to an unattended bot, and I'm going to put a chat bot in front of it, and then all's they have to do is type in "run my bot" and it'll come up if they have more than one bot, it'll say "which one do you want to run?" They'll click it and it'll go. Instead of having to go out on their machine, figure out where to go, figure out which button to do, and in the chat I can also send them a little message, "Did you run your other reports? Did you do this?" You know, so, I can use it for the end user, to make that experience for them better. And plus, we've got a lot of IT, we've got a lot of HR stuff that can fold into that, and then RPA all in behind it, kind of the engine on a lot of it. >> I mean you've child proofed the bot. >> Exactly! There you go. There you go. >> Exactly. Exactly. And it also provides a means to be able to answer those commonly asked questions for HR for example. You know, how much vacation time do I have? When can I change my benefits? Examples of those that they answer frequently every day. So that provides another avenue for utilization of the chat bot. >> And if I may, Dave, it supports a concept that I know we were talking about yesterday. At HFS it's our "Triple-A Trifecta", but it's taking the baseline of automation, it intersects with components of AI, and then potentially with analytics. This is starting to touch on some of the opportunities to look at other technologies. You say chat bots. At HFS we don't use the term chat bot, just because we like to focus and emphasize the cognitive capability if you will. But in any case, you guys essentially are saying, well RPA is doing great for what we're using RPA for, but we need a little bit of extension of functionality, so we're layering in the chat bot or cognitive assistant. So it's a nice example of some of that extension of really seeing how it's, I always call it the power of and if you will. Are you going to layer these things in to get what you need out of it? What best solves your business problems? Just a very practical approach I think. >> So Elena, Guy has a session tomorrow on predictions. So we're going to end with some predictions. So our RPA is dead, (chuckle) will it be resuscitated? What's the future of RPA look like? Will it live up to the hype? I mean so many initiatives in our industry haven't. I always criticize enterprise data warehousing and ETL and big data is not living up to the hype. Will RPA? >> It's got a hell of a lot of hype to live up to, I'll tell you that. So, back to some of our causality about why we even said it's dead. As a discrete software category, RPA is clearly not dead at all. But unless it's helping to drive forward with transformation, and even some of the strategies that these fine ladies from Security Benefit are utilizing, which is layering in additional technology. That's part of the path there. But honestly, the biggest challenge that you have to go through to get there and cannot be underestimated, is the change that your organization has to go through. Cause think about it, if we look at the grand big vision of where RPA and broader intelligent automation takes us, the concept of creating a hybrid workforce, right? So what's a hybrid workforce? It's literally our humans complemented by digital workers. So it still sounds like science fiction. To think that any enterprise could try and achieve some version of that and that it would be A, fast or B, not take a lot of change management, is absolutely ludicrous. So it's just a very practical approach to be eyes wide open, recognize that you're solving problems but you have to want to drive change. So to me, and sort of the HFS perspective, continues to be that if RPA is not going to die a terrible death, it needs to really support that vision of transformation. And I mean honestly, we're here at a UiPath event, they had many announcements today that they're doing a couple of things. Supporting core functionality of RPA, literally adding in process discovery and mining capabilities, adding in analytics to help enterprises actually track what your benefit is. >> Jean: Yes. >> These are very practical cases that help RPA live another day. But they're also extending functionality, adding in their whole announcement around AI fabric, adding in some of the cognitive capability to extend the functionality. And so prediction-wise, RPA as we know it three years from now is not going to look like RPA at all. I'm not going to call it AI, but it's going to become a hybrid, and it's honestly going to look a lot like that Triple-A Trifecta I mentioned. >> Well, and UiPath, and I presume other suppliers as well, are expanding their markets. They're reaching, you hear about citizens developers and 100% of the workforce. Obviously you guys are excited and you see a long-run way for RPA. >> Jean: Yeah, we do. >> I'll give you the last word. >> It's been a wonderful journey thus far. After this morning's event where they showed us everything, I saw a sneak peek yesterday during the CAB, and I had a list of things I wanted to talk to her about already when I came out of there. And then she saw more of 'em today, and I've got a pocketful of notes of stuff that we're going to take back and do. I really, truly believe this is the future and we can do so much. Six Sigma has kind of gotten a rebirth. You go in and look at your processes and we can get those to perfect. I mean, that's what's so cool. It is so cool that you can actually tell somebody, I can do something perfect for you. And how many people get to do that? >> It's back to the user experience, right? We can make this wildly functional to meet the need. >> Right, right. And I don't think RPA is the end all solution, I think it's just a great tool to add to your toolkit and utilize moving forward. >> Right. All right we'll have to leave it there. Thanks ladies for coming on, it was a great segment. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. We'll be right back from UiPath Forward III from Las Vegas, right after this short break. (technical music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back to the Bellagio in Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. Day one of UiPath Forward III, hashtag UiPathForward. Elena Christopher is here. She's the senior vice president at HFS Research, and Elena, I'm going to recruit you to be my co-host here. >> Co-host! >> On this power panel. Jean Youngers here, CUBE alum, VP, a Six Sigma Leader at Security Benefit. Great to see you again. >> Thank you. >> Dave: And Amy Chandler, who is the Assistant Vice President and Director of Internal Controls, also from Security Benefit. >> Hello. >> Dave: Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Alright Elena, let's start off with you. You follow this market, you have for some time, you know HFS is sort of anointed as formulating this market place, right? >> Elena: We like to think of ourselves as the voice-- >> You guys were early on. >> The voice of the automation industry. >> So, what are you seeing? I mean, process automation has been around forever, RPA is a hot recent trend, but what are you seeing the last year or two? What are the big trends and rip currents that you see in the market place? >> I mean, I think one of the big trends that's out there, I mean, RPA's come on to the scene. I like how you phrase it Dave, because you refer to it as, rightly so, automation is not new, and so we sort of say the big question out there is, "Is RPA just flavor of the month?" RPA is definitely not, and I come from a firm, we put out a blog earlier this year called "RPA is dead. Long live automation." And that's because, when we look at RPA, and when we think about what it's impact is in the market place, to us the whole point of automation in any form, regardless of whether it's RPA, whether it be good old old school BPM, whatever it may be, it's mission is to drive transformation, and so the HFS perspective, and what all of our research shows and sort of justifies that the goal is, what everyone is striving towards, is to get to that transformation. And so, the reason we put out that piece, the "RPA is dead. Long live integrated automation platforms" is to make the point that if you're not- 'cause what does RPA allow? It affords an opportunity for change to drive transformation so, if you're not actually looking at your processes within your company and taking this opportunity to say, "What can I change, what processes are just bad, "and we've been doing them, I'm not even sure why, "for so long. What can we transform, "what can we optimize, what can we invent?" If you're not taking that opportunity as an enterprise to truly embrace the change and move towards transformation, that's a missed opportunity. So I always say, RPA, you can kind of couch it as one of many technologies, but what RPA has really done for the market place today, it's given business users and business leaders the realization that they can have a role in their own transformation. And that's one of the reasons why it's actually become very important, but a single tool in it's own right will never be the holistic answer. >> So Jean, Elena's bringing up a point about transformation. We, Stew Bennett and I interviewed you last year and we've played those clips a number of times, where you sort of were explaining to us that it didn't make sense before RPA to try to drive Six Sigma into business processes; you couldn't get the return. >> Jean: Right. >> Now you can do it very cheaply. And for Six Sigma or better, is what you use for airplane engines, right? >> Right. >> So, now you're bringing up the business process. So, you're a year in, how's it going? What kind of results are you seeing? Is it meeting your expectations? >> It's been wonderful. It has been the best, it's been probably the most fun I've had in the last fifteen years of work. I have enjoyed, partly because I get to work with this great person here, and she's my COE, and helps stand up the whole RPA solution, but you know, we have gone from finance into investment operations, into operations, you know we've got one sitting right now that we're going to be looking at statements that it's going to be fourteen thousand hours out of both time out as well as staff hours saved, and it's going to touch our customer directly, that they're not going to get a bad statement anymore. And so, you know, it has just been an incredible journey for us over the past year, it really has. >> And so okay Amy, your role is, you're the hardcore practitioner here right? >> Amy: That's right. >> You run the COE. Tell us more about your role, and I'm really interested in how you're bringing it out, RPA to the organization. Is that led by your team, or is it kind of this top-down approach? >> Yeah, this last year, we spent a lot of time trying to educate the lower levels and go from a bottom-up perspective. Pretty much, we implemented our infrastructure, we had a nice solid change management process, we built in logical access, we built in good processes around that so that we'd be able to scale easily over this last year, which kind of sets us up for next year, and everything that we want to accomplish then. >> So Elena, we were talking earlier on theCUBE about you know, RPA, in many ways, I called it cleaning up the crime scene, where stuff is kind of really sort of a mass and huge opportunities to improve. So, my question to you is, it seems like RPA is, in some regards, successful because you can drop it into existing processes, you're not changing things, but in a way, this concerns that, oh well, I'm just kind of paving the cow path. So how much process reinvention should have to occur in order to take advantage of RPA? >> I love that you use that phrase, "paving the cow path." As a New Englander, as you know the roads in Boston are in fact paved cow paths, so we know that can lead to some dodgy roads, and that's part of, and I say it because that's part of what the answer is, because the reinvention, and honestly the optimization has to be part of what the answer is. I said it just a little bit earlier in my comments, you're missing an opportunity with RPA and broader automation if you don't take that step to actually look at your processes and figure out if there's just essentially deadwood that you need to get rid of, things that need to be improved. One of the sort of guidelines, because not all processes are created equal, because you don't want to spend the time and effort, and you guys should chime in on this, you don't want to spend the time and effort to optimize a process if it's not critical to your business, if you're not going to get lift from it, or from some ROI. It's a bit of a continuum, so one of the things that I always encourage enterprises to think about, is this idea of, well what's the, obviously, what business problem are you trying to solve? But as you're going through the process optimization, what kind of user experience do you want out of this? And your users, by the way, you tend to think of your user as, it could be your end customer, it could be your employee, it could even be your partner, but trying to figure out what the experience is that you actually want to have, and then you can actually then look at the process and figure out, do we need to do something different? Do we need to do something completely new to actually optimize that? And then again, line it with what you're trying to solve and what kind of lift you want to get from it. But I'd love to, I mean, hopping over to you guys, you live and breathe this, right? And so I think you have a slightly different opinion than me, but-- >> We do live and breathe it, and every process we look at, we take into consideration. But you've also got to, you have a continuum right? If it's a simple process and we can put it up very quickly, we do, but we've also got ones where one process'll come into us, and a perfect example is our rate changes. >> Amy: Rate changes. >> It came in and there was one process at the very end and they ended up, we did a wing to wing of the whole thing, followed the data all the way back through the process, and I think it hit, what, seven or eight-- >> Yeah. >> Different areas-- >> Areas. >> Of the business, and once we got done with that whole wing to wing to see what we could optimize, it turned into what, sixty? >> Amy: Yeah, sixty plus. Yeah. >> Dave: Sixty plus what? >> Bot processes from one entry. >> Yeah. >> And so, right now, we've got 189 to 200 processes in the back log. And so if you take that, and exponentially increase it, we know that there's probably actually 1,000 to 2,000 more processes, at minimum, that we can hit for the company, and we need to look at those. >> Yeah, and I will say, the wing to wing approach is very important because you're following the data as it's moving along. So if you don't do that, if you only focus on a small little piece of it, you don't what's happening to the data before it gets to you and you don't know what's going to happen to it when it leaves you, so you really do have to take that wing to wing approach. >> So, internal controls is in your title, so talking about scale, it's a big theme here at UiPath, and these days, things scale really fast, and boo-boos can happen really fast. So how are you ensuring, you know that the edicts of the organization are met, whether it's security, compliance, governance? Is that part of your role? >> Yeah, we've actually kept internal audit and internal controls, and in fact, our external auditors, EY. We've kept them all at the table when we've gone through processes, when we've built out our change management process, our logical access. When we built our whole process from beginning to end they kind of sat at the table with us and kind of went over everything to make sure that we were hitting all the controls that we needed to do. >> And actually, I'd like to piggyback on that comment, because just that inclusion of the various roles, that's what we found as an emerging best practice, and in all of our research and all of the qualitative conversations that we have with enterprises and service providers, is because if you do things, I mean it applies on multiple levels, because if you do things in a silo, you'll have siloed impact. If you bring the appropriate constituents to the table, you're going to understand their perspective, but it's going to have broader reach. So it helps alleviate the silos but it also supports the point that you just made Amy, about looking at the processes end to end, because you've got the necessary constituents involved so you know the context, and then, I believe, I mean I think you guys shared this with me, that particularly when audit's involved, you're perhaps helping cultivate an understanding of how even their processes can improve as well. >> Right. >> That is true, and from an overall standpoint with controls, I think a lot of people don't realize that a huge benefit is your controls, cause if you're automating your controls, from an internal standpoint, you're not going to have to test as much, just from an associate process owner paying attention to their process to the internal auditors, they're not going to have to test as much either, and then your external auditors, which that's revenue. I mean, that's savings. >> You lower your auditing bill? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Well we'll see right? >> Yeah. (laughter) >> That's always the hope. >> Don't tell EY. (laughter) So I got to ask you, so you're in a little over a year So I don't know if you golf, but you know a mulligan in golf. If you had a mulligan, a do over, what would you do over? >> The first process we put in place. At least for me, it breaks a lot, and we did it because at the time, we were going through decoupling and trying to just get something up to make sure that what we stood up was going to work and everything, and so we kind of slammed it in, and we pay for that every quarter, and so actually it's on our list to redo. >> Yeah, we automated a bad process. >> Yeah, we automated a bad process. >> That's a really good point. >> So we pay for it in maintenance every quarter, we pay for it, cause it breaks inevitably. >> Yes. >> Okay so what has to happen? You have to reinvent the process, to Elena's? >> Yes, you know, we relied on a process that somebody else had put in place, and in looking at it, it was kind of a up and down and through the hoop and around this way to get what they needed, and you know there's much easier ways to get the data now. And that's what we're doing. In fact, we've built our own, we call it a bot mart. That's where all our data goes, they won't let us touch the other data marts and so forth so they created us a bot mart, and anything that we need data for, they dump in there for us and then that's where our bot can hit, and our bot can hit it at anytime of the day or night when we need the data, and so it's worked out really well for us, and so the bot mart kind of came out of that project of there's got to be a better way. How can we do this better instead of relying on these systems that change and upgrade and then we run the bot and its working one day and the next day, somebody has gone in and tweaked something, and when all's I really need out of that system is data, that's all I need. I don't need, you know, a report. I don't need anything like that, cause the reports change and they get messed up. I just want the raw data, and so that's what we're starting to do. >> How do you ensure that the data is synchronized with your other marts and warehouses, is that a problem? >> Not yet. >> No not yet! (laughter) >> I'm wondering cause I was thinking the exact same question Dave, because on one hand its a nice I think step from a governance standpoint. You have what you need, perhaps IT or whomever your data curators are, they're not going to have a heart attack that you're touching stuff that they don't want you to, but then there is that potential for synchronization issues, cause that whole concept of golden source implies one copy if you will. >> Well, and it is. It's all coming through, we have a central data repository that the data's going to come through, and it's all sitting there, and then it'll move over, and to me, what I most worry about, like I mentioned on the statement once, okay, I get my data in, is it the same data that got used to create those statements? And as we're doing the testing and as we're looking at going live, that's one of our huge test cases. We need to understand what time that data comes in, when will it be into our bot mart, so when can I run those bots? You know, cause they're all going to be unattended on those, so you know, the timing is critical, and so that's why I said not yet. >> Dave: (chuckle) >> But you want to know what, we can build the bot to do that compare of the data for us. >> Haha all right. I love that. >> I saw a stat the other day. I don't know where it was, on Twitter or maybe it was your data, that more money by whatever, 2023 is going to be spent on chat bots than mobile development. >> Jean: I can imagine, yes. >> What are you doing with chat bots? And how are you using them? >> Do you want to answer that one or do you want me to? >> Go ahead. >> Okay so, part of the reason I'm so enthralled by the chat bot or personal assistant or anything, is because the unattended robots that we have, we have problems making sure that people are doing what they're supposed to be doing in prep. We have some in finance, and you know, finance you have a very fine line of what you can automate and what you need the user to still understand what they're doing, right? And so we felt like we had a really good, you know, combination of that, but in some instances, they forget to do things, so things aren't there and we get the phone call the bot broke, right? So part of the thing I'd like to do is I'd like to move that back to an unattended bot, and I'm going to put a chat bot in front of it, and then all's they have to do is type in "run my bot" and it'll come up if they have more than one bot, it'll say "which one do you want to run?" They'll click it and it'll go. Instead of having to go out on their machine, figure out where to go, figure out which button to do, and in the chat I can also send them a little message, "Did you run your other reports? Did you do this?" You know, so, I can use it for the end user, to make that experience for them better. And plus, we've got a lot of IT, we've got a lot of HR stuff that can fold into that, and then RPA all in behind it, kind of the engine on a lot of it. >> I mean you've child proofed the bot. >> Exactly! There you go. There you go. >> Exactly. Exactly. And it also provides a means to be able to answer those commonly asked questions for HR for example. You know, how much vacation time do I have? When can I change my benefits? Examples of those that they answer frequently every day. So that provides another avenue for utilization of the chat bot. >> And if I may, Dave, it supports a concept that I know we were talking about yesterday. At HFS it's our "Triple-A Trifecta", but it's taking the baseline of automation, it intersects with components of AI, and then potentially with analytics. This is starting to touch on some of the opportunities to look at other technologies. You say chat bots. At HFS we don't use the term chat bot, just because we like to focus and emphasize the cognitive capability if you will. But in any case, you guys essentially are saying, well RPA is doing great for what we're using RPA for, but we need a little bit of extension of functionality, so we're layering in the chat bot or cognitive assistant. So it's a nice example of some of that extension of really seeing how it's, I always call it the power of and if you will. Are you going to layer these things in to get what you need out of it? What best solves your business problems? Just a very practical approach I think. >> So Elena, Guy has a session tomorrow on predictions. So we're going to end with some predictions. So our RPA is dead, (chuckle) will it be resuscitated? What's the future of RPA look like? Will it live up to the hype? I mean so many initiatives in our industry haven't. I always criticize enterprise data warehousing and ETL and big data is not living up to the hype. Will RPA? >> It's got a hell of a lot of hype to live up to, I'll tell you that. So, back to some of our causality about why we even said it's dead. As a discrete software category, RPA is clearly not dead at all. But unless it's helping to drive forward with transformation, and even some of the strategies that these fine ladies from Security Benefit are utilizing, which is layering in additional technology. That's part of the path there. But honestly, the biggest challenge that you have to go through to get there and cannot be underestimated, is the change that your organization has to go through. Cause think about it, if we look at the grand big vision of where RPA and broader intelligent automation takes us, the concept of creating a hybrid workforce, right? So what's a hybrid workforce? It's literally our humans complemented by digital workers. So it still sounds like science fiction. To think that any enterprise could try and achieve some version of that and that it would be A, fast or B, not take a lot of change management, is absolutely ludicrous. So it's just a very practical approach to be eyes wide open, recognize that you're solving problems but you have to want to drive change. So to me, and sort of the HFS perspective, continues to be that if RPA is not going to die a terrible death, it needs to really support that vision of transformation. And I mean honestly, we're here at a UiPath event, they had many announcements today that they're doing a couple of things. Supporting core functionality of RPA, literally adding in process discovery and mining capabilities, adding in analytics to help enterprises actually track what your benefit is. >> Jean: Yes. >> These are very practical cases that help RPA live another day. But they're also extending functionality, adding in their whole announcement around AI fabric, adding in some of the cognitive capability to extend the functionality. And so prediction-wise, RPA as we know it three years from now is not going to look like RPA at all. I'm not going to call it AI, but it's going to become a hybrid, and it's honestly going to look a lot like that Triple-A Trifecta I mentioned. >> Well, and UiPath, and I presume other suppliers as well, are expanding their markets. They're reaching, you hear about citizens developers and 100% of the workforce. Obviously you guys are excited and you see a long-run way for RPA. >> Jean: Yeah, we do. >> I'll give you the last word. >> It's been a wonderful journey thus far. After this morning's event where they showed us everything, I saw a sneak peek yesterday during the CAB, and I had a list of things I wanted to talk to her about already when I came out of there. And then she saw more of 'em today, and I've got a pocketful of notes of stuff that we're going to take back and do. I really, truly believe this is the future and we can do so much. Six Sigma has kind of gotten a rebirth. You go in and look at your processes and we can get those to perfect. I mean, that's what's so cool. It is so cool that you can actually tell somebody, I can do something perfect for you. And how many people get to do that? >> It's back to the user experience, right? We can make this wildly functional to meet the need. >> Right, right. And I don't think RPA is the end all solution, I think it's just a great tool to add to your toolkit and utilize moving forward. >> Right. All right we'll have to leave it there. Thanks ladies for coming on, it was a great segment. Really appreciate your time. >> Thanks. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for watching, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with theCUBE. We'll be right back from UiPath Forward III from Las Vegas, right after this short break. (technical music)

>> fly from San Francisco. It's the queue covering Google Cloud next nineteen, Tio by Google Cloud and its ecosystem Partners. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We hear it live coverage here in San Francisco, in Moscow, near on the show floor at Google Cloud. Next. Hashtag Google next nineteen on John Barrier with Dave. A long thing with the Cube, where he with Amy Loki G Sweet vice president of U X for Google. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> So we've been here. It's day two of three days of coverage. A lot of action here. Great profile of of attendees. You got developers. You've got a lot of corporate enterprise focus kind of cloud coming. Maid. She has been the part of the theme, But I loved your key. No, you're showing all the cool features of G. Sweep of the new innovations was kind of going away. What's coming around the corner? What was the mean exercise of Aquino was the main theme. What was the key message? >> Yeah, well, I think in general we are really excited about how g speed is adapting to the changing landscape of work. And so what you heard me talk about was really how we're seeing how ghee sweets, playing a key role and connecting mobile remote workforces. So those front line workers with the back office. And that's a scenario that we're seeing happening today with our customers and many different industries, some unexpected, some expected. So, you know, we heard about AirAsia aviation industry on DH. Then we also talked about a scenario in the retail industry. And so what we're seeing is that these frontline workers are using products like hangouts, chat to communicate very quickly and send data and information back to the back office. S O G. Sweets. Really helping make this immediate sharing of information available so that, you know, strategic decisions can be made based on the data and the information that this remote workforce has available to them. And so, you know, helping connect those groups is a key piece of, I think, where we see work going in the future. What if some >> of the innovations, because one thing is that we're power uses of G sweet disclosure, we use G sweet, happy customers. The productivity has always been a big one stand up very easily. Don't need it. Get search all this great. All these great features. But as people keep using it, you guys are innovating more. What of the key design and user experience? Innovations to help people remember more productive because no males not going away. You've got good filtering. What if some of the new things >> right, Right. Well, you know, I think I certainly a hot word, right? But that is something where we see, you know, plays a key role in the enterprise. Because what we found through a lot of the user research that my team has done and also just largely in the industry, is that people categorized their work into two things. One is kind of repetitive, mundane work that the things that they have to do but they don't really enjoy and the other would be their core work. That, they see, is their intellectual contribution that builds their profile, builds their reputation, makes the marketable, unemployable and so on. And so if you look at that category of that repetitive work hey, I can play a really amazing role in helping alleviate that mundane, repetitive work. And so, you know, great example of that. A smart compose which hopefully you views on. So what we look at is things like, say, a salutation in an email where you have to think about who are you addressing? How do you want to address some? How do you spell their name? We can alleviate that and make your composition much faster. S o The exciting announcement that we had today was that we are leveraging the Google assistant. So the assistant that you're used to using at home via your home devices are on your phone and we're connecting that to your Google calendar. And so you'LL be able to ask your assistant what you have on your schedule. You know what's ahead of you during your day. Be able to do that on the go. So, you know, I think in general one of the unique opportunities that we have with G suite is not only I, but taking these products that consumers know in love and bringing them into the enterprise. And so we see that that helps people adopted understand the products, but also just brings that like consumer grade simplicity and elegance in the design into the enterprise, which brings joy to the workplace. >> You talk about this kind of new vision of of how you're gonna work. And I I first started. It was introduced with the sweet because of collaboration features. I mean, to this day, if somebody wants to be to edit a document, if it's not in Google docks, I'm going to look at it. >> Not gonna tell >> you I'm not going to do when I got it. You get it? It's just a waste of time. So I want to work faster. Smarter? I want more productive. I wanted to be secure. And the great thing is, these features just show up. Yes. Yeah. You call that smart? Composed. I call it, finish my thought. So. So paint a vision of what that future of work looks like. >> Yeah, well, I mean, certainly we see that work is getting more distributed. Work is getting more mobile. You know, we see more and more that work forces are in many different locations, not just all together in one office. So what excites me about these tools is I really see them in ways that we kind of build relationships amongst colleagues that may not get to spend face to face time together. So whether that's through video conferencing, whether that's through chat, all of these tools play a critical role in really building connective ity and culture of a team so that they can do their best work together. And so I really think of them not just a CZ like productivity tools, but as relationship building tools on DH. So I think the more that the tools can almost just help facilitate humans connecting and communicating. That's when we're really going to elevate the way that people can work together. >> I think cloud is so disrupted. We've been talking all today and yesterday around how the disruptive business miles changed with SAS and Cloud and databases from databases to the front end and one of the things that we've seen over the years. The trends is O Cloud. First Mobile first, first Mobile first and cloud First data first. But one of the things we're seeing is that no one's really cracked the code yet on virtual First, where companies now could be virtual. You don't really need maybe even need an office for me when you say virtual first. That means having an HR app that's designed for remote and distributed work teams. This's becoming a trend. Now we're starting to see some visibility around this new virtual first. >> Yeah, you guys look >> at it that way You guys have any conversation about? Can you share any reaction to that concept of virtual first companies where the processes were tailored for those remote work forces that might gather for meetings physical face to face, but then have to go back and be digital? Yeah, it's on that. >> Uh, Well, yeah. I mean, I think it goes back. Tio, this distributed idea, right? People are working in different places, but I think also different time place an element as well to solve, you know, speak for Google. In particular, we have a global team, right? Which means my team is working on different time zones. It's different, you know, different places as well. So you have to find kind of like you said that virtual way to connect. It's definitely something that we're seeing. I don't know that I have anything specific to comment on it this time, and it's definitely a trend that we're aware of. How >> about you? I designed and user experience what some of the cutting edge techniques that are emerging that you're seeing that's working that you're doubling down on. Can you share some insight into what u ex think customers and users like? >> Sure, Well, I mean, I think one of the big thing is voice input, right? And so you hear a lot about conversational You y is certainly very much an emerging discipline within the field. So, you know, when I started this career path, it was all about pixels on a screen and how you might move and manipulate those pixels and interact with them. But now, with all the voice to text capability, it's really about how can you communicate in an interactive way with digital experience? But you don't necessarily have to use your hands right. You don't necessarily have to have an input device like a mouse or a keyboard, which is a really exciting space, right, because it also opens up a world of, you know, ways that we can bring in more diverse workforce together through assistive technology and accessibility features. Right? So one of the things that I was excited to demonstrate today eyes the transcription capability within a meeting. So using hangouts meet you'LL be able to transcribe the meeting and have that show up on text on the screen, which helps people with varying ways that they might want to engage, be able to engage with the conversation right >> there. Just taking notes >> first is taking the right person. You >> are listening to the whole, you know, recorded video aft. The fact, Yeah, yeah, time consuming. >> Absolutely. You could look at a transcription. So I do think that, like interaction, is going to be less necessarily about using a device that helps you interact and more about using a natural interface like a conversation. >> We had a highlight reel for the meetings. That >> way you get the hard life. That's machine learning could come in. I was asking about the inbox before. What did you learn from that initiative? What do you carrying over what could use his expect? >> Yeah, well, I mean, inbox certainly was a great way for us to experiment and try out different features. There was a lot that we learn from that product. Onda lot of it. We have brought over ways that we kind of come prioritized your messages. Help kind of remind you what to get back Teo and categorize them. And those are all things that we've learned from inbox and we'LL continue to carry for it and it to Gino >> One of things we hear all the time that we've been covering Google clouds. Really, since the beginning, security has always been a big part of it. One things that you guys do that I like is identifying malicious e mails. Right? So talk about how you guys interface because also, you've got a little warning. Gotta warn users. Well, maybe a visual thing as well. But also this tech involved, right? Security's a huge concern for fishing. Spear fishing, Right, So we're talking about that. >> What's fantastic about what we could do a female is like I mentioned this morning. This is a product that, you know, I think over one point five billion people use right, which means that our machine learning on that data is incredibly powerful. And that's how we're able to detect malicious e mails and protect you from them and also warn you. And it's where design plays a role, too, because, like you may have seen it, I know it for myself. I rarely see them, but when I d'Oh, there's a big red banner at the top of the email that warns you that this is an email you should probably be cautious around, right? Eso ITT's were designed plays a role in security. But also our technology really is, you know, kind of far above on. You know what >> you do notice? It's like, Are you sure you want to hit? Send this makes your right. Thank you. Thank >> you. The productivity is is also a double edged sword. You guys have been so good with filtering. I can't use the excuse almost being my spam folder. You guys do a great job of filtering out spam, and it's kind of killing the newsletter business. But there's a lot of stuff that you guys categorize this this kind of again back to the collective intelligence across the billions of signals or users. How do you guys look at that? What's the Can you share some insight on how that works is their secret sauce is there, You know, because you've got spam, you got, you know, not urgent. You got a ways to kind of bring all that out >> Yeah. You know, I'm probably not the best to comment on how that all works, you know, coming from or is it a secret arrest after >> some machine learning? >> So that's an element. But, you know, essentially, what we want to do is make sure that your most important messages are in the foreground. And then you Khun, respond to the other messages when you have the right time and you want to address this thing. So you know, I find for me it's actually useful to go through, and I'm in that mindset like maybe it's a Sunday morning while I'm having my lot go through the newsletters and see the things that I want to catch in Terms of promotions are offers things like that, and I like being able to compartmentalize my time that way. One of >> the nice things that I noticed that you guys a collective intelligence, always a good thing that's where data comes in is that you have these now reminded. Sometimes I see some stuff on my email or says, Hey, you might want to pay attention this evening. >> A little >> kind of pops up the nudge. Is that new? When does that come out. Is that something that's been around >> something that's been out for a bit? I don't remember specifically when we launched it, but it was probably in the last few months, kind of time frame. But yeah, that's another way that we want to make sure that you're not missing important messages. I find it incredibly useful at work because there are those messages that I read, and I think I'm going to respond right away, but something to divert me to something else. And then I pushes down the list, so I find that the accuracy on this is amazing as well. >> About search of discovery I was just one of the benefits of of G Suite is across the board surgeon. Cross correlation. Any innovations there? Any new kind of techniques that you're seeing around search and layout holders is going because anything new there were thinking around that. >> I spoke a bit this morning about clouds search, which is, you know, a product that we launched about two years ago and that really, that enables businesses bring the power of Google search into their business, and it's also a standalone products. So if businesses aren't totally ready to make the move to G suite. They can kind of dip a toe in the water by trying search within their business on DH. Then what was exciting that we announced today is we now allow third party connectivity, so clouds search will not just searched. Your corpus of G sweet data are Google data. It will search all types of data at your company. So you know, including things like cells for us or SAPI data on. So that means that now, for the end user benefit, they can search all of the digital assets at their company and all the people and get those results in one place >> because, I mean, I know I personally creating data faster than I could manage it. So having a powerful search like that, So that sounds like was gonna ask you that sounds like you help how you'LL help use your solve that problem. Yeah, absolutely. So that's a product that I can purchase a standalone you completely standalone. Whatever data I want >> all the data within your business. Yeah, and, you know, based on our research, we find that people spend an inordinate, inordinate amount of time at work, searching for information, right? So we can help cut down that time and help them find the thing that they need That saves people that kind of time at work. >> How do you price it is for users that there's a terabyte or >> I have to get back? >> Don't know. Don't >> know off the top >> of citrus and I'm ready to buy a castle only objective. Come on. Any >> question for you on a CZ you look at the Enterprise is a big enterprise. Focus. What have you learned in dealing with the enterprise? Because great born in the clouds standing up Jeez, we, like we've done ten years ago on then certainly won't get the corporate account been great for our business. But as enterprising had the legacy stuff, whether Microsoft outlook or whatever they have existing stuff that they're used to. What have you learned dealing with the enterprise either? Integration. Sarah experienced What? Can you share any insights to some of those learnings? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean so one of the things that's tantamount the enterprises interoperability. And so we've been really focused on ensuring that the sweet works well with other products in the enterprise, and I think that is a continuing trend way. See more and more when we speak with our customers. They're not looking for a one size fits all solution for all of their software needs. They understand now that really employees have a lot more control and influence on the tools that they want to use on DH. That's where you really looking at. You know, an employee will try to seek out the tool that they think is the best user experience, and that's what they want to use in the work place. And so that means the employer, the enterprise has to be much more nimble about how they might put a complimentary group of tools together. Eh? So we've been very, very focused on ensuring that our products work well with other products, including Microsoft, but including, you know, other video conferencing solutions, hardware solutions and so on. >> Security. Something neat. Thanks so much for sharing the inside. The update on G Suite. Final question for him. Curious because you're going unique position. Vice president of U Ex share what your job is. What do you do on a day to day basis? There's through the day in the life for a year in the life. What do you work on? What's in the projects? What do your objective? What do you do for your job? Specifically? Were the key things? >> Yeah. I mean, the best part of my job is I get to be, you know, really close with our customers and users. And I see my job is kind of like cheap chief. Empathize, er right. And so really understanding the human need behind you know, users and what they need to accomplish. And I spoke today about one of the most rewarding aspects is helping people accomplish their most important goals. And that could be in their personal life. It could be for education on it could be in the workplace is well, too. And so for us, like my team does a lot of user research and design to understand. What are those big bulls that people have? What is the friction that they have in accomplishing those goals? And then how can our tools solve those problems for them and make a frictionless experience that brings delight and helps him accomplish great things? >> You're like a life coaching a psychologist, same time. Hear my problems? Amy, Thank you so much for sharing the inside. Great. Inside here in the Cube on the U ex behind G suite. Really successful platform. I've seen innovation on Web mail taking to a home of the level now into the enterprise. Excuse coverage here on the the show floor of Google Cloud. Next. I'm John for a day. Volonte, stay with us for more coverage after this short break.

(energetic string music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Cube Conversation from our beautiful studios in Palo Alto. As we do with every Cube Conversation, we want to find a great topic and a smart person to talk about it, and that's what we've got today. What's the topic? We're going to be talking about new classes of AI, that are capable of addressing some of the more complex white-collar worker work that gets done. And to have that conversation, we've got Amy Guarino, who's the COO of Kyndi, here on the Cube with us today. Amy, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you very much Peter. >> So, tell us a little bit about yourself first. >> Sure, so I grew up at IBM in sales and sales management, and then started doin' startups. Most recently, I spent eight years at Marketo, and then just after the Vista acquisition, I joined Kyndi. So that was two years ago. It was a nine person science and research kind of an organization and we've done a few things to get the group in order and we now have 31 folks and really focus on explainable AI. >> Okay, so explainable AI, what is that? >> So what's really interesting is that AI has had a lot of success, specifically around deep learning, neural nets. And one of the challenges with that approach is that it is a black box. You can't understand what the outcome was, or is. And what's really interesting, I was with a customer yesterday, and they were telling me that they were using deep learning around water treatment plants. But they got a lot of feedback that if I'm going to be drinking water, you need to explain to me what it is that you're doing to it and why. And they were like, well holy cow, we can't. And they said, that's a problem. And that's why they came to us, cause they wanted to learn about how you could do explainable type of AI. And the approach that we take really focuses on language. And how do analyze that language, but doin' it in a way where you're able to trace back to the actual raw data source to make sure that it really is correct. So we think about it as more augmenting humans versus replacing humans. >> Well let me see if I can break that down, cause I think of AI, at least things that are pertinent to AI, in a couple of different ways, kind of a mix. To what degree is something programatic, and therefore you can discover patterns in how the program operates so that you can improve it. But there's also social elements to any system that has to happen. >> Yes. >> And it's, and the black box is good for very programatic, relatively structured, where the problem space is relatively well defined, relatively well articulated and has a very specific role in a broader context of things. But when we start talking about activities that have a significant social component, where human beings are a major participant or a major source of value in the activity set that's being performed, you can't count on a black box because humans won't adopt it. So is it, when you say discoverable AI, was that it? >> Explainable AI. >> Explainable AI, is it really AI for those use cases where human beings are and essential part of the value, creation value chain? >> I think that's a great way to think about it. We initially thought it was going to be most applicable in regulated industries, where you had a requirement to explain it. But what we found is it absolutely works there, but it also is very relevant for any kind of decisions where humans are allocating resources or doing something and they have to explain why. >> So the explainable AI means that the AI can be more easily adopted by human centered activities. >> Absolutely. >> Okay, so how, so we think about AI, we think about deep learning, we think about machine learning, I mean, text automatically introduces natural language processing. What of, what elements are you combining to make the explainable AI of Kyndi work? >> So what we do is we actually ingest documents, PDF's, word documents, any kind of text, we then apply natural language processing to that to be able to parse out the entities, the terms, all of the concepts. We apply machine learning so that we can extract what we call proto-ontology, or structure, from that. So you don't have to do a lot of work upfront building out a taxonomy, and therefore we have benefit of being able to go from one domain to another very quickly and then we take all-- >> Which, by the way, blackbox AI does not do well. >> That's correct, that's absolutely correct. We addressed that deficiency as well. And then we take that output and we put it in what we call cognitive memory, which is a knowledge graph. It's a proprietary knowledge graph that allows us then to be able to search the information on there from a context perspective, so a cognitive type of search. We can also apply certain preset, sort of a filters, for different applications. So, one of the areas where we focus on is around pharmaceutical, and they're very interested in understanding and analyzing a lot of the texts associated with reports around drug discovery. And to be able to understand where there's data integrity and where's there's not-- >> And whether the process had been followed right, you got to believe. >> Yes, absolutely. And to be able to apply those preset filters against that across a really large data set and be able to highlight and get to a smaller subset that the scientists can dig into and really understand where there are potential issues and figure out how to mitigate those issues is critical. >> So let me see if I can generalize. A explainable AI being applied in a domain, like pharmaceutical-- >> Yes. >> that has a common set of audit features to it, in terms of the methods used-- >> Yes. >> for drug discovery, drug authorization, and okay. And utilizing that with the drug discovery people who are responsible for actually validating that the process is being followed appropriately to limit the amount of manual work that goes into the audit process, have I got that right? >> Yes, absolutely, by a huge factor. >> How huge? >> It's like 100 times. >> Oh, okay, well that works. >> Yes, it does work. >> So we're talking about being able to, you said 100 times, to reduce the number of people or to increase the volume of possible candidates for drug commercialization. >> Absolutely right, absolutely right. >> So what other domains do you expect Kyndi to be applied to? >> It's a very broad capability. It's any kind of work where you're reading lots of text. Today we focus in terms of the pharma opportunities. We have a lot of manufacturing folks that are looking at ways to be able to look at and review, sort of tribal knowledge that exists within a manufacturing environment. As people retire, there's a lot of information that doesn't quite get passed down and they're trying to figure out ways to get that information and also make it more easily searchable. >> Can you look at COBOL code? >> Uh, we've talked about it, we've talked about it. We do that and also in the government, we do a lot of work. >> Alright, so, you know it's interesting that you started talking about pharmaceutical. Most firms like yours work their way up to pharmaceutical. >> Yes. >> Because pharmaceutical is, you know the FDA is governed by rules where liabilities actually are associated with software. >> Yes. >> Most domains doesn't have to worry about that. So you guys are starting with the hardest problems with the greatest potential commercial risk and you're working your way into others. >> Well I think it's because it's explainable. I think that's the advantage that we have. And so we are able, then, to go back and provide that provenance to be able to support how we got there. And so it makes a big difference. >> Okay, so what's going to happen with Kyndi in 2019? >> We're going to continue to grow and really expand, particularly on the commercial side of the business, and go beyond pharmaceutical into manufacturing, maybe even a little for the financial services. But really make our customers successful, show how successful we can be. And that's going to be our marketing capability, to be able to help share this with the rest of the world. >> Yeah, if you're around COBOL, you can help my CIO guys. >> Okay. (laughter) >> There's a lot of people, like me, retiring. Alright, Amy Guarino, COO of Kyndi, talking about explainable AI and the need for new classes of tools that can augment human activity, make 'em more productive. Amy, thanks very much for being on The Cube. >> Thanks Peter, it's been great. >> Once again, I'm Peter Burris, thanks very much for watching this Cube Conversation. Until next time. (energetic string music)

(light orchestral music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris and welcome to another Cube Conversation from our wonderful studios here in Palo Alto, California. One of the most challenging things that any business has to navigate, especially B2B business, is that crucial relationship between sales and marketing and customer engagement. How to make customer engagement as high quality, high value, to a customer but also as productive to the business as possible. And to have that conversation, we've got Amy Guarino, who's a COO of Kyndi here on theCUBE with us today. Now Amy, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much Peter. >> So we're going to start with something that recently happened. You recently attended a Women in Sales conference, tell us a little bit about yourself and then we can talk about that conference. >> Sure, I'm the COO of Kyndi which is an explainable AI company, and that means I have responsibility for everything customer-facing. So from sales, marketing, services, support, and anything else to help make sure that we run the business in a good way. I recently came from Marketo, I had eight years there, where sales and marketing was really definitely a critical piece, and hopefully we helped change a little bit in terms of the way people think about sales and marketing. >> Well that's a small job that you have so, but nonetheless you had time to go to this Women in Sales conference, tell us a little bit about it. >> Sure yeah, so it's a group that started out in New York city, and then they've been having some events across the country, but this was the first West Coast event. So myself and there were two other women that have sales leadership roles out here and we participated and there were about 120 mostly women, I think there were three fellas there that joined. So what I couldn't figure out is why more fellas didn't come, it seems like a great place to meet a bunch of pretty interesting women. So, it really was a fun event and a lot of the questions focused on women in sales careers and how best to develop a sales career. >> Well certainly I'm sure it would have been an opportunity for some men to discover something about how women envision the role that sales plays, the role of engagement. There have been a number of studies over the years that women actually seem to demonstrate an even stronger affinity for making some of those connections necessary to traverse a very highly complex, high-value sales relationship. What were some of the highlights that you took away from the conference? >> Well I think some of things that were pretty interesting was understanding how do women look at sales differently and really what are some of the unique aspects of how women approach things, and a lot of it focused on listening skills and a woman's ability to, and it's not to mean that fellas aren't good listeners. >> What, what, what, what? I'm sorry, what? >> But I think it is something that women do have a natural affinity to be able to listen and to really pull out when someone is speaking, whether it's a prospect or a customer, what really is important to them? >> So listening is one, any others that just pop to mind? >> I think the other was in terms of sales management is really interesting is the ability for women sales managers and leaders to be able to understand what are the strengths and weaknesses of folks on the team, how to be able to coach them, and then how to pull together a team that really takes advantage of all of the different skills across the whole sales team. >> So here's one of the questions that I have about looking at women in sales as a thing. You have to on the one hand be very careful about generalizing, but on the other hand you really do want to discover what attributes of a person tend to create value for business, create value for the customers, et cetera. Was there any conversation about how far we should take some of these generalizations like I once had someone tell me, "Well men are very transactional, "women are very relationship-orientated." Which always seemed to me to be a bromide. But how far should we take the notion of women specifically in sales as we think about business management? >> Well the piece I think we talked about a lot last night was not so much in terms of the generalizations, but the fact that in today's world you want to hire the best of the best, and in order to hire the best of the best, women make up 50% of the population, you want to be able to-- >> And 80% of the best. >> (laughs) Well I appreciate that, but you want to be able to put yourself in a business culture or a sales culture where that's appreciated. I think especially in tech there's so many situations where you walk into a tech sales organization, and it's 80, 90% fellas and it makes it tough for women to want to join that kind of an organization. And as a sales leader, as a sales manager, if you want to hire the best of the best, you want to make sure that you're attracting people, the best, and so therefore you want to make sure your culture really is in a position to be able to attract the best. >> Yeah, 'cause I think one of the things that our Chief Revenue Officer has to do is it has to drive sales productivity which means taking advantage of skills and improving sales enabled them. But at the same time establishing a culture that encourages each person to shine, that doesn't diminish different types of skills. And I got to believe that's one of the things you took away. How are you applying some of the lessons that you learned to your job as a COO and responsible for customer engagement at Kyndi? >> Well I think the one thing is to really be attentive to it. Sometimes your business is growing so fast you're just like, "Oh, I'm just going to hire and get things going." And one of the things, we're not quite at that stage where we're adding tons of people yet, but we know we're going to, is making sure that we're thinking about and being very deliberate in terms of the types of folks that we're recruiting. And one of the things that I've seen most effective, particularly for fast-growing tech companies, is hiring women leadership. I think sometimes, and I don't think it's where the fellas are hiring people 'cause they want to not hire women, but its more they hire people they know. And so all of a sudden you look up and you realize, oh my goodness I've got six first-line sales managers and they're all guys. And when a woman goes in to interview for a first-line role and they look at that and say well, your whole management staff is all men, how is that going to make me feel comfortable? Is this the kind of environment where I'm going to be able to be successful? And so it's really being very deliberate and intense in terms of thinking about how can I make sure that I do have some women in leadership? And I think that can change the dynamic quite a bit in terms of the company culture. >> And are you discovering that at least from a Kyndi standpoint, I mean obviously Kyndi at very, very senior levels is you. So that says something about what constitutes being important at Kyndi. Do you anticipate that having more women is going to improve your ability to engage customers? Improve your ability for customers to take action quicker? What's the expectation? >> I think that the expectation is that you've got different types of perspectives and different types of way to look at customer acquisition and customer engagement and customer support, and we can all help each other. When you have different opinions and different ways of looking at things, as a team then you really get much more productive in terms of being able to do the right things for customers and make sure they're successful. >> So a culture that encourages, or at least liberates and takes advantage of diversity. Talk a little bit about the sales enablement side of that. Because again one of the things I mentioned earlier is that as chief revenue officer, part of your job has to be to accelerate increases in productivity of your field organization as fast as possible. How does what you heard from the conference yesterday, that mission, sales enablement, et cetera, come together, collide? >> Sure, yeah I'm not sure that it's specific to women, but it's any time you bring on a new rep, you want to be able to take that gap from when you hire them to the time their productive, and productive means being able to go out and actually sell something to a customer. You want to make that as quick as possible and as efficient as possible. So it's really understanding that path and understanding what it's going to take to help make that rep successful. Doing that in a systematic approach as opposed to, hey why don't you go out and go on a few calls with somebody and then see how it goes. Because when you actually take that and make it into a process, you can understand where people are picking things up, where they're not picking things up, what you can actually do to enhance that process and make it go faster and make it easier for new to people to come on board and be productive. 'Cause sales people want to sell, they want to get engaged with customers, they're eager to get going and really make an impact, and so the better you can enhance that process I think the better and more successful they'll feel. And then from an organizational standpoint, the quicker you can make your number, because it's all about how do I have as many quota-carrying, productive reps in the territory as quickly as possible. >> Yeah, one last thought, I think other thing is that sales people tend to learn from other sales people. Having a culture that encourages that kind of sharing and that kind of respect and that kind of diversity means that you're going to get a lot more different perspectives on what works. >> Exactly, it's all about figuring out what works and what doesn't work and then sharing that information across the group. >> Alright, fantastic, Amy Guarino, COO of Kyndi, talking about women in sales and how she is COO and to space taking some of the lessons learned and applying it to make Kyndi a more inclusive, better customer serving business. >> Terrific, thanks Peter. >> Thanks Amy, and once again this is Peter Burris, thanks again for listening to this Cube Conversation. Until next time. (light orchestral music)

>> From Santa Clara, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering Technovation's World Pitch 2018. Now, here's Sonia Tagare. >> Hi, welcome back, I'm Sonia Tagare here with theCUBE in Santa Clara, California, covering Technovation's World Pitch Summit 2018, a pitch competition for girls to develop apps in order to create a better, positive change in the world. This week, 12 finalist teams are competing for their chance to win the gold or silver scholarships. With us today, we have on Amy Kim, the Chief Operating Officer for Iridescent. Amy, congratulations, and welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> Can you tell me more about Technovation? >> Technovation is a program for girls where girls identify a problem in their community and they build a mobile app and a business plan to help solve that problem. Our girls, this past year we had almost 20,000 girls participate from all around the world. We had about 115 different countries registered this year so we've had really big growth. We are in a ninth year of operation for this program, and Iridescent, who's our mother organization, we're about 13 years old. >> How did you get involved with all of this? >> I actually started off as a mentor and a volunteer here at Iridescent, so I used to volunteer for Technovation team when we used to do a small program in L.A. and San Francisco where girls used to physically come to the studio and do the Technovation program and also I used to be a mentor for our Curiosity Machine program, which is a hands-on engineering design challenge program and competition. I was a volunteer for about four years, and then I came on board as a staff member about four years ago. >> What have you noticed has been the change from when you came on to now? >> I think one thing we have done at Iridescent strategically is grow the program globally, and we did that by making our programs free and all of our curriculum accessible. What we've really relied on is training our volunteers. I think you've talked to some of the mentors, some of the regional ambassadors. The trainer model has really helped us grow, and then we're able to reach more girls at a lower cost. Most of the money that we are able to raise, we are able to serve more children and serve more kids. >> What method do you think that's really helping getting these girls noticing Technovation? Is it online, is it through mentorship? >> Actually a lot of it is word of mouth. We were featured in a documentary called Code Girl about two years ago, and that has helped us get a broader reach, too, but really it's one girl who participates or one volunteer who volunteered with us. And our RAs, our regional ambassadors, in each of their countries they really do a great job promoting on our behalf to get more girls an opportunity to be a part of this program. >> What are you most excited about for this year's competition? >> That's a little tricky, cause we always get a little attached to every team, and we really try hard not to pick a favorite, but I think one thing we've seen this year is we updated our curriculum last year and I think the curriculum has really shown to be really strong and then more and more countries can adapt it. I think just seeing what the girls can accomplish, if you guys, what you'll see is that the girls are tackling really hard problems and they bring their own unique perspectives. Just seeing how they approach a problem is, to me, very exciting. >> What are these girls judged on for their pitches? >> They're mostly judged on a few criteria. One is the actual technical ability of their apps and how well do they solve the problem that they are trying to solve. Also, what is their business plan, is this a doable thing, does this business already exist, what is unique. There will be a little bit of public speaking, also how they present themselves, and the actual technical ability of the apps as well. >> That's great. What do you hope Technovation will bring for the greater girls in tech community? >> I'm a chemist by training, and I was the only woman in my PhD program, and I think one thing that really comes up a lot is that women oftentimes don't have mentors, don't have a community, and I think for these girls, I hope that as they grow and as they go to college and they pursue their career that they have a community that they built from here that will carry on through their career. >> What success stories do you have from past Technovation winners? >> That's a tricky question cause we have so many. We have, sorry, I'm trying to remember her name. We have a student who participated about four years ago and she built an app to help Alzheimer's patients, and what she has done is she has actually created a start-up and has been featured in New York Times before. We have stories like that, but we also have stories like in the slums of India where girls don't have internet, they don't have power everyday, so what they will do is they will code on post-it notes. Then when the power will come on, they will turn on their internet and they will be able to code it on App Inventor altogether in that one hour. We have success that really varies and the way we count our success is really the fact that the girls had an opportunity that they may not have had otherwise. That's really how we count our success. Even if they don't become technology entrepreneurs, our goal really is that they try to tackle something hard, they learn through their failures, and they persisted is really our goal. >> That's wonderful, and we're so glad to be here at Technovation. Thank you for having us on. >> Thank you so much. >> Thanks for being here. I'm Sonia Tagare, and this is Amy Kim, and we're at Technovation's World Pitch Summit 2018. Stay tuned for more. 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>> Host: Live from Atlanta, Georgia, it's theCUBE. Covering IFS World Conference 2018, brought to you by IFS. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of IFS World Conference here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We have a three-guest panel with us today. We have Amy Eager. She is the technical solution architect APS10 evangelist. Mark Large, the head of business systems at Volac, and Jay Gnuse, who is the information technology director at Chief industries. Jay, Mark, Amy, thanks so much for joining us. >> Absolutely. >> Thanks. >> So, tell me Amy, you are an evangelist. I love that you have that in your title, very cool. Tell me a little bit about what you do as a technical solution architect. >> So, I really have sort of a dual role. And technical solution architect is something very important to me, because I have the luxury of working with our prospective customers. So folks that haven't joined the IFS family yet, as well as our existing customers. So, for example I've known Jay for over 10 plus years, and we've worked on various technology aspects together. When customers upgrade and they need new hardware, and all those types of things I provide advice on that. But being a product evangelist, which is my second time. I'm very honored I was the APS9 evangelist, and the applications 10 evangelist, and that means that I get to go out and spread the word about all the benefits that IFS Applications 10 is going to bring to our customer base. So it's very exciting. >> So, you were on the main stage this morning, you're going to be back this afternoon. What are some of your favorite features that you sing from the rooftops? >> Well, I think really we got to see a great look at some of that this morning. The fact that you can interact with a business application simply by typing a few words in, and talking to the arena bot. I think that is really next generation, and going to take us to the next level. Obviously we see more and more of our users wanting to interact with their business applications the way they do with their phones and their consumer apps. So I think that's really very exciting, that certainly would be one feature, and just continuing to extend our user experience through what you saw this morning and the IFS arena client. Really putting the information right in the hands of the users. >> And then in an intuitive way, an easy way. >> Yes, absolutely, if it's not easy they're not using it so. >> That's a very good point, good point. So you both have these buttons on that says, "I'm an early adopter of IFS Applications 10". >> Yes. >> I want to hear from both of you, why were you an early adopter? We'll start with you Mark. >> Well, we were on Apps8 before we joined Apps10, and we did a lot of development work with IFS on Apps8, and it sort of came to fruition within nine, so within nine, a lot of the work we did was available. We didn't upgrade to nine, so when the opportunity with ten came along, we said let's go for it. We have a very good relationship with IFS, so we trust each other, which is key to any upgrade program. And there's so many new features that we can really benefit from as a business. >> And do you feel almost a little bit of an ownership in the sense that you, because you were with Apps9, and you may have even helped IFS sort of think about what could be next. >> Yes, yeah, so we definitely own the system. And in working with R&D they listened to what we're saying, so that, you know, for a software provider, that's a real key thing that they listen to their customers. IFS has definitely done that on Apps10, especially with the arena client, which launched today, and the arena bot, which I was one of the first people to use, so it's a very good tool. >> Very cool. Jay, how about you, why did your company choose to be an early adopter? >> Yeah, we've really got a great team at Chief, so we knew that we could find the problems and create the cases accordingly that are needed, so that IFS could fix them. And then we also have some very creative people on our team that can come up with enhancements, or small tweaks to the program to help and shape it for the future. So that was one of the reasons. We also are really excited about the training that we received, and that was something we were looking forward to, and sure enough we did get a lot of training, lot of questions asked, so we feel like we know IFS better now than we did before thanks to all the training with it, especially with R&D. >> So what are some of the benefits that you're already seeing? So, IFS Apps10 is going to be out to the general market later this year, or early next? >> Amy: Just shortly following the conference. >> Oh, excellent, okay. But you've been playing around with it for a while now, what are some of the benefits that you're seeing? >> One of the features that we like is the ability to edit customer order lines. Multiple lines at the same time, that's a nice new features that makes it a little quicker for our end users. Another one is the part cost history details. We should be able to save some data space by using that one. We also like the ability to move functional objects in the equipment object navigator. That's easier now, before we had left over objects sitting out there, and now we can move them. So that's nice. I really like the ability to pin records on the detail screen. It's kind of hard to describe how it works, but once you see it, it's easy and it's a very nice feature. And then, of course, the manufacturing visualizer is huge for us. With it, our customers have to make changes, and may be late in the game, and with that, we can see what's going on on the shop floor, and we can adjust accordingly. >> Yeah. >> How about you, Jay? I mean, sorry, Mark. (laughing) >> Yeah, so we, that's been a gamechanger for the business, we've gone from the webportal for booking holidays to the arena client, you can do it in the pub, or anywhere on the go, basically. Which is really good. >> I like being in the pub. >> Yeah, the pub's good. >> That works for me. >> And then um, Wadaco, which is the warehouse data collection system, which is all about scanning and handling units, and we manufacture lots of different products for the human and animal markets, and we have a sashay and then a box and an outer box and then onto a pallet, that's lots of transactions, but in Wadaco now, handing an issue you can do it as one transaction, so instead of ten transactions, you've got one transaction. That's a massive gamechanger for the way in which we use the system. >> One of the things we've heard a lot in the keynote, and also just in these interviews that I'm doing here, is just how customer-centric IFS is. And you're customers, so can you tell us a little bit about how, how has this company, earned your trust? What is it, what is it doing that's so special than other companies, that its competitors aren't? >> It's the relationship, it's all down to relationships. We have four values in our company, performance, ambition, collaboration, and trust. And actually, if you take all those four key values, IFS follows them, we work together well with best of breed system, we collaborate well. We're both ambitious businesses, and we trust each other. So if you've got all those four things, you've got a win. >> Right, right, right. So what do you want to see out of the next Woco. So we're at Woco 2018, I know it's only day one, but when you think about, you are valued and dear customers to IFS, so what do you want to see with this relationship going forward? >> Well I think the title this year, the what's coming next, is really important, and it's so great to be able to see all the new features that they're rolling out, and what they're doing, so looking forward to that again next time. >> And it's also the expansion of the arena client, you know, it's quite small at the moment, and there's all the updates coming, we're getting to see them firsthand, but this time next year or in 18 months, the arena client will be massive. And it will be the future. >> It's true, it's true. And how much are you talking with each other? I mean, that's one of the things that we've heard, too, is that customers, you know, it's almost like companies don't want their clients talking to each other but that's not so at Woco, that we want the feedback, want the interaction. What's the experience, can you describe what it's like? >> Well, to me, I mean, it really is sort of the foundation of IFS. I really believe that, I see that, I think we all do. The relationships that we have with our customers, that is something unique. This is not a vendor supplier customer type relationship. We are partners in this, and I think another unique aspect that I would love to point out is the fact that, not only do we want our customers talking to each other, we have perspective customers here. This is not a situation where it's all just long-term customers, we've all known each other. We have perspective customers here that are really gaining insight into what it means to be part of the IFS family. And that's certainly, I'm very proud to say, I've been with IFS for over 20 years, and that's something that has always been the case with our organization, and it means a lot to us for our customers to feel that way as well. >> So, now that the software has been deployed, how are you keeping, how can customers keep it up to date? >> Well, this is another aspect that we, we really introduced this in IFS Applications 9, but it continues on with IFS Applications 10, of course, which are quarterly updates. So, through the lifecycle of a release, an update will come out every quarter, they are cumulative updates, excuse me, so if you see update four comes out, and there isn't anything that you need, then you skip that, maybe you skip the next one, but six comes by and you say, there's something there that I want to apply, it's like applying a patch. So they can really stay current, and that's our driver. And another unique thing about this is not only are we introducing fixes and corrections, we know those exist in software, but we also try and introduce little feature, functional enhancements in these updates as well. So there could be a new feature available to you, or a new lobby, or something new with the bot perhaps coming in an update, so, it's very important to us to not only, of course, deliver fixes and patches when needed, but also functional enhancements throughout the lifecycle of the product. >> And have you experienced this yet? >> Yeah, even on the beta version, we've been taking updates, so we're on update four at the moment, so, uh, and update five's ready. We're going to make the decision if we want to take it now or we wait til RTM which is July for us. Which is quite soon. >> Right, right, no, it's just around the corner. Exactly. And so, I assume you'll be early adopters of Apps 11, too. >> Mark: Maybe. (laughing) There's no reason why not. >> Right, exactly. Well, Jay, Mark, Amy, thank you so much for joining us. It's been a really great conversation here. >> Amy: Thank you so much, thank you guys. >> Jay: Thank you. >> Mark: Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, we'll have more from IFS WOCO 2018 just after this.

(clicking) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE, we're in downtown San Francisco, the Hotel Nikko, it's International Women's Day, March 8th, stuff happening all around the world If you haven't seen it, jump on social. I think there's more hashtags than I even know what to do with. Thankfully we have 240 characters now. (Lisa laughs) But we're excited to be here at the Accenture event, it's Getting To Equal. Accenture's made a commitment to get to 50% gender equality by 2025, and this is a terrific event, 400 people, a lot of panels, a lot of real-world conversations. So we're excited to be here and our next guests are joining us, it's Lisa Bridgett, she's the COO of The Modist. Welcome. >> Thank you so much. >> And Amy Fuller, chief marketing and communications officer from Accenture. Thank you for having us. >> Thank you. >> So for folks that aren't familiar with The Modist, give us a little overview. >> Hi everyone, we are a year old today. >> A year today? >> A year old on International Women's Day. >> Happy birthday. >> Thank you so much. And we are a luxury ecommerce platform between Dubai and London, that has an assortment and a curation of luxury fashion, 150 brands, but all with the sensibility around modesty, so we think about hemlines, we think about opacity, we think about loose fits, all with luxury fashion on top of it, but making sure that we cater for our customers' needs in mind. >> How could this not have existed before, 366 days ago. >> This is the age old question, and our founder Ghizlan Guenez has been asked that time and time again. We have numerous places where you can go and find anything that will reveal, but there wasn't a one-stop place that really had curation and styling thought through from a modest perspective. And the customer base spans women who think about modesty from a religious perspective, businesswomen, curvier women, older women, high fashionistas that love a layered look, really, it's a niche, but it's massive. It's a massive global niche. >> Again, we're here, Macy's is right across the street, we're right downtown San Francisco, Nordstrom's, this is the big retail hub of San Francisco, one of the bigger retail hubs in the United States. And we know, we were talking before we turned on the cameras, I have teenage girls, and you go to the store, and you're like, "Oh my gosh, "is there nothing else that you can buy, "besides what's on there?" Why is this so underserved, or was underserved? >> I mean, I think that the fashion industry is going through a massive overhaul now, as one thinks about whether you're designing for aspiration, or whether you're designing and selling for really the reality of what the consumer segment is out there. And that goes for a Western woman, and when you think about the global fashion industry, are we thinking about fashion that resonates in India, or the Middle East, or in Asia, or are you sticking to a more conformed, idealized persona of what the customer is. And so this is very much on top of minds of all retail at the moment, and you will have seen shifts into larger sizes, very well-known fashion designers thinking about how do I design and cater for women that don't subscribe to an idealized format, it's quite a reflective thing that the fashion industry's going through at the moment. >> It's interesting Amy, a lot of conversations about communications, and objectives, not necessarily about what's comfortable and what I want to wear. As you look at this world and how it evolves, what's your take? Because, designing for an aspiration, that's a really interesting way, versus just designing practical clothes, we haven't seen the practical side. >> Well I think that what Lisa and her company are doing has potential to be quite transformational, and, I'll just plug a piece of research that we're publishing in honor of International Women's Day, which looked at, how do we get to equality in the workplace. Massive research, analytics, surveyed 22,000 working adults, men and women, in 34 countries, and what we were trying to get at, and did get at, are things about the culture. So what are the cultural factors that actually make a difference? So this is a very long way of getting to the point, but one of the questions we asked was, have you ever been asked to change clothing, hair, tattoos, et cetera, things about personal appearance to fit and conform in the workplace. A lot of people had been asked, sadly. And this was across 34 countries. But what we further found was, if you had not been asked to conform to the workplace, in other words, if you are allowed to dress as you wish to dress, that that was a factor that drove equality in the workplace. So, the idea that a woman with fabulous taste, who wishes to dress modestly, and Lisa described, there are a lot of people out there with that point of view, have a place to go to get absolutely stunning stuff, and dress as they wish to dress, and therefore, be the persona they want to be in the workplace is really powerful. And there were a lot of other factors, but that was the one that I found really, really, really interesting, and we found out before we had even invited Lisa to talk to us today, so it was a coming together of things that do matter. >> It's interesting because dress in the workplace, in the context of the workplace, is an interesting topic, if you go to Wall Street, everybody's got to buy the super nice suits, and then we got this kind of Casual Friday thing a few years ago, and people were very confused, how casual do I get on Casual Friday, and then, you've kind of got the whole joke about the baristas, with tats, and ripped up t-shirts-- >> There you go. >> And the getting that blended into traditional corporate cultures, little bit of a shocker. >> Well, there are a lot of questions that come into play, and I was having a long chat with one of my male colleagues, last night about how things have changed, and how much trickier it is to navigate, and he described that early on, cut to a couple of decades ago, men had to wear white shirts and ties at Accenture, and there was a young man who came to work in a blue Oxford, tie, suit, perfectly appropriate-- >> But blue, not white. >> On a Monday, yes, taken to task, and drawn aside, and said, "Blue shirts are for Fridays." >> Wow. >> So, from there, we go, and one of the things we really love about Accenture is that, you can wear what you want to wear, and it really has such a profound impact on how you feel in the workplace. And, if I can pull in a little AI stuff as well, when we look at AI, and the impact it will have on the workforce, what really, really matters is the things that humans are uniquely able to do. And what AI is uniquely able to deliver, that's the big win for all of us, for business, and when you think about the uniquely human characteristics, creativity, comfort that leads to creativity, and being able to freely think, is one of the most valuable qualities we have as humans. And, oddly, or not oddly, what you wear allows you to feel comfortable, or not. So coming back to what the Modist really provides women with great taste-- >> Great taste. >> To something that they feel comfortable with, and they can be more productive, and more successful. >> Yeah, I'll halo just a couple of those points. The first one is about choice. So, we were saying earlier on, we're in a luxurious environment where we are able to say, "You can choose," because it has not been that way and still continues not to be that way for many people. And that's why we really are for a mission and a purpose, because here we provide you with this element of choice, and you don't need to be ashamed of it, and you'd need to be proud of it. The second part was that modesty didn't need to equate to frumpiness, why can't I dress elegantly and magnificently beautifully, and there is something about dress, and fashion, that really provides a sense of identity, that's an age old desire for society, and for women, a lot, and this is a place where you can be modest, but luxuriously, and beautifully dressed up. And be proud of that, and not necessarily conformed into a box of frumpiness, or less stylish wear. >> The other big interchange, I think, which drove a lot of the traditional norms around clothing, was when you interface with a customer. It was how do you represent the customer, I'm sure that was a lot of what the story that you said, or in the investment bankers, where, we want you to have a certain look, because you're representing the company, it's that company's look that you are personifying when you go out and talk to your customer. Well today, a lot of customer interactions, let's take banking for one, is done on a mobile app. People don't go to the bank, I don't expect the guy to come out from the back with the beautiful pinstripe suit, who knows me anymore. I wonder, do you think that's had a part of the impact on this? Or just more of our acceptance in general of people that don't necessarily look like me? Whether that be in skin color, dress, the way they speak, et cetera. >> Yeah, those are great-- >> You go, and I've got a-- >> Well, I think it's both, and I love both of those points, more virtual interaction clearly takes clothing out of the equation, as well as a lot of other things, and that can be liberating, though I think we have a thirst for the in real life, and the person-to-person which isn't going away. But, I grew up in the advertising business, and, at ad agencies, they were pretty loose. But you always dressed for your client, so that certainly was a dynamic. But of course, now, dressing for your client doesn't imply a suit. And it makes it slightly more work, in fact, 'cause you have to do some anthropological study of what is the client environment like, and that how would you be most comfortable, and appropriate in that environment, so, certainly both of those factors come into play. >> And I feel the hyperdigitalization of the way we interact actually allows for more authenticity. Because you don't have to dress up in the suit that's the conform, you know. Your digital interaction and the work effect is happening, and so people behind that wanting to know who are you really? And authenticity is a way in which you get your own identifical message through, and dressing is one of the elements that comprises that. >> Alright, so before we wrap, Lisa, I want to get your take, so, you've been in business for a year-- >> Yes. >> Again, happy birthday. >> Thank you. >> If we get together, a year from now, you've, say, got over the hurdle, you're up, you're running, you're shipping, what are some of your objectives for the next year? >> Well, we have an amazing strategic roadmap ahead, we have got a very secret launch around product that will be coming out shortly, and that's something that we've been deep in. We are really developing the personalization and the AI component of our shopping experience, so we're really targeting what works best for this consumer, how and where, and that goes all the way from her marketing, through to her experience inside, and through to the retention side. And, just increasly, continually growing globally. We ship to 120 countries, our first market is UAE, our second is America, third is UK, fourth Saudi Arabia, fifth Canada, sixth Hong Kong. So we're global at the get-go, and it's just continuing to grow our customer base in this magnificently beautiful parts of the world that love modest fashion. >> Well, congratulations-- >> Thank you so much. >> And what a great story, we'll continue to watch it. >> Thank you so much. >> So Lisa, thank you, Amy, thanks for spending some time with us. >> Thanks so much! >> Alright, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE, We're at the Accenture International Women's Day event, in San Francisco, California. Thanks for watching. (mellow electronic music)

>> Narrator: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017. Brought to you by Samsung. >> Welcome back everyone. Live here in San Francisco at Moscone West is the exclusive coverage from theCUBE SiliconANGLE Media of the SDC 2017. I'm John Furrier the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and the co-host of theCUBE. My next guest is Amy Jo Kim who is the CEO of Shufflebrain. It's the parent company of gamethinking.io, a variety of other projects, and expert in the convergence of design, gaming, computer science, and et cetera. Welcome to theCUBE. >> It's a pleasure to be here. >> Thanks for coming on. Obviously we've been seeing the trend, the convergence trend for a while certainly in the tech industry. Computer science and social science coming together, that was our motto when we started our company eight years ago. But really to me the flashpoint was Steve Jobs had the technology-liberal arts crossroads. That really kind of spawned the beginning of a creative generation start thinking about the devices, how it all intersects, and not the pure play handheld. So gamers here at Samsung Development Conference and developers bring game mechanics in. That's communities, gamification, games themselves, user interface. What's your reaction to all this? You've designed a great bunch of interfaces. >> I'm, I think it's fantastic. I think what we're seeing is really a flashpoint that has several trends converging. One of the trends we have is developers, the folks here, you know are right here at this wonderful conference, they've grown up with games. They're familiar with the lexicon of games, with how games work. And so it's very natural for them when they start to build their own apps and say what will make this engaging to turn to games and look for inspiration in games? So that's been going on for a while and it's accelerating. We're also seeing that mobile technology, mobile phones, have become so ubiquitous that most of the traffic coming in on many people's experiences 70%, I recently ran a promotion for Shufflebrain, 70% of our traffic was mobile total traffic. So the ubiquity of mobile phones means that everybody's got a potential gaming machine or a machine where they can have a light, fun, engaging experience right in their pocket. So as you noted, we've moved away from single purpose game consoles, handheld or otherwise they still exist, but more and more what we see is the best games and the best game like experiences that might not be games but they the feel and the pull of games. Those are showing up on mobile phones like Samsung. >> And the screens are awesome. I'll say my Note 8 here is awesome and bigger and better and the graphics. But it's a generational shift too. Like my son was, we're designing a new app and we're kind of sitting at the drawing board and he's like, "Dad, you're a search generation. "No one searches anymore. "You actually type on the keyboard, that's like so old." So he brings up a point which is illuminated here. Which is you see voice touch, voice activation. Harman's got now the kind of interface with this audio. You're seeing cars all over the air with software. This is really the computer science, computer engineering culture interfacing with art. Where new user experiences are coming that quite frankly don't look the same. >> Exactly that's such a good point. So what's happening is that a lot of the user experiences, the back end neural networks, the AI, the sophisticated bots that we've been seeing in gaming for the last five or six years are trickling into the mainstream. And that's what you always see. Gaming is the canary in a coal mine. What we see now happening in games and what we saw a few years ago is becoming more mainstream. So if we look now at what's happening in gaming, that gives us a clue to 18 to 24 months out for app developers. >> Yeah we brought this up on day one. You nailed it. It's an early indicator. >> That's right. >> What are you seeing in that area? Because you're in the vanguard of the user interface so you have a computer science background. You understand how communities work. Which by the way, you look at anything from blockchain ICOs to game communities, community is the most important aspect right now in the world. The community role of the people are so important. You don't have a network effect. You don't have input output into the quote neural aspect of the interface because now people are involved. Not just software and data bits. I need a notification from my friend if they're right around the corner from me. So it's the role of people. >> Exactly, so I'm a multiplayer game designer. The teams I work with, because it's always a team effort, are multiplayer games. Rock Band, Covet Fashion is a more recent one. And so we've known for a long time in the gaming industry that if you want to drive deep lasting engagement, you need to create a multiplayer experience and some sort of community around that. What you'll hear gamers say is "You know, I'm kind of tired of that game "but my friends need me. "It's where my friends are, my team needs me." So that's part of what drives long term engagement. >> John: The socialization piece. >> Exactly. What we're seeing now and the opportunity I think for developers even outside of gaming is we're seeing the intersection of gaming, a style of gaming that's sort of I would call them gaming systems versus game mechanics. We're seeing gaming systems find their way into social media. Musical.ly is a great example. And Discord is another example. Discord is a platform started by gamers but now it's merging into just other people. That's for communication. Sort of like a next generation Slack but mobile and for gamers. Covet Fashion, a game I worked on with a brilliant team who actually came up with the idea at CrowdStar, really merged a cooperative game mechanic like you might see in say Portal 2 or Left for Dead with social media and very lightweight voting systems of the users themselves playing a crucial role in what's good or not. Just like in Facebook or in Instagram, your feed is going to show you what gets liked a lot, what gets popular. And games are starting to incorporate this too so that the players themselves become almost like the game pieces and become a big part of what's entertaining. We see networks like Twitch with a huge rush of popularity. That is people delivering entertainment to each other. It's not scripted. So this user generated content, this systems which let people be entertaining to each other, is the huge push that's going on in gaming. And we have, part of what makes a game so exciting, is when the game makes interacting with other people lower friction or more magical but it's still the people that makes it exciting. >> Amy Jo this is amazing. I think that you're right on it. Because remember when I was a gamer, single player game on the computer, you got bored. I mastered it. Then comes multiplayer. But you're bringing up a new dynamic which is the dynamic nature of the people themselves. And I think Twitch had an interesting experiment where the comments, which we know on Twitch are pretty bad, drove the game experience. So now you have the people being part of the input to the game itself. I mean isn't Life a game in a way? >> Sure, you could look at Life the game. I think that that's a semantic issue. There are people that really enjoy looking at life as a game And if you define a game as a structured activity with roles and goals, sure you could look at it that way. What I think is most exciting is not so much what is and isn't a game but the bleeding over of gaming systems into places like digital health and education and enterprise and fashion, and those are, and genealogy. Right now I have a client who's merging a game like experience with a genealogy crowd source experience. So I think what I'd like to leave you with and to understand is the first wave of this we called gamification where people got very excited about the visible markers of progress that are in games like points and badges and leaderboards. And that's a great opening door, but that's not where the magic is. Where the magic is is in the underlying systems that drive you toward mastery of something you care about. And that's the explosion we're seeing now. So you say what am I seeing? I'm seeing clients come to me, a game designer, in all kinds, banking, call centers, SaaS products, change transformation in companies as well as all kinds of consumer products, saying we tried gamification. It just worked in the short term. We want what makes games interesting in the long term. First of all you said the most important thing which is other people. But it's not just other people. It's other people in a playful and mastery based environment that helps you get better at something you care about getting better at. >> So this great so take me through what game system. What I hear you saying is, okay, people think of gamification as a one trick pony, a shortcut to something. You're taking a much more wholistic approach saying the game system. What does that mean? What is a game system? Because you're, what I hear you saying, is that this is like a fabric. It's not like, or an operating system maybe. How should people think of a game... >> It's a methodology or a system. A good way to think about this, are you familiar with design thinking? >> Mm-hmm. >> Are you familiar with an agile approach or Agile Lean UX? Those are systems. Those are methodologies. Those are approaches to creating great products. And they help you. Game thinking is similar. It's got elements of design thinking, elements of Agile, but it adds game design. The difference between strong game design and gamification is game design is about bringing systems to life from the inside out. And so game thinking is as much about how you bring your product to life as it is about anything that you put into the product once it's brought to life. Which is where gamification usually comes in. So it's really about building a learning architecture into the core of your game using feedback loops and using simple systems. And one more thing. Every complex system starts as a simple system that works. So it's really about building core systems and then bringing them to life with the right approach and the right people. >> It's like having a kernel or a small building block. If you overthink it you could get in trouble. >> Right. But you also have to have the right building block so you build a strong foundation. >> Yeah I remember the old days when game engines came out. There was no market for game engines when the first games came out. Then someone said hey why don't we just take the game engine and become a game engine. That was an interesting dynamic that spawned a lot of innovation. Is there an analogy to that happening now where there's new innovations that people can build on top of? Is it open source? Is there an equivalent? I'm trying to figure out where that next level up is going to be because right now we've gone like this and then we see a new level with AR and these new kinds of games and you're bringing this kind of integrated system approach is coming. >> Right so I think there's two thing that have to happen for those to take off. One of which is technology based. You have to have engines. So Unity's rise has been tremendous for the gaming industry. Many many simple game-like experiences are being built in Unity, not from scratch. And other tools like that. And then ARKit from Apple is causing an explosion of really interesting work happening, making it easier to create and experiment with an experience like Pokemon Go. So those are the bottom-up tools based changes that are really accelerating innovation in our industry. Now at the time, none of that will work if you don't have the customer demand and the customer hunger. So the other thing that's happening is that customers are being trained by Pokemon Go and things like that that oh, this is how AR could work. We've seen that VR has kind of stalled out but again, that's a special purpose hardware that's not something easy that you can get on your mobile phone in between all the other things you do. So I think it can't be overstated how powerful it is to have these platforms combined with a huge consumer base on mobile, with phones in their pocket, ready to have a compelling game-like experience that doesn't necessarily have to be a game. The world is waiting for those. >> Yeah and your point about VR, you don't want a build it they will come mentality. You got to focus on the magic formula which is-- >> Customer demand. >> Call it sticky. But some could say look it's got to be a utility and that mastery component is critical whether it's learning, friendship, or some human dopamine effect right. >> Well that's exactly what we do at gamethinking.io. We help teams and companies create a product that customers love and come back to from the ground up using gaming techniques. So anyone who's interested, that's what we do. And the reason we help people do that is it's hard, and it's incredibly high leverage. >> Yeah and you got to have the expertise to do it. And it really is. It sounds like gamethinking.io, you're going to bring architecture. It's not just going to be jump on the grenade that someone throws a project at you. Sure, if it's a big project maybe. But you're kind of train the trainer it sounds like, you're teaching people to fish if you will. >> It's product development. Gamification is often a marketing campaign. We're talking about product development. If you want to build lasting engagement and you're a product leader, then you can use these techniques to build it from the ground up but it's not a silver bullet. >> Give a plug for what you do at Shufflebrain about your company and share some advice for folks watching that might be interested. Like I want to transform my Web 2.0, my 1.0 web responsive app, or my offshore built mobile app that I hired someone to just iOS it and Android it. I want to actually build from the ground up a new architecture that's going to be, have a lot of headroom, I really want to build it from the ground up with good design thinking, game system, game thinking, with the game systems, all the magic potentially in there. What do they do? I don't know do you call the, you know there's no Yellow Pages anymore. Do you Google search it? >> Thank you that was a great setup because that's, I mean I wish that I had had this years ago when I doing a venture funded startup. I needed help. So that's why I do what I do. So what we do is take 20 years of what works and what doesn't in game and product design and turn it into a step by step toolkit with templates, instruction, training, and coaching. And let me give you a specific tip. So there's, it's a whole system we use, but one of the things that you do and if anybody wants to try this it will amaze you if you're able to do it right, one of the things that the greatest game designers, the Will Wrights and folks at CrowdStar and Harmonics, what they do is when they're bringing a new game idea to life, first of all they find out aggressively as much about what's wrong with their ideas, what's right with it, through iterative, low fidelity testing early. Secondly they test it on their superfans that shortcut for high need, high value, early adopters. Not your target market but people that can get you to your target market. Knowing how to find and identify and then leverage your superfans for very early product testing and iteration, that's how you bring your core systems to life. Not with your ultimate target market. Most people don't know this. Knowing this, and then finding those people and leveraging them will turn what's often a failure into success. >> John: That's gold. >> It's complete gold. Let me just tell you why. Because if you're able to ask very product-focused questions, again with my guidance, of these people, you can build your product around what you know they want rather than guessing. >> And you can also help the person, might have blind spot, your customer, understand what superfans are saying. Sometimes it's like they're just giving you the answer right there early on. >> That's such a good point. And when you're inside of it- >> And I have bias. I'm an entrepreneur. Oh no I want to hear what I want to hear. I'm going to change the world. (laughs) Not really. >> That's why when I was an entrepreneur I knew all this stuff but I needed a coach when I was doing this. Because you can't see outside of your bubble and that's part of the value of doing this. >> Amy, the URL is? >> Gamethinking.io. >> Gamthinking.io. Amy Jo is a coach, she is an entrepreneur, venture backed, probably has some scar tissue from that but now she's kicking ass and taking names on gamethinking.io. Great mind. Thank you for sharing an amazing tutorial. You know that's free consulting here on theCUBE right here from and expert. >> It's what I love to do. Thank you for having me. >> Amy Jo here on theCUBE. Live in San Francisco at the Samsung Developer Conference, I'm John Furrier back with more here in theCUBE after this short break. (techno music)

>>Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's the cube covering EMC world 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade and VCE. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas with the cube at EMC real 2015. I'm John ferry, the founder of Silicon Ang. I'm joined with two special guests. Stella Lowe. Who's the global communications at EMC runs, global communications and Amy Posey, neuro facilitator at peak teams. Welcome to the cube. >>So >>You had a session women of the world. We did it last year, but great cube session last year. Um, so I want to get a couple of quick questions. What's going on with women of the world, what you guys just came from there and you guys were on the panel and then what is a neuro facilitator? And then let's get into it. Let's talk about men and women, how we work together. >>Okay, great. So let's start with women of world. So, um, so last year we talked about the challenges that we face and how we reframe them into opportunities that we had some fantastic panelists, but this year I was really interested in the science behind men and women. So it's clear that we're different and we're all bled for success, but, but we're wired differently. And we kind of knew that already. I know we talked about it before John, but we now have the science behind it. We can look at brain scans and we can see that we, Oh, we have different brain patterns. We think differently, uh, different parts of the brain fire fire up when, in times of motivation and stress and people like Amy here, who've done lots of work into this, have having the stages. It was great to have her on the panel to discuss it. >>I'm going to give you a plug because EMC does all kinds of things with formula one cars, motorcycles, getting the data and understanding the race. But now you're dealing with people. So what is going on? Tell us what's up neuro facilitator and let's >>So a neuro facilitator is maybe the best made up job title in the world that I gave myself. So essentially what I do is I look at information about the brain and I curate the research that's out there. So there's a lot of new technology to actually read and look inside our heads. We all have a brain, but we don't necessarily all know how it works. So there's a lot more research and, and tools to read our brains and take a look inside. So what I do is I take that research and, and work with, um, neuroscientists and neurobiologist at Stanford, Columbia, UCLA, and, and reach out and figure out how do we take that information and make it easier, still attain. And I do it in the scope of leadership at organizations like EMC and other technology companies to figure out how do we work better? What information is out there? You know, soft skills and sort of relationship skills. I've always been sort of squishy, right? So now there's a lot more science and information about our brains that are informing it. The, the data's out there, what I do and what my job is, is to pull the data and figure out how do we make it into practical, useful applications for us at work at home, wherever we are. So that's essentially, I'm doing so you >>Guys discussed and how men and women are different. Actually look at the data. We have to give a lot of qualitative data. I mean, it keeps counselors in business. You know, the grant in the workforce, uh, balance is important, but we have a lot of that data, but what's the numbers. What is your findings? So >>What's interesting is looking at men and women's brains. What's fascinating is that we are more alike than dissimilar in looking at a brain. If you looked at a brain scan, one of a man and woman, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between the two, but they're now finding and looking at different parts of the brain in different functions. So for instance, men have approximately 6% more gray matter than women. So in terms of the gray matter, that's the thinking brain essentially, and women have more white matter than gray. Matter about 9% more than men. And the white matter is what connects the brain and communicate both front and back and side to side. And so you can make some extrapolation of that information and say, you know, men may focus more on issues, solutions, problems, whereas women sort of think more broadly or wider. >>So, I mean, there are generalities, but a lot of the sciences is fascinating. There's also some interesting science about the hippocampus, which is, um, sort of deep. If this is your brain, it's deep inside the brain and the hippocampus is the memory center. And it's what they're finding is that for women, they tend to store emotional memories more effectively. So happy, sad, fearful those types of emotions get stored more effectively in the hippocampus. Whereas men oftentimes during stress, the hippocampus actually has a challenge in making connections. So that's where, again, some of the, the focus and determination and silo viewed sometimes that men have in situations or problems comes into play. Um, there's one other piece, the anterior cingulate cortex, which is sort of within the brain and that's the brains error detector. And it turns out it's a little bit bigger in women. So women sort of tend to look for, uh, issues CA you know, problems, um, maybe less solution focused, especially under times of stress and, and a lot of this, data's interesting. >>It, it causes you to make some generalities, you know, not everybody is going to operate in that way. Your mileage may theory, but it's, it's good because it helps us inform some of the quirky behavior that we deal with at work and figuring out why, why don't you do that? Why do you do that and installed that women being better or women using more of the brain or less of the brain it's, it's, it's simply about we, we, if all brains away from differently, we both bring different things to the table. And how do you take both of those benefits and bring them forward into a better outcomes? >>Always great to talk about because in the workforce, people are different. And so differences is a term that we use, like, you know, with kids learn differently, some have evolved differently and men and women have had differences. So the data shows that that's clear. Um, I want to share a quote that my wife shared on Facebook. It says mother, um, well, a worried mother does better research than the FBI. So, um, I bring that up, you know, it's instinctual. So a lot of it's also biological and also environmental talk about the dynamics around that, that wiring, because you're wired by your upbringing too, that affects you. And what's the, what's the data show in the biology. >>So it's interesting because the, the key piece is that it's not just the biological brain differences. It's, it's a whole host of factors that leave a footprint on us, in our behavior. So it's our education, it's our, uh, you know, where we, where we grew up, our culture is part of that. It's also gender stereotypes that play a role in how we operate. And I think all of those things leave a footprint on a, an and lead us to different behaviors. And so you can't just say it's the, the, the information that's on our brains. It's a whole host of factors that influence. So my study of looking at how the brains are a little bit different and what the research is coming, it's, it's blended in with research around leadership and things like confidence and motivation in the workplace bias in the workplace. And they're, they're showing very different things. >>So for instance, if you think about confidence, we did an interesting exercise in the event at women of world. And I asked, you know, there's, there's a lot about confidence and confidence is essentially the will or motivation to act. So how many women in the room, uh, would raise the, you know, go up for a job that they were really interested in and fascinated by, but maybe weren't a hundred percent qualified for, like, how many of you have maybe turned down that job or decided not to apply because it wasn't the right time. Like you, you're pretty competent, but not a hundred percent confident in it. And it was funny because the majority, all the women's hands went up in the room. So then I asked him, I flipped the question in the room and I asked the men in the room. I said, okay, if you were only about 50% confident for a job that you were going up for, would you, of course, right. Like, yes, I >>Fabricate some stuff on their resume and you make >>Them look bigger. So, exactly. So what's interesting is testosterone plays a role in confidence and motivation at work. And it turns out men have 10 times the amount of testosterone as women do. So part of that is that aggression, but we both have it, but that, that aggressive factor, that idea to go after something, to be more confident, um, women are behind the curve in that, from the research that I've seen. So it takes more effort to, to, to be able to have the confidence, to go for it and to sort of break down those barriers that exist for women to, to go after those jobs that they want, even if it's not a hundred percent. And so we did a, an exercise in boosting confidence in testosterone called power posing. And Amy Cuddy out of Harvard does a, a whole Ted talk on it, which is fascinating. >>But the idea is that you, you know, you, you put your chest back, you put your hands on your hips and it helps boost your testosterone up to about 20%. And it reduces cortisol, which is a stress hormone. So it's a, it's a quick way. You don't do it in front of people. You do it sort of on the sly or else you kind of, you don't look very nice to others, but you, you boost your confidence doing that. And it's just a small sort of brain hack that you can do to give yourself an upper hand, knowing that knowing the science behind it. So it's a behavior changing type of research that's coming out, which I think is really, >>That's really interesting, but now it translates into leadership and execution in the workforce. So people are different than men and women are different that changes the dynamic around what good is, because if your point about women not asking for that job or having confidence to the field, like I'm not going to go for it, like a man bravado, whatever testosterone that's what mean that that's the benchmark of what drive means. So this came up with Microsoft CEO at the Anita board conferences, which we had a cube there. And, and this is a big issue. So how do HR, how do the managers, how do people recognize the differences and what does the data show, and, and can you share your thoughts on that? >>Yeah, so I think a lot of it comes down to bias and bias is essentially a shortcut that we use in our brains to take less energy. And it's not a bad thing. It's, it's something we all do. And it's conscious and it's unconscious. So bias, I think is a key piece of that. And the research on bias is fascinating. It's very, it's, it's very popular topic these days, because I think being able to do a couple of things, be aware that there are hundreds of biases and they're both conscious and unconscious, uh, acknowledge that it exists, but not legitimize it not make that. Okay. The third piece is to, to counter it and, and being able to counter bias by making sure that people have opportunities. And even though you may have re removed hypothetical barriers explicitly stating that you want people, men, or women to apply for promotions, be this type of leader, not just assume that because there are no barriers that it's okay, but really be explicit in how you give people opportunities and let them know that they're out there. I think that's really key. >>Yeah. That brings up the point around work life balance, because, you know, I have a family of four, four kids it's stressful just in and of itself to have four kids, but then I go to the workforce and the same with women too. So there's also a home dynamic with leadership and biases and roles. Um, what's your take on any data on the how of that shifting persona realities, if you will, um, shapes the data. >>It's interesting because it's, it's something that we even talked about in the session that it's a struggle and, and, um, Bev career from Intel was talking about that. There's a period of time that actually is really tough to keep women in the workforce. And it's that time where you're growing your family, you're growing your career. And oftentimes things sort of struggle. And I, I read something recently around women in STEM careers, over a 10-year period, 42% of women drop out of the workforce in comparison to 17% of men. And so I think there's a lot, a ways to go in terms of being able to set up environments where working life is integrated, because it's, it's not even balanced anymore. It's integration. And how do you set up structures so that people can do that through how they work through how they connect with others. And, and to me, that's a big piece is how do you keep people in the workforce and still contributing in that critical point in time? And, you know, Intel hasn't figured it out. It's a tough challenge, >>Stamina. We're a big fans of women in tech, obviously because we love tech athletes. We'd love to promote people who are rock stars and technology, whether it's developers to leaders. And I also have a daughter, two daughters. And so two questions. One is women in tech, anything you could share that the data can talk to, to either inspire or give some insight and to, for the young women out there that might not have that cultural baggage, that my generation, at least our worse than older than me have from the previous bias. So motivating young daughters out there, and then how you deal with the career advice for existing women. >>So the motivating young women to get into tech, um, Bev shared a really absolutely fascinating statistic that between the ages of 12 and 18, it's incredibly important to have a male support model for young girls to get into STEM careers, that it was absolutely critical for their success. And it's funny because the question came up like, why can't that be a woman too? And what's interesting. And what we find is oftentimes we give men the short shrift when they try and support women, and we don't want to do that. We want to support men supporting women because when that happens, we all win. Um, and so I think that's a big piece of it is starting young and starting with male support as well as female support. So many women who, who cite men as, as he had mental was in that gray, you know, or in their daily life. And it's pretty important that they can feel that they can do that. >>And this goes back down the wiring data that you have the data on how we're were wired. It's okay, guys, to understand that it's not an apples to apples. So to speak, men are from Mars. Women are from beans, whatever that phrase is, but that's really what the data is. >>And being explicit to men to say, we want you to support women instead of having men take a back seat feeling like maybe this isn't my battle to fight. It's, it's really important to then encourage men to speak up to in those, those situations to, to think about sort of women in tech. One of, uh, a really interesting piece of research that I've seen is about team intelligence and what happens on teams and Anita Willy from Carnegie Mellon produced this really fascinating piece of research on the three things that a team needs to be more intelligent. It's not just getting the smartest people in the room with the highest IQ. That's a part of it. You want table stakes, you want to start with smart people, but she found that having women, more women on a team actually improved the team's overall intelligence, the collective intelligence and success of a team. So more women was the first one. The second was there's this ability and women tend to be better at it, but the ability to read someone's thoughts and emotions just by looking at their eyes. So it's called breeding in the mind's eye. So just taking a look and being able to sense behavior, um, and, and what someone's thinking and feeling, and then being able to adjust to that and pivot on that, not just focusing on the task at hand, but the cohesion of a team with that skill made a difference. >>It's like if it's a total team sport, now that's what you're saying in terms of how use sport analogy, but women now you see women's sports is booming. This brings up my, my, your, uh, awesome research that you just did for the folks out there. Stella was leading this information generation study and the diversity of use cases now with tech, which is why we love tech so much. It's not just the geeky programmer, traditional nail role. You mentioned team, you've got UX design. You have, um, real time agile. So you have more of a, whether it's a rowing analogy or whatever sport or music, collaboration, collaboration is key. And there's so many new disciplines. I mean, I'll share data that I have on the cube looking at all the six years and then even women and men, the pattern that's coming up is women love the visualization. It's weird. I don't know if that's just so it's in the data, but like data scientists that render into reporting and visualization, not like just making slides like in the data. Yeah. So, but they're not writing, maybe not Python code. So what do you guys see similar patterns in terms of, uh, information generation, it's sexy to have an iWatch. It's >>Cool. So like a cry from Intel on the panel, she gave a great statistic that actually, uh, it's more it's women that are more likely to make a decision on consumer tech than men. And yet a lot of the focus is about trying to build tech for men, uh, on the, you know, if consumer tech companies want to get this right, they need to start thinking about what are women looking for, uh, because, uh, they're the ones that are out there making these decisions, the majority of those decisions. >>Yeah. I mean, it's an old thing back in the day when I was in co, um, right out of college and doing my first startup was the wife test. Yeah. Everything goes by the wife because you want to have collaborative decision-making and that's kind of been seen as a negative bias or reinforcement bias, but I think what guys mean is like, they want to get their partner involved. Yeah. So how do, how do we change the biases? And you know, where I've talked to a guy who said, the word geek is reinforcing a bias or nerd where like, I use that term all the time, um, with science, is there, I mean, we had the, the lawsuit with Kleiner Perkins around the gender discrimination. She wasn't included. I mean, what's your take on all of this? I mean, how does someone practically take the data and put it into practice? >>I think the big thing is, you know, like I said, acknowledging that it exists, right? It's out there. We've been, I feel like our brains haven't necessarily adapted to the modern workplace and the challenges that we've dealt with because the modern workplace is something that was invented in the 1960s and our brains have evolved over a long time. So being able to handle some of the challenges that we have, especially on how men and women operate differently at the workplace, I think is key, but calling it out and making it okay to acknowledge it, but then counter where it needs to be countered where it's not right. And being explicit and having the conversations I think is the big piece. And that's what struck me with the Kleiner Perkins deal was let's have the conversation it's out there. A lot of times people are reticent to, to have the conversation because it's awkward and I need to be PC. And I'm worried about things. It's the elephant in the room, right. But it actually is. Dialogue is far better than leaving it. >>People are afraid. I mean, guys are afraid. Women are afraid. So it's a negative cycle. If it's not an out in the open, that's what I'm saying. >>And the idea is it's, what can we do collectively better to, to be more positive, to, to frame it more positively, because I think that makes a bigger difference in terms, in terms of talking about, Oh, we're different. How are we the same? How can we work together? What is the, the connection point that you bring, you bring, we all bring different skills and talents to the table. I think it's really taking a look at that and talking about it and calling it out and say, I'm not great at this. You're great at this. Let's, let's work together on what we can do, uh, more effectively, >>Okay. Team sports is great. And the diversity of workforce and tech is an issue. That's awesome. So I'd ask you to kind of a different question for both of you guys. What's the biggest surprise in the data and it could be what reinforced the belief or insight into something new share, uh, a surprise. Um, it could be pleasant or creepy or share it. >>Price to me is intuition. So we always talk about women having intuitions. I've had men say, you know, well, my wife is so intuitive. She kind of, she kinda gets that and I've had that in the workplace as well. And I think the biggest surprise for me was that we can now see, we've now proved the intuition. Intuition is a thing that women have, and it's about this kind of web thinking and connecting the dots. Yeah. So we sort of store these memories deep, deep inside. And then when we see something similar, we then make that connection. We call it intuition, but it's actually something it's a kind of a, you know, super recall if you like, and, and, and replaying that situation. But that I think was the biggest surprise to me, Amy. So I would think that the thing that, that always astonishes me is the workplace environment and how we set up environments sometimes to shoot ourselves in the foot. >>So, so often we'll set up, uh, a competitive environment, whatever it is, let's let's and it's internal competition. Well, it turns out that the way that the brain chemicals work in women is that competition actually froze us into, to stress or threat cycle much more easily than it does to men, but men need it to be able to get to optimal arousal. There's a lot of interesting research from Amy Ernest in, at Yale and, and that piece of how you can manipulate your environment to be more successful together to me is absolutely key. And being able to pull out elements of competition, but also elements of collaboration, you kind of knew it, but the science validates it and you go, this is why we need to make sure there's a balance between the two. So everyone's successful. So to me, that's the aha. I could listen to Amy all day and how we apply it to the workplace. That's the next big step. Yeah. >>Yeah. You guys are awesome. And thanks so much for sharing and I wish we could go long. We're getting the hook here on time, but is there any links and locations websites we can, people can go to to get more information on the studies, the science. So I, a lot of my day curating >>And looking for more research. So peak teams.com/blog is where I do a lot of my writing and suggestions. Um, it's peak teams, P E K T E M s.com. And so I run our blog and kind of put my musings every once in a while up there so that people can see what I'm working on. Um, but they can reach out at any time. And I'm on Twitter at, at peak teams geek. Speaking of geeks, I embraced the geek mentality, right? >>Well, we have, I think geeks comment personally, but, um, final point, I'll give you the last word, Amy, if you could have a magic wand to take the science and change the preferred vision of the future with respect to men and women, you know, working cohesively together, understanding that we're different decoupled in science. Now, what would you want to see for the environment work force, life balance? What would be the magic wand that you would change? >>I think being able to make women more confident by helping reduce bias with everybody. So being more keyed in to those biases that we have in those automatic things we do to shortcut and to be more aware of them and work on them together and not see them as bad, but see them as human. So I think that's my big takeaway is remove, remove more bias. >>Fantastic. Stella Lowe, and Amy Posey here inside the cube. Thanks so much. Congratulations on your great work. Great panel. We'll continue. Of course, we have a special channel on SiliconANGLE's dot TV for women in tech. Go to SiliconANGLE dot DV. We've got a lot of cube alumni. We had another one here today with Amy. Thank you for joining us. This is the cube. We'll be right back day three, bringing it to a close here inside the cube live in Las Vegas. I'm John Forney. We'll be right back after this short break.

>> A cube at DMC World twenty fourteen is brought to you by D. M. C. Redefine, see innovating the world's first converged infrastructure solution for private cloud computing brocade. Say goodbye to the status quo and hello to Brocade. >> Welcome back to the Cube. This silken angle TVs live wall to wall Coverage of DMC World twenty fourteen here in the Sands Convention Center in Las Vegas. We've got three days to stage is over eighty guests. Lots of practitioners, execs, business leaders got a special segment. I'm bringing you today, bringing onto two thirds of the geek whispers, podcasts, Those in the story for the virtual ization and Claude Communities. No art is to guess. Well, let me introduce it's John Troyer, who's making his debut as the founder of tech reckoning. >> Thanks for having me. >> And we've got Amy Lewis influence marketing from Cisco. Name is your first time on the Cube, so, you know, welcome to the program. >> Thank you for having me on. >> All right, so So, guys, you know, we've been to a lot of conferences way we've hung out with, You know, the various influencers bloggers. It's changed a lot. This is my twelfth year coming M. C World. If you had told me twelve years ago some of things I'd be doing at this show, I wouldn't have believed you. I mean, I was one of the guys in a polo that only got out of out of the office once a year to give a presentation and, you know, talks in people about some cool tak um, and you know, social media is one of those things that, you know turn my career. Eleven. So you know what? Let's have a conversation about what's going on in the industry with kind of community influences and everything. John, maybe you could start us often. You know, Maybe if it leads in tow your new gigs? >> Sure, sure, on one on one, and things have changed. On the other hand, the same dynamics are playing out. Buying the buying cycle has changed. The buying process has changed. Customers are looking much more to their peers and not to traditional media analysts. Marketing folks, they can't find more ads. You can't send out more E mail. So what do you do? You need to get part of the conversation. We've been saying that for five or ten years, that's actually happened. Now the folks that were early on into the blogging space have turned themselves into communicators as well as technologists. We've seen, you know, their careers have have gone and all sorts of interesting places, for instance, you. But I think now that even we could talk about his art Is blogging dead? But I think now we're seeing it. We're seeing social media not as a trade or a practice practice, but simply a tool set that we all use. So that's all I'm saying is it's a It's more of a it spread throughout our organization. Not so much in one tiny niche, right? >> Yeah, Jonah, I love that point. I I I've been preaching for a bunch of years that this is an important skill, something you have to have their wonderful tools. But you've been doing community for a lot longer than Social Media has been around, and, you know, so it's peace, Amy, your influence marketing. What would please way out on this? >> Yeah, I chose the title, actually myself on purpose. To say it's not just social media, think social Media is very important, but like John was saying that to me is a set of tools. They're important platforms or important communications channels, but influencers the people who between the term citizen analysts they are unpaid analyst. But people are very passionate about technology, and they want to write on block and share, really engage their community. That's an important group of people. It's a really a buying center, and we have to find new ways to address them. So community is more important than >> ever. Citizen analysts thought, Let's focus that >> some of the >> people you know, I say some people goto event and they get it, get it, get wined and dined and they get to, you know, write about a bunch of stuff I'm like, you know you're better than journalists, you know, you'll You know you do some really good stuff and sometimes it's a little bit too friendly to the people that are doing it. So you know where do you see the role of kind of the press? You know, the analyst and the influencer? >> It's a great question I've been checking. We need to abstract the or chart. It is. It is a complicated question, but I think the traditional presses really trained and rightfully so in giving us that neutrality. So that is still a very important role. I think the analysts are paid Tio Tio, analyze particular sets, etcetera. They have nation specialty. I think the citizen analyst is interesting because they are what you don't know about the neutrality. But you do know that there are people who roll up their sleeves and really touched the technology. So that becomes a very interesting set because they really care about the technology Kazakh but could become their problem if they don't, you know, raise our voice and sort of engaged with technology and let the community know what, what the new trends are, what they need, what business needs. Our etcetera gives us a really applied version, the PR in the e R outside. >> Don't you want to comment on matter? >> I mean, these are the folks that they lose their jobs if they picked the wrong technology. So they have much more. Their discussions have it. They have more skin in the game. >> Aye, that's right. If you've got the practitioner, you know whether it be the end user sometime times it's the you know channel guy that they do that that's good, You know? What about the people inside the corporations that are also using these? >> I'm super bullish about the use of employees as advocates and evangelists in our community, both for technical education. And for the commercial part of our conversation in the enterprise space, we don't sell solutions with Russia. Your hair's a pressure and very nice calm. Give me a call. We sell it with relationships with people. I've been working on the social media since it existed, I suppose. And what we've seen over and over again is the social channels are really great for getting the word out. But without that personal component, it's like just handing out brochures. So you need your employees out there. You need your employees talking to folks. You need your employees without their representing your brand, just like they would have an event. I've seen that at something. On one hand, it's something that's so trivial that we all agree it's true. On the other hand, I don't. I think a lot of people are just realizing that now. >> So, John, you know, there's some some big companies, you know, creative certification programs to do some of this. There's some companies that just, you know, sign everybody up and, you know, it could be kind of an echo chamber or things like that. You know what? What do you see in these days? To kind of help out. You know the community >> well. There's a lot of software and a lot of programmatic things you could do. Those may be useful in terms of organizing you. It comes down to the people in the culture of the company and help much. You trust your people to go out. I think the best thing we can do is sit up platform for folks to be able to, to communicate. I think that's actually what Amy does really well at Cisco. >> X. It's, um I always talk about influence marketing as being people, platforms in content. And so I agree. I think that we sorted out some of the platform issues as we've learned about social media and grew up with it. I think that we are still working out the people in the content side and what's appropriate, how we can join together and do that and how we can creates a mute platforms may be using the tools of social tio to drive the conversation forward. >> All right. So, I mean, I got one for you. You know, how do we balance the kind of creation of information and kind of the community and fund? I mean, you do a lot of fun event you've got, you know, awful club this week. You've got, you know, bacon, stack and B bacon and bacon. I e I mean, I can't keep track of you, deport vacants and everything. And, you know, there'd be some executives here that would be like that, That social stuff. And they're playing games and things like that. So how do we balance kind of attic business value and greeting, you know, value to the community. And, you know, having fun in building community. >> No, it's a great question. A couple of years ago, I got a text in the middle of the night that said, Please explain to me how the bacon is a marketing play. Please explain this and you know, I need a power point slide. So if you've never had to explain, be bacon on the power points, I for that challenge out to everyone. But I think in the last couple of years people started to see it more and more as we're, uh, we're similar to the sales role, and that's how we've sort of changed the language. So I perform a sales like function, except I don't carry a quota. So it is about building the relationship like John was saying, and it is about balancing fun with your intent. So I think that if you create a fun environment, if you create an openness and willingness to listen, then the good things will follow. So you form the relationships of people. You open up their ability to create content with you because they don't feel under attack. They're ready to share. And again, it's it's kind of a magical formula. Be nice and create opportunity. >> Yeah, so >> I think we'll part of it's a generational ship. I think part of it a generational shift and part of it is a temperamental she So tradition again, going back to sales traditional enterprise sales. You might go and play golf with somebody, cause that's what you enjoy doing for our kind of geeks. Our golf is eating bacon and talking about the duplication strategies, right? That's where we're having the most fun. So it's It's just it's same sort of thing. Just a shift in generations. >> Yeah, I wonder if you know what, what role this community help in kind of careers. You know, I think you know, we're talking so much of these shows about, you know, if your storage admin. If you're networking admin and you know you're down there, you know, configuring Luns or setting up the land, you know, we're going to have a job in a couple of years because automation is gonna change. You know, how much does the community help in kind of those career paths and education? >> So, John, I think we should interview stew on this one. Should we have the geek whispers takeover. I think this is your great example. You've talked about you, you were on a career path and we hear this a lot, and when you raise your hand to volunteer, we sort of jokingly call the spokes uniforms. You both really enjoy the technology and like to communicate about it. When you raise your hand and make yourself known to the community, to your employers, to the world at large, it gives you different opportunities. And I think I don't think you go into technology really without wanting to have an evolving, exciting career. So I think that he's becoming proficient in these tools. Joining your community is an opportunity to learn from your peers to get back to your peers and to raise her profile and open yourself up to the possibility of a new opportunity or a new idea or different engagement. A new way to learn >> In today's business environment, communication is a key part of whatever you do, even if you're the guy sitting there configuring the lungs, because if you're not communicating with your teams and the application teams and the storage of network virtualization team, you're not going to succeed so I think that's an important part of it, right? Being a communicator, absolutely critical and art. Barney. >> All right, so either one of you feel free to answer, but I think back to my early days, you know, two thousand eight, I was so excited when I got invited to a couple of conferences. A blogger, you could kind of get a pass, and I would, You know, ten might take my own vacation time and usually spend that on expenses because my employer at the time didn't get it. It was this innovation conference in, like, in a New York City with four hundred people, and it was like, kind of amazing. I've seen people go to B m world on their own dime where they can get a pass. I mean, you know, it's great to see when you when you got the passion. So I guess the question I wanted to ask is, you know, with companies today, who should they be inviting? How do they do it? You know? You know. Is it you know, the blogger Or is it the, you know, empty Alexis co expert? You know, bm where be expert, you know, What? How's that? How's that changing? Or is it >> changing? Well, I think what you've seen happen over the years is something that was a little more unstructured, which was a kind of blogger relations program. Working with both customers partners, employees in your ecosystem has turned into something a little more formal. We created the V Expert program in two thousand nine to formalize what we were already doing. It's an analogy to the endless relations, press relations, investor relations, sorts of programs. So I mean, it's it's it's a little more buttoned up. It's a little more of a membership thing, but we I know both of DMC and BM where and it Cisco, Francisco champions to try to embrace all the folks that are out there blogging. I think you know, if you're a market or you need to make sure that you're keep your eyes open and you don't just talk to the people that you've gathered in your living room, Bye. You know, a lot of it's pretty easy if you're enthusiastic about technology, if you're engaged with the technology, if you put some effort into it, it's actually pretty easy to get involved with one of these programs there, there, there and there, there, fourth of people in them right there. They're not there to say the glory of the emcee and glory of Cisco and glory of'em, where they're there to help you with your career. They're there to give you tools to give you networking and, you know, hopefully get you to places like this. So I encourage everybody that that's interested in starting, you know, go ahead and get started. It's easier than you think to get involved. >> I agree with that, and I think that way want to be almost like an airline program that you'd actually want to participate. And it's sort of my job like this is a customer service activity, and I often talk about if you talk about the large pool of influencers. Maybe they haven't identified yet. Or maybe they prefer to stay independent. Or maybe they do have interest in a lot of different technologies. Me for them to engage in one of these programs, that stolen, important set of people that you have to deal with the mark, you know, and again set up these blogger days have longer briefings. But like John was saying, When you have the group of people that you name and give it a program name, this is a little bit of inside baseball if we don't talk about giving program a name and funding can follow. So if you're working in a corporate marketing environment, it's really important to explain to people that marketing structure behind what you're doing and when you treat them as a class, it gives you some advantage is you can scale out a little easier. You can provide more assets to those individuals, and it frees you up to Dio. What I love to do, which is is to really engage with those individuals and create content with them. So, >> yeah, so how is engagement these days? You know, I think back, you know, that you know, ten years ago, you talk. You know, one percent of the community would, you know, be doing almost all the contribution. Ten percent might be a little active and everybody else's lurker. You know, when we founded Wicked Bond Day, Volonte actually has on his business card that he's a one percenter which goes back to you know it. It's, you know, the one percent that causes all the trouble, the one percent that causes all all of the commotion. So, you know, with this wave, I mean, we were founded off of, you know, economics in crowd sourcing and everything else, and the Cube is all about, you know, sharing information. We put it all out there. We want everybody to contribute and, you know, give that feedback. You know, How are we along now? You know that that journey to get more people involved. >> I think the opportunity is there more than ever. I think you're right. I mean, there's always gonna be a percentage of people who want to raise her hand, the class that want to give up their PTO to go to a conference that that had this other life they just can't help themselves. And so in some ways it's finding the most impassioned and giving them opportunities. But I think that with the platforms and the scale, there is a greater opportunity for people. They don't want to start their own block. For instance, one of the things we do it Cisco champions is allowed people to guess, block or allow them to come post a podcast. So I think there are more more ways to and there, you know, that's one example. There's lots of other groups that provide people again a little bit a dose of it so they might not want to run a full media company on their own. They don't wanna build Q, but they want to participate. And I think that we have so many more opportunities for them to do that that we're seeing group. >> We're seeing platform ships over the years. I think we as technologists human beings have a tendency to forget their past relatively quickly, as people have moved from the MySpace world to the Facebook Twitter world. I think actually, we're headed for I don't call it I don't want to call it post Facebook, but it certainly is. A multi platform world made >> it just like >> it's a multi device world. We're not opposed PC world in that. I think you're seeing the rise of more specialized communities. They come back again from from our from our origins back ten or twenty years ago. I think we're seeing that people want more deeper engagement along the company. A lot of the report building and kind of conversation. And hey, how are you? Goes on on Twitter. But I think people are really looking for a place where they can have a better conversation, more interaction, more lasting death that might not be on their own. Blogger in their own kind of indie web sort of style, roll your own block. But there are more and more platforms that people are making available for this kind of connection again. What was once niche eventually permeates the whole >> yes. So, you know, the concern I have is it's tough because it is so dispersed right now, you know? You know, I love Twitter, you know? Hi, I'm stew, you know, on Twitter. And I know you guys are big on it, too. And I don't love the multi platform discussion. You know, I always love when you dropped that kind information on the community. But, you know, how >> do we How do we get that >> depth? It's one of the things I always worry about is, you know, people will read the headline and, you know, just react at it and, you know, they might even share it a bunch, but they haven't read it. Uh, so how do we get that deeper engagement? Deeper understanding. I mean, you know, I always say, you know, the I'm too busy is a poor excuse because, you know, you know Michelangelo and I'd sign that many hours in the day way we did and, you know, sure they didn't have their phone buzzing all over >> the place. >> I actually think we should do less. Not more. I think I think too much information, too many channels, too many corporate channels, too many personal channels, too much bad content. The world does not need more crappy content. So whether you're a individual, blogger or marketer, I'd say just turn the dial back a little bit. Did work on better, longer pieces that add more? I think that's the only way that we can shift the conversation. >> Yeah, long for love it. Oh, no, absolutely. I still read so >> well. It's a curatorial function as well, that we have to be responsible. And that's yet one more way people can participate. We see people rise and in the community because they're really great curator Sze, because they syndicate the content in ways are interesting to others because time is of a value so that becomes a real asset. And the skill is Well, >> yeah, great. Great point. Could you know, so many times I'm like I really like to do a thousand word post on this, but, you know, sometimes all I'll come out of this show and take, you know, I did a year ago. I did it. I didn't article on the federation. You know, the ZPM were pivotal and coming out of the show, I've got a lot of new data, and I could really quickly take some photos. I've done. Takes some of the notes. I take some of the tweets and, you know, put together an order. Won't take me as long. I mean, I'll probably do it on the plane ride home. So what I wanna ask next is, you know, you guys see a lot of things out there. What coolest thing you're seeing either at a at a conference or event or you know what? What? What's catching, right? What? What's interesting? Done. >> There's a whole new side out there called Tech, right? I don't know what's cool out there again. I'm seeing multi channel multi, a lot of experiments. There's some cool stuff going on with the indie web. There's I mean, everything is mobile. I don't know. There's just a lot of places. It >> sounds like you Let's give the plug. Integrity has finally cool things and, you know, solid. But something >> like that tech reckoning is a site that's gonna bring. It's an independent site. It's not associate with any vendor. It's going to bring some of the community and enterprise community together to talk about some of these things about Where is it going as a whole? Where's technology going, where our career is going to try to help us get to whatever this you know, it is a service. Third platform, Whatever you wanna call it, where the heck were going? It looks pretty interesting, and it looks like it isn't gonna be quite the same thing. So we're trying to bring together a set of people and just tackle some of those problem and also work together and collaborate. It's so much easier with open source with cloud. With all the tools we have available, it's so cheap and easy to build new pieces of technology, not just a type of each other words online, but to actually build stuff that I'm very excited about. The power taking going far. This from open source, right? Taking the power of people to come together and build cool new stuff. That's what I would like to. >> Still, I'm just angry that you scooped Matt and I on getting to interview John first about >> tech recognition. So, Amy, you you do some cool things that some of events we talk about, the waffle bacon, you What have you seen out there that that's kind of interesting? Or, you know, how do you find some of the cool new ideas? >> Yeah, I think you always I'm working with a really talented events team right now. And I think one of the things I've seen them sort of transform is that social is not other, you know? And we're seeing the social and this concept of community permeate and really think about our audience to really engage that core base, those those tech enthusiasts, and to see what you can do to in engage them. So I'm saying it in real life and in these community platforms. So I think that's been one of the other great trends is watching people band together and various kinds of consortiums. I won't name names, but there's a few folks outlook community. We're seeing a lot of this happen where they're sort of grouping together, and they're saying if they pull their resource is what happens, they might be able to gather enough money to go to a conference or to fund a buddy or to get a hotel room that they've got extra spaces somebody can crash. So I'm saying it's very cool, sort of stitching together opportunity and working together to learn more. So again, the combination of the platforms, using the technology and then in real life connection. >> All right, so I've been asking all the questions here. So before we wrap up, you know, Amy, anything you want, Johnny, when as me, John same, we throw it open. When Whenever >> you first signed up for your Twitter account, did you think it would lead you here because you have the best Twitter >> account? No, actually, a friend of mine for me and Steve Todd, who was blogging before I was, and he said, You know, when there's trepidation when you're gonna get published and you never know where it leads. And we were talking about this after he and I were on the stage at Radio City Music Hall right after Bill Clinton had been on because they brought the bloggers down when we were there. And it's like, Come on, you know, I'm, you know, I'm an engineer by training, you know, I've done. You know, I've done some sales. I've done engineering. I've done you no operations. Technologist is hard. So you know, some of the places the people I've met. I mean, if you just reach out to people, it still, even though there's so many people on Twitter, you know, the people that right and our authors and bloggers, If you comment or you reach out to them, a lot of them reach back. I mean, you know, I still amazed at some of the people I've met get to rub elbows with. No, just just have had a blast with him. So >> get another one. So do you think unicorns can be trained? Do you think people have to be born with the skill set, Or do you think you can be a uniformed rancher? >> No, I think I think I think they could be trained. You know, it's absolutely it's Ah, it's a tough skill set. I mean, you know, doing video is not easy. First couple of times you do it. It's different there's there's all these muscles. You know, Writing is one of those things that you know. I thought I was an okay writer, but hadn't done a lot of it. They're things you do. So try it out. And that thing I tell you, you got to stick with it for a while. I thought Twitter was pretty stupid. First Go on it. But, you know, I stuck on it for another six months and have some fun with it. No, here we are six years later and you know it is a lot and, you know, blocking of writing and blogging and everything else you know all over. I >> like the muscle memory idea. >> It's hard. You were on camera, have remember not to scratch my face. Strange. He'll set, I ask. I actually, I'm seeing a lot of interest in short form video. I know the kids are all doing it. I mean, obviously, we're doing it here. You do it. It's part of your practice. But in talking with people about our new activities, it's just so easy to take a chair. I think that's actually, even though it's been coming up for years, I think where I think that's an interesting thing >> on all right now, I'll give one of those inside tips videos. Great. Some people don't like to watch video. Yeah, broadcaster great. Some people don't like to listen to him, you know, writing's great. Some people won't read. So you know what? One of the early lessons I had is when I was, you know, being a, you know, active member on standard evangelizing of solution. I did it everywhere it you know that give presentations that shows you put it up on slide chair. You do you two videos, you blogged about it. You talk to everybody, you bet that you can everywhere. And you know, it just permeates out there. It could be a bunch of works and then there's tools that are out there. >> They're all connected events, right? I've discovered recently, and I can't believe I just realized this. But it was with the conversation with Amy on our Christmas broadcast that even though I've been part of an online group for years, I'm part of digital marketing for BM. Where for years, Uh, actually, most of my work. Half of my work is off line having my workers meeting people in person, getting to meet them and connecting that online and offline. And the synergy there is just is immense. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, other than the keynotes, my phone stays in my pocket for the most time. Unless I'm going between events. It's the in real life and nearly getting to know things. I was joking, You know, Twitter went away. Tomorrow might be a little sad, but I can connect the most. All those people, we got him on LinkedIn, Facebook and, you know, email. I still use something. Don't taking their holds. Absolutely. So you know, to wrap. I guess if you want to, just You know what people find more on your podcast. Find your website. You know Amy, Like it start? Well, >> where >> are Equus? Versace, of course. Geek hyphen whispers dot com on way, published every week. So give us a listen. See what you think. And I'm >> Matthew Brender. Sorry you couldn't join this time, but it's a lot as it were. A DMC world and you two are here in Matthew's. >> It's hard. We're going toe to toe. It's true. We're going to record with him like it's a Max headroom figure on a yes tomorrow, so and also I'm on Twitter as calms mention and I block under that same constantly dot com girls have engineers. That's true. I have engineers, unplug dot com as well. And now sixty second Tech, the short first on the popcorn version >> and I. J. Troia on Twitter and tech reckoning dot com. I went inside. >> Hey, Amy, John. Thanks so much. We We love taking the podcast. Inception. Sile inside the Cube. Look forward to seeing you lost events connecting with the community and everybody. Definitely check out their stuff. I'm at stew on Twitter with yvonne dot org's is where most of my articles go, and, of course, silicon angled on TV is where you can find all the video. Thanks for joining us. We will be back with the rest of DMC world covered.

More bottoms up and have more technical early adopters. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software and it starts with great technical founders with great products and great bottoms of emotions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background, super smart, but Myer of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is all companies there's no, I mean, consumer is enterprise now, everything is what was once a niche. No, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. <laugh> but remember, like right now there's also a tech and VC conference in Miami <laugh> and it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, >>Ts is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. >>Well, and, and I think all of us here that are, uh, may maybe students of history and have been involved in open source in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three >>Movement. The hype is definitely one web three. Yeah. >>But, >>But you know, >>For sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east of Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case now? And maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many measures over, uh, $500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30% a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast, well, >>Let's get, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant <laugh> but there's also the hype of like the web three, for instance, but you know, for, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Luman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, higher, a direct sales force and SAS kind of crushed that now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS is snowflake assassin or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, they own all my data and you know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of common across all successful startups and the overall adoption of technology. Um, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually like growth, right. They're one and the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving growth. >>You just pull the product >>Through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this, but maybe started with open source where users were contributors, you know, contributors were users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing. It's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the, and they're really the, the beneficiaries and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a gen Xer technically. So for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I have what been saying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit digital hippie revolution, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one other group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. You, we hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>During the mainframe days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home group. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on. Well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal it'll trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion yeah. Around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source, one example of that religion. Some people will say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? Yeah. It's so it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily caring >>About data. Data drives all decision making. Let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've been a VC for many years, but you also have the founder entrepreneurial mindset, but you can get empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of it's about believing in the person. So faking it till you make it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. >>Oh, AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur. Right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, so somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story, and I still think that that's important, right. It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. Yeah. But having said that you're right. The proof is in the pudding, right. At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it gonna it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in the new economy that we live in, really, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative of because their product begins exactly >>The volume you back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song is the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, like the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with. Right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the it's gotta speak to the, >>Speak to the user, but let me ask a question now that for the people watching, who are maybe entrepreneurial entre, preneurs, um, masterclass here in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine with you an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do, do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think something will become. Right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way. And we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be the, of more likely somebody is gonna align with your vision and, and wanna invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I, you gotta >>Show the >>Path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision. Uh, if you have the same vision, you can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle. The journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the latest trends because it's over before you can get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living, we'll say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. <laugh> so you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going in this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but some times it happens in six months. Sometimes it takes six years. Sometimes it takes 16 years. Uh, >>What's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Bel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There's three big trends that we invest in. And the they're the only things we do day in, day out one is the explosion and open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen, an alwa timeline >>Happening forever. >>But, uh, it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's, it's one big, massive wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now, a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally, it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is underinvested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a dessert do over, right? I mean, do we need you do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cybersecurity as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is run $150 billion. And it still is a fraction of what we're, >>What we're and national security even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital that's >>Right. You mean arguably, right? I mean, arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say, you gotta love your firm. Love. You're doing we're big supporters, your mission. Congratulations on your entrepreneurial venture. And, uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cuban. Uh, absolutely not. Certainly EU maybe even north Americans in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for helping me on the show. >>Guess be VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California. After this short break, stay with us. Everyone. Welcome to the cue here. Live in San Francisco. K warn you for AWS summit 2022 we're live we're back with events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube. Got a great guest here, Justin Kobe owner, and CEO of innovative solutions. Their booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us the story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. >>Yeah. <laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to mid-size businesses that are moving to the cloud, or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control security, compliance, all the good stuff that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is, but now we have offices down in Austin, Texas, up in Toronto, uh, Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago. And it's been a great ride. >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by a of us. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization, but obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? >>Yeah. It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small mids to size business. They're all trying to understand how to leverage technology better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech is really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're of like, listen, we gotta move to the cloud or we move some things to the cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then so, uh, progressively working through a modernization strategy is always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to mid-size businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. And they want to get set up. But the, the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is not it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem. And you guys solve >>In the SMB space. The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and our hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with, to technology staff that has traditional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether that's, we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to yeah. Feel like, listen, at the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's on primer in the cloud, I just want know that I'm doing that way. That helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. Good. >>How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I think there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start down your journey in one way and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's a, gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning, the projects that early, not worrying about it, you got it mean most people don't abandon stuff cuz they're like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. >>And they get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. >>Yeah. Frog and boiling water, as we used to say, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean, this, this is a dynamic. That's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you guys come in. I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talked to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did Andy jazzy announcer Adam? You know, the 5,000 announcement or whatever. They did huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just processes. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are >>Values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to midsize business leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a 10 a company in the process of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning they know that we have their back and we're the safety net. So when a customer is saying, right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand and dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going in alone. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say your high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attacks. If you have a partner that's offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products, uh, that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own. It, it would cost 'em a four, >>The training alone would be insane. A risk factor. I mean the cost. Yes, absolutely opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018. When, uh, when we, he made the decision to go all in on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious, it wasn't requirement. It still isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front >>Desk and she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I >>Love it. It's >>Amazing. >>But I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get >>The right people with. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point out SMBs and businesses in general, small and large it staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the buildout, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner, SMB, do I get to ROI? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cyber security issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one in the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Like critical issues. >>This is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about this, >>That's, that's what, at least a million in loading, if not three or more Just to get that app going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side. No. And they remind AI and ML. >>That's right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It it's incredibly difficult. And the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll do all that exactly. In the it department. >>Exactly. >>So like, can we just call up, uh, you know, our old vendor that's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like it, >>But that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I was a business owner starting a business today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. It's something that we talk about every, with every one of our small to mid-size >>Businesses. So just, I want get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative yeah. Award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, I was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduced other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. Yeah. I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months than I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at RT long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2000 and I was like, Hey, I'm growing the value of this business. And who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years? What do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner. But if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that were gonna also buy the business with me. >>And they were the owners, no outside capital, >>None zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons. They all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like, if we're own, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015 and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an earn out process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the BI cuz they cared very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting all going all in on the cloud was important for us. And we haven't looked back. >>And at that time, the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly the, uh, and those kinds of big enterprises. The GA I don't wanna say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to midsize business to migrate completely to the cloud is as infrastructure was considered, that just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing where the, a lot of our small to midsize business customers, they wanted to leverage cloud based backup, or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration. The, the Microsoft suite to the cloud. And a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on AWS at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plugin for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating into the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customer is not to be cash strapped and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so they can modernize. So >>Like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers and being empathetic to where they are in their journey. >>And that's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable win that's right. Seeing the value and ING down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate >>It. Thank you very much for having me. >>Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We're back with more great coverage for two days after this short break >>Live on the floor in San Francisco for Aus summit. I'm John for host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the actual back in person we're at AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube. Bring all the action. Also virtual. We have a hybrid cube, check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad to be here. >>So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to be back through events. It's >>Amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to, to in what two, three >>Years. That's awesome. We'll be at the, uh, a AWS summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and the big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything devs sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Benet, he's got cloud native. So the, the game is pretty much laid out. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's >>Right. Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions. The at our around, especially the edge public cloud for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give >>An example, >>Uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech data and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running or FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering Aw since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam slaps in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't wanna say trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listens to the customer. They work backwards from the customer. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does >>Computing. >>It >>Does. That's not centralized in the public cloud now they got regions. So what is the issue with the edge what's driving? The behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got five GM having. So it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data in is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always use the riff on the cube, uh, cause it's basically Amazon in a box, pushed in the data center, running native, all this stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of becoming standard. You're starting to see some standard. Deepak syncs group is doing some amazing work with opensource Raul's team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my datas center, do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outpost. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone now happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment. And it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. Right? So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. That's right. Innovative. Does that get the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in these new areas that you're helping out are they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is that they don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on what's making them money as a business. They wanna focus on their applications. They wanna focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and a AWS. You take the infrastructure, you take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. Uh, we help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. So >>Basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it >>Works? Right. And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy fin in the Caribbean, we're gonna talk about hurricanes. And we're gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that, that requirement. It makes total sense. We're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's a, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech. And in, in the islands there a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming. Uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a, uh, technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure, because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on >>It's interesting. I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, project going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart contract, we use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead and it's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain just for like smart contracts, for instance, or certain transactions. And they go to Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service. Well, what happened to decentralized? >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance issue. Yeah. And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through, uh, a use case of a customer Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my a, I also want all the benefit of the cloud. So I want the modern, and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer. >>Yeah. Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up, they don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with a regular commercially available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Inside of that manufacturing plant, we can do pre-procesing on things coming out of the robotics, depending on what we're manufacturing. Right. And then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard >>For data, data lake, or whatever, >>To the data lake. Yeah. Data lake house, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but a lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just time manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going to the data that saves that cost yeah. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data unless you have to. Um, but those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever, the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? There's a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe, maybe this decision can wait. Right. And then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot tube doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture on the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about customers are starting to talk about throwing away data. Uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And well, >>I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session this, but the one pattern we're seeing come of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retrain their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes co as we call it in our last showcase, we did a whole whole an event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw away. It's not just business benefits. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. There >>Are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are running petabyte level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a, kind of a, um, fun, I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, Aus cloud, and skydiving instructor. How does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? >>Yeah. Uh, I, >>You jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump >>Out kind of. So I was, you jumped out. I was teaching Scott eing, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a Scott I instructor. Uh, I was teaching Scott eing and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and how his customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, I started in the first day there, we had a, and, uh, EC two had just come out <laugh> um, and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that, and through being in on premises, migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services to premises. >>So it's such a great story. You know, I was gonna, you know, you know, the, the, the, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early days was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, uh, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and I, maybe it does still feel like that to some people, right. Yeah. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting stuff like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You guys, the right equipment, you gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Matthew, thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here, lot in San Francisco for AWS summit, I'm John for your host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look at this calendar for all the cube, actually@thecube.net. We'll right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube, a summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John furry host of the cube. We'll be at the, a us summit in New York city this summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco getting all coverage, what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dos car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor and a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you, Pam. Cool. How are you? Good. >>How are you? >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah so give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? First >>Of all, thank you for having me. We're back to be business with you never while after. Great to see you. Um, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. Um, we have raised close to a hundred million there. Uh, the investors are people like nor west Menlo, true ventures, coast, lo ventures, Ram Shera, and all those people, all known guys that Antibe chime Paul Mayard web. So a whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley vs are involved. >>And has it gone? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISR is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and ServiceNow to take it to the next stage? Well, >>I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, and Dave Valenti as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh>, >>You know, >>You >>Get, the comment is fun to talk to you though. >>You get the commentary, you, your, your finger on the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud out scale. You predicted that we talked about in the cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing Docker just raised a hundred million on our $2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from an enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control, plane emerging, AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded observability there's 10 million observability companies. Data is the key. This is what's your angle on this. What's your take. Yeah, >>No, look, I think I'll give you the view that I see, right? I, from my side, obviously data is very clear. So the things that room system of record that you and me talked about, the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud native, it'll be called AI. NA NA is a new buzzword and using the AI for customer service, it operations. You talk about observability. I call it AI ops, applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and AI service desk. What needs to be helped desk with ServiceNow BMC <inaudible> you see a new ALA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflows, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with AI workflows. So you'll see AI going >>Off is RPA a company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI S one will be at their event this summer? Um, or is it a product company? I mean, I mean, RPA is almost, should be embedded in everything. >>It's a feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company also, but that automation should be a, in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NA and AI NATO it'll become automation. NA yeah. And that's your thinking. >>It's almost interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kind having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle and it was software was action. Now you have all kinds of workflows abstractions everywhere. Right? So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed or they integrated. I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So don't about the databases become all polyglot databases. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area, like, as you were talking about, it should be part of ServiceNow. It should be part of ISRA, like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see MuleSoft and Salesforce buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies could cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also will have an automation as a layer <inaudible> inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind us, you got the expo hall. You got, um, we're back to vents, but you got, you know, am Clume Ove, uh, Dynatrace data dog, innovative all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right. Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Deibel later today. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen, we know all the, the VCs. What does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation. Cloud's bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's. Yes. Basically. Data's everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders, how Amazon created the startups 15 years back, everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be is people don't just build on Amazon. They're gonna build it on top of snowflake. Companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake. Right? So I see my old boss flagman try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer. Right? So I think that's the next level of <inaudible> trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis of a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your Mo is what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in, in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last reinvent, coined the term super cloud, right? He's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage, and guys, Charles Fitzgerald out there who we like was kind of shitting on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get it. Like, yeah, I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> cause he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Now. They say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist. And, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. It >>Is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer. Remember the middle layer pass will be snowflake so I can build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer if I really need to size build it on force.com Salesforce. Yeah. Right. So I think that's where you'll see. So >>Basically the, if you're an entrepreneur, the, the north star in terms of the, the outcome is be a super cloud. >>It is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. Yeah. >>Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales, the snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think they had Redshift. Amazon has got Redshift. Um, but Snowflake's a big customer in the, they're probably paying AWS, I think big bills too. So >>Joe on very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-optation will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with, uh, snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouses or data layer. So I think depending on the application use case, you have to use each of the above. I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that it comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, you know, foreclose, your, you that's right with some sort of internal hack. Uh, but I think, I think the general question that I have is that I, I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point, when does the rising tide stop and do the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth? So >>I think it's growth. You call it cloud scale, you invented the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's as long as there more movement from on, uh, OnPrem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations. It helpless, even the customer service service now and, uh, ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go >>Made. I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers are practitioners, not suppliers to the more market, feel free to text me or DMing. The next question's really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products, cuz you know, the big enterprises now and you know, small, medium, large and large enterprise are all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean I'm seeing some stuff, but why don't get your thoughts on that? What, >>No, it is. If I growing by or 2007 or eight, when I used to talk to you back then and Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or 1% today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a CIO or line of business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. >>Yeah. And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I reference the URL cause it's like, there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solutions that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there. Um, and goes back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure is code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share >>Yourself a lot of first is I see the AIOP solutions in the future should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app Dyna, right? Dynatrace, all this solution. We will go future towards predict to proactive solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service desk. Customers are give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can them, but I gotta train them, modify them, tweak them, make them >>Better, >>Make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to big data days back in 2009, you know, >>Look at, look how much data Rick has grown. >>It is. They doubled the >>Key cloud air kinda went private. So good stuff, man. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking at that growing customers and my customers are some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk McAfee, uh, grand to so all the top customers, um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on predict is one area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service. >>Great stuff, man. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of Aish summit 2022. And we're gonna be at Aus summit in San, uh, in New York in the summer. So look for that on this calendar, of course go to eight of us, startups.com. I mentioned that it's decipher all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This the cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back, little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit in new York's coming in the summer. We'll be there too with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the groove psych to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're can see a lot of virtual cube outta hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economists with bill group. He's the founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank >>You. Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe is shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at mark, Andrew's been doing a lot of shit posting lately. All a billionaires are shit hosting, but they don't know how to do it. Like they're not >>Doing it right? So there's something opportunity there. It's like here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a midsize island, do begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. >>This shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on this side I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what is shit posting? >>It's more or less talking about the world of enter prize technology, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream. But it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a jackass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, coupons coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you see the growth of cloud native Amazon's of all the Adams, especially new CEO. Andy's move on to be the chief of all Amazon. Just so I'm the cover of was it time met magazine? Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything. These folks do. They're they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble imagining the logistics. It takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. And it's, it's sprawling immense that dominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. >>Well, there's a lot of force for good conversations. Seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to port eight of us is trying to portray themselves as you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. <laugh> either way, sounds like more exciting. Like I better >>Have a replacement ready <laugh> I, in case something goes wrong on the track, highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in east sports with other people in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and videographic card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. >>Oh, it's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going on in your world. I know you have a lot of great success. We've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter, check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's the blowback, any blowback late? Has there been uptick? What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's high. I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They must not have heard me it. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do >>That. We should do that. Actually. I think you're people would call in, oh, >>I, I think >>I guarantee we had that right now. People would call in and say, Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised about anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the >>Customer. You know, I always joke with Dave Alane about how John Fort's always at, uh, um, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0, 0 5, or we can't call, we >>Have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And then there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented SU sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish. That's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their >>Producting. So they're going in different directions. When they named Amazon Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonused on number of words, they can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, session manager is a great one. I love the service ridiculous name. They have a systems manager, parameter store, which is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage your parameter store does not. It's fun. >>What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination >>Of gots. You got EMR, you got EC two, you got S3 SQS. Well, RedShift's not an acronym you >>Gets is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation, they >>Shook up bean stock or is that still around? Oh, >>They never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, well, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it, but while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it. John three <laugh>. Okay. Simple BV still haunts our dreams. >>I, I actually got an email on, I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C twos were being deprecated and I got an email I'm I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me? Just like, give me something else. All right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you, is that like, okay. So as Amazon better in some areas where do they need more work in your opinion? Because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database Snowflake's got out database service. So Redshift, snowflake data breach is out there. So you got this co-op petition. Yes. How's that going? And what do you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with, and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want. And they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multicloud. Cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word multicloud. Um, a lot of people though saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word. Like multicloud sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multicloud? >>Multiple single >>Cloudant loves that term. Yeah. >>You know, you're building in multiple single points of failure, do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about my multi-cloud either as the industry leader, let's talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective. It doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of forms. Some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on, but my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. >>Yeah, course. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question cause I know you we've been, you know, fellow journeyman and the, and the cloud journey going to all the events and then the pandemic hit. We now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna gonna end. Certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations. Community's gonna emerge. You've got a pretty big community growing and it's growing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing or just big changes you've seen with the pandemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece, come in, you're commentating, you're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck build group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, funny, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who can pony up two grand and a week in Las Vegas and get to Las Vegas from wherever they happen to be by moving virtually suddenly it, it embraces the reality that talent is evenly. Distributed. Opportunity is not. And that means that suddenly these things are accessible to a wide swath of audience and potential customer base and the rest that hadn't been invited to the table previously, it's imperative that we not lose that. It's nice to go out and talk to people and have people come up and try and smell my hair from time to time, I smelled delightful. Let me assure you. But it was, but it's also nice to be. >>I have a product for you if you want, you know? Oh, >>Oh excellent. I look forward to it. What is it? Pudding? Why not? <laugh> >>What else have you seen? So when accessibility for talent. Yes. Which by the way is totally home run. What weird things have happened that you've seen? Um, that's >>Uh, it's, it's weird, but it's good that an awful lot of people giving presentation have learned to tighten their message and get to the damn point because most people are not gonna get up from a front row seat in a conference hall, midway through your Aing talk and go somewhere else. But they will change a browser tab and you won't get them back. You've gotta be on point. You've gotta be compelling if it's going to be a virtual discussion. Yeah. >>And you turn off your iMessage too. >>Oh yes. It's always fun in the, in the meetings when you're ho to someone and their colleague is messaging them about, should we tell 'em about this? And I'm sitting there reading it and it's >>This guy is really weird. Like, >>Yes I am and I bring it into the conversation and then everyone's uncomfortable. It goes, wow. Why >>Not? I love when my wife yells at me over I message. When I'm on a business call, like, do you wanna take that about no, I'm good. >>No, no. It's better off. I don't the only entire sure. It's >>Fine. My kids text. Yeah, it's fine. Again, that's another weird thing. And, and then group behavior is weird. Now people are looking at, um, communities differently. Yes. Very much so, because if you're fatigued on content, people are looking for the personal aspect. You're starting to see much more of like yeah. Another virtual event. They gotta get better. One and two who's there. >>Yeah. >>The person >>That's a big part of it too is the human stories are what are being more and more interesting. Don't get up here and tell me about your product and how brilliant you are and how you built it. That's great. If I'm you, or if I wanna work with you or I want to compete with you or I want to put on my engineering hat and build it myself. Cause why would I buy anything? That's more than $8. But instead, tell me about the problem. Tell me about the painful spot that you specialize in. Yeah. Tell me a story there. >>I, I think >>That gets a glimpse in a hook and makes >>More, more, I think you nailed it. Scaling storytelling. Yes. And access to better people because they don't have to be there in person. I just did a thing. I never, we never would've done the queue. We did. Uh, Amazon stepped up in sponsors. Thank you, Amazon for sponsoring international women's day, we did 30 interviews, APAC. We did five regions and I interviewed this, these women in Asia, Pacific eight, PJ, they call for in this world. And they're amazing. I never would've done those interviews cuz I never, would've seen 'em at an event. I never would've been in pan or Singapore, uh, to access them. And now they're in the index, they're in the network. They're collaborating on LinkedIn. So a threads are developing around connections that I've never seen before. Yes. Around the content. >>Absolutely >>Content value plus and >>Effecting. And that is the next big revelation of this industry is going to realize you have different companies. And, and I Amazon's case different service teams all competing with each other, but you have the container group and you have the database group and you have the message cuing group. But customers don't really want to build things from spare parts. They want a solution to a problem. I want to build an app that does Twitter for pets or whatever it is I'm trying to do. I don't wanna basically have to pick and choose and fill my shopping cart with all these different things. I want something that's gonna basically give me what I'm trying to get as close to turnkey as possible. Moving up the stack. That is the future. And just how it gets here is gonna be >>Well we're here at Corey Quinn, the master of the master of content here in the a ecosystem. Of course we we've been following up from the beginning. His great guy, check out his blog, his site, his newsletter screaming podcast. Corey, final question for, uh, what are you here doing? What's on your agenda this week in San Francisco and give a plug for the duck build group. What are you guys doing? I know you're hiring some people what's on the table for the company. What's your focus this week and put a plug in for the group. >>I'm here as a customer and basically getting outta my cage cuz I do live here. It's nice to actually get out and talk to folks who are doing interesting things at the duck bill group. We solved one problem. We fixed the horrifying AWS bill, both from engineering and architecture, advising as well as negotiating AWS contracts because it turns out those things are big and complicated. And of course my side media projects last week in aws.com, we are, it it's more or less a content operation where I in my continual and ongoing love affair with the sound of my own voice. >><laugh> and you're good. It's good content it's on, on point fun, Starky and relevant. So thanks for coming to the cube and sharing with us. Appreciate it. No >>Thank you button. >>You. Okay. This the cube covers here in San Francisco, California, the cube is back going to events. These are the summits, Amazon web services summits. They happen all over the world. We'll be in New York and obviously we're here in San Francisco this week. I'm John fur. Keep, keep it right here. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Okay. Welcome back everyone. This's the cubes covers here in San Francisco, California, we're live on the show floor of AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube and remember AWS summit in New York city coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. And of course reinvent the end of the year for all the cube coverage on cloud computing and AWS two great guests here from the APN global APN Sege chef Jenko and Jeff Grimes partner lead Jeff and Sege is doing partnerships global APN >>AWS global startup program. Yeah. >>Okay. Say that again. >>AWS. We'll start >>Program. That's the official name. >>I love >>It too long, too long for me. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, >>Of course. >>Appreciate it. Tell us about what's going on with you guys. What's the, how was you guys organized? You guys we're obviously we're in San Francisco bay area, Silicon valley, zillions of startups here, New York. It's got another one we're gonna be at tons of startups. A lot of 'em getting funded, big growth and cloud big growth and data secure hot in all sectors. >>Absolutely. >>So maybe, maybe we could just start with the global startup program. Um, it's essentially a white glove service that we provide to startups that are built on AWS. And the intention there is to help identify use cases that are being built on top of AWS. And for these startups, we want to pro vibe white glove support in co building products together. Right. Um, co-marketing and co-selling essentially, um, you know, the use cases that our customers need solved, um, that either they don't want to build themselves or are perhaps more innovative. Um, so the, a AWS global startup program provides white glove support. Dedicat at headcount for each one of those pillars. Um, and within our program, we've also provided incentives, programs go to market activities like the AWS startup showcase that we've built for these startups. >>Yeah. By the way, AWS startup, AWS startups.com is the URL, check it out. Okay. So partnerships are key. Jeff, what's your role? >>Yeah. So I'm responsible for leading the overall effort for the AWS global startup program. Um, so I've got a team of partner managers that are located throughout the us, uh, managing a few hundred startup ISVs right now. <laugh> >>Yeah, you got a >>Lot. We've got a lot. >>There's a lot. I gotta, I gotta ask a tough question. Okay. I'm I'm a startup founder. I got a team. I just got my series a we're grown. I'm trying to hire people. I'm super busy. What's in it for me. Yeah. What do you guys bring to the table? I love the white glove service, but translate that what's in it for what do I get out of it? What's >>A story. Good question. I focus, I think. Yeah, because we get, we get to see a lot of partners building their businesses on AWS. So, you know, from our perspective, helping these partners focus on what, what do we truly need to build by working backwards from customer feedback, right? How do we effectively go to market? Because we've seen startups do various things, um, through trial and error, um, and also just messaging, right? Because oftentimes partners or rather startups, um, try to boil the ocean with many different use cases. So we really help them, um, sort of laser focus on what are you really good at and how can we bring that to the customer as quickly as possible? >>Yeah. I mean, it's truly about helping that founder accelerate the growth of their company, right. And there's a lot that you can do with AWS, but focus is truly the key word there because they're gonna be able to find their little piece of real estate and absolutely deliver incredible outcomes for our customers. And then they can start their growth curve there. >>What are some of the coolest things you've seen with the APN that you can share publicly? I know you got a lot going on there, a lot of confidentiality. Um, but you know, we're here a lot of great partners on the floor here. I'm glad we're back at events. Uh, a lot of stuff going on digitally with virtual stuff and, and hybrid. What are some of the cool things you guys have seen in the APN that you can point to? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can point to few, you can take them. So, um, I think what's been fun over the years for me personally, I came from a startup brand sales at an early stage startup and, and I went through the whole thing. So I have a deep appreciation for what these guys are going through. And what's been interesting to see for me is taking some of these early stage guys, watching them progress, go public, get acquired and see that big day mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, and being able to point to very specific items that we help them to get to that point. Uh, and it's just a really fun journey to watch. >>Yeah. I, and part of the reason why I really, um, love working at the AWS, uh, global startup program is working with passionate founders. Um, I just met with a founder today that it's gonna, he's gonna build a very big business one day, um, and watching them grow through these stages and supporting that growth. Um, I like to think of our program as a catalyst for enterprise is sort of scale. Yeah. Um, and through that we provide visibility, credibility and growth opportunities. >>Yeah. A lot, a lot of partners too. What I found talking to staff founders is when they have that milestone, they work so hard for it. Whether it's a B round C round Republic or get bought. Yeah. Um, then they take a deep breath and they look back at wow, what a journey it's been. So it's kind of emotional for sure. But still it's a grind. Right? You gotta, I mean, when you get funding, it's still day one. You don't stop. It's no celebrate, you got a big round or valuation. You still gotta execute >>And look it's hypercompetitive and it's brutally difficult. And our job is to try to make that a little less difficult and navigate those waters. Right. Where ever everyone's going after similar things. >>Yeah. And I think as a group element too, I observe that startups that I, I meet through the APN has been interesting because they feel part of AWS. Yeah, totally. As a group of community, as a vibe there. Um, I know they're hustling, they're trying to make things happen. But at the same time, Amazon throws a huge halo effect. I mean, that's a huge factor. I mean, you guys are the number one cloud in the business, the growth in every sector is booming. Yeah. And if you're a startup, you don't have that luxury yet. And look at companies like snowflake that built on top of AWS. I mean, people are winning by building on AWS. >>Yeah. And our, our, our program really validates their technology first. So we have, what's all the foundation's technical review that we put all of our startups through before we go to market. So that when enterprise customers are looking at startup technology, they know that it's already been vetted. And, um, to take that a step further and help these partners differentiate, we use programs like the competency programs, the DevOps competencies, the security competency, which continues to help, um, provide sort of a platform for these startups, help them differentiate. And also there's go to market benefits that are associated with that. >>Okay. So let me ask the, the question that's probably on everyone's mind, who's watching, certainly I asked this a lot. There's a lot of companies startups out there who makes the cut, is there a criteria cut? It's not like it's sports team or anything, but like sure. Like there's activate program, which is like, there's hundreds of thousands of startups out there. Not everyone is at the APN. Right? Correct. So ISVs again, that's a whole nother, that's a more mature partner that might have, you know, huge market cap or growth. How, how do you guys focus? How do you guys focus? I mean, you got a good question, you know, thousand flowers blooming all the time. Is there a new way you guys are looking at it? I know there's been some talk about restructure or, or new focus. What's the focus. >>Yeah. It's definitely not an easy task by any means. Um, but you know, I recently took over this role and we're really trying to establish focus areas, right. So obviously a lot of the ISVs that we look after are infrastructure ISVs. That's what we do. Uh, and so we have very specific pods that look after different type of partners. So we've got a security pod, we've got a DevOps pod, we've got core infrastructure, et cetera. And really, we're trying to find these ISVs that can solve, uh, really interesting AWS customer. >>You guys have a deliberate, uh, focus on these pillars. So what infrastructure, >>Security, DevOps, and data and analytics, and then line of business >>Line, business line business, like web >>Marketing, business apps, >>Owner type thing. Exactly. >>Yeah, exactly. >>So solutions there. Yeah. More solutions and the other ones are like hardcore. So infrastructure as well, like storage back up ransomware kind of stuff, or, >>Uh, storage, networking. >>Okay. Yeah. The classic >>Database, et cetera. Right. >>And so there's teams on each pillar. >>Yep. So I think what's, what's fascinating for the startups that we cover is that they've got, they truly have support from a build market sell perspective, right. So you've got someone who's technical to really help them get the technology, figured out someone to help them get the marketing message dialed and spread, and then someone to actually do the co-sell, uh, day to day activities to help them get in front of customers. >>Probably the number one request that we always ask for Amazon is can wish that sock report, oh, download it on the console, which we use all the time. <laugh> exactly. But security's a big deal. I mean, you know, ask the res are evolving, that role of DevOps is taking on dev SecOps. Um, I, I can see a lot of customers having that need for a relationship to move things faster. Do you guys provide like escalation or is that a part of a service or that not part of, uh, uh, >>Yeah, >>So the partner development manager can be an escalation for absolutely. Think of that. 'em as an extension of your business inside of AWS. >>Great. And you guys, how is that partner managers, uh, measure >>On those three pillars? Right. Got it. Are we billing, building valuable use cases? So product development go to market, so go to market activities, think blog, posts, webinars, case studies, so on and so forth. And then co-sell not only are we helping these partners win their current opportunities that they are sourcing, but can we also help them source net new deals? Yeah. Right. That's very, >>I mean, top asked from the partners is get me in front of customers. Right. Um, not an easy task, but that's a huge goal of ours to help them grow their top line. >>Right. Yeah. In fact, we had some interviews here on the cube earlier talking about that dynamic of how enterprise customers are buying. And it's interesting, a lot more POCs. I have one partner here that you guys work with, um, on observability, they got a huge POC with capital one mm-hmm <affirmative> and the enterprises are engaging the star ups and bringing them in. So the combination of open source software enterprises are leaning into that hard and bringing young growing startups in mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yep. So I could see that as a huge service that you guys can bring people in. >>Right. And they're bringing massively differentiated technology to the table. The challenge is they just might not have the brand recognition. The, at the big guys have mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so that's, our job is how do you get that great tech in front of the right situations? >>Okay. So my next question is about the show here, and then we'll talk globally. So here in San Francisco sure. You know, Silicon valley bay area, San Francisco bay area, a lot of startups, a lot of VCs, a lot of action. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so probably a big market for you guys. Yeah. So what's exciting here in SF. And then outside of SF, you guys have a global pro, have you see any trends that are geography based or is it sure areas more mature? There's certain regions that are better. I mean, I just interviewed a company here. That's doing, uh, a AWS edge really well in these cases. It's interesting that these, the partners are filling a lot of holes and gaps in the opportunities with a AWS. So what's exciting here. And then what's the global perspective. >>Yeah, totally. So obviously see a ton of partners from the bay area that we support. Um, but we're seeing a lot of really interesting technology come out of AMEA specifically. Yeah. Uh, and making a lot of noise here in the United States, which is great. Um, and so, you know, we definitely have that global presence and, and starting to see super differentiated technology come out of those regions. >>Yeah. Especially Tel Aviv. Yeah. >>Amy and real quick before you get into surge. It's interesting. The VC market in, in Europe is hot. They've got a lot of unicorns coming in. We've seen a lot of companies coming in. They're kind of rattling their own, you know, cage right now. Hey, look at us. Let's see if they crash, you know, but we don't see that happening. I mean, people have been predicting a crash now in, in the startup ecosystem for least a year. It's not crashing. In fact, funding's up. >>Yeah. The pandemic was hard on a lot of startups for sure. Yeah. Um, but what we've seen is many of these startups, they, as quickly as they can grow, they can also pivot as, as, as well. Um, and so I've actually seen many of our startups grow through the demo because their use cases are helping customers either save money, become more operationally efficient and provide value to leadership teams that need more visibility into their infrastructure during a pandemic. >>It's an interesting point. I talked to Andy jazzy and Adam Celski both say the same thing during the pandemic. Necessity's the mother of all invention. Yep. And startups can move fast. So with that, you guys are there to assist if I'm a startup and I gotta pivot cuz remember iterate and pivot, iterate and pivot. So you get your economics, that's the playbook of the ventures and the models. >>Exactly. How >>Do you guys help me do that? Give me an example of what me through. Pretend me, I'm a start up. Hey, I'm on the cloud. Oh my God. Pandemic. They need video conferencing. Hey cube. Yeah. What do I need? Search? What, what do >>I do? That's a good question. First thing is just listen. Yeah. I think what we have to do is a really good job of listening to the partner. Um, what are their needs? What is their problem statement? Where do they want to go at the end of the day? Um, and oftentimes because we've worked with, so how many successful startups that have come out of our program, we have, um, either through intuition or a playbook determined what is gonna be the best path forward and how do we get these partners to stop focusing on things that will eventually, um, just be a waste of time. Yeah. And, or not provide, or, you know, bring any fruit to the table, which, you know, essentially revenue. >>Well, we love startups here in the cube because one, um, they have good stories, they're oil and cutting edge, always pushing the envelope and they're kind of disrupting someone else. Yeah. And so they, they have an opinion. They don't mind sharing on camera. So love talking to startups. We love working with you guys on our startups. Showcases startups.com. Check out AWS startups.com and she got the showcase. So is, uh, final word. I'll give you guys the last word. What's the bottom line bumper sticker for AP globe. The global APN program summarize the opportunity for startups, what you guys bring to the table and we'll close it out. Totally. We'll start >>With you. Yeah. I think the AWS global startup programs here to help companies truly accelerate their business full stop. Right. And that's what we're here for. Love it. >>It's a good way to, it's a good way to put it. Dato yeah. >>All right. Thanks for coming out. Thanks John. Great to see you love working with you guys. Hey, startups need help. And the growing and huge market opportunities, the shift cloud scale data engineering, security infrastructure, all the markets are exploding in growth because of the digital transformation of realities here, open source and cloud. I'll making it happen here in the cube in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, your host. Thanks for >>Watching Cisco, John. >>Hello and welcome back to the Cube's live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, two days of coverage, AWS summit, 2022 in New York city coming up this summer will be there as well. Events are back. The cube is back of course, with the cube virtual cube hybrid, the cube.net. Check it out a lot of content this year more than ever a lot more cloud data cloud native, modern applic is all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, Cub alumni, uh, CEO of observe Inc in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data observability, Jeremy. Great to see you. Thanks. >>Coming on. Always great to come and talk to you on the queue, man. It's been been a few years, so, >>Um, well you, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, uh, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability Smith hot area, but also you've been a senior executive president of Dell EMC. Um, 11 years ago you had a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. Um, yeah. And it's here, you predicted it 11 years ago. Um, look around it's cloud meets big data. >>Yeah. I mean the, the cloud thing I think, you know, was, was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for, for sort of catching that bus early, um, you know, we, we were on the, the, the bus early and, and I think it was only inevitable. Like, you know, if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you, you could find out things you could never possibly imagine. >>So you're close to a lot of companies that we've been covering deeply snowflake, obviously you involved, uh, at the board level, the other found, you know, the people there, uh, cloud, you know, Amazon, you know, what's going on here? Yeah. You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, uh, chief of observ, Inc, which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data engineering, large scale integrations, um, data as code integrating into applications. I mean, it's a whole nother world developing, like you see with snowflake, it means snowflakes is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's your, what's this wave we're on what's how would you describe the wave? >>Well, a couple of things, I mean, people are, I think right in more software than, than ever before are why? Because they've realized that if, if you don't take your business online and offer a service, then you become largely irrelevant. And so you you've got a whole set of new applications. I think, I think more applications now than any point. Um, not, not just ever, but the mid nineties, I always looked at as the golden age of application development. Now, back then people were building for windows. Well, well now they're building for things like AWS is now the platform. Um, so you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data. And the, you know, there's sort of the transactions, you know, what you bought today are something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry, all the exhaust fumes. And I think people really are realizing that their differentiation is not so much their application. It's their understanding of the data. Can, can I understand who my best customers are, what I sell today. If people came to my website and didn't buy, then why not? Where did they drop off all of that? They wanna analyze. And, and the answers are all in the data. The question is, can you understand it >>In our last startup showcase, we featured data as code one of the insights that we got out of that, and I wanna get your opinion on our reaction to is, is that data used to be put into a data lake and turns into a data swamp or throw into the data warehouse. And then we'll do some queries, maybe a report once in a while. And so data, once it was done, unless it was real time, even real time was not good anymore after real time. That was the old way. Now you're seeing more and more, uh, effort to say, let's go look at the data, cuz now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once mm-hmm <affirmative> they're iterating. Yeah. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting. Yeah, that's a Silicon valley story. That's like how startups work, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have another, this data concept that's now yeah. Part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole, this whole new cycle of >>Yeah. >>Data being reused and repurposed and figured out and yeah, >>Yeah. I'm a big fan of, um, years ago. Uh, uh, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee at the MIT C cell labs I spent time with and he, he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look I'm I'm. He said I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you have enough data, you can answer any question. And, and this is going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and, and certainly, you know, research is on the forefront. But I think, you know, starting to see that mindset of the, the sort of MIT research be mainstream, you know, in enterprises, they they're realizing that. Yeah, it is about the data. You know, if I can better understand my data better than my competitor, then I've got an advantage. And so the question is is, is how, what, what technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to, to allow me to do that. >>So let's talk about observing you the CEO of, okay. Given you've seen the ways before you're in the front lines of observability, which again is in the center of all this action what's going on with the company. Give a quick minute to explain, observe for the folks who don't know what you guys do. What's the company doing? What's the funding status, what's the product status and what's the customer status. Yeah. >>So, um, we realized, you know, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago that, um, look, the way people are building applications is different. They they're way more functional. They change every day. Uh, but in some respects they're a lot more complicated. They're distributed. They, you know, microservices architectures and when something goes wrong, um, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not gonna fly because you had SA so much change going into production on a daily basis. It was hard to tell like where the problem was. And so we thought, okay, it's about time. Somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and all the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot and make sense of the problems that they're seeing. So, I mean, that's observability, it's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was a guy called, uh, Rudolph like, like everything in tech, you know, it's, it's a reinvention of something from years gone by. >>Um, there's a guy called, um, Rudy Coleman in 1960s coiner term and, and, and the term was being able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for, uh, the best part of four years now. Um, it took us three years just to build the product. I think, I think what people don't appreciate these days often is the barrier to entry in a lot of these markets is quite high. You, you need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. Um, so yeah, this last year we, we, we did our first year selling, uh, we've got about 40 customers now. Um, we just we've got great investors for the hill ventures. Uh, I mean, Mike SP who was, you know, the, the guy who was the, really, the first guy in it snowflake and the, the initial investor were fortunate enough to, to have Mike and our board. And, um, you know, part of the observed story is closely knit with snowflake all of that time with your data, you know, we, we store in there. >>So I want to get, uh, yeah. Pivot to that. Mike SP snowflake, Jeremy Burton, the cube kind of, kind of same thinking this idea of a super cloud or what snowflake became. Yeah. Snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of snowflake. Yeah. So that's become an entrepreneurial story that we think that to go big in the cloud, you can have a cloud on a cloud, uh, like as Jerry, Jerry Chan and Greylock calls it, castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you, you're doing some stuff with snowflake. So as a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a snowflake or an AWS, because again, you gotta go where the data is. You need all the data. >>Yeah. So >>What's your take on that? I mean, >>Having enough gray hair now, um, you know, again, in tech, I think if you wanna predict the future, look at the past. And, uh, you know, 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a, a smaller company called Oracle and an Oracle was the database company. And, uh, their, their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms, one, one windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operating system was the platform. And, and then that was the, you know, ecosystem that you would compete on top of. And then there were companies like SAP that built applications on top of Oracle. So then wind the clock forward 25 years gray hairs. <laugh> the platform, isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, you know, Google cloud. I gotta probably look around if I say that in. Yeah, >>It's okay. Columbia, but hyperscale. Yeah. CapX built out >>That is the new platform. And then snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generated data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. And I think they they've done an amazing job are doing for the, I'd say, say the, the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world, you know, way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and, and of course my ambition would be, look, if, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of snowflake, uh, as, as they were on top of Oracle, then, then we'd probably be quite happy, >>Happy. So you're building on top of snowflake, >>We're building on top of snowflake a hundred percent. And, um, you know, I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that that's a risk. You're >>Still on the board. >>Yeah. I'm still on the board. Yeah. That's a risk I'm prepared to take. I am more on snowing. >>It sounds well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board, then you'll know what's going on. Okay. No, yeah. Serious one. But the, this is a real dynamic. It is. It's not a one off its >>Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS is in order of magnitude, more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so I've believe the opportunity for folks like snowflake and, and folks like observe it. It's an order of magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old world. >>Yeah. And I think this is really, I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you gotta be on a platform. Yeah. >>It's quite easy >>Or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how seats were at that table left >>Well value migrates up over time. So, you know, when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, you know, rack space and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure, a service platform as a service. My, my old, uh, um, employee EMC, we had pivotal, you know, pivotal was a platform as a service. Don't hear so much about it these days, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to, to like extract, uh, a real business, you gotta move up, you gotta add value, you gotta build databases, then you gotta build applications. So >>It's interesting. Moving from the data center of the cloud was a dream for starters within if the provision, the CapEx. Yeah. Now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on, on top of that, you got snowflake. Now you got on top of that. >>The assumption is almost that compute and storage is free. I know it's not quite free. Yeah. It's almost free, but you can, you know, as an application vendor, you think, well, what can I do if I assume compute and storage is free, that's the mindset you've gotta get >>Into. And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm gonna get a series us multiple of value in what I'm paying. Yeah. Most people don't even blanket their Avis pills unless they're like massively huge. Yeah. Then it's a repatriation question or whatever discount question, but for most startups or any growing company, the Amazon bill should be a small factor. >>Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, um, ask me, uh, like, look you build in on snowflake. Um, you, you know, you, you, you're gonna be, you're gonna be paying their money. How, how, how, how does that work with your business model? If you're paying their money, you know, do, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. I, we could build a database as well and observe, but then I've got half the development team working on something that will never be as good as snowflake. And so we made the call early on that. No, no, we, we want a eight above the database. Yeah. Right. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and, and the same is true of something like Amazon, like, like snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >>Yeah. And what's interesting is that Dave <inaudible> and I have been pointing this out and he's obviously a more on snowflake. I've been looking at data bricks, um, and the same dynamics happening, the proof is the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, if you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and data bricks it's exploding. Right. I mean, the shows are selling out the floor. Space's book. That's the old days at VMware. Yeah. The old days at AWS. >>Well, and for snowflake and, and any platform from VI, it's a beautiful thing because, you know, we build on snowflake and we pay them money. They don't have to sell to us. Right. And we do a lot of the support. And so the, the economics work out really, really well. If you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of >>Ecosystems. Yeah. And then also you get, you get a, um, a trajectory of, uh, economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of snowflake integrations, right. New product, you're scaling a step function with them. >>Yeah. I mean, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. Right. When I, when I, when I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had, we had one petabyte customer. And, and so at observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so been able to rely on a platform that can manage that is inve >>You know, well, Jeremy great conversation. Thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. Uh, we got a couple minutes left, um, put a plug in for observe. What do you guys know? You got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your, your, your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You getting in traction. >>Yeah. Yeah. Scales >>Around the corner. Sounds like, are you, is that where you are scale? >>We've got a big that that's when coming up in two or three weeks, we've got, we've got new funding, um, which is always great. Um, the product is, uh, really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, you know, which is at which point can you just start hiring salespeople? And the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. Um, we've got about 40 SaaS companies that run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, uh, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting, um, enterprise type customers. We're, we're, you know, F five networks we're POC in right now with capital one, we got some interest in news around capital one coming up. I, I can't share too much, but it's gonna be exciting. And, and like I said, so hill continue to, to, >>I think capital one's a big snowflake customer as well. Right. >>They were early in one of the things that attracted me to capital one was they were very, very good with snowflake early on. And, and they put snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. And, and today that, that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts, >>Capital, one, very innovative cloud, obviously Atos customer, and very innovative, certainly in the CISO and CIO, um, on another point on where you're at. So you're, Prescale meaning you're about to scale, >>Right? >>So you got POCs, what's that trajectory look like? Can you see around the corner? What's, what's going on? What's on, around the corner. That you're, that you're gonna hit this straight and narrow and, and gas it fast. >>Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the key thing for us is we gotta get the product. Right. Um, the nice thing about having a guy like Mike Pfizer on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage. His questions that the board are always about, like is the product, right? Is the product right? Is the product right? Have you got the product right? And cuz we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and, and the revenue will take care of itself. Yeah. So right now all the attention is on the product. Um, the, this year, the exciting thing is we we're, we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that by in the day you could do with the new relics and AppDynamics, the last generation of, of APM tools, you're gonna be able to do that within observe. And we've already got the logs and the metrics capability in there. So for us this year is a big one, cuz we sort of complete the trifecta, you know, the, the >>Logs, what's the secret sauce observe. What if you had the, put it into a, a, a sentence what's the secret sauce? >>I, I, I think, you know, an amazing founding engineering team, uh, number one, I mean, at the end of the day, you have to build an amazing product and you have to solve a problem in a different way. And we've got great long term investors and, and the biggest thing our investors give is it actually, it's not just money. It gives us time to get the product, right. Because if we get the product right, then we can get the growth. >>Got it. Final question. While I got you here, you've been on the enterprise business for a long time. What's the buyer landscape out there. You got people doing POCs on capital one scale. So we know that goes on. What's the appetite at the buyer side for startups and what are their requirements that you're seeing? Uh, obviously we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their, this restructure. So, so a lot of happening in cloud, what's the criteria. How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >>Yeah. I mean, enterprises, they know they've gotta spend money transforming the business. I mean, this was, I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but, um, what, what we were saying five years ago is happening. Um, everybody needs to figure out a way to take their business to this digital world. Everybody has to do it. So the nice thing from a startup standpoint is they know at times they need to risk or, or take a bet on new technology in order to, to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that a have money, uh, B it prepared to take risks and it's, it's a race against time to you'll get their, their offerings in this, a new digital footprint. >>Final, final question. What's the state of AWS. Where do you see them going next? Obviously they're continuing to be successful. How does cloud 3.0, or they always say it's day one, but it's more like day 10, but what's next for Aw. Where do they go from here? Obviously they're doing well. They're getting bigger and bigger. Yeah, >>Better. It's an amazing story. I mean, you know, we're, we're on AWS as well. And so I, I think if they keep nurturing the builders and the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They, they have an early leads. And if you look at where, you know, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the, in the late nineties, it was, they stopped, uh, really caring about developers in the folks who were building on top of their ecosystem. In fact, they started buying up their ecosystem and competing with people in their ecosystem. And I see with AWS, they, they have an amazing headstart and if they did more, you know, if they do more than that, that's, what's gonna keep this juggernaut rolling for many years to come. >>Yeah. They got the Silicon and got the stack. They're developing Jeremy Burton inside the cube, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called observing in the middle of all the action on the board of snowflake as well. Um, great startup. Thanks for coming on the cube. Always a pleasure. Okay. Live from San Francisco. It's to cube. I'm John for your host. Stay with us more coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. >>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here live in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cubes cube coverage of AWS summit 2022 here in San Francisco. We're all the developers are the bay air at Silicon valley. And of course, AWS summit in New York city is coming up in the summer. We'll be there as well. SF and NYC cube coverage. Look for us. Of course, reinforcing Boston and re Mars with the whole robotics, AI. They all coming together. Lots of coverage stay with us today. We've got a great guest from Bel VC. John founding partner, entrepreneurial venture is a venture firm. Your next act, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Good to see you, man. I feel like it's been forever since we've been able to do something in person. Well, >>I'm glad you're here because we run into each other all the time. We've known each other for over decade. Um, >>It's been at least 10 years, >>At least 10 years more. And we don't wanna actually go back as bring back the old school web 1.0 days. But anyway, we're in web three now. So we'll get to that in a second. We, >>We are, it's a little bit of a throwback to the path though, in my opinion, >>It's all the same. It's all distributed computing and software. We ran each other in cube con. You're investing in a lot of tech startup founders. Okay. This next level, next gen entrepreneurs have a new makeup and it's software. It's hardcore tech in some cases, not hardcore tech, but using software to take an old something old and make it better new, faster. So tell us about Bel what's the firm. I know you're the founder, uh, which is cool. What's going on. Explain >>What you, I mean, you remember I'm a recovering entrepreneur, right? So of course I, I, >>No, you're never recovering. You're always entrepreneur >>Always, but we are also always recovering. So I, um, started my first company when I was 24. If you remember, before there was Facebook and friends, there was instant messaging. People were using that product at work every day, they were creating a security vulnerability between their network and the outside world. So I plugged that hole and built an instant messaging firewall. It was my first company. The company was called IM logic and we were required by Symantec. Uh, then spent 12 years investing in the next generation of software companies, uh, early investor in open source companies and cloud companies and spent a really wonderful years, uh, at a firm called NEA. So I, I feel like my whole life I've been either starting enterprise software companies or helping founders start enterprise software companies. And I'll tell you, there's never been a better time than right now to start an enterprise software company. >>So, uh, the passion for starting a new firm was really a recognition that founders today that are starting an enterprise software company, they, they tend to be, as you said, a more technical founder, right? Usually it's a software engineer or a builder mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, they are building that are serving a slightly different market than what we've traditionally seen in enterprise software. Right? I think traditionally we've seen it buyers or CIOs that have agendas and strategies, which, you know, purchase software that is traditionally bought and sold tops down. But you know, today I think the most successful enterprise software companies are the ones that are built more bottoms up and have more technical early adopters. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software. And it starts with great technical founders with great products and great bottoms of motions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background. You're super smart admire of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is, is all companies there's no, I mean, consumer is enterprise now. Everything is what was once a niche, not, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. But remember, like right now, there's also a giant tech in VC conference in Miami <laugh> and it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, well, >>MFTs is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. >>Well, and, and I think all of us here that are of may, maybe students of his stream have been involved in open source in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three >>Movement. The hype is definitely web >>Three. Yeah. But, >>But you know, >>For sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east to Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case and maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many measures over, uh, $500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30 a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast >>Let's getting, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant <laugh> but there's also the hype of like the web three, for instance, but you know, for, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Lutman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, hire a direct sales force and sass kind of crushed that now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS? Is snowflake a SAS or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, and they own all my data. And you know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of commonalities across all six of startups and the overall adoption of technology. Uh, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually user like growth, right. They're one in the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving. >>You just pull the product >>Through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this movement may be started with open source where users were contributors, you know, contributors were users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing and it's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the users. And they're really the, the offic and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a gen Xer technically. So for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I've, I've been saying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit a digital hippie Revolut, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one of group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. We hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>During the mainframe days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home brew club. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on like, well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source. One example of that religion. Some people say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? It's, it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily. I mean, >>The data drives all decision making. Let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've been a VC for many years, but you also have the founder entrepreneurial mindset, but you can empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of is about believing in the first. So faking it till you make it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. Oh, >>AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur, right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story. And I still think that that's important, right. It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. Yeah. But having said that you're right. The proof is in the pudding, right. At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it's gonna, it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in this new economy, that're, we live in really, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative because their product begin for exactly >>The volume you back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song is the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, like the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with for right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the it's gotta speak to the, >>Exactly. Speak to the user. But let me ask a question now that for the people watching, who are maybe entrepreneurial entre entrepreneurs, um, masterclass here is in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur to come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine. Whether you're an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think will become, right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way, and we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be, the more likely somebody is gonna to align with your vision and, and want to invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I, you gotta show the path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision. Uh, if you have the same vision, you can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle of the journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the, the latest trends because it's over before you even get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living will say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. So you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but sometimes it happens ins six months. Sometimes it takes six years. Sometimes it takes 16 years. Uh, >>What's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Tebel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There there's three big trends that we invest in. And then the, the only things we do day in day out one is the explosion at open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen an alwa timeline happening forever, but it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's its one big mass of wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is underinvested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a do over, right? I mean, do we need a do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cyber security as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole like economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is around 150 billion and it still is a fraction of what >>We're, what we're and even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital >>That's right. You mean arguably, right. Arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say you gotta love your firm. Love who you're doing. We're big supporters of your mission. Congrat is on your entrepreneurial venture. And uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cuban. Uh, >>Absolutely >>Not. Certainly EU maybe even north America's in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for helping me on the show. >>Des bell VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California, after the short break, stay with us. Hey everyone. Welcome to the cue here. Live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022 we're live we're back with events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, 80% summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube. Got a great guest here. Justin Colby, owner and CEO of innovative solutions they booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us the story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. Yeah. >><laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to midsize businesses that are moving to the cloud or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control, cost, security, compliance, all the good stuff, uh, that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is. But now we have offices down in Austin, Texas up in Toronto, uh, Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago. And it's been a great ride. >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by AWS. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization and obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? Yeah. >>It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small to mid-size business. I'll try and understand how to leverage technology better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech is really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're like, listen, we gotta move to the out or we move some things to the cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then, uh, progressively working through a modernization strategy is always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to midsize businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. They want to get set up. But the, the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is. And it's not, it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem you guys solve >>The SMB space. The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and are hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with technology staff that has additional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether that's, we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to, yeah, they're like, listen, the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's OnPrem or in the cloud. I just want to know that I'm doing that in a way that helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. Good. >>How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I think there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start the, on your journey in one way, and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's a, gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning, the projects that early and not worrying about it, you got it. I mean, most people don't abandon stuff cuz they're like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. >>And they get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. Yeah. >>Frog and boiling water as we used to say so, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean this, this is a dynamic that's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you guys come in. I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talk to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did Andy jazzy announcer Adam, you know, five, a thousand announcement or whatever they did with huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just product. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are >>The values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to mid-size business, leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a tech company in the pro of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning know that we have their back and we're the safety net. So when a customer is saying, all right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going on loan. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say you're high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attack. If you have a partner that's offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own, it would cost 'em a fortune. If >>It's training alone would be insane. A risk factor not mean the cost. Yes, absolutely. Opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. Yeah. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018, when, uh, when we made the decision to go all on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious decision. It wasn't requirement isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front desk >>And she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I >>Love it. It's amazing. So I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get the right >>People involved. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point about SMBs and BIS is in general, small and large. It staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the build out, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner or SMB, do I get the why? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cyber security issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one in the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Like critical issues. This >>Is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about this, that's, >>That's what, at least a million in bloating, if not three or more Just to get that going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side now. Yeah. No. And nevermind AI and ML. That's >>Right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It's incredibly difficult. And the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll do all that exactly. In the it department. >>Exactly. >>Like, can we just call up, uh, you know, our old vendor that's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like >>It, >>But that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I were a business owner starting a business today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. And it's something that we tell, talk about every, with every one of our small to mid-size >>Businesses. So just, I wanna get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative yeah. Award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, I was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduce other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. And I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months that I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at RT long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2010 and I was like, Hey, on the value of this business and who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years, what do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner, but if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that were gonna also buy into the business with me. >>And they were the owners, no outside capital, none >>Zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons, they all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like if we're owners, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015, and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an early now process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the business, cuz they cared very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting going all in on the cloud was important for us and we haven't looked back. >>And at that time the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly. And those kinds of big enterprises, the GA I don't wanna say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to mid-size business, to migrate completely to the cloud as, as infrastructure was considered. That just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing where a lot of our small to mid-size as customers, they wanted to leverage cloud-based backup or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration, the Microsoft suite to the cloud. And a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on AWS at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is it the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plug in for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking to migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating to the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customers not to be cash strap and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so that they can modernize. >>So like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers and being empathetic to where they are in their journey. >>And that's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable wind. That's right. Seeing the value and Ling down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much for having me. >>Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. We're back with more great coverage for two days after this short break, >>Live on the floor and see San Francisco for a AWS summit. I'm John ferry, host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the action we're back in person. We're at a AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back. Events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube. Bring all the action. Also virtual. We have a hybrid cube. Check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticking off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad to be >>Here. So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to have to be back through events. >>It's amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to and what two, three years. >>It's awesome. We'll be at the UHS summit in New York as well. A lot of developers and a big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything dev sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the game is pretty much laid out mm-hmm <affirmative> and the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's right. >>Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around, especially the edge public cloud for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give an example, uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, it's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering a, since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and became the CEO. Now Adam's in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to avoid. I don't wanna say trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listen to the customers. They work backwards from the customer. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does computing. It >>Does. That's not centralized in the public cloud now they got regions. So what is the issue at the edge what's driving the behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see that the data at the edge, you got 5g having. So it's pretty obvious, but there's a slow transition. What was the driver for the edge? What's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation where today we have over 15 AWS edge services and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always used to riff on the cube cause it's basically Amazon and a box pushed in the data center, running native, all the stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of becoming standard. You're starting to see some standard Deepak syncs. Group's doing some amazing work with open source Rauls team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW, he was giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see local zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my data center, do I want to manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outposts. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere or in your VMware environment. And it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. Right? So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. That's right. Innovative as that you get the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in, in these new areas that you're helping out are, they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their availability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is it. They don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on, what's making them money as a business. They want on their applications. They want to focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS, you take the infrastructure. You take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. Uh, we help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company. We have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping of these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. So >>Basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it works? Right. >>And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy FinTech in the Caribbean, we talk about hurricanes and we're gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where you now have data and you have applications that are tapping into that, that required. It makes total sense. We're seeing that across the board. So it's not like it's, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech. And in, in the islands there a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what's your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto to underlie parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming a, uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a, uh, technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure, because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on it's >>Interesting. I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, projects going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart concept. We use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead and it's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain, just for this like smart contracts for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service, but what happened to decentralized. >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance issue. Yeah. And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through, uh, a use case of a customer, um, Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud. Um, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my ad. And I also want all the benefit of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the goodness of the cloud. What's the answer. Yeah. >>Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment inside that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with, uh, regular commercial available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Uh, inside of that manufacturing plant, uh, we can do pre-procesing on things coming out of the, uh, the robotics that depending on what we're manufacturing, right. Uh, and then we can take those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard for >>Data, data lake, or whatever, to >>The data lake. Yeah. Data lake house, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but a lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just in time, manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going to the data that saves that cost yep. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data, unless you have to, um, those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacturing, industrial, whatever, the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? This is a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud out? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe maybe decision can wait. Right? Yeah. Uh, and then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot too, doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture on the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are. And, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about customers are starting to talk about throwing away data, uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And >>Well, I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this, but the one pattern was income of the past year is that throwing away data's bad. Even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retrain their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes code, as we call it our lab showcase, we did a whole, whole, that event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw away. It's not just business benefits. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. There >>Are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are run petabyte level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, uh, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move petabytes of data to the AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a kind of a, um, fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background on premise architect, a cloud and skydiving instructor. <laugh> how does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? Yeah. >>Uh, you >>Jumped out a plane and got a job. You, you got a customer to jump out >>Kind of. So I was jump, I was teaching Scott eing, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a Scott I instructor. Yeah. Uh, I was teaching Scott eing and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and, and how his cus customers are working. And he can't find enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, uh, I was living in a tent in the woods teaching scout. I think I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, uh, I started in the first day there, uh, we had a, a discussion, uh, EC two, just come out <laugh> um, and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that and through being an on premises migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services to >>It's. So it's such a great story, you know, I was gonna, you know, you know, the, the, the, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early day was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, um, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and I, maybe it does still feel like that to some people. Right. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days, AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's pretty much now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting edge stuff, like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You guys, the right equipment, you gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Matthew, thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here live and San Francisco for summit. I'm John Forry host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. look@thiscalendarforallthecubeactionatthecube.net. We'll be right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube a be summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John fury host to the cube. We'll be at the eight of his summit in New York city. This summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco, getting all the coverage what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dudes, car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor and a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you, sir. Chris. Cool. How are, are you >>Good? How are you? >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah. So give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? First >>Of all, thank you for having me back to be business with you. Never great to see you. Um, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. Um, we have raised close to a hundred million there. Uh, the investors are people like Norwes Menlo, Tru ventures, coast, lo ventures, Ram Sheam and all those people, all well known guys. The Andy Beckel chime, Paul Mo uh, main web. So a whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley VCs are involved >>And has it come? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISR is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk, uh, the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and ServiceNow to take it to the next stage? >>Well, I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, Dave Valenti as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a GE, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh> >>You know who you >>Get to call this fun to talk. You though, >>You got the commentary, you, your, your finger on the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud scale. You predicted that we talked about on cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing DACA just raised a hundred million on a 2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from an enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control, plane emerging, AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded, observability there's 10 million observability companies. Data is the key. What's your angle on this? What's your take. Yeah, >>No, look, I think I'll give you the view that I see right from my side. Obviously data is very clear. So the things that remember system of recorded you and me talked about the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud NA it'll be called AI, NA AI native is a new buzzword and using the AI customer service it operations. You talk about observability. I call it, AIOps applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and service desk. What needs to be helped us with ServiceNow BMC G you see a new ELA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflow, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with a AI workflows. So you'll see AI going >>Off is RPA a company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI pass? One will be at their event this summer? Um, is it a product company? I mean, I mean, RPA is almost, should be embedded in everything. It's >>A feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company, or, but that automation should be embedded in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NA and AI NATO it'll become automation. NA yeah. And that's your thinking. >>It's almost interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kinda having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it. It was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle, and it was software abstraction. Now you have all, all kinds of workflows, abstractions everywhere. So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed or they integrated. I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So don't about the databases become called poly databases. Yeah. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area like you were talking about. It should be part of service. Now it should be part of ISRA, like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see MuleSoft and Salesforce buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies, cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also have an automation as a layer <inaudible> inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind us, you've got the expo hall. We got, um, we're back to vents, but you got, you know, AMD, Clum, Ove, uh, Dynatrace data, dog, innovative, all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right. Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Bel later today. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen. We know all the, the VCs. What does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation, clouds bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's code. Yes. Basically data is everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders of Amazon created the startups 15 years back. Everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be is people don't just build on Amazon. They're going to build it on top of snowflake. Companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake. Right? So I see my old boss flagman try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer. Right? So I think that's in the of, <inaudible> trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your moat is, what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last reinvent, coined the term super cloud, right? He's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage. And guys like Charles Fitzgeral out there, who we like was kind of shit on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get it. Like, yeah. I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> if he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Yes. Now they say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist. And, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. >>It is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer. Remember the middle layer pass will be snowflake. So can build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer. If I really need to size, I'll build it on four.com Salesforce. So I think that's where you'll see. So >>Basically if you're an entrepreneur, the north star in terms of the outcome is be a super cloud. >>It is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. >>Yeah. Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales? The snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think got Redshift. Amazon has got red, um, but Snowflake's a big customer. They're probably paying AWS think big bills too. >>So John, very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-option will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with, uh, snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouse as a data layer. So I think depending on the application use case, you have to use each of the above. I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, You know, foreclose your value that's right. But some sort of internal hack, but I think, I think the general question that I have is that I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point. When does the rising tide stop >>And >>Do the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth cycle? I >>Think it's growth. You call it cloud scale. You invented the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's, as long as there are more movement from on, uh, OnPrem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations. It helpless, even the customer service service now and, uh, ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go made. >>I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers or practitioners, not suppliers to the market, feel free to, to XME or DMing. Next question's really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products. Cause you know, the big enterprises now and, you know, small, medium, large, and large enterprise are all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or a growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean I'm seeing some stuff, but why don't we get your thoughts on that? What, no, it is. >>If I remember going back to our 2007 or eight, it, when I used to talk to you back then when Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or 1% today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a CIO line business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can double in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. >>Yeah. And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I reference the URL cause it's like, there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solutions that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting left for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there, um, and gives back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure as code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share >>Yourself? No, I have a lot of thoughts that plus I see AIOP solutions in the future should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app Dyna, right? Dynatrace, all this solution will go future towards to proactive solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service that customers are give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can come the best algorithm, but I gotta train them, modify them, tweak them, make them better, make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to our big data days back in 2009, you know, >>Look at, look how much data bricks has grown. >>It is uh, double, the key >>Cloud kinda went private, so good stuff. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking at that growing customers and my customers are some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk, Mac of fee, uh, grandchildren, all the top customers. Um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on predict S one area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service, >>Great stuff, man. Doing great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of 80 summit, 2022. And we're gonna be at 80 summit in San, uh, in New York and the summer. So look for that on this calendar, of course go to eight of us, startups.com. I mentioned that it's a site for all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This to cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back a little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit new York's coming in the summer. We'll be there too with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the groove, psyched to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're gonna see a lot of virtual cube, a lot of hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economists with duck, bill groove, he founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe as shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at Mark's been doing a lot of shit posting lately, all a billionaires are shit posting, but they don't know how to do it. Like they're not >>Doing it right. Something opportunity there. It's like, here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a mid-size island to begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. This >>Shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on the other side, I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what is shit posting? >>It's more or less talking about the world of enterprise tech, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream. But it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a jackass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, coupons coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you can see the growth of cloud native Amazons, all, all the Adams let see new CEO, Andy move on to be the chief of all. Amazon just saw him. The cover of was it time magazine. Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything these folks do. They they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble imagining the logistics. It takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. It's, it's sprawling, immense that dominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. Well, >>There's a lot of force for good conversations, seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to port and he was trying to portray themselves as you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now it same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. Either way, sounds like more exciting >>Replacement ready <laugh> in case something goes wrong. I, the track highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in e-sports with other, in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and video graphics card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. >>Oh, it's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going in your world. I know you have a lot of great success. We've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter. Check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's back any blow back late there been uptick. What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's high. I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They must not have heard me it. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do that. >>We should do that. Actually. I think sure would call in. Oh, I, >>I think >>Chief, we had that right now. People would call in and say, Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the customer. >>You know, I always joke with Dave ante about how John Fort's always at, uh, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0 5, or we can't, >>We have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish. That's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their >>Producting, they're going in different directions. When they named Amazon Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonused on a number of words. They can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, session manager is a great one. I love the service, ridiculous name. They have systems manager, parameter store, which is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage your parameter store does not. It's >>Fun. What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination of you >>Got Ks. You got EMR, you got EC two. You got S three SQS. Well, Redshift the on an acronym, you >>Gots is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation. >>They still up bean stalk. Or is that still around? Oh, >>They never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, wow, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it. But while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it. John three <laugh>. >>Okay. >>Simple BV still haunts our dreams. >>I, I actually got an email. I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C two S were being deprecated and I got an email I'm like, I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me just like, give me something else. Right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you is that like, okay. So as Amazon gets better in some areas, where do they need more work in your opinion? Because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database, Snowflake's got a database service. So Redshift, snowflake database is, so you got this co-op petition. Yes. How's that going? And what are you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with Amazon and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want and they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multi-cloud cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word. Multi-cloud um, a lot of people are saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word, like multi sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multi-cloud >>Multiple single points? >>Dave loves that term. Yeah. >>Yeah. You're building in multiple single points of failure. Do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about multi-cloud either as the industry leader, talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective, it doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of forms. Some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on context. But my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing, because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. Yeah. >>Cool. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question, cause I know you, we you've been, you know, fellow journeymen and the, and the cloud journey going to all the events and then the pandemic hit where now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna gonna end. Certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations. Community's gonna emerge. You got a pretty big community growing and it's throwing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing, or just big chain angels. You've seen with the pandemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece, come in, you're commentating. You're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck bill group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, fun, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who can pony up two grand and a week in Las Vegas and get to Las Vegas from wherever they happen to be by moving virtually suddenly it, it embraces the reality that talent is even distributed. Opportunity is not. And that means that suddenly these things are accessible to a wide swath of audience and potential customer base and the rest that hadn't been invited to the table previously, it's imperative that we not lose that. It's nice to go out and talk to people and have people come up and try and smell my hair from time to time, I smell delightful. Let make assure you, but it was, but it's also nice to be. >>I have a product for you if you want, you know. >>Oh, excellent. I look forward to it. What is it putting? Why not? <laugh> >>What else have you seen? So when accessibility for talent, which by the way is totally home run. What weird things have happened that you've seen? Um, that's >>Uh, it's, it's weird, but it's good that an awful lot of people giving presentations have learned to tighten their message and get to the damn point because most people are not gonna get up from a front row seat in a conference hall, midway through your Aing talk and go somewhere else. But they will change a browser tab and you won't get them back. You've gotta be on point. You've gotta be compelling if it's going to be a virtual discussion. >>Yeah. And also turn off your IMEs too. >>Oh yes. It's always fun in the, in the meetings when you're talking to someone and their co is messaging them about, should we tell 'em about this? And I'm sitting there reading it and it's >>This guy is really weird. Like, >>Yes I am and I bring it into the conversation and then everyone's uncomfortable. It goes, wow. >>Why not? I love when my wife yells at me over I message. When I'm on a business call, like, do you wanna take that about no, I'm good. >>No, no. It's better off. I don't. No, the only encourager it's fine. >>My kids. Excellent. Yeah. That's fun again. That's another weird thing. And, and then group behavior is weird. Now people are looking at, um, communities differently. Yes. Very much so, because if you're fatigued on content, people are looking for the personal aspect. You're starting to see much more of like yeah. Another virtual event. They gotta get better. One and two who's there. >>Yeah. >>The person >>That's a big part of it too is the human stories are what are being more and more interesting. Don't get up here and tell me about your product and how brilliant you are and how you built it. That's great. If I'm you, or if I wanna work with you or I want to compete with you, or I wanna put on my engineering hat and build it myself. Cause why would I buy anything? That's more than $8. But instead, tell me about the problem. Tell me about the painful spot that you specialize in. Tell me a story there. >>I, I >>Think that gets a glimpse in a hook and >>Makes more, more, I think you nailed it. Scaling storytelling. Yes. And access to better people because they don't have to be there in person. I just did it thing. I never, we never would've done the queue. We did. Uh, Amazon stepped up in sponsors. Thank you, Amazon for sponsoring international women's day, we did 30 interviews, APAC. We did five regions and I interviewed this, these women in Asia, Pacific eight, PJ, they called for in this world. And they're amazing. I never would've done those interviews cuz I never, would've seen 'em at an event. I never would've been in Japan or Singapore to access them. And now they're in the index. They're in the network. They're collaborating on LinkedIn. So a threads are developing around connections that I've never seen before. Yes. Around the content, >>Absolutely >>Content value plus >>The networking. And that is the next big revelation of this industry is going to realize you have different companies. And in Amazon's case, different service teams, all, all competing with each other, but you have the container group and you have the database group and you have the message cuing group. But customers don't really want to build things from spare parts. They want a solution to a problem. I want to build an app that does Twitter for pets or whatever it is I'm trying to do. I don't wanna basically have to pick and choose and fill my shopping cart with all these different things. I want something that's gonna give me what I'm trying to get as close to turnkey as possible. Moving up the stack. That is the future. And just how it gets here is gonna be >>Well we're here with Corey Quinn, the master of the master of content here in the a ecosystem. Of course we we've been following up in the beginnings. Great guy. Check out his blog, his site, his newsletter screaming podcast. Cory, final question for you. Uh, what do you hear doing what's on your agenda this week in San Francisco and give a plug for the duck build group. What are you guys doing? I know you're hiring some people what's on the table for the company. What's your focus this week and put a plug in for the group. >>I'm here as a customer and basically getting outta my cage cuz I do live here. It's nice to actually get out and talk to folks who are doing interesting things at the duck build group. We solve one problem. We fixed the horrifying AWS bill, both from engineering and architecture, advising as well as negotiating AWS contracts because it turns out those things are big and complicated. And of course my side media projects last week in aws.com, we are, it it's more or less a content operation where I indulge my continual and ongoing law of affair with the sound of my own voice. >><laugh> and you good. It's good content. It's on, on point fun, Starky and relevant. So thanks for coming to the cube and sharing with us. Appreciate it. No, thank you. Fun. You. Okay. This the cube covers here in San Francisco, California, the cube is back at to events. These are the summits, Amazon web services summits. They happen all over the world. We'll be in New York and obviously we're here in San Francisco this week. I'm John furry. Keep, keep it right here. We'll be back with more coverage after this short break. Okay. Welcome back everyone. This's the cubes covers here in San Francisco, California, we're live on the show floor of AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube and remember AWS summit in New York city coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. And of course reinvent the end of the year for all the cube coverage on cloud computing and AWS. The two great guests here from the APN global APN se Jenko and Jeff Grimes partner leader, Jeff and se is doing partnerships global APN >>AWS global startup program. Yeah. >>Okay. Say that again. >>AWS global startup program. >>That's the official name. >>I love >>It too long, too long for me. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, of course. Appreciate it. Tell us about what's going on with you guys. What's the, how was you guys organized? You guys we're obviously were in San Francisco bay area, Silicon valley, zillions of startups here, New York. It's got another one we're gonna be at tons of startups. Lot of 'em getting funded, big growth and cloud big growth and data security, hot and sectors. >>Absolutely. >>So maybe, maybe we could just start with the global startup program. Um, it's essentially a white glove service that we provide to startups that are built on AWS. And the intention there is to help identify use cases that are being built on top of AWS. And for these startups, we want to provide white glove support in co building products together. Right. Um, co-marketing and co-selling essentially, um, you know, the use cases that our customers need solved, um, that either they don't want to build themselves or are perhaps more innovative. Um, so the, a AWS global startup program provides white glove support, dedicated headcount for each one of those pillars. Um, and within our program, we've also provided incentives, programs go to market activities like the AWS startup showcase that we've built for these startups. >>Yeah. By the way, start AWS startups.com is the URL, check it out. Okay. So partnerships are key. Jeff, what's your role? >>Yeah. So I'm responsible for leading the overall F for, for the AWS global startup program. Um, so I've got a team of partner managers that are located throughout the us, uh, managing a few hundred startup ISVs right now. <laugh> >>Yeah, I got >>A lot. We've got a lot. >>There's a lot. I gotta, I gotta ask the tough question. Okay. I'm I'm a startup founder. I got a team. I just got my series a we're grown. I'm trying to hire people. I'm super busy. What's in it for me. Yeah. What do you guys bring to the table? I love the white glove service, but translate that what's in it. What do I get out of it? What's >>A good story. Good question. I focus, I think. Yeah, because we get, we get to see a lot of partners building their businesses on AWS. So, you know, from our perspective, helping these partners focus on what, what do we truly need to build by working backwards from customer feedback, right? How do we effectively go to market? Because we've seen startups do various things, um, through trial and error, um, and also just messaging, right? Because oftentimes partners or rather startups, um, try to boil the ocean with many different use cases. So we really help them, um, sort of laser focus on what are you really good at and how can we bring that to the customer as quickly as possible? >>Yeah. I mean, it's truly about helping that founder accelerate the growth of their company. Yeah. Right. And there's a lot that you can do with AWS, but focus is truly the key word there because they're gonna be able to find their little piece of real estate and absolutely deliver incredible outcomes for our customers. And then they can start their growth curve there. >>What are some of the coolest things you've seen with the APN that you can share publicly? I know you got a lot going on there, a lot of confidentiality. Um, but you know, we're here lot of great partners on the floor here. I'm glad we're back at events. Uh, a lot of stuff going on digitally with virtual stuff and, and hybrid. What are some of the cool things you guys have seen in the APN that you can point to? >>Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can point to few, you can take them. Sure. So, um, I think what's been fun over the years for me personally, I came from a startup, ran sales at an early stage startup and, and I went through the whole thing. So I have a deep appreciation for what these guys are going through. And what's been interesting to see for me is taking some of these early stage guys, watching them progress, go public, get acquired, and see that big day mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, and being able to point to very specific items that we help them to get to that point. Uh, and it's just a really fun journey to watch. >>Yeah. I, and part of the reason why I really, um, love working at the AWS, uh, global startup program is working with passionate founders. Um, I just met with a founder today that it's gonna, he's gonna build a very big business one day, um, and watching them grow through these stages and supporting that growth. Um, I like to think of our program as a catalyst for enterprise sort of scale. Yeah. Um, and through that we provide visibility, credibility and growth opportunities. >>Yeah. A lot, a lot of partners too. What I found talking to staff founders is when they have that milestone, they work so hard for it. Whether it's a B round C round Republic or get bought. Yeah. Um, then they take a deep breath and they look back at wow, what a journey it's been. So it's kind of emotional for sure. Yeah. Still it's a grind. Right? You gotta, I mean, when you get funding, it's still day one. You don't stop. It's no celebrate, you got a big round or valuation. You still gotta execute >>And look it's hypercompetitive and it's brutally difficult. And our job is to try to make that a little less difficult and navigate those waters right. Where everyone's going after similar things. >>Yeah. I think as a group element too, I observe that startups that I, I meet through the APN has been interesting because they feel part of AWS. Yeah, totally. As a group of community, as a vibe there. Um, I know they're hustling, they're trying to make things happen. But at the same time, Amazon throws a huge halo effect. I mean, that's a huge factor. I mean, yeah. You guys are the number one cloud in the business, the growth in every sector is booming. Yeah. And if you're a startup, you don't have that luxury yet. And look at companies like snowflake, they're built on top of AWS. Yeah. I mean, people are winning by building on AWS. >>Yeah. And our, our, our program really validates their technology first. So we have, what's called a foundation's technical review that we put all of our startups through before we go to market. So that when enterprise customers are looking at startup technology, they know that it's already been vetted. And, um, to take that a step further and help these partners differentiate, we use programs like the competency programs, the DevOps compet, the, the security competency, which continues to help, um, provide sort of a platform for these startups, help them differentiate. And also there's go to market benefits that are associated with that. >>Okay. So let me ask the, the question that's probably on everyone's mind, who's watching. Certainly I asked this a lot. There's a lot of companies startups out there who makes the, is there a criteria? Oh God, it's not like his sports team or anything, but like sure. Like there's activate program, which is like, there's hundreds of thousands of startups out there. Not everyone is at the APN. Right? Correct. So ISVs again, that's a whole nother, that's a more mature partner that might have, you know, huge market cap or growth. How do you guys focus? How do you guys focus? I mean, you got a good question, you know, a thousand flowers blooming all the time. Is there a new way you guys are looking at it? I know there's been some talk about restructure or, or new focus. What's the focus. >>Yeah. It's definitely not an easy task by any means. Um, but you know, I recently took over this role and we're really trying to establish focus areas, right. So obviously a lot of the fees that we look after our infrastructure ISVs, that's what we do. Uh, and so we have very specific pods that look after different type of partners. So we've got a security pod, we've got a DevOps pod, we've got core infrastructure, et cetera. And really we're trying to find these ISVs that can solve, uh, really interesting AWS customer challenges. >>So you guys have a deliberate, uh, focus on these pillars. So what infrastructure, >>Security, DevOps, and data and analytics, and then line of business >>Line of business line, like web marketing >>Solutions, business apps, >>Business, this owner type thing. Exactly. >>Yeah, exactly. >>So solutions there. Yeah. More solutions and the other ones are like hardcore. So infrastructure as well, like storage, backup, ransomware of stuff, or, >>Uh, storage, networking. >>Okay. Yeah. The classic >>Database, et cetera. Right. >>And so there's teams on each pillar. >>Yep. So I think what's, what's fascinating for the startup that we cover is that they've got, they truly have support from a build market sell perspective. Right. So you've got someone who's technical to really help them get the technology, figured out someone to help them get the marketing message dialed and spread, and then someone to actually do the co-sell, uh, day to day activities to help them get in front of customers. >>Probably the number one request that we always ask for Amazon is can we waste that sock report? Oh, download it, the console, which we use all the time. Exactly. But security's a big deal. I mean, you know, SREs are evolving, that role of DevOps is taking on dev SecOps. Um, I, I could see a lot of customers having that need for a relationship to move things faster. Do you guys provide like escalation or is that a part of a service or not, not part of a, uh, >>Yeah, >>So the partner development manager can be an escalation point. Absolutely. Think of them as an extension of your business inside of AWS. >>Great. And you guys how's that partner managers, uh, measure >>On those three pillars. Right. Got it. Are we billing, building valuable use cases? So product development go to market, so go to market activities, think blog, posts, webinars, case studies, so on and so forth. And then co-sell not only are we helping these partners win their current opportunities that they are sourcing, but can we also help them source net new deals? Yeah. Right. That's >>Very important. I mean, top asked from the partners is get me in front of customers. Right. Um, not an easy task, but that's a huge goal of ours to help them grow their top >>Line. Right. Yeah. In fact, we had some interviews here on the cube earlier talking about that dynamic of how enterprise customers are buying. And it's interesting, a lot more POCs. I have one partner here that you guys work with, um, on observability, they got a huge POC with capital one mm-hmm <affirmative> and the enterprises are engaging the startups and bringing them in. So the combination of open source software enterprises are leaning into that hard and bringing young growing startups in mm-hmm <affirmative>. Yep. So I could see that as a huge service that you guys can bring people in. >>Right. And they're bringing massively differentiated technology to the table. Mm-hmm <affirmative> the challenge is they just might not have the brand recognition that the big guys have. And so that it's our job is how do you get that great tech in front of the right situations? >>Okay. So my next question is about the show here, and then we'll talk globally. So here in San Francisco sure. You know, Silicon valley bay area, San Francisco bay area, a lot of startups, a lot of VCs, a lot of action. Mm-hmm <affirmative> so probably a big market for you guys. Yeah. So what's exciting here in SF and then outside SF, you guys have a global program, you see any trends that are geography based or is it sure areas more mature? There's certain regions that are better. I mean, I just interviewed a company here that's doing, uh, AWS edge really well in these cases. It's interesting that these, the partners are filling a lot of holes and gaps in the opportunities with AWS. So what's exciting here. And then what's the global perspective. >>Yeah, totally. So obviously a ton of partners, I, from the bay area that we support. Um, but we're seeing a lot of really interesting technology coming out of AMEA specifically. Yeah. Uh, and making a lot of noise here in the United States, which is great. Um, and so, you know, we definitely have that global presence and, and starting to see super differentiated technology come out of those regions. >>Yeah. Especially Tel Aviv. Yeah. >>Amy real quick, before you get in the surge. It's interesting. The VC market in, in Europe is hot. Yeah. They've got a lot of unicorns coming in. We've seen a lot of companies coming in. They're kind of rattling their own, you know, cage right now. Hey, look at us. We'll see if they crash, you know, but we don't see that happening. I mean, people have been projecting a crash now in, in the startup ecosystem for at least a year. It's not crashing. In fact, funding's up. >>Yeah. The pandemic was hard on a lot of startups for sure. Yeah. Um, but what we've seen is many of these startups, they, as quickly as they can grow, they can also pivot as, as, as well. Um, and so I've actually seen many of our startups grow through the pandemic because their use cases are helping customers either save money, become more operationally efficient and provide value to leadership teams that need more visibility into their infrastructure during a pandemic. >>It's an interesting point. I talked to Andy jazzy and Adam Leski both say the same thing during the pandemic necessity, the mother of all invention. Yep. And startups can move fast. So with that, you guys are there to assist if I'm a startup and I gotta pivot cuz remember iterate and pivot, iterate and pivot. So you get your economics, that's the playbook of the ventures and the models. >>Exactly. How >>Do you guys help me do that? Give me an example of walk me through, pretend me I'm a startup. Hey, I am on the cloud. Oh my God. Pandemic. They need video conferencing. Hey cube. Yeah. What do I need? Surge? What, what do I do? >>That's a good question. First thing is just listen. Yeah. I think what we have to do is a really good job of listening to the partner. Um, what are their needs? What is their problem statement and where do they want to go at the end of the day? Um, and oftentimes because we've worked with so many successful startups, they have come out of our program. We have, um, either through intuition or a playbook, determined what is gonna be the best path forward and how do we get these partners to stop focusing on things that will eventually, um, just be a waste of time yeah. And, or not provide, or, you know, bring any fruit to the table, which, you know, essentially revenue. >>Well, we love star rights here in the cube because one, um, they have good stories. They're oil and cutting edge, always pushing the envelope and they're kind of disrupting someone else. Yeah. And so they have an opinion. They don't mind sharing on camera. So love talking to startups. We love working with you guys on our startup showcases startups.com. Check out AWS startups.com and you got the showcases, uh, final. We I'll give you guys the last word. What's the bottom line bumper sticker for AP the global APN program. Summarize the opportunity for startups, what you guys bring to the table and we'll close it out. Totally start >>With you. Yeah. I think the AWS global startup program's here to help companies truly accelerate their business full stop. Right. And that's what we're here for. I love it. >>It's a good way to, it's a good way to put it Dito. >>Yeah. All right, sir. Thanks for coming on. Thanks John. Great to see you love working with you guys. Hey, startups need help. And the growing and huge market opportunities, the shift cloud scale data engineering, security infrastructure, all the markets are exploding in growth because of the digital transformation of the realities here. Open source and cloud all making it happen here in the cube in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, your host. Thanks for watching >>John. >>Hello and welcome back to the cubes live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, two days of coverage, AWS summit, 2022 in New York city. Coming up this summer, we'll be there as well at events are back. The cube is back of course, with the cube virtual cube hybrid, the cube.net, check it out a lot of content this year, more than ever, a lot more cloud data cloud native, modern applic is all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, Cub alumni, uh, CEO of observe Inc in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data observability Jeremy. Great to see you. Thanks >>Always great to come and talk to you on the queue, man. It's been been a few years, so, >>Um, well you, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, uh, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability hot area, but also you've been a senior executive president of Dell, uh, EMC, uh, 11 years ago you had a, a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. Um, yeah. And it's here. You predicted it 11 years ago. Um, look around it's cloud meets big data. >>Yeah. I mean the, the cloud thing I think, you know, was, was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for, for, for sort of catching that bus out, um, you know, we, we were on the, the, the bus early and, and I think it was only inevitable. Like, you know, if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you, you could find out things you could never possibly imagine. >>So you're close to a lot of companies that we've been covering deeply. Snowflake obviously are involved, uh, the board level, you know, the founders, you know, the people there cloud, you know, Amazon, you know, what's going on here? Yeah. You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, uh, chief of observ, Inc, which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data engineering, large scale integrations, um, data as code integrating into applic. I mean, it's a whole nother world developing, like you see with snowflake, it means snowflake is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's your, what's this wave we're on what's how would you describe the wave? >>Well, a couple of things, I mean, people are, I think riding more software than, than ever fall. Why? Because they've realized that if, if you don't take your business online and offer a service, then you become largely irrelevant. And so you you've got a whole set of new applications. I think, I think more applications now than any point. Um, not, not just ever, but the mid nineties, I always looked at as the golden age of application development. Now back then people were building for windows. Well, well now they're building for things like AWS is now the platform. Um, so you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data and the, you know, the sort of the transactions, you know, what you bought today or something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry data, all the exhaust fumes. And I think people really are realizing that their differentiation is not so much their application. It's their understanding of the data. Can, can I understand who my best customers are, what I sell today. If people came to my website and didn't buy, then I not, where did they drop off all of that they wanna analyze. And, and the answers are all in the data. The question is, can you understand it >>In our last startup showcase, we featured data as code. One of the insights that we got out of that I wanna get your opinion on our reaction to is, is that data used to be put into a data lake and turns into a data swamp or throw into the data warehouse. And then we'll do some query, maybe a report once in a while. And so data, once it was done, unless it was real time, even real time was not good anymore after real time. That was the old way. Now you're seeing more and more, uh, effort to say, let's go look at the data cuz now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once mm-hmm <affirmative> they're iterating. Yeah. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting. Yeah, that's a Silicon valley story. That's like how startups work, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have another, this data concept that's now yeah. Part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole, this whole new cycle of >>Yeah. >>Data being reused and repurposed and figured out and >>Yeah, yeah. I'm a big fan of, um, years ago. Uh, uh, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee at the MIT C cell labs I spent time with and he, he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look I'm I'm. He said I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you, of enough data, you can answer any question. And, and this is going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and, and certainly, you know, research is on the forefront. But I, I think, you know, starting to see that mindset of the, the sort of MIT research be mainstream, you know, in enterprises, they they're realizing that yeah, it is about the data. You know, if I can better understand my data better than my competitor than I've got an advantage. And so the question is is, is how, what, what technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to, to allow me to do that. So >>Let's talk about observing you the CEO of, okay. Given you've seen the wave before you're in the front lines of observability, which again is in the center of all this action what's going on with the company. Give a quick minute to explain, observe for the folks who don't know what you guys do. What's the company doing? What's the funding status, what's the product status and what's the customer status. Yeah. >>So, um, we realized, you know, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago that, um, look, the way people are building applications is different. They they're way more functional. They change every day. Uh, but in some respects they're a lot more complicated. They're distributed. They, you know, microservices architectures and when something goes wrong, um, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not gonna fly because you had SA so much change going into production on a daily basis. It was hard to tell like where the problem was. And so we thought, okay, it's about time. Somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and all the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot and make sense of the problems that they're seeing. So, I mean, that's observability, it's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was a guy called, uh, Rudolph like, like everything in tech, you know, it's, it's a reinvention of, of something from years gone by. >>But, um, there's a guy called, um, Rudy Coleman in 1960s, kinder term. And, and, and the term was been able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for, uh, the best part of the all years now. Um, it took us three years just to build the product. I think, I think what people don't appreciate these days often is the barrier to entry in a lot of these markets is quite high. You, you need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. Um, so yeah, this last year we, we, we did our first year selling, uh, we've got about 40 customers now. <affirmative> um, we just we've got great investors for the hill ventures. Uh, I mean, Mike SP who was, you know, the, the guy who was the, really, the first guy in it snowflake and the, the initial investor were fortunate enough to, to have Mike on our board. And, um, you know, part of the observed story yeah. Is closely knit with snowflake because all of that time data know we, we still are in there. >>So I want to get, uh, >>Yeah. >>Pivot to that. Mike Pfizer, snowflake, Jeremy Burton, the cube kind of, kind of same thinking this idea of a super cloud or what snowflake became snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of snowflake. Yeah. So that's become an entrepreneurial story that we think that to go big in the cloud, you can have a cloud on a cloud, uh, like as Jerry, Jerry Chan and Greylock calls it castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you're doing some stuff with snowflake. So a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a snowflake or an AWS, because again, you gotta go where the data is. You need all the data. >>Yeah. So >>What's your take on that? >>I mean, having enough gray hair now, um, you know, again, in tech, I think if you wanna predict the future, look at the past. And, uh, you know, to many years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a, a smaller company called Oracle and an Oracle was the database company. And, uh, their, their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms, one, one windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operator and system was the platform. And, and then that was the, you know, ecosystem that you would compete on top of. And then there were companies like SAP that built applications on top of Oracle. So then wind the clock forward 25 years gray hairs. <laugh> the platform, isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, you know, Google cloud. I gotta probably look around if I say that in. Yeah. It's >>Okay. But hyperscale, yeah. CapX built out >>That is the new platform. And then snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generator data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. And I think they they've done an amazing job doing for the, I'd say, say the, the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world, you know, way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and, and of course my ambition would be, look, if, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of snow snowflake, uh, as, as they were on top of Oracle, then, then we'd probably be quite happy. >>So you're building on top of snowflake. >>We're building on top of snowflake a hundred percent. And, um, you know, I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that that's a risk. You >>Still on the board. >>Yeah. I'm still on the board. Yeah. That that's a risk I'm prepared to take <laugh> I am long on snowflake you, >>Well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board, then you'll know what's going on. Okay. No know just doing, but the, this is a real dynamic. It is. It's not a one off it's. >>Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS is an order of magnitude more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so I believe the opportunity for folks like snowflake and folks like observe it's an order of magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old >>World. Yeah. And I think this is really, I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you gotta be on a platform. Yeah. >>It's quite >>Easy or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how many seats are at that table left. >>Well, value migrates up over time. So, you know, when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, you know, Rackspace and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure, a service platform as a service, my, my old, uh, um, employee EMC, we had pivotal, you know, pivotal was a platform as a service. You don't hear so much about it, these, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to, to like extract, uh, a real business, you gotta move up, you gotta add value, you gotta build databases, then you gotta build applications. So >>It's interesting. Moving from the data center of the cloud was a dream for starters. Cause then if the provision, the CapEx, now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on top of that, you got snowflake you on top of that, the >>Assumption is almost that compute and storage is free. I know it's not quite free. Yeah. It's >>Almost free, >>But, but you can, you know, as an application vendor, you think, well, what can I do if I assume compute and storage is free, that's the mindset you've gotta get into. >>And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm gonna get a serious, multiple of value in what I'm paying. Yeah. Most people don't even blanket their Avis pills unless they're like massively huge. Yeah. Then it's a repatriation question or whatever discount question, but for most startups or any growing company, the Amazon bill should be a small factor. >>Yeah. I mean, a lot of people, um, ask me like, look, you're building on snowflake. Um, you, you know, you are, you are, you're gonna be, you're gonna be paying their money. How, how, how, how does that work with your business model? If you're paying them money, you know, do, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. I, we could build a database as well in observe, but then I've got half the development team working on in that will never be as good as snowflake. And so we made the call early on that. No, no, we, we wanna innovate above the database. Yeah. Right. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and, and the same is true of something like Amazon, like, like snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >>Yeah. And what's interesting is that Dave <inaudible> and I have been pointing this out and he's actually more on snowflake. I I've been looking at data bricks, um, and the same dynamics happening, the proof is the ecosystem. Yeah. I mean, if you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and data bricks it's exploding. Right. I mean, the shows are selling out the floor. Space's book. That's the old days at VMware. Yeah. The old days at AWS >>One and for snowflake and, and any platform provider, it's a beautiful thing. You know, we build on snowflake and we pay them money. They don't have to sell to us. Right. And we do a lot of the support. And so the, the economics work out really, really well. If you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of ecosystems. >>Yeah. And then also you get, you get a, um, a trajectory of, uh, economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of snowflake integrations, right. New products. You're scaling that function with the, >>Yeah. I mean, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. Right. When I, when I, when I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had, we had one petabyte customer. And, and so at observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so been able to rely on a platform that can manage that is invaluable, >>You know, but Jeremy Greek conversation, thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. Uh, we got a couple minutes left. Um, put a plug in for observe. What do you guys, I know you got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your, your, your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You getting traction. Yeah. >>Yeah. >>Scales around the corner. Sounds like, are you, is that where you are scale? >>Got, we've got a big announcement coming up in two or weeks. We've got, we've got new funding, um, which is always great. Um, the product is, uh, really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, you know, which is at which point can you just start hiring salespeople? And the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. Um, we've got about 40 SaaS companies run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, uh, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting, um, enterprise type customers. We're, we're, you know, F five networks we're POC in right now with capital one, we got some interest in news around capital one coming up. I, I can't share too much, uh, but it's gonna be exciting. And, and like I saids hill continued to, to, to stick, >>I think capital one's a big snowflake customer as well. Right. They, >>They were early in one of the things that attracted me to capital one was they were very, very good with snowflake early on. And, and they put snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. Yeah. And, and today that, that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts. >>So capital one, very innovative cloud, obviously AIOS customer and very innovative, certainly in the CISO and CIO, um, on another point on where you're at. So you're, Prescale meaning you're about to scale, right? So you got POCs, what's that trick GE look like, can you see around the corner? What's, what's going on? What's on, around the corner. That you're, that you're gonna hit the straight and narrow and, and gas it >>Fast. Yeah. I mean, the, the, the, the key thing for us is we gotta get the product. Right. Um, the nice thing about having a guy like Mike Pfizer on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage is questions that the board are always about, like, is the product, right? Is the product right? Is the product right? If you got the product right. And cuz we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and, and the revenue will take care of itself. Yeah. So right now all the attention is on the product. Um, the, this year, the exciting thing is we were, we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that back in the day you could do with the new lakes and, and AppDynamics, the last generation of, of APM tools, you're gonna be able to do that within observe. And we've already got the logs and the metrics capability in there. So for us, this year's a big one, cuz we sort of complete the trifecta, you know, the, the logs, >>What's the secret sauce observe. What if you had the, put it into a, a sentence what's the secret sauce? I, >>I, I think, you know, an amazing founding engineering team, uh, number one, I mean, at the end of the day, you have to build an amazing product and you have to solve a problem in a different way. And we've got great long term investors. And, and the biggest thing our investors give is actually it's not just money. It gives us time to get the product, right. Because if we get the product right, then we can get the growth. >>Got it. Final question. Why I got you here? You've been on the enterprise business for a long time. What's the buyer landscape out there. You got people doing POCs on capital one scale. So we know that goes on. What's the appetite at the buyer side for startups and what are their requirements that you're seeing? Uh, obviously we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their business restructure. So a lot happening in cloud. What's the criteria. How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >>Yeah. I mean, enterprises, they know they've gotta spend money transforming the business. I mean, this was, I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but, um, what, what we were saying five years ago is happening. Um, everybody needs to figure out out a way to take their, this to this digital world. Everybody has to do it. So the nice thing from a startup standpoint is they know at times they need to risk or, or take a bet on new technology in order to, to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that a have money, uh, B prepared to take risks and it's, it's a race against time to, you know, get their, their offerings in this. So a new digital footprint, >>Final, final question. What's the state of AWS. Where do you see them going next? Obviously they're continuing to be successful. How does cloud 3.0, or they always say it's day one, but it's more like day 10. Uh, but what's next for Aw. Where do they go from here? Obviously they're doing well. They're getting bigger and bigger. >>Yeah. They're, they're, it's an amazing story. I mean, you know, we we're, we're on AWS as well. And so I, I think if they keep nurturing the builders in the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They, they have an early leads. And if you look at where, you know, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the, in the late it was, they stopped, uh, really caring about developers and the folks who were building on top of their ecosystem. In fact, they started buying up their ecosystem and competing with people in their ecosystem. And I see with AWS, they, they have an amazing head start and if they did more, you know, if they do more than that, that's, what's gonna keep the jut rolling for many years to come. Yeah, >>They got the silicone and they got the staff act, developing Jeremy Burton inside the cube, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called observing in the middle of all the action on the board of snowflake as well. Um, great start. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Always a pleasure. >>Okay. Live from San Francisco to cube. I'm John for your host. Stay with us more coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. >>Hello. Welcome back to the cubes coverage here live in San Francisco, California. I'm John furrier, host of the cubes cube coverage of AWS summit 2022 here in San Francisco. We're all the developers of the bay area at Silicon valley. And of course, AWS summit in New York city is coming up in the summer. We'll be there as well. SF and NYC cube coverage. Look for us. Of course, reinforcing Boston and re Mars with the whole robotics AI thing, all coming together. Lots of coverage stay with us today. We've got a great guest from Deibel VC. John Skoda, founding partner, entrepreneurial venture is a venture firm. Your next act, welcome to the cube. Good to see you. >>Good to see you, Matt. I feel like it's been forever since we've been able to do something in person. Well, >>I'm glad you're here because we run into each other all the time. We've known each other for over a decade. Um, >><affirmative>, it's been at least 10 years now, >>At least 10 years more. And we don't wanna actually go back as frees back, uh, the old school web 1.0 days. But anyway, we're in web three now. So we'll get to that in >>Second. We, we are, it's a little bit of a throwback to the path though, in my opinion, >><laugh>, it's all the same. It's all distributed computing and software. We ran each other in cube con you're investing in a lot of tech startup founders. Okay. This next level, next gen entrepreneurs have a new makeup and it's software. It's hardcore tech in some cases, not hardcore tech, but using software is take old something old and make it better, new, faster. <laugh>. So tell us about Deibel what's the firm. I know you're the founder, uh, which is cool. What's going on. Explain >>What you're doing. I mean, you remember I'm a recovering entrepreneur, right? So of course I, I, I, >>No, you're never recovering. You're always entrepreneur >>Always, but we are also always recovering. So I, um, started my first company when I was 24. If you remember, before there was Facebook and friends, there was instant messaging. People were using that product at work every day, they were creating a security vulnerability between their network and the outside world. So I plugged that hole and built an instant messaging firewall. It was my first company. The company was called, I am logic and we were required by Symantec. Uh, then spent 12 years investing in the next generation of our companies, uh, early investor in open source companies and cloud companies and spent a really wonderful 12 years, uh, at a firm called NEA. So I, I feel like my whole life I've been either starting enterprise software companies or helping founders start enterprise software companies. And I'll tell you, there's never been a better time than right now to start enter price software company. >>So, uh, the passion for starting a new firm was really a recognition that founders today that are starting in an enterprise software company, they, they tend to be, as you said, a more technical founder, right? Usually it's a software engineer or a builder mm-hmm <affirmative>, uh, they are building products that are serving a slightly different market than what we've traditionally seen in enterprise software. Right? I think traditionally we've seen it buyers or CIOs that have agendas and strategies, which, you know, purchased software that has traditionally bought and sold tops down. But, you know, today I think the most successful enterprise software companies are the ones that are built more bottoms up and have more technical early opts. And generally speaking, they're free to use. They're free to try. They're very commonly community source or open source companies where you have a large technical community that's supporting them. So there's a, there's kind of a new normal now I think in great enterprise software. And it starts with great technical founders with great products and great and emotions. And I think there's no better place to, uh, service those people than in the cloud and uh, in, in your community. >>Well, first of all, congratulations, and by the way, you got a great pedigree and great background, super smart admire of your work and your, and, and your founding, but let's face it. Enterprise is hot because digital transformation is all companies. The is no, I mean, consumer is enterprise. Now everything is what was once a niche. No, I won't say niche category, but you know, not for the faint of heart, you know, investors, >>You know, it's so funny that you say that enterprise is hot because you, and I feel that way now. But remember, like right now, there's also a giant tech in VC conference in Miami <laugh> it's covering cryptocurrencies and FCS and web three. So I think beauty is definitely in the eye of the beholder <laugh> but no, I, I will tell you, >>Ts is one big enterprise, cuz you gotta have imutability you got performance issues. You have, I IOPS issues. Well, and, >>And I think all of us here that are, uh, maybe students of history and have been involved in, open in the cloud would say that we're, you know, much of what we're doing is, uh, the predecessors of the web web three movement. And many of us I think are contributors to the web three movement. >>The hype is definitely that three. >>Yeah. But, but >>You know, for >>Sure. Yeah, no, but now you're taking us further east to Miami. So, uh, you know, look, I think, I, I think, um, what is unquestioned with the case now? And maybe it's, it's more obvious the more time you spend in this world is this is the fastest growing part of enterprise software. And if you include cloud infrastructure and cloud infrastructure spend, you know, it is by many men over, uh, 500 billion in growing, you know, 20 to 30% a year. So it it's a, it's a just incredibly fast, >>Let's getting, let's get into some of the cultural and the, the shifts that are happening, cuz again, you, you have the luxury of being in enterprise when it was hard, it's getting easier and more cooler. I get it and more relevant, but it's also the hype of like the web three, for instance. But you know, uh, um, um, the CEO snowflake, okay. Has wrote a book and Dave Valenti and I were talking about it and uh, Frank Luman has says, there's no playbooks. We always ask the CEOs, what's your playbook. And he's like, there's no playbook, situational awareness, always Trump's playbooks. So in the enterprise playbook, oh, higher direct sales force and SAS kind of crushed the, at now SAS is being redefined, right. So what is SAS? Is snowflake a SAS or is that a platform? So again, new unit economics are emerging, whole new situation, you got web three. So to me there's a cultural shift, the young entrepreneurs, the, uh, user experience, they look at Facebook and say, ah, you know, they own all my data. You know, we know that that cliche, um, they, you know, the product. So as this next gen, the gen Z and the millennials come in and our customers and the founders, they're looking at things a little bit differently and the tech better. >>Yeah. I mean, I mean, I think we can, we can see a lot of commonalities across all successful startups and the overall adoption of technology. Uh, and, and I would tell you, this is all one big giant revolution. I call it the user driven revolution. Right. It's the rise of the user. Yeah. And you might say product like growth is currently the hottest trend in enterprise software. It's actually user like growth, right. They're one in the same. So sometimes people think the product, uh, is what is driving. You >>Just pull the >>Product through. Exactly, exactly. And so that's that I, that I think is really this revolution that you see, and, and it does extend into things like cryptocurrencies and web three and, you know, sort of like the control that is taken back by the user. Um, but you know, many would say that, that the origins of this movement maybe started with open source where users were, are contributors, you know, contributors, we're users and looking back decades and seeing how it, how it fast forward to today. I think that's really the trend that we're all writing and it's enabling these end users. And these end users in our world are developers, data engineers, cybersecurity practitioners, right. They're really the users. And they're really the, the beneficiaries and the most, you know, kind of valued people in >>This. I wanna come back to the data engineers in a second, but I wanna make a comment and get your reaction to, I have a, I'm a GenXer technically, so for not a boomer, but I have some boomer friends who are a little bit older than me who have, you know, experienced the sixties. And I've, I've been staying on the cube for probably about eight years now that we are gonna hit a digital hippie revolution, meaning a rebellion against in the sixties was rebellion against the fifties and the man and, you know, summer of love. That was a cultural differentiation from the other one other group, the predecessors. So we're kind of having that digital moment now where it's like, Hey boomers, Hey people, we're not gonna do that anymore. We hate how you organize shit. >>Right. But isn't this just technology. I mean, isn't it, isn't it like there used to be the old adage, like, you know, you would never get fired for buying IBM, but now it's like, you obviously probably would get fired if you bought IBM. And I mean, it's just like the, the, I think, I think >>It's the main for days, those renegades were breaking into Stanford, starting the home brew club. So what I'm trying to get at is that, do you see the young cultural revolution also, culturally, just, this is my identity NFTs to me speak volumes about my, I wanna associate with NFTs, not single sign on. Well, >>Absolutely. And, and I think like, I think you're hitting on something, which is like this convergence of, of, you know, societal trends with technology trends and how that manifests in our world is yes. I think like there is unquestionably almost a religion around the way in which a product is built. Right. And we can use open source, one example of that religion. Some people will say, look, I'll just never try a product in the cloud if it's not open source. Yeah. I think cloud, native's another example of that, right? It's either it's, you know, it either is cloud native or it's not. And I think a lot of people will look at a product and say, look, you know, you were not designed in the cloud era. Therefore I just won't try you. And sometimes, um, like it or not, it's a religious decision, right? It's, it's something that people just believe to be true almost without, uh, necessarily. I mean >>The decision making, let me ask you this next question. As a VC. Now you look at pitch, well, you've made a VC for many years, but you also have the founder, uh, entrepreneurial mindset, but you can get empathize with the founders. You know, hustle is a big part of the, that first founder check, right? You gotta convince someone to part with their ch their money and the first money in which you do a lot of is about believing in the person. So fing, so you make, it is hard. Now you, the data's there, you either have it cloud native, you either have the adaption or traction. So honesty is a big part of that pitch. You can't fake it. Oh, >>AB absolutely. You know, there used to be this concept of like the persona of an entrepreneur, right. And the persona of the entrepreneur would be, you know, somebody who was a great salesperson or somebody who tell a great story. You, I still think that that's important, right? It still is a human need for people to believe in narratives and stories. But having said that you're right, the proof is in the pudding, right? At some point you click download and you try the product and it does what it says it it's gonna do, or it doesn't, or it either stands up to the load test or it doesn't. And so I, I feel like in this new economy that we live in, it's a shift from maybe the storytellers and the creators to, to the builders, right. The people that know how to build great product. And in some ways the people that can build great product yeah. Stand out from the crowd. And they're the ones that can build communities around their products. And, you know, in some ways can, um, you know, kind of own more of the narrative because their products exactly >>The volume back to the user led growth. >>Exactly. And it's the religion of, I just love your product. Right. And I, I, I, um, Doug song was the founder of du security used to say, Hey, like, you know, the, the really like in today's world of like consumption based software, the user is only gonna give you 90 seconds to figure out whether or not you're a company that's easy to do business with. Right. And so you can say, and do all the things that you want about how easy you are to work with. But if the product isn't easy to install, if it's not easy to try, if it's not, if, if the, you know, it's gotta speak to >>The, speak to the user, but let me ask a question now that the people watching who are maybe entrepreneurial entrepreneur, um, masterclass here is in session. So I have to ask you, do you prefer, um, an entrepreneur to come in and say, look at John. Here's where I'm at. Okay. First of all, storytelling's fine. Whether you're an extrovert or introvert, have your style, sell the story in a way that's authentic, but do you, what do you prefer to say? Here's where I'm at? Look, I have an idea. Here's my traction. I think here's my MVP prototype. I need help. Or do you wanna just see more stats? What's the, what's the preferred way that you like to see entrepreneurs come in and engage, engage? >>There's tons of different styles, man. I think the single most important thing that every founder should know is that we, we don't invest in what things are today. We invest in what we think something will become. Right. And I think that's why we all get up in the morning and try to build something different, right? It's that we see the world a different way. We want it to be a different way, and we wanna work every single moment of the day to try to make that vision a reality. So I think the more that you can show people where you want to be, the more likely somebody is gonna align with your vision and, and want to invest in you and wanna be along for the ride. So I, I wholeheartedly believe in showing off what you got today, because eventually we all get down to like, where are we and what are we gonna do together? But, um, no, I >>Show >>The path. I think the single most important thing for any founder and VC relationship is that they have the same vision, uh, have the same vision. You can, you can get through bumps in the road, you can get through short term spills. You can all sorts of things in the middle of the journey can happen. Yeah. But it doesn't matter as much if you share the same long term vision, >>Don't flake out and, and be fashionable with the latest trends because it's over before you can get there. >>Exactly. I think many people that, that do what we do for a living will say, you know, ultimately the future is relatively easy to predict, but it's the timing that's impossible to predict. So you, you know, you sort of have to balance the, you know, we, we know that the world is going this way and therefore we're gonna invest a lot of money to try to make this a reality. Uh, but sometimes it happens in six months. Sometimes it takes six years is sometimes like 16 years. >>Uh, what's the hottest thing in enterprise that you see the biggest wave that people should pay attention to that you're looking at right now with Desel partners, Tebel dot your site. What's the big wave. What's your big >>Wave. There, there's three big trends that we invest in. And they're the, they're the only things we do day in, day out. One is the explosion and open source software. So I think many people think that all software is unquestionably moving to an open source model in some form or another yeah. Tons of reasons to debate whether or not that is gonna happen and on what timeline happening >>Forever. >>But it is, it is accelerating faster than we've ever seen. So I, I think it's, it's one big, massive wave that we continue to ride. Um, second is the rise of data engineering. Uh, I think data engineering is in and of itself now, a category of software. It's not just that we store data. It's now we move data and we develop applications on data. And, uh, I think data is in and of itself as big of a, a market as any of the other markets that we invest in. Uh, and finally, it's the gift that keeps on giving. I've spent my entire career in it. We still feel that security is a market that is under invested. It is, it continues to be the place where people need to continue to invest and spend more money. Yeah. Uh, and those are the three major trends that we run >>And security, you think we all need a dessert do over, right? I mean, do we need a do over in security or is what's the core problem? I, >>I, I keep using this word underinvested because I think it's the right way to think about the problem. I think if you, I think people generally speaking, look at cyber security as an add-on. Yeah. But if you think about it, the whole economy is moving online. And so in, in some ways like security is core to protecting the digital economy. And so it's, it shouldn't be an afterthought, right? It should be core to what everyone is doing. And that's why I think relative to the trillions of dollars that are at stake, uh, I believe the market size for cybersecurity is around 150 billion. And it still is a fraction of what we're, what >>We're and security even boom is booming now. So you get the convergence of national security, geopolitics, internet digital >>That's right. You mean arguably, right? I mean, arguably again, it's the area of the world that people should be spending more time and more money given what to stake. >>I love your thesis. I gotta, I gotta say, you gotta love your firm. Love. You're doing we're big supporters of your mission. Congratulations on your entrepreneurial venture. And, uh, we'll be, we'll be talking and maybe see a Cub gone. Uh, >>Absolutely. >>Certainly EU maybe even north America's in Detroit this year. >>Huge fan of what you guys are doing here. Thank you so much for having me on >>The show. Guess bell VC Johnson here on the cube. Check him out. Founder for founders here on the cube, more coverage from San Francisco, California. After the short break, stay with us. Everyone. Welcome to the queue here. Live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022 we're live we're back with the events. Also we're virtual. We got hybrid all kinds of events. This year, of course, 80% summit in New York city is happening this summer. We'll be there with the cube as well. I'm John. Again, John host of the cube got a great guest here. Justin Coby owner and CEO of innovative solutions. Their booth is right behind us. Justin, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Thank you for having me. >>So we're just chatting, uh, uh, off camera about some of the work you're doing. You're the owner of and CEO. Yeah. Of innovative. Yeah. So tell us a story. What do you guys do? What's the elevator pitch. >>Yeah. <laugh> so the elevator pitch is we are, uh, a hundred percent focused on small to midsize businesses that are moving into the cloud or have already moved to the cloud and really trying to understand how to best control, cost, security, compliance, all the good stuff, uh, that comes along with it. Um, exclusively focused on AWS and, um, you know, about 110 people, uh, based in Rochester, New York, that's where our headquarters is, but now we have offices down in Austin, Texas up in Toronto, uh, key Canada, as well as Chicago. Um, and obviously in New York, uh, you know, the, the business was never like this, uh, five years ago, um, founded in 1989, made the decision in 2018 to pivot and go all in on the cloud. And, uh, I've been a part of the company for about 18 years, bought the company about five years ago and it's been a great ride. It >>It's interesting. The manages services are interesting with cloud cause a lot of the heavy liftings done by AWS. So we had Matt on your team on earlier talking about some of the edge stuff. Yeah. But you guys are a managed cloud service. You got cloud advisory, you know, the classic service that's needed, but the demands coming from cloud migrations and application modernization and obviously data is a huge part of it. Huge. How is this factoring into what you guys do and your growth cuz you guys are the number one partner on the SMB side for edge. Yeah. For AWS, you got results coming in. Where's the, where's the forcing function. What's the pressure point. What's the demand like? >>Yeah. It's a great question. Every CEO I talk to, that's a small to midsize business. They're trying to understand how to leverage technology. It better to help either drive a revenue target for their own business, uh, help with customer service as so much has gone remote now. And we're all having problems or troubles or issues trying to hire talent. And um, you know, tech ISNT really at the, at the forefront and the center of that. So most customers are coming to us and they're like, listen, we gotta move to the cloud or we move some things to cloud and we want to do that better. And um, there's this big misnomer that when you move to the cloud, you gotta automatically modernize. Yeah. And what we try to help as many customers understand as possible is lifting and shifting, moving the stuff that you maybe currently have OnPrem and a data center to the cloud first is a first step. And then, uh, progressively working through a modernization strateg, always the better approach. And so we spend a lot of time with small to midsize businesses who don't have the technology talent on staff to be able to do >>That. Yeah. They want get set up. But then the dynamic of like latency is huge. We're seeing that edge product is a big part of it. This is not a one-off happening around everywhere. It is. And it's not, it's manufacturing, it's the physical plant or location >>Literally. >>And so, and you're seeing more IOT devices. What's that like right now from a challenge and problem statement standpoint, are the customers, not staff, is the it staff kind of old school? Is it new skills? What's the core problem you guys solve >>In the SMB space? The core issue nine outta 10 times is people get enamored with the latest and greatest. And the reality is not everything that's cloud based. Not all cloud services are the latest and greatest. Some things have been around for quite some time and are hardened solutions. And so, um, what we try to do with technology staff that has traditional on-prem, uh, let's just say skill sets and they're trying to move to a cloud-based workload is we try to help those customers through education and through some practical, let's just call it use case. Um, whether that's a proof of concept that we're doing or whether we're gonna migrate a small workload over, we try to give them the confidence to be able to not, not necessarily go it alone, but to, to, to have the, uh, the Gusto and to really have the, um, the, the opportunity to, to do that in a wise way. Um, and what I find is that most CEOs that I talk to, yeah, they're like, listen, the end of the day, I'm gonna be spending money in one place or another, whether that's OnPrem or in the cloud. I just want to know that I'm doing that in a way that helps me grow as quickly as possible status quo. I think every, every business owner knows that COVID taught us anything that status quo is, uh, is, is no. No. >>Good. How about factoring in the, the agility and speed equation? Does that come up a lot? It >>Does. I think, um, I, there's also this idea that if, uh, if we do a deep dive analysis and we really take a surgical approach to things, um, we're gonna be better off. And the reality is the faster you move with anything cloud based, the better you are. And so there's this assumption that we gotta get it right the first time. Yeah. In the cloud, if you start down your journey in one way and you realize midway that it's not the right, let's just say the right place to go. It's not like buying a piece of iron that you put in the closet and now you own it in the cloud. You can turn those services on and off. It's gives you a much higher density for making decisions and failing >>Forward. Well actually shutting down the abandoning the projects that early and not worrying about it, you got it. I mean, most people don't abandon cause like, oh, I own it. >>Exactly. And >>They get, they get used to it. Like, and then they wait too long. >>That's exactly. Yeah. >>Frog and boiling water as we used to say. So, oh, it's a great analogy. So I mean, this is a dynamic that's interesting. I wanna get more thoughts on it because like I'm a, if I'm a CEO of a company, like, okay, I gotta make my number. Yeah. I gotta keep my people motivated. Yeah. And I gotta move faster. So this is where you, I get the whole thing. And by the way, great service, um, professional services in the cloud right now are so hot because so hot, you can build it and then have option optionality. You got path decisions, you got new services to take advantage of. It's almost too much for customers. It is. I mean, everyone I talked to at reinvent, that's a customer. Well, how many announcements did am jazzy announce or Adam, you know, the 5,000 announcement or whatever. They do huge amounts. Right. Keeping track of it all. Oh, is huge. So what's the, what's the, um, the mission of, of your company. How does, how do you talk to that alignment? Yeah. Not just processes. I can get that like values as companies, cuz they're betting on you and your people. >>They are, they are, >>What's the values. >>Our mission is, is very simple. We want to help every small to midsize business leverage the power of the cloud. Here's the reality. We believe wholeheartedly. This is our vision that every company is going to become a technology company. So we go to market with this idea that every customer's trying to leverage the power of the cloud in some way, shape or form, whether they know it or don't know it. And number two, they're gonna become a tech company in the process of that because everything is so tech-centric. And so when you talk about speed and agility, when you talk about the, the endless options and the endless permutations of solutions that a customer can buy in the cloud, how are you gonna ask a team of one or two people in your, or it department to make all those decisions going it alone or trying to learn it as you go, it only gets you so far working with a partner. >>I'll just give you some perspective. We work with about a thousand small to midsize business customers. More than 50% of those customers are on our managed services. Meaning they know that we have their back Andre or the safety net. So when a customer is saying, all right, I'm gonna spend a couple thousand dollars a month in the cloud. They know that that bill, isn't gonna jump to $10,000 a month going in alone. Who's there to help protect that. Number two, if you have a security posture and let's just say you're high profile and you're gonna potentially be more vulnerable to security attack. If you have a partner, that's all offering you some managed services. Now you, again, you've got that backstop and you've got those services and tooling. We, we offer, um, seven different products, uh, that are part of our managed services that give the customer the tooling, that for them to go out and buy on their own for a customer to go out today and go buy a new Relic solution on their own. It, it would cost 'em a fortune. If >>Training alone would be insane, a factor and the cost. Yes, absolutely. Opportunity cost is huge, >>Huge, absolutely enormous training and development. Something. I think that is often, you know, it's often overlooked technologists. Typically they want to get their skills up. Yeah. They, they love to get the, the stickers and the badges and the pins, um, at innovative in 2018, when, uh, when we made the decision to go all in on the club, I said to the organization, you know, we have this idea that we're gonna pivot and be aligned with AWS in such a way that it's gonna really require us all to get certified. My executive assistant at the time looks at me. She said, even me, I said, yeah, even you, why can't you get certified? Yeah. And so we made, uh, a conscious decision. It wasn't requirement and still isn't today to make sure everybody in the company has the opportunity to become certified. Even the people that are answering the phones at the front desk >>And she could be running the Kubernetes clusters. I love it. It's amazing. >>But I'll tell you what, when that customer calls and they have a real Kubernetes issue, she'll be able to assist and get >>The right people involved. And that's a cultural factor that you guys have. So, so again, this is back to my whole point about SMBs and businesses in general, small en large, it staffs are turning over the gen Z and millennials are in the workforce. They were provisioning top of rack switches. Right. First of all. And so if you're a business, there's also the, I call the build out, um, uh, return factor, ROI piece. At what point in time as an owner or SMB, do I get the ROI? Yeah. I gotta hire a person to manage it. That person's gonna have five zillion job offers. Yep. Uh, maybe who knows? Right. I got cybersecurity issues. Where am I gonna find a cyber person? Yeah. A data compliance. I need a data scientist and a compliance person. Right. Maybe one and the same. Right. Good luck. Trying to find a data scientist. Who's also a compliance person. Yep. And the list goes on. I can just continue. Absolutely. I need an SRE to manage the, the, uh, the sock report and we can pen test. Right. >>Right. >>These are, these are >>Critical issues. This >>Is just like, these are the table stakes. >>Yeah. And, and every, every business owner's thinking about. So that's, >>That's what, at least a million in bloating, if not three or more Just to get that going. Yeah. Then it's like, where's the app. Yeah. So there's no cloud migration. There's no modernization on the app side though. Yeah. No. And nevermind AI and ML. That's >>Right. That's right. So to try to go it alone, to me, it's hard. It it's incredibly difficult. And, and the other thing is, is there's not a lot of partners, so the partner, >>No one's raising their hand boss. I'll >>Do all that >>Exactly. In it department. >>Exactly. >>Like, can we just call up, uh, you know, <laugh> our old vendor. That's >>Right. <laugh> right. Our old vendor. I like it, but that's so true. I mean, when I think about how, if I was a business owner, starting a business to today and I had to build my team, um, and the amount of investment that it would take to get those people skilled up and then the risk factor of those people now having the skills and being so much more in demand and being recruited away, that's a real, that's a real issue. And so how you build your culture around that is, is very important. And it's something that we talk about every, with every one of our small to midsize business. >>So just, I want to get, I want to get your story as CEO. Okay. Take us through your journey. You said you bought the company and your progression to, to being the owner and CEO of innovative award winning guys doing great. Uh, great bet on a good call. Yeah. Things are good. Tell your story. What's your journey? >>It's real simple. I was, uh, was a sophomore at the Rochester Institute of technology in 2003. And, uh, I knew that I, I was going to school for it and I, I knew I wanted to be in tech. I didn't know what I wanted to do, but I knew I didn't wanna code or configure routers and switches. So I had this great opportunity with the local it company that was doing managed services. We didn't call it at that time innovative solutions to come in and, uh, jump on the phone and dial for dollars. I was gonna cold call and introduce other, uh, small to midsize businesses locally in Rochester, New York go to Western New York, um, who innovative was now. We were 19 people at the time. And I came in, I did an internship for six months and I loved it. I learned more in those six months that I probably did in my first couple of years at, uh, at R I T long story short. >>Um, for about seven years, I worked, uh, to really help develop, uh, sales process and methodology for the business so that we could grow and scale. And we grew to about 30 people. And, um, I went to the owners at the time in 2010 and I was like, Hey, I'm growing the value of this business. And who knows where you guys are gonna be another five years? What do you think about making me an owner? And they were like, listen, you got long ways before you're gonna be an owner, but if you stick it out in your patient, we'll, um, we'll work through a succession plan with you. And I said, okay, there were four other individuals at the time that we're gonna also buy the business with >>Me. And they were the owners, no outside capital, >>None zero, well, 2014 comes around. And, uh, the other folks that were gonna buy into the business with me that were also working at innovative for different reasons. They all decided that it wasn't for them. One started a family. The other didn't wanna put capital in. Didn't wanna write a check. Um, the other had a real big problem with having to write a check. If we couldn't make payroll, I'm like, well, that's kind of like if we're owners, we're gonna have to like cover that stuff. <laugh> so >>It's called the pucker factor. >>Exactly. So, uh, I sat down with the CEO in early 2015, and, uh, we made the decision that I was gonna buy the three partners out, um, go through an earn out process, uh, coupled with, uh, an interesting financial strategy that wouldn't strap the business, cuz they care very much. The company still had the opportunity to keep going. So in 2016 I bought the business, um, became the sole owner. And, and at that point we, um, we really focused hard on what do we want this company to be? We had built this company to this point. Yeah. And, uh, and by 2018 we knew that pivoting all going all in on the cloud was important for us and we haven't looked back. >>And at that time, the proof points were coming clearer and clearer 2012 through 15 was the early adopters, the builders, the startups and early enterprises. Yes. The capital ones of the world. Exactly the, uh, and those kinds of big enterprises. The game don't, won't say gamblers, but ones that were very savvy. The innovators, the FinTech folks. Yep. The hardcore glass eating enterprises >>Agreed, agreed to find a small to midsize business, to migrate completely to the cloud as, as infrastructure was considered. That just didn't happen as often. Um, what we were seeing were a lot of our small to midsize business customers, they wanted to leverage cloud based backup, or they wanted to leverage a cloud for disaster recovery because it lent itself. Well, early days, our most common cloud customer though, was the customer that wanted to move messaging and collaboration. The, the Microsoft suite to the cloud and a lot of 'em dipped their toe in the water. But by 2017 we knew infrastructure was around the corner. Yeah. And so, uh, we only had two customers on eight at the time. Um, and we, uh, we, we made the decision to go all in >>Justin. Great to have you on the cube. Thank you. Let's wrap up. Uh, tell me the hottest product that you have. Is it migrations? Is the app modernization? Is it data? What's the hot product and then put a plug in for the company. Awesome. >>So, uh, there's no question. Every customer is looking to migrate workloads and try to figure out how to modernize for the future. We have very interesting, sophisticated yet elegant funding solutions to help customers with the cash flow, uh, constraints that come along with those migrations. So any SMB that's thinking about migrating to the cloud, they should be talking innovative solutions. We know how to do it in a way that allows those customers not to be cash strapped and gives them an opportunity to move forward in a controlled, contained way so that they can modernize. >>So like insurance, basically for them not insurance class in the classic sense, but you help them out on the, on the cash exposure. >>Absolutely. We are known for that and we're known for being creative with those customers, empathetic to where they are in their journey. And >>That's the cloud upside is all about doubling down on the variable wind. That's right. Seeing the value and doubling down on it. Absolutely not praying for it. Yeah. <laugh> all right, Justin. Thanks for coming on. You really appreciate it. Thank >>You very much for having >>Me. Okay. This is the cube coverage here live in San Francisco, California for AWS summit, 2022. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching with back with more great coverage for two days after this short break >>Live on the floor in San Francisco for 80 west summit, I'm John ferry, host of the cube here for the next two days, getting all the action we're back in person. We're at AWS reinvent a few months ago. Now we're back events are coming back and we're happy to be here with the cube, bringing all the action. Also virtual, we have a hybrid cube, check out the cube.net, Silicon angle.com for all the coverage. After the event. We've got a great guest ticketing off here. Matthew Park, director of solutions, architecture with innovation solutions. The booth is right here. Matthew, welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much. I'm glad >>To be here. So we're back in person. You're from Tennessee. We were chatting before you came on camera. Um, it's great to have to be back through events. >>It's amazing. This is the first, uh, summit I've been to and what two, three years. >>It's awesome. We'll be at the, uh, New York as well. A lot of developers and a big story this year is as developers look at cloud going distributed computing, you got on premises, you got public cloud, you got the edge. Essentially the cloud operations is running everything dev sec ops, everyone kind of sees that you got containers, you got Kubernetes, you got cloud native. So the, the game is pretty much laid out. Mm. And the edge is with the actions you guys are number one, premier partner at SMB for edge. >>That's right. >>Tell us about what you guys doing at innovative and, uh, what you do. >>That's right. Uh, so I'm the director of solutions architecture. Uh, me and my team are responsible for building out the solutions that are around, especially the edge public cloud out for us edge is anything outside of an AWS availability zone. Uh, we are deploying that in countries that don't have AWS infrastructure in region. They don't have it. Uh, give >>An example, >>Uh, example would be Panama. We have a customer there that, uh, needs to deploy some financial tech data and compute is legally required to be in Panama, but they love AWS and they want to deploy AWS services in region. Uh, so they've taken E EKS anywhere. We've put storage gateway and, uh, snowball, uh, in region inside the country and they're running their FinTech on top of AWS services inside Panama. >>You know, what's interesting, Matthew is that we've been covering Aw since 2013 with the cube about their events. And we watched the progression and jazzy was, uh, was in charge and then became the CEO. Now Adam Slosky is in charge, but the edge has always been that thing they've been trying to, I don't wanna say, trying to avoid, of course, Amazon would listen to customers. They work backwards from the customers. We all know that. Uh, but the real issue was they were they're bread and butters EC two and S three. And then now they got tons of services and the cloud is obviously successful and seeing that, but the edge brings up a whole nother level. >>It does >>Computing. It >>Does. >>That's not central lies in the public cloud. Now they got regions. So what is the issue with the edge what's driving? The behavior. Outpost came out as a reaction to competitive threats and also customer momentum around OT, uh, operational technologies. And it merging. We see with the data at the edge, you got five GM having. So it's pretty obvious, but there was a slow transition. What was the driver for the <affirmative> what's the driver now for edge action for AWS >>Data is the driver for the edge. Data has gravity, right? And it's pulling compute back to where the customer's generating that data and that's happening over and over again. You said it best outpost was a reaction to a competitive situation. Whereas today we have over fit 15 AWS edge services, and those are all reactions to things that customers need inside their data centers on location or in the field like with media companies. >>Outpost is interesting. We always used to riff on the cube, uh, cuz it's basically Amazon in a box, pushed in the data center, uh, running native, all the stuff, but now cloud native operations are kind of become standard. You're starting to see some standard Deepak sings group is doing some amazing work with open source Rauls team on the AI side, obviously, uh, you got SW who's giving the keynote tomorrow. You got the big AI machine learning big part of that edge. Now you can say, okay, outpost, is it relevant today? In other words, did outpost do its job? Cause EKS anywhere seems to be getting a lot of momentum. You see low the zones, the regions are kicking ass for Amazon. This edge piece is evolving. What's your take on EKS anywhere versus say outpost? >>Yeah, I think outpost did its job. It made customers that were looking at outpost really consider, do I wanna invest in this hardware? Do I, do I wanna have, um, this outpost in my data center, do I wanna manage this over the long term? A lot of those customers just transitioned to the public cloud. They went into AWS proper. Some of those customers stayed on prem because they did have use cases that were, uh, not a good fit for outpost. They weren't a good fit. Uh, in the customer's mind for the public AWS cloud inside an availability zone. Now what's happening is as AWS is pushing these services out and saying, we're gonna meet you where you are with 5g. We're gonna meet you where you are with wavelength. We're gonna meet you where you are with EKS anywhere. Uh, I think it has really reduced the amount of times that we have conversations about outposts and it's really increased. We can deploy fast. We don't have to spin up outpost hardware. We can go deploy EKS anywhere in your VMware environment and it's increasing the speed of adoption >>For sure. So you guys are making a lot of good business decisions around managed cloud service. Innovative does that. You have the cloud advisory, the classic professional services for the specific edge piece and, and doing that outside of the availability zones and regions for AWS, um, customers in, in these new areas that you're helping out are they want cloud, like they want to have modernization a modern applications. Obviously they got data machine learning and AI, all part of that. What's the main product or, or, or gap that you're filling for AWS, uh, outside of their available ability zones or their regions that you guys are delivering. What's the key is it. They don't have a footprint. Is it that it's not big enough for them? What's the real gap. What's why, why are you so successful? >>So what customers want when they look towards the cloud is they want to focus on, what's making them money as a business. They wanna focus on their applications. They want focus on their customers. So they look towards AWS cloud and say, AWS, you take the infrastructure. You take, uh, some of the higher layers and we'll focus on our revenue generating business, but there's a gap there between infrastructure and revenue generating business that innovative slides into, uh, we help manage the AWS environment. We help build out these things in local data centers for 32 plus year old company, we have traditional on-premises people that know about deploying hardware that know about deploying VMware to host EKS anywhere. But we also have most of our company totally focused on the AWS cloud. So we're filling that gap in helping deploy these AWS services, manage them over the long term. So our customers can go to just primarily and totally focusing on their revenue generating business. >>So basically you guys are basically building AWS edges, >>Correct? >>For correct companies, correct? Mainly because the, the needs are there, you got data, you got certain products, whether it's, you know, low latency type requirements, right. And then they still work with the regions, right. It's all tied together, right. Is that how it works? Right. >>And, and our customers, even the ones in the edge, they also want us to build out the AWS environment inside the availability zone, because we're always gonna have a failback scenario. If we're gonna deploy FinTech in the Caribbean, we're gonna talk about hurricanes and gonna talk about failing back into the AWS availability zones. So innovative is filling that gap across the board, whether it be inside the AWS cloud or on the AWS edge. >>All right. So I gotta ask you on the, since you're at the edge in these areas, I won't say underserved, but developing areas where now have data, you have applications that are tapping into that, that requirement. It makes total sense. We're seeing across the board. So it's not like it's, it's an outlier it's actually growing. Yeah. There's also the crypto angle. You got the blockchain. Are you seeing any traction at the edge with blockchain? Because a lot of people are looking at the web three in these areas like Panama, you mentioned FinTech in, in the islands. There are a lot of, lot of, lot of web three happening. What's your, what's your view on the web three world right now, relative >>To we, we have some customers actually deploying crypto, especially, um, especially in the Caribbean. I keep bringing the Caribbean up, but it's, it's top of my mind right now we have customers that are deploying crypto. A lot of, uh, countries are choosing crypto underly parts of their central banks. Yeah. Um, so it's, it's up and coming. Uh, I, I have some, you know, personal views that, that crypto is still searching for a use case. Yeah. And, uh, I think it's searching a lot and, and we're there to help customers search for that use case. Uh, but, but crypto, as a, as a tech technology, um, lives really well on the AWS edge. Yeah. Uh, and, and we're having more and more people talk to us about that. Yeah. And ask for assistance in the infrastructure because they're developing new cryptocurrencies every day. Yeah. It's not like they're deploying Ethereum or anything specific. They're actually developing new currencies and, and putting them out there on it's >>Interesting. And I mean, first of all, we've been doing crypto for many, many years. We have our own little, um, you know, projects going on. But if you look talk to all the crypto people that say, look, we do a smart contract, we use the blockchain. It's kind of over a lot of overhead. It's not really their technical already, but it's a cultural shift, but there's underserved use cases around use of money, but they're all using the blockchain, just for this like smart contracts for instance, or certain transactions. And they go into Amazon for the database. Yeah. <laugh> they all don't tell anyone we're using a centralized service, but what happened to decent centralized. >>Yeah. And that's, and that's the conversation performance. >>Yeah. >>And, and it's a cost issue. Yeah. And it's a development issue. Um, so I think more and more as, as some of these, uh, currencies maybe come up, some of the smart contracts get into, uh, they find their use cases. I think we'll start talking about how does that really live on, on AWS and, and what does it look like to build decentralized applications, but with AWS hardware and services. >>Right. So take me through a, a use case of a customer, um, Matthew around the edge. Okay. So I'm a customer, pretend I'm a customer, Hey, you know, I'm, we're in an underserved area. I want to modernize my business. And I got my developers that are totally peaked up on cloud. Um, but we've identified that it's just a lot of overhead latency issues. I need to have a local edge and serve my a and I also want all the benefits of the cloud. So I want the modernization and I wanna migrate to the cloud for all those cloud benefits and the good this of the cloud. What's the answer. Yeah. >>Uh, big thing is, uh, industrial manufacturing, right? That's, that's one of the best use cases, uh, inside industrial manufacturing, we can pull in many of the AWS edge services we can bring in, uh, private 5g, uh, so that all the, uh, equipment inside that, that manufacturing plant can be hooked up. They don't have to pay huge overheads to deploy 5g it's, uh, better than wifi for the industrial space. Um, when we take computing down to that industrial area, uh, because we wanna do pre-procesing on the data. Yeah. We want to gather some analytics. We deploy that with, uh, regular commercially available hardware running VMware, and we deploy EKS anywhere on that. Uh, inside of that manufacturing plant, uh, we can do pre-processing on things coming out of the, uh, the robotics that depending on what we're manufacturing, right. Uh, and then we can take the, those refined analytics and for very low cost with maybe a little bit longer latency transmit those back, um, to the AWS availability zone, the, the standard >>For data lake or whatever, >>To the data lake. Yeah. Data Lakehouse, whatever it might be. Um, and we can do additional data science on that once it gets to the AWS cloud. Uh, but I'll lot of that, uh, just in time business decisions, just in time, manufacturing decisions can all take place on an AWS service or services inside that manufacturing plant. And that's, that's one of the best use cases that we're >>Seeing. And I think, I mean, we've been seeing this on the queue for many, many years, moving data around is very expensive. Yeah. But also compute going of the data that saves that cost yep. On the data transfer also on the benefits of the latency. So I have to ask you, by the way, that's standard best practice now for the folks watching don't move the data unless you have to. Um, but those new things are developing. So I wanna ask you, what new patterns are you seeing emerging once this new architecture's in place? Love that idea, localize everything right at the edge, manufacture, industrial, whatever the use case, retail, whatever it is. Right. But now what does that change in the, in the core cloud? There's a, there's a system element here. Yeah. What's the new pattern. There's >>Actually an organizational element as well, because once you have to start making the decision, do I put this compute at the point of use or do I put this compute in the cloud? Uh, now you start thinking about where business decisions should be taking place. Uh, so not only are you changing your architecture, you're actually changing your organization because you're thinking, you're thinking about a dichotomy you didn't have before. Uh, so now you say, okay, this can take place here. Uh, and maybe, maybe this decision can wait. Yeah. Uh, and then how do I visualize that? By >>The way, it could be a bot tube doing the work for management. Yeah. <laugh> exactly. You got observability going, right. But you gotta change the database architecture in the back. So there's new things developing. You've got more benefit. There >>Are, there are. And, and we have more and more people that, that want to talk less about databases and want to talk more about data lakes because of this. They want to talk more about out. Customers are starting to talk about throwing away data, uh, you know, for the past maybe decade. Yeah. It's been store everything. And one day we will have a data science team that we hire in our organization to do analytics on this decade of data. And well, >>I mean, that's, that's a great point. We don't have time to drill into, maybe we do another session on this, but the one pattern we're seeing of the past year is that throwing away data's bad, even data lakes that so-called turn into data swamps, actually, it's not the case. You look at data, brick, snowflake, and other successes out there. And even time series data, which may seem irrelevant efforts over actually matters when people start retraining their machine learning algorithms. Yep. So as data becomes code, as we call it in our last showcase, we did a whole whole event on this. The data's good in real time and in the lake. Yeah. Because the iteration of the data feeds the machine learning training. Things are getting better with the old data. So it's not throw it away. It's not just business better. Yeah. There's all kinds of new scale. >>There are. And, and we have, uh, many customers that are running pay Toby level. Um, they're, they're essentially data factories on, on, uh, on premises, right? They're, they're creating so much data and they're starting to say, okay, we could analyze this, uh, in the cloud, we could transition it. We could move Aytes of data to the AWS cloud, or we can run, uh, computational workloads on premises. We can really do some analytics on this data transition, uh, those high level and sort of raw analytics back to AWS run 'em through machine learning. Um, and we don't have to transition 10, 12 petabytes of data into AWS. >>So I gotta end the segment on a, on a kind of a, um, fun note. I was told to ask you about your personal background, OnPrem architect, Aus cloud, and skydiving instructor. <laugh> how does that all work together? What tell, what does this mean? Yeah. >>Uh, you >>Jumped out a plane and got a job. You got a customer to jump out >>Kind of. So I was, you jumped out. I was teaching having, uh, before I, before I started in the cloud space, this was 13, 14 years ago. I was a, I still am a sky. I instructor, uh, I was teaching skydiving and I heard out of the corner of my ear, uh, a guy that owned an MSP that was lamenting about, um, you know, storing data and, and how his customers are working. And he can't find an enough people to operate all these workloads. So I walked over and said, Hey, this is, this is what I went to school for. Like, I'd love to, you know, uh, I was living in a tent in the woods, teaching skydiving. I was like, I'd love to not live in a tent in the woods. So, uh, uh, I started and the first day there, uh, we had a, a discussion, uh, EC two had just come out <laugh> and, uh, like, >>This is amazing. >>Yeah. And so we had this discussion, we should start moving customers here. And, uh, and that totally revolutionized that business, um, that, that led to, uh, that that guy actually still owns a skydiving airport. But, um, but through all of that, and through being in on premises, migrated me and myself, my career into the cloud, and now it feels like, uh, almost, almost looking back and saying, now let's take what we learned in the cloud and, and apply those lessons and those services tore >>It's. So it's such a great story, you know, was gonna, you know, you know, the whole, you know, growth mindset pack your own parachute, you know, uh, exactly. You know, the cloud in the early days was pretty much will the shoot open. Yeah. It was pretty much, you had to roll your own cloud at that time. And so, you know, you, you jump on a plane, you gotta make sure that parachute is gonna open. >>And so was Kubernetes by the way, 2015 or so when, uh, when that was coming out, it was, I mean, it was, it was still, and maybe it does still feel like that to some people. Right. But, uh, it was, it was the same kind of feeling that we had in the early days of AWS, the same feeling we have when we >>It's now with you guys, it's more like a tandem jump. Yeah. You know, but, but it's a lot of, lot of this cutting edge stuff, like jumping out of an airplane. Yeah. You got the right equipment. You gotta do the right things. Exactly. >>Right. >>Yeah. Thanks for coming. You really appreciate it. Absolutely great conversation. Thanks for having me. Okay. The cubes here live in San Francisco for eight of us summit. I'm John for host of the cube. Uh, we'll be at a summit in New York coming up in the summer as well. Look up for that. Look up this calendar for all the cube, actually@thecube.net. We'll right back with our next segment after this break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone to San Francisco live coverage here, we're at the cube a be summit 2022. We're back in person. I'm John fury host of the cube. We'll be at the eighties summit in New York city this summer, check us out then. But right now, two days in San Francisco, getting all the coverage what's going on in the cloud, we got a cube alumni and friend of the cube, my dos car CEO, investor, a Sierra, and also an investor in a bunch of startups, angel investor. Gonna do great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. Good to see you. Good to see you. Cool. How are you? Good. >>How hello you. >>So congratulations on all your investments. Uh, you've made a lot of great successes, uh, over the past couple years, uh, and your company raising, uh, some good cash as Sarah. So give us the update. How much cash have you guys raised? What's the status of the company product what's going on? >>First of all, thank you for having me. We're back to be business with you, never after to see you. Uh, so is a company started around four years back. I invested with a few of the investors and now I'm the CEO there. We have raised close to a hundred million there. The investors are people like Norwes Menlo ventures, coastal ventures, Ram Shera, and all those people, all well known guys. And Beckel chime Paul me Mayard web. So whole bunch of operating people and, uh, Silicon valley VCs are involved >>And has it gone? >>It's going well. We are doing really well. We are going almost 300% year over year. Uh, for last three years, the space ISRA is going after is what I call the applying AI for customer service. It operations, it help desk, uh, the same place I used to work at ServiceNow. We are partners with ServiceNow to take, how can we argument for employees and customers, Salesforce, and service now to take you to the next stage? Well, >>I love having you on the cube, Dave and I, Dave LAN as well loves having you on too, because you not only bring the entrepreneurial CEO experience, you're an investor. You're like a, you're like a guest analyst. <laugh> >>You know, who does >>You, >>You >>Get the call fund to talk to you though. You >>Get the commentary, your, your finger in the pulse. Um, so I gotta ask you obviously, AI and machine learning, machine learning AI, or you want to phrase it. Isn't every application. Now, AI first, uh, you're seeing a lot of that going on. You're starting to see companies build the modern applications at the top of the stack. So the cloud scale has hit. We're seeing cloud scale. You predicted that we talked about in the cube many times. Now you have that past layer with a lot more services and cloud native becoming a standard layer. Containerizations growing Docker just raised a hundred million on a $2 billion valuation back from the dead after they pivoted from enterprise services. So open source developers are booming. Um, where's the action. I mean, is there data control plan? Emerging AI needs data. There's a lot of challenges around this. There's a lot of discussions and a lot of companies being funded, observability there's 10 billion observability companies. Data is the key. This is what's your end on this. What's your take. >>Yeah, look, I think I'll give you the few that I see right from my side. Obviously data is very clear. So the things that rumor system of recorded you and me talked about the next layer is called system of intelligence. That's where the AI will play. Like we talk cloud native, it'll be called AI. NA AI enable is a new buzzword and using the AI for customer service. It, you talk about observability. I call it, AIOps applying AOPs for good old it operation management, cloud management. So you'll see the AOPs applied for whole list of, uh, application from observability doing the CMDB, predicting the events insurance. So I see a lot of work clicking for AIOps and AI services. What used to be desk with ServiceNow BMC GLA you see a new ALA emerging as a system of intelligence. Uh, the next would be is applying AI with workflow automation. So that's where you'll see a lot of things called customer workflows, employee workflows. So think of what UI path automation, anywhere ServiceNow are doing, that area will be driven with AI workflows. So you, you see AI going >>Off is RPA. A company is AI, is RPA a feature of something bigger? Or can someone have a company on RPA UI S one will be at their event this summer? Um, is it a product company? I mean, or I mean, RPA is, should be embedded in everything. It's a >>Feature. It is very good point. Very, very good thinking. So one is, it's a category for sure. Like, as we thought, it's a category, it's an area where RPA may change the name. I call it much more about automation, workflow automation, but RPA and automation is a category. Um, it's a company also, but that automation should be embedded in every area. Yeah. Like we call cloud NATO and AI. They it'll become automation data. Yeah. And that's your, thinking's >>Interesting me. I think about the, what you're talking about what's coming to mind is I'm kinda having flashbacks to the old software model of middleware. Remember at middleware, it was very easy to understand it was middleware. It sat between two things and then the middle, and it was software abstraction. Now you have all kinds of workflows, abstractions everywhere. So multiple databases, it's not a monolithic thing. Right? Right. So as you break that down, is this the new modern middleware? Because what you're talking about is data workflows, but they might be siloed. Are they integrated? I mean, these are the challenges. This is crazy. What's the, >>So remember the databases became called polyglot databases. Yeah. I call this one polyglot automation. So you need automation as a layer, as a category, but you also need to put automation in every area like you, you were talking about, it should be part of service. Now it should be part of ISRA. Like every company, every Salesforce. So that's why you see it MuleSoft and sales buying RPA companies. So you'll see all the SaaS companies, cloud companies having an automation as a core. So it's like how you have a database and compute and sales and networking. You'll also have an automation as a layer embedded inside every stack. >>All right. So I wanna shift gears a little bit and get your perspective on what's going on behind us. You can see, uh, behind, as you got the XPO hall got, um, we're back to vis, but you got, you know, AMD, Clum, Dynatrace data, dog, innovative, all the companies out here that we know, we interview them all. They're trying to be suppliers to this growing enterprise market. Right? Okay. But now you also got the entrepreneurial equation. Okay. We're gonna have John Sado on from Deibel later. He's a former NEA guy and we always talk to Jerry, Jen, we know all the, the VCs, what does the startups look like? What does the state of the, in your mind, cause you, I know you invest the entrepreneurial founder situation. Cloud's bigger. Mm-hmm <affirmative> global, right? Data's part of it. You mentioned data's code. Yes. Basically. Data's everything. What's it like for a first an entrepreneur right now who's starting a company. What's the white space. What's the attack plan. How do they get in the market? How do they engineer everything? >>Very good. So I'll give it to, uh, two things that I'm seeing out there. Remember leaders of Amazon created the startups 15 years back. Everybody built on Amazon now, Azure and GCP. The next layer would be people don't just build on Amazon. They're going to build it on top of snow. Flake companies are snowflake becomes a data platform, right? People will build on snowflake, right? So I see my old boss playing ment, try to build companies on snowflake. So you don't build it just on Amazon. You build it on Amazon and snowflake. Snowflake will become your data store. Snowflake will become your data layer, right? So I think that's the next level of companies trying to do that. So if I'm doing observability AI ops, if I'm doing next level of Splunk SIM, I'm gonna build it on snowflake, on Salesforce, on Amazon, on Azure, et cetera. >>It's interesting. You know, Jerry Chan has it put out a thesis a couple months ago called castles in the cloud where your moat is, what you do in the cloud. Not necessarily in the, in the IP. Um, Dave LAN and I had last re invent, coined the term super cloud, right? It's got a lot of traction and a lot of people throwing, throwing mud at us, but we were, our thesis was, is that what Snowflake's doing? What Goldman S Sachs is doing. You're starting to see these clouds on top of clouds. So Amazon's got this huge CapEx advantage. And guys like Charles Fitzgeral out there, who we like was kind of hitting on us saying, Hey, you guys terrible, they didn't get him. Like, yeah, I don't think he gets it, but that's a whole, can't wait to debate him publicly on this. <laugh> cause he's cool. Um, but snowflake is on Amazon. Yes. Now they say they're on Azure now. Cause they've got a bigger market and they're public, but ultimately without a AWS snowflake doesn't exist and, and they're reimagining the data warehouse with the cloud, right? That's the billion dollar opportunity. >>It is. It is. They both are very tight. So imagine what Frank has done at snowflake and Amazon. So if I'm a startup today, I want to build everything on Amazon where possible whatever is, I cannot build. I'll make the pass layer room. The middle layer pass will be snowflake. So I cannot build it on snowflake. I can use them for data layer if I really need to size, I'll build it on force.com Salesforce. Yeah. Right. So I think that's where you'll >>See. So basically the, the, if you're an entrepreneur, the, the north star in terms of the, the outcome is be a super cloud. It >>Is, >>That's the application on another big CapEx ride, the CapEx of AWS or cloud, >>And that reduce your product development, your go to market and you get use the snowflake marketplace to drive your engagement. Yeah. >>Yeah. How are, how is Amazon and the clouds dealing with these big whales, the snowflakes of the world? I mean, I know they got a great relationship, uh, but snowflake now has to run a company they're public. Yeah. So, I mean, I'll say, I think got Redshift. Amazon has got Redshift. Um, but snowflake big customer. The they're probably paying AWS big, >>I >>Think big bills too. >>So John, very good. Cause it's like how Netflix is and Amazon prime, right. Netflix runs on Amazon, but Amazon has Amazon prime that co-option will be there. So Amazon will have Redshift, but Amazon is also partnering with the snowflake to have native snowflake data warehouse as a data layer. So I think depending on the use case you have to use each of the above, I think snowflake is here for a long term. Yeah. Yeah. So if I'm building an application, I want to use snowflake then writing from stats. >>Well, I think that comes back down to entrepreneurial hustle. Do you have a better product? Right. Product value will ultimately determine it as long as the cloud doesn't, you know, foreclose your value. That's right. With some sort of internal hack, but I've think, I think the general question that I have is that I think it's okay to have a super cloud like that because the rising tide is still happening at some point, when does the rising tide stop and the people shopping up their knives, it gets more competitive or is it just an infinite growth cycle? I >>Think it's growth. You call it closed skill you the word cloud scale. So I think look, cloud will continually agree, increase. I think there's as long as there more movement from on, uh, on-prem to the classical data center, I think there's no reason at this point, the rumor, the old lift and shift that's happening in like my business. I see people lift and shifting from the it operations, it helpless. Even the customer service service. Now the ticket data from BMCs CAS like Microfocus, all those workloads are shifted to the cloud, right? So cloud ticketing system is happening. Cloud system of record is happening. So I think this train has still a long way to go made. >>I wanna get your thoughts for the folks watching that are, uh, enterprise buyers are practitioners, not suppliers to the market. Feel free to text me or DMing. Next question is really about the buying side, which is if I'm a customer, what's the current, um, appetite for startup products. Cause you know, the big enterprises now and you know, small, medium, large, and large enterprise, they're all buying new companies cuz a startup can go from zero to relevant very quickly. So that means now enterprises are engaging heavily with startups. What's it like what's is there a change in order of magnitude of the relationship between the startup selling to, or growing startup selling to an enterprise? Um, have you seen changes there? I mean seeing some stuff, but why don't we get your thoughts on that? What it >>Is you, if I remember going back to our 2007 or eight, when I used to talk to you back then when Amazon started very small, right? We are an Amazon summit here. So I think enterprises on the average used to spend nothing with startups. It's almost like 0% or one person today. Most companies are already spending 20, 30% with startups. Like if I look at a C I will line our business, it's gone. Yeah. Can it go more? I think it can double in the next four, five years. Yeah. Spending on the startups. Yeah. >>And check out, uh, AWS startups.com. That's a site that we built for the startup community for buyers and startups. And I want to get your reaction because I, I reference the URL causes like there's like a bunch of companies we've been promoting because the solution that startups have actually are new stuff. Yes. It's bending, it's shifting left for security or using data differently or um, building tools and platforms for data engineering. Right. Which is a new persona that's emerging. So you know, a lot of good resources there. Um, and goes back now to the data question. Now, getting back to your, what you're working on now is what's your thoughts around this new, um, data engineering persona, you mentioned AIOps, we've been seeing AIOps IOPS booming and that's creating a new developer paradigm that's right. Which we call coin data as code data as code is like infrastructure as code, but it's for data, right? It's developing with data, right? Retraining machine learnings, going back to the data lake, getting data to make, to do analysis, to make the machine learning better post event or post action. So this, this data engineers like an SRE for data, it's a new, scalable role we're seeing. Do you see the same thing? Do you agree? Um, do you disagree or can you share? >>I, a lot of thoughts that Fu I see the AI op solutions in the futures should be not looking back. I need to be like we are in San Francisco bay. That means earthquake prediction. Right? I want AOPs to predict when the outages are gonna happen. When there's a performance issue. I don't think most AOPs vendors have not gone there yet. Like I spend a lot of time with data dog, Cisco app dynamic, right? Dynatrace, all this solution will go future towards predict to pro so solution with AOPs. But what you bring up a very good point on the data side. I think like we have a Amazon marketplace and Amazon for startup, there should be data exchange where you want to create for AOPs and AI service that customers give the data, share the data because we thought the data algorithms are useless. I can give the best algorithm, but I gotta train them, modify them, make them better, make them better. Yeah. And I think their whole data exchange is the industry has not thought through something you and me talk many times. Yeah. Yeah. I think the whole, that area is very important. >>You've always been on, um, on the Vanguard of data because, uh, it's been really fun. Yeah. >>Going back to big data days back in 2009, you know that >>Look at, look how much data bricks has grown. >>It is doubled. The key cloud >>Air kinda went private, so good stuff. What are you working on right now? Give a, give a, um, plug for what you're working on. You'll still investing. >>I do still invest, but look, I'm a hundred percent on ISRA right now. I'm the CEO there. Yeah. Okay. So right. ISRA is my number one baby right now. So I'm looking year that growing customers and my customers, or some of them, you like it's zoom auto desk, McAfee, uh, grand <inaudible>. So all the top customers, um, mainly for it help desk customer service. AIOps those are three product lines and going after enterprise and commercial deals. >>And when should someone buy your product? What's what's their need? What category is it? >>I think they look whenever somebody needs to buy the product is if you need AOP solution to predict, keep your lights on, predict ours. One area. If you want to improve employee experience, you are using a slack teams and you want to automate all your workflows. That's another value problem. Third is customer service. You don't want to hire more people to do it. Some of the areas where you want to scale your company, grow your company, eliminate the cost customer service, >>Great stuff, man. Doing great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Congratulations on the success of your company and your investments. Thanks for coming on the cube. Okay. I'm John fur here at the cube live in San Francisco for day one of two days of coverage of a us summit 2022. And we're gonna be at Aus summit in San, uh, in New York in the summer. So look for that on the calendar, of course, go to a us startups.com. That's a site for all the hot startups and of course the cube.net and Silicon angle.com. Thanks for watching. We'll be back more coverage after this short break. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. This the cubes coverage here in San Francisco, California, a Davis summit, 2022, the beginning of the event season, as it comes back, little bit smaller footprint, a lot of hybrid events going on, but this is actually a physical event, a summit in new York's coming in the summer. We'll be two with the cube on the set. We're getting back in the Groove's psych to be back. We were at reinvent, uh, as well, and we'll see more and more cube, but you're gonna see a lot of virtual cube outta hybrid cube. We wanna get all those conversations, try to get more interviews, more flow going. But right now I'm excited to have Corey Quinn here on the back on the cube chief cloud economist with duck bill groove, he's the founder, uh, and chief content person always got great angles, fun comedy, authoritative Corey. Great to see you. Thank you. >>Thanks. Coming on. Sure is a lot of words to describe is shit posting, which is how I describe what I tend to do. Most days, >>Shit posting is an art form now. And if you look at mark, Andrew's been doing a lot of shit posting lately. All a billionaires are shit posting, but they don't know how to do it. They're >>Doing it right. There's something opportunity there. It's like, here's how to be even more obnoxious and incisive. It's honestly the most terrifying scenario for anyone is if I have that kind of budget to throw at my endeavors, it's like, I get excited with a nonsense I can do with a $20 gift card for an AWS credit compared to, oh well, if I could buy a mid-size island to begin doing this from, oh, then we're having fun. >>This shit posting trend. Interesting. I was watching a thread go on about, saw someone didn't get a job because of their shit posting and the employer didn't get it. And then someone on this side I'll hire the guy cuz I get that's highly intelligent shit posting. So for the audience that doesn't know what shit posting is, what, what is shitposting >>It's more or less talking about the world of enterprise technology, which even that sentence is hard to finish without falling asleep and toppling out of my chair in front of everyone on the livestream, but it's doing it in such a way that brings it to life that says the quiet part. A lot of the audience is thinking, but generally doesn't say either because they're polite or not a Jack ass or more prosaically are worried about getting fired for better or worse. I don't have that particular constraint, >>Which is why people love you. So let's talk about what you, what you think is, uh, worthy and not worthy in the industry right now, obviously, uh, Cuban coming up in Spain, which they're having a physical event, you see the growth of cloud native Amazon's evolving Atos, especially new CEO. Andy move on to be the chief of all. Amazon just saw him the cover of was it time magazine. Um, he's under a lot of stress. Amazon's changed. Invoice has changed. What's working. What's not, what's rising, what's falling. What's hot. What's not, >>It's easy to sit here and criticize almost anything. These folks do. They're they're effectively in a fishbowl, but I have trouble. Imagine the logistics, it takes to wind up handling the catering for a relatively downscale event like this one this year, let alone running a 1.7 million employee company having to balance all the competing challenges and pressures and the rest. I, I just can't fathom what it would be like to look at all of AWS. And it's, it's sprawling immense, the nominates our entire industry and say, okay, this is a good start, but I, I wanna focus on something with a broader remit. What is that? How do you even get into that position? And you can't win once you're there. All you can do is hold onto the tiger and hope you don't get mold. >>Well, there's a lot of force for good conversations. Seeing a lot of that going on, Amazon's trying to a, is trying to portray themselves, you know, the Pathfinder, you know, you're the pioneer, um, force for good. And I get that and I think that's a good angle as cloud goes mainstream. There's still the question of, we had a guy on just earlier, who was a skydiving instructor and we were joking about the early days of cloud. Like that was like skydiving, build a parachute open, you know, and now it's same kind of thing. As you move to edge, things are like reliable in some areas, but still new, new fringe, new areas. That's crazy. Well, >>Since the last time we've spoken, uh, Steve Schmidt is now the CISO for all of Amazon and his backfill replacement. The AWS CISO is CJ. Moses who as a hobby races, a as a semi-pro race car, our driver to my understanding, which either, I don't know what direction to take that in either. This is what he does to relax or ultimately, or ultimately it's. Huh? That, that certainly says something about risk assessment. I'm not entirely sure what, but okay. Either way, it sounds like more exciting. Like they >>Better have a replacement ready in case something goes wrong on the track, highly >>Available >>CSOs. I gotta say one of the things I do like in the recent trend is that the tech companies are getting into the formula one, which I was never a fan of until I watched that Netflix series. But when you look at the formula one, it's pretty cool. Cause it's got some tech angles, I get the whole data instrumentation thing, but the most coolest thing about formula, the one is they have these new rigs out. Yeah. Where you can actually race in e-sports with other people in pure simulation of the race car. You gotta get the latest and video graphics card, but it's basically a tricked out PC with amazing monitors and you have all the equipment of F1 and you're basically simulating racing. Oh, >>It's great too. And I can see the appeal of these tech companies getting it into it because these things are basically rocket shifts. When those cars go, like they're sitting there, we can instrument every last part of what is going on inside that vehicle. And then AWS crops up. And we can bill on every one of those dimensions too. And it's like slow down their hasty pudding one step at a time. But I do see the appeal. >>So I gotta ask you about, uh, what's going on in your world. I know you have a lot of great SA we've been following you in the queue for many, many years. Got a great newsletter. Check out Corey Quinn's newsletter, uh, screaming in the cloud program. Uh, you're on the cutting edge and you've got a great balance between really being snarky and, and, and really being delivering content. That's exciting, uh, for people, uh, with a little bit of an edge, um, how's that going? Uh, what's the blowback, any blowback late leads there been tick? What was, what are some of the things you're hearing from your audience, more Corey, more Corey. And then of course the, the PR team's calling you >>The weird thing about having an audience beyond a certain size is far and away as a landslide. The most common response I get is silence where it's hi, I'm emailing an awful lot of people at last week in AWS every week and okay. They not have heard me. It. That is not actually true. People just generally don't respond to email because who responds to email newsletters. That sounds like something, a lunatic might do same story with response to live streams and podcasts. It's like, I'm gonna call into that am radio show and give them a piece of my mind. People generally don't do that. >>We should do that. Actually. I think sure would call in. Oh, I, I >>Think >>I guarantee if we had that right now, people would call in and Corey, what do you think about X? >>Yeah. It not, everyone understands the full context of what I do. And in fact, increasingly few people do and that's fine. I, I keep forgetting that sometimes people do not see what I'm doing in the same light that I do. And that's fine. Blowback has been largely minimal. Honestly, I am surprised anything by how little I have gotten over the last five years of doing this, but it would be easier to dismiss me if I weren't generally. Right. When, okay, so you launch this new service and it seems pretty crappy to me cuz when I try and build something, it falls over and begs for help. And people might not like hearing that, but it's what customers are finding too. Yeah. I really am the voice of the customer. >>You know, I always joke with Dave Avante about how John Fort's always at, uh, um, reinvent getting the interview with jazzy now, Andy we're there, you're there. And so we have these rituals at the events. It's all cool. Um, one of the rituals I like about your, um, your content is you like to get on the naming product names. Um, and, and, and, and, and kind of goof on that. Now why I like is because I used to work at ETT Packard where they used to name things as like engineers, HP 1 0, 0 5, or we can't, we >>Have a new monitor. How are we gonna name it? Throw the wireless keyboard down the stairs again. And then there you go. Yeah. >>It's and the old joke at HP was if they, if they invented sushi, they'd say, yeah, we can't call sushi. It's cold, dead fish, but that's what it is. And so the joke was cold. Dead fish is a better name than sushi. So you know is fun. So what's the, what are the, how's the Amazon doing in there? Have they changed their naming, uh, strategy, uh, on some of their, their product >>They're going in different directions. When they named Aurora, they decided to explore a new theme of Disney princesses as they go down those paths. And some things are more descriptive. Some people are clearly getting bonus on number of words, they can shove into it. Like the better a service is the longer it's name. Like AWS systems manager, a session manager is a great one. I love the service ridiculous name. They have a systems manager, parameter store with is great. They have secrets manager, which does the same thing. It's two words less, but that one costs money in a way that systems manage through parameter store does not. It's fun. >>What's your, what's your favorite combination of acronyms >>Combination of you >>Got Ks. You got EMR, you got EC two. You got S three SQS. Well, RedShift's not an acronym. You got >>Gas is one of my personal favorites because it's either elastic block store or elastic bean stock, depending entirely on the context of the conversation, >>They still got bean stock or is that still >>Around? Oh, they never turn anything off. They're like the anti Google, Google turns things off while they're still building it. Whereas Amazon is like, wow, we built this thing in 2005 and everyone hates it. But while we certainly can't change it, now it has three customers on it, John. >>Okay. >>Simple BV still haunts our >>Dreams. I, I actually got an email on, I saw one of my, uh, servers, all these C twos were being deprecated and I got an email I'm like, I couldn't figure out. Why can you just like roll it over? Why, why are you telling me just like, gimme something else. Right. Okay. So let me talk about, uh, the other things I want to ask you is that like, okay, so as Amazon gets better in some areas where do they need more work? And you, your opinion, because obviously they're all interested in new stuff and they tend to like put it out there for their end to end customers. But then they've got ecosystem partners who actually have the same product. Yes. And, and this has been well documented. So it's, it's not controversial. It's just that Amazon's got a database Snowflake's got out database service. So, you know, Redshift, snowflake database is out there. So you've got this optician. Yes. How's that going? And what are you hearing about the reaction to any of that stuff? >>Depends on who you ask. They love to basically trot out a bunch of their partners who will say nice things about them. And it very much has heirs of, let's be honest, a hostage video, but okay. Cuz these companies do partner with Amazon and they cannot afford to rock the boat too far. I'm not partnered with anyone. I can say what I want. And they're basically restricted to taking away my birthday at worse so I can live with that. >>All right. So I gotta ask about multi-cloud cause obviously the other cloud shows are coming up. Amazon hated that word. Multi-cloud um, a lot of people are saying, you know, it's not a real good marketing word. Like multicloud sounds like, you know, root canal. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. So is there a better description for multicloud? >>Multiple single >>Loves that term. Yeah. >>You're building in multiple single points of failure. Do it for the right reasons or don't do it as a default. I believe not doing it is probably the, the right answer. However, and if I were, if I were Amazon, I wouldn't want to talk about multi-cloud either as the industry leader, let's talk about other clouds, bad direction to go in from a market cap perspective. It doesn't end well for you, but regardless of what they want to talk about, or don't want to talk about what they say, what they don't say, I tune all of it out. And I look at what customers are doing and multi-cloud exists in a variety of some brilliant, some brain dead. It depends a lot on context. But my general response is when someone gets on stage from a company and tells me to do a thing that directly benefits their company. I am skeptical at best. Yeah. When customers get on stage and say, this is what we're doing because it solves problems. That's when I shut up and listen. >>Yeah. Cool. Awesome. Corey, I gotta ask you a question cause I know you we've been, you know, fellow journey mean in the, in the cloud journey, going to all the events and then the pandemic hit where now in the third year, who knows what it's gonna end, certainly events are gonna look different. They're gonna be either changing footprint with the virtual piece, new group formations community's gonna emerge. You've got a pretty big community growing and it's growing like crazy. What's the weirdest or coolest thing, or just big changes you've seen with the pan endemic, uh, from your perspective, cuz you've been in the you're in the middle of the whitewater rafting. You've seen the events you circle offline. You saw the online piece come in, you're commentating, you're calling balls and strikes in the industry. You got a great team developing over there. Duck bill group. What's the big aha moment that you saw with the pandemic. Weird, funny, serious, real in the industry and with customers what's >>Accessibility. Reinvent is a great example. When in the before times it's open to anyone who wants to attend, who >>Can pony. >>Hello and welcome back to the live cube coverage here in San Francisco, California, the cube live coverage. Two days, day two of a summit, 2022 Aish summit, New York city coming up in summer. We'll be there as well. Events are back. I'm the host, John fur, the Cub got great guest here. Johnny Dallas with Ze. Um, here is on the queue. We're gonna talk about his background. Uh, little trivia here. He was the youngest engineer ever worked at Amazon at the age. 17 had to get escorted into reinvent in Vegas cause he was underage <laugh> with security, all good stories. Now the CEO of company called Z know DevOps kind of focus, managed service, a lot of cool stuff, Johnny, welcome to the cube. >>Thanks John. Great. >>So tell a story. You were the youngest engineer at AWS. >>I was, yes. So I used to work at a company called Bebo. I got started very young. I started working when I was about 14, um, kind of as a software engineer. And when I, uh, it was about 16. I graduated out of high school early, um, working at this company Bebo, still running all of the DevOps at that company. Um, I went to reinvent in about 2018 to give a talk about some of the DevOps software I wrote at that company. Um, but you know, as many of those things were probably familiar with reinvent happens in a casino and I was 16. So was not able to actually go into the, a casino on my own. Um, so I'd have <inaudible> security as well as casino security escort me in to give my talk. >>Did Andy jazzy, was he aware of >>This? Um, you know, that's a great question. I don't know. <laugh> >>I'll ask him great story. So obviously you started a young age. I mean, it's so cool to see you jump right in. I mean, I mean you never grew up with the old school that I used to grew up in and loading package software, loading it onto the server, deploying it, plugging the cables in, I mean you just rocking and rolling with DevOps as you look back now what's the big generational shift because now you got the Z generation coming in, millennials on the workforce. It's changing like no one's putting and software on servers. Yeah, >>No. I mean the tools keep getting better, right? We, we keep creating more abstractions that make it easier and easier. When I, when I started doing DevOps, I could go straight into E two APIs. I had APIs from the get go and you know, my background was, I was a software engineer. I never went through like the CIS admin stack. I, I never had to, like you said, rack servers, myself. I was immediately able to scale. I was managing, I think 2,500 concurrent servers across every Ables region through software. It was a fundamental shift. >>Did you know what an SRE was at that time? >>Uh, >>You were kind of an SRE on >>Yeah, I was basically our first SRE, um, was familiar with the, with the phrasing, but really thought of myself as a software engineer who knows cloud APIs, not a SRE. All >>Right. So let's talk about what's what's going on now as you look at the landscape today, what's the coolest thing that's going on in your mind in cloud? >>Yeah, I think the, I think the coolest thing is, you know, we're seeing the next layer of those abstraction tools exist and that's what we're doing with Z is we've basically gone and we've, we're building an app platform that deploys onto your cloud. So if you're familiar with something like Carku, um, where you just click a GitHub repo, uh, we actually make it that easy. You click a GI hub repo and it will deploy on ALS using a AWS tools. So, >>Right. So this is Z. This is the company. Yes. How old's the company about >>A year and a half old now. >>All right. So explain what it does. >>Yeah. So we make it really easy for any software engineer to deploy on a AWS. It's not SREs. These are the actual application engineers doing the business logic. They don't really want to think about Yamo. They don't really want to configure everything super deeply. They want to say, run this API on S in the best way possible. We've encoded all the best practices into software and we set it up for you. Yeah. >>So I think the problem you're solving is that there's a lot of want be DevOps engineers. And then they realize, oh shit, I don't wanna do this. Yeah. And some people want to do it. They loved under the hood. Right. People love to have infrastructure, but the average developer needs to actually be as agile on scale. So that seems to be the problem you solve. Right? >>Yeah. We, we, we give way more productivity to each individual engineer, you know? >>All right. So let me ask you a question. So let me just say, I'm a developer. Cool. I build this new app. It's a streaming app or whatever. I'm making it up cube here, but let's just say I deploy it. I need your service. But what happens about when my customers say, Hey, what's your SLA? The CDN went down from this it's flaky. Does Amazon have, so how do you handle all that SLA reporting that Amazon provides? Cuz they do a good job with sock reports all through the console. But as you start getting into DevOps <affirmative> and sell your app, mm-hmm <affirmative> you have customer issues. How do you, how do you view that? Yeah, >>Well, I, I think you make a great point of AWS has all this stuff already. AWS has SLAs. AWS has contract. Aw has a lot of the tools that are expected. Um, so we don't have to reinvent the wheel here. What we do is we help people get to those SLAs more easily. So Hey, this is AWS SLA as a default. Um, Hey, we'll fix you your services. This is what you can expect here. Um, but we can really leverage S's reliability of you. Don't have to trust us. You have to trust ALS and trust that the setup is good there. >>Do you handle all the recovery or mitigation between, uh, identification say downtime for instance? Oh, the server's not 99% downtime. Uh, went down for an hour, say something's going on? And is there a service dashboard? How does it get what's the remedy? Do you have a, how does all that work? >>Yeah, so we have some built in remediation. You know, we, we basically say we're gonna do as much as we can to keep your endpoint up 24 7 mm-hmm <affirmative>. If it's something in our control, we'll do it. If it's a disc failure, that's on us. If you push bad code, we won't put out that new version until it's working. Um, so we do a lot to make sure that your endpoint stay is up, um, and then alert you if there's a problem that we can't fix. So cool. Hey S has some downtime, this thing's going on. You need to do this action. Um, we'll let you know. >>All right. So what do you do for fun? >>Yeah, so, uh, for, for fun, um, a lot of side projects. <laugh> uh, >>What's your side hustle right now. You got going on >>The, uh, it's >>A lot of tools playing tools, serverless. >>Yeah, painless. A lot of serverless stuff. Um, I think there's a lot of really cool WAM stuff as well. Going on right now. Um, I love tools is, is the truest answer is I love building something that I can give to somebody else. And they're suddenly twice as productive because of it. Um, >>It's a good feeling, isn't it? >>Oh yeah. There's >>Nothing like tools were platforms. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know, the expression, too many tools in the tool. She becomes, you know, tools for all. And then ultimately tools become platforms. What's your view on that? Because if a good tool works and starts to get traction, you need to either add more tools or start building a platform platform versus tool. What's your, what's your view on a reaction to that kind of concept debate? >>Yeah, it's a good question. Uh, we we've basically started as like a, a platform. First of we've really focused on these, uh, developers who don't wanna get deep into the DevOps. And so we've done all of the pieces of the stacks. We do C I C D management. Uh, we do container orchestration, we do monitoring. Um, and now we're, spliting those up into individual tools so they can be used. Awesome in conjunction more. >>All right. So what are some of the use cases that you see for your service? It's DevOps basically nano service DevOps. So people who want a DevOps team, do clients have a DevOps person and then one person, two people what's the requirements to run >>Z. Yeah. So we we've got teams, um, from no DevOps is kind of when they start and then we've had teams grow up to about, uh, five, 10 men DevOps teams. Um, so, you know, as is more infrastructure people come in because we're in your cloud, you're able to go in and configure it on top you're we can't block you. Uh, you wanna use some new AWS service. You're welcome to use that alongside the stack that we deploy >>For you. How many customers do you have now? >>So we've got about 40 companies that are using us for all of their infrastructure, um, kind of across the board, um, as well as >>What's the pricing model. >>Uh, so our pricing model is we, we charge basically similar to an engineering salary. So we charge a monthly rate. We have plans at 300 bucks a month, a thousand bucks a month, and then enterprise plan for >>The requirement scale. Yeah. So back into the people cost, you must have her discounts, not a fully loaded thing, is it? >>Yeah, there's a discounts kind of asking >>Then you pass the Amazon bill. >>Yeah. So our customers actually pay for the Amazon bill themselves. So >>Have their own >>Account. There's no margin on top. You're linking your, a analyst account in, um, got it. Which is huge because we can, we are now able to help our customers get better deals with Amazon. Um, got it. We're incentivized on their team to drive your costs down. >>And what's your unit main unit of economics software scale. >>Yeah. Um, yeah, so we, we think of things as projects. How many services do you have to deploy as that scales up? Um, awesome. >>All right. You're 20 years old now you not even can't even drink legally. <laugh> what are you gonna do when you're 30? We're gonna be there. >>Well, we're, uh, we're making it better, better, >>Better the old guy on the queue here. <laugh> >>I think, uh, I think we're seeing a big shift of, um, you know, we've got these major clouds. ALS is obviously the biggest cloud and it's constantly coming out with new services, but we're starting to see other clouds have built many of the common services. So Kubernetes is a great example. It exists across all the clouds and we're starting to see new platforms come up on top that allow you to leverage tools for multiple times. At the same time. Many of our customers actually have AWS as their primary cloud and they'll have secondary clouds or they'll pull features from other clouds into AWS, um, through our software. I think that's, I'm very excited by that. And I, uh, expect to be working on that when I'm 30. <laugh> awesome. >>Well, you gonna have a good future. I gotta ask you this question cuz uh, you know, I always, I was a computer science undergrad in the, in the, and um, computer science back then was hardcore, mostly systems OS stuff, uh, database compiler. Um, now there's so much compi, right? Mm-hmm <affirmative> how do you look at the high school college curriculum experience slash folks who are nerding out on computer science? It's not one or two things. You've got a lot of, lot of things. I mean, look at Python, data engineering and emerging as a huge skill. What's it, what's it like for college kids now and high school kids? What, what do you think they should be doing if you had to give advice to your 16 year old self back a few years ago now in college? Um, I mean Python's not a great language, but it's super effective for coding and the datas were really relevant, but it's, you've got other language opportunities you've got tools to build. So you got a whole culture of young builders out there. What should, what should people gravitate to in your opinion and stay away from or >>Stay away from? That's a good question. I, I think that first of all, you're very right of the, the amount of developers is increasing so quickly. Um, and so we see more specialization. That's why we also see, you know, these SREs that are different than typical application engineering. You know, you get more specialization in job roles. Um, I think if, what I'd say to my 16 year old self is do projects, um, the, I learned most of my, what I've learned just on the job or online trying things, playing with different technologies, actually getting stuff out into the world, um, way more useful than what you'll learn in kind of a college classroom. I think classroom's great to, uh, get a basis, but you need to go out and experiment actually try things. >>You know? I think that's great advice. In fact, I would just say from my experience of doing all the hard stuff and cloud is so great for just saying, okay, I'm done, I'm banning the project. Move on. Yeah. Cause you know, it's not gonna work in the old days. You have to build this data center. I bought all this, you know, people hang on to the old, you know, project and try to force it out there. Now you >>Can launch a project now, >>Instant gratification, it ain't working <laugh> or this is shut it down and then move on to something new. >>Yeah, exactly. Instantly you should be able to do that much more quickly. Right. So >>You're saying get those projects and don't be afraid to shut it down. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that? Do you agree with that? >>Yeah. I think it's ex experiment. Uh, you're probably not gonna hit it rich on the first one. It's probably not gonna be that idea is the genius idea. So don't be afraid to get rid of things and just try over and over again. It's it's number of reps >>That'll win. I was commenting online. Elon Musk was gonna buy Twitter, that whole Twitter thing. And someone said, Hey, you know, what's the, I go look at the product group at Twitter's been so messed up because they actually did get it right on the first time. And we can just a great product. They could never change it because people would freak out and the utility of Twitter. I mean, they gotta add some things, the added button and we all know what they need to add, but the product, it was just like this internal dysfunction, the product team, what are we gonna work on? Don't change the product so that you kind of have there's opportunities out there where you might get the lucky strike right outta the gate. Yeah. Right. You don't know. >>It's almost a curse too. It's you're not gonna hit curse Twitter. You're not gonna hit a rich the second time too. So yeah. >><laugh> Johnny Dallas. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it. Give a plug for your company. Um, take a minute to explain what you're working on. What you're look looking for. You hiring funding. Customers. Just give a plug, uh, last minute and kind the last word. >>Yeah. So, um, John Dallas from Ze, if you, uh, need any help with your DevOps, if you're a early startup, you don't have DevOps team, um, or you're trying to deploy across clouds, check us out z.com. Um, we are actively hiring. So if you are a software engineer excited about tools and cloud, or you're interested in helping getting this message out there, hit me up. Um, find us on z.co. >>Yeah. LinkedIn Twitter handle GitHub handle. >>Yeah. I'm the only Johnny on a LinkedIn and GitHub and underscore Johnny Dallas underscore on Twitter. All right. Um, >>Johnny Dallas, the youngest engineer working at Amazon, um, now 20 we're on great new project here in the cube. Builders are all young. They're growing into the business. They got cloud at their, at their back it's tailwind. I wish I was 20. Again, this is a I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching. Thanks. >>Welcome >>Back to the cubes. Live coverage of a AWS summit in San Francisco, California events are back, uh, ADAS summit in New York cities. This summer, the cube will be there as well. Check us out there lot. I'm glad we have events back. It's great to have everyone here. I'm John furry host of the cube. Dr. Matt wood is with me cube alumni now VP of business analytics division of AWS. Matt. Great to see you. Thank >>You, John. Great to be here. >>Appreciate it. I always call you Dr. Matt wood, because Andy jazzy always says Dr. Matt, we >>Would introduce you on the he's the one and only the one and >>Only Dr. Matt wood >>In joke. I love it. >>Andy style. And I think you had walkup music too on, you know, >>Too. Yes. We all have our own personalized walk. >>So talk about your new role. I not new role, but you're running up, um, analytics, business or AWS. What does that consist of right now? >>Sure. So I work, I've got what I consider to be the one of the best jobs in the world. Uh, I get to work with our customers and, uh, the teams at AWS, uh, to build the analytics services that millions of our customers use to, um, uh, slice dice, pivot, uh, better understand their day data, um, look at how they can use that data for, um, reporting, looking backwards and also look at how they can use that data looking forward. So predictive analytics and machine learning. So whether it is, you know, slicing and dicing in the lower level of, uh Hado and the big data engines, or whether you're doing ETR with glue or whether you're visualizing the data in quick side or building models in SageMaker. I got my, uh, fingers in a lot of pies. >>You know, one of the benefits of, uh, having cube coverage with AWS since 2013 is watching the progression. You were on the cube that first year we were at reinvent 2013 and look at how machine learning just exploded onto the scene. You were involved in that from day one is still day one, as you guys say mm-hmm <affirmative>, what's the big thing now. I mean, look at, look at just what happened. Machine learning comes in and then a slew of services come in and got SageMaker became a hot seller, right outta the gate. Mm-hmm <affirmative> the database stuff was kicking butt. So all this is now booming. Mm-hmm <affirmative> that was the real generational changeover for <inaudible> what's the perspective. What's your perspective on, yeah, >>I think how that's evolved. No, I think it's a really good point. I, I totally agree. I think for machine machine learning, um, there was sort of a Renaissance in machine learning and the application of machine learning machine learning as a technology has been around for 50 years, let's say, but, uh, to do machine learning, right? You need like a lot of data, the data needs to be high quality. You need a lot of compute to be able to train those models and you have to be able to evaluate what those mean as you apply them to real world problems. And so the cloud really removed a lot of the constraints. Finally, customers had all of the data that they needed. We gave them services to be able to label that data in a high quality way. There's all the compute. You need to be able to train the models <laugh> and so where you go. >>And so the cloud really enabled this Renaissance with machine learning, and we're seeing honestly, a similar Renaissance with, uh, with data, uh, and analytics. You know, if you look back, you know, five, 10 years, um, analytics was something you did in batch, like your data warehouse ran a analysis to do, uh, reconciliation at the end of the month. And then was it? Yeah. And so that's when you needed it, but today, if your Redshift cluster isn't available, uh, Uber drivers don't turn up door dash deliveries, don't get made. It's analytics is now central to virtually every business and it is central to every virtually every business is digital transformation. Yeah. And be able to take that data from a variety of sources here, or to query it with high performance mm-hmm <affirmative> to be able to actually then start to augment that data with real information, which usually comes from technical experts and domain experts to form, you know, wisdom and information from raw data. That's kind of, uh, what most organizations are trying to do when they kind of go through this analytics journey. It's >>Interesting, you know, Dave LAN and I always talk on the cube, but out, you know, the future and, and you look back, the things we were talking about six years ago are actually happening now. Yeah. And it's not a, a, a, you know, hyped up statement to say digital transformation. It actually's happening now. And there's also times where we bang our fist on the table, say, I really think this is so important. And Dave says, John, you're gonna die on that hill <laugh>. >>And >>So I I'm excited that this year, for the first time I didn't die on that hill. I've been saying data you're right. Data as code is the next infrastructure as code mm-hmm <affirmative>. And Dave's like, what do you mean by that? We're talking about like how data gets and it's happening. So we just had an event on our 80 bus startups.com site mm-hmm <affirmative>, um, a showcase with startups and the theme was data as code and interesting new trends emerging really clearly the role of a data engineer, right? Like an SRE, what an SRE did for cloud. You have a new data engineering role because of the developer on, uh, onboarding is massively increasing exponentially, new developers, data science, scientists are growing mm-hmm <affirmative> and the, but the pipelining and managing and engineering as a system. Yeah. Almost like an operating system >>And as a discipline. >>So what's your reaction to that about this data engineer data as code, because if you have horizontally scalable data, you've gotta be open that's hard. <laugh> mm-hmm <affirmative> and you gotta silo the data that needs to be siloed for compliance and reasons. So that's got a very policy around that. So what's your reaction to data as code and data engineering and >>Phenomenon? Yeah, I think it's, it's a really good point. I think, you know, like with any, with any technology, uh, project inside an organization, you know, success with analytics or machine learning is it's kind of 50% technology and then 50% cultural. And, uh, you have often domain experts. Those are, could be physicians or drug experts, or they could be financial experts or whoever they might be got deep domain expertise. And then you've got technical implementation teams and it's kind of a natural often repulsive force. I don't mean that rudely, but they, they just, they don't talk the same language. And so the more complex the domain and the more complex the technology, the stronger that repulsive force, and it can become very difficult for, um, domain experts to work closely with the technical experts, to be able to actually get business decisions made. And so what data engineering does and data engineering is in some cases team, or it can be a role that you play. >>Uh, it's really allowing those two disciplines to speak the same language it provides. You can think of it as plumbing, but I think of it as like a bridge, it's a bridge between like the technical implementation and the domain experts. And that requires like a very disparate range of skills. You've gotta understand about statistics. You've gotta understand about the implementation. You've gotta understand about the, it, you've gotta understand and understand about the domain. And if you could pull all of that together, that data engineering discipline can be incredibly transformative for an organization, cuz it builds the bridge between those two >>Groups. You know, I was advising some, uh, young computer science students at the sophomore junior level, uh, just a couple weeks ago. And I told 'em, I would ask someone at Amazon, this questions I'll ask you since you're, you've been in the middle of of it for years, they were asking me and I was trying to mentor them on. What, how do you become a data engineer from a practical standpoint, uh, courseware projects to work on how to think, um, not just coding Python cause everyone's coding in Python mm-hmm <affirmative> but what else can they do? So I was trying to help them and I didn't really know the answer myself. I was just trying to like kind of help figure it out with them. So what is the answer in your opinion or the thoughts around advice to young students who want to be data engineers? Cuz data scientists is pretty clear in what that is. Yeah. You use tools, you make visualizations, you manage data, you get answers and insights and apply that to the business. That's an application mm-hmm <affirmative>, that's not the, you know, sta standing up a stack or managing the infrastructure. What, so what does that coding look like? What would your advice be to >>Yeah, I think >>Folks getting into a data engineering role. >>Yeah. I think if you, if you believe this, what I said earlier about like 50% technology, 50% culture, like the, the number one technology to learn as a data engineer is the tools in the cloud, which allow you to aggregate data from virtually any source into something which is incrementally more valuable for the organization. That's really what data engineering is all about. It's about taking from multiple sources. Some people call them silos, but silos indicates that the, the storage is kind of fungible or UND differentiated. That that's really not the case. Success requires you to really purpose built well crafted high performance, low cost engines for all of your data. So understanding those tools and understanding how to use 'em, that's probably the most important technical piece. Um, and yeah, Python and programming and statistics goes along with that, I think. And then the most important cultural part, I think is it's just curiosity. >>Like you want to be able to, as a data engineer, you want to have a natural curiosity that drives you to seek the truth inside an organization, seek the truth of a particular problem and to be able to engage, cuz you're probably, you're gonna have some choice as you go through your career about which domain you end up in, like maybe you're really passionate about healthcare. Maybe you're really just passionate about your transportation or media, whatever it might be. And you can allow that to drive a certain amount of curiosity, but within those roles, like the domains are so broad, you kind of gotta allow your curiosity to develop and lead, to ask the right questions and engage in the right way with your teams. So because you can have all the technical skills in the world, but if you're not able to help the team's truths seek through that curiosity, you simply won't be successful. >>We just had a guest on 20 year old, um, engineer, founder, Johnny Dallas, who was 16 when he worked at Amazon youngest engineer at >>Johnny Dallas is a great name by the that's fantastic. It's his real name? >>It sounds like a football player. Rockstar. I should call Johnny. I have Johnny Johnny cube. Uh it's me. Um, so, but he's young and, and he, he was saying, you know, his advice was just do projects. >>Yeah. That's get hands on. >>Yeah. And I was saying, Hey, I came from the old days though, you get to stand stuff up and you hugged onto the assets. Cause you didn't wanna kill the cause you spent all this money and, and he's like, yeah, with cloud, you can shut it down. If you do a project that's not working and you get bad data, no one's adopting it or you don't want like it anymore. You shut it down. Just something >>Else. Totally >>Instantly abandoned it. Move onto something new. >>Yeah. With progression. Totally. And it, the, the blast radius of, um, decisions is just way reduced, gone. Like we talk a lot about like trying to, you know, in the old world trying to find the resources and get the funding. And it's like, right. I wanna try out this kind of random idea that could be a big deal for the organization. I need 50 million in a new data center. Like you're not gonna get anywhere. You, >>You do a proposal working backwards, document >>Kinds, all that, that sort of stuff got hoops. So, so all of that is gone, but we sometimes forget that a big part of that is just the, the prototyping and the experimentation and the limited blast radius in terms of cost. And honestly, the most important thing is time just being able to jump in there, get fingers on keyboards, just try this stuff out. And that's why at AWS, we have part of the reason we have so many services because we want, when you get into AWS, we want the whole toolbox to be available to every developer. And so, as your ideas developed, you may want to jump from, you know, data that you have, that's already in a database to doing realtime data. Yeah. And then you can just, you have the tools there. And when you want to get into real time data, you don't just have kineses, but you have real time analytics and you can run SQL again, that data is like the, the capabilities and the breadth, like really matter when it comes to prototyping and, and >>That's culture too. That's the culture piece, because what was once a dysfunctional behavior, I'm gonna go off the reservation and try something behind my boss's back or cause now as a side hustle or fun project. Yeah. So for fun, you can just code something. Yeah, >>Totally. I remember my first Haddo project, I found almost literally a decommissioned set of servers in the data center that no one was using. They were super old. They're about to be literally turned off. And I managed to convince the team to leave them on for me for like another month. And I installed her DUP on them and like, got them going. It's like, that just seems crazy to me now that I, I had to go and convince anybody not to turn these service off, but what >>It was like for that, when you came up with elastic map produce, because you said this is too hard, we gotta make it >>Easier. Basically. Yes. <laugh> I was installing Haddo version, you know, beta nor 0.9 or whatever it was. It's like, this is really hard. This is really hard. >>We simpler. All right. Good stuff. I love the, the walk down memory lane and also your advice. Great stuff. I think culture's huge. I think. And that's why I like Adam's keynote to reinvent Adam. Lesky talk about path minds and trail blazers because that's a blast radius impact. Mm-hmm <affirmative> when you can actually have innovation organically just come from anywhere. Yeah, that's totally cool. Totally. Let's get into the products. Serverless has been hot mm-hmm <affirmative> uh, we hear a lot about EKS is hot. Uh, containers are booming. Kubernetes is getting adopted. There's still a lot of work to do there. Lambda cloud native developers are booming, serverless Lambda. How does that impact the analytics piece? Can you share the hot, um, products around how that translates? Sure, absolutely. Yeah, the SageMaker >>Yeah, I think it's a, if you look at kind of the evolution and what customers are asking for, they're not, you know, they don't just want low cost. They don't just want this broad set of services. They don't just want, you know, those services to have deep capabilities. They want those services to have as lower operating cost over time as possible. So we kind of really got it down. We got built a lot of muscle, lot of services about getting up and running and experimenting and prototyping and turning things off and turn turning them on and turning them off. And like, that's all great. But actually the, you really only most projects start something once and then stop something once. And maybe there's an hour in between, or maybe there's a year, but the real expense in terms of time and, and complexity is sometimes in that running cost. Yeah. And so, um, we've heard very loudly and clearly from customers that they want, that, that running cost is just undifferentiated to them and they wanna spend more time on their work and in analytics that is, you know, slicing the data, pivoting the data, combining the data, labeling the data, training their models, uh, you know, running inference against their models, uh, and less time doing the operational pieces. >>So is that why the servers focus is there? >>Yeah, absolutely. It, it dramatically reduces the skill required to run these, uh, workloads of any scale. And it dramatically reduces the UND differentiated, heavy lifting, cuz you get to focus more of the time that you would've spent on the operation on the actual work that you wanna get done. And so if you look at something just like Redshift serverless that we launched a reinvent, you know, there's a kind of a, we have a lot of customers that want to run like a, uh, the cluster and they want to get into the, the weeds where there is benefit. We have a lot of customers that say, you know, I there's no benefit for me though. I just wanna do the analytics. So you run the operational piece, you're the experts we've run. You know, we run 60 million instant startups every single day. Like we do this a lot. Exactly. We understand the operation. I >>Want the answers come on. So >>Just give the answers or just let, give me the notebook or just give the inference prediction. So today for example, we announced, um, you know, serverless inference. So now once you've trained your machine learning model, just, uh, run a few, uh, lines of code or you just click a few buttons and then yeah, you got an inference endpoint that you do not have to manage. And whether you're doing one query against that endpoint, you know, per hour or you're doing, you know, 10 million, but we'll just scale it on the back end. You >>Know, I know we got not a lot of time left, but I want, wanna get your reaction to this. One of the things about the data lakes, not being data swamps has been from what I've been reporting and hearing from customers is that they want to retrain their machine learning algorithm. They want, they need that data. They need the, the, the realtime data and they need the time series data, even though the time has passed, they gotta store in the data lake mm-hmm <affirmative>. So now the data lakes main function is being reusing the data to actually retrain. Yeah, >>That's >>Right. It worked properly. So a lot of, lot of postmortems turn into actually business improvements to make the machine learning smarter, faster. You see that same way. Do you see it the same way? Yeah, >>I think it's, I think it's really interesting. No, I think it's really interesting because you know, we talk it's, it's convenient to kind of think of analytics as a very clear progression from like point a point B, but really it's, you are navigating terrain for which you do not have a map and you need a lot of help to navigate that terrain. Yeah. And so, you know, being, having these services in place, not having to run the operations of those services, being able to have those services be secure and well governed, and we added PII detection today, you know, something you can do automatically, uh, to be able to use their, uh, any unstructured data run queries against that unstructured data. So today we added, you know, um, text extract queries. So you can just say, well, uh, you can scan a badge for example, and say, well, what's the name on this badge? And you don't have to identify where it is. We'll do all of that work for you. So there's a often a, it's more like a branch than it is just a, a normal, uh, a to B path, a linear path. Uh, and that includes loops backwards. And sometimes you gotta get the results and use those to make improvements further upstream. And sometimes you've gotta use those. And when you're downstream, you'll be like, ah, I remember that. And you come back and bring it all together. So awesome. It's um, it's, uh, uh, it's a wonderful >>Work for sure. Dr. Matt wood here in the queue. Got just take the last word and give the update. Why you're here. What's the big news happening that you're announcing here at summit in San Francisco, California, and update on the, the business analytics >>Group? Yeah, I think, you know, one of the, we did a lot of announcements in the keynote, uh, encouraged everyone to take a look at that. Uh, this morning was Swami. Uh, one of the ones I'm most excited about, uh, is the opportunity to be able to take, uh, dashboards, visualizations. We're all used to using these things. We see them in our business intelligence tools, uh, all over the place. However, what we've heard from customers is like, yes, I want those analytics. I want their visualization. I want it to be up to date, but you know, I don't actually want to have to go my tools where I'm actually doing my work to another separate tool to be able to look at that information. And so today we announced, uh, one click public embedding for quick side dashboards. So today you can literally, as easily as embedding a YouTube video, you can take a dashboard that you've built inside, quick site cut and paste the HTML, paste it into your application and that's it. That's all you have to do. It takes seconds and >>It gets updated in real time. >>Updated in real time, it's interactive. You can do everything that you would normally do. You can brand it like this is there's no power by quick site button or anything like that. You can change the colors, make it fit in perfectly with your, with your applications. So that's sitting incredibly powerful way of being able to take a, uh, an analytics capability that today sits inside its own little fiefdom and put it just everywhere. It's, uh, very transformative. >>Awesome. And the, the business is going well. You got the serverless and your tailwind for you there. Good stuff, Dr. Matt with thank you. Coming on the cube >>Anytime. Thank >>You. Okay. This is the cubes cover of eight summit, 2022 in San Francisco, California. I'm John host cube. Stay with us with more coverage of day two after this short break.