(relaxing music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, your host. We got a great lineup of of guests this program and this segment, we got talking about hot company called, MessageBird. We got three amazing executives and leaders. Rachel Thornton, who's the chief marketing officer, and Andrea Euenheim, Chief People Officer, and Asha Thurthi, Chief Product Officer, We've got the CMO, Chief People Officer, and the Chief Product Officer. We've got everyone who's building that company. This is about building a startup culture that empowers women in tech. Ladies, thanks for coming on and thanks for taking the time. >> Thank you, John, for having us. >> Rachel, you know, you've seen big organizations, you're the CMO at AWS, now at MessageBird. This is a world where now there's new standards, you've got global culture, you can start off anywhere. A lot of things involved in being a C-suite leader, from not only marketing product to customers, but building a product, hiring the right team, team dynamics, power dynamics. So as female leaders, you guys are building that culture that empowers women to not only find their voices, but to use their voices to lead. What's the secret? What are you guys doing? Give us a taste of what's it like right now. Give us a feeling for what's going on in this world for you guys right now. >> I'll go first. I actually want to say that I was the, when MessageBird was building out their team, I was super excited to join because I was so impressed with the fact that the product officer was a woman, the HR officer was a woman. It was so great to see women in those leadership roles and I was just really positive and bullish on that. I felt like any company that was really building out that leadership team and thinking about being conscious of how do we have diverse perspectives and doing that is only going to make the product better. So I was super excited to join and I have really, really enjoyed being on a leadership team where I think we're 50% women. I think that is true. Like it's half women, which is really amazing. >> And that's to be the standard because I mean, software is in every product. Digital transformation is everyone and the world is not 17% women. I mean, let's just face it. So this is really a product issue as well and team issue because I mean, it just makes sense. I mean, this is really still, the industry's behind, this is a big problem. >> But I do think that, like I said, watching what's happening here, it gives me hope. Actually, it makes me inspired for to see other companies adopt it. I think, you know, both Asha and Andrea and you guys chime in, have just, you know, they're doing great jobs as leaders. I feel like we're all sort of, you know, able to speak, able to share our voice and able to inspire the folks in the company when they see that. >> Asha, talk, wait, Asha, could you weigh in on this because people matter in companies and now you have work at home, remote, you're seeing very successful configurations of teams, technical to business across the board, building products and working as a team. What's your take on this and what's your perspective? >> No, no, great question. The time is now. I really feel like the time has come for women to take what's really due for them and not just because we're women, because we are equally strong and contributing on the table. So I'm super excited for the generation that's to come because great voices really represent great customers because customers come in all different shapes and forms and people who are building the products, plus running companies should represent the customers, that end of the day, buy your products. So voice on the table is extremely important and so is making an attempt to make sure that you are hiring across all walks of life, all the way from sea level to even at IC level, ensuring that there is inclusion and diversity from a representation perspective. >> You've got the keys to the kingdom there as the product officer, Chief Product Officer, you know, you got to interface with engineering, you got to interface with the customers and like I mentioned earlier, the products are used by everyone now. This is all the, what's your experience been? What have you learned? Because again, a lot of engineers are male dominated and around the world, teams are male. What's your experience? How do you blend that together? How do you bring that harmony and so, and productivity? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. No, like I think the first thing is I think acknowledging the current state, which is women in tech, specifically because you asked about my role, continues to be a challenge. Women in tech be it in the product side of the equation or design side of the equation or engineering side of the equation, I think continues to be a challenge. I think all companies will have to lean in, especially starting education from STEM degrees, going forward to see how do you kind of make an effort to ensure that women in technology is not as high of a barrier that it used to be. Women in color in technology is not as high of a barrier as well. And how do you kind of make sure that when you are hiring, when you are advocating for your company, when you're setting up your interview loops, to actually setting up the right platform for all of these employees to thrive. You are ensuring that every walk of this, is kind of including women and making sure that all voice are voices are represented. Andrea, Rachel, I'd love your take as well because products just one piece of this whole equation where you build product. I'm kind of curious to see how you-- >> Andrea, weigh in, because this is like a hiring thing too. Like if you have a special test, like, okay, do we have the right makeup this person's going to, is there a bro test for example? I've heard companies have that where they have this kind of special questions that identify bros 'cause they don't want that in their culture. Is there a playbook? Is there a best practice in sourcing and identifying and interviewing loops? For instance, we just heard, Asha, that was great on the product side, Andrea, this is a big challenge. Putting teams together, having the right cohesive harmony, talent, looking for people, having the right interview loops, identifying that bro or the right makeup that you want to bring in or interview out. What's the strategy? How do you put these teams together because this is the real secret sauce. >> Not sure whether it's a secret sauce, but I think what we have shown that message for, is that we have made a very conscious effort and decision to start leading by example from the top to really build a leadership team that is already combining all the great traits on top of a good diversity in the team. Not only from a gender but also a skills and personality point of view. And then, from there, really making a planful intentional way down to say where do we hire which talent? What is it that we're still missing as a piece of the puzzle to really make the right decisions on leadership but also team compositions to really look at what's the customer needs, how can we build great products, how can we also compose great engineering teams to meet those expectations that our customers have and how do we build for the future? And that needs to happen in all different parts of the organization to really see that we can make a great effort across the board. >> And, you know, Rachel, last year, your talk inspired a lot of folks in conversation around sponsorship and you talk about networking and mentoring, but you highlighted sponsorship, I remember that clearly and that got great play in the conversation. So it's not just mentoring for mentoring's sake, there's also sponsorships. So there's really identifying, hiring, and then working with. And according to McKenzie's report that you guys are highlighting at me, MessageBird one in four C-suite leaders are identified as women and and with more hurdles to climb every day, especially at a startup. >> And I think that's why it has to be a combination of how do you think about your team composition? How do you think about your leadership composition? So all the things that Andrea just said, but then how do you make sure, as you're bringing folks in, you're constructing the right loop so people feel like this is a great place they want to be a part of, that it represents a diverse group of people. And then once they're in, how do you mentor people? What's the mentorship program you put in place? But the sponsorship program, I think like, sponsorship as well as mentorship also matters because you want to make sure when you identify folks in the organization, that you feel are ready for the next step, that you have identified as high potential, how do you come together as a leadership team and have a program that sponsors them, that gets them training or maybe it's executive coaching but also just makes them visible to leaders across the organization. So when it's time to put together the case for that promotion or maybe that new project or that that new group they would lead, everyone is aware of them and everyone has had some sort of interaction with them. So it really is building the right sort of sponsorship framework to help people get the kind of visibility and the kind of support they need to then unlock their potential in other areas. Whether, again, that's promotion or just taking on new groups or taking on new projects. >> Awesome. Well, you guys are fabulous. >> And in addition to this. >> Oh, go ahead, go ahead. >> No, in addition to this, I think it's also what is critical. Even though we're not the biggest company without Amazon and not Microsoft, but I think it's still important to also give exposure to the great people that we have, to make sure that everybody has visibility, everybody has a voice, and to make sure that we can then build sponsorship and mentorship across the different levels and teams and to build a great succession pipeline to really make sure that people can be considered for the next big project that is coming independent of any skill that they might have. But being a voice and having the experience that counts as most important. >> I love that inclusion, you jumped ahead. I wanted to get some questions 'cause you guys are a great group here. I guess the first question I had on the list here, is for you guys, what does it take to build an environment of inclusion? Because that's really key where female identified employees aren't just asked to questions, they take risks, they ask the right questions, they get involved, they're heard, they're recognized. What's it take to build that kind of environment? >> I can go, I think two things come to mind. One, I would say is commitment. Like commitment at the top. That you're not just going to lip sync, but you're going to walk the talk, that this is important to you as a company and who you stand or what you stand for as a human being. And you are going to put in the effort as a leadership team at the top to actually set the right example. Like MessageBird, I think Rachel said in her intro, 50% of the C level is women and you start right there. The second thing I would say is giving our people voice, you know, giving them confidence. Women because of, I don't know, thousands of years of social conditioning as such, hesitate to kind of speak up. So setting the right example, giving them the voice and encouraging them to take the challenges even if they're sponsored or not, to kind of make sure that they're willing to try new things and be not afraid of risk as much, I think is also super important. >> I think that's very, it is so, so true about the voice and about encouragement and just, I think all, you know, making sure people feel like across, you know, the entire organization, that they feel like they have a voice, their voice can be heard. And that we as a leadership team are supportive in those environments and people feel like I can take risks, I can't ask questions, I can push the envelope in terms of, "Hey, do you know, do we agree with this point? Is there room for discussion?" I think when people see that that's encouraged and it's encouraged for everyone, that's powerful. >> The McKinsey study had a lot of data in there. What's the summary on that on the people side? Obviously, the women are underrepresented, one in four, the C-suite leaders are women, but there's also people who are climbing through the ranks. I mean, what's the big takeaway from the McKinsey study beyond the obvious one in four stat? Is there any other messages in there that people should pay attention to? >> I think Asha said it really well with building the pipeline at the top. And I think that's something that we all think about every day. I think Andrea and her team do such a great job in helping us with that, but that is huge. Like, you're going to, you have to really think how can you build that pipeline out? And I think encouraging people, women, underrepresented groups, everyone to just think what do I want to do? What are the companies out there that I think would be great to work for? How can I find the right environment to support me? I think that's important and I think that helps build that pipeline. >> Okay. When you're a startup, you're a lot different than the big company, right? So the big companies are different. You guys are growing, startups are a lot about, you know, don't run a cash, hard charging, creative, teamwork. But it could be tough under fire. The startup, what's the learnings? How do you guys look at that and how do you guys manage that? Because it's super impart of the culture, of where the phase of these startups are in. >> I think the advantage that we have is we're not a big company. So I think in that way, there is a way to really build a culture of empowerment and us making decisions together and independent of where you come from, what experience you have, it's really what you can bring to the table. It's not having the fear of political cohesion. >> Yeah. >> That you have in larger corporations at times. To really build that great team that we are building right now. To say, all that matters to us is to build great products for our customers. And there's a lot of discussion about quota and one in four and I know large corporations are a lot more tied to meeting requirements that are depending on national laws and whatever, which is sometimes required to force a change in culture and how to do business. But I think us as a company, we just see a strong, strong benefit in not worrying about the gender. It's really like making an effort at the beginning to build the culture and the company that is just looking for a great team and a great culture independent of quotas. >> Actually, on the product side, Asha, on the product side. I want to get your thoughts because I know from startups, you know, being done a few myself, product market fit is huge, right? So you got, that's the goal and there's a lot of pressure. Rachel, you got to go to put the go to market together and you got to build the product. If you don't hit it, you got to br agile, you got to be fast, which could cause a lot of friction. You know, it's 'cause people got to reset, regroup. It's not for the faint of heart. How do you, pipeline folks, women are great for that. Are people aware? Do you have to, are people ready for it? Is there a training? How do you get someone ready or is there a test if they're startup ready? >> No, no, it's a great question. So like, we have a value at the company that's called move 200 miles an hour. All startups, I think, will totally resonate with this. As Andrea was saying, it's a balancing act. >> John: Yeah. >> How do you ensure that you're moving 200 miles an hour, but at the same time ensuring that you're hiring the right people who ultimately represent the customer. One example, Rachel and I were talking about this earlier, we actually represent 40% of the B2C emails that send globally. Imagine as the audience who's receiving one of these emails, think your favorites, you know, brand in Nordstrom that's actually sending you an email on the other end. Think about the customer on the other end. So it does require company commitment to ensure that the people you hire, represent ultimately the customer you're going after. So even if you're a startup, that's moving 200 miles an hour with lesser resources than any other bigger company, you have to commit to actually ensuring that your team has the right diversity. Starting all the way from sourcing to ensuring that this person is thriving and getting hopefully promoted to one day replace all of us. Let's put it that way. >> Rachel, weigh in on the startup velocity, challenges, dynamism, thoughts. >> You go, Andrea. >> It's not for everyone, you know, in that way, but it's something that if you find the right environment and the right people who thrive in such an environment like we do, it's magic. And building on that magic that we have is so powerful that we cannot afford giving voice to one group that is stronger than the others. We're counting on each other and this is a key element to who we are and how we want to build going forward. >> Rachel, your reaction, you're in a startup scene, whitewater rafting, heavy. Speed. >> It is very different. It's very different. But I love it. And what Andrea said is totally true. I think it isn't for everyone, but when you find a great organization and when you find a great group of people, it is magic. You know, it just, it's amazing the things you can do and it is a palpable feeling in the company when everyone is, you know, working on the same thing and excited about the same thing. >> You know, it's interesting about startups, not to take a tangent here, but a lot of startups just, it's not as much resource as a big company that that department doesn't exist. A lot of people doing multiple things. Wait a minute, someone doesn't write my emails for me, doesn't do the PowerPoints. Where's the marketing department? Where's the big budgets? There's a lot of juggling and a lot of versatility required, but also, there's opportunities to identify talent that could be hired for something that could move into something else. And this is part of the growth. And that's one side. On the other side, and this is a question, I promise, there's burnout, right? So you have burnout and fatigue, whether it's cultural and, or, I don't see an opportunity to really, truly a lot of aperture for new opportunities. So can you guys share your thoughts on this dynamic? Because in startups, there's a double-edged sword that could be burnout or there could be opportunity. >> I'll go and then I'll have Asha on the product side. I think that's true everywhere. I don't know, it could be that in some startups, it's exasperated, but I think that actually is true whether you're in a big company or a small company. I think, you know, depending on the industry, depending on the company size, depending on what you're going after, you know, you have to be clear about what it is you're going to deliver, how you're going to do it. And I do think it's important that everyone be able to say for themselves, "Hey, I'm excited about this product or I'm excited about this company and here's what I'm going to do," but I'm also going to make sure that I'm not putting myself in such a way that it does, you know, burnout does happen, but I don't think it can confine it to startups. I think it can happen anywhere. >> Okay. Yeah, exactly. We've seen that now. >> Yeah, I couldn't agree more. John, you've three moms on the call and definitely, we've all kind of come out of Covid into this space. I'm not going to lie, it's really hard. >> Yeah. >> It's really hard, actually balancing and juggling multiple different priorities that you have to. Especially in a startup world, when you move so many different miles an hour and you don't have enough support around you, it is really hard. The one advice I do have for women, which I kind of tell myself very repeatedly, is it's completely okay to be honest, I have taken an intentional action to be a lot more vulnerable over the years. Talk about, you know, having to pick up my child or, you know, having to spend the evening out when I need to spend time with my family. And being open about it because when I do it at the top, I can accept the space for enough people to talk about it a as well. So really, helping women set their own boundaries without feeling guilty about it. Because by nature, we end up, you know, taking care of everything around us. So how do you take care of yourself, fill your cup first so you don't burnout, to your question, I think is extremely critical. >> Yeah. Yeah, that's a really great point. Good point. I think about honesty and transparency comes in with boundaries, but also empathy. I think a lot of people, there's a lot of awareness now to this factor of teamwork and remote and creativity. Productivity is kind of a new, not new thing, but it's kind of more forefront and that's super important. How do you guys promote that? Because you still got to move fast, you got to schedule things differently. I mean, I find myself much more schedule oriented and it's hard to coordinate. How do you guys balance that because it's a management challenge, an opportunity at the same time to have that inclusivity vibe. >> I think on the empathy part on balancing, I just think you have to focus on it. It has to be a conscious choice. And I think, you know, sometimes we do it great and I only speak for myself. Sometimes I do it great, sometimes I don't. But I definitely think you have to focus on it. Think about it, think about where are you, you know, where are you scheduling things, what are you doing? How are you making sure you're thinking about your team, thinking about the, you know, the example you're providing or the example you're setting. >> Thoughts on the boundaries and when does something not a boundary, when it's not productive. 'Cause, you know, so I got my boundaries and they're like, "Wait, whoa, whoa, stay in your lane." No one likes to hear that. Stay in your lane thing. I mean, not to say that that people shouldn't stay in their lane. I just find that a little bit off-putting like, you know, stay in your lane. That sounds like a, it's against the culture. What do you guys think about how people should be thinking about their norms in these environments whether it's inclusivity and diversity? What are some of the areas to stay away from and what are the areas to promote in terms of how they'll communicate these boundaries and, or, good lanes, I should say. I mean, maybe I shouldn't say, stay in your lane's a bad thing, but, so it could be more off-putting. >> I can touch on something which is what can you do more of? I really resonated so much with Rachel's comment from last year on sponsorship. I am the product of sponsorship so it really resonates with me. Also, wouldn't even be sitting here with these two wonderful women and you. In addition to that, I think allyship, I think that's extremely important. What I would love to, you know, see everybody set the right example on is promoting a lot more of allyship where you kind of encourage, not just women, underrepresented minority, knowing really well the backgrounds that they come from and the, you know, situational context around it and seeing how can you be a great ally. And what great ally looks like for me is simple things. If you're in a meeting full of people and you see the underrepresented folks not talking or sharing their voice, how can you, as the senior person in the room, and you know, any person in the room, actually share the voice out and get their thoughts. If you can have many different people present in your company, all hands or what have you, what other forums that can be, how do you ensure that it's not just you always, but like you're putting in the spotlight on other people and, you know, when calibrations come in, when recruiting comes in, how do you ensure that your loops are diverse? So long story short, how do you ensure that you are setting the right example even if you don't belong to one of these groups, that I think do more of. >> Well, that's a great call out on the allies on mentorship programs and support networks. These are important. How should someone go forward and build a mentorship program and support networks so people can help each other out? Is there a way you guys have found best practices, Rachel and team? Is there a strategy that works well? >> Actually, Asha has some great examples here, so I'm going to toss it over to her. >> Thank you, Andy. Team, like this is what I would love for everyone to do more of. Like, we just kicked off 2023, why not make it a goal for this year? Let's seize the year to ensure that, you know, I'll start off with tech, especially where women are underrepresented. We ensure that all of your rock stars, all of your women, at least have a mentor, either within the organization or you reach out to your network externally and pair this person up with a mentor. What ultimately helps us, people having somebody they can bounce off their ideas off, get tips, get advice on how to tackle a particular situation. So really, pairing people up to ensure that they have a way to kind of bounce off ideas and see how can they elevate themselves, I think will go a long way. >> I mean, this is a big problem. Rachel, you've been a leader, you've seen this happen before. How do people climb through the ranks successfully? And you've seen people, maybe, fail a little bit. Is there a best practice or advice you could share with folks that are out there watching and listening on, you know, how to be savvy on climbing through the ranks, whether it's finding mentors being the right place at the right time. I always have the old saying, you know, "Hang around the basketball rim and you'll get a rebound." So is it timing, is it placement? What's your best practice advice for coming through the rim? >> I have a little, and then again, I think I've been very impressed with the team Asha built and just the things that she's done in her career. And I think that for women in tech, that's crucial. I would just say overall, finding your voice, using your voice, but also thinking about who's around you, who's supportive, who are the mentors or who are the people you would love to either mentor or have mentored you. And be sure to speak up and and make that known. And then I also think, don't be afraid to, like I said, use your voice, ask questions. Don't be afraid to also help people up. I think, Asha, what you said a few minutes ago is so true. Like, if there are folks in the room that aren't, you know, as vocal, that you know have amazing ideas, be sure that you're there to help them up, to help them with their voice 'cause you want to make sure that it just brings more to the conversation. >> Asha, you're running a product group, that's a big challenge. What's your thoughts on that? Can you share your opinion? >> Yeah, imposter syndrome is a real thing. I would definitely say confidence is self-taught is what I have really learned over the years and really kind of knowing that the next person to you may not be any smarter than you or may not be any less smart than you. So really, treating everybody as an equal around you and finding that inner strength and inner voice to be able to speak for yourself and to be able to share your ideas and do the best that you possibly can. Bring the A game and when you need help, asking for it. So really, just knowing that and taking initiative and we're here to help. >> Awesome. Andrea, you're here. I want to get your thoughts on building out a mentoring program and networks for women so they can have this great environment. What's it take to do that? I mean, it's hard to do. Building out meaningful networking mentorship program and sport network for women to help each other's hard. What's your experience? >> I think you need some strong leaders within an organization who are willing to sponsor and support. You need somebody to start it. It's usually senior female leaders who are kickstarting a networking environment and some good groups to have some great impact and then, also making sure that they get the visibility to see we accomplish great things together. We raise the topics that not everybody would see. And really bringing the other voice to the table to have like contradicting perspectives on what a company should do on the product side, but also on the general strategic side of things. And then building from there to say, "How can we also build great project teams that support these ideas and to really get the momentum going." Not big programs, but will really impact all communities that will push the topics. >> Awesome. Well, great, great, great panel here. Building a startup culture that empowers women in tech. You guys are amazing. Final question, rapid fire, go down the line. We'll start with Rachel, Andrea, Asha. What's it take to have that kind of success for startup? If you could share quickly what your advice is for people watching and succeeding in a startup. >> I would say focus, intention, and commitment. >> John: Andrea. >> I would say courage, backbone, authenticity. >> I couldn't agree more with Rachel. Focus and commitment. It is for me too. >> Well, you guys are amazing. Congratulations. And MessageBird, again, great ratios. You guys are succeeding. You're a standard for the industry and congratulations and thank you for taking the time on theCUBE's coverage National Women's Day. We also have women in data science at Stanford, with other programs going on today. It's a big day. Thank you very much for coming on. Really appreciate it. Thank you. >> Thank you, Jim. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage of international news. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (relaxing music)

>> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE, where we're live from Dallas, Texas here at Super computing 2022. I am joined by my cohost David Nicholson. Thank you so much for being here with me and putting up with my trashy jokes all day. >> David: Thanks for having me. >> Yeah. Yes, we are going to be talking about AI this morning and I'm very excited that our guest has has set the stage for us here quite well. Please welcome Andrea Booker. Andrea, thank you so much for being here with us. >> Absolutely. Really excited to be here. >> Savannah: How's your show going so far? >> It's been really cool. I think being able to actually see people in person but also be able to see the latest technologies and and have the live dialogue that connects us in a different way than we have been able to virtually. >> Savannah: Oh yeah. No, it's all, it's all about that human connection and that it is driving towards our first question. So as we were just chit chatting. You said you are excited about making AI real and humanizing that. >> Andrea: Absolutely. >> What does that mean to you? >> So I think when it comes down to artificial intelligence it means so many different things to different people. >> Savannah: Absolutely. >> I was talking to my father the other day for context, he's in his late seventies, right. And I'm like, oh, artificial intelligence, this or that, and he is like, machines taking over the world. Right. >> Savannah: Very much the dark side. >> A little bit Terminator. And I'm like, well, not so much. So that was a fun discussion. And then you flip it to the other side and I'm talking to my 11 year old daughter and she's like, Alexa make sure you know my song preferences. Right. And that's the other very real way in which it's kind of impacting our lives. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> Right. There's so many different use cases that I don't think everyone understands how that resonates. Right. It's the simple things from, you know, recommend Jason Engines when you're on Amazon and it suggests just a little bit more. >> Oh yeah. >> I'm a little bit to you that one, right. To stuff that's more impactful in regards to getting faster diagnoses from your doctors. Right. Such peace of mind being able to actually hear that answer faster know how to go tackle something. >> Savannah: Great point, yeah. >> You know, and, and you know, what's even more interesting is from a business perspective, you know the projections are over the next five years about 90% of customers are going to use AI applications in in some fashion, right. >> Savannah: Wow. >> And the reason why that's interesting is because if you look at it today, only about 15% of of them are doing so. Right. So we're early. So when we're talking growth and the opportunity, it's, it's amazing. >> Yeah. I can, I can imagine. So when you're talking to customers, what are are they excited? Are they nervous? Are you educating them on how to apply Dell technology to advance their AI? Where are they off at because we're so early? >> Yeah well, I think they're figuring it out what it means to them, right? >> Yeah. Because there's so many different customer applications of it, right? You have those in which, you know, are on on the highest end in which that our new XE products are targeting that when they think of it. You know, I I, I like to break it down in this fashion in which artificial intelligence can actually save human lives, right? And this is those extreme workloads that I'm talking about. We actually can develop a Covid vaccine faster, right. Pandemic tracking, you know with global warming that's going on. And we have these extreme weather events with hurricanes and tsunamis and all these things to be able to get advanced notice to people to evacuate, to move. I mean, that's a pretty profound thing. And it is, you know so it could be used in that way to save lives, right? >> Absolutely. >> Which is it's the natural outgrowth of the speeds and feeds discussions that we might have internally. It's, it's like, oh, oh, speed doubled. Okay. Didn't it double last year? Yeah. Doubled last year too. So it's four x now. What does that mean to your point? >> Andrea: Yeah, yeah. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> Being able to deliver faster insight insights that are meaningful within a timeframe when otherwise they wouldn't be meaningful. >> Andrea: Yeah. >> If I tell you, within a two month window whether it's going to rain this weekend, that doesn't help you. In hindsight, we did the calculation and we figured out it's going to be 40 degrees at night last Thursday >> Knowing it was going to completely freeze here in Dallas to our definition in Texas but we prepare better to back to bring clothes. >> We were talking to NASA about that yesterday too. I mean, I think it's, it's must be fascinating for you to see your technology deployed in so many of these different use cases as well. >> Andrea: Absolutely, absolutely. >> It's got to be a part of one of the more >> Andrea: Not all of them are extreme, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> There's also examples of, you know natural language processing and what it does for us you know, the fact that it can break down communication barriers because we're global, right? We're all in a global environment. So if you think about conference calls in which we can actually clearly understand each other and what the intent is, and the messaging brings us closer in different ways as well. Which, which is huge, right? You don't want things lost in translation, right? So it, it helps on so many fronts. >> You're familiar with the touring test idea of, of, you know whether or not, you know, the test is if you can't discern within a certain number of questions that you're interacting with an AI versus a real human, then it passes the touring test. I think there should be a natural language processing test where basically I say, fine >> Andrea: You see if people was mad or not. >> You tell me, you tell me. >> I love this idea, David. >> You know? >> Yeah. This is great. >> Okay. AI lady, >> You tell me what I meant. >> Yeah, am I actually okay? >> How far from, that's silly example but how far do you think we are from that? I mean, what, what do you seeing out there in terms of things where you're kind of like, whoa, they did this with technology I'm responsible for, that was impressive. Or have you heard of things that are on the horizon that, you know, again, you, you know they're the big, they're the big issues. >> Yeah. >> But any, anything kind of interesting and little >> I think we're seeing it perfected and tweaked, right? >> Yeah. >> You know, I think going back to my daughter it goes from her screaming at Alexa 'cause she did hear her right the first time to now, oh she understands and modifies, right? Because we're constantly tweaking that technology to have a better experience with it. And it's a continuum, right? The voice to text capabilities, right. You know, I I'd say early on it got most of those words, right Right now it's, it's getting pretty dialed in. Right. >> Savannah: That's a great example. >> So, you know, little things, little things. >> Yeah. I think I, I love the, the this thought of your daughter as the example of training AI. What, what sort of, you get to look into the future quite a bit, I'm sure with your role. >> Andrea: Absolutely. >> Where, what is she going to be controlling next? >> The world. >> The world. >> No, I mean if you think about it just from a generational front, you know technology when I was her age versus what she's experiencing, she lives and breathes it. I mean, that's the generational change. So as these are coming out, you have new folks growing with it that it's so natural that they are so open to adopting it in their common everyday behaviors. Right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> But they'd they never, over time they learn, oh well how it got there is 'cause of everything we're doing now, right. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> You know, one, one fun example, you know as my dad was like machines are taking over the world is not, not quite right. Even if when you look at manufacturing, there's a difference in using AI to go build a digital simulation of a factory to be able to optimize it and design it right before you're laying the foundation that saves cost, time and money. That's not taking people's jobs in that extreme event. >> Right. >> It's really optimizing for faster outcomes and, and and helping our customers get there which is better for everyone. >> Savannah: Yeah and safer too. I mean, using the factory example, >> Totally safer. >> You're able to model out what a workplace injury might be or what could happen. Or even the ergonomics of how people are using. >> Andrea: Yeah, should it be higher so they don't have to bend over? Right. >> Exactly. >> There's so many fantastic positive ways. >> Yeah so, so for your dad, you know, I mean it's going to help us, it's going to make, it's going to take away when I. Well I'm curious what you think, David when I think about AI, I think it's going to take out a lot of the boring things in life that, that we don't like >> Andrea: Absolutely. Doing. The monotony and the repetitive and let us optimize our creative selves maybe. >> However, some of the boring things are people's jobs. So, so it is, it it it will, it will it will push a transition in our economy in the global economy, in my opinion. That would be painful for some, for some period of time. But overall beneficial, >> Savannah: Yes. But definitely as you know, definitely there will be there will be people who will be disrupted and, you know. >> Savannah: Tech's always kind of done that. >> We No, but we need, I, I think we need to make sure that the digital divide doesn't get so wide that you know that, that people might not be negative, negatively affected. And, but, but I know that like organizations like Dell I believe what you actually see is, >> Andrea: Yeah. >> No, it's, it's elevating people. It's actually taking away >> Andrea: Easier. >> Yeah. It's, it's, it's allowing people to spend their focus on things that are higher level, more interesting tasks. >> Absolutely. >> David: So a net, A net good. But definitely some people disrupted. >> Yes. >> I feel, I feel disrupted. >> I was going to say, are, are we speaking for a friend or for ourselves here today on stage? >> I'm tired of software updates. So maybe if you could, if you could just standardize. So AI and ML. >> Andrea: Yeah. >> People talk about machine learning and, and, and and artificial intelligence. How would you differentiate the two? >> Savannah: Good question. >> It it, it's, it's just the different applications and the different workloads of it, right? Because you actually have artificial intelligence you have machine learning in which the learn it's learning from itself. And then you have like the deep learning in which it's diving deeper in in its execution and, and modeling. And it really depends on the workload applications as long as well as how large the data set is that's feeding into it for those applications. Right. And that really leads into the, we have to make sure we have the versatility in our offerings to be able to meet every dimension of that. Right. You know our XE products that we announced are really targeted for that, those extreme AI HPC workloads. Right. Versus we also have our entire portfolio products that we make sure we have GPU diversity throughout for the other applications that may be more edge centric or telco centric, right? Because AI isn't just these extreme situations it's also at the edge. It's in the cloud, it's in the data center, right? So we want to make sure we have, you know versatility in our offerings and we're really meeting customers where they're at in regards to the implementation and and the AI workloads that they have. >> Savannah: Let's dig in a little bit there. So what should customers expect with the next generation acceleration trends that Dell's addressing in your team? You had three exciting product announcements here >> Andrea: We did, we did. >> Which is very exciting. So you can talk about that a little bit and give us a little peek. >> Sure. So, you know, for, for the most extreme applications we have the XE portfolio that we built upon, right? We already had the XC 85 45 and we've expanded that out in a couple ways. The first of which is our very first XC 96 88 way offering in which we have Nvidia's H 100 as well as 8 100. 'Cause we want choice, right? A choice between performance, power, what really are your needs? >> Savannah: Is that the first time you've combined? >> Andrea: It's the first time we've had an eight way offering. >> Yeah. >> Andrea: But we did so mindful that the technology is emerging so much from a thermal perspective as well as a price and and other influencers that we wanted that choice baked into our next generation of product as we entered the space. >> Savannah: Yeah, yeah. >> The other two products we have were both in the four way SXM and OAM implementation and we really focus on diversifying and not only from vendor partnerships, right. The XC 96 40 is based off Intel Status Center max. We have the XE 86 40 that is going to be in or Nvidia's NB length, their latest H 100. But the key differentiator is we have air cold and we have liquid cold, right? So depending on where you are from that data center journey, I mean, I think one of the common themes you've heard is thermals are going up, performance is going up, TBPs are going up power, right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> So how do we kind of meet in the middle to be able to accommodate for that? >> Savannah: I think it's incredible how many different types of customers you're able to accommodate. I mean, it's really impressive. I feel lucky we've gotten to see these products you're describing. They're here on the show floor. There's millions of dollars of hardware literally sitting in your booth. >> Andrea: Oh yes. >> Which is casual only >> Pies for you. Yeah. >> Yeah. We were, we were chatting over there yesterday and, and oh, which, which, you know which one of these is more expensive? And the response was, they're both expensive. It was like, okay perfect >> But assume the big one is more. >> David: You mentioned, you mentioned thermals. One of the things I've been fascinated by walking around is all of the different liquid cooling solutions. >> Andrea: Yeah. >> And it's almost hysterical. You look, you look inside, it looks like something from it's like, what is, what is this a radiator system for a 19th century building? >> Savannah: Super industrial? >> Because it looks like Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly, exactly. It's exactly the way to describe it. But just the idea that you're pumping all of this liquid over this, over this very, very valuable circuitry. A lot of the pitches have to do with, you know this is how we prevent disasters from happening based on the cooling methods. >> Savannah: Quite literally >> How, I mean, you look at the power requirements of a single rack in a data center, and it's staggering. We've talked about this a lot. >> Savannah: Yeah. >> People who aren't kind of EV you know electric vehicle nerds don't appreciate just how much power 90 kilowatts of power is for an individual rack and how much heat that can generate. >> Andrea: Absolutely. >> So Dell's, Dell's view on this is air cooled water cooled figure it out fit for for function. >> Andrea: Optionality, optionality, right? Because our customers are a complete diverse set, right? You have those in which they're in a data center 10 to 15 kilowatt racks, right? You're not going to plum a liquid cool power hungry or air power hungry thing in there, right? You might get one of these systems in, in that kind of rack you know, architecture, but then you have the middle ground the 50 to 60 is a little bit of choice. And then the super extreme, that's where liquid cooling makes sense to really get optimized and have the best density and, and the most servers in that solution. So that's why it really depends, and that's why we're taking that approach of diversity, of not only vendors and, and choice but also implementation and ways to be able to address that. >> So I think, again, again, I'm, you know electric vehicle nerd. >> Yeah. >> It's hysterical when you, when you mention a 15 kilowatt rack at kind of flippantly, people don't realize that's way more power than the average house is consuming. >> Andrea: Yeah, yeah >> So it's like your entire house is likely more like five kilowatts on a given day, you know, air conditioning. >> Andrea: Maybe you have still have solar panel. >> In Austin, I'm sorry >> California, Austin >> But, but, but yeah, it's, it's staggering amounts of power staggering amounts of heat. There are very real problems that you guys are are solving for to drive all of these top line value >> Andrea: Yeah. >> Propositions. It's super interesting. >> Savannah: It is super interesting. All right, Andrea, last question. >> Yes. Yes. >> Dell has been lucky to have you for the last decade. What is the most exciting part about you for the next decade of your Dell career given the exciting stuff that you get to work on. >> I think, you know, really working on what's coming our way and working with my team on that is is just amazing. You know, I can't say it enough from a Dell perspective I have the best team. I work with the most, the smartest people which creates such a fun environment, right? So then when we're looking at all this optionality and and the different technologies and, and, and you know partners we work with, you know, it's that coming together and figuring out what's that best solution and then bringing our customers along that journey. That kind of makes it fun dynamic that over the next 10 years, I think you're going to see fantastic things. >> David: So I, before, before we close, I have to say that's awesome because this event is also a recruiting event where some of these really really smarts students that are surrounding us. There were some sirens going off. They're having competitions back here. >> Savannah: Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> So, so when they hear that. >> Andrea: Where you want to be. >> David: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. >> Savannah: Well played. >> David: That's exactly right. >> Savannah: Well played. >> Have fun. Come on over. >> Well, you've certainly proven that to us. Andrea, thank you so much for being with us This was such a treat. David Nicholson, thank you for being here with me and thank you for tuning in to theCUBE a lot from Dallas, Texas. We are all things HPC and super computing this week. My name's Savannah Peterson and we'll see you soon. >> Andrea: Awesome.

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're here talking about how you can better understand and manage the risks associated with the digital supply chain. How in this day and age where software comes from so many different places and sources throughout the ecosystem, how can organizations manage the risks associated with our dependence on software? And with me now are two great guests, Andrea Hall, who is a specialist solution architect and project manager for security and compliance at Red Hat. She's going to focus on public sector. And Andrew Block who's a distinguished architect at Red Hat Consulting, folks welcome. >> Welcome >> Thank you. Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. Andrea, let's start with you. Let's talk about regulations. What exists today that we should be aware of that organizations should be paying attention to? >> Oh sure, so the thing that comes to mind first being in the US is the presidential executive order on cybersecurity that came out a few months ago. Organizations are really paying attention to that. And in the US, it's having a ripple effect with policy, but we're also seeing policy considerations pop up in other countries, Australia and England. The supply chain is a big focus right now, of course, but we see these changes coming down the road as more and more government organizations are trying to secure their critical infrastructure. >> Is there kind of a leadership, or probably in other words, is somebody saying seeing what the UK does and say, okay, we're going to follow that template? Or is it just a variety and a mish mash with no sort of consolidation? How is that sort of playing out? >> I see a lot of organizations kind of basing their requirements on (indistinct) However, each organization has its own nuances. Each agency has its own nuances to how it wants them implemented. >> Andrew, maybe you could chime in here. What are you seeing when you talk to customers that are tuned into this issue? >> You know, as Andrea had just mentioned having that north star in terms of regulations is so fundamentally great for them because many of them especially in regulate industries, look to these regulations on how they apply their own policies. So at least it has some guidance on how to move forward because as we all know the secure software supply chain is getting news every day and how they react to it is something that I know all their leaders are asking themselves, especially those IT leaders. >> Andrea, when I talk to practitioners, sometimes they're frustrated. They understand they have to comply. They know new regulations are coming out, but sometimes it's hard for them to keep up. It would be helpful if you're sitting across the table from somebody who's frustrated and they ask you, what are your expectations? What are the trends in regulations? How do you see the current regulations evolving to specifically accommodate the digital supply chain and the security exposures and corollary requirements there? >> We see a lot of organizations struggling in the sense of trying to understand what the policy actually wants. Definitions are still a little bit vague, but implementation is also difficult because sometimes organizations will add more tools to their toolkit, adding a layer of complexity there. Really automation has to be pulled in. That's key to implementing this instead of adding more workload and more burden to your folks. It's really important for these organizations to pull stakeholders in the organization together. So the IT leaders bring together the developers, the security operations sit at the same table, talk about whether or not what needs to be implemented or what's proposed to be implemented, will affect the mission or in any way or disrupt operations. It's important for everybody to be on the same page so it doesn't slow anything down as you're trying to roll it out. >> And one of the things here is that we're seeing a lot of change with these new regulations and with a lot of organizations, any type of change is scary. And that is one area that they're looking for guidance not only in the tooling, but also how they apply it in the organization. >> I'll add on. >> Please. >> I'll add onto that and say, organizations really need to take into account the people side of things too. People need to understand what the impact is to the organization, so that they don't try to find the loopholes, they're buying into what needs to be done. They understand the why behind it. You for example, if you walk into your house, you normally close the door behind you. Security needs to be seen as that, as well, that's the culture and it's the habit. And it's ingrained in the fabric of the organization to live this way, not just implement the tools to do it. >> Right, and the number of doors you have in your infrastructure are a lot more than just a couple. Andrew mentioned sort of guidance and governments are obviously taking a more active role. I mean, sometimes I'm a cynic. I mean, the president Biden signs an executive order, but swipe of a pen doesn't really give us enough to go on. Do you think Andrea, that we're going to see new guidance from governments in the very near future? What are you expecting? >> I expect to see more conversations happening. I know that agencies who developed the policies are pulling together stakeholders and getting input. But I do see in the not too distant future, that mandates will be rolling out, yes. >> Well, so Andrew of course, Andrea, if you have a thought on this as well, but how do you see organizations dealing with adopting these new policies. >> Slowly, don't boil the ocean is one thing I tell a lot to every one of them, because a lot of these tooling, a lot of these concepts are foreign to them, brand new. How they adopt those and how they implement them, needs to be done in a very agile fashion, very slow and prescriptive. Go ahead and try to find one area of improvement and go ahead and work upon it and build upon it. Because not only does that normally make your organization more successful and secure, but also helps your organization just from a more out standpoint. One thing that you need to emphasize is that don't blame anyone. 'Cause a lot of times when you're going through this, you're reassessing your own supply chain. You might find where you could see improvements that need to be done. Don't blame things that may have occurred in the past. See how you can benefit from these lessons learned in the future. >> It's interesting you say that the blame game, I mean it used to be that failure meant you get fired and that's obviously has changed. As many have said, you know you're going to have incidents. It's how you respond to those incidents. What you learn from them. Do you have Andrew, any insights from specifically working with customers on securing their software supply chain? What can you tell us about what leading practitioners are doing today? >> They're going in and not only assessing what their software components consist of. Using tools like an SBOM, a software bill of materials, understand where all the components of their ecosystem and their lineage comes from. We're hearing almost every single day, new vulnerabilities that are being introduced in various software packages. By having that understanding of what is in your ecosystem, you can then better understand how to mitigate those concerns moving forward. >> Andrea, Andrew was just saying, one of the things is you don't just dive in. You've got to be careful. There's going to be ripple effects is what I'm inferring, but at the same time, there's a mandate to move quickly. Are there things that could accelerate the adoption of regulation or even the creation of regulations and that guidance in your view? What could accelerate this? >> As far as accelerating it goes, I think it's having those conversations proactively with the stakeholders in your organization and understanding the environment like Andrew said. Go ahead and get that baseline. And just know that whatever changes you make are maybe going to be audited down the road, because as we were moving towards this kind of third-party verification, that you're actually implementing things in order to do business with another organization. The importance of that, if organizations see that gravity to this, I think they will try to speed things up. I think that if organizations and the people in those organizations understand that why, that I talked about earlier and they understand how things like solar winds or things like the oil disruption that happened earlier this year. The personal effect to cyber events will help your organization move forward. Again, everybody's bought into the concept, everybody's working towards the same goals and they understand that why behind it. >> In addition to that, having tooling available, that makes it easy for them. You have a lot of individuals who this is all foreign, providing that base level tooling that aligns to a lot of the regulations that might be applicable within their real realm and their domain, makes it easier for them to start to complying and taking less burden off of them to be able to be successful. >> So it's a hard problem because Andrew, how do you deal with sort of the comment more tools, okay. But I look at that the Optiv map, if you've seen that. It makes your eyes cross. You've got so many tools, so much fragmentation, you're introducing new tools. Can automation help that? Is there hope for consolidation of that tools portfolio? >> Right now, this space is very emerging. It's very emerging, it's very fluid to be honest, 'cause there is actually mandates only a year or two old. But as they come over the course of time, however, I do see these types of tooling starting to consolidate where right now it seems like every vendor has a tool that tries to address this. It's being able to have the people work together, have more regulations that will come out that will allow us to start to redefine and solidify on certain tools like ISO standards. There are certain ones that I mentioned on as balance previously, there's now a ISO standard on SBOM there wasn't previously. So as more and more of these regulations come out, it makes it easier to provide that recommended set of tooling that organizations can start leveraging instead of vendor A, vendor B. >> Andrea, I said this before I was a cynic, but will give you the last word, give us some hope. I mean, obviously public policy is very important. A partnership between governments and industry, both the practitioners, the organizations that are buying these tools, as well as the technology industry got to work together in an ecosystem. Give us some hope. >> The hope I think will come from realizing that as you're doing this, as you are implementing these changes, you're in a sense trying to prevent those future incidents from happening. There's some assurance that you're doing everything that you can do here. It's a situation, it can be daunting, I'll put it that way. It can be really daunting for organizations, but just know that organizations like Red Hat are doing what we can to help you down the road. >> And really it's just continuing this whole shifting left mentality. The top of supply chain is just one component, but the introducing dev sec ops security at the beginning, that really will make the organizations become successful because this is not just a technology problem, It's a people issue as well. And being able to kind of package them all up together will help organizations as a whole. >> Yeah, so that's a really important point. You hear that term shift left. For years, people say, hey, you can't just bolt security on, as an afterthought, that's problematic. And that's the answer to that problem, right? Is shifting left meaning designing it in at the point of code, infrastructure as code, dev sec ops. That's where it starts, right? >> Exactly, being able to have security at the forefront and then have everything afterwards. Propagate from your security mindset. >> Excellent, okay, Andrea, Andrew, thanks so much for coming to the program today. >> Thank you for having us. >> Very welcome, thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube. Your a global leader in enterprise tech coverage. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're here talking about how you can better understand and manage the risks associated with the digital supply chain. How in this day and age where software comes from so many different places and sources throughout the ecosystem, how can organizations manage the risks associated with our dependence on software? And with me now are two great guests, Andrea Hall, who is a specialist solution architect and project manager for security and compliance at Red Hat. She's going to focus on public sector. And Andrew Block who's a distinguished architect at Red Hat Consulting, folks welcome. >> Welcome >> Thank you. Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. Andrea, let's start with you. Let's talk about regulations. What exists today that we should be aware of that organizations should be paying attention to? >> Oh sure, so the thing that comes to mind first being in the US is the presidential executive order on cybersecurity that came out a few months ago. Organizations are really paying attention to that. And in the US, it's having a ripple effect with policy, but we're also seeing policy considerations pop up in other countries, Australia and England. The supply chain is a big focus right now, of course, but we see these changes coming down the road as more and more government organizations are trying to secure their critical infrastructure. >> Is there kind of a leadership, or probably in other words, is somebody saying seeing what the UK does and say, okay, we're going to follow that template? Or is it just a variety and a mish mash with no sort of consolidation? How is that sort of playing out? >> I see a lot of organizations kind of basing their requirements on (indistinct) However, each organization has its own nuances. Each agency has its own nuances to how it wants them implemented. >> Andrew, maybe you could chime in here. What are you seeing when you talk to customers that are tuned into this issue? >> No as Andrea had just mentioned having that north star in terms of regulations is so fundamentally great for them because many of them especially in regulate industries, look to these regulations on how they apply their own policies. So at least it has some guidance on how to move forward because as we all know the secure software supply chain is getting news every day and how they react to it is something that I know all their leaders are asking themselves, especially those IT leaders. >> Andrea, when I talk to practitioners, sometimes they're frustrated. They understand they have to comply. They know new regulations are coming out, but sometimes it's hard for them to keep up. It would be helpful if you're sitting across the table from somebody who's frustrated and they ask you, what are your expectations? What are the trends in regulations? How do you see the current regulations evolving to specifically accommodate the digital supply chain and the security exposures and corollary requirements there? >> We see a lot of organizations struggling in the sense of trying to understand what the policy actually wants. Definitions are still a little bit vague, but implementation is also difficult because sometimes organizations will add more tools to their toolkit, adding a layer of complexity there. Really automation has to be pulled in. That's key to implementing this instead of adding more workload and more burden to your folks. It's really important for these organizations to pull stakeholders in the organization together. So the IT leaders bring together the developers, the security operations sit at the same table, talk about whether or not what needs to be implemented or what's proposed to be implemented, will affect the mission or in any way or disrupt operations. It's important for everybody to be on the same page so it doesn't slow anything down as you're trying to roll it out. >> And one of the things here is that we're seeing a lot of change with these new regulations and with a lot of organizations, any type of change is scary. And that is one area that they're looking for guidance not only in the tooling, but also how they apply it in the organization. >> I'll add on. >> Please. >> I'll add onto that and say, organizations really need to take into account the people side of things too. People need to understand what the impact is to the organization, so that they don't try to find the loopholes, they're buying into what needs to be done. They understand the why behind it. You for example, if you walk into your house, you normally close the door behind you. Security needs to be seen as that, as well, that's the culture and it's the habit. And it's ingrained in the fabric of the organization to live this way, not just implement the tools to do it. >> Right, and the number of doors you have in your infrastructure are a lot more than just a couple. Andrew mentioned sort of guidance and governments are obviously taking a more active role. I mean, sometimes I'm a cynic. I mean, the president Biden signs an executive order, but swipe of a pen doesn't really give us enough to go on. Do you think Andrea, that we're going to see new guidance from governments in the very near future? What are you expecting? >> I expect to see more conversations happening. I know that agencies who developed the policies are pulling together stakeholders and getting input. But I do see in the not too distant future, that mandates will be rolling out, yes. >> Well, so Andrew of course, Andrea, if you have a thought on this as well, but how do you see organizations dealing with adopting these new policies. >> Slowly, don't boil the ocean is one thing I tell a lot to every one of them, because a lot of these tooling, a lot of these concepts are foreign to them, brand new. How they adopt those and how they implement them, needs to be done in a very agile fashion, very slow and prescriptive. Go ahead and try to find one area of improvement and go ahead and work upon it and build upon it. Because not only does that normally make your organization more successful and secure, but also helps your organization just from a more out standpoint. One thing that you need to emphasize is that don't blame anyone. 'Cause a lot of times when you're going through this, you're reassessing your own supply chain. You might find where you could see improvements that need to be done. Don't blame things that may have occurred in the past. See how you can benefit from these lessons learned in the future. >> It's interesting you say that the blame game, I mean it used to be that failure meant you get fired and that's obviously has changed. As many have said, you know you're going to have incidents. It's how you respond to those incidents. What you learn from them. Do you have Andrew, any insights from specifically working with customers on securing their software supply chain? What can you tell us about what leading practitioners are doing today? >> They're going in and not only assessing what their software components consist of. Using tools like an SBOM, a software bill of materials, understand where all the components of their ecosystem and their lineage comes from. We're hearing almost every single day, new vulnerabilities that are being introduced in various software packages. By having that understanding of what is in your ecosystem, you can then better understand how to mitigate those concerns moving forward. >> Andrea, Andrew was just saying, one of the things is you don't just dive in. You've got to be careful. There's going to be ripple effects is what I'm inferring, but at the same time, there's a mandate to move quickly. Are there things that could accelerate the adoption of regulation or even the creation of regulations and that guidance in your view? What could accelerate this? >> As far as accelerating it goes, I think it's having those conversations proactively with the stakeholders in your organization and understanding the environment like Andrew said. Go ahead and get that baseline. And just know that whatever changes you make are maybe going to be audited down the road, because as we were moving towards this kind of third-party verification, that you're actually implementing things in order to do business with another organization. The importance of that, if organizations see that gravity to this, I think they will try to speed things up. I think that if organizations and the people in those organizations understand that why, that I talked about earlier and they understand how things like solar winds or things like the oil disruption that happened earlier this year. The personal effect to cyber events will help your organization move forward. Again, everybody's bought into the concept, everybody's working towards the same goals and they understand that why behind it. >> In addition to that, having tooling available, that makes it easy for them. You have a lot of individuals who this is all foreign, providing that base level tooling that aligns to a lot of the regulations that might be applicable within their real realm and their domain, makes it easier for them to start to complying and taking less burden off of them to be able to be successful. >> So it's a hard problem because Andrew, how do you deal with sort of the comment more tools, okay. But I look at that the Optiv map, if you've seen that. It makes your eyes cross. You've got so many tools, so much fragmentation, you're introducing new tools. Can automation help that? Is there hope for consolidation of that tools portfolio? >> Right now, this space is very emerging. It's very emergent, it's very fluid to be honest, 'cause there is actually mandates only a year or two old. But as they come over the course of time, however, I do see these types of tooling starting to consolidate where right now it seems like every vendor has a tool that tries to address this. It's being able to have the people work together, have more regulations that will come out that will allow us to start to redefine and solidify on certain tools like ISO standards. There are certain ones that I mentioned on as balance previously, there's now a ISO standard on SBOM there wasn't previously. So as more and more of these regulations come out, it makes it easier to provide that recommended set of tooling that organization is leveraging instead of vendor A, vendor B. >> Andrea, I said this before I was a cynic, but will give you the last word, give us some hope. I mean, obviously public policy is very important. A partnership between governments and industry, both the practitioners, the organizations that are buying these tools, as well as the technology industry got to work together in an ecosystem. Give us some hope. >> The hope I think will come from realizing that as you're doing this, as you are implementing these changes, you're in a sense trying to prevent those future incidents from happening. There's some assurance that you're doing everything that you can do here. It's a situation, it can be daunting, I'll put it that way. It can be really daunting for organizations, but just know that organizations like Red Hat are doing what we can to help you down the road. >> And really it's just continuing this whole shifting left mentality. The top of supply chain is just one component, but the introducing dev sec ops security at the beginning, that really will make the organizations become successful because this is not just a technology problem, It's a people issue as well. And being able to kind of package them all up together will help organizations as a whole. >> Yeah, so that's a really important point. You hear that term shift left. For years, people say, hey, you can't just bolt security on, as an afterthought, that's problematic. And that's the answer to that problem, right? Is shifting left meaning designing it in at the point of code, infrastructure as code, dev sec ops. That's where it starts, right? >> Exactly, being able to have security at the forefront and then have everything afterwards. Propagate from your security mindset. >> Excellent, okay, Andrea, Andrew, thanks so much for coming to the program today. >> Thank you for having us. >> Very welcome, thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube. Your a global leader in enterprise tech coverage. (soft music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're here talking about how you can better understand and manage the risks associated with the digital supply chain. How in this day and age where software comes from so many different places and sources throughout the ecosystem, how can organizations manage the risks associated with our dependence on software? And with me now are two great guests, Andrea Hall, who is a specialist solution architect and project manager for security and compliance at Red Hat. She's going to focus on public sector. And Andrew Block who's a distinguished architect at Red Hat Consulting, folks welcome. >> Welcome >> Thank you. Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. Andrea, let's start with you. Let's talk about regulations. What exists today that we should be aware of that organizations should be paying attention to? >> Oh sure, so the thing that comes to mind first being in the US is the presidential executive order on cybersecurity that came out a few months ago. Organizations are really paying attention to that. And in the US, it's having a ripple effect with policy, but we're also seeing policy considerations pop up in other countries, Australia and England. The supply chain is a big focus right now, of course, but we see these changes coming down the road as more and more government organizations are trying to secure their critical infrastructure. >> Is there kind of a leadership, or probably in other words, is somebody saying seeing what the UK does and say, okay, we're going to follow that template? Or is it just a variety and a mish mash with no sort of consolidation? How is that sort of playing out? >> I see a lot of organizations kind of basing their requirements on (indistinct) However, each organization has its own nuances. Each agency has its own nuances to how it wants them implemented. >> Andrew, maybe you could chime in here. What are you seeing when you talk to customers that are tuned into this issue? >> No as Andrea had just mentioned having that north star in terms of regulations is so fundamentally great for them because many of them especially in regulate industries, look to these regulations on how they apply their own policies. So at least it has some guidance on how to move forward because as we all know the secure software supply chain is getting news every day and how they react to it is something that I know all their leaders are asking themselves, especially those IT leaders. >> Andrea, when I talk to practitioners, sometimes they're frustrated. They understand they have to comply. They know new regulations are coming out, but sometimes it's hard for them to keep up. It would be helpful if you're sitting across the table from somebody who's frustrated and they ask you, what are your expectations? What are the trends in regulations? How do you see the current regulations evolving to specifically accommodate the digital supply chain and the security exposures and corollary requirements there? >> We see a lot of organizations struggling in the sense of trying to understand what the policy actually wants. Definitions are still a little bit vague, but implementation is also difficult because sometimes organizations will add more tools to their toolkit, adding a layer of complexity there. Really automation has to be pulled in. That's key to implementing this instead of adding more workload and more burden to your folks. It's really important for these organizations to pull stakeholders in the organization together. So the IT leaders bring together the developers, the security operations sit at the same table, talk about whether or not what needs to be implemented or what's proposed to be implemented, will affect the mission or in any way or disrupt operations. It's important for everybody to be on the same page so it doesn't slow anything down as you're trying to roll it out. >> And one of the things here is that we're seeing a lot of change with these new regulations and with a lot of organizations, any type of change is scary. And that is one area that they're looking for guidance not only in the tooling, but also how they apply it in the organization. >> I'll add on. >> Please. >> I'll add onto that and say, organizations really need to take into account the people side of things too. People need to understand what the impact is to the organization, so that they don't try to find the loopholes, they're buying into what needs to be done. They understand the why behind it. You for example, if you walk into your house, you normally close the door behind you. Security needs to be seen as that, as well, that's the culture and it's the habit. And it's ingrained in the fabric of the organization to live this way, not just implement the tools to do it. >> Right, and the number of doors you have in your infrastructure are a lot more than just a couple. Andrew mentioned sort of guidance and governments are obviously taking a more active role. I mean, sometimes I'm a cynic. I mean, the president Biden signs an executive order, but swipe of a pen doesn't really give us enough to go on. Do you think Andrea, that we're going to see new guidance from governments in the very near future? What are you expecting? >> I expect to see more conversations happening. I know that agencies who developed the policies are pulling together stakeholders and getting input. But I do see in the not too distant future, that mandates will be rolling out, yes. >> Well, so Andrew of course, Andrea, if you have a thought on this as well, but how do you see organizations dealing with adopting these new policies. >> Slowly, don't boil the ocean is one thing I tell a lot to every one of them, because a lot of these tooling, a lot of these concepts are foreign to them, brand new. How they adopt those and how they implement them, needs to be done in a very agile fashion, very slow and prescriptive. Go ahead and try to find one area of improvement and go ahead and work upon it and build upon it. Because not only does that normally make your organization more successful and secure, but also helps your organization just from a more out standpoint. One thing that you need to emphasize is that don't blame anyone. 'Cause a lot of times when you're going through this, you're reassessing your own supply chain. You might find where you could see improvements that need to be done. Don't blame things that may have occurred in the past. See how you can benefit from these lessons learned in the future. >> It's interesting you say that the blame game, I mean it used to be that failure meant you get fired and that's obviously has changed. As many have said, you know you're going to have incidents. It's how you respond to those incidents. What you learn from them. Do you have Andrew, any insights from specifically working with customers on securing their software supply chain? What can you tell us about what leading practitioners are doing today? >> They're going in and not only assessing what their software components consist of. Using tools like an SBOM, a software bill of materials, understand where all the components of their ecosystem and their lineage comes from. We're hearing almost every single day, new vulnerabilities that are being introduced in various software packages. By having that understanding of what is in your ecosystem, you can then better understand how to mitigate those concerns moving forward. >> Andrea, Andrew was just saying, one of the things is you don't just dive in. You've got to be careful. There's going to be ripple effects is what I'm inferring, but at the same time, there's a mandate to move quickly. Are there things that could accelerate the adoption of regulation or even the creation of regulations and that guidance in your view? What could accelerate this? >> As far as accelerating it goes, I think it's having those conversations proactively with the stakeholders in your organization and understanding the environment like Andrew said. Go ahead and get that baseline. And just know that whatever changes you make are maybe going to be audited down the road, because as we were moving towards this kind of third-party verification, that you're actually implementing things in order to do business with another organization. The importance of that, if organizations see that gravity to this, I think they will try to speed things up. I think that if organizations and the people in those organizations understand that why, that I talked about earlier and they understand how things like solar winds or things like the oil disruption that happened earlier this year. The personal effect to cyber events will help your organization move forward. Again, everybody's bought into the concept, everybody's working towards the same goals and they understand that why behind it. >> In addition to that, having tooling available, that makes it easy for them. You have a lot of individuals who this is all foreign, providing that base level tooling that aligns to a lot of the regulations that might be applicable within their real realm and their domain, makes it easier for them to start to complying and taking less burden off of them to be able to be successful. >> So it's a hard problem because Andrew, how do you deal with sort of the comment more tools, okay. But I look at that the Optiv map, if you've seen that. It makes your eyes cross. You've got so many tools, so much fragmentation, you're introducing new tools. Can automation help that? Is there hope for consolidation of that tools portfolio? >> Right now, this space is very emerging. It's very emergent, it's very fluid to be honest, 'cause there is actually mandates only a year or two old. But as they come over the course of time, however, I do see these types of tooling starting to consolidate where right now it seems like every vendor has a tool that tries to address this. It's being able to have the people work together, have more regulations that will come out that will allow us to start to redefine and solidify on certain tools like ISO standards. There are certain ones that I mentioned on as balance previously, there's now a ISO standard on SBOM there wasn't previously. So as more and more of these regulations come out, it makes it easier to provide that recommended set of tooling that organization is leveraging instead of vendor A, vendor B. >> Andrea, I said this before I was a cynic, but will give you the last word, give us some hope. I mean, obviously public policy is very important. A partnership between governments and industry, both the practitioners, the organizations that are buying these tools, as well as the technology industry got to work together in an ecosystem. Give us some hope. >> The hope I think will come from realizing that as you're doing this, as you are implementing these changes, you're in a sense trying to prevent those future incidents from happening. There's some assurance that you're doing everything that you can do here. It's a situation, it can be daunting, I'll put it that way. It can be really daunting for organizations, but just know that organizations like Red Hat are doing what we can to help you down the road. >> And really it's just continuing this whole shifting left mentality. The top of supply chain is just one component, but the introducing dev sec ops security at the beginning, that really will make the organizations become successful because this is not just a technology problem, It's a people issue as well. And being able to kind of package them all up together will help organizations as a whole. >> Yeah, so that's a really important point. You hear that term shift left. For years, people say, hey, you can't just bolt security on, as an afterthought, that's problematic. And that's the answer to that problem, right? Is shifting left meaning designing it in at the point of code, infrastructure as code, dev sec ops. That's where it starts, right? >> Exactly, being able to have security at the forefront and then have everything afterwards. Propagate from your security mindset. >> Excellent, okay, Andrea, Andrew, thanks so much for coming to the program today. >> Thank you for having us. >> Very welcome, thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube. Your a global leader in enterprise tech coverage. (soft music)

from the Regency Center in San Francisco it's the queue covering serverless con San Francisco 2018 brought to you by silicon ankle media upstream in a minute you're watching the cubes coverage of thanks for joining me yeah thanks all right so you work for a company server lists we're in a conference about server list help us explain a little bit your background your company yeah well I guess I'll start with the capital s service the only way I know to distinguish so service got its start when Austin Collins he was an AWS community hero he decided that he wanted to use this new lambda thing to launch some of his own side projects so he built the service framework he did not expect for it to completely skyrocket I think we have like somewhere close to thirty thousand github stars it's like 25 28 at this point and it really kind of like this whole surrealist movement lowercase s now started to build up around AWS lambda and like all of the major cloud providers started launching their own service solutions right and so I got involved with serverless calm because I guess I had been in the tech industry in San Francisco for a while I think I have a pretty non-traditional background for someone who's at a developer tools company I've kind of done things all over the map and right now what I do primarily at service is write a lot of their content you know think that they tweet out things that are in their newsletter on their blog a lot of tech writing and stuff like that yeah you know some techies you know they it's like oh wait that's like marketing stuff we can't do this you give a lightning talk here maybe give give our audience a little bit of a flavor what you talked about there yeah I mean I think one of the biggest appeals to me about service as a company was how passionate everyone there was about the fact that you didn't need to have an engineering background to be able to develop software and we have people in our company who have like film backgrounds who have fashion backgrounds and they're working at a tech company and so really what my talk was about is I deploy applications and that's because technologies like Surrealists really lower the barrier to entry for people who were trying to get involved in this stuff so I was able to deploy a fully working applications that even having to coat that much and I think that it's something really exciting that not a lot of people are talking about right yeah and you're something I'm a little older than you when I went to school it's like we called it programming and that was like you know you wrote code which meant you know you got some big book you look like you know lines of code and you execute this now it's like you know well coding you take a bunch of stuff you put it together you know it looks you know very different from you know what I learned to program back in the day and therefore you know right you don't need a CS major necessarily to be able to get some doing and several it sounds like you know is lowers that bar even more right yeah I mean like one of the things is I do feel like AWS lambda for instance that already makes it so much easier to be able to you know code something and publicly host it you don't have to worry about setting up your own server isn't all that stuff it also makes it a lot cheaper to get started so if you just have like this side project or a hackathon project you know super easy to kind of just deploy that to anyone a cool thing that I feel like other developer tools like the serverless framework does is make it so that you don't even have to understand AWS so you can leverage the power of not having to administer your own servers and also not have to understand like confirmation you know you can just kind of like few lines of code and get it done tell us a little bit of your journey you know what what have you you build with it with the server with stuff how do you get involved in it what can you do with it yeah I mean uh whenever you say how do you get involved you mean just me or just like any person out there so start with a personal oh yeah what what's your recommendation to others yeah I mean I would say there are so many tutorials available that actually start from the basics and one thing that's already started happening is service is attracting all different kinds of people so I would say just start looking online for tutorials like even I've written some that cover everything from how do you set up an AWS account in the first place - how do you put this on AWS and that sort of thing also I think a thing that's really important whenever you take on any sort of side project like this is why does it matter to you and I think for me that reason is I don't have a lot of time you know life is short and there are lots of things I do it we're just like everyone that are so mundane and so routine and I do them over and over and those are perfect candidates for automation and so anytime you have something in your life like that that you feel like you'll be really motivated to never have to do again I feel like it's a great reason to want to learn all right Andrea one of the other things you're involved with here is there's women who serve a lists event that that is happening you know later today so you know we love supporting at Silicon angle in the cube a lot of these women events you know especially here in the Bay Area but all over the place so gets a little bit of insight as to what's happening at this event yeah so I feel like you know one thing that a lot of women in the tech industry can't help but notice is that it's pretty male-dominated and I think that it makes it really important then to try and create community and try to bring more women into the space make it feel like it's really safe and fun place to be for women so I've been throwing these women who serve us happy hours and we're gonna have one tonight after serverless comp so if you're really excited if anyone wanted to come also like keep on event right because we'll be throwing more of them and I hope to see everyone there who can come alright last thing if people want to find out more about women who serve or less about I believe server luscom is the website for your company that's easy as a matter of fact yeah I think in the early days I grabbed us one of the stickers from your company just because I thought it was about serverless in general so alright you know pretty well fused together from a from a branding standpoint yeah yeah I would say that the server list calm and surrealist movement distinction is sort of a blessing and a curse on the one hand it makes it a little bit hard to talk about one or the other you can kind of get them mixed up on the other hand it's been really nice for us to be able to see like all of the excitement that's kind of come out of service and being able to educate people so all right Andrew really appreciate you joining us shit sharing your story as to have somebody you don't have to be in a hardcore a you know developer to be able to get yeah and if anyone makes an application who thought they couldn't code I would love to hear about it yeah and we also love to hear about it here on our program so of course reach out to us the cube dot that's the website I'm just apps to on Twitter always appreciate the feedback love to hear these stories about people using phenomenal technology I'm Stu Mittleman and thanks so much for watching the Q [Music]

(clicking) >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. It looks like they're letting the general session out. We're here at the Professional Business Women of California Conference; 6,000 women, about 5% men really talking about, it's amazing, the 28th year. I've never been to this show about how women can get more inclusive and diversity and taking, executing on steps to actually make it happen as somebody said in the key note. It's not a strategy problem, it's an execution problem. So, we've got a great story here and we're really excited to have CUBE alumni, Andrea Ward. She's now the CMO of Magento Commerce. Welcome back, Andrea. >> Thank you so much, it's great to be here and great to be at this conference. The buzz is amazing and I was here two years ago and it's grown so much, just in the two years. >> How many people were there, they say it's 6,000, now. >> I mean, it looks like it's about doubled. I don't know what the numbers were two years ago but the participation is amazing and it's such a great opportunity for local businesses to bring employees from their companies, have them have a chance just to talk and learn from such powerful women. So, it's been a really great conference. >> And, it's also a cross of so many kind of verticals if you will, because you know we go to a lot of tech conferences. This is more kind of a cross industry with banking and insurance and, you know, United Airlines we talked to earlier. And so, it's a much more diverse kind of set. >> Absolutely, I mean the women on the panels this morning spanned legal professions, government, entertainment, business, really diverse issue and it's fantastic that women are coming together to support each other to help make a difference. >> So last we saw you, I think we were on the street on Howard Street a couple years back which was pretty exciting as well, but now your new company, Magento Commerce. So, for people who aren't familiar with the company, give them kind of the four-one-one. >> Yeah great, well Magento Commerce is a leading commerce technology platform for mid-size businesses. We have recently separated from Ebay about 15 months ago and are now a privately held company and we power about a third of the world's commerce, believe it or not. >> That is amazing. Yeah. >> A third of the world's eCommerce. >> That's right. So, it's a fantastic company. We're growing and a part of that growth is absolutely growing a more diverse workforce and we've been putting into place some initiatives since last year. >> Yeah, part of the key note conversations were, obviously, that you need to put goals down on paper and you need to measure them and I think it was Bev Crair from Intel talked about, you know, doing it across all the pay grades. It's not just in engineering or just on the board or just the executive ranks, but really all the way across and it sounds like you guys are executing that to really help you just grow the company generically. >> Well, we're in a very lucky position in that we're experiencing growth and so that gives us room to really go out and look for amazing talent across the board. And so, we put a focus on diversity and inclusion and by doing that, we've increased the percentage of women in all roles across the company by 50% and that's since last June. So I think, you know, really just what you said earlier about execution and putting some numbers and goals against that can really make a difference. >> Right, and if you hadn't had those, that execution detail you probably couldn't have grown that fast because let's face it, it's hard to get good talent. If you're not including a broader base of talent, you're not going to be able to achieve your goals. >> Well, that's right and I think that some of that is, I don't know if you want to call it unconscious bias or unintentional, we're used to hiring people that look like us, have experience like us. And so, by encouraging that diversity, it really has made us expand the pool of applicants, make sure that we're not going for the easiest choice or the simplest choice but really considering a wide range of candidates to fill those positions. >> You know, I don't the birds of a feather conversation comes up enough, it's just easy to go with what you're familiar with. So whether it's unconscious or not, it's just easy, people are busy, you want to check the box and get off to your next task. So, you have to take a step back and consciously do the extra work, take the extra effort. >> Well, in the industry we support, the industries we support are going through digital transformation, I mean, commerce is key and central to digital transformation. And, transformation and change means that you have to consider other perspectives. You need to learn from new ideas and I think, you know, diversity plays a big part in that as well. So, I think bringing that into our own company because we're supporting that broader industry has been very important. >> Right. So, I want to take that opportunity to pivot on what you just said about in terms of the changing role of commerce. You know, I often think of like banks because in a bank, you know, your relationship was with your local branch; maybe you knew the banker, maybe you knew a couple of the tellers whatever, but you had a personal connection. Now, most people's engagement with the brands they interact with is electronic and via their phone and it's interesting that you say that. And, it's the commerce around those engagements, that the commerce is becoming the central point of gravity if you will and the relationship is spawning all from that. >> Well, I mean, personal connections are still very important and commerce I feel is like the moment where a conversation really turns into a relationship. So, it's important that those digital experiences, the customer experiences really make up the right connection with the brand. And so, that seamless interaction between what happens at the branch, for example in the financial example, on what you can do at home, that needs to be very cohesive. It needs to be trustworthy, it needs to be authentic and that means businesses need to create individual experiences that really reflect their brand. And, our company specifically has really helped businesses create those experiences, seamless experiences and translated them from digital to in-store or in the branch. I think the biggest change now is how that's starting to impact business-to-business relationships, I think. >> In what way? In the consumer world, we're used to that now right? We're all doing that in our everyday experiences. Now, we're starting to see that also come into a business-to-business relationship. So, just like the seamless conveniences that you have online in your day to day life, people want to see that in the workplace, too. And so, we're seeing the biggest change now in those types of business models. >> They're rocking in the background, if you can't hear them. >> Yeah! We are here. >> Yeah! You know, it's funny, I just saw, something come across the feed talking about that annoying business-to-business add in Instagram, but then aren't you glad you saw it? >> Yeah. >> So, it's interesting how, you know, the B to C norms, you know, continue to help define what's going on in the B to B space and we've seen it in Enterprise Software Applications and Cloud and the flexibility and speed of innovation. It just continues to really drive the business-to-business relationship. >> Yeah, and I think just like in the business-to-consumer world, it has started with content in business-to-business. But, now people want to move from just learning and knowledge to actually transacting which means that companies need to enable specialized price list, account management, things like that and that's starting to surface in the commerce world as well. So, we're really excited about that and we're going to be sharing some of that at our conference next week; Imagine, in Las Vegas. >> Okay yeah, it's amazing how fast. It was not that long ago, we were just trying to get the 360 view. Right? We were just trying to pull from all the various desperate systems to know who that customer was for a given system. Now, it's a segmentation to want, a very different challenge. >> Right, I mean it's that change from thinking about trying to attract your customer to come to your business to really bringing the business to the customer. I mean, I think that's what some of this digital technology is allowing us to do. We're going to them rather than trying to draw them in to come to us, if that makes sense. This idea of commerce coming to you, right? >> And, it's got to come to you with something that's relevant, that's topical, that's timely. >> That's easy to execute, that can mirror a real experience. I mean, you hear a lot of things about, things like virtual reality, artificial intelligence. I mean, all of that's just gimmicks unless you can actually think about how you make that real for your brand. So, for example, we have a customer in Mexico City who is selling eyewear, right. And so, everybody when they buy glasses, they want to try them on, so we need to help them give their customers that virtual experience. If they can't come into the store and try them on, we want to be able to let them try them on at home. So, that's a natural extension of the brand and a way to use virtual reality and I think businesses are still trying to figure that out. But, if those customers didn't have that experience, it'd be less likely that they actually would buy or, you know, make a commerce transaction. >> But, if I'm hearing you, instead of it really kind of being in a marketing effort that then it's completed with a transaction, you're kind of coming at that which you just described from the transaction first and this is really a supporting or an enabling activity. >> That's right, it all starts with the customer understanding what is going to help them make their decisions. Giving them experiences that feel seamless, giving them options. So, if they want to come in-store but see what's maybe available at another store for pick-up or if they want to come in-store and order online or if they want to order from home and then go into the store and pick it up. It's really about giving the customer the right options for them. >> Right. >> Another great story we had is, I mean, how many of us travel, I know you travel a lot. >> Right. >> I travel a ton. >> Especially, to Vegas. (chuckling) >> Especially, to Vegas! And, you know, my kids are always expecting something when I come home but who has time? So, you know, one of our partners worked with the Frankfurt Airport and created an application where on the way to the airport, you can go shopping at all of their stores in the airport and have your package waiting for you at the gate on the way to the plane. So now, you know, they've figured out what their customers want to do first by creating this great shopping experience at the airport. Now, they know people are running through the airport, how can we extend that shopping experience for them while they're sitting in the taxi (chuckling) on the way, have it waiting for them at the gate? And so, for me personally, working for a company that's helping customers to do those kinds of things has really been fun. >> Right, because they always have the liquor for ya ready to go at the gate but never the kids', you know, t-shirts or a little tchotchke or, I can remember running through Heathrow time and time again trying to find something quickly. >> Yeah, and now with two kids and a husband that all want something different, (laughing) you know, it makes it much easier for me. >> Alright, Andrea, well you've been doing this marketing thing for a long time. I'll give you the last word both on the conference and kind of, you know, as a marketer to see where we're going with A.I. and really the ability to actually segment to one. You know, how exciting is that for you? >> Yeah, I mean, it's fantastic. I think, you know, marketers want to create relationships with their brand and all of these tools are giving us better access, better chance to create that fantastic experience. So, it's a great time to be a marketer. (chuckling) And, it's a great time to be at this conference, too so. >> Alright. Thanks very much. >> Thanks for stopping by, Andrea Ward. I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from the Professional Business Women's Conference in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> So Alex, we're going to do, this is a different segment so I'll do a break, okay. What's that? Yeah, yeah. The 2019 SolarWinds hack represents a new threat milestone in the technology industry. The hackers, they patiently waited and evolved their intrusion over several years, literally. They lived in stealth. They tested, they retested their techniques and they use very sophisticated methods to get into email systems, networks, authentication systems, and numerous points in the software supply chain to replicate the malicious code at massive scale. Now they use techniques like they would insert malware steal data, and then they'd remove the malicious code before it was discovered. And so many other advanced approaches were used to cover their tracks. Now the really scary thing about this breach is people often think, oh, I'm good. Thankfully, I don't use SolarWinds, but it's not true. You're not safe because the domino effect of this hack has created massive concerns. We actually, to this day, we don't know the true scope of this attack and who really was impacted. And we may never know. Connecting all the dots on this breach is extremely difficult. Moreover, new threats like those exposed in the recent Log4j vulnerability, seemed to hit the news cycle weekly. And they further underscore the risk to organizations, not just large companies by the way, but small businesses, mid-size organizations and individuals. Hello, my name is Dave Vellante, and welcome to theCUBE's special look at managing risk in the digital supply chain, made possible by Red Hat. Today we're going to hear from some of the top experts that will help you better understand how to think about the exposures in the software supply chain, some of the steps we can all take to reduce our risks and how an endless game of escalation will likely play out over the next decade. Up next is our first segment hosted by Dave Nicholson of theCUBE. He's with Luke Hinds and Vincent Danen of Red Hat. They're going to talk about where the greatest threats exist. How to think about open source versus other commercial software. And discuss ways organizations can reduce their risks going forward. Let's get started. I'm going to do that again. Same one, I'll do each one twice. The 2019 SolarWinds hack represents a new threat milestone in the technology industry. The hackers, they patiently waited and evolved their intrusion over several years, literally. They lived in stealth. They tested and they retested their techniques and used very sophisticated methods to get into email systems, networks, authentication systems in numerous points in the software supply chain to replicate the malicious code at massive scale. They would use techniques like inserting malware and then they would steal data. And then they would remove the code before it was discovered. And they use many other advanced approaches to cover their tracks. The really scary thing about this breach is, people often think, oh, well, I'm good. Thankfully, I don't use SolarWinds, but it's not true you're not safe, because the domino effect of this hack it's created a massive massive concerns throughout the industry. We actually to this day, we don't know the true scope of this attack and we don't even know who was impacted. We may never know. So connecting all the dots in this breach is extremely difficult. Moreover, new threats like those exposed in the recent Log4j vulnerability, they seem to hit the news like weekly. And they further underscore the risks that organizations face, not just large companies by the way, small businesses, mid-size organizations and individuals. Hello, my name is Dave Vellante, and welcome to theCUBE's special look at managing risk in the digital supply chain, made possible by Red Hat. Today, we're going to hear from some of the top experts that will help you better understand how to think about the exposures in the software supply chain, some of the steps that we can all take to reduce our risks and how an endless game of escalation is likely going to play out over the next decade. Up next is our first segment hosted by Dave Nicholson of theCUBE. He's with Luke Hinds and Vincent Danen of Red Hat. They're going to talk about where the greatest threats exist and how to think about open source versus other commercial software. And discuss ways that organizations can reduce their risk going forward. Let's get started. When we return Andrea Hall, a specialist solution architect and project manager for security and compliance, along with Andrew Block, who is a distinguished architect, both from Red Hat will join me. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in enterprise tech coverage. Now when we return Andrea Hall, who's a specialist solutions architect and project manager for security and compliance will join me along with Andrew Block, who's a distinguished architect. They're both from Red Hat. You're watching theCUBE, the global leader in enterprise tech coverage. So look, I wish I could say there's an end to these threats, there isn't. They will continue indefinitely. Now the adversaries they're well-funded, they're motivated and sophisticated. Your job as practitioners is to make it less profitable for hackers. At the end of the day, this is a business for them and the hackers want value it's all about ROI. That means benefit over cost. So if you can increase the denominator, it lowers their value and they'll go elsewhere to fish in a more productive place. The hard reality is bad user practices are going to trump good security every time. And that's where the vulnerability starts. So shoring up the basics, that's table stakes. Beyond that, working with strong technology partners can bring expertise to compliment your team's skills and reduce the threat against these sophisticated attacks. We hope this program was informative and will inspire you to take action. All of these videos are available on demand, check out thecube.net and theCUBE's and Red Hat's, social channels, and a variety of other places that we'll share with the community. Thanks to our guests today for Dave Nicholson and the entire CUBE team, this is Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time. Do that again. (cough) Excuse me. So look, I wish I could say there's an end. I'll try it again. So look, I wish I could say there's an end to these threats, there isn't. They will continue indefinitely. The adversaries they're well-funded, they're motivated and they're sophisticated. Your job as practitioners is to try and make it less profitable for the hackers. At the end of the day, this is a business for them. And the hackers, what do they want? They want value. It's all about ROI for them. That means benefit over cost. If you can increase the denominator, it lowers their value and they're going to go elsewhere, and they'll fish in more productive places. The hard reality is that bad user practices will trump good security every time. And that's where the vulnerability starts. So shoring up the basics, that's table stakes. Now beyond that, working with strong technology partners can bring expertise to compliment your team's skills, and reduce the threat against these sophisticated attacks. We hope this program was informative and will inspire you to take action. All of these videos that are available on demand at thecube.net and both theCUBE's and Red Hat's social channels, and a variety of other places that we'll share with the community. Thanks to all our guests today for Dave Nicholson and the entire CUBE team. This is Dave Vellante. I appreciate you watching and we'll see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this special CUBE program. We're going to help you better understand how to manage risk by securing your digital supply chain. And we're going to first give you a high level preview of what's happening in the market. And with me, is Ben Fischer, who's Emerging Security Technology Advocate at Red Hat. Hello, Ben. Good to see you again. >> Nice to meet you, David. I'm (indistinct) >> Yeah, so let's set it up. What can people expect to hear from this program? >> So today, I'm going to start off and you're going to, we're going to have a conversation about some of the business challenges related to the software supply chain. And then the next video will be with Vincent Danen, Red Hat's VP of product security, and Luke Hinds, our security lead from the office of the CTO. And they're going to discuss more of the security aspects of the software supply chain. Thirdly, you'll (indistinct) the newcomer director of hybrid platforms, security product management. We'll dig into some of the practices and the technologies, and that will be followed up by Andrea Hall and Andrew Block. Andrea is a specialist solution architect, and Andrew is a distinguished architect, and they're going to cover some of the change in environments. There's a lot of change in environments related to the regulations and different movements in the industry and organizations. And then lastly, we'll have a video from an interview you did with Luke Hinds, discussing a software sign in tool called Sigstore and how it can improve security supply chain. >> Excellent. Thank you for that. Okay. So Ben, people hear the term software supply chain, and makes them, "Oh. That's an interesting name." But what do we mean by the term software supply chain, Ben? >> So it's a loaded term. Simply, it's the supply chain but of software. And people think, "Oh well. I just go to a store, and I buy software and it comes packaged," maybe in the old days. But these days, we've got open source software. So there's repositories and collaboration upstream where a lot of people in a community contribute to all these different pieces of the software. It's kind of like when you go to a store. You go to a store and you just see this one piece, but that store carries lots of different products. And for each of those products, they have relationships with different vendors and different distributors to gather all those products into a store. And it's pretty complex. So there's been this kind of curation of products and softwares that's kind of come about kind of like a warehouse club. So like you would trust a warehouse club to be kind of a place to reduce the amount of shopping you might have, or you can kind of go there and you trust that they have good products that you'll like, and that fulfill most of your needs for your family, and you can go there and you can kind of get most of your shopping out of one place versus having to drive all around town to go get a bunch of different products that are carried in different stores, and then having to research all those products, warehouse clubs make that experience very simple. And so there's been kind of an upsurge of organizations like Red Hat that just help simplify your choices and do that curation. And the value there is in trying to not just give you everything, but also curate and try to make sure that what you have is secure. Make sure what you have is up to date. Kind of do all these kinds of nuanced things. The software supply chain is kind of complex in that there's all these extra details you need to be kind of aware of, and it's true. You know, you could run around town and shop for every product you would like yourself, just like in a software supply chain, you could go directly and get all the pieces of software and manage them and update them and do all the work yourself. But it it's a lot of work, and it is, as the word implies, it's a chain. So it's not just one relationship. It's a whole chain of relationships. And having a trusted entity as kind of a proxy, that you could put your faith in, and knowing that they're kind of doing some of that work for you makes life a lot easier just like in the warehouse club, right? You want to kind of go one place, get all your shopping done and be satisfied. And so just like you would in traditional times. You Know, before open source came about, there was a lot of proprietary software, and you'd put your trust and faith into them, that they would satisfy all of your needs, and they service you entirely. But even proprietary software now is an open source software so it comes into the same problem. So you need to have a trusted partner basically to help you understand and give you that level of trust in the software you're buying. >> Makes sense, yeah. And Red Hat plays that critical role. >> Yeah. >> So let's explain why all of a sudden this topic of digital supply chain, software supply chain has taken center stage. Ben, what should people understand about the digital supply chain and how it impacts their respective businesses? >> Well, the digital supply chain is really, really critical, I mean, if nothing else. I mean to bring up the kind of the COVID analogy, right? Everything changed with COVID. Things just got accelerated because we realized that the old way of doing things in person and a lot of physical ways slowed things down. And so when we were trying to social distance and have space, the pressure for doing everything in a digital form, and to make it easier to, you know, order your groceries and have them delivered to your door, or, you know, do a trunk delivery of your pizza at the local pizza shop, all this became really critical. So yeah. It's just, honestly, the COVID experience really accelerated the whole need for digital transformation. I'm not trying to go there, but that was part of the supply chain because all those companies also needed to have that digital experience with all of their vendors, and it's kind of accelerated in that respect. So the supply chain in general is something that's gotten a lot of attention. I think people actually understand, maybe have an idea what the word means over the last two years with all the incidents that have happened, and kind of the power of having it in digital electronic form, really really, I think, has hit home for a lot of people. And it's critical because now, I just don't feel like the world can ever really kind of go back from that. We're all so dependent on transacting in a digital form. Our businesses rely on it. We rely on a daily checking of phones, checking websites for information, doing everything. All this is run on software, right? And it's not just software that maybe one person wrote and can maintain for the rest of their lives, and do it in a perfect form. At some point, the software, you know, almost all of it, is using different parts of software that are open source and out there and available. And the pieces that were already developed, cause there's no reason to recreate the wheel. And they just kind of pulled in all these little open source components. If they didn't make a program, it was the programming around that to kind of make that usable for their particular use case. And everyone's just gotten very, very comfortable with this model of pulling software, what we would say, from the upstream down to the downstream and consume it and utilize it themselves. It's just pervasive everywhere. It's just, you know, open source, they say, is kind of eating the world and that's kind of where it's come from. >> Right. Yeah. And this is really a major issue for folks. We're seeing all kinds of new techniques. And for example, just imagine you've got dozens or even hundreds of suppliers, and the bad guys are targeting, you know, a victim, and they might put a piece of malware in an individual, one of the suppliers, you know. They'll get in to one of the suppliers, and that's a benign piece of code, but when it gets actually through the victims', you know, the targets' firewall, things will start to self-form in ways that we've really not seen before. And so this is really a big issue. There's a lot of talk coming from policymakers. Of course, the POTUS has issued an executive order and is putting pressure on businesses and technology companies to improve their security posture. I wish it were as easy as a sort of a swipe of a pen, but what's behind these trends, Ben? >> So, oh, there's so much behind there. So I think you're alluding to something really, really, really important. So in the security world, I mean, most of the issues in the security world is due to, you know, breaches, I should say. Hacks are due to kind of unpatched vulnerabilities. So the problem with that is then the answer is, well, you should patch and patch regularly, and that's absolutely true. You should patch as much as you can where it's not causing business disruptions. But when you get into a supply chain, or a digital supply chain issue, if you have a hacker who is able to penetrate into a vendor's software, and they're able to play something that gets placed into their update mechanism and then gets pushed out to all of our customers, it can be catastrophic and it can be, it will spread very fast and all the customers that are doing the right thing normally, by doing constant updates, will get infected. This is kind of the scary thing. Obviously, it is the right thing to do. And the right thing is for those vendors to secure their environment as much as possible and do everything they can to make that as tight as possible. But also, as in anything, it's really, we're in a world now where it's not if you're going to be breached or, you know, it's going to be when. Everybody in the world, especially the United States, we've all had breaches with our confidential information exposed, right? It's kind of the world we live in. It's what we expect. So with that understanding, you know, it becomes more about how we'll react to that. You know, if your credit card number gets exposed, you just don't throw your hands up in the air. You go, "Okay. Well, I need to put a credit freeze. I need to do certain diligent actions." Same thing in the industry. You know if something happens like that, an organization needs to respond properly and fast to share with the industry what has happened to stop those updates from continuing to perpetrate and provide guidance on what they can do. And this is one of the wonderful things, I think, about the security industry, is actually the willingness and interest to share. You'd kind of think of people in the old days wanting to hide their security secrets. Hide and protect what they do to make sure that, to safeguard all their assets and safeguard the company, their data, everything. And I'm not saying that everything is exposed, but there's a more willingness to share information on threats they're seeing and collaborate on fixes, and work through very difficult issues in a collaborative way, which is, I think it's really wonderful, and it plays perfectly in my mind, kind of the open source mentality of doing things together, out in the open, across organizations. >> Right. So, I mean, again, it's, you know, the very things that, the good behavior we're supposed to be doing with patching and what everybody's advising us to do, we have to be really careful. That can actually turn around and bite you. So how should we think about trust with software? What does that even mean today, Ben? >> Well, it's becoming more important than ever before, because before, you know, there, like I'll tell you way back when I, long time ago, when I was quite young, you'd just download software. And you would share it with friends and copy it, and there was no such thing as antivirus. And everybody was fine with that, and you didn't even think of an issue. And then I remember the first antivirus or viruses came out and then you went down to your local computer software store, and they're handing out free discs as antivirus fixes for that one particular issue. So you went down and you got it and you'd patch it up. And that was that. And you didn't really have any worries beyond that. These days, you know, and that's because you trust the store, and you knew there was only one issue and nobody was, it's kind of a free environment where nobody thought that anything bad would really happen. Today though, we hear in the news constantly about cyber attacks, about breaches, about just endless numbers of things that are happening. Ransomware. There's so many different types of attacks and it's happening in so many different ways across every industry, every geography. It's everywhere, you know. It's really, in my mind, the world's largest industry, cyber crime. And that's just a scary thing and that's because it's profitable. And so, you know, when you think of it as that, as a kind of an evil industry, if you will, it puts things into a little bit of a perspective that, okay, their motives, for the most part are money, and they're trying to do this. So if that's the case, then you're just trying to create enough friction that it's just not profitable for them. And so it's not about doing everything in terms of security. It's about trying to do, you know, for the right things to mitigate the risks for organization. And so getting back to your point about trust, how do you trust the software that you're given? You know, if you download a piece of software, you should be thinking about where's the software being downloaded from? There's lots of sites. There's lots and lots of ways to get it. There's absolutely millions of different pieces of open source code that's out there. And just because you downloaded it from a site, you don't know who posted it, you don't know a lot of these issues. So it can be scary. And as an organization, you can choose to take on all or part of that risk by trying to understand which locations are safe. You can try to understand, you know, which code is safe, and which code you can basically feel comfortable that there's a level of trust. Or simply you can shift that risk over to an organization that might do some of that work for you, like kind of in any business model. Red Hat is an entity, and it focuses on open source software. So, you know, you can go out and you could download any bit of open source software that Red Hat sells, and you can run it today. There's nothing stopping you, and that's wonderful, and we're happy that you're doing that, but Red Hat plays a particular role in that. We're trying to kind of curate that software. We're trying to pick the best piece of software that we feel we can trust. We have a lot of people in those communities, working with the people who actually work on that software. We believe in the open source model, partly because not only is it collaborative and just open and transparent, but in that transparency and in that collaboration, there is review of all the code that gets submitted. So if you can go to the right upstream article repositories, and you can work with those people, you have insight into what's happening, and you can pull down the pieces and the components that you feel are best that you can package into a product that you feel can meet all the needs for your particular customers, and you can do that in a particular way. And then having that close proximity to those communities, you also have an idea when there's updates and patches and you get to work on those, and that allows you to consume those faster, and bring those to your customers faster. And so this is part of the trust element. It's a matter of do you want to do it yourself? Like, you know, warehouse club analogy? Do you want to go to 100 stores when you do a shopping list, or, you know, 20, 30 stores driving around the whole day? I don't know. I don't want to do that on my Saturday. Or, you know, do you want to go to warehouse stuff? Yeah, you might pay a little bit more. There's a premium there. You have to have that warehouse club membership, but then you kind of go to one store and maybe get 80% of your shopping done there, and that's really good. And maybe get the 20% from a couple other stores down the street, but you're done in a matter of a few hours versus the whole day. And so I would implore you, in terms of trust, you need to think about what are the critical pieces of software that you have in your organization, right? What are the critical digital processes that your organization runs? Think about them, and also not just think about what the risks are around them, but also think about beyond them, what the risks are to the people you're trusting. So whether it's Red Hat, or whether it's a particular website you might be wanting to download that open source software from, you need to think about it's a whole chain of things. So you will need to know that, okay, I have access to these things. I have this information, and I have these risks. Now, if I extend that out one degree further, then what risks are those folks are exposed to? What do they have knowledge of? And do that, and then think about it, and think about and evaluate who has the most information? Where are the risks? And think about what makes sense for the organization in terms of mitigating those risks and giving you the best ability to respond when something does happen. I think you can reduce your risk exposure with an organization that curates open source, or even closed source, but also you can also kind of reduce the blast radius, I think, because if they can get you those updates faster, respond faster than you could yourself, then that's hugely valuable too. >> Yeah. I mean, you know, to your point about it's very lucrative for the hackers. I mean, the criminal algorithm is actually pretty simple. It's all about ROI for them, which is how much value can they extract and what does it cost them to extract that in a numerator denominator? And so to the extent that you can increase the cost to the hacker, there's less value to them, and they will go look somewhere else. So question is, what are the parameters of trust in software that can potentially help organizations increase that denominator? And how do you define trustworthy software? What are the attributes? >> Yeah. So there's a lot of attributes. Yeah. I come back to kind of warehouse club analogy. When you kind of go to the warehouse club, they've kind of already pre-picked for various use cases, kind of, you know. Here's the, you know. Here's the two brands of shavers and we have it in the disposable form and the replacement blade form. And you just have a few options there. And it's you know a nice, simple selection, and you look at it and, you know, you can see the price and you know the quantity and you have certain information. And if you did want to look up more information, it's either on the package or you pull out your phone and get more information. In the open source world, you know, some things you want to look at, you want to see its transparency. So everything in open source is very transparent. If you do want to go with a closed source provider, that's fine too. But you know, you do want to have as much transparency as possible. So you want to build up a good relationship, whether it's Red Hat, open source or a closed source vendor, you want to have that relationship to get insight. And if it's closed source, it's more important because you need to go deeper into that relationship to understand what's happening behind that veiled curtain. Accountability. So, you know, whether it is software that you're getting through another organization, you want to make sure you know who in that organization is accountable. You want to know how they're going to be accountable, how they're going to respond. If it's upstream, right now, one thing that's coming through is, and they call it S bomb, software bills and material, which has details about kind of an ingredient list, if you will, of that software. And that is something that will, in the future, make it a little bit easier for everybody, but also if you're going to get software yourself directly, give you an understanding of maybe who's accountable, who actually wrote the software or made the patch, or submitted the last update to a branch. That type of information is very useful because you need, at some point, you may need to know who did this to verify if something is trustworthy, if something was intentional or not, if you see something that might be curious or, I don't know, questionable in some nature. And traceability. You want to be able to have that ability to understand all the changes that have been done in that software, right? Software is, you know, it's highly versioned. So there's constantly new features or updates or patches. And you want to be able to go through and know what's happened there. So not only for the benefit of understanding the things that have been added and the benefits that have been added to the software, but if something happened or you were trying to make sure nothing bad happened, you'd want to make sure maybe there has been no malicious submissions into that code stream as well. And so by tracing that, that's good. And then the whole auditability of it, to go back and look at the software, and having somebody understand what might have happened by kind of digging into all the records for that particular software. I'd also say risk management, because you, as an organization, you really need to know what your risks are, and you need to be able to not just do that at the macro level, but now with the software supply chain, you need to bring that down to kind of a software level and really understand, you know, if my business relies on a particular software component, like open SSL for VPN software and site-to-site networking and whatnot, I need to make sure that if anything happens to this piece of software, which is a critical component for me operating my business, what am I going to do about it? You know do I just terminate all my VPN connections and leave my rural workers stranded and, you know, disable site-to-site networking so my different sites don't have direct networking connections? You have to kind think about what are the risks and, you know, what's my plan B? How would I possibly manage things? And it feels very overwhelming when you think about the number of components. And so this is where understanding this and trying to find ways to mitigate risk and manage it and make things a little bit simpler so you can really focus on things that matter and think are important. And then incident response, which is, there's going to be something that happens sometimes to some piece of software that your organization has. So how are you going to respond? How are you going to even find out? How are you going to know that something happened? How are you monitoring for vulnerabilities in the software? How are you connecting with the upstream communities and being aware that something is happening wrong, and there's a bunch of developers scrambling to try to fix something quick because maybe there's a known (indistinct) of some software out in the wild. So having that awareness and having that ability to building to respond really is probably one of the most critical things here. >> Ben, can you give us a sense of just kind of the scope of this problem? Are there metrics you can share to kind of frame the issue for the audience? >> Yeah. So in terms of open source supply chain attacks, some type, a software vendor, actually has reports every year. And they've reported that there was a 650% increase in open source supply chain attacks in the past year. And this is on top of a 430% increase the prior year. So it's scary, but it's basically literally exploding in terms of the threats happening in the supply chain attacks. Supply chain attacks are not new, but they've become quite popular. And the power of the supply chain, as an amplifying factor, is starting to get exploited really well by the attackers these days. >> Mm-hmm. Okay. So let's kind of go to best practice. I mean, what are businesses doing about these today? These problems today? What should they be doing that maybe they're not doing? >> So with the explosion, you can understand that with the spike of these supply chain attacks, organizations are honestly, and understandably pretty caught off guard. So while organizations have been working on their cybersecurity programs for some time now, they're mostly trying to react. And by react, they're reacting with maybe not the most efficient of incident response plans yet. And these attacks are spreading like wildfire, but as an industry, you know, it's not really helping us get ahead. So, you know, it's the unfortunate place where we're at. You mentioned that there's, obviously there's some guidance from POTUS and other folks in the industry, and various efforts in the industry to work on improving the supply chain, work on improving different components that can help make things dramatically better for the industry, but they're still pretty early stage. There's still a lot of work to be done. So as far as kind of what we can be doing as an industry, obviously, you know, I'll say collaboration again, because, you know, by working together, whether it's with the government or in an upstream organization setting standards, these things are all really important. And especially within verticals, I think it's really important to kind of get together because even if you have a general standard, things can vary quite a bit within the verticals. But besides that outwardly looking action, looking inside and trying to understand, in a sense, it's kind of a simple thing. It's a business process engineering a question of, okay, what are your critical business processes? You know, what do those business processes rely upon? You know, what software components are there? And then okay, for those pieces of software, they also have different components. So even if you go to, you know, whether you go to an open source provider or a closed source provider, there are open source components. So understanding the software that you use, understanding where you get that software from, and understanding the components in those software and how those are digested, whether it's from an organization like Red Hat that's open source, or maybe a closed source provider, is really important. Developing the relationships that you have, that bi-directional trust with those organizations that are running that critical software for your organization is really important. So it's a lot more of a mapping and awareness type exercise, because from there, you can start asking a bunch of different questions. And by engaging in conversations about those questions, you're going to learn more and more and more. And that will continue to lead forward. Eventually, you'll get an understanding of, "I have these risks," and you may not necessarily know everything, but along the way, you'll start developing awareness of risks, and then you can ask yourself along the way, "Okay. As an organization, let's come together and figure out how can we- Let's look at these risks and how can we think about mitigating these right within our budget? To meet our business needs," et cetera. But it's a hard question because there's so many software out there. Our businesses are so critical on so many ways. There's so much software, and each software has so many different components. It's a pretty overbearing problem. I just not trying to scare anybody, but it's just important to just take some time and think about it and understand what you have, and be diligent about kind of walking through those business processes, and start with the most critical ones and kind of keep walking forward. And as you're mitigating them, think about, do you want to have an organization help you with these, or do you want to hire people and have them invest their time into doing the work that an outside organization might do for you? >> Right. Hey, Ben, I've taken a lot of your time. Really appreciate your insights, and really great to have you on. Thank you. >> Well, thank you for having me, Dave. Appreciate it. >> And thank you for watching the CUBE. This is Dave Vellante, and we are the leader in enterprise technology coverage. (upbeat music)

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

>>Yeah. >>Welcome back for our last session of the day how to deliver career making business outcomes with Search and AI. So we're very lucky to be hearing from Canada. Canadian Tire, one of Canada's largest and most successful retailers, have been powered 4.5 1000 employees to maximize the value of data with self service insights. So today we're joining us. We have Yarrow Baturin, who is the manager of Merch analytics and planning to support at Canadian Tire and then also Andrea Frisk, who is the engagement manager manager for thoughts. What s O U R Andrea? Thanks so much for being here. And with >>that, >>I'll pass the mic to you guys. >>Thank you for having us. Um, already, I I think I'll start with an introduction off who I am, what I do. A Canadian entire on what Canadian pair is all about. So, as a manager of Merch analytics at Canadian Tire, I support merchant organization with reporting tools, and then be I platform to enable decision making on a day to day basis. What is? Canadian Tire's Canadian tire is one of the largest retailers in Canada. Um, serving Canadians with a number of lines of business spanning automotive fixing, living, playing and SNG departments. We have a number of banners, including sport check Marks Party City Phl that covers more than 1700 locations. So as an organization, we've got vast variety of different data, whether it's product or loyalty. Now, as the time goes on, the number of asks the number off data points. The complexity of the analysis has been increasing on banned traditional tools. Analytical tools such as Excel Microsoft Access do find job but start hitting their limitations. So we started on the journey of exploring what other B I platforms would be suitable for our needs. And the criteria that we thought about as we started on that journey is to make sure that we enable customization as well as the McCarthy ization of data. What does that mean? That means we wanted to ensure that each one of the end users have ability to create their own versions off the report while having consistency from the data standpoint, we also wanted Thio ensure that they're able to create there at hawks search queries and draw insights based on the desired business needs. As each one of our lines of business as each one of our departments is quite unique in their nature. And this is where thoughts about comes into play. Um, you checked off all the boxes? Um, as current customers, as potential customers, you will discover that this is the tool that allows that at hawks search ability within a matter of seconds and ability to visualize the information and create those curated pin boards for each one of the business units, depending on what the needs are. And now where? I guess well, Andrea will talk a little bit more about how we gained adoption, but the usage was like and how we, uh, implemented the tool successfully in the organization. >>Okay, so I actually used to work for Canadian tire on DSO. During that time, I helped Thio build training and engaging users to sort of really kick start our use cases. Andi, the ongoing process of adopting thought spot through Canadian Tire s 01 of the sort of reasons that we moved into using thought spot was there was a need Thio evolve, um, in order to see the wealth of data that we had coming in. So the existing reporting again. And this is this sort of standard thoughts bought fix is, um, it brings the data toe. Everyone on git makes it more accessible, so you get more out of your data. So we want to provide users with the ability to customize what they could see and personalized three information so that they could get their specific business requirements out of the data rather than relying on the weekly monthly quarterly reporting. That was all usually fairly generic eso without the ability to deep dive in. So this gave the users the agility thio optimize their campaigns, optimize product murder, urgency where products are or where there's maybe supply chain gaps. Andi just really bring this out for trillions of rose to become accessible. Thio the Canadian tire. That's what user base think. That's the slide. >>That's the slight, Um So as Andrea talked about the business use of the particular tool, let's talk a little bit about how we set it up and a wonderful journey of how it's evolved. So we first implemented 5.3 version of that spot on the Falcon server on we've been adding horsepower to it over time. Now mhm. What I want to stress is the importance off the very first, Data said. That goes into the tool toe. Actually engage the users and to gain the adoption and to make sure there is no argument whether the tool is accurate or not. So what we've started with is a key p I marked layer with all the major metrics that we have and all the available permutations and combinations off the dimensions, whether it's a calendar dimension, proud of dimension or, let's say, customer attribute now, as we started with that data set, we wanted to make sure that we're we have the ability to add and the dimensions right. So now, as we're implementing the tool, we're starting to add in more dimension tables to satisfy the needs off our clients if you want to call it that way as they want to evolve their analytics. So we started adding in some of the store attributes we started adding in some of the product attributes on when I refer to a product attributes, let's say, uh, it involves costs and involves prices involved in some of the strategic internal pieces that we're thinking about now as the comprehensive mark contains right now, in our instance, close to five billion records. This is where it becomes the one source of truth for people declaring information against right so as they go in, we also wanted to make sure when they Corey thought spot there, we're really Onley. According one source of data. One source of truth. It became apparent over time, obviously, that more metrics are needed. They might not be all set up in that particular mark. And that's when we went on the journey off implementing some of the new worksheets or some of the new data sets particularly focused on the four looking pieces. And uh, that's where it becomes important to say This is how you gain the interest and keep the interests of the public right. So you're not just implementing a number off data sets all at once and then letting the users be you're implementing pieces and stages. You're keeping the interest thio, the tool relevant. You're keeping, um, the needs of the public in mind. Now, as you can imagine on the Falcon server piece, um, adding in the horsepower capacity might become challenging the mawr. Billions of Rosie erratic eso were actually in the middle of transitioning our environment to azure in snowflake so that we can connect it. Thio embrace capability of thoughts cloud. And that's where I'm looking forward to that in 2021 I truly believe this will enable us Thio increase the speed off adoption Increase the speed of getting insights out of the tool and scale with regards Thio new data sets that we're thinking about implementing as we're continuing our thoughts about journey >>Okay, so how we drove adoption Thio 4500 plus users eso When we first started Thio approach our use case with the merchants within Canadian Tire We had meetings with these users with who are used place is gonna be with and sort of found out. What are they searching for, Where they typically looking at what existing reports are available for them. Andi kind of sought out to like, What are those things where you're pulling this on your own or someone else's pulling this data because it's not accessible yet And we really use that as our foundation to determine one what data we needed to initially bring into the system but also to sort of create those launchpad pin boards that had the base information that the users we're gonna need so that we could twofold, make it easy for them, toe adopt into the tool and also quickly start Thio, deactivate or discontinue those reports. And just like these air now only available in thought spot because with the sort of formatting within thought spot around dates, it's really easy to make this year's report last year report etcetera. Just have everything roll over every month or a recorder s. So that was kind of some of the pre work foundation when we originally did it. But really, it's been a lot of training, a lot of training. So we conducted ah, lot of in person training, obviously pre co vid eso. We've started to train the group that we targeted, which was the merchants and all of the like, surrounding support groups. Eso we had planners going in and training as well, so that everyone who was really closely connected to the merchants I had an idea of what thoughts about what was and how to use it and where the reports were, and so we just sort of rolled it out that way, and then it started to fly like wildfire. Eso the merchants start to engage with supply chain to have conversations, or the merchants were engaging with the vendors to sort of have negotiations about pricing. And they're creating these reports and getting the access to the information so quickly, and they're sharing it out that we had other groups just coming to us asking, How do I get into thoughts about how can I get in on DSO on top of those groups, we also sought out other heavy analytics groups such a supply chain where we felt like they could have the same benefits if they on boarded into thought spot with their data as well on Ben. Just continuing to evolve the training roll out. Um, you know, we continued to engage with the users, >>so >>we had a newsletter briefly Thio, sort of just keep informing users of the new data coming in or when we actually upgraded our system. So the here are the new features that you'll start seeing. We did virtual trainings and maintaining an F A Q document with the incoming questions from the users, and then eventually evolved into a self guided learning so that users that were coming to a group, or maybe we've already done a full rollout could come in and have the opportunity to learn how to use thought spot, have examples that were relevant to the business and really get started. Eso then each use case sort of after our initial started to build into a formula of the things that we needed to have. So you need to understand it. Having SMEs ready and having the database Onda worksheets built out sort of became the step by step path to drive adoption. Um, from an implementation timeline, I think they're saying, Took about two months and about half of that waas Kenny entire figuring out how figuring out our security, how to get the data in on, Do we need the time to set up the environment and get on Falcon? So then, after that initial two months, then each use case that we come through. Generally, we've got users trained and SMEs set up within about 2 to 3 weeks after the data is ingested. It's not obviously, once snowflakes set up on the data starts to get into that and the data feeds in, then you're really just looking at the 2 to 3 weeks because the data is easily connected in, >>um, no. All right, let's talk about some of the use cases. So we started with what data we've implemented. Andrea touched upon what Use a training look like what the back curate that piece wants. Now let's talk a little bit about use cases and how we actually leverage thoughts bought together the insights. So the very first one is ultimately the benefit of the tool to the entire organization. Israel Time insights. To reiterate what Andrea said, we first implemented the tool with our buyers. They're the nucleus of any retail organization as they work with everybody within the company and as the buyer's eyes, Their responsibility to ensure both the procurement and the sales channel, um, stays afloat at the end of the day, right? So they need information on a regular basis. They needed fast. They needed timely, and they needed in a fashion that they choose to digest it. It right? Not every business is the same. Not every individual is the same. They consume digest, analyze information differently. And that's what that's what allows you to dio whether it's the search, whether it's a customized onboard, please now supply chain unexpected things. As Andrea mentioned Irish work a lot of supply chain. What is the goal of supply chain to receive product and to be able to ship that product to the stores Now, as our organization has been growing and is doing extremely well, we've actually published Q three results recently. Um, the aspect off prioritization at D C level becomes very important, And what drives some of that prioritization is the analysis around what the upcoming sales would be for specific products for specific categories. And that's where again thoughts. But is one of the tools that we've utilized recently to set our prioritization logic from both inbound and outbound us. It's right because it gives you most recent results. It gives you most granular results, depending on the business problem that you're trying to tackle. Now let's chat a little bit about covert 19 response, because this one is an extremely interesting case as a pandemic hit back in March. Um, as you can imagine, the everyday life a Canadian entire became as business unusual is our executives referred to it under business unusual. This speed and the intensity of the insights and the analytics has grown exponentially. And the speed and the intensity of the insights is driven by the fact that we were trying Thio ensure that we have the right selection of products for our Canadian customers because that's ultimately bread and butter off all of the retailers is the customers, right? So thoughts bought allowed us to have early trends off both sales and inventory patterns, where, whether we were stalking out of some of the products in specific stories of provinces, whether we saw some of the upload off different lines of business, depending on the region, ality right as pandemic hit, for example, um, gym's closed restaurants closed. So as Canadian pack carries a wide variety of different lines of business, we actually offer a wide selection of exercise equipment and accessories, cycling products as well as the kitchen appliances and kitchen accessories pieces. Right? So all of those items started growing exponentially and in certain areas more than others. And this is where thoughts about comes into play. A typical analysis on what the region ality of the sales has been over the last couple of days, which is lifetime and pandemic terms, um, could have taken days weeks for analysts to ultimately cobbled together an Excel spreadsheet. Meanwhile, it can take a couple of seconds for 12 Korean tosspot set up a PIN board that can be shared through a wide variety of individuals rather than fording that one Excel spreadsheet that gets manipulated every single time. And then you don't get the right inside. So from again merch supply chain covert response aspect of things. That spot has been one of those blessings and one of those amazing tools to utilize and improve the speed off insights, improved the speed of analytics and improve the speed of decision making that's ultimately impacting, then consumer at the store level. So Andrea talked about 4500 users that we have that number of school. But what I owe the recently like to focus on, uh, Andrew and I laughing because I think the last time we've spoken at a larger forum with the fastball community, I think we had only 500 users. That was in the beginning >>of the year in in February, we were aiming to have like 1000 >>exactly. So mission accomplished. So we've got 4500 employees now. Everybody asked me, Yeah, that's a big number, but how many times do people actually log in on a weekly or daily basis? I'm or interested in that statistic? So lately, um, we've had more than 400 users on the weekly basis. What's what's been cool lately is, uh, the exponential growth off ad hoc ways. So throughout October, we've reached a 75,000 ad hoc ways in our system and about 13,000 PIN board views. So why is that's that's significant? We started off, I would say, in January of 2020 when Andrea refers to it, I think we started off with about 40 45,000 ad hoc worries a month. So again, that was cool. But at the end of the day, we were able to thio double that amount as more people migrate to act hawk searches from PIN board views, and that's that's a tremendous phenomena, because that's what that's about is all about. So I touched upon a little bit about exercise and cycling. So these are our quarterly results for Q two, um, that have showed tremendous growth that we did not plan for, that we were able to achieve with, ultimately the individuals who work throughout the organization, whether it's the merch organization or whether it's the supply chain side of the business. But coming together and utilizing a B I platform by tools such a hot spot, we can see triple digit growth results. Eso What's next for us users at Hawks searches? That's fantastic. I would still like to get to more than 1200 people on the weekly basis. The cool number to me is if all of our lifetime users were you were getting into the tool on a weekly basis. That would be cool. And what's proven to be true is ultimately the only way to achieve it is to keep surprising and delighting them and your surprising and delighting them with the functionality of the tool. With more of the relevant content and ultimately data adding in more data, um, is again possible through ET else, and it's possible through pulling that information manually. But it's expensive, expensive not from the sense of monetary value, but it's expensive from the size time, all of those aspects of things So what I'm looking forward to is migrating our platform to azure in snowflake and being able thio scale our insights accordingly. Toe adding more data to Adam or incites more, uh, more individual worksheets and data sets for people to Korea against helps the each one of the individuals learn. Get some of the insights. Helps my team in particular be, well, more well versed in the data that we have existing throughout the organization. Um, and then now Andrea, in touch upon how we scale it further and and how each one of the individuals can become better with this wonderful >>Yeah, soas used a zero mentioned theater hawk searches going up. It's sort of it's a little internal victory because our starting platform had really been thio build the pin boards to replicate what the users were already expecting. So that was sort of how we easily got people in. And then we just cut off the tap Thio, whatever the previous report waas. So it gave them away. Thio get into the tool and understand the information. So now that they're using ad hoc really means they understand the tool. Um, then they they have the data literacy Thio access the information and use it how they need. So that's it's a really cool piece. Um, that worked on for Canadian tire. A very report oriented and heavy organization. So it was a good starting platforms. So seeing those ad hoc searches go up is great. Um, one of the ways that we sort of scaled out of our initial group and I kind of mentioned this earlier I sort of stepped on my own toes here. Um is that once it was a proven success with the merchants and it started to spread through word of mouth and we sought out the analyst teams. Um, we really just kept sort of driving the insights, finding the data and learning more about the pieces of the business. As you would like to think he knows everything about everything. He only knows what he knows. Eso You have to continue to cultivate the internal champions. Um Thio really keep growing the adoption eso find this means that air excited about the possibility of using thought spot and what they can do with it. You need to find those people because they're the ones who are going to be excited to have this rapid access to the information and also to just be able to quickly spend less time telling a user had access it in thought spot. Then they would running the report because euro mentioned we basically hit a curiosity tax, right? You you didn't want to search for things or you didn't want to ask questions of the data because it was so conversed. Um, it was took too much time to get the data. And if you didn't know exactly what you were looking for, it was worse. So, you know, you wouldn't run a query and be like, Oh, that's interesting. Let me let me now run another query of all that information to get more data. Just not. It's not time effective or resource effective. Actually, at the point, eso scaling the adoption is really cultivating those people who are really into it as well. Um, from a personal development perspective, sort of as a user, I mean, one who doesn't like being smartest person in the room on bought spot sort of provides that possibility. Andi, it makes it easier for you to get recognized for delivering results on Dahlia ble insights and sort of driving the business forward. So you know, B b that all star be the Trailblazer with all the answers, and then you can just sort of find out what really like helping the organization realized the power of thought spot on, baby. Make it into a career. >>Amazing. I love love that you've joined us, Andrea. Such a such an amazing create trajectory. No bias that all of my s o heaps of great information there. Thank you both. So much for sharing your story on driving such amazing adoption and the impact that you've been able to make a T organization through. That we've got a couple of minutes remaining. So just enough time for questions. Eso Andrea. Our first questions for you from your experience. What is one thing you would recommend to new thoughts about users? >>Um, yeah, I would say Be curious and creative. Um, there's one phrase that we used a lot in training, which was just mess around in the tool. Um, it's sort of became a catchphrase. It is really true. Just just try and use it. You can't break. It s Oh, just just play around. Try it you're only limitation of what you're gonna find is your own creativity. Um, and the last thing I would say is don't get trapped by trying to replicate things. Is that exactly as they were? B, this is how we've always done it. Isin necessarily The the best move on day isn't necessarily gonna find new insights. Right. So the change forces you thio look at things from a different perspective on defined. Find new value in the data. >>Yeah, absolutely. Sage advice there. Andan another one here for Yaro. So I guess our theme for beyond this year is analytics meets Cloud Open for everyone. So, in your experience, what does What does that mean for you? >>Wonderful question. Yeah. Listen, Angela Okay, so to me, in short, uh, means scale and it means turning Yes. Sorry. No, into a yes. Uh, no, I'm gonna elaborate. Is interest is laughing at me a little bit. That's right. >>I can talk >>Fancy Two. Okay, So scale from the scale perspective Cloud a zai touched upon Throw our conversation on our presentation cloud enables your ability Thio store have more data, have access to more data without necessarily employing a number off PTL developers and going toe a number of security aspect of things in different data sources now turning a no into a yes. What does that mean with more data with more scalability? Um, the analytics possibilities become infinite throughout my career at Canadian Tire. Other organizations, if you don't necessarily have access thio data or you do not have the necessary granularity, you always tell individuals No, it's not possible. I'm not able to deliver that result. And quite often that becomes the norm, saying no becomes the norm. And I think what we're all striving towards here on this call Aziz part the conference is turning that no one say yes on then making a yes a new, uh, standard a new form. Um, as we have more access to the data, more access to the insights. So that would be my answer. >>Love it. Amazing. Well, that kind of brings in into this session. So thank you, everyone for joining us today on did wrap up this dream. Don't miss the upcoming product roadmap eso We'll be sticking around to speak thio some of the speakers you heard earlier today and I'll make the experts round table, and you can absolutely continue the conversation with this life. Q. On Q and A So you've got an opportunity here to ask questions that maybe keep you up at night. Perhaps, but yet stay tuned for the meat. The experts secrets to scaling analytics adoption after the product roadmap session. Thanks everyone. And thank you again for joining us. Guys. Appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thanks. Thanks.

>>Yeah, yeah. >>Welcome back, everyone. And let's get ready for session number two, which is all around picking the right use cases. We're going to take a look at how to make the most of your data driven journey through the lens of some instructive customer examples. So today we're joined by thought squads David Copay, who is a director of business value consulting like Daniel, who's a customer success manager and then engagement manager. Andrea Frisk, who not so long ago was actually a product manager. Canadian Tire, who are one of our customers. And she was responsible for the thoughts. What implementation? So we figured Who better to get involved? But yeah, let's Let's take it away, David. >>Thanks, Gina. Welcome, everybody. And Andrea Blake looking forward to this session with you. A zoo. We all know preparation early is key to success on Duin. Any project having the right team on sponsorship Thio, build and deploy. Ah, use case is critical being focused on three outcome that you have in mind both the business deliverables and then also the success criteria of how you're going to manage, uh, manage and define success. When you get there, Eyes really critical to to set you up in the right direction initially. So, Andrea, as as we mentioned, uh, you came from an organization that quite several use cases on thoughts about. So maybe you can talk us through some of those preparation steps that, yeah, that you went through and and share some insights on how folks can come prepare appropriately. >>Eso having the right team members makes such a difference. Executive support really helped the Canadian tire adoption spread. It gave the project presence and clout in leadership meetings and helped to drive change from the top down. We had clear goals and success criteria from our executive that we used to shape the go forward plan with training and frame the initial use case roadmap. One of the other key benefits over executive sponsor was that the reporting team for our initial use case rolled up by underhand. So there was a very clear directive for a rapid phase out of the old tools once thought Spot supported the same data story. And this is key because as you start to roll through use cases, you wanna realize the value. And if you're still executing the old the same time as the new. That's not gonna happen. As we expanded into areas where we were unfamiliar with the data in business utilization, we relied on the data experts and and users to inform what success would look like in the new use cases. We learned early on that those who got volunteer old and helping didn't always become the champions. That would help you drive value from the use case. Using the thoughts about it meant tables. We started to seek out users who are consistently logging in after an initial training, indicating their curiosity and appetite to learn more. We also looked for activities outside of just pin board views toe identify users that had the potential to build and guide new users as subject matter experts, not just in a data but in thought spot. This helps us find the right people to cultivate who were already excited about the potential of thought spot and could help us champion a use case. >>That's really helpful, great, great insight for someone who's been there and done that. Blake is as a customer success manager. Obviously, you approach many of the same situations, anything you'd like to add that >>I still along with the right team. My first question with any use cases. Why Why are we doing this? You've gathered all this data and now we want to use it. But But what for? When you get that initial response on Why this use case? Don't stop there. Keep asking Why keep digging? Keep digging. Keep digging. So what you're essentially trying to get at is what does the decision is that we will be made or potentially be made because of this use case. For example, let's say that we're looking at an expenses use case. What will be done with the insides gathered with this use case? Are those insights going? Thio change the expense approval process Now, Once you have that, why defined now it becomes a lot easier to define the success criteria. Success criteria they use. Face can sometimes be difficult to truly defined. But when you understand why it becomes much easier, so now you can document that success criteria. And the hard part at that point is to actually track that success over time, track the success of the use case, which is something that is easily miss but It's something that is incredibly useful to the overall initiative. >>Right measure. Measure the outcomes. You can't manage what you what? You can't what you don't measure right? As the old adage goes, and you know it's part of the business consulting team. That's really where we come in. Is helping customers really fundamentally define? How are we going to measure a success? Aziz. We move forward. Andi, I think you know, I think we've alluded to this a little bit in terms of that sort of ongoing nature of This is, you know, after the title of the session, eyes choosing the right news cases in the plural right? So it's very important to remember that this is not a single point in time event that happens once. This is a constant framework or process, because most organizations will find that there's many use cases, potentially dozens of use cases that thoughts what could be used for, and clearly you can't move forward with all of them. At the same time, eso. Another thing that our team helps customers walk through is what's the impact, the potential value, other particular use case. You know, you, Blake, you mentioned some of those outcomes, is it? Changing the expense processes it around? Reducing customer churn is an increasing speed toe insight and speak the market on defining those measurable outcomes that define the vertical axis here. The strategic importance off that use case. Um, but that's not the only dimension that you're gonna look at the East to deploy factors into that you could have the most valuable use case ever. But if it's going to take you to three years to get it implemented for various reasons, you're not really gonna start with that one, right? So the combination of east to deploy, aligned with the strategic importance or business value really gives you that road map of where to focus to prioritize on use cases. Eso again, Andrea, you've been through this, um, in your prior time at Canadian time. Maybe you can share some thoughts on how you approach that. >>Yeah. So our initial use case was a great launching platform because the merchandizing team had a huge amount across full engagement. So once we had the merchants on board, we started to plan or use case roadmap looking for other areas, and departments were thought spot had already started to spread by word of mouth and we where we felt there was a high strategic importance. As we started to scope these areas, the ease of deployment started to get more complicated. We struggled to get the right people engaged and didn't always have the top down support for resources in the new use case area. We wanted to maintain momentum with the adoption, but it was starting to feel like we were stalling out on the freeway. Then the strategic marketing team reached out and was really excited about getting into thought spot. This was an underserved team where when it came to data, they always had someone else running it for them, and they'd have to request reports and get the information in. Um, and our initial roadmap focused on the biggest impact areas where we could get the most users, and this team was not on the radar. But when we started to engage with them, we realized that this was gonna be an easy deployment. We already had the data and thought spot to support their needs, and it turned into such a great win because as a marketing team, they were so thrilled to have thought spot and to get the data when they needed it and wanted it. They continued to spread the word and let everyone know. But it also gave the project team a quick win to put some gas in the tank and keep us moving. So you want to plan your use case trajectory, but you also need to be willing to adapt to keep the momentum going. >>Yeah, no, that's a That's a really great point. So So Blake is a customer success manager. I'm sure you lived through some integration of this all the time. So any anything you wanted to add that >>Yes. So to Andrew's point, continuous delivery is key for technical folks out there were talking and agile methodology mindset versus a waterfall. So to show value, there's many different factors that air at play. You need to look at the overall business initiatives. We need to look at financial considerations. We need to look at different career objectives and also resource limitations. So when you start thinking about all those different factors, this becomes a mixture of art and science. So, for example, at the beginning of a project when thought spot is has just been purchased or whatever tool has just been purchased. You want to show immediate value to justify that purchase. So in order to show immediate value, you might want to look at a project or a use case that is tightly aligned to a business objective. Therefore, it shows value, and it has data that is ready to go without many different transformations. But as you move forward, you have to come up with a plan that is going to mix together these difficult use cases with the easier use cases and high business values cases versus the lower. So in order to do that, my most successful customers are evaluating those different business factors and putting those into place with an overall use case development plan. >>Really good feedback. That's great. Thank you. Thanks, Blake. Um, I think s a little bit of a reality check here. Right. So I think we all recognize that any technology implementation, um, is gonna have her bumps in the road. It's not gonna be smooth sailing all along the way. You know, we talk about people, process and technology. The technology wrote wrote roadblocks can be infrastructure related there could be some of the data quality issues that you're alluding to there. Like Onda, people in process fall into the sort of the cultural, uh, cultural cultural side of it. Blake, maybe you can spend a couple minutes going through. What? What if some of those bigger roadblocks that people may face on that, um, technical side on how they could both prepare for them and then address them as they come along? >>Yeah. So the most intimidating part of any business intelligence or analytics initiative is that it's going to put the data directly into the hands of the business users. And this is especially true with ocelot. So why this is intimidating is because it's going toe, lay bare and expose any data issues that exist. So this is going to lead to the most common objective that I hear to starting. Any new use case or any FBI initiative overall, which is our data isn't ready. And essentially that is fear of failure. So when data isn't ready and companies aren't ready to start these projects, what happens is to get around those data issues. There's a lot of patchwork that's happening, you know, this patchwork is necessary just to keep the wheels in motion just to keep things going. So what I mean by the patchwork is extracting the data from a source doing some manual manipulation, doing some manipulation directly within the within the database in order to satisfy those business users request. So this keeps things going, but it's not addressing the key issues that are in place now. While it's intimidating to start these initiatives, the beauty of starting these B I initiatives is it's going to force your company to address and fix these issues. And this, to me, is somewhere where thoughts what is a gigantic benefit? It's not something that we talk about necessarily or market, but thought Spot is really good at helping fix these data issues. And I say this for two reasons. One his data quality. So, with thoughts about you can run, searches directly against your most granular level data and find where those data issues exist, and now, especially with embrace, you're running it directly against the source. So thats what is going to really help you figure out those data quality issues. So as you develop a use case, we can uncover those data quality issues and address them accordingly. And second is data governance. So especially again with embrace and our cloud, our cloud structure is you are going to be bringing Companies are going to be bringing data sources from all over the place all into one source and into one logical view. And so traditionally, the problem with that is that your data and source a might be the theoretically the same data and source B. But the numbers are different. And so you have different versions of the truth. So what thoughts about helps you do is when you bring those sources together. Now you're gonna identify those issues, and now you're gonna be forced to address them. You're gonna be forced to address naming convention issues, business logic issues, which business logic translates to the technical logic toe transform that data and then also security and access. Who was actually able to see this data across these different data sources. So overall, the biggest objective eye here is our data isn't ready. But I challenge that. And I say that by taking on this initiative with thought spot, you were going to be directly addressing that issue and thoughts. What's going to help you fix it? >>Yeah, that's Ah, I'd love that observation that, you know, data quality issues. They're not gonna go away by themselves. And if thoughts, thoughts what could be part of the solution, then even better. So that's a That's a really great observation. Eso Andrea, looking at the sort of the cultural side of things the people in process, Um, what are some of the challenges that you've seen there that folks in the audience could that could learn from? >>Yeah. So think about the last time you learned a new system or tool. How long did it take you to get adjusted and get the performance you wanted from it? Maybe you hit the ground running, but maybe you still feel like you're not quite getting the most out of it. Everyone deals with change differently, and sometimes we get stuck in the change curve and never fully adapt. Companies air no different. Ah, lot of the roadblocks you may face are not only from individual struggling to get on board, but can be the result of an organizational culture that may not be used to change or managing it. Their external impacts on how we accept change such as Was there a clear message about the upcoming changes and impacts? Was there a communication channel for questions and concerns? Did individuals feel like their input was sought after and valued? Where there are multiple mediums, toe learn from was their time to learn? Organizational change is hard. And if there isn't a culture that allocates time and resources to training, then realizing success is gonna be an uphill battle. It will be harder to move people forward if they don't have the time to get comfortable and feel acclimated to the new way of doing things. Without the training and change support from the organization, you'll end up running the old and the new simultaneously, which we talked about not in our live supporting users, in both eyes going to negate that value. There were times at Canadian Tire where we really struggled to get key stakeholders engaged or to get leadership by it on the time of the resources that we're gonna be needed and committed Thio to make a use case successful. So gauging where people and the organization are in the change curve is the first step in moving them along the path towards acceptance and integration. So you'll wanna have an action plan to address the concerns and resistance and a way to solicit and channel feedback. >>Yeah, that's Zo great feedback. And I particularly like what you talked about sort of the old and the new because, you know, we've talked about success and measurement on value quite a bit in this session, and ultimately that's that's the goal, right? Is to live a Value s o. This is a framework that we found really helpful visit. Value Team is defining those success criteria really actually falls into two categories on the right hand side. Better decisions. Um, that's ultimately what you're looking to drive with thoughts about right. You're looking to get newer inside faster to be able to drive action and outcomes based on decisions that do. Maybe we're using your gut for previously on the words under that heading. They're going to change by organizations. So you know, those don't get too caught up on those, but it's really around defining, you know, one. Are those better decisions that you're looking to drive, Who what's the persona is gonna be making them one of their actually looking to accomplish when inside. So they're looking to get one of what are the actions they're going to take on those insights? And then how do we measure Thean pact of those actions that then provides us with the the foundation of a business case in our I, um, in parallel to that, it's important to remember that this use case is not just operating in a vacuum, right? Every organization has a Siri's off strategic transformational initiatives move to the cloud democratized data, etcetera. And to the extent that you can tie particular use cases into those key strategic initiatives, really elevates the importance off that use case outside of its own unique business case. In our calculation on Bazzaz several purposes, right, it raises the visibility project. It raises the visibility of the person championing project on. Do you know reality here is that every idea organization has tons of projects have taken invest in, but the ones they're gonna be more likely to invest in other ones that are tied to those strategic initiatives. So it increases the likelihood of getting the support and funding that you need to drive this forward um, that's really around defining the success success criteria upfront. Um, and >>what >>we find is a lot of organizations do that pretty well, and they've got a solid, really solid business case to move forward. But then over time, they kind of forget about that on. Do you know, a year down the line two years down the line, Maybe even, you know, three months, six months down the line. Maybe people have rotated through the business. People have come and gone, and you almost forget the benefit that you're driving, right? And so it's really important to not do that and keep an eye on and track Onda, look back and analyze and realize the value that use cases have driven on. Obviously, the structure of that and what you measure is gonna very significantly by escape. But it's really important there Thio to make sure that you're counting your success and measuring your success. Um, Andrea, I don't any any thoughts on that from from your past experience. >>Yeah, um, success will be different For each use case, 1 may be focused on reducing the time to insights in a fast competitive market, while another may be driven by a need to increase data fluency to reduce risk. The weighting of each of these criterias will shift and and the value perception should as well. Um, but one thing that we don't want to forget is to share your personal successes. So be proud of the work that you've done in the value it's created. Um, if you're a user who has taken advantage of thought spot and managed to grab a competitive edge by having faster in depth access to data, share that in your business reviews. If you're managing the adoption at your company, share your use case winds and user adoption stories. Your customer success team is here to help you articulate the value and leverage the great work being done in and because of thought spot. >>Yeah, long story short here. This benefits everybody. This is something that's easily overlooked and something that it ZZ not to do this to track adoption to define the r o I, but it benefits those benefits. Start spot benefits of customers. Everybody wins. When we do this, >>that's Ah, that's a great point. So, um, so if we talk about you know, as we wrap the session up. You know what can what can folks in the audience dio right now to start making some of this stuff happened? You know, you're Blake again, coming back to you in customer success. How have you and your role help customers take that next step and start executing on some of the things that we've talked about? >>Yeah. So to start off with, I would just say for each use case as much as possible, define the why and to find the success criteria. Just start off with those two, those two elements and over time that that process we'll get more and more refined and our goal within the CSCE or within within thoughts. But overall, not just the C s order is to enable all of our all of our customers to be able to do all these things on their own. And to be a successful, it's possible to be able to pick the right use cases to be able to execute those right use cases as effectively as possible. So we are here to help with that. CS is here to help with that. Your account executives here to help with that, we have use case workshops. We have our professional services team that can get in and help develop use cases. So lots of options available in goal. We all mutually benefit when we try to track towards thes best possible use cases. >>All right, that we're here to help. That's Ah, that's a great way. Thio, wrap up the session there. Thanks, Blake. For all of your thoughts and Andrea to hope everyone in the audience got some valuable insights here on how to choose the right news case and be successful with thoughts about, um, with that being, I'll hand it back over to you. >>Amazing. That was an awesome session. Thank you so much, guys. So our third session is up next, and we're going to be going Global s. Oh, hang on tight as we explore best practices from the extended ecosystem of cloud based analytics. >>Yeah,

>>Bye from San Francisco. It's the cube covering RSA conference, 2020 San Francisco brought to you by Silicon angle media. >>Hey, welcome back. Everyone's keeps coverage here in San Francisco at the Moscone center for RSA conference 2020 I'm John, your host, as cybersecurity goes to the next generation as the new cloud scale, cyber threats are out there, the real impact a company's business and society will be determined by the industry. This technology and the people that a cube alumni here, caramel Jaffer, SVP, senior vice president of strategy and corporate development for iron net. Welcome back. Thanks to Shawn. Good to be here. Thanks for having so iron net FC general Keith Alexander and you got to know new CEO of there. Phil Welsh scaler and duo knows how to scale up a company. He's right. Iron is doing really well. The iron dome, the vision of collaboration and signaling. Congratulations on your success. What's a quick update? >> Well look, I mean, you know, we have now built the capability to share information across multiple companies, multiple industries with the government in real time at machine speed. >>Really bringing people together, not just creating collected security or clip to defense, but also collaborating real time to defend one another. So you're able to divide and conquer Goliath, the enemy the same way they come after you and beat them at their own game. >> So this is the classic case of offense defense. Most corporations are playing defense, whack-a-mole, redundant, not a lot of efficiencies, a lot of burnout. Exactly. Not a lot of collaboration, but everyone's talking about the who the attackers are and collaborating like a team. Right? And you guys talk about this mission. Exactly. This is really the new way to do it. It has, the only way it works, >> it is. And you know, you see kids doing it out there when they're playing Fortnite, right? They're collaborating in real time across networks, uh, to, you know, to play a game, right? You can imagine that same construct when it comes to cyber defense, right? >>There's no reason why one big company, a second big company in a small company can't work together to identify all the threats, see that common threat landscape, and then take action on it. Trusting one another to take down the pieces they have folk to focus on and ultimately winning the battle. There's no other way a single company is gonna be able defend itself against a huge decency that has virtually unlimited resources and virtually unlimited human capital. And you've got to come together, defend across multiple industries, uh, collectively and collaboratively. >> Do you mean, we talked about this last time and I want to revisit this and I think it's super important. I think it's the most important story that's not really being talked about in the industry. And that is that we were talking last time about the government protects businesses. If someone dropped troops on the ground in your neighborhood, the government would protect you digitally. >>That's not happening. So there's really no protection for businesses. Do they build their own militia? Do they build their own army? Who was going to, who's going to be their heat shield? So this is a big conversation and a big, it brings a question. The role of the government. We're going to need a digital air force. We're going to need a digital army, Navy, Navy seals. We need to have that force, and this has to be a policy issue, but in the short term, businesses and individuals are sitting out there being attacked by sophisticated mission-based teams of hackers and nation States, right? Either camouflaging or hiding, but attacking still. This is a huge issue. What's going on? Are people talking about this in D C well, >> John, look not enough. People are talking about it, right? And forget DC. We need to be talking about here, out here in the Silicon Valley with all these companies here at the RSA floor and bring up the things you're bringing up because this is a real problem we're facing as a nation. >>The Russians aren't coming after one company, one state. They're coming after our entire election infrastructure. They're coming after us as a nation. The Chinese maybe come after one company at a time, but their goal is to take our electoral properties, a nation, repurpose it back home. And when the economic game, right, the Iranians, the North Koreans, they're not focused on individual actors, but they are coming after individual actors. We can't defend against those things. One man, one woman, one company on an Island, one, one agency, one state. We've got to come together collectively, right? Work state with other States, right? If we can defend against the Russians, California might be really good at it. Rhode Island, small States can be real hard, defends against the Russians, but if California, Rhode Island come together, here's the threats. I see. Here's what it's. You see share information, that's great. Then we collaborate on the defense and work together. >>You take these threats, I'll take those threats and now we're working as a team, like you said earlier, like those kids do when they're playing fortnight and now we're changing the game. Now we're really fighting the real fight. >> You know, when I hear general Keith Alexander talking about his vision with iron net and what you guys are doing, I'm inspired because it's simply put, we have a mission to protect our nation, our people, and a good businesses, and he puts it into kind of military, military terms, but in reality, it's a simple concept. Yeah, we're being attacked, defend and attack back. Just basic stuff. But to make it work as the sharing. So I got to ask you, I'm first of all, I love the, I love what he has, his vision. I love what you guys are doing. How real are we? What's the progression? >>Where are we on the progress bar of that vision? Well, you know, a lot's changed to the last year and a half alone, right? The threats gotten a lot, a lot more real to everybody, right? Used to be the industry would say to us, yeah, we want to share with the government, but we want something back for, right. We want them to show us some signal to today. Industry is like, look, the Chinese are crushing us out there, right? We can beat them at a, at some level, but we really need the governor to go do its job too. So we'll give you the information we have on, on an anonymized basis. You do your thing. We're going to keep defending ourselves and if you can give us something back, that's great. So we've now stood up in real time of DHS. We're sharing with them huge amounts of data about what we're seeing across six of the top 10 energy companies, some of the biggest banks, some of the biggest healthcare companies in the country. >>Right? In real time with DHS and more to come on that more to come with other government agencies and more to come with some our partners across the globe, right? Partners like those in Japan, Singapore, Eastern Europe, right? Our allies in the middle East, they're all the four lenses threat. We can bring their better capability. They can help us see what's coming at us in the future because as those enemies out there testing the weapons in those local areas. I want to get your thoughts on the capital markets because obviously financing is critical and you're seeing successful venture capital formulas like forge point really specialized funds on cyber but not classic industry formation sectors. Like it's not just security industry are taking a much more broader view because there's a policy implication is that organizational behavior, this technology up and down the stack. So it's a much broad investment thesis. >>What's your view of that? Because as you do, you see that as a formula and if so, what is this new aperture or this new lens of investing to be successful in funding? Companies will look, it's really important what companies like forge point are doing. Venture capital funds, right? Don Dixon, Alberta Pez will land. They're really innovating here. They've created a largest cybersecurity focused fund. They just closed the recently in the world, right? And so they really focus on this industry. Partners like, Kleiner Perkins, Ted Schlein, Andrea are doing really great work in this area. Also really important capital formation, right? And let's not forget other funds. Ron Gula, right? The founder of tenable started his own fund out there in DC, in the DMV area. There's a lot of innovation happening this country and the funding on it's critical. Now look, the reality is the easy money's not going to be here forever, right? >>It's the question is what comes when that inevitable step back. We don't. Nobody likes to talk about it. I said the guy who who bets on the other side of the craps game in Vegas, right? You don't wanna be that guy, but let's be real. I mean that day will eventually come. And the question is how do you bring some of these things together, right? Bring these various pieces together to really create long term strategies, right? And that's I think what's really innovative about what Don and Alberto are doing is they're building portfolio companies across a range of areas to create sort of an end to end capability, right? Andrea is doing things like that. Ted's doing stuff like that. It's a, that's really innovation. The VC market, right? And we're seeing increased collaboration VC to PE. It's looking a lot more similar, right? And now we're seeing innovative vehicles like stacks that are taking some of these public sort of the reverse manner, right? >>There's a lot of interests. I've had to be there with Hank Thomas, the guys chief cyber wrenches. So a lot of really cool stuff going on in the financing world. Opportunities for young, smart entrepreneurs to really move out in this field and to do it now. And money's still silver. All that hasn't come as innovation on the capital market side, which is awesome. Let's talk about the ecosystem in every single market sector that I've been over, my 30 year career has been about a successful entrepreneurship check, capital two formation of partnerships. Okay. You're on the iron net, front lines here. As part of that ecosystem, how do you see the ecosystem formula developing? Is it the same kind of model? Is it a little bit different? What's your vision of the ecosystem? Look, I mean partnerships channel, it's critical to every cyber security company. You can't scale on your own. >>You've got to do it through others, right? I was at a CrowdStrike event the other day. 91% of the revenue comes from the channel. That's an amazing number. You think about that, right? It's you look at who we're trying to talk about partnering with. We're talking about some of the big cloud players. Amazon, Microsoft, right? Google, right on the, on the vendor side. Pardon me? Splunk crashes, so these big players, right? We want to build with them, right? We want to work with them because there's a story to tell here, right? When we were together, the AECOS through self is defendant stronger. There's no, there's no anonymity here, right? It's all we bring a specialty, you bring specialty, you work together, you run out and go get the go get the business and make companies safer. At the end of the day, it's all about protecting the ecosystem. What about the big cloud player? >>Cause he goes two big mega trends. Obviously cloud computing and scale, right? Multi-cloud on the horizon, hybrids, kind of the bridge between single public cloud and multi-cloud and then AI you've got the biggies are generally will be multiple generations of innovation and value creation. What's your vision on the impact of the big waves that are coming? Well, look, I mean cloud computing is a rate change the world right? Today you can deploy capability and have a supercomputer in your fingertips in in minutes, right? You can also secure that in minutes because you can update it in real time. As the machine is functioning, you have a problem, take it down, throw up a new virtual machine. These are amazing innovations that are creating more and more capability out there in industry. It's game changing. We're happy, we're glad to be part of that and we ought to be helping defend that new amazing ecosystem. >>Partnering with companies like Microsoft. They didn't AWS did, you know, you know, I'm really impressed with your technical acumen. You've got a good grasp of the industry, but also, uh, you have really strong on the societal impact policy formulation side of government and business. So I want to get your thoughts for the young kids out there that are going to school, trying to make sense of the chaos that's going on in the world, whether it's DC political theater or the tech theater, big tech and in general, all of the things with coronavirus, all this stuff going on. It's a, it's a pretty crazy time, but a lot of work has to start getting done that are new problems. Yeah. What is your advice as someone who's been through the multiple waves to the young kids who have to figure out what half fatigue, what problems are out there, what things can people get their arms around to work on, to specialize in? >>What's your, what's your thoughts and expertise on that? Well, John, thanks for the question. What I really like about that question is is we're talking about what the future looks like and here's what I think the future looks like. It's all about taking risks. Tell a lot of these young kids out there today, they're worried about how the world looks right? Will America still be strong? Can we, can we get through this hard time we're going through in DC with the world challenges and what I can say is this country has never been stronger. We may have our own troubles internally, but we are risk takers and we always win. No matter how hard it gets them out of how bad it gets, right? Risk taking a study that's building the American blood. It's our founders came here taking a risk, leaving Eagle to come here and we've succeeded the last 200 years. >>There is no question in my mind that trend will continue. So the young people out there, I don't know what the future has to hold. I don't know if the new tape I was going to be, but you're going to invent it. And if you don't take the risks, we're not succeed as a nation. And that's what I think is key. You know, most people worry that if they take too many risks, they might not succeed. Right? But the reality is most people you see around at this convention, they all took risks to be here. And even when they had trouble, they got up, they dust themselves off and they won. And I believe that everybody in this country, that's what's amazing about the station is we have this opportunity to, to try, if we fail to get up again and succeed. So fail fast, fail often, and crush it. >>You know, some of the best innovations have come from times where you had the cold war, you had, um, you had times where, you know, the hippie revolution spawn the computer. So you, so you have the culture of America, which is not about regulation and stunting growth. You had risk-taking, you had entrepreneurship, but yet enough freedom for business to operate, to solve new challenges, accurate. And to me the biggest imperative in my mind is this next generation has to solve a lot of those new questions. What side of the street is the self driving cars go on? I see bike lanes in San Francisco, more congestion, more more cry. All this stuff's going on. AI could be a great enabler for that. Cyber security, a direct threat to our country and global geopolitical landscape. These are big problems. State and local governments, they're not really tech savvy. They don't really have a lot ID. >>So what do they do? How do they serve their, their constituents? You know, look John, these are really important and hard questions, but we know what has made technology so successful in America? What's made it large, successful is the governor state out of the way, right? Industry and innovators have had a chance to work together and do stuff and change the world, right? You look at California, you know, one of the reasons California is so successful and Silicon Valley is so dynamic. You can move between jobs and we don't enforce non-compete agreements, right? Because you can switch jobs and you can go to that next higher value target, right? That shows the value of, you know, innovation, creating innovation. Now there's a real tendency to say, when we're faced with challenges, well, the government has to step in and solve that problem, right? The Silicon Valley and what California's done, what technology's done is a story about the government stayed out and let innovators innovate, and that's a real opportunity for this nation. >>We've got to keep on down that path, even when it seemed like the easier answer is, come on in DC, come on in Sacramento, fix this problem for us. We have demonstrated as a country that Americans and individual are good at solve these problems. We should allow them to do that and innovate. Yeah. One of my passions is to kind of use technology and media to end communities to get to the truth faster. A lot of, um, access to smart minds out there, but young minds, young minds, uh, old minds, young minds though. It's all there. You gotta get the data out and that's going to be a big thing. That's the, one of the things that's changing is the dark arts of smear campaigns. The story of Bloomberg today, Oracle reveals funding for dark money, group biting, big tech internet accountability projects. Um, and so the classic astroturfing get the Jedi contract, Google WASU with Java. >>So articles in the middle of all this, but using them as an illustrative point. The lawyers seem to be running the kingdom right now. I know you're an attorney, so I'm recovering, recovering. I don't want to be offensive, but entrepreneurship cannot be stifled by regulation. Sarbanes Oxley slowed down a lot of the IPO shifts to the latest stage capital. So regulation, nest and every good thing. But also there's some of these little tactics out in the shadows are going to be revealed. What's the new way to get this straightened out in your mind? We'll look, in my view, the best solution for problematic speech or pragmatic people is more speech, right? Let's shine a light on it, right? If there are people doing shady stuff, let's talk about it's an outfit. Let's have it out in the open. Let's fight it out. At the end of the day, what America's really about is smart ideas. >>Winning. It's a, let's get the ideas out there. You know, we spent a lot of time, right now we're under attack by the Russians when it comes to our elections, right? We spent a lot of time harping at one another, one party versus another party. The president versus that person. This person who tells committee for zap person who tells committee. It's crazy when the real threat is from the outside. We need to get past all that noise, right? And really get to the next thing which is we're fighting a foreign entity on this front. We need to face that enemy down and stop killing each other with this nonsense and turn the lights on. I'm a big believer of if something can be exposed, you can talk about it. Why is it happening exactly right. This consequences with that reputation, et cetera. You got it. >>Thanks for coming on the queue. Really appreciate your insight. Um, I want to just ask you one final question cause you look at, look at the industry right now. What is the most important story that people are talking about and what is the most important story that people should be talking about? Yeah. Well look, I think the one story that's out there a lot, right, is what's going on in our politics, what's going on in our elections. Um, you know, Chris Krebs at DHS has been out here this week talking a lot about the threat that our elections face and the importance about States working with one another and States working with the federal government to defend the nation when it comes to these elections in November. Right? We need to get ahead of that. Right? The reality is it's been four years since 2016 we need to do more. That's a key issue going forward. What are the Iranians North Koreans think about next? They haven't hit us recently. We know what's coming. We got to get ahead of that. I'm going to come again at a nation, depending on staff threat to your meal. Great to have you on the QSO is great insight. Thanks for coming on sharing your perspective. I'm John furrier here at RSA in San Francisco for the cube coverage. Thanks for watching.

>>from San Francisco. It's the Q covering pager duty Summit 2019. Brought to you by pager Duty. >>Hey, welcome back there, Right, Jeffrey here with the cue, We're pager duty Psalm in its fourth year page summit Third year The Cube being here at West say, Fritz in downtown San Francisco and tying a pager duty summons up running the Western Frances. We're excited to be joined by our next two guests coming all way across the Pacific Ocean. My media left is Daniel Sultaana, group director for >>Sass for Technology. Want Daniel? Great to see you. Thank you. On his left camera. Network TV production engineer Lee also for technology one woke up. So first question. First time in the States. >>Not the first time. The state of into the states, Many tires. So it's a great comeback. California particular center. It is the >>first time for May, but it's been absolutely great. I got the whole weekend to explore San Francisco. Just one >>good give great. It's a great place thio around, but let's talk about Pedro December 1st time duty, Simon A lot. Actually, 1000 people company I P o. This year, a lot of buzz around here >>Really exciting. Great for pages. Video. I appreciate very similar company to technology wanted. Tim saws terms off genetic heritage. So there's a lot of affiliation between our two companies. >>All right, let's jump into what is technology. >>So technology wanted to Australia's largest enterprise software company. We produce software in a few vertical markets, focusing on higher education, local federal government, asset intensive and healthy. >>All right, so you guys are presenting later today on a really interesting topic referenced in the keynote. Your conversation is having increased customer experiences without burning out your people. I think the official report was unplanned work. The human impact been always on world. This is a really deal. People about the human impact duty, the pager. Peter's got a ring somewhere. You see a big impact in terms of the pressure on the teams to deliver with this kind of consumerism ation of I t expect. And that's >>exactly if you look at the enterprise well. Vanda pauses, expecting consumer response. You know, if your Netflix goes down your home tonight, you want that keeps immediately. It's the same pressure now that we're saying transferring today, it's complicated >>for me on on myself. So implementing these kind of systems that just helps an awful ones really understand and reduce the amount of time that we're spending on those incidents after Alice. >>Right? Because we talk a lot about unplanned downtime and maintenance for here, right on machines. And it's hugely impactful and a lot of conversations about prescriptive maintenance and kind of getting ahead of that. We don't hear that conversation so much about people you got humans about. The humans evolved, and I really interesting take as we go aboard. The complexity of the systems between the 80 eyes and everything's connected is no astronomically more complex. And it wasn't >>it definitely is way usedto have very simple traditional surfaces, but now it's hundreds of different services and applications that only talk together. Managing That's a very different game when it used to be >>right. So how does painting maybe help you? How did you start to build a I machine learning for it to be able to get a triage and more importantly, you know, assigned right tasked with the right people, >>I think first start off with us having many district systems bring that together, falling through. So it's like having many different nations around the world. Trying to talk, but not a common interface on bringing together was a first >>for us. What's next? They're still together, >>still pulling together now, actually understanding what we have turning that into processes that are more efficient, using the technology to move the various conversation alerts and information right ares triage ahead of time before problems actually happening. >>I think the other thing that we're more towards starting to use the diner a lot more to make more valuable got agreement, decisions, a supposed toe, intuition based decisions that we used to make >>right, replace something else that you already had kind of a supplement, >>not replace it. So So if I go back just to the technology wanted a street we're 30 years old started off before the Internet. So as we made this transition from on premises to a sax baseball way, needed tools help us in these multiple always on world. >>So So what? What are the characteristics of the biggest problems come up in terms of application interfaces or no way at all? These things tied together what seems to be the weakest link What is the one that you know most banks Now you can kind of reduced the settings. >>I don't think there's any one specific thing way. Talk about Cole's. An awful lot guards really great causes. It's very rarely ever one simple thing that's caused the problem. It's normally a multiple factors that come into play, and some of that can be. Has the engineer being cold three times. I've not came to what with two hours sleep, >>right? And you said you said you carry a pager and hopefully you don't have it All right Now >>it is on >>its way to switch number inside of me. Have you seen seen a reduction in kind of the pressure call in the qualities stuff that gets through triage and actually make it to the major >>way some stuff, way fix from bed. Now you stop to wake up >>way getting up. >>So we used a pager beauty my bollock way. Have some stuff that we built into that as well. And waken fix things from Ben >>give you exact way, have some issues that take us minutes to resolve. We've managed to bring that down to three >>wise that because better, better tasking of the people. Better identification problems were some things that drive exactly that. >>So it is bringing the multiple inputs into a central place that being interpreted and then being shifted off to the right resources to be able to fix it behind. Or there's no some automated, tacit kickoff. And that just condenses the whole into in process dramatically. So our customers seeing a much greater meantime between failure because we could get on the things a lot faster. >>Okay, so lessons for people thinking about paging me. What would you tell him? Some of your peers that are that are carrying the pager and red eyed way. >>Look, I think managing your PayPal is very important, I think way living in a world where talent is actually hard to secure. So you need to ensure that that talent is protected and looked after well nourished and grows on. So we've just page me to help do that, sure that teams don't burn out to understand what root causes also attack a rock, pools on become more efficient. >>Is there any specific characteristics are attributes in the people leaving? They're in their behavior, things that they do You're measuring as being now less burning? Absolutely >>way. Actually running employee in peace >>So they all just wrote a book. Five. So they get >>Andrea Lee. Something fundamental was around with number out of Dallas. That was That was really died. Other measure its foreign off. I wonder what a >>charity secrets. But when things were not good, orders of magnitude of work was done. Kind of unscheduled, which is causing this angst. How's that? Kind of? Just >>wear multiple hours every night. I'll be, quite frankly, people was on way. Knew that's how far. >>Right? Right, Right. >>Good. Well, thank you. Thank you for sharing the story. And good luck. Hopefully nobody else resigns and keep a couple a bunch of happy, happy clients opened out and deliver the great customer experience. Absolutely. Alright, >>stand the camera. Jeff, You're watching the cube? Were some it downtown

>>Live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the cube covering Ansible Fest 2019 brought to you by red hat. >>Welcome back everyone. That's the cubes live coverage for two days here in Atlanta, Georgia for Ansible Fest. I'm John fire with my cohost, stupid man. Andrew has been, Oh Kratos who's here and senior principal product manager at Ansible. Welcome to the cube. Welcome back. Thank you. Good to see you. 2017 you were last on red hat summit. It's like, Oh it was a, it was basically the introduction to the Ansible network basically. So, so much has gone on. One of the things I'm really impressed by this event and why we're here is um, configuration management and super important part of the plumbing. We all know dev ops is infrastructure as code, but as the evolution of cloud and software is changing the game, you start to see visibility into where automation's coming in. This is the whole focus of the event automation for all. It's the theme w w and this is about the core infrastructure. >>So it's not like it's just a random thing. Six most popular in get hub project out of millions. This is real. It's real. It's quite real and especially on the network side. This is something that came out organically. The birth of Ansible network was because it was agent lists, honestly, you know, simple, powerful agent lists. The agent list piece was the piece that really made it really fly for Ansible. Configuration management. By the way, on net networking side when we talked about this before is the most important because that's where it's the most static has one of those where it's been most static. I mean we all know networking, right? But as networking becomes policy base and moves up the stack, we've seen some firms like Cisco trying to figure out their dev net. It's like you starting to see the networking mindset moving up the stack. >>This is super huge change. It's a huge change. But the nice thing is that it's easy to get into. So all the network operators and network engineers, they're still used to using command and config modules with their iOS devices, their iOS devices, Juniper, all those things, right? They don't have to throw away everything they've learned for the past 10 15 years in order to get with Ansible. And then when they go beyond that, then they can start seeing the real power of the platform, which we announced today. So going from command line to programmability is kind of what's happening. Yes, absolutely. And what's the big four, the big key factors right now that are driving this? So a lot of key factors are, I mean, you saw the keynote this morning with Microsoft, that's our, that was a huge, and it'd been doing this for about two years. >>So they started from, from nothing. He chose Ansible and they quickly saw that the power of automation for the networks, but they had to grow it at scale. So that was the big problem was how do we do this at scale while still using all the knowledge that we've learned? So day zero, day one, it's extremely important and obviously we know that, but as we were going down the journey with them from a engineering standpoint, day two became extremely important. And that's what we're, we're focused on now. You know, uh, it was really interesting. Microsoft really talked about that cultural shift. Uh, you know, we've heard in the networking space forever, it was like you're all going to need to become coders. You're going to need to be able to do this to tell us how Ansible is really impacting some of those cultural shifts in a, you know, how is that discussion changed today versus what it might've been a few years ago? >>It's truly half the battle is the culture I like to call it as everyone's talking about digital transformation in a network world, this is an analog transformation in all honesty. This isn't anything about the bits and bytes. You cannot automate anything today. There are lots of point tools to automate networks today, but how are you gonna actually move that into a world where culturally you can have people buy in from the bottom up organically as well as from the top down from the it managers. It's extremely important. So on the platform announcement, the key and as was the Ansible automation platform, where can you just help us understand the relationship between network automation and the automation platform? Because I'll see an you need to move things around the network, but there's a lot of other things being configured as well and automated. What's the relationship between the two? >>So before we had the platform actually ends well network was an actual product. It was a separate skew as a separate offering and we treated it as such as a platform. We were like the first Guinea pigs I like to think of, we were the ones that said let's treat Ansible as a platform and let's move it that way. So we actually went out and built roles. We built modules, we built a network engine, which is a parser, right? Similar like text, FSM, uh, you know, those kinds of things. We put those in galaxy 22,000 downloads later. We proved it. We know that everything that we're doing in galaxy today for Ansible network proves the fact that people are using it as a platform. And we were successful in that, doing that and then telling me yours was that just track record wise, what was it, how many years? >>Oh, that was a year. So to.seven was when we released network engine for parsing, parsing CLI commands, you know, and that moves into the next generation of what we call the day two operations for networking is typically we see network configuration has been a one way street. So you would pull a configuration data from a device, you would have to parse it, you put it in SCM, it's an an SCM and now you actually have to put into a template and then you push it. Right. This has been a one way street typically, and it's an Ansible has been very good at one way streets, but now we're moving towards an Ansible two. Dot nine coming soon is making that a two way street. So integrating the fat collection from module, so when you pull facts from iOS, EOS and XLS, et cetera, treating that data consistently across the board and using that for it. >>Networking is one of the tracks here at this show. What are, what are some of the more popular things? What, what, what? Where's the focus? The focus is, it's across the board. Again, you have people that are it managers that have been doing Ansible for years and now they're saying, Hey look, they're seeing network automation is extremely pervasive. How can we get that into our pipeline? We have ticketing systems. How can we integrate ancil network with our larger business processes? And then tops like top five use cases, the typical backing up systems, uh, from, uh, you know, backup, restore a, and then doing a lot of sorts of true things there too. So making sure that you have all of your, your network configuration data off the box, right? A lot of people are fetching configurations from thousands and thousands devices. That's pretty hard to do. So let's make that easier for them. >>What's been the customer interest and the growth path for network automation? Because I'll see, that makes sense. I see a different product, but now that the automation picture's getting wider and bigger, what's the interest from customers say? The key focus area though on that? Well, we've typically focused on to date and, and from the marketing slides is the number of platforms we've supported. We can always see up to the right, right. We support 10 platforms, 2030, we're up to 65 platform supported. I think we've pretty much proven the fact that I think we can pretty much work on anything. So it's going beyond that and making lives easier for the network operators, engineers holistically. And this event here, what's going on here for you guys here? What specific tracks are doing? Right? So we're actually conversations you having. Yeah, we're talking more about the actual resource modules that are coming in two dot nine I was talking about, which is bringing fact collection and the modules together as a two way street. >>So as people start moving into this day two operations, um, we have a lot of experts here and they're hitting stumbling blocks around. They're managing ginger temp like 500 lines into templates, like on a daily basis. Nobody wants to do that. So we're getting to a place where the people that are really relying on Ansible in it, in the expert field, making it much, much easier for them to look forward. We had Greg on earlier. And um, Robin, they talk about the glue layer that Ansible provides for the folks that are not using Ansible, what's the big message that you'd like to send them? What's the, what's the real, uh, attraction from the customers and why should people be using Ansible? Well, it, yeah, I mean it's, it, it's for everything. I mean, you don't have to, you really don't. I mean, it, it speaks for itself, but it breaks down the barriers. >>If you're a server person, a restorative person or a cloud person or a windows person or a network person, you all have the same language base in Ansible and you can get things done more quickly and more efficiently that way. So one of the other things we were talking to the community about is the, the feedback loops that you have with the community to tell us a little bit about what your teams hoping to get from the users attending and barges. Oh, absolutely. On the animal network side, everything is done transparently in the community. We have weekly, we have a community meetup. We've had this for a long time. Everything's out in the open. Everything's in get hub. Everything that we've done, we've had a contributor day. I don't know if you were here on Monday, it was focused on network. We're pitching this idea around resource modules in the, in the forward strategy of, of the platform as it relates to network, everyone including the contributors, developers, the partners, all of the people that you could see that half the off half the vendors here on the floor, our network partners. >>So they're invested as well. They want this to succeed. So we're extremely proud and happy that they're along for the ride as well. Alright. Maybe explain to our audience what an angry potato is. Uh, it's a, was it a tater, it's an angry tater. Uh, yeah, it's a, the mascot for AWX I believe. And um, yeah, they're fun. The stickers and little plushes. So we're going back to keep sticking appreciation. What's the coolest thing that you're, you've seen this year that you think people should know about? Oh, wow. Um, I think a lot of, a lot of focus around testing and development. So a lot of developers are now writing code. They're rebuilding the wheel themselves. So developers are writing the same stuff over and over and over again. So how can we scale that to say, Hey, why don't we all get together and write the same code and then about testing. >>So once you actually have the code, you have a lot of vendors here on CIC, D testing quality. So we at its Ansible, um, we can talk, and this was Greg, I don't know if you mentioned earlier, but Greg to go into Sprig said, you know, we're really good at making sure, um, playbooks and roles and modules are correct, but we want to make sure that the vendors and the developers like focused on the functionality. We can give them guidance around, um, syntax and correctness, but we want to make sure that the innovation really comes from them. Andrea, talk about this annual Fest this year, 2019 as we run into 2020 coming up towards the end of the year, fall here. Why is this year different? What's important about this year? Um, this seems to be, this almost seems to be an inflection point this year. Why? Why is it so important as what's what's going on right now that makes this event so popular? >>You're seeing convergence in a lot of different activities. The, the silos around you typically say, I'm a, I'm a, you know, I'm, I do Kubernetes or I do network or I do cloud. You're starting to see a lot of these people like, okay, well I have to do a cloud. I have to do a cloud VPN connection using containers and automate the network. So you're starting to see a lot of these different traditional people having to think outside of their traditional areas and have to start thinking about other areas to their, whatever that whatever their technology silo is in their head, they have to start learning or they're being forced to learn around a lot of different things. It's a systems architecture. Absolutely. System says consequences. You can't just dig in the silo. That's the issue. Absolutely. That seems to be the core issue. And also culturally it's collaborative. I mean, who would have thought configuration management be the next social network for enterprises at turning it out to be, yeah, absolutely. Not social network. Literally like Facebook, but you know, thanks to come on. Thank you so much for having said, we're bringing all the action down here at Asheville Fest where dev ops is being operationalized cultural change within organizations, but keep abilities much more of a systems view now. So the networking is a key part of it. I'm John for a stupid man back after this short break.

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the cubes Live coverage of Del World Technologies Here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host Stew Minutemen. We have two guests on the seven, both both Cube veterans. So we have Varun Cabra. He is the VP product Marketing Cloud Delhi Emcee and Moeneeb unit. Minute Soudan VP Solutions Product marketing at VM. Where. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thanks for having >> thanks for having us. So we just had the keynote address we heard from Michael Dell Satya Nadella Pack Girl Singer It's a real who's who of this of this ecosystem. Break it down for us. What? What did we hear? What is what is sort of the most exciting thing from your perspective? >> So, Rebecca, what? What we hear from customers again and again is it's a multi cloud world, right? Everybody has multiple cloud deployments, but we saw that mentioned five on average cloud architectures in customer environments and what we keep hearing from them is they There are operational silos that developed as part of the to set the fellas that are different. The machine formats. All of these things just lied a lot of lead to a lot of operational silos in complexity, and the customers are overwhelming or willingly asking William C. As well as being Where is that? How do we reduce this complexity? How do we we'll be able to move, were close together? How do we manage all of this in a common framework and reduce some of the complexity? So there's really they could take advantage off the promise of Monte Club. >> Yeah, so many. The Cube goes to all the big industry shows. I feel like everywhere I go used to be, you know, it's like intel and in video, up on stage for the next generation. Well, for the last year, it felt like, you know, patent Sanjay, or, you know, somebody like that, you know, up on stage with Google Cloud of a couple of years ago, there was Sanjay up on St Come here. They're searching Adela up on stage. So let's talk about that public cloud piece China. We know you know the relationship with a wsbn were clad in a ws sent ripples through the industry on you know, the guru cloud piece. So tell us what's new and different peace when it comes to come up to public clouded. How does that fit with in relation to all the other clouds? >> Sure, no, I'll amplify. You know what Aaron said, Right? We think about customer choice first. Andrea Lee, customer choice. As you know, you got multiple cloud providers. We've seen customers make this choice off. I need to make this, you know, a multi cloud world. Why're they going towards the multi clothing world? It's because applications air going there on really well, where strategy has bean to say, How do we empower customers without choice? Are you know, eight of us partnership is as strong as ever, but we continue to eat away there, and that was their first going to choice a platform. And Patty alluded to this on the stage. We have four thousand cloud provider partners right on the four thousand block provider partners we've built over the years, and that includes, you know, not small names. They include IBM. They, like, you know, they've got in Iraq space. Some of the biggest cloud providers. So our strategy is always being. How do we take our stack and and lighted and as many public laws? It's possible. So we took the first step off IBM. Then you know, about four thousand. You know, other plot providers being Rackspace, Fujitsu, it's Archie. Then came Amazon. I'm is on being the choice of destination for a lot of public clouds. Today we kind of further extend that with Microsoft and, you know, a few weeks ago with Google, right? So there's really about customer choice and customers when they want the hybrid multi Claude fees his abdomen right. You got two worlds, you couldn't existing application and you're looking Just get some scale out of that existing application and you're building a lot of, you know, native cloud native applications. They want this, you know, in multiple places. >> All right, so if I could just drilled down one level deep, you know? So if I'm in as your customer today, my understanding it's Veum or STD. Sea Stack. What does that mean? You know what I use, You know? How is that? You can feel compare? Do I use the Microsoft? You know System Center. Am I using V Center? You know, >> shark now, and this is really again in an abdomen. Calm conversation, right where they were multiple announcements in here just to unpack them there. It's like, Hey, we had the Del Technologies Cloud platform. The Del Technologies clock platform is powered by, you know, Delhi emcee infrastructure and be aware Cloud Foundation on top, where slicing your full computer network storage with the sphere of visa and a sex and management. Right. And the second part was really We've got being where cloud on a deli emcee. The system brings a lot of the workloads which stood in public clouds. We're seeing this repatriation off workloads back on. You know, on the data center are the edge. This is really driven by a lot of customers and who have built native I pee in the public cloud beyond Amazon beat ashore who want to now bring some of those workloads closer to the, you know, data center or the edge. Now this comes to how do I take my azure workloads and bring it closer to the edge or my data center? Why's that? I need you know, we have large customers, you know. You know, large customers multinational. They have, you know, five hundred thousand employees, ninety locations will wide. Who built to I p or when I say I p applications natively in cloud suddenly for five thousand employees and ninety locations, they're going ingress egress. Traffic to the cloud public cloud is huge. How do I bring it closer to my data centers? Right. And this is where taking us your workloads. Bringing them, you know, on prime closer salts. That big problem for them. Now, how do I take that workloads and bring them closer? Is that where we landed in the Veum wear on Del, you know AMC Infrastructure? Because this big sea closer to the data center gives me either Lowell agency data governance and you know, control as well as flexibility to bring these work clothes back on. Right? So the two tangent that you're driving both your cloud growth and back to the edge The second tangent of growth or explosion is cloud native workloads. We're able to bring them closer. Your data center is freely though the value proposition, right? >> Well, we heard so much about that on the main stage this morning about just how differently with modern workforce works in terms of the number of devices that used the different locations they are when they are doing the tasks of their job. >> You talk a little bit about the >> specifics in terms of customers you're working with. You don't need a name names. But just how you are enabling the >> way get feedback from customers in all industries, right? So you don't even share a few as well Way have large banks that are, you know, they're standardized their workloads on VM where today, right as as have many Morgan is ations, and they're looking for the flexibility to be able to move stuff to the cloud or moving back on premises and not have to reformat, not have to change that machine formats and just make it a little easy. They want the flexibility to be able to run applications in their bank branches right in the cloud, right? But then they don't they don't necessarily want adopt a new machine format for a new standardized platform. That's really what Thie azure announcement helps them do, Just like with eight of us, can now move workloads seamlessly to azure USVI center. Use your other you know, tools that you're familiar with today. Already to be ableto provision in your work clothes. All >> right, so for and what? Wonder if we could drill into the stack a little bit here? You know, I went to the Microsoft show last year, and it was like, Oh, WSSD is very different than Azure Stack even if you look at the box and it's very much the same underneath the covers, there was a lot of discussion of the ex rail. We know how fast that's been growing. Can you believe there's two pieces? This there's the VCF on Vieques rail and then, you know, just help. Help explain >> s o for the Del Technologies Cloud Platform announcement, which is, as you said, VX rail in first hcea infrastructure with Mia McLeod foundations tightly integrated, right, so that the storage compute and networking capabilities of off the immortal foundation are all incorporated and taken advantage off it. In the end structure. This is all about making things easier to consume, right, producing the complexity for customers. When they get the X trail, they overwhelmingly tell us they want to use the metal foundations to be able to manage and automate those workloads. So we're packaging this up out of the box. So when customers get it, they have That's cloud experience on premises without the complexity of having to deploy it because it's already integrated, cited the engineering teams have actually worked together. And then you can then, as we mentioned, extend those workloads to public loud, using the same tools, the same, the MSR foundation tools. >> And, you know, uh, we built on Cloud Foundation for a while, and I'm sure you followed us on the Cloud Foundation. And that has bean when you know yes, we talk about consistent infrastructure, consistent operations, this hybrid cloud world and what we really mean. Is that really where? Cloud foundation stack, right? So when we talk about the emcee on eight of us, is that Cloud foundation stack running inside of Amazon? When we talk about you know, our partnership with the shore, he's not being where Cloud Foundation stack running on a shore. We talk about this four thousand partners. Cloud certified IBM. It is the Cloud Foundation stack and the key components being pulled. Stack the Sphere v. Santana Sex and there's a critical part in Cloud Foundation called lifecycle management. It's, you know, it's missed quite easily, right? The benefit of running a public cloud. The key through the attributes you get is you know, you get everything as a service, you get all your infrastructure of software. And the third part is you don't spend any time maintaining the interoperability between you compete network storage. And that is a huge deal for customers. They spent a lot of time just maintaining this interrupt and, you know, view Marie Claude Foundation has this life cycle manager which solves that problem. Not not just Kee. >> Thank you for bringing it up because, right, one of the big differences you talk about Public Cloud, go talk to your customer and say, Hey, what version of Microsoft Azure are you running and the laughter you and say like, Well, Microsoft takes care of that. Well, when I differentiate and I say Okay, well, I want to run the the same stack in my environment. How do I keep that up today? We know the VM where you know customers like there's lots of incentives to get them there, but oftentimes they're n minus one two or something like that. So how do we manage and make sure that it's more cloud like enough today? >> Yeah, absolutely. So. So there's two ways to do that to one of them is because the V m. A and L E M C team during working on engineering closely together, we're going to have the latest word in supported right right out the gate. So you have an update, you know that it's gonna work on your your hardware or vice versa. So that's one level and then with via MacLeod and L E M C. We're also providing the ability to basically have hands off management and have that infrastructure running your data center or your eyes locations, but at the same time not have to manage it. You leave that management to tell technologies into somewhere. To be able to manage that solution for you is really, as Moody said, bringing that public loud experience to your own premise. Locations is long, >> and I think that's one of the big, different trainers that's going to come right. People want to get that consumption model, and they're trying to say, Hey, how do I build my own data center, maintain it, but the same time I want to rely on, you know, dull and beyond Where to come and help us build it together. Right? And the second part of announcement was really heavy and wear dull on the d l E M C. Is that Manager's offered the demo you saw from June. Yang was being able to have a consumption interface where you could connect click of a button, roll it back into a data center as well. It's an edge because you have real Italy. Very little skill sets where night in the edge environment and as EJ Compute needs become more prolific with five g i ot devices, you need that same kind of data governance model and data center model. There is well and not really the beauty off, you know, coming to be aware. And Delta, you know Del DMC del. Technology's power is to maintain that everywhere, right? I >> won't ask you about >> innovation. One of the things that's really striking during American executive, Even though I obviously have my own customers, >> I think it really comes down to listening to customers. Write as as Del Technologies is Liam, where we have the advantage of working with so many customers, hundreds of thousand customers around the world we get to hear and listen and understand what are the cutting edge things that customers are looking for? And then we can not take that back to customers like Bank of America who may have taught about certain scenarios right that we will learn from. But they may not have thought about other industries where things could be applicable to their street, so that drives a lot of our innovation. Very. We are very proud about the fact that we're customer focused. Our invasion is really driven by listening to customers on. And, you know, having smart people just work on this one to work on this problems. And, >> you know, customer wise is a big deal customer choice. That's why we're doing what we're doing with multiple cloud providers, right? And I think this is really a key, too. If you just look at being where's innovation were already talking about this multi claude world where it was like, Hey, you've got workloads natively. So we How do you manage? Those were already ahead and thinking about, you know come in eighties with acquisition of Hip Tio and you if you think about it, you know, we've done this innovation in the cloud space established this hybrid credibility on we've launched with Del Technology. Now we're already ahead in this multi cloud operational model. We're already ahead in this coop in eighties. Evolution will bring it back with the family and listen to the customers for choice. Because of the end of the day, we're here to South customer problems. I >> think that's another dimension of choice that we offer, which is both traditional applications as well as applications of the future that will increasingly, because container based, >> yeah, I just wonder if you could spend on a little bit. You know what? One of the things I said via Moore is great. It really simplified and by environment, I go back. Fifteen years ago, one of things that did is let me take my old application that was probably long in the tooth. Begin with my heart was out of date, my operating system at eight, sticking in of'em and leave it for another five years, and the users that are like, Oh my gosh, I'd need an update. How do we get beyond that and allow this joint solution to be an accelerant for applications? >> Yeah, and I think you know the application is probably the crux of the business, right? >> We'Ll call in the tent from >> change applications of Evolve. This is actually the evolution journey of itself is where they used to be, like support systems. Now they become actually translate to business dollars because, you know, the first thing that your customer awful customer touches is an application and you can drive business value from it. And customers are thinking about this old applications and new applications. And they have to start thinking about where do I take my applications? Where do they need to line and then make a choice off? What infrastructures? The best black mom for it. So really can't flip the thing on. Don't think infrastructure first and then retrospect APS to it. I think at first and then make a charge on infrastructure based on the application need and and really look like you said being where kind of took the abstraction layer away from infrastructure and make sure that you'll be EMS could run everywhere. We're taking the same for applications to say. Doesn't matter if it's of'Em based. It's a cloud native will give you the same, you know, inconsistent infrastructure in operations. >> Okay, we're in that last thing. Could you just tell us of the announcements that were made? What's available today? What's coming later this year? >> Absolutely So Del Technologies Cloud Platform that's based on the X Trail and via MacLeod Foundation is available now as an integrated solution via MacLeod and Daddy and see the fully managed offer is available in >> the second half of this >> year. It's invader right now. And as you saw, we have really good feedback >> from our customers. And then I think >> the, uh, the Azure BMR Solutions offer will be available soon as well. >> All right, well, Varun and many Congratulations on the progress. We look forward to talking to the customers as they roll this out, and Rebecca and I will be back with lots more coverage here. Del Technologies World twenty nineteen. Little coverage to sets three days, tenth year, The Cube at M. C and L World. I'm still many men. And thanks so much for watching

>> From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley. HOLLOWAY ALTO, California It is a cube conversation >> high on Peter Birds and welcome to another cube conversation from our beautiful Palo Alto studios. One of the things that makes a cube so exciting as we get great guest from great companies coming on here and talking about some of their new products that they're trying to get in the marketplace of customers Khun Doom or with their technology. And we've got that today. Eric Herzog, cmon VP of worldwide storage channels that IBM storage. He's here to talk about some new things that IBM is doing that especially relevant to high performance, closer, more down market, branch oriented kinds of applications. Eric, welcome to the Cube. >> Thank you, Peter. Really appreciate. Very excited to be with Cuba's Always. >> All right, So what? Start Give us the quick business update and IBM, And let's talk about how that inform some of the new announcement. You >> sure? So two thousand eighteen was a great year for IBM storage. Lots of new introductions and portfolio continue with our multi cloudiness. Everything we've doing now for seven years, all about my multi cloud hybrid private, multiple public cloud providers would continue that mantra. You always something very interesting from a storage array system level perspective brought out extensive portfolio around Envy Me the newest high performance protocol, both inside of a storage array and connecting a storage rate into a network fabric for storage. >> Now let's talk about that. Envy me because envy Me has been associate ID a little bit more higher and stuff. Some of the new things you're doing are bringing envy me and related classes of technology flash to a new class of workload. New class of Hugh's case. Tell us about it. >> Absolutely so what we're doing is bringing out the >> brand new >> refresh store wise portfolio. We start with R V seven thousand, which has envy me both inside the array and support for envy him Over Fibre channel. We have our fifty one hundred just below that, also supporting Envy me in the storage system. We're bringing out a new version of our fifty thirty called the fifty thirty at the very entry space are fifty tenny. These solutions all deliver dramatic performance gains but incredible price discounts as well. For example, the fifty ten e is not only twice as fast as the older fifty ten, but it happens to be up to twenty five percent less expensive. More for the money. That's the key watchword in the store. Wai's family. >> So tell us a little bit more about the fifty Tenney. What kind of use you love talking about applications, workload? Use cases? What kinds of applications were close use cases Are we talking about? >> So we've done a couple things. So first of all, we're leading with all flash across the portfolio. Yes, we still sell hybrids and hard drive a ways, and we'LL still do that in the fifty Tenney, for example. So if you're using hard drive, raise backup in archive work loads. Of course. Now, when using all flash arrays in a smaller shop, it could be your primary storage. Herzog's Barn Grill. That might be the great way to go when you're thinking more of the broader enterprises. It's great for edge. So branches of a bank, all of the outlets of a retail location and even a core data center. Not every workload is even not every data set is even so. Certain things need more expensive arrays and other ways you can go with an entry product. Still deliver the availability, the reliability of the performance you need, but you don't need to spend the most amount of money and stories gives you. That breath gives you the right price point the right software, and it even gives you six nines of availability, which is only thirty one seconds of downtime in a full year on an entry product. That's incredible. >> Well, I would think that the fifty thirty he would be especially relevant for some of those scale at work loves. Tell us about that. >> So in the fifty thirty, we can scale out into two note cluster up to thirty two petabytes, but we start small. You could get it at twelve. Same thing two. Ex Performance. Up to thirty percent less money and all of the store West family comes with our award winning Spectrum Virtualized software, which delivers enterprise class data services. Such a snapshot replication data rest, encryption, tearing, migration, et cetera, et cetera, not only for IBM store wise portfolio, but actually could work with over four hundred fifty raise, most of which are not ours. Great value for the money. Great software and bring better performance at a lower price. The fifty thirty and the whole portfolio includes our spectrum virtually software family. >> Now that's important because as we think about that, the relationship between these and other IBM or other products in the portfolio and multi cloud I know there's some work that's being done there tell us a bit about some of the some of the new updates that you've made. How that spectrum family is becoming even more relevant in the multi club so >> well, when you look at the whole family, everything in the spectrum family has heavy clarification in a multi cloud environment. Let's take spectrum protect not new from an announcement perspective of what we're doing and what we're launching on what we're doing from a new perspective. But it's been ableto backup to the cloud for years. In fact, over three hundred fifty cloud providers use spectrum protect as the engine further back. Oppa's a service portfolio Spectrum virtualized Computer Club. But we also have spectrum virtualized for public cloud that allows you to do staff shot replication only for IBM arrays, but for competitive a raise out to a public loud and even supports a rhe air gapping with a snapshot so you don't have to worry about ransomware malware, that's all. With Spectrum Virtualized family are spectrum sale product can automatically tear to the cloud IBM clad object storage could go from on premise toe off premise. So the big thing we've done with all of our portfolio, the software and then the arrays that sit on it when the case of spectrum protect backup is make sure we can work with any and almost every single cloud in the industry. Whether it's a big cloud like IBM Cloud, Amazon or Microsoft or a small cloud provider, you may want to use a local cloud provider depending on where you're located, not use one of the big club fighters. We work with that cloud provider to, But you made >> some made some special for spectrum virtual eyes. I mean spectrum virtualized. You're adding a new brother to the portfolio >> so that spectrum virtualized Republic Cloud. We first brought it out on IBM Cloud only. It now supports a ws. We know customers multi cloud most end users and you guys have written about it extensively at Weeki Bond in the Cube and silicon angle. That and users will not use one public loud. They will have four, five, six different public clouds. So spectrum virtualized republic loud delivers to onsite arrays. All the capability spectrum virtualized for public cloud sits in a V m wear virtualized in stand station out of the public cloud provider. Giving all those enterprise class functionalities and allowing us to move data back and forth to IBM. Cloud allows to move data back and forth to an Amazon cloud not only first store wise but also for again over four hundred fifty Raise that aren't ours using the spectrum virtualized software. So that's a great edition. We had it for IBM Cloud now for Amazon. As Republican Stanley first brought it out last year. It will also be extended to more clouds in the future as well. >> So store rise gonna refresh nooooo spectrum virtualized for public cloud Also getting, you know, adding to the portfolio great stuff. How do you anticipate that customers are gonna respond? >> Well, we've already had a great response for those customers we talked to under a non disclosure agreement. Now we're public with this new portfolio. What's not to like? You get extensive software capably spectrum virtualized with our fifty one hundred store wise and are seven thousand stories. Now get thie Envy Me technology, which is white hot performance technology in the storage injury, except at a much lower price point that when our competitors are brought out. So he brought Andrea me high end technology into the entry price point space, which is great. And we also have a nice portfolio that gives you certain products. Accuse the court data center other pranks that you would use the edge like banking and all the locations or in retail. So you're not going to put the most expensive practice. But you have a great six nines of availability, extensive software, twice the performance, and I said up to twenty five percent or thirty percent less, depending on which of our products than the older product. Bigger, faster, better, cheaper. >> So, Eric, let me be one of first congratulate you thie IBM storage journey since you and Ed Assualt have shown up at IBM or come backto idea in some cases has it's been a great thing to watch. You really refreshed portfolio made some great strides and we're getting great feedback from customers about the effort. So congratulations. >> Great. Thank you. And the new store lives is the latest in that and look for more just like we did in two thousand eighteen. Refresh across the plug. There's more coming in the second half here in other elements of our portfolio. >> Great sea IBM back and relevant in storage World Eric Herds on CMO VP of worldwide store channels, IBM Storage Thanks once again for being on the Cube. >> Thank you, Peter on. >> I'm Peter Burroughs. Thanks for listening until next time. Thanks for participating in this cube conversation.