>> Announcer: TheCUBE presents Ignite '22, brought to you by Palo Alto Networks. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. It's theCUBE covering Palo Alto Networks '22, from the MGM Grand, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Dave, we are going to unpack in the next few minutes what we heard and saw at day one of Palo Alto Networks, Ignite. A lot of great conversations, some great guests on the program today. >> Yeah last event, CUBE event of the year. Probably last major tech event of the year. It's kind of an interesting choice of timing, two weeks after reInvent. But you know, this crowd is it's a lot of like network engineers, SecOps pros. There's not a lot of suits here. I think they were here yesterday, all the partners. >> Yeah. >> We talked to Carl Sunderland about, Hey, these, these guys want to know how do I grow my business? You know, so it was a lot of C level executives talking about their business, and how they partner with Palo Alto to grow. The crowd today is really, you know hardcore security professionals. >> Yeah. >> So we're hearing a story of consolidation. >> Yes. >> No surprise. We've talked about that and reported on it, you know, quite extensively. The one big takeaway, and I want, I came in, as you know, wanting to understand, okay, can you through m and a maintain, you know, build a suite of great, big portfolio and at the same time maintain best of breed? And the answer was consistent. We heard it from Nikesh, we heard it from Nir Zuk. The answer was you can't be best of breed without having that large portfolio, single data lake, you know? Single version of the truth, of there is such a thing. That was interesting, that in security, you have to have that visibility. I would imagine, that's true for a lot of things. Data, see what Snowflake and Databricks are both trying to do, now AWS. So to join, we heard that last week, so that was one of the big takeaways. What were your, some of your thoughts? >> Just impressed with the level of threat intelligence that Unit 42 has done. I mean, we had Wendy Whitmer on, and she was one of the alumni, great guest. The landscape has changed so dramatically. Every business, in any industry, nobody's safe. They have such great intelligence on what's going on with malware, with ransomware, with Smishing, that they're able to get, help organizations on their way to becoming cyber resilient. You know, we've been talking a lot about cyber resiliency lately. I always want to understand, well what does it mean? How do different organizations and customers define it? Can they actually really get there? And Wendy talked about yes, it is a journey, but organizations can achieve cyber resiliency. But they need to partner with Palo Alto Networks to be able to understand the landscape and ensure that they've got security established across their organization, as it's now growingly Multicloud. >> Yeah, she's a blonde-haired Wonder Woman, superhero. I always ask security pros that question. But you know, when you talk to people like Wendy Whitmore, Kevin Mandy is somebody else. And the people at AWS, or the big cloud companies, who are on the inside, looking at the threat intelligence. They have so much data, and they have so much knowledge. They can, they analyze, they could identify the fingerprints of nation states, different, you know, criminal organizations. And the the one thing, I think it was Wendy who said, maybe it was somebody else, I think it was Wendy, that they're they're tearing down and reforming, right? >> Yes. >> After they're discovered. Okay, they pack up and leave. They're like, you know, Oceans 11. >> Yep. >> Okay. And then they recruit them and bring them back in. So that was really fascinating. Nir Zuk, we'd never had him on theCUBE before. He was tremendous founder and and CTO of Palo Alto Networks, very opinionated. You know, very clear thinker, basically saying, look you're SOC is going to be run by AI >> Yeah. >> within the next five years. And machines are going to do things that humans can't do at scale, is really what he was saying. And then they're going to get better at that, and they're going to do other things that you have done well that they haven't done well, and then they're going to do well. And so, this is an interesting discussion about you know, I remember, you know we had an event with MIT. Eric Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee, they wrote the book "Second Machine Age." And they made the point, machines have always replaced humans. This is the first time ever that machines are replacing humans in cognitive functions. So what does that mean? That means that humans have to rely on, you know, creativity. There's got to be new training, new thinking. So it's not like you're going to be out of a job, you're just going to be doing a different job. >> Right. I thought Nir Zuk did a great job of explaining that. We often hear people that are concerned with machines taking jobs. He did a great job of, and you did a great recap, of articulating the value that both bring, and the opportunities to the humans that the machines actually deliver as well. >> Yeah so, you know, we didn't, we didn't get deep into the products today. Tomorrow we're going to have a little bit more deep dive on products. We did, we had some partners on, AWS came on, talked about their ecosystem. BJ Jenkins so, you know, BJ Jenkins again I mean super senior executive. And if I were Nikesh, he's doing exactly what I would do. Putting him on a plane and saying, go meet with customers, go make rain, right? And that's what he's doing is, he's an individual who really knows how to interact with the C-suite, has driven value, you know, over the years. So they've got that angle goin', they're driving go to market. They've got the technology piece and they've, they got to build out the ecosystem. That I think is the big opportunity for them. You know, if they're going to double as a company, this ecosystem has to quadruple. >> Yeah, yeah. >> In my opinion. And I, we saw the same thing at CrowdStrike. We said the same thing about Service Now in 2013. And so, what's happened is the GSIs, the global system integrators start to get involved. They start to partner with them and then they get to get that flywheel effect. And then there's a supercloud, I think that, you know I think Nir Zuk said, Hey, we are basically building out that, he didn't use the term supercloud. But, we're building out that cross cloud capability. You don't need another stove pipe for the edge. You know, so they got on-prem, they got AWS, Azure, you said you have to, absolutely have to run on Microsoft. 'Cause I don't believe today, right? Today they run on, I heard somebody say they run on AWS and Google. >> Yeah. >> I haven't heard much about Microsoft. >> Right. >> Both AWS and Google are here. Microsoft, the bigger competitor in security, but Nir Zuk was unequivocal. Yes, of course you have to run, you got to run it on an Alibaba cloud. He didn't say that, but if you want to secure the China cloud, you got to run on Alibaba. >> Absolutely. >> And Oracle he said. Didn't mention IBM, but no reason they can't run on IBM's cloud. But unless IBM doesn't want 'em to. >> Well they're very customer focused and customer first. So it'll be interesting to see if customers take them in that direction. >> Well it's a good point, right? If customers say, Hey we want you running in this cloud, they will. And, but he did call out Oracle, which I thought was interesting. And so, Oracle's all about mission critical data, mission critical apps. So, you know, that's a good sign. You know, I mean there's so much opportunity in cyber, but so much confusion. You know, sneak had a raise today. It was a down round, no surprise there. But you know, these companies are going to start getting tight on cash, and you've seen layoffs, right? And so, I dunno who said it, I think it was Carl at the end said in a downturn, the strongest companies come out stronger. And that's generally, generally been the case. That kind of rich get richer. We see that in the last downturn? Yes and no, to a certain extent. It's still all about execution. I mean I think about EMC coming out of the last downturn. They did come out stronger and then they started to rocket, but then look what happened. They couldn't remain independent. They were just using m and a as a technique to hide the warts. You know so, what Nir Zuk said that was most interesting to me is when we acquire, we acquire with the intent of integrating. ServiceNow has a similar philosophy. I think that's why they've been somewhat successful. And Oracle, for sure, has had a similar philosophy. So, and that idea of shifting labor into vendor R and D has always been a winning formula. >> I think we heard that today. Excited for day two tomorrow. We've got some great conversations. We're going to be able to talk with some customers, the chief product officer is on. So we have more great content coming from our last live show over the year. Dave, it's been great co-hosting day one with you. Look forward to doing it tomorrow. >> Yeah, thanks for doing this. >> All right. >> All right. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching theCUBE, the leader in live enterprise and emerging tech coverage. See you tomorrow. (gentle music fades)

(bright music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco, California for AWS Summit 2022. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Two days of coverage, AWS Summit 2022 in New York city's coming up this summer, we'll be there as well. Events are back. theCUBE is back. Of course, with theCUBE virtual, CUBE hybrid, the cube.net. Check it out, a lot of content this year more than ever. A lot more cloud data, cloud native, modern applications, all happening. Got a great guest here. Jeremy Burton, CUBE alumni, CEO of Observe, Inc. in the middle of all the cloud scale, big data, observability. Jeremy, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Always great to come and talk to you on theCUBE man. It's been a few years. >> Well, you got your hands. You're in the trenches with great startup, good funding, great board, great people involved in the observability space, hot area, but also you've been a senior executive. President of Dell, EMC, 11 years ago you had a vision and you actually had an event called cloud meets big data. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> And it's here. You predicted it 11 years ago. Look around, it's cloud meets big data. >> Yeah, the cloud thing I think was probably already a thing, but the big data thing I do claim credit for sort of catching that bus early, We were on the bus early and I think it was only inevitable. Like if you could bring the economics and the compute of cloud to big data, you could find out things you could never possibly imagine. >> So you're close to a lot of companies that we've been covering deeply. Snowflake obviously are involved. The board level, the founders, the people there, cloud, Amazon, what's going on here? You're doing a startup as the CEO at the helm, chief of Observe, Inc., which is an observability, which is to me in the center of this confluence of data, engineering, large scale integrations, data as code, integrating into applications. It's a whole another world developing, like you see with Snowflake, it means Snowflake is super cloud as we call it. So a whole nother wave is here. What's this wave we're on? How would you describe the wave? >> Well, a couple of things. People are, I think, riding more software than ever before. Why? Because they've realized that if you don't take your business online and offer a service, then you become largely irrelevant. And so you you've got a whole set of new applications. I think more applications now than any point, not just ever, but the mid nineties. I always looked at as the golden age of application development. Now, back then people were building for Windows. Well now they're building for things like, AWS is now the platform. So you've got all of that going on. And then at the same time, the side effect of these applications is they generate data and lots of data and the transactions, what you bought today or something like that. But then there's what we do, which is all the telemetry data, all the exhaust fumes. And I think people really are realizing that their differentiation is not so much their application. It's their understanding of the data. Can I understand who my best customers are? What I sell today? If people came to my website and didn't buy, then why not? Where did they drop off? All of that they want to analyze. And the answers are all in the data. The question is, can you understand it? >> In our last startup showcase, we featured data as code. One of the insights that we got out of that, and I want to get your opinion on or reaction to is, is that data used to be put into a data lake and turns into a data swamp or throw into the data warehouse, and then we'll do some queries, maybe a report once in a while. And so data, once it was done, unless it was real time, even real time was not good anymore after real time. That was the old way. Now you're seeing more and more effort to say, let's go look at the data, 'cause now machine learning is getting better. Not just train once, they're iterating. This notion of iterating and then pivoting, iterating and pivoting That's a Silicon Valley story. That's like how startups were, but now you're seeing data being treated the same way. So now you have this data concept that's now part of a new way to create more value for the apps. So this whole new cycle of data being reused and repurposed, then figure it out. >> Yeah, yeah, I'm a big fan of, years ago, just an amazing guy, Andy McAfee, at the MIT labs. I spent time with and he had this line, which still sticks to me this day, which is look, he said, I'm part of a body, which believes that everything is a matter of data. Like if you have enough data, you can answer any question. And this has going back 10 years when he was saying these kind of things and certainly, research is on the forefront. But I think starting to see that mindset of the MIT research be mainstream in enterprises. They're realizing that, yeah, it is about the data. If I can better understand my data better than competitor, then I've got an advantage. And so the question is how? What technologies and what skills do I need in my organization to allow me to do that? >> So let's talk about Observe, Inc. You're the CEO. Given you've seen the waves before, you're in the front lines of observability, which again is in the center of all this action. What's going on with the company? Give a quick minute to explain Observe for the folks who don't know what you guys do. What's the company doing? What's the funding status? What's the product status? And what's the customer status? >> Yeah, so we realized, a handful of years ago, let's say five years ago. Look, the way people are building applications is different. They're way more functional. They change every day. But in some respects there are a lot more complicated. They're distributed, microservices architectures. And when something goes wrong, the old way of troubleshooting and solving problems was not going to fly because you had so much change going into production on a daily basis. It was hard to tell like where the problem was. And so we thought, okay, it's about time. Somebody looks at the exhaust fumes from this application and all the telemetry data and helps people troubleshoot and make sense of the problems that they're seeing. So that's observability. It's actually a term that goes back to the 1960s. It was, a guy called, like everything in tech, it's a reinvention of something from years gone by, but there's a guy called Rudy Coleman in 1960s, kind of term. And the term was been able to determine the state of a system by looking at its external outputs. And so we've been going on this for the best part of four years now. It took us three years just to build the product. I think what people don't appreciate these days often is the barrier to entry in a lot of these markets is quite high. You need a lot of functionality to have something that's credible with a customer. So yeah, this last year, we did our first year selling. We've got about 40 customers now. We got great investors Sutter Hill Ventures. Mike Speiser who was really the first guy in the Snowflake and the initial investor. We're fortunate enough to have Mike on our board. And part of the Observe story is closely knit with Snowflake because all of that telemetry data, we store in there. >> So I want to pivot to that. Mike Speiser, Snowflake, Jeremy Burton, theCUBE kind of same thinking. This idea of a super cloud or what Snowflake became. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> Snowflake is massively successful on top of AWS. And now you're seeing startups and companies build on top of Snowflake. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> So that's become an entrepreneurial story that we think that to go big in the cloud, you can have a cloud on a cloud, like as Jerry Chen in Greylock calls it, castles in the cloud where there are moats in the cloud. So you're close to it. I know you're doing some stuff with Snowflake's. So as a startup, what's your view on building on top of say a Snowflake or an AWS, because again, you got to go where the data is. You need all the data. >> Jeremy: Yeah. >> What's your take on that? >> Having enough gray hair now. Again, in tech, I think if you want to predict the future, look at the past. And 20 years ago, 25 years ago, I was at a smaller company called Oracle. And an Oracle was the database company and their ambition was to manage all of the world's transactional data. And they built on a platform or a couple of platforms. One, Windows, and the other main one was Solaris. And so at that time, the operating system was the platform. And then that was the ecosystem that you would compete on top of. And then there were companies like SAP that built applications on top of Oracle. So then wind the clock forward 25 years, gray hairs, the platform isn't the operating system anymore. The platform is AWS, Google cloud. I probably look around if I say that in. >> It's okay. But Hyperscale. >> Yeah. >> CapEx built out. >> That is the new platform. And then Snowflake comes along. Well, their aspiration is to manage all of the, not just human generated data, but machine generated data in the world of cloud. And I think they they've done an amazing job doing for the, I'd say the big data world, what Oracle did for the relational data world way back 25 years ago. And then there are folks like us come along and of course my ambition would be, look, if we can be as successful as an SAP building on top of Snowflake, as they were on top of Oracle, then we'd probably be quite happy. >> So you're building on top of Snowflake? >> We're building on top of Snowflake a hundred percent. And I've had folks say to me, well, aren't you worried about that? Isn't that a risk? It's like, well, that's a risk. >> Are you still on the board? >> Yeah, I'm still on the board. Yeah. That's a risk I'm prepared to take. I am long on Snowflake. >> It sounds, well, you're in a good spot. Stay on the board then you'll know as going on. Okay, seriously, this is a real dynamic. >> Jeremy: It is. >> It's not a one off. >> Well, and I do believe as well that the platform that you see now with AWS, if you look at the revenues of AWS, it is an order of magnitude more than Microsoft was 25 years ago with windows. And so I believe the opportunity for folks like Snowflake and folks like Observe, it's an order magnitude more than it was for the Oracle and the SAPs of the old world. >> Yeah, and I think this is something that this next generation of entrepreneurship is the go big scenario is you got to be on a platform. >> Yeah and it's quite easy. >> Or be the platform, but it's hard. There's only like how many seats are at that table left. >> Well, value migrates up over time. So when the cloud thing got going, there were probably 10, 20, 30, rack space and there's 1,000,001 infrastructure for service, platform as a service. My old employee EMC, we had Pivotal. Pivotal was a platform as a service. You don't hear so much about it these days, but initially there's a lot of players and then it consolidates. And then to extract a real business, you got to move up, you got to add value, you got to build databases, then you got to build applications. >> It's interesting. Moving from the data center to the cloud was a dream for starters 'cause they didn't have to provision the CapEx. Now the CapEx is in the cloud. Then you build on top of that, you got Snowflake. Now you got on top of that. >> The assumption is almost that compute and storage is free. I know it's not quite free. >> Yeah, it's almost free. >> But as an application vendor, you think, well, what can I do if I assume compute and storage is free, that's the mindset you've got to get into. >> And I think the platform enablement to value. So if I'm an entrepreneur, I'm going to get a serious multiple of value in what I'm paying. Most people don't even blink at their AWS bills unless they're like massively huge. Then it's a repatriation question or whatever discount question. But for most startups or any growing company, the Amazon bill should be a small factor. >> Yeah, a lot of people ask me like, look, you're building on Snowflake. You're going to be paying their money. How does that work with your business model? If you're paying them money, do you have a viable business? And it's like, well, okay. We could build a database as well in Observe, but then I've got half the development team working on something that will never be as good as Snowflake. And so we made the call early on that, no, we want to innovate above the database. Snowflake are doing a great job of innovating on the database and the same is true with something like Amazon, like Snowflake could have built their own cloud and their own platform, but they didn't. >> Yeah and what's interesting is that Dave Vellante and I have been pointing this out and he's obviously more on Snowflake. I've been looking at Databricks and the same dynamics happening. The proof is the ecosystem. >> Yeah. >> If you look at Snowflake's ecosystem right now and Databricks, it's exploding. The shows are selling out. This floor space is booked. That's the old days at VMware. The old days at AWS. >> One and for Snowflake and any platform provider, it's a beautiful thing because we build on Snowflake and we pay their money. They don't have to sell to us. And we do a lot of the support. And so the economics work out really, really well if you're a platform provider and you've got a lot of ecosystems. >> And then also you get a trajectory of economies of scale with the institutional knowledge of Snowflake, integrations, new products, you're scaling and step function with them. >> Yeah, we manage 10 petabytes of data right now. When I arrived at EMC in 2010, we had one petabyte customer. And so at Observe, we've been only selling the product for a year. We have 10 petabytes of data under management. And so being able to rely on a platform that can manage that is invaluable. >> Well, Jeremy, great conversation. Thanks for sharing your insights on the industry. We got a couple minutes left, put a plug in for Observe. What do you guys do? You got some good funding, great partners. I don't know if you can talk about your POC customers, but you got a lot of high ends folks that are working with you. You get in traction. >> Yeah >> Scales around the corner sounds like. Is that where you at? Pre-scale? >> We've got a big announcement coming up in two or three weeks. We've got new funding, which is always great. The product is really, really close. I think, as a startup, you always strive for market fit, at which point can you just start hiring salespeople and the revenue keeps going. We're getting pretty close to that right now. We've got about 40 SaaS companies that run on the platform. They're almost all AWS Kubernetes, which is our sweet spot to begin with, but we're starting to get some really interesting enterprise type customers. We're F5 networks. We're POC in right now with Capital One. We've got some interesting news around Capital One coming up. I can't share too much, but it's going to be exciting. And like I said, Sutter Hill continue to stick. >> And I think Capital One's a big Snowflake customer as well, right? >> They were early and one of the things that attracted me to Capital One was they were very, very good with Snowflake early on and they put Snowflake in a position in the bank where they thought that snowflake could be successful. And today that is one of Snowflake's biggest accounts. >> Capital One, very innovative cloud. Obviously, AWS customer and very innovative. certainly in the CISO and CIO. On another point on where you're at. So you're pre-scale meaning you're about to scale. >> Jeremy: Right. >> So you got POCs. What's that trajectory look like? And you see around the corner, what's going on? What's around the corner that you're going to hit the straight and narrow and gas it fast? >> Yeah, the key thing for us is we got to get the product right. The nice thing about having a guy like Mike Speiser on the board is he doesn't obsess about revenue at this stage. His questions at the board are always about like, is the product right? Is the product right? Have you got the product right? 'Cause we know when the product's right, we can then scale the sales team and the revenue will take care of itself. So right now all the attention is on the product. This year, the exciting thing is we're adding all the tracing visualizations. So people will be able to the kind of things that back in the day you could do with the New Relics and AppDynamics, the last generation of APM tools. You're going to be able to do that within Observe. And we've already got the logs and the metrics capability in there. So for us this year is a big one 'cause we complete the trifecta, the logs. >> What's the secret sauce of observe if you put it into a sentence, what's the secret sauce? >> I think, an amazing founding engineering team, number one. At the end of the day, you have to build an amazing product and you have to solve a problem in a different way and we've got great long term investors. And the biggest thing our investors give is, actually it's not just money, it gives us time to get the product right. Because if we get the product right, then we can get the growth. >> Got it. Final question while I got you here. You've been on the enterprise business for a long time. What's the buyer landscape out there? You got people doing POCs, Capital One scale. So we know that goes on. What's the appetite at the buyer side for startups and what are their requirements that you're seeing? Obviously, we're seeing people go in and dip into the startup pool because new ways to refactor their business, restructure. So a lot of happening in cloud. What's the criteria? How are enterprises engaging in with startups? >> Yeah, enterprises, they know they've got to spend money transforming the business. I almost feel like my old Dell or EMC self there, but what we were saying five years ago is happening. Everybody needs to figure out a way to take their business to this digital world. Everybody has to do it. So the nice thing from a startup standpoint is they know at times they need to risk or take a bet on new technology in order to help them do that. So I think you've got buyers that A, have money, B, are prepared to take risks, and it's a race against time to get their offerings in this new digital footprint. >> Final, final question. What's the state of AWS? Where do you see them going next? Obviously, they're continuing to be successful. How does cloud 3.0? Or they always say it's day one, but it's maybe more like day 10, but what's next for AWS? Where do they go from here? Obviously, they're doing well and they're getting bigger and bigger. >> Yeah, it's an amazing story. We are on AWS as well. And so I think if they keep nurturing the builders and the ecosystem, then that is their superpower. They have an early leads. And if you look at where, maybe the likes of Microsoft lost the plot in the late nineties, it was they stopped really caring about developers and the folks who are building on top of their ecosystem. In fact, they started buying up their ecosystem and competing with people in their ecosystem. And I see with AWS, they have an amazing head start. And if they did more, if they do more than that, that's what's going to keep this juggernaut rolling for many years to come. >> They got the Silicon and they got the Stack developing. Jeremy Burton inside theCUBE, great resource for commentary, but also founding with the CEO of a company called Observe, Inc. In the middle of all the action and the board of Snowflake as well. Great startup. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Always a pleasure. >> Live from San Francisco's theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, your host. Stay with us. More coverage from San Francisco, California after the short break. (soft music)

>>we'll go back to the cubes. Coverage of the age of US Executive Summit at Davis. Reinvent made possible by Accenture My name is Dave Volunteer. We're gonna talk about the arm nation advantage, embraced the future of productivity, improve speed quality and customer experience through artificial intelligence. And we herewith Bhaskar goes, Who's the chief strategy Officer X censure in Rajendra RP Prasad is the senior managing director in Global Automation. The Accenture guys walk into the Cube. Get to seal. >>Thank you. >>Hey, congratulations on the new book. I know it's like giving birth, but it's a mini version. If the well, the automation advantage embraced a future of productivity, improve speed, quality and customer experience to artificial intelligence. What inspired you to write this book? Can you tell us a little bit more about it and how businesses are going to be able to take advantage of the information that's in there? Maybe you could start, >>so I think you know, if we say that what inspired as primarily the two things really style, you know, over inspired have to start this project in first of all is the technology change step change in the technology. Second is the mile maturity of the buyer maturity of the market when it's a little more, you know, when I talk about the technology change, automation is nothing new in the industry. In the starting from the Industrial Revolution, always, industry adopted the automation. But last few years would happen. That there is a significant change in the technology in terms of not of new technologies are coming together like cloud data, artificial intelligence, machine learning and they are gearing match you, and that created a huge opportunity in the industry. So that is number one second if fighting the maturity of the buyer. So buyers are always buying automation, adopting the automation. So when I talked to this different by a different industrial wire, suddenly we realise they're not asking about workings automation, how that will help. But primarily they're talking about how they can scaling. They have all have done the pilot, the prototype, how they can take the full advantage in their enterprise through scheme and talking to few client few of our clients, and he realised that it's best to write this boat and film all our clients to take advantage of this new technologies to skill up their business. If I give a little more than inside that one, exactly we are trying to do in this boat primarily, we dealt with three things. One is the individual automation which deals with the human efficiency. Second is the industrial automation who visited a group efficiency. And third is the intelligent automation. We deal city business, official efficiency while business value. So we believe that this is what will really change their business and help our client help the automation. It users to really make clear an impact in their business. >>Yeah, And so you talked about that? The maturity of the customer. And and I like the way you should describe that spectrum ending with intelligent automation. So the point is you not just paving the cow path, if you will, automating processes that maybe were invented decades ago. You're really trying to rethink the best approach. And that's where you going to get the most business value, our peace In thinking about the maturity, I think the a pre pandemic people were maybe a little reluctant s Bhaskar was saying maybe needed some education. But But how? If things change me, obviously the penned Emmick has had a huge impact. It's accelerated things, but but what's changed in the business environment? In terms of the need to implement automation? R. P >>thank you Well, that is an excellent question. As even through the pandemic, most of the enterprises accelerated what I call as the digital transformation, technology transformation and the war all time that it takes to do. The transformation is compressed in our most land prices. Now do compress transformation. The core of it is innovation and innovation, led technology and technology based solutions. To drive this transformation automation. Artificial intelligence becomes hot of what we do while we are implementing this accelerators. Innovation enablers within the enterprises, most of the enterprises prior to the pandemic we're looking automation and I as a solution for cost efficiency. Saving cost in DePina deriving capacity efficiency does if they do the transformation when we press the fast forward but draw the transformation journey liberating automation. What happens is most of the enterprises which the focus from cost efficiency to speed to market application availability and system resiliency at the core. When I speaking to most of the sea woes Corrine Wall in the tech transformation they have now embrace automation and air as a Conan able to bribe this journeys towards, you know, growth, innovation, lead application, availability and transformation and sustainability of the applications through the are A book addresses all of these aspects, including the most important element of which is compute storeys and the enablement that it can accomplish through cloud transformation, cloud computing services and how I I and Michelle learning take log technologies can in a benefit from transformation to the block. In addition, we also heard person talk about automation in the cloud zero automation taking journey towards the cloud on automation Once you're in the clouds, water the philosophy and principles he should be following to drive the motivation. We also provide holy holistic approach to dry automation by focusing process technology that includes talent and change management and also addressing automation culture for the organisations in the way they work as they go forward. >>You mentioned a couple things computing, storage and when we look at our surveys, guys is it is interesting to see em, especially since the pandemic, four items have popped up where all the spending momentum is cloud province reasons scale and in resource and, you know, be able the report to remotely containers because a lot of people have work loads on Prem that they just can automatically move in the company, want to do development in the cloud and maybe connect to some of those on from work clothes. R P A. Which is underscores automation in, of course, and R. P. You mentioned a computing storage and, of course, the other pieces. Data's We have always data, but so my question is, how has the cloud and eight of us specifically influenced changes in automation? In a >>brilliant question and brilliant point, I say no winner. I talked to my clients. One of the things that I always says, Yeah, I I is nothing but y for the data that is the of the data. So that date of place underlying a very critical part of applying intelligence, artificial intelligence and I in the organization's right as the organisation move along their automation journey. Like you said, promoting process automation to contain a realisation to establishing data, building the data cubes and managing the massive data leveraging cloud and how Yebda please can help in a significant way to help the data stratification Dana Enablement data analysis and not data clustering classification All aspects of the what we need to do within the between the data space that helps for the Lord scale automation effort, the cloud and and ablest place a significant role to help accelerate and enable the data part. Once you do that, building mission learning models on the top of it liberating containers clusters develops techniques to drive, you know the principles on the top of it is very makes it easier to drive that on foster enablement advancement through cloud technologists. Alternatively, using automation itself to come enable the cloud transformation data transformation data migration aspects to manage the complexity, speed and scale is very important. The book stresses the very importance of fuelling the motion of the entire organisation to agility, embracing new development methods like automation in the cloud develops Davis a cop's and the importance of oral cloud adoptions that bills the foundational elements of, you know, making sure you're automation and air capabilities are established in a way that it is scalable and sustainable within the organisations as they move forward, >>Right? Thank you for that r p vast crime want to come back to this notion of maturity and and just quite automation. So Andy Jossy made the phrase undifferentiated, heavy lifting popular. But that was largely last decade. Apply to it. And now we're talking about deeper business integration. And so you know, automation certainly is solves the problem of Okay, I can take Monday and cast like provisioning storage in compute and automate that great. But what is some of the business problems, that deeper business integration that we're solving through things? And I want to use the phrase they used earlier intelligent automation? What is that? Can you give an example? >>Let's a very good question as we said, that the automation is a journey, you know, if we talk to any blind, so everybody wants to use data and artificial intelligence to transform their business, so that is very simple. But the point is that you cannot reach their anti unless you follow the steps. So in our book, we have explained that the process that means you know, we defined in a five steps. We said that everybody has to follow the foundation, which is primarily tools driven optimise, which is process drivel. An official see improvement, which is primarily are driven. Then comes predictive capability, the organisation, which is data driven, and then intelligence, which is primarily artificial intelligence driven. Now, when I talked about the use of artificial intelligence and this new intelligent in the business, what the what I mean is basically improved decision making in every level in the organisation and give the example. We have given multiple example in this, both in a very simple example, if I take suppose, a financial secretary organisation, they're selling wealth management product to the client, so they have a number of management product, and they have number of their number of clients a different profile. But now what is happening? This artificial intelligence is helping their agents to target the night product for the night customers. So then, at the success rate is very high. So that is a change that is a change in the way they do business. Now some of the platform companies like Amazon on Netflix. He will see that this this killed is a very native skill for them. They used the artificial intelligence try to use everywhere, but there a lot of other companies who are trying to adopt this killed today. Their fundamental problem is they do not have the right data. They do not have the capability. They do not have all the processes so that they can inject the decision making artificial intelligence capability in every decision making to empower their workforce. And that is what we have written in this book. To provide the guidance to this in this book. How they can use the better business decision improved the create, the more business value using artificial intelligence and intelligent automation. >>Interesting. Bhaskar are gonna stay with you, you know, in their book in the middle of last decade, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee wrote the second Machine Age, and they made a point in the book that machines have always replaced humans in instead of various tasks. But for the first time ever, we're seeing machines replacing human in cognitive task that scares a lot of people so hardy you inspire employees to embrace the change that automation can bring. What what are you seeing is the best ways to do that? >>This is a very good question. The intelligent automation implementation is not, Iet Project is primarily change management. It's primarily change in the culture, the people in the organisation into embrace this change and how they will get empowered with the machine. It is not about the replacing people by machine, which has happened historically into the earlier stages of automation, which I explained. But in this intelligent automation, it is basically empowering people to do the better. Dwelled the example. That is the thing we have written in the book about about a newspaper, 100 years old newspaper in Italy. And you know, this industry has gone through multiple automation and changes black and white printing, printing to digital. Everything happened. And now what is happening? They're using artificial intelligence, so they're writers are using those technologies to write faster. So when they are writing immediately, they're getting supported with the later they're supporting with the related article they are supporting with this script, even they're supported to the heading of this article. So the question is that it is not replacing the news, you know, the content writer, but is basically empowering them so that they can produce the better quality of product they can, better writing in a faster time. So is very different approach and that is why is, um, needs a change management and it's a cultural change. >>Garden R P What's it for me? Why should we read the automation advantage? Maybe you can talk about some of the key takeaways and, you know, maybe the best places to start on an automation journey. >>Very will cut the fastest MP, Newer automation journey and Claude Adoption Journey is to start simple and start right if you know what's have free one of the process, Guru says, If you don't know where you are on a map, a map won't help you, so to start right, a company needs to know where they are on a map today, identify the right focus areas, create a clear roadmap and then move forward with the structured approach for successful our option. The other important element is if you automate an inefficient process, we are going to make your inefficiency run more efficiently. So it is very important to baseline, and then I established the baseline and know very or on the journey map. This is one of the key teams we discuss in the Automation Advantis book, with principles and tips and real world examples on how to approach each of these stages. We also stress the importance of building the right architecture is for intelligent automation, cloud enablement, security at the core of automation and the platform centric approach. Leading enterprises can fade out adopters and Iraq, whether they are in the early stages of the automation, journey or surrender advanced stage the formation journey. They can look at the automation advantage book and build and take the best practises and and what is provided as a practical tips within the book to drive there. Automation journey. This also includes importance of having right partners in the cloud space, like a loveliest who can accelerate automation, journey and making sure accompanies cloud migration. Strategy includes automation, automation, lead, yea and data as part of their journey. Management. >>That's great. Good advice there. Bring us home. Maybe you can wrap it up with the final final world. >>So, lefty, keep it very simple. This book will help you to create difference in your business with the power of automation and artificial intelligence. >>That's a simple message and will governor what industry you're in? There is a disruptions scenario for your industry and that disruption scenarios going to involve automation, so you better get ahead of editor game. They're The book is available, of course, at amazon dot com. You can get more information. X censure dot com slash automation advantage. Gosh, thanks so much for coming in the Cube. Really appreciate your time. >>Thank you. Thank >>you. >>Eh? Thank you for watching this episode of the eight of US Executive Summit of reinvent made possible by Accenture. Keep it right there for more discussions that educating spy inspire You're watching the queue.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the AWS Executive Summit at AWS re:Invent made possible by Accenture. My name is Dave Vellante. We going to talk about The Automation Advantage, embrace the future of productivity, and improve speed quality and customer experience through artificial intelligence. And we're here with Bhaskar Ghosh who is the Chief Strategy Officer at Accenture and Rajendra 'RP' Prasad who is a Senior Managing Director and Global Automation Lead at Accenture. Guys, welcome to the cube, good to see you. >> Good to see you. >> Hello, David, thank you. >> Hey, congratulations on the new book. I know it's not like giving birth, but it's a mini version if you will. The automation advantage embraced a future of productivity, improved speed, quality, and customer experience through artificial intelligence. What inspired you to write this book? Can you tell us a little bit more about it, and how businesses are going to be able to take advantage of the information that's in there? That's great. Maybe you could start. >> Okay. So I think, you know, if we say that what inspired us, primarily the two things really inspired us to start this project. First of all, is the technology change, step change in the technology. Second is the maturity of the buyer, maturity of the market. So let me explain a little more. When I talk about the technology change, automation is nothing new in the industry, starting from the industrial revolution, always industry adopted the automation. But last few years, what happened, that there is a significant change in the technology in terms of lot of new technologies are coming together like Cloud, Data, Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, and they are getting matured. I think that created a huge opportunity in the industry. So that is number one. Second thing I think the maturity of the buyer. So buyers are always buying the automation, adopting the automation. So when I talk to this different buyer, different industrial buyer, suddenly we realize, they are not asking about what is automation. How that will help. But primarily they're talking about how they can scale it. They have all have done the pilot, the prototype, how they can take the full advantage in that enterprise to scale. And after talking to a few clients, few of our clients, they don't realize that it would be best to write this book and help all our clients to take advantage of this new technologies to scale up their business. If I give them a little more insight that what exactly we are trying to do in this book, primarily we dealt with three things. One is the individual automation, which deals with the human efficiency. Second is the industrial automation, which deals with the group efficiency . And third is the intelligent automation, which deals with the business efficiency or business value. So we believe that, this is what will really change their business and help our client help the automation IT users to really make an impact in their business. >> Yeah, and so you talked about that, the maturity of the customer and I liked the way you sort of described that spectrum ending with intelligent automation. So the point is you're not just paving the cow path if you will, automating processes that maybe were invented decades ago, you're really trying to rethink the best approach. And that's where you going to get the most business value and RP in thinking about the maturity, I think in pre-pandemic, people were maybe a little reluctant or as Bhaskar was saying, maybe needed some education. But how have things changed? Obviously the pandemic has had a huge impact. It's accelerated things. But what's changed in the business environment in terms of the need to implement automation, RP? >> Thank you for that is an excellent question. As we went through the pandemic, most of the enterprises accelerated what I call as the digital transformation. Technology transformation. And the overall time that it takes to do the transformation has compressed. Most of the enterprises now do compress transformation. The core of it is innovation and innovation led technology and technology based solutions. To drive this transformation, automation, artificial intelligence becomes part of what we do, while we are implementing these accelerators, innovation enablers within the enterprises. Most of the enterprises prior to the pandemic, we're looking, automation and AI as a solution for cost efficiency, saving costs and not deriving capacity efficiency as if they do the transformation (indistinct). Let me press the fast forward button through the transformation journey, leveraging automation. What happens is most of the enterprises switch the focus from cost efficiency to speed, to market, application availability and system resiliency are the core. When I speak to most of the CIO's, who are involved in the tech transformation, they now embrace automation and AI as a core enabler to drive this journeys towards, growth, innovation led, application availability and transformation and sustainability of the applications through their journey. Our book addresses, all of these aspects, including the most important element of AI, which is compute, storage and the enablement that it can accomplish through cloud transformation, cloud computing services and how AI and machine learning technologies can benefit from transformation to the cloud. In addition, we also address and talk about automation in the cloud. Automation, taking journey towards the cloud and automation, once you are in the cloud, what are the philosophy and principles you should be following to drive that automation? We also provide holistic approach to drive automation by focusing process technology that includes talent and change management, and also addressing automation culture for the organizations in the way they work as they move forward. >> So you mentioned a couple of things, compute and storage and when we look at our surveys, guys, it's interesting to see, especially since the pandemic, four items have popped up, where all the spending momentum is cloud, but for obvious reasons, scale and resource, and be able to work remotely, contain us because a lot of people have workloads on prem that they just can't automatically move into cloud, but they want to do development in the cloud and maybe connect to some of those on-prem workloads, RPA, which is _automation, and of course, AI. And, RP, you mentioned compute and storage, and of course the other pieces' data. So we have all this data. But so my question is, how has the cloud and AWS specifically influenced changes in automation in AI? >> Brilliant question and brilliant point. I say, whenever I talk to my clients, one of the things that I always say is, AI is nothing but an UI for the data. Let me repeat that, AI is the UI of the data. So that data plays a underlying and very critical part of applied intelligence, artificial intelligence and AI in the organizations, right? As the organization move along their automation journey, like you said, robotic process automation to containerization, to establishing data, building the data cubes and managing the massive data leveraging cloud and how AWS can help in a significant way to help the data stratification, data enablement, data analysis, and data clustering, classification, all aspects of that what we need to do within the data space. That helps for the large scale automation effort. The cloud and AWS plays a significant role to help accelerate and enable the data part. Once you do that, building machine learning models on the top of it, leveraging containers, clusters, DevOps techniques to drive, the AI principles on the top of it is very, it's kind of makes it easier to drive that and foster enablement advancement through cloud technologies. Alternatively, using automation itself to kind of enable the cloud transformation, data transformation, data migration aspects to manage the complexity speed and scale is very important. The book stresses the very importance of fueling the motion of the entire organization through agility, embracing new development, whether it's like automation in the cloud, DevOps, DevSecOps and the importance of oral cloud adoption that builds the foundational elements of making sure your automation and AI capabilities are established in a way that it is scalable and sustainable within the organizations as they move forward. >> Great. Thank you for that, RP. Bhaskar, I want to come back to this notion of maturity and just apply it to automation. So, Andy Jassy made the phrase, undifferentiated heavy lifting popular, but that was largely last decade applied to IT. And now we're talking about deeper business integration. And so, automation certainly solves the problem of, okay, I got to take mundane tasks like provisioning, storage, and compute and automate that. Great. But what are some of the business problems that deeper business integration that we're solving through things that, and I want to use the phrase that you used earlier, intelligent automation. What is that? And can you give an example? >> That's a very good question. As we said, that the automation is a journey. If we talk to any clients, so everybody wants to use data and artificial intelligence to transform their business. So that is very simple, but the point is that you cannot reach there unless you follow the steps. So in our book we have explained the process. That means, we defined in a five steps. We said that everybody has to follow the foundation which is primarily the tools driven, optimize, which is process-driven then efficiency improvement, which is primarily RPA driven, then comes predictive capability, the organization, which is data driven and then intelligence, which is primarily artificial intelligence driven. Now, when I talk about the use of artificial intelligence and this new intelligent ID in the business, what we mean is basically improved decision-making in every level in the organization. I'll give you an example. We have given multiple example in this book and a very simple example if I take. Suppose a financial sector organization, they're selling wealth management product to the clients. So they have a number of wealth management products and they have number, there are number of clients with different profile, but now what is happening, this artificial intelligence is helping their agents to target the right product for the right customer, so that the success rate is very high. So that is a change. That is a change in the way they do business. Now, some of the platform companies like Amazon and Netflix, you will see that this skill is a very native skill for them. They use the artificial intelligence, try to use everywhere. But there are a lot of other companies who are trying to adopt this skill today. Their fundamental problem is that they do not have the right data. They do not have that capability. They do not have all the processes so that they can inject the decision-making artificial intelligence capability in every decision-making to empower their workforce. And that is what we have written in this book to provide the guidance to this in this book. How they can use the better business decision, improve then create the more business value using artificial intelligence and intelligent automation. >> Interesting, Bhaskar, I want to stay with you, in their book, in the middle of last decade, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee wrote. The Second Machine Age and they made the point in the book that machines have always replaced humans in sort of various tasks, but for the first time ever, we're seeing, machines replacing humans in cognitive tasks, and that scares a lot of people. So how do you inspire employees to embrace the change that automation can bring? What are you seeing as the best ways to do that? >> That's a very good question. Intelligent automation implementation is not an IT project. It's primarily change management. It's primarily change in the culture. The people in the organization need to embrace this change and how they will get empowered with the machine. It is not about the replacing people by machine, which has happened historically into the earliest stages of automation, which I explained. But in this intelligent automation, it is basically empowering people to do the better job. I will give you example. That is the thing we have written in the book, about a newspaper, a hundred years old newspaper in Italy. And this industry has gone through multiple automation and changes. So black and white printing to color, printing to digital, everything happened. And now what is happening, they are using artificial intelligence, so their writers are using those technologies to write faster, so when they're writing immediately, they are getting supported with the data, they are supporting with the related article. They are supporting with the script, even they're supported with the heading of this article. So the question is that it is not replacing the news, the content writer, but it's basically empowering them so that they can produce the better quality of product, they can be better at writing in a faster time. So it's a very different approach and that is why this needs a change management than a cultural change. >> Got it. RP, what's in it for me? Why should we read the automation advantage? Maybe you could talk about some of the key takeaways and maybe the best places to start on an automation journey. >> Very good question. The fastest step in your automation journey and cloud adoption journey is to start simple and start right. If you know what's happening, one of the process guru says, "If you don't know where you are on a map, a map won't help you." So to start right, a company needs to know where they are on a map today, identify the right focus areas, create a clear roadmap and then move forward with a structured approach for successful adoption. The other important element is if you automate an inefficient process, you are going to make your inefficiency run more efficiently. So it is very important to baseline and establish the baseline and know where you are on the journey map. This is one of the key themes we discuss in the Automation Advantage book. With principles and tips and real world examples on how to approach each of these stages. We also stress the importance of building the right architectures for intelligent automation, cloud enablement, security at the core of automation and the platform centric approach. Leading enterprises can fit on adopters and whether they are in the earlier stages of the automation journey or they're in the advanced stage of automation journey. They can look at the Automation Advantage book and build and take the best practices and what is provided as a practical tips within the book to drive their automation journey. This also includes importance of having right partners in the cloud space like AWS, who can accelerate automation journey and making sure a company's cloud migration strategy includes automation, automation-led AI and data as part of their journey management. >> That's great. Good advice there. But Bhaskar, bring us home, maybe you could wrap it up with the final word. >> So let me keep it very simple. This book will help you to create difference in your business with the power of automation and artificial intelligence. >> That's a simple message. And no matter what industry you're in, there is a disruption scenario for your industry, and that disruption scenario is going to involve automation. So you better get ahead of the game there. The book is available of course, at Amazon.com and you can get more information at accenture.com/automationadvantage. Guys, thanks so much for coming in the Cube. I really appreciate your time. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> And thank you for watching this episode of the AWS Executive Summit at re:Invent made possible by Accenture. Keep it right there for more discussions that educate and inspire, you're watching the Cube. (upbeat music)

>>From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward for brought to you by UI path. >>Good morning. Welcome to the cubes coverage of UI path forward for day two. Live from the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Velante, Dave. We had a great action packed day yesterday. We're going to have another action packed day today. We've got the CEO coming on. We've got customers coming on, but there's been a lot in the news last 24 hours. Facebook, what are your thoughts? >>Yeah, so wall street journal today, headline Facebook hearing fuels call for rain in on big tech. All right, everybody's going after big tech. Uh, for those of you who missed it, 60 minutes had a, uh, an interview with the whistleblower. Her name is, uh, Francis Haugen. She's very credible, just a little background. I'll give you my take. I mean, she was hired to help set Facebook straight and protect privacy of individuals, of children. And I really feel like, again, she, she didn't come across as, as bitter or antagonistic, but, but I feel as though she feels betrayed, right, I think she was hired to do a job. They lured her in to say, Hey, this is again, just my take to say, Hey, we want your help in earnest to protect the privacy of our users, our citizens, et cetera. And I think she feels betrayed because she's now saying, listen, this is not cool. >>You hired us to do a job. We in earnest, went in and tried to solve this problem. And you guys kind of ignored it and you put profit ahead of safety. And I think that is the fundamental crux of this. Now she made a number of really good points in her hearing yesterday and I'll, and we'll try to summarize, I mean, there's a lot of putting advertising revenue ahead of children's safety and, and, and others. The examples they're using are during the 2020 election, they shut down any sort of negative conversations. They would be really proactive about that, but after the election, they turned it back on and you know, we all know what happened on January 6th. So there's sort of, you know, the senators are trying that night. Um, the second thing is she talked about Facebook as a wall garden, and she made the point yesterday at the congressional hearings that Google actually, you can data scientists, anybody can go download all the data that Google has on you. >>You and I can do that. Right? There's that website that we've gone to and you look at all the data Google has and you kind of freak out. Yeah, you can't do that with Facebook, right? It's all hidden. So it's kind of this big black box. I will say this it's interesting. The calls for breaking up big tech, Bernie Sanders tweeted something out yesterday said that, uh, mark Zuckerberg was worth, I don't know. I think 9 billion in 2007 or eight or nine, whatever it was. And he's worth 122 billion today, which of course is mostly tied up in Facebook stock, but still he's got incredible wealth. And then Bernie went on his red it's time to break up big tech. It's time to get people to pay their fair share, et cetera. I'm intrigued that the senators don't have as much vigilance around other industries, whether it's big pharma, food companies addicting children to sugar and the like, but that doesn't let Facebook. >>No, it doesn't, but, but you ha you bring up a good point. You and I were chatting about this yesterday. What the whistleblower is identifying is scary. It's dangerous. And the vast majority, I think of its users, don't understand it. They're not aware of it. Um, and why is big tech being maybe singled out and use as an example here, when, to your point, you know, the addiction to sugar and other things are, uh, have very serious implications. Why is big tech being singled out here as the poster child for what's going wrong? >>Well, and they're comparing it to big tobacco, which is the last thing you want to be compared to as big tobacco. But the, but the, but the comparison is, is valid in that her claim, the whistleblower's claim was that Facebook had data and research that it knew, it knows it's hurting, you know, you know, young people. And so what did it do? It created, you know, Instagram for kids, uh, or it had 600,000. She had another really interesting comment or maybe one of the senators did. Facebook said, look, we scan our records and you know, kids lie. And we, uh, we kicked 600,000 kids off the network recently who were underaged. And the point was made if you have 600,000 people on your network that are underage, you have to go kill. That's a problem. Right? So now the flip side of this, again, trying to be balanced is Facebook shut down Donald Trump and his nonsense, uh, and basically took him off the platform. >>They kind of thwarted all the hunter Biden stuff, right. So, you know, they did do some, they did. It's not like they didn't take any actions. Uh, and now they're up, you know, in front of the senators getting hammered. But I think the Zuckerberg brings a lot of this on himself because he put out an Instagram he's on his yacht, he's drinking, he's having fun. It's like he doesn't care. And he, you know, who knows, he probably doesn't. She also made the point that he owns an inordinate percentage and controls an inordinate percentage of the stock, I think 52% or 53%. So he can kind of do what he wants. And I guess, you know, coming back to public policy, there's a lot of narrative of, I get the billionaires and I get that, you know, the Mo I'm all for billionaires paying more taxes. >>But if you look at the tax policies that's coming out of the house of representatives, it really doesn't hit the billionaires the way billionaires can. We kind of know the way that they protect their wealth is they don't sell and they take out low interest loans that aren't taxed. And so if you look at the tax policies that are coming out, they're really not going after the billionaires. It's a lot of rhetoric. I like to deal in facts. And so I think, I think there's, there's a lot of disingenuous discourse going on right now at the same time, you know, Facebook, they gotta, they gotta figure it out. They have to really do a better job and become more transparent, or they are going to get broken up. And I think that's a big risk to the, to their franchise and maybe Zuckerberg doesn't care. Maybe he just wants to give it a, give it to the government, say, Hey, are you guys are on? It >>Happens. What do you think would happen with Amazon, Google, apple, some of the other big giants. >>That's a really good question. And I think if you look at the history of the us government, in terms of ant anti monopolistic practices, it spent decade plus going after IBM, you know, at the end of the day and at the same thing with Microsoft at the end of the day, and those are pretty big, you know, high profiles. And then you look at, at T and T the breakup of at T and T if you take IBM, IBM and Microsoft, they were slowed down by the U S government. No question I've in particular had his hands shackled, but it was ultimately their own mistakes that caused their problems. IBM misunderstood. The PC market. It gave its monopoly to Intel and Microsoft, Microsoft for its part. You know, it was hugging windows. They tried to do the windows phone to try to jam windows into everything. >>And then, you know, open source came and, you know, the world woke up and said, oh, there's this internet that's built on Linux. You know, that kind of moderated by at T and T was broken up. And then they were the baby bells, and then they all got absorbed. And now you have, you know, all this big, giant telcos and cable companies. So the history of the U S government in terms of adjudicating monopolistic behavior has not been great at the same time. You know, if companies are breaking the law, they have to be held accountable. I think in the case of Amazon and Google and apple, they, a lot of lawyers and they'll fight it. You look at what China's doing. They just cut right to the chase and they say, don't go to the, they don't litigate. They just say, this is what we're doing. >>Big tech, you can't do a, B and C. We're going to fund a bunch of small startups to go compete. So that's an interesting model. I was talking to John Chambers about this and he said, you know, he was flat out that the Western way is the right way. And I believe in, you know, democracy and so forth. But I think if, to answer your question, I think they'll, they'll slow it down in courts. And I think at some point somebody's going to figure out a way to disrupt these big companies. They always do, you know, >>You're right. They always do >>Right. I mean, you know, the other thing John Chambers points out is that he used to be at 1 28, working for Wang. There is no guarantee that the past is prologue that because you succeeded in the past, you're going to succeed in the future. So, so that's kind of the Facebook break up big tech. I'd like to see a little bit more discussion around, you know, things like food companies and the, like >>You bring up a great point about that, that they're equally harmful in different ways. And yet they're not getting the visibility that a Facebook is getting. And maybe that's because of the number of users that it has worldwide and how many people depend on it for communication, especially in the last 18 months when it was one of the few channels we had to connect and engage >>Well. And, and the whistleblower's point, Facebook puts out this marketing narrative that, Hey, look at all this good we're doing in reality. They're all about the, the, the advertising profits. But you know, I'm not sure what laws they're breaking. They're a public company. They're, they're, they have a responsibility to shareholders. So that's, you know, to be continued. The other big news is, and the headline is banks challenge, apple pay over fees for transactions, right? In 2014, when apple came up with apple pay, all the banks lined up, oh, they had FOMO. They didn't want to miss out on this. So they signed up. Now. They don't like the fact that they have to pay apple fees. They don't like the fact that apple introduced its own credit card. They don't like the fact that they have to pay fees on monthly recurring charges on your, you know, your iTunes. >>And so we talked about this and we talk about it a lot on the cube is that, that in, in, in, in his book, seeing digital David, Michelle, or the author talked about Silicon valley broadly defined. So he's including Seattle, Microsoft, but more so Amazon, et cetera, has a dual disruption agenda. They're not only trying to disrupt horizontally the technology industry, but they're also disrupting industry. We talked about this yesterday, apple and finances. The example here, Amazon, who was a bookseller got into cloud and is in grocery and is doing content. And you're seeing these a large companies, traverse industry value chains, which have historically been very insulated right from that type of competition. And it's all because of digital and data. So it's a very, pretty fascinating trends going on. >>Well, from a financial services perspective, we've been seeing the unbundling of the banks for a while. You know, the big guys with B of A's, those folks are clearly concerned about the smaller, well, I'll say the smaller FinTech disruptors for one, but, but the non FinTech folks, the apples of the world, for example, who aren't in that industry who are now to your point, disrupting horizontally and now going after individual specific industries, ultimately I think as consumers we want, whatever is going to make our lives easier. Um, do you ever, ever, I always kind of scratch my nose when somebody doesn't take apple pay, I'm like, you don't take apple pay so easy. It's so easy to make this easy for me. >>Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's going to be really interesting to see how this plays out. I, I do think, um, you know, it begs the question when will banks or Willbanks lose control of the payment systems. They seem to be doing that already with, with alternative forms of payment, uh, whether it's PayPal or Stripe or apple pay. And then crypto is, uh, with, with, with decentralized finance is a whole nother topic of disruption and innovation, >>Right? Well, these big legacy institutions, these organizations, and we've spoke with some of them yesterday, we're going to be speaking with some of them today. They need to be able to be agile, to transform. They have to have the right culture in order to do that. That's the big one. They have to be willing. I think an open to partner with the broader ecosystem to unlock more opportunities. If they want to be competitive and retain the trust of the clients that they've had for so long. >>I think every industry has a digital disruption scenario. We used to always use the, don't get Uber prized example Uber's coming on today, right? And, and there isn't an industry, whether it's manufacturing or retail or healthcare or, or government that isn't going to get disrupted by digital. And I think the unique piece of this is it's it's data, data, putting data at the core. That's what the big internet giants have done. That's what we're hearing. All these incumbents try to do is to put data. We heard this from Coca-Cola yesterday, we're putting data at the core of our company and what we're enabling through automation and other activities, uh, digital, you know, a company. And so, you know, can these, can these giants, these hundred plus year old giants compete? I think they can because they don't have to invent AI. They can work with companies like UI path and embed AI into their business and focused on, on what they do best. Now, of course, Google and Amazon and Facebook and Microsoft there may be going to have the best AI in the world. But I think ultimately all these companies are on a giant collision course, but the market is so huge that I think there's a lot of, >>There's a tremendous amount of opportunity. I think one of the things that was exciting about talking to one, the female CIO of Coca-Cola yesterday, a hundred plus old organization, and she came in with a very transformative, very different mindset. So when you see these, I always appreciate when I say legacy institutions like Coca-Cola or Merck who was on yesterday, blue cross blue shield who's on today, embracing change, cultural change going. We can't do things the way we used to do, because there are competitors in that review mirror who are smaller, they're more nimble, they're faster. They're going to be, they're going to take our customers away from us. We have to deliver this exceptional customer and employee experience. And Coca-Cola is a great example of one that really came in with CA brought in a disruptor in order to align digital with the CEO's thoughts and processes and organization. These are >>Highly capable companies. We heard from the head of finance at, at applied materials today. He was also coming on. I was quite, I mean, this is a applied materials is really strong company. They're talking about a 20 plus billion dollar company with $120 billion market cap. They supply semiconductor equipment and they're a critical component of the semiconductor supply chain. And we all know what's going on in semiconductors today with a huge shortage. So they're a really important company, but I was impressed with, uh, their finance leaders vision on how they're transforming the company. And it was not like, you know, 10 years out, these were not like aspirational goals. This is like 20, 19, 20, 22. Right. And, and really taking costs out of the business, driving new innovation. And, and it's, it was it's, it's refreshing to me Lisa, to see CFOs, you know, typically just bottom line finance focused on these industry transformations. Now, of course, at the end of the day, it's all about the bottom line, but they see technology as a way to get there. In fact, he put technology right in the middle of his stack. I want to ask him about that too. I actually want to challenge him a little bit on it because he had that big Hadoop elephant in the middle and this as an elephant in the room. And that picture, >>The strategy though, that applied materials had, it was very well thought out, but it was also to your point designed to create outcomes year upon year upon year. And I was looking at some of the notes. I took that in year one, alone, 274 automations in production. That's a lot, 150,000 in annual work hours automated 124 use cases they tackled in one year. >>So I want to, I want to poke at that a little bit too. And I, and I did yesterday with some guests. I feel like, well, let's see. So, um, I believe it was, uh, I forget what guests it was, but she said we don't put anything forward that doesn't hit the income statement. Do you remember that? Yes, it was Chevron because that was pushing her. I'm like, well, you're not firing people. Right. And we saw from IDC data today, only 13% of organizations are saying, or, or, or the organizations at 13% of the value was from reduction in force. And a lot of that was probably in plan anyway, and they just maybe accelerated it. So they're not getting rid of headcount, but they're counting hours saved. So that says to me, there's gotta be an normally or often CFOs say, well, it's that soft dollars because we're redeploying folks. But she said, no, it hits the income statement. So I don't, I want to push a little bit and see how they connect the dots, because if you're going to save hours, you're going to apply people to new work. And so either they're generating revenue or cutting costs somewhere. So, so there's another layer that I want to appeal to understand how that hits the income state. >>Let's talk about some of that IDC data. They announced a new white paper this morning sponsored by UI path. And I want to get your perspectives on some of the stats that they talked about. They were painting a positive picture, an optimistic picture. You know, we can't talk about automation without talking about the fear of job loss. They've been in a very optimistic picture for the actual gains over a few year period. What are your thoughts about that? Especially when we saw that stat 41% slowed hiring. >>Yeah. So, well, first of all, it's a sponsored study. So, you know, and of course the conferences, so it's going to be, be positive, but I will say this about IDC. IDC is a company I would put, you know, forest they're similar. They do sponsored research and they're credible. They don't, they, they have the answer to their audience, so they can't just out garbage. And so it has to be defensible. So I give them credit there that they won't just take whatever the vendor wants them to write and then write it. I've used to work there. And I, and I know the culture and there's a great deal of pride in being able to defend what you do. And if the answer doesn't come out, right, sorry, this is the answer. You know, you could pay a kill fee or I dunno how they handle it today. >>But, but, so my point is I think, and I know the people who did that study, many of them, and I think they're pretty credible. I, I thought by the way, you, to your 41% point. So the, the stat was 13% are gonna reduce head count, right? And then there were two in the middle and then 41% are gonna reduce or defer hiring in the future. And this to me, ties into the Erik Brynjolfsson and, and, and, uh, and, and McAfee work. Andy McAfee work from MIT who said, look, initially actually made back up. They said, look at machines, have always replaced humans. Historically this was in their book, the second machine age and what they said was, but for the first time in history, machines are replacing humans with cognitive functions. And this is sort of, we've never seen this before. It's okay. That's cool. >>And their, their research suggests that near term, this is going to be a negative economic impact, sorry, negative impact on jobs and salaries. And we've, we've generally seen this, the average salary, uh, up until recently has been flat in the United States for years and somewhere in the mid fifties. But longterm, their research shows that, and this is consistent. I think with IDC that it's going to help hiring, right? There's going to be a boost buddy, a net job creator. And there's a, there's a, there's a chasm you've got across, which is education training and skill skillsets, which Brynjolfsson and McAfee focused on things that humans can do that machines can't. And you have this long list and they revisited every year. Like they used to be robots. Couldn't walk upstairs. Well, you see robots upstairs all the time now, but it's empathy, it's creativity. It's things like that. >>Contact that humans are, are much better at than machines, uh, even, even negotiations. And, and so, so that's, those are skills. I don't know where you get those skills. Do you teach those and, you know, MBA class or, you know, there's these. So their point is there needs to be a new thought process around education, public policy, and the like, and, and look at it. You can't protect the past from the future, right? This is inevitable. And we've seen this in terms of economic activity around the world countries that try to protect, you know, a hundred percent employment and don't let competition, they tend to fall behind competitively. You know, the U S is, is not of that category. It's an open market. So I think this is inevitable. >>So a lot about upskilling yesterday, and the number of we talked with PWC about, for example, about what they're doing and a big focus on upscaling. And that was part of the IDC data that was shared this morning. For example, I'll share a stat. This was a survey of 518 people. 68% of upscaled workers had higher salaries than before. They also shared 57% of upskilled workers had higher roles and their enterprises then before. So some, again, two point it's a sponsored study, so it's going to be positive, but there, there was a lot of discussion of upskilling yesterday and the importance on that education, because to your point, we can't have one without the other. You can't give these people access to these tools and not educate them on how to use it and help them help themselves become more relevant to the organization. Get rid of the mundane tasks and be able to start focusing on more strategic business outcome, impacting processes. >>We talked yesterday about, um, I use the example of, of SAP. You, you couldn't have predicted SAP would have won the ERP wars in the early to mid 1990s, but if you could have figured out who was going to apply ERP to their businesses, you know what, you know, manufacturing companies and these global firms, you could have made a lot of money in the stock market by, by identifying those that were going to do that. And we used to say the same thing about big data, and the reason I'm bringing all this up is, you know, the conversations with PWC, Deloitte and others. This is a huge automation, a huge services opportunity. Now, I think the difference between this and the big data era, which is really driven by Hadoop is it was big data was so complicated and you had a lack of data scientists. >>So you had to hire these services firms to come in and fill those gaps. I think this is an enormous services opportunity with automation, but it's not because the software is hard to get to work. It's all around the organizational processes, rethinking those as people process technology, it's about the people in the process, whereas Hadoop and the big data era, it was all about the tech and they would celebrate, Hey, this stuff works great. There are very few companies really made it through that knothole to dominate as we've seen with the big internet giants. So you're seeing all these big services companies playing in this market because as I often say, they like to eat at the trough. I know it's kind of a pejorative, but it's true. So it's huge, huge market, but I'm more optimistic about the outcomes for a broader audience with automation than I was with, you know, big data slash Hadoop, because I think the software as much, as much more adoptable, easier to use, and you've got the cloud and it's just a whole different ball game. >>That's certainly what we heard yesterday from Chevron about the ease of use and that you should be able to see results and returns very quickly. And that's something too that UI path talks about. And a lot of their marketing materials, they have a 96, 90 7% retention rate. They've done a great job building their existing customers land and expand as we talked about yesterday, a great use case for that, but they've done so by making things easy, but hearing that articulated through the voice of their customers, fantastic validation. >>So, you know, the cube is like a little, it's like a interesting tip of the spirits, like a probe. And I will tell you when I, when we first started doing the cube and the early part of the last decade, there were three companies that stood out. It was Splunk service now and Tableau. And the reason they stood out is because they were able to get customers to talk about how great they were. And the light bulb went off for us. We were like, wow, these are three companies to watch. You know, I would tell all my wall street friends, Hey, watch these companies. Yeah. And now you see, you know, with Frank Slootman at snowflake, the war, the cat's out of the bag, everybody knows it's there. And they're expecting, you know, great things. The stock is so priced to perfection. You could argue, it's overpriced. >>The reason I'm bringing this up is in terms of customer loyalty and affinity and customer love. You're getting it here. Absolutely this ecosystem. And the reason I bring that up is because there's a lot of questions in the, in the event last night, it was walking around. I saw a couple of wall street guys who came up to me and said, Hey, I read your stuff. It was good. Let's, let's chat. And there's a lot of skepticism on, on wall street right now about this company. Right? And to me, that's, that's good news for you. Investors who want to do some research, because the words may be not out. You know, they, they, they gotta prove themselves here. And to me, the proof is in the customer and the lifetime value of that customer. So, you know, again, we don't give stock advice. We, we kind of give fundamental observations, but this stock, I think it's trading just about 50. >>Now. I don't think it's going to go to 30, unless the market just tanks. It could have some, you know, if that happens, okay, everything will go down. But I actually think, even though this is a richly priced stock, I think the future of this company is very bright. Obviously, if they continue to execute and we're going to hear from the CEO, right? People don't know Daniel, Denise, right? They're like, who is this guy? You know, he started this company and he's from Eastern Europe. And we know he's never have run a public company before, so they're not diving all in, you know? And so that to me is something that really pay attention to, >>And we can unpack that with him later today. And we've got some great customers on the program. You mentioned Uber's here. Spotify is here, applied materials. I feel like I'm announcing something on Saturday night. Live Uber's here. Spotify is here. All right, Dave, looking forward to a great action packed today. We're going to dig more into this and let's get going. Shall we let's do it. All right. For David Dante, I'm Lisa Martin. This is the cube live in Las Vegas. At the Bellagio. We are coming to you presenting UI path forward for come back right away. Our first guest comes up in just a second.

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel, AWS, and our community partners. >>Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the cubes. Live coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 I'm John Farrow, your hosts. We've got the cube virtual. We're not there in person with remote this year, and we're excited to cover three weeks of wall-to-wall coverage. It's virtual events, so they don't over three weeks. We're in week three, day two. Um, and if you're watching this live on the platform tomorrow, Thursday at two o'clock Andy Jassy, we'll be live here on the cube with one-on-one with me to address all the hard questions, but here we're doing a day two of week three analysis with Jeremy Burton industry legend entrepreneur. Now the CEO of observe Inc, um, formerly the CMO of Dell technologies before that EMC has done a variety of ventures, seeing many ways of innovation, friend of the cube. Jeremy, thank you for coming on. >>Yeah, my pleasure. Great. Always great to be on the cube. >>Uh, great to have you on in particularly because, um, yesterday Verner, Vogel's talked a lot about observability and I noticed you got your observed shirt on, uh, observe Inc is your company's name, which is one of the many, uh, hot startups around observability, where you're making a business out of basically what he talked about yesterday. Um, and today's keynote. You had the extended cloud, uh, edge applications. You had bill Vass who leads up both edge and quantum. And then you had Rudy Valdez who, who talked a lot about, uh, evolution of cloud architecture. And of course you finally had, um, David Richardson, who is the VP of serverless. So you got edge. Quantum serverless architecture speaks to the sea change, Jeremy, and you have a good read on these big waves. When you look at serverless and then quantum, you look at, uh, edge, which is data, and you look at, um, all this coming together and on their architecture, Verner's keynote yesterday kind of makes sense. It's a systems architecture and this new observability trend, isn't like a point product. It's a broader concepts. You have a complete rethinking of distributed computing in the cloud. This is kinda what this Amazon feels like. What's your, what's your take? >>Yeah, it's a, it's a good observation. You know, the, the, the, the sort of punchline is, is that people are building applications differently. Um, so the, the, the, the, the technologies that people are using to build apps are different, um, the way in which they build applications is different. Um, the way folks released codes into production is different, and it stands to reason. Therefore, you're going to need a different approach, uh, when you want to troubleshoot these applications. So, uh, when you find, uh, you know, w w what is show when you want to find out what issues customers are having? So what, what we fell a couple of three years ago when we started to observe was that, um, uh, a new approach was required, what you're going to need to monitor your application. And, you know, 2020 is not the same as what you needed in 2015 or 2010. >>And we felt very strongly that this new wave was, was going to be called observability. It, it brings a tear to my eye to hear a Verner, talk about it, because as much as we observe, you know, believe that we can do big things in future. It's the big vendors today that can move markets. And so the Amazon and vulnerable particular talk about observability, I think it lends more credence to the topic. Um, we think that organizations should have observability teams. We think there should be a head of observability. And again, you know, Amazon and Dawson this, uh, I think means that there's a much stronger chance that that's going to happen. And they're going to start, start to shine a light on, I think, a topic that almost everybody needs to pay attention to as they build their next generation of applications. >>When you guys, I know you guys are launched and you have couple of campaign customers now and growing rapidly, um, well-funded, um, uh, get some great investors have found that the investors of snowflake also, um, invested in you guys. So they see this cloud trend LC snowflake when public, and I know you're on the board of snowflake as well. So, uh, you, you, you know, a little bit about what's going on with Amazon and the opportunity when you look at observability, okay, you're building a business around it. And again, you think about head of observability. That's not like a small thing when you make, put someone in charge of something. So why do you say that? I mean, what, I mean, you know, some would say, you know, Hey, it's a feature, not a company. I mean, this is two mindsets that are different. How do you address that? >>Yeah, the, the, the, the thing I'd say is, look, the number one job in America is, um, is a software engineer is writing code. The number two job is fixing it. And so, you know, th th the job think about that for a second. The job of fixing our applications is almost as big as the job of creating our applications. Uh, something has to change, right? I know the job of fixing cars is not as big as the auto industry. Why, because over time that industry has matured and there are better tools to diagnose cars. Uh, and so they're, they, they become easy to fix over time. We've, we've not made that leap with our applications. Um, the tools that the engineering team use to debug and troubleshoot their application are often still very different to what the dev ops team is using, um, which is very different to what maybe the SRE team is using. >>And so it's a huge problem in our industry. Um, really not being able to diagnose troubleshoot issues when they arise. It, it costs the industry, a fortune, it costs, you know, sort of in indirect wasted productivity of development teams, but it also costs in terms of customer experience. Um, I mean, you know, you and I both know is, look, if we're, if we're having a bad experience with maybe a new service that we're trying out online, w w we're probably going to go somewhere else. And so the there's never been like a more important time for people to invest in observing the entire environment, the entire customer experience, not only will you have happier customers, you might actually reduce the costs and improve the productivity in your engineering team as well. So I feel like the opportunity there is, is, is, is, is vast. Um, I also think longer term, um, it doesn't just apply to troubleshooting distributed applications. >>Um, I think the security systems are very related to the way we build software. Um, I mean, I think in, in, in the news in recent days, we've, we've come attuned, uh, uh, to, to software defects, um, or malware in software causing breaches and government agencies. Um, Hey, that, that could be anybody's software right there. Yeah. And so security has got a role to play in observability and the customer experience. It doesn't stop when they have a bad experience on the website. What if they complain? You know, what if a help desk ticket get, how do you track that? >>Yeah, I'm going to, I have a lot of questions for chassis tomorrow. One of them I'm going to ask him, and I want to get your thoughts on it. Cause you brought that up. And I think it's a key point, you know, building applications and supporting them and fixing them. It kind of reminds me of the old adage of, um, you know, you know, you gotta run it running the operation, 70% of the budget using to running it. If you look at what's happening and if you talk to customers and this is what I'm going to ask chassis tomorrow, Verner actually talked about, I on day two operations in his keynote. Yeah. I mean, this is Amazon they're, they're targeting builders. And so I talked to, um, a few other entrepreneurs, um, who were growing companies and some CIA CIOs and CEOs and the basic enterprises. >>They don't want to be building things like they, that's not their DNA. They don't build things like, that's not what they do. I mean, first of all, I love the builder mentality and with Amazon. Um, but they might be at a time where there might not be enough builders, Jeremy right out there. So you've got skill shortages and then ultimately are enterprises really builders. Yeah. They'll build something, but then they just run it it's. So, so at what point do they stop building or they build their own thing in the cloud and then they got to run it. So I think Amazon is going to shift quickly to day two operations, get bill, bill, bill run, run, run. >>Yeah. That's a great topic of conversation. I think what you sort of poking out is, is sort of the maturation of this digital age in the state that we're at. Um, I mean, if you, if you go back, you, you know, to, you know, 10, 10, 20 years, um, I mean, look at the mid nineties, um, there were a lot of people building custom applications, right? I mean, you know, it was innovation, it was all about building custom apps. And I think that golden era of application development whack that now, um, and, and customers in order to get competitive advantage, they are building their own applications. When you talk about digital transformation, what does that mean? Well, it means, you know, often a traditional company building a new digital experience for services that they've potentially offered in a physical way, uh, in the past. So make no mistake, P people are builders or they are writing code, they are becoming digital. >>I think what you'll find at some point as the industry's mature, some of these digital experience is become packaged. And so you can buy those off the shelf. And so there's less building required. But I think as we sit today, um, that there's probably more code been written in anger by more organizations that at any point in the last 30 years. And, and I think this is another reason why observability is so important, um, as you're building that code and as you're developing that customer experience, you want to be able to understand, um, where the issues are and, and, um, uh, like along the way, you don't want to wait until there's a, a big customer disaster on the day of you roll that, something to production before you start investigate. And you want to do that as you go. >>Yeah. And I think that's a kill. I do agree with you, by the way. I think the, there is a builder mentality, but it's probably right. But remember those days back in it, if you want to put our, our time machine hat on and go through the time machine is, you know, that was during the mainframe client server transition. And it was called spaghetti code. You know, it's like the monoliths were built and then it had to be supported and that became legacy. So I kind of see that happening today, where, um, people are moving to the cloud, they are building, but at some point you got to build your thing in the cloud. If I'm a company. And again, this isn't some dots trying to connect in real time. I got serverless, which is totally cool. I'm gonna have quantum has headroom for compute. >>I'm going to have, um, kind of a S a SOA service oriented architecture with web services, with observability. I'm gonna have all these modern apps great that, or run them. And I'm now I'm gonna shift them. Multiple clouds is so, you know, maybe the private cloud waves coming back, you're seeing telco clouds. You start to see these new tier. I won't say tier two clouds, but I mean, people will build their own cloud environment. There's no doubt as going to the cloud. And Steve Malania, Aviatrix kind of made this point yesterday in his analysis where he's like, he thinks private cloud will be back. I was just, it'll just be public cloud. People will build their own clouds and run them. >>Yeah. I feel well, what happens over time is, is the, the sort of line above which you would add value rises. So I kind of feel like, look, cloud is just going to the infrastructure. We can debate, you know, private cloud, public cloud. Is it a public cloud, or is it a private cloud served up by a public cloud provider? My view is, is look, all of that is, is, um, just going to be commodity, right? Um, it's going to be served up for an ever decreasing cost. And so then it's incumbent on organizations to innovate above that line. And, you know, 20 years ago, you know, we, we built our own data centers. Um, and now increasingly that, that seeming like a crazy idea. Um, and you know, now you can get almost all of your infrastructure from the cloud. The great thing is, I mean, look at observe. >>We have no people running data center operations, none, right? We have no people building a database, non, you know, we use snowflake in the cloud. It runs on AWS. We have, we have one dev ops, uh, engineer. And so all the people in the company right now, we're focused on adding value, helping people understand and analyze data, uh, above that line. And we just pay for a service level and, and look, uh, as time goes by, there's going to be more and more services and that line's going to rise. And so, you know, what, what I care about and what I think a lot of CEOs care about is are most of my resources innovating above that sort of value creation line, um, because that's what people are going to pay for in our business. And I think that's, what's going to represent you, you know, sort of value add for you, you know, organizations big and small. >>Yeah. That's a good point. I want to shift to the next topic and then we'll get into some observability questions I have for you and update on your company. Um, complexity has been a big theme. That's come out of all the conversations with analysts that have come on the cube, as you hear it with Amazon, a lot of undifferentiated, heavy lifting, being extracted away to your point about value layers and competing on value. Amazon continues to do that all great stuff, but some are saying, and we had said on the cube, yes, two days ago you put them complexity behind the curtain. It's still complexity, right? So, so complexity with the edge is highlighted. Uh, even though they got green, uh, I, um, edge core Greengrass, which has core thing, IOT core, a lot of cool things happening, but it's still not yet super easy. So complexity tends to slow things down became striction, what's your view on this? Because taming, the complexity seems to be a post COVID pandemic mandate for cloud journeys. What's your thing. >>Yeah, I totally agree. I think, I think in certainly you look organizations that have been in existence, but you know, 30, 40 years, or maybe even 10 years look at there's an amount of technical debt and complexity that you build up over time. Um, but even newer companies, um, the way that people are building modern distributed applications and in some respects is, is more complex than in days gone by, you know, microservices. Um, some of which maybe you own some of which maybe you don't, and what you've gotta be able to do is, is see the big picture, you know, w w when, when there's something in my code, but then when am I making a call out to maybe a third party microservice and, and that microservices bailing out on me, like people have got to see the big picture. And I think what hasn't been available as people have changed the architecture and their applications, there hasn't been an equivalent set of innovation or evolution in the tools that they use to manage that environment. And so you, you, you, you've got this sort of dichotomy of, uh, a better way for software developers to write code and deploy it into production microservices. But at the same time, you don't have good information and good tools to make sense of that complexity. >>That's great stuff. Jeremy Burton is here. He's the CEO of observe Inc cube, alumni, VIP cube alumni, by the way, has been on the cube every year, since the Q has been around 2010, when he took the new job as the CMO of EMC prior to being bought by Dell, Jeremy, you're a legend in the industry, certainly on as an executive and a marketer. And as an entrepreneur, um, I gotta ask you observe Inc, your company now, um, you're right in the middle of all this, you, you got a big bet going on. Could you share, in your opinion, your words, what is the big bet that you're making with observing? Uh, what are you betting on? How do you see the preferred future unfolding and where are you guys going to capture that value? >>Yes, I I'll big bat. Hey, uh, really is to take a new approach, um, in, in, in, in terms of enabling people to observe their systems, that the term observability actually goes back, uh, to a guy in control systems theory in the sixties. And then it's got quite a simple definition, which is, you know, being able to determine the, uh, I've been able to diagnose a system by the telemetry data that it emits. So let's look at the external outputs. And then based on that, can I determine the internal state of the application? And so from the get-go, we felt like observability was not about building another tool, right? We're not, you know, it's not about building another monitoring tool, a logging tool. Um, it's about analyzing data. And I, I was struck many years ago. Uh, I spent a bit of time with, with Andy McAfee, uh, from the sea sail lab at MIT. >>And he made a statement that I thought at the time was quite profound, which he said, look, everything's a matter of data. If you have enough data, you can solve any problem. And that stuck with me for a long time. And, um, you know, observe really what we do is we ingest vast quantities of telemetry data. We treat everything as events and we try and make sense of it. And the economics of the infrastructure now is such, that is you truly can ingest all the Alltel telemetry data and it's affordable, right? I mean, one of the wonderful things that Amazon has done is they've brought you, you know, very cheap, affordable storage. You can ingest all your data and keep it forever. Um, but, but now can you make sense of it? Well, you know, compute is pretty cheap these days and you've got amazing processing engines like snowflake. >>And so I was sense was that if we could allow folks to ingest all of this telemetry data process, that data and help people easily analyze that data, then they could find almost any problem that existed, uh, in their applications or in their infrastructure. So we really set out to create a data company, which I think is fundamentally different to, to really what everybody else is doing. And today we're troubleshooting distributed applications, but I think in future, we, my hope is that we can, we can help people analyze almost anything around their applications or infrastructure. >>And what's the use case problem statement that you're entering the market on? Is it just making sure microservices can be deployed as a Kubernetes? Is it managing containers? Is there a specific, um, customer adoption use case that you're focused on right now? >>Yeah, we've tried to target our ideal customer if you like has been the three or 4,000, uh, uh, SAS companies. Uh, we're, we're really focused on the U S right now, but three to 5,000 SAS companies, um, predominantly, uh, obviously running on AWS often, uh, Kubernetes infrastructure, but, you know, people who, uh, having a hard time, uh, understanding the complexity of the application that they've created, and they're having a hard time understanding, uh, the experience that their customers are having and tracking that back to root cause. So, you know, really helping those SAS companies troubleshoot their applications and having a better customer experience that's where the early customers are. And if we can do a good job in that area, I think we can, you know, over time, you know, start to take on some of the bigger companies and maybe some of the more established companies that are moving in this, this digital direction. >>Jeremy, thanks for sharing that. And I got one last set of questions for you around the industry, but before I get there, give a quick plug for observe. What are you guys looking to do hire, I mean, give a quick, uh, a PSA on what's going on with observed. >>Yeah, so we're, uh, the company is now what a rough and tough. About three years old, we got about 40 people. Uh we're well-funded by sort of Hill ventures. Uh, they were the original investors in, in snowflake. Um, and, um, yeah, I mean, we we've, we've well, more than doubled in size since the COVID lockdown began. We had about 15 people when that began. We've got almost 40 now. Um, and I would anticipate in the next year we're, we're probably going to double in size again, but, um, yeah, really the core focus in the company is, is understanding and analyzing vast quantities of data. And so anybody who is interested in, uh, that space look us up >>Mainly any areas, obviously engineering and the other areas okay. >>Near in all over. I mean, we, you know, w w w as you'll see, if you go to observing.com, we've got a pretty slick front end. Uh, we invested very early on in design and UX design. So we believe that you are, can be a differentiator. So we've got some amazing engineers on the front end. Uh, so going to can always do with the help there, but obviously, um, you know, there's a data processing platform here as well. Um, we, uh, we do run on top of snowflake. We, we do have a number of folks here who are very familiar, uh, you know, with the snowflake database and, and how to write efficiency equals. So, so front and backend. Um, we very soon, I think we'll be starting to expand the sales team. Um, we're really starting to get our initial set of customers and the feedback loop rule in rolling into engineering. And my hope would be, you know, probably early part of next year, we re we really start to nail the product market fit. Um, and we've got a huge release coming in the early part of next year where that the metrics and alerting functionality will be in the product. So, yeah, it's, it's sort of all systems go right now. >>Congratulations. Love to see the entrepreneurial journey. We'll keep an eye out for you and you're in a hot space. So we'll be riding, you'll be riding that wave, uh, question for you on the, um, just kind of the industry, uh, you're in the heart of Silicon Valley. Like I am honestly, I'm fellow Alto, you're up in the Hillsborough area. Um, I think you're in Hillsborough, right? That's where you, where you live. Um, San Francisco, the Valley, the pandemic pretty hard hit right now. People are sheltering in place, but still a lot of activity. Um, what are you hearing in, um, in, in the VC circles, startup circles, as everyone looks at coming out of the pandemic and you look at Amazon and you look at what snowflake has done. I mean, snowflake was built on top of Amazon competing against Redshift. Um, okay. They were hugely successful at doing that. So there's kind of this new playbook emerging. What are, what are people talking about? What's the scuttlebutt. >>Yeah. I mean, clearly TAC has done very well throughout what has been, you know, like just a terrible environment. Um, I think both kind of socially and economically, and I think what's going on in the stock market right now is probably not reflective of the, of the economic situation. And I think a lot of the indices are dominated by tech companies. So you, if you're not careful, you can get a little bit of a false read. Um, but look, what is undisputed is, is that the world is going to become more digital, more tech centric than, than less. Um, so I think there is a very, very bright future, you know, for tech, um, that there is certainly plenty of VC money, um, available. Um, you know, that is not really changed materially in the last year. Um, so if you have a good idea, if you're on one of these major trends, I think that there is a very good chance that you can get the company funded. >>Um, and you know, our, our expectation is that, you know, next year, obviously industries are going to return to work that have been dominant maybe for the last six, nine months. And so some parts of the economy should pick up again, but I would also tell you, I think certain, uh, sort of habits are not going to die. I mean, I think more things are going to be done online and we've gotten used to that way of working and, and you know, what, not, some of it is measurable. I don't know about cocktails over zoom, but working with customers, um, in some respects is easier because they're not traveling, we're not traveling. So we both have more time. Uh, it's sometimes easy to get meetings with people that you would never get. Now. Now, can you do an efficient sales process, education proof of concept? You know, those processes maybe have to grow up a little bit to be taken online, but I think the certain parts of the last, maybe six to nine months that we don't want to throw away and go back to the way we were doing it, because I think, you know, maybe this way of doing it is, is more efficient. >>What do you think about the, uh, entrepreneurial journeys out there? Obviously, um, Amazon we're here covering re-invent is really kind of, you know, building a massive compute engine. They've got higher level services and, you know, I've been speculating for years. I think snowflake is the first kind of big sign. That points to kind of what I said five years ago, which is there's going to be an opportunity for these other clouds as specialty clouds. I called them might be the wrong word, but snowflake basically built on top of Amazon, you know, most valuable company ever on wall street, uh, IPO on someone else's cloud. So is that a playbook? I mean, is that a move? I mean, this is kind of like a new thing. >>Yeah. I mean, that's, I mean, I, I feel like on databases, I've got a lot of history on management, Oracle almost 10 years. And you know, what snowflake does they did was they, they rearchitected the database explicitly for the cloud. I mean, you can run Oracle on the cloud, but, but it, but it doesn't do things the way that snowflake does it. Right. I mean, snowflake uses commodity storage. It uses S3 it's elastic. And so when you're not using it, you're not paying it. And these things sound very simple and very obvious now, which is I think what, what, what the genius of the founders, you know, Ben Warren and Tre, uh, work, and, and I think there will be other costs, you know, categories of infrastructure that will get rearchitected and reinvented for the cloud. And, you know, I've got equally big opportunities. Um, and so, yeah, I mean, I think the model, I believe firmly that the model is if you're a startup, you don't need to waste a lot of time, like reinventing the wheel on data center, infrastructure and databases, and a lot of the services that you would use to construct an application. >>You, you, you can start, you know, if, if the building that you're trying to build is like 12 floors, you can start at the eighth or ninth floor. Um, you know, I've, I've got like what three or 400 quality engineers at snowflake that are building our database. I don't, I don't need to do that. I can just piggyback on top of what they've done and add value. And, you know, the, the, the beautiful thing, you know, now, if you're a business out there thinking of, of, of, of becoming digital and reinventing yourself, or you're a startup just getting going, there's a lot of stuff you just don't have to build anymore. You just don't even have to think about it. >>Yeah. This is the new program of bull internet. It's internet, truly 2.0 or 3.0, whatever 4.0, a complete reset of online. And I think the pandemic, as you pointed out on many cube interviews and Andy Jassy send his keynote is on full display right now. And I think the smart money and smart entrepreneurs are going to see the opportunities. Okay. >>Yeah. It comes back to ideas and a great, I mean, I've always been a product person. Um, but look at great idea, a great product idea and a great product idea that, that capitalizes on the big trends in the industry. I think there's always going to be funding for those kinds of things. I don't know a lot about the consumer world I've always worked in, in B2B, but, um, you know, the kind of things that you're going to be able to do in future. I mean, think about it. If storage is essentially free and compute is essentially free. Just imagine what you could do, right. Jeremy, >>This is the new consumer. Get out. Let's understand that. Finally, B2B is the new consumer enterprise is hot. I was, again, it was riffing on this all week. All the things going on in enterprise is complex is now the new consumers now all connected. It's all one thing. The consumerization of it, the condition of computing has happened. It's going on. So you're a leader. Thank you for coming on. Great to see you as always, um, say hi to your family and stay safe. >>Yeah, you too. Thanks for the invite. Always, always a pleasure. >>Jeremy Burton breaking down the analysis of day two of week three of re-invent coverage. I'm John furry with the cube virtual. We're not in person anymore. Virtualization has allowed us to do more interviews over 110 interviews so far for re-invent and tomorrow, Thursday at two o'clock, Andy Jassy will spend 30 minutes with me here on the cube, looking back at re-invent the highs, the lows, and what's next for Amazon web services. I'm chef Aria. Thanks for watching.

>> Presenter: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders around the globe, these are cloud native insights. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, the host of Cloud Native Insights. When we launched this program, we talked about, how do we take advantage of the innovation and agility that's in the cloud? And of course, one of the big components that we've talked about for many years on theCUBE is, how do we empower developers? and developers are helping change things, and I'm really happy to welcome to the program first time guests that helped build many of the tools that developers are very well familiar. So Tom Preston Werner, he is the co-founder of Chatterbug, he is the creator of redwoodjs, we had an early episode, the JAMstack Netlify team, he's also on the board for that, and we'll talk about those pieces. People might know him, if you check him out on Wikipedia, you know, GitHub, he was one of the co-founders as well as held both CTO and CEO roles there. I could go on but Tom, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, so let's start there, Tom, you know, when I live in the enterprise space, how do you take advantage of new things? One of the biggest challenges out there is, let's go to something new, but let's do it the old way. And we know that that really doesn't take advantage of it you know, I think back to the oldest, some of the older technologies, it's like, well, you know, if I talk to people that are riding horses, what do they want? You know, well, I want faster horses, not the, you know, let's completely change things. I was hearing a stat that, you know, back in the early days of cars, we had like, 30% of them were electric cars, and now it's one. So what's old is new again, but I digress. One, as I mentioned, you know, GitHub, of course, is, you know, such a fundamental piece when we look at in the technology space over the last decade, you know, get in general, GitHub, specifically, of course, has created so much value engaged, you know, just millions and millions of developers and transform businesses. Take us back a little bit and you know, like to get your philosophy on, you know, building tools, how do you do it? How do you think about it? And what's inspired you? >> Yeah, I think it goes a long way back to just wanting to build things for the community. One of the first big projects I worked on was called Gravatar, and I remember laying in bed staring at the ceiling, just trying to think up some idea that that would contribute to what we then called The Blogosphere, and I came up with an idea for avatars that would follow you around and I coded it up and I got it out to a few bloggers and they started using it, and it caught on and it was really, it really introduced me to this idea that no matter who you are, where you come from, or what your background is, you know, I grew up in Iowa, things are very different there. And with with the Internet, and the ability to code, you can impact the world in really significant ways. And so it follows on from there, and I think GitHub is an extension of that desire to really put things into the world that will be useful for people, and knowing that, if you have the ability to code and especially with the advent of web applications as a common tool, there's such power in that you have global reach, you just need a computer and the ability to code and you can create these things, and GitHub kind of became that. It was just, it started out really as a side project, and I hoped that someday it would be able to support me to work on it full time. But I, we started building it just because we wanted it to exist. And that's most of what I work on is, is just ideas that I want to exist in the world. >> Yeah, it's been one of those great trends to watch at, you know, there were certain technologies that used to have to be a nation state, or, you know, one of the one of the global 50 companies to take advantage of it. Now, tools like GitHub, making it so that, you know, the smallest company or even the individuals can participate in communities, can create and build you know, the building is such an important theme. So Maybe, let's fast forward a little bit if we would, I mentioned Netlify and JAMstack, you talked about the blogosphere, that team is helping to really reinvent how we think about the web, you know, it's real time, It's high performance, and you know, we need to be able to get that to where everybody is. So, you know, back in the early days, web pages, you know, relatively static and, you know, had certain criteria, and now, of course, you know, edge devices and the global population change things. So, you know, you, you've been engaged in a, you know, huge supporter of that project, and that'll lead us towards the redwoods discussion, but maybe bring us as to how you got involved there, and what got you excited? >> Well, like you said, Everything old is new again and I think that's true in fashion. It's also true in technology, in a lot of ways, and the JAMstack really is taking these old ideas where the web started, taking files and just serving them as static files and it's super fast, and it's extremely secure. This is how the internet started, and now we've sort of come full circle. But we've added a lot of really nice things and workflows on top of that. And so my journey into the JAMstack, I suppose, started more than a decade ago, when I started working on a project called Jekyll, that's a, I called it at the time, A Blog Aware Static Site Generator. So you would write your blog articles, and you would run it through Jekyll, and that would take your markdown, you'd write your articles in markdown, and it would combine them with a, some kind of a theme that you would have, and that would output static pages that represented your blog, and then you could serve those from any kind of static blog serving system. GitHub had has one built in called GitHub Pages, and so we ended up adopting Jekyll for GitHub Pages. So everything that you put up on GitHub Pages. would be run through Jekyll, and so it was a really natural place to put your blog. And so I had a blog post, one of my blog posts using Jekyll was called Blogging Like A Hacker. And it was this idea that you don't need WordPress, you don't need to have a database somewhere that's, that's hackable, that's going to cause you security problems, all the WordPress admin stuff that constantly is being attacked. You don't need all that, like you can just write articles in flat files, and then turn them into a blog statically and then put those up to serve them somewhere, right? And so when I say it like that, it sounds a little bit like the JAMstack, right? That's not how we thought about it at the time, because it was really hard to do dynamic things. So if you wanted to have comments on your blog for instance, then you needed to have some third party service that you would embed a component onto your blog, so you could receive comments. And so you had to start gluing things together, but even then, again, that sounds a little bit like the JAMstack. So it's all of these ideas that have been, evolving over the last decade to 15 years, that now we finally have an entire tool chain and adding Git on top of that and Git based workflows, and being able to push to GitHub and someone like Netlify can pick those up and publish them, and you have all these third party services that you can glue together without having to build them yourself. All of the billing things, like there's just the ecosystem is so much more advanced now, so many more bits are available for you to piece together that in a very short amount of time, you can have an extremely performant site capable of taking payments, and doing all of the dynamic things that we want to do. Well, many, I should say many of the dynamic things that we want to do, and it's fast and secure. So it's like the web used to be when the web started, but, now you can do all the modern things that you want to do. >> You're giving me flashbacks remembering how I glued discus into my Tumblr instance when that was rolling out. (laughing) >> That's what I was referring to, discuss. >> Yeah, so absolutely, you talk about there's just such a robust ecosystem out there, and one of the real challenges we have out there is, people will come in and they say, "Oh my gosh, where do I start?" And it's like, well, where do you want to go? There's the Paradox of Choice, and that I believe is one of the things that led you to create Redwoods. So help explain to our audience you know, you created this project Redwood, it related to JAMstack, but, but I'll let you explain you know, what it is in life needed? >> Yeah, Redwood is a response to a couple of things. One of those things, is the JavaScript world has, as everything has evolved in tremendous way, in all kinds of ways and almost entirely positive I think. The language itself has been improved so much from when I was a teenager using view source and copy pasting stuff into you know, some random X Files fan site. To now it's a first class language I can compete with with everything, from a ergonomics perspective. I really enjoy programming in it and I come from a Ruby, Ruby on Rails background and now I'm very happy in JavaScript that was not true even five, seven years ago, right? So JavaScript itself has changed a lot. Along with that comes NPM in the whole packaging universe, of availability of modules, right? So most of the things that you want to do, you can go and you can search and find code that's going to do those things for you, and so being able to, to just pull those into your projects so easily. That is amazing, right? The power that that gives you is tremendous. The problem comes in when, like you said, you have the Paradox of Choice. Now you have, not just one way to do something, but you have 100 ways to do something, right? And now as a as a developer, and especially as a new developer, someone who's just learning how to build web applications, you come into this and you say, all you see is the complexity, just overwhelming complexity, and every language goes through this. They go through a phase of sort of this Cambrian explosion of possibilities as people get excited, and you see that the web is embracing these technologies, and you see what's possible. Everyone gets excited and involved and starts creating solution after solution after solution, often times to the same problems. And that's a good thing, right, like exploring the territory is a good and necessary part of the evolution of programming languages and programming ecosystems. But there's comes a time where that becomes overwhelming and starts to trend towards being a negative. And so at Chatterbug, which is a foreign language learning service, if you want to learn how to speak French or Spanish or German, we'll help you do that, as part of that work, we started using react on the front end, because I really love what react brings you from a JavaScript and interactivity perspective. But along with react, you have to make about 50 other choices of technologies to use to actually create a fully capable website, something for state management, you got to choose a way to do JavaScript or sorry, CSS. There's 100 things that you have to choose, and it's, it seems very arbitrary and you go through a lot of churn, you choose one, and then the next day an article comes out and then people raving about another one, and then you choose, you're like, Oh, that one looks really nice. You know, grass is always greener, and so Redwood is a bit of a, an answer to that, or a response to that, which is to say, we've learned a lot of things now about what works in building with react, especially on the front end. And what I really want to do is have a tool that's more like Ruby on Rails, where I come from, having done years and years of Ruby on Rails, what GitHub was built with. And Ruby on Rails presents to you a fully capable web application framework that has made all the choices or most of the choices, many of the important choices. And the same is kind of missing in the JavaScript TypeScript world and so, when I saw Netlify come out with their feature where you could commit the code for a lambda function to your repository, and if you push that up to GitHub, Netlify will grab it, and they will orchestrate deploying that code to an AWS lambda so that you can run business logic in a lambda but without having to touch AWS, because touching AWS is another gigantic piece of complexity, and their user interfaces are sometimes challenging, I'll say. That, that then made me think that, here finally is the ability to combine everything that's awesome about the JAMstack and static files, and security, and this workflow, with the ability to do business logic, and that sounded to me like the makings of a full stack web application framework, and I kept waiting for someone to come out and be like, hey, tada, like we glued this all together, and here's your thing, that's rails, but for the JAMstack, JavaScript, TypeScript world and nobody was doing it. And so I started working on it myself, and that has become Redwoodjs. >> It's one of the things that excited me the early days when I looked into Serverless was that, that low bar to entry, you know, I didn't have to have, you know, a CS degree or five years of understanding a certain code base to be able to take advantage of it. Feels like you're hoping to extend that, it believe it's one of your passions, you know, helping with with Chatterbug and like, you know, helping people with that learning. What do you feel is the state out there? What's your thoughts about kind of the future of jobs, when it when it comes to this space? >> I think the future of jobs in technology and especially software development is, I mean, there is no, there is no better outlook for any profession than that. I mean, this is the, this is where the world is going, more and more of what we want to accomplish, we do in software and it happens across every industry. I mean, just look at Tesla's for instance, right? You think about automobiles and the car that you owned, you know, 10 years ago, and you're like, I don't know, I know there's a computer in here somewhere, but like, I don't really, you know, either the software for it is terrible, and you're like, who, when was the last time you actually use the navigation system in your car, right? You just like get like just turn that off because it's, it's so horrible. And then Tesla comes along and says, hey, what if we actually made all this stuff useful, and had a thoughtful interface and essentially built a car that where everything was controlled with software, and so now cars are are basically software wrapped in hardware, and the experience is amazing. And the same is true of everything, look at your, look at how many things that your phone has replaced that used to be physical devices. Look at manufacturing processes, look at any any element of bureaucracy, all of this stuff is mediated by computers, and oftentimes it's done badly. But this just shows how much opportunity there is speaking of like governmental websites, right, you go to the DMV, and you try to schedule an appointment, and you just have no confidence that that's going to work out because the interfaces feel like they were written 15 years ago, and sometimes I think they were, written that long ago. But there's so much, there's still so much improvement to be had and all of that is going to take developers to do it. Unless, you know, we figure out how to get AI to do it for us, and there's been some very interesting things lately around that angle, but to me, it's, humans will always be involved. And so, at some level, humans are telling machines what to do, whether you're doing it more or less directly, and having the ability to tell machines what to do gives you tremendous leverage. >> Yeah, we're big fans, if you know Erik Bryjolfsson and Andy McAfee from MIT, they've, you know, are very adamant that it's the combination of people plus machines that always will win against either people alone or machines alone. Tom, what, you know, right now we're in the middle of a global pandemic, there're financially, there's a lot of bad news around the globe right now. I've talked to many entrepreneurs that said, well, a downturn market is actually a great time to start something new. You're an investor, you've helped build lots of things. We talked a lot about lowering the bar for people to create and build new things. What do you see are some of the opportunities out there, if you know, you had to recommend for the entrepreneurs out there? Where should they be looking? >> I'd say look at all of the things in your life that have become challenging, because where there's challenge, where there's pain, there's opportunity for solutions. And especially when there's a big environmental change, which we see right now, with COVID-19, obviously has changed a lot of our behaviors and made some of the things that used to be easy. It's made those a lot harder, and so you see, certain segments of the economy are doing extremely well, namely technology and things that allow us to do interviews like this instead of in person, and so those industries are doing extremely well. So you look at the you look at the stock market in the United States, and it's it's very interesting, because while much of the country is suffering, the people that are already wealthy are doing very well, and technology companies are doing very well. And so the question for me is, what are the opportunities that we have, leveraging technology in the internet, to where we can create more opportunities for more people, to get people back to work, right? I think there's so much opportunity there. Just look at education, like the entire concept of educating kids right now and I have three. So we feel this very much, it has been turned on its head. And so we so you see many people looking for solutions in that space, and that's, I think that's as it should be. When things get, when things get challenged when our, our normal daily experience is so radically changed, there's opportunity there, because people are willing to change more quickly in a crisis, right? Because you need, you need something like any solution. And so some choice is going to be made, and where that's happening, then you can find early adopters more easily, than you can under other circumstances, and so in economic downturns, you often see that kind of behavior where these are crisis moments for people, you have an opportunity to come in and if you have something that could solve a problem for them, then you can get a user where that may have not been a problem for a person before. So where there is, where there is a crisis, there is always opportunity to help people solve their problems in different and better ways to address that crisis. So again, it goes back to pain, you know, and it doesn't have to be the pain from a crisis. It could be a pain from from anything. Just like with GitHub, it was, it was hard to share code as developers like it was, there was too much pain, and this was, we started it in 2008, right after the housing crisis. It was unrelated to that, but it turns out that when you start a company, when the economy is depressed in a certain way, then at least you can look forward to the economy getting better as you are building your company. >> Oh, Tom, Preston Werner, thank you so much for joining pleasure talking with you. I appreciate all of your input. >> Absolutely, thanks for having me. >> I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for joining this Episode of cloud native insights. Thank you for watching the theCUBE. (light music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of UiPath Live, the Release Show. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Every body welcome back, to this special presentation, theCUBE has been covering the RPA space for quite some time. UiPath just had recently a huge launch, and Daniel Dines, as the CEO and founder of UiPath, has set forth the vision, of a robot for every person. (Giggles) pretty substantial goals that he has. And Brandon Node is here. He's the Senior Vice President of Product at UiPath. Brandon, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> So that is a really ambitious goal. And, we're going to poke at that a little bit, and ask you to sort of defend it. Give us some proof points and help us understand sort of why you guys are so confident in this vision. You guys obviously the leader in RPA, growing like crazy, you've shared some metrics, very transparent. So we'd love to have these transparent and open honest computation. So I'm going to start with just sort of the basic, I mean, people understand RPA, just as in terms of automating a lot of mundane tasks, these tasks, you know, are often very repetitive or rules based. They're sort of interacting with existing applications. Now, in the early days of RPA, these are stable legacy apps with people sitting in front of a screen. So I guess my first question to you is, you know, some of the criticisms of RPA have been that if the app changes, you know, the robot breaks. So, first of all, is that the correct way to be thinking about the state of RPA. Today, is that an outdated view? And let's get into it so we can understand how we achieve robot for every person. >> Your thought sure. So I think it's a fair point in that RPA, by definition is built on top of applications. And it's always been the case that you need to be in coordination with your release teams with the application teams to understand what's happening there. Do I think it's a fair statement on where the industry is? I don't think so I think that is a small component of what the center of excellence looks at. And when you look at RPA, at scale today, there are many considerations governance, change management training, things that make these companies successful and these companies that are embracing it as part of their strategic plan for digital transformation. So for sure, it's a part of the story. But I would say, it's just a small part, the bigger part of the story is really about how you bring RPA into the culture. And that's what I think we'll talk about some more with the robot for every person. >> Yeah, definitely. You know, and I want to get back into that sort of how you make RPA strategic but before we get there, so a lot of people have said. Okay, you know're your interacting with existing legacy applications stable. There's no problem, you kind of sort of refuted that. But a lot of people also talk about a point into the API economy that API's are really a way that your platform or other your competitors platform can interact with applications. And that begins to sort of widen the opportunity, sort of modernize both infrastructure and applications. Where do where does the API economy, the whole equation? >> Sure. When you look at RPA, we shouldn't look at it as just a narrow set of implementations. RPA is capable of connecting directly to API's directly to it interfaces to you know, mouse and click style integrations as well as deeper levels, connecting directly to the lower levels of the application bypassing the mouse and keyboard entirely. So think about RPA, not just as keyboard and mouse automations, but also benefiting from all of those API's that exists, also being able to span the full spectrum of automation. >> So I want to talk sometimes I joke, you know, tongue in cheek, it's sort of a pejorative, I say, hey, RPA sometimes paves the cow path. But you know, what if my cow path works, and I can pave it and allows me to go faster and automate. So what? There's other opportunities I can I can attack. So my question is, where are you seeing people really applying RPA today, and how rapidly are they going forward? You know, really transforming. You mentioned digital transformation. And you guys announced a ton of product getting into it where do you see them in terms of glomming on to some of those more strategic areas >> Yeah, absolutely. So we've had lots of conversation around what the right methodology is for RPA, kind of like you said, should I just automate the process as it is? Or should I break down the process, assess it, re-engineer it and then automate? And the answer is, we have customers all over the spectrum. And there's a lot to be said for automating the process as is, if a robot can do it in a minute and a half as is. But if I re engineer it, it can do it in a minute flat. Where's your time best spent? And I think the biggest consideration that companies need to have right now with regard to automation is just really around opportunity costs. If I can automate a process as is and put my re-engineering team on to a bigger problem, that's going to get a bigger lift for the organization. ploy those people there, right? So what you end up having is this kind of mosaic of opportunities. How much does it cost to automate? How much does it cost to re engineer? What's my benefit going to be from that automation or from that re engineering, and now you have different tools that you can apply to your backlog. So, for sure, RPA can automate things as it is as is as well as do take that re-engineering approach and make sure that you are getting the most out of that automation. In terms of the strategic nature of it. Again, all over the map. You know, we've always said automate the mundane automate the repeatable. I was a customer before I was an employee, some of my automations were actually my most critical things, the things that I couldn't let fall through the cracks under any circumstances. So while they were maybe relatively easy for a human To do the compliance pick up that I had the guaranteed delivery pick up that I had, to me made it worth it. >> How does artificial intelligence address some of this in terms of, of making RPA more strategic. In one hand, it is going to inject some, simplicity into the process. On the other hand, you know, people cerned about AI, where does it fit? In? What form does it take? Is it natural language processing? Is it? Is it actually taking actions like systems of agency? How should we think about that? >> Sure. I think about it as, again, a spectrum. You know, so many of these questions, there's not a single answer. There. It's really about what you want to accomplish and how you're going to approach it. So for instance, let's say I'm a company and I want to build the next best action AI model or ML model. right, I'm going to start with the data that I have from my operation. So I may want to use RPA. To help extract data out of processes the build repository that I'm going to build my, my model off of, or let's say I, you know, we have customers that are implementing complex models to help with with their customers. And they have those models being surfaced through RPA. So now I have the model, but I want a human to review it before it takes action. I can surface that in an attended automation in a form or something that's pre built that gives the agent guidance on what to do. And then at the fully autonomous side, you have AI and ML models attached to chat bots that are hooked into RPA processes that can service customers in real time. >> You know, I want to ask you about sort of Product versus platforms in their, their book, the second Machine Age Andy McAfee and Erik brynjolfsson MIT professors years ago sort of laid out, they said products or platforms beat products. And I think a lot of the criticisms of EA around point products, you guys made a big deal. In your your last release, you didn't really talk specifically about this. But to me, my one of my takeaways is, you're building out a platform, you talked about a spectrum. You know, you've got, you know, studio x versus low code, you've got your studio, which is for RPA developers, you got Studio Pro, for hardcore, you know what to do quality assurance, so you've really got a spectrum of capabilities. So it strikes me that one of the ways in which you get to a robot for every person is that you've got a platform that can evolve, you know, with the market. And I wonder if you could sort of talk about that and really try to plug it into that vision that Daniel set out a couple years ago. >> Absolutely. You know, to be honest, this always been a blessing and a curse for us, right? When you install UiPath, you have all of these tools, all of these capabilities. And you've got some places that you can start immediately we place a number of pre existing code bases and modules up on our marketplace. For instance, we have sample code that you can use that we provide. But still, you need to take the platform and customize it for your applications for your business. And when we talk about the platform mindset, really what our primary goal is, is to build something robust enough, flexible enough, reliable enough that any company can use it within their operations. And you see that that's borne out on our customer list that we publish. And we talked about, you have every industry covered, every region covered, and and that's our Challenge is really to make something robust enough to be everywhere, but intuitive and understandable enough that anyone can pick an entry point and begin to use that platform. >> So when we talk about a robot for every person, I want to know better definition around a person we talking about every worker, or is it even more sort of ambitious. >> More ambitious, because it's not just a worker, an employee, it includes students, teachers, take the broadest definition. And think about how taking advantage of automation or being able to write your own automations is beneficial. There's, there's no limit my son is in first grade. He's taking a class right now as part of his curriculum, on the basics of coding. He's doing loops and retries and step based algorithm. Islamic teaching, this is something that's ubiquitous, this applies to everybody. >> That's awesome. Scary at the same time. [Laughter] So I'm talking about this idea of bringing your own AI to the equation. You guys referenced that a little bit of your kind of fabric approach. But can you clarify sort of how you see that playing out? >> This goes straight back to the platform concept, right? If it's the case, that you already have an existing model, and I talk to customers almost daily, who have some form of intelligence existing within their platform today, right? It could be a model that helps with payment processing. Could be that next best action model, right? Data science has been on its own rocket ship for the past couple decades. And by now, most enterprise companies already have models that they're using. Or somewhere or something, we don't want to come in and say, rebuild that model with us. We're not a takeout company. We're an integration company. So we want you to be able to use those existing models, connect them directly to orchestrator. And once it's connected to orchestrator, that means that your developers can access those models directly within the automations that they're writing. So the ability to attach what you already have, those assets that you've already been working on, and make it one click, one drag and drop accessible to your developers is huge. >> It is huge. I mean, I think that's you can observe markets, the ones that have less friction in terms of, you know, their deployments tend to have greater adoption, you're not asking people to rip and replace. This is really sort of additive and you can get some quick wins. I want to come back to mentioned, you know, security, you mentioned that you've got to be in sync with your your teams. What's the right regime? I'm particularly interested in the security and compliance piece because a lot of times users when they hear it security, compliance governance, they go slow me down, say no. How do you help square that circle? >> Yeah, it's a great question. And it's funny because the narrative has changed so much. A year and a half ago, we were educating people on you know, the fact that robots won't go rogue, they won't. All of a sudden just start doing things that you haven't told him to do or haven't programmed in. Right. It was very much a fear of the unknown. I don't have those conversations anymore. Now the conversations with customers are really around. I will enable people to build around automations. I wanted to democratize RPA but I don't want people to automate things. That I don't want them to, for instance, I have a legacy database, it has a limited amount of bandwidth of capacity. So if all of my developers hit that database at once, I could slow down the the access to that database. So maybe I want to blacklist that from my development environments, because that's off limits for automation. And from our standpoint, we're completely okay with this. We want customers to use RPA for the right tools for their organization and give them the ability to build governance into the development tools and into the overall framework, so that it's very much in line with what their expectations. >> Brandon, I really appreciate you helping me wrap up this sort of RPA market analysis, the post UI path, Folks, you can you can DM me @DaveVellante or hit me on Twitter, and you know, love to hear your comment. UiPath as I've said, very open and transparent in the organization, go hit them up, challenge them as I have. Brandon again, thanks so much for for coming on theCUBE and helping us with this program. >> Great. Thanks for having me. It's always great to be here. All right, you're welcome. And thank you everybody for watching Dave volante for theCUBE. We'll see you next time. 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>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to a CUBE Conversation. We always love talking to founders of companies. We love supporting the Boston-area community, but even more, right now, we're of course talking to leaders in the industry about some of the challenges facing with the global pandemic, so, happy to welcome to the program first-time guest Paulo Rosado, who is the founder and CEO of OutSystems. You are based in Boston, your company is global. Paulo, thanks so much for joining us, and let's start out talking about kind of the age we are in right now and how you are supporting your customers, your employees, and the developer community that you engage with. >> Absolutely, and it's a pleasure to be here, Stu. Actually, since the 23rd of March, that our 1,100 employees are all working remote, so we've had more than 1,000 Zoom calls logged, at least among the people that I know. And we have dogs and kids everywhere, and we have to adjust, 'cause we have a lot of new parents, so the kids are all over them and whatever. But actually, productivity and morale is really at a high rate. The business is going really, really well. However, as in a very OutSystems type of way, actually, because we're so fast building these digital solutions that we've launched a program with our partners. We asked them for ideas, we got more than 200 ideas coming in, and we're sponsoring 20 of those ideas. One of them is with Deloitte, for instance, where we fundamentally, in one week, they've created a full logistics system to manage all the supplies within 16 municipalities, including ventilators, masks, PPEs and the like. >> Well, that's great to hear, right. So if people want to find out more on the OutSystems website, it's the COVID-19 Community Response Program, and love to see, Paulo, we're going to talk a bit about OutSystems and what you're doing for customers. Of course, the speed of development of new applications is what your company's been doing for a long time, and it kind of becomes a little bit bromide that we talk about, "Oh, well, software's eating the world." Well, in challenging times, how is software hoping to meet the challenges that communities, municipalities, employees, companies need to survive in these challenging situations? So anything else you want to talk about, kind of the community program? >> Yeah, well, so what we did is we opened up the community, worldwide community, actually, because today we serve about 60 countries, and so we wanted to have projects that really add impact. We had a couple from Germany, and some from Asia, and it's amazing. Today, we have sponsored 14, so we have 14 scalable installations already running. Some of these projects have gone live, some are still in development. But what's interesting is that the 200,000-plus communities, that they're getting together. We have all these virtual teams, subject matter experts, relationships with house officers and house offices, and developers, and we're just churning away. And the innovation of the people when they have, actually, something that they can build real solutions fast, they can iterate on top, it's absolutely amazing. And it's our contribution, also, to the world here, really. >> Yeah, very important, Paulo, thank you for doing that. Boy, I think, Paulo, you started the company back in 2001. The discussion around software and developers was rather nascent back in those days. So bring us a little bit through the journey of the company, if you would, and some of the major things that are different now in, really, you're entering the third decade of the company, so bring us back to some of the early days, as well as, what is significantly different today? >> Actually, the idea that we had initially was very much the one that has become truth. We were just about 14 years ahead of the market. So the company's called OutSystems because at the time, we believed that a large percent of systems would migrate out of the data center. That is what today is called the cloud. We believed, at the time, based on all the evidence, that a lot of software that companies were going to be building needed to be done in a very agile way, which is, you need to build fast, but not only build fast, but change very, very fast. And it took us a while until we reached about three to four years ago, when suddenly, everything became agile. Suddenly, everything that you build, all the software that you build, you no longer had one year or 18 months to build this project. Now, you had weeks, and those times have been compressing. And so, what's happening now is we encounter ourselves in a world where companies increasingly want to build more software because they want to be differentiated, they want to compete, but the talent available and the speed they have to build these pieces of software are becoming more and more challenging, and we help a lot in doing that. We are the most mature, the most advanced no-code/low-code platform in the market. And so, it's a great time for us now. >> Yeah, Paulo, I'd like to help understand software development, application modernization are very important topics for a number of years now. I think back to last year, Satya Nadella on stage at Microsoft Ignite, and he was talking about just the massive amounts of new applications that would be built over the next few years. And it's interesting, a company like Microsoft that, you go back 10 years ago, it'd be like, "Well, you'll be using all of our software, "not thinking about building your own software." So you've got partnerships with the public cloud providers, there's all sorts of new partners as well as competitors entering the space. So help us understand kind of where OutSystems fits in this ecosystem and differentiates itself from some of the other noise that's out there. >> No, absolutely. Well, we've woken up a lot of giants, definitely, with this approach. One of the differentiators is that these platforms are actually pretty hard to build, and so, if you look into what Satya said in that particular conference, he was mentioning the fact that fundamentally, every company needs to become a cloud software company. But in order for you to become a cloud software company, you need a very large number of talent skills. You need good web developers, front-end developers, back-end developers. You need to have people who understand DevOps, you need to understand scalability, security, all of these things. You can do that with the tens and even hundreds of tools that are in the market, but what the platform like OutSystems stands up by doing is ends up abstracting a lot of debt and just gives you a very fast capacity for you to build your mobile applications, your pricing engines, your workflows, your portals, in a very fast way. So leveraging the people that you have, leveraging the unique knowledge of the business that you have, and letting you catch up to disruptors that really have all those technical skill sets that today are so rare. >> Yeah, and I'd love to hear, tell us a little bit about your customer base. So you've been around for many years, so I'm sure it is quite diverse, but how many customers does OutSystems have? If you've got a key use case or two that might help us understand where this low-code/no-code solution is helping them through their journey. >> Oh, absolutely, we have companies like Safeway, Chevron, T-Mobile. All of them have somehow different use cases, because we are in the business of innovation, and so, whatever you want to innovate with, you innovate typically with OutSystems. We have a particular company which is the largest oil and gas terminal management company in the world. They have 73 terminals. And one of the things they built was a full ERP, a full platform, digital platform, to manage all logistics of the tankers that come into the ports, deploy the oil in the reservoirs, and then having trucks that come and take the oil away. It's a very complex business, and they were looking at, fundamentally, a four- to six-year project to build this, and they did it in seven months. And so, these type of compressions of time for these very large systems is a huge, huge differentiator. Then we have, on the other hand, companies that have built their front ends, typically mobile applications integrated with web applications, and those applications change, fundamentally, almost every day or every week. We have a bank, for instance, that's releasing a version per day in their applications. That speed of development gives them a huge competitive advantage but puts a lot of pressure on the stack and all the IT that's needed, and we help there because of the platform. >> Yeah, Paulo, we've been talking for years about some of the transformations that companies are going through, and that application transformation really is one of the bigger challenges that they face along those lines. In some of the events I go to, the communities I look at, there's a lot of talk about how containerization in Kubernetes is helping to move the infrastructure team to get ready for this. Of course, we've talked a bit already about how public cloud's changing things. Serverless is a different paradigm for how application developers should think about the platforms they're living on. How does OutSystems kind of plug in to these trends which have come along in the time since you've been out there? >> Oh, very well. The way these platforms work, at least, the way the OutSystems platform works, is that we have an automation layer who's responsible, fundamentally, for compressing time and making things increasingly easier. Basically, just give an IT department or company the capacity to build things 100 times faster. But underneath, we actually use the newest architectures that give us high scalability, also scaling resilience, 99.999% of uptime. And in those cases, for instance, for that, we use containers, Linux, Docker, all of those type of technologies. We run standard on AWS, we also run on Azure. And so, we can provide automation, but underneath, we're fundamentally using the same tools that all enterprise-grade architects are using. >> Okay, great, Paulo. Last question I have for you, give us a little bit your outlook on the future of software development, what we should be looking at when it comes to OutSystems and your community. >> Well, actually, it's not only about OutSystems, it's all about development of the software. We believe, and we see evidence of it, that while software development used to be done by some elites about 10, 15 years ago, today, every company needs to build their own software. And more than 65% of new software that's going to be built in the next three to five years is going to be done with a no-code or low-code platform. That's just too much, you just need that speed, you don't have enough talent. And actually, what we see, and we're doing a lot of research there, is that complementing the developers, we're seeing more and more AI bots that actually assist development in a lot of the boring tasks that are part of the development and deployment cycle, like validation of code, automatic testing, creating the right patterns of architecture for high scalability and maintainability. We're introducing a lot of those things in the platform. So in the next years, we believe we'll see more and more developers being helped by artificial intelligence bots, therefore progressing in that 100X to 1,000X automation productivity enhancement. >> Well, I tell you, you're hitting on one of our favorite topics to talk about. (Paulo chuckles) We did an event years ago with Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson from MIT, talking about how it really is about racing with the machines. So I've seen things that said, "Oh, computer programmers, you're the next things "that are going to be replaced by robots." And what I'm hearing from you is, of course, what we know is that really it is the combination of people plus this software that are really going to supercharge things going forward. And you're nodding, so you would agree. >> That's exactly it. And we already have evidence of that because we have a lot of our AI is already deployed inside the platform, and so we're measuring, we're learning with it. And we can see tremendous, almost exponential improvements. It's almost as if a developer, as they're creating these functional requirements, gets augmented with an extra brain. So it really works, and it's time now, it's reaching time for AI to be used to help the software development cycle. >> Right, well, Paulo, thank you so much for the conversation. Absolutely we hope that these kind of technologies are the ones that are going to help the global economy as we hopefully move forward from the results of the current global situation here. So thank you so much for joining us, and definitely look forward to keeping track of the company in the future. All right-- >> Thank you, Stu, it was a pleasure. Thank you very much. >> Thanks, I'm Stu Miniman, and as always, check out theCUBE.net for all of the digital events, as well as the archives of interviews that we've done, reach out to us if you have any questions, and as always, thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat electronic music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to theCUBE's Boston-area studio. Happy to welcome back to the program two CUBE alums. To my immediate right is Peter Smails, who's the CMO of Imanis Data, and joining him for the segment is Zeus Kerravala, who is founder and Principal at ZK Research. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> Thanks for having me. >> All right, so, we go out to so many shows, we're talking about massive change in the industry. Last two shows I've gone to, really looking at how hybrid and multi-cloud are shaping up, and change, and just the proliferation of options really seems to define what's happening in our industry. And Zeus, want to start with you because you've got some good research which looks at the data side of it. And of course, I'm an infrastructure guy, >> Yeah. >> but the reason we have infrastructure is to run my apps. And the only reason we have apps, really, is behind the data. And that transformation of data, and data at the core of everything, is something that we've loved to cover the last few years. So, what's new on your world? >> Yeah I, in fact, the word you said there, change, is apropos. Because I think I have never seen a time in IT, and I've been an analyst for 20 years and I was a CIO for a while, but I've never seen a period of change like this before. Where digital transformation is reshaping companies as fast as possible. Now, the key to being a successful digital organization is being able to take advantage the massive amounts of data that you have, and then be able to use some machine learning, or other analytic capabilities, to find those nuggets in there to be able to help you change your business process, make people more productive, improve customer service, whatever you're trying to do. I think it really stems from the analytics, that data. Now, what my research has found is that companies are really, and this shouldn't be a big surprise, but companies are really only using a very small slice of their data. Maybe five to 10% at the most in their data. Most data's kept in what's called secondary storage, and there what's happening is this concept called mass data fragmentation. Where we've always had data fragmentation, but it's becoming worse. Where data's now being stored, not only on local computers and servers, but also in the cloud, on IoT devices, out at the edge, within your organization. And so, this concept of mass data fragmentation has exploded. And it's hampering companies' ability to actually make critical decisions to be able to move fast and keep up with a lot of the cloud-native counterparts. And if they don't get a handle on this, they're going to wind falling further and further behind. I think it's absolutely critical today that this challenge of mass data fragmentation be solved. >> Yeah, Peter, want to pull you into this discussion. You talked to a lot of users, and we've talked to you at some of the Hadoop Shows. We look at what's happening in like the database world and there's so many options. >> Yeah. >> I know our team members that keep up to it, they keep spreadsheets. and they're trying to keep up with all of these, but seems like every week there's a new open-source this and that, >> Right, right. >> that's going to capture this segment of the market. But something that I found interesting from one of the previous interviews we'd done with you and your company is it's not that I took my main vendor of choice and I went to one other. It's that today, the database world is like everything else, I'm using a lot. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And it is, and, and therefore, we know that has ripple effects for what I do for security and what I do for things like data protection. Can you give us a little bit of, just kind of a view as to what customers, you know, why are they going to so many applications? What are some of the leading >> Sure. ones in the space? And we know that in IT nothing ever dies, >> and it's, >> Right. >> it tends to be additive. So, how are they dealing with this? >> Yeah, and it picks up directly on what Zeus was just saying before around this notion of fragmentation. So, Imanis Data, the genesis of Imanis Data was really around, if you look at it in the context of cloud, Could 1.0 was, it was essentially, let me take all my legacy applications, lift and shift. Right, let's just take everything on on-prem and let's put it in the cloud. People quickly realized that they were solving the wrong problem. The real answer to the problem was if I want to take advantage of all my data, if I want to take advantage of hybrid-cloud infrastructure. I've got to move from a traditional monolithic stack, application stack, to more of a microservices-based architecture. That led to a very rapid proliferation of new database platforms, both on the Hadoop side for big data, as well as the on the NoSQL side. So, the synergy here in why we like this research so much is because Hadoop, the key message is that Hadoop and NoSQL have both become significant contributors to the mass data fragmentation challenge. And that's really driven, ultimately, by digital transformation and organizations' desire to move to a true hybrid-cloud-based infrastructure. >> How does cloud and this data fragmentation, how does this all go together? >> Oh, our cloud and data fragmentation actually go hand in hand. People thought the cloud was actually solving a lot of their problems, but in a lot of ways it contributed to it, because, as you said, we never get rid of the old. We keep the old around and we add to it. In fact, what I've seen happens is with so many cloud repositories now, users are storing data in the place they were before and then making copies of it in these new cloud services. And in fact, almost all of the new app collaborative applications have their own cloud repositories. So, we've gone from an environment where we had a handful of storage repositories to manage to that absolutely exploding. And I think the cloud itself has matured. I think people are now starting to figure out how to really, to your point, use the cloud in a much different way than before. And so, they're reliant on it. The companies are dependent on it, but if we don't get a handle on where our data is we're going to wind up in a situation where it just becomes unmanageable. >> Yeah, and just to add to that, from additional researches, that according to recent research, 38% of interviewed companies had more than 25 databases. 20% of those same companies had over 100 databases. So, the point is there is a huge fragmentation issue. And if the problem you're trying to solve, ultimately, is insight to your data and intelligence on your business, you've got to create, you've got to solve this problem of fragmentation, because otherwise, you're never going to have any economies of scale. You're never going to be able to give visibility to all your data. That's ultimately the problem that needs to be solved. >> Yeah, it's funny, 'cause you talked about early cloud, and people thought oh, right, I'm going to move everything there and I'll have one cloud, it'll be the cloud. >> The cloud. >> Ah yeah, things like that. And of course, we understand, there's lots of reasons why I'm going to choose multiple solutions. But, too many companies I talk to, when you figure out how they got there. It wasn't like they said, well this is our strategy and we're going to do this, and this, and this. It was, well, different business units have different reasons. Just like I would build infrastructure for my various applications, I would have different groups with different needs. And then, hey IT, can you help us bring all these pieces together? So, how are we doing as an industry for helping customers get their arms around this? Is this just a mess today? Is there a wave, or a trend, as to how we put together, right? Who solves it from a vendor standpoint, and who, from the customer standpoint, kind of has the, is the champion of helping to solve this issue? >> Yeah, I think one of anything is unrealistic, right? And in fact, customers do want choice and they do want options. So, it's not the industry's job to force customers consolidate to one. In fact, it's better to let them use whatever they want. Now, where it becomes, where the work needs to be done now is creating that middleware layer, if you will, or that management layer, that sits above the infrastructure, that gives you the common view. So, I think this mythical single pane of glass we've been searching for for so long, actually, the cloud drives us in that direction, because we do need something to help us give that visibility. I know one of your partners, Cohesity, does that on the secondary storage side to actually make MDF, or mass data fragmentation, manageable. And there's other vendors that do that in other areas, but I think the concept here isn't to try and drive customers into selective choices, but it's to allow them to use whatever they want and then create a management layer over top that gives them that visibility to it looks like one environment. But in fact, it's whatever they want to use underneath. >> Yeah, and picking up on that, the notion of, if you look at the, you asked the question about, sort of, who owns the mantle of driving all this stuff together? And the answer isn't, you could say, oh, the chief data officer. Certain organizations have gone to the level of saying we have a chief data officer and they're trying to drive towards a consolidated strategy. That's a great idea, but, sort of the federation of how things have evolved is actually, is been a good model. Like, a lot of the folks that, from an Imanis Data standpoint, that we speak to, it's architects, it's developers, it's DevOps. And so, from an organizational standpoint, what's happening is you've got to have, over time, you've got to have the application folks, the DevOps folks, the architects, the DBAs, get more closely aligned with your traditional IT and infrastructure folks. That's evolving. And to Zeus' point there, that's not, you're not going to drive them all to one thing, because they have different viewpoints and such, but you need to provide that common layer. Sort of let them do their own thing, but then on the backend be able to sort of provide that common layer to be able to eliminate the backend silos. >> Okay, and drill us down a little bit. We brought up then that the notion of management being able to see across these environments as a piece of the solution, but what is Imanis doing? What are you seeing out there? And, I'll caution, we know a single pane of glass to solve everything is kind of the holy grail, but reality is we need to solve real problems for customers today, and yeah. >> Yeah, and our piece of the puzzle, our piece of the puzzle is Imanis Data is enterprise data management for Hadoop and NoSQL. That's where we focus. We're basically delivering industry-leading solutions for Hadoop and NoSQL. That has led to a very logical collaboration with Cohesity, who's one of the leaders in hyper-converged secondary storage. So, they're trying to provide that common layer of infrastructure to address mass data fragmentation. We see that as, we're the Hadoop and NoSQL folks, so there's a very logical synergy, whereby the combination of Cohesity's solution and Imanis Data's solution essentially then provides, ultimately will provide that single pane of glass. But also, again, at the end of the day provides a common visibility and a common layer to all of your secondary storage whether traditional, relational, VM-based, cloud-based, whether it's your Hadoop and NoSQL-based data. >> Okay, so, bring us back to the customers. We know that simplification is something we want. You know, the cloud world doesn't feel like it's gotten things any simpler. So, where are we? What needs to happen down the road? What more can you share about customers? >> Yeah, I think that's fair to say it hasn't gotten more simple, and in fact, it's gotten more complicated. Everybody I talk to in IT is drowning today in whatever the task is. And I think the point you made of single pane of glass, of remain largely myth, I think the focus is wrong. I don't believe we actually need a single pane of glass that can manage, that can see everything. I think what we need are separate panes of glass that let us see what we need to see. And in fact, the way you guys do that for NoSQL and Hadoop makes some sense. Cohesity has their own that looks at things at more of a higher level, data plate. So, I think we're really in the early innings here, Stu. I think over the next few years, we will see a rise in better management tools and things to help us simplify. I know I just did some research on IT priority for 2019, and simplification actually is now ahead of even cybersecurity as the number one path for today's CIOs. So, I think we've gotten to the point where we've consumed so much stuff, now it's time to simplify it. And there's no one answer for that, but I think within the different departments within IT, they need to look at what those management tools are to let them do that. >> Yeah, I mean, going back, I think back to when I first became an analyst about nine years ago. A central premise is that enterprise IT doesn't necessarily have the skillset to go architect it. They're not a Google or a Yahoo. So, they will spend money from the vendors and the suppliers to help simplify that for them environment. But Peter, I want to ask you, brought up people who are drowning in information. >> Yeah, yes. >> Definitely, we know that today in 2019 there is more going on than they had a year from now, and when we look forward to 2020, we expect that there will be even more. So, the answer in the industry is AI and ML are going to come solve some of this for us. So, to tell us, how does that fits in to these sorts of solutions? >> Sure, and the answer is machine learning and AI will absolutely need to be. Our view is that they're critical pillars to the future of data management. They have to be, because the volume of data and the complexity of the infrastructure within which you're running. You can't, as human beings, we are drowning, and you need tools, you need help to solve this problem. And machine learning and AI are absolutely going to be key contributors. From an Imanis Data standpoint, our approach has been very much about completely avoiding the whole notion of machine learning whitewash. Let's talk about the practical application of machine learning. So, for example, what we do today is we apply machine learning to do what we call ThreatSense. So, it's very specifically applied to the automation of anomaly detection, okay. Build a model of what normal looks like from a backup and recovery standpoint. Anything that falls outside of normal gets flagged, so that administrators can then do something. Provide a human feedback loop to that machine running algorithm, so it can get smarter. We also recently introduced something that we call smart policies. That's about the automation of backup. So, again, it's not about the holy grail of machine learning. In the case of smart policies, it's instead of creating spreadsheets and having a human being trying to figure out how to address a particular RPO, it's tell us what's your RPO and what data do you want to protect. We'll go build a model and we'll address your RPOs, and if we can't, we'll tell you why we can't. So, very practical for today. To the point you made earlier about that fact that we're still in the early innings, today it's about the practical application of machine learning and AI to help people automate processes. >> I think the fear and doom and gloom around AI is, particularly in the IT circles, is completely misguided. I understand why people might think it's going to take their job, but AI and ML is the IT pro's best friend. There's so much data today, they're so much to do, that people just can't connect the dots between those data points fast enough. >> Right. >> Just like you look, today you wouldn't go to a radiologist that doesn't use machine learning to look at your brain scans, right? You know, it's getting harder and harder to work, to be a customer of a company that doesn't use AI or ML to analyze your data, and it becomes very apparent, because they're just not able to provide the same type of service. >> Yeah, totally agree. We've done some events with MIT and a couple of the professors there, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee talk about racing with the machines. >> Yeah. >> So, the people that can actually harness and leverage that, the challenge is, if you're in IT and you're working on stuff that's five to 10 years old, and you can't take advantage of those new tools, well, you need to skill up, and you need to get ready. But most companies I talk to, it's not that they're looking to cut half the workforce, it's just that they can't add many more people, so most of them can be reskilled, or heck, if there's some automation they can have in there. There's lots of projects sittin' on the table that they've been trying to do for years. I don't find anybody that ever said, hey, if I could give ya an extra month in the year that you wouldn't have to figure out. >> The question is, do you want to be strategic to your organization, or tactical? And if you want to be tactical, your job's only as long as that tactic, right, so. >> Peter, when I was hearing you walk through some of that ML piece, things like security and ransomware kind of popped into my head. Is that a part of the solution in offer? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, ThreatSense is, specifically, we talk about as anomaly detection, because overall it really is about, ransomware is essentially about detecting anomalies. So, ransomeware is an application of anomaly detection. So, our ThreatSense capability is built into the product. What happens is, when we do backups, like I said, we build a model of what normal looks like, and then we flag anomalies. My dataset size, all of a sudden spike. My data type, all of a sudden I have a bunch of ZIP files, or something, all of a sudden. Something has changed that's outside of normal, and then we flag that, and you can take action against that. So, absolutely it is, but the initial application is specifically about ransomware. >> All right. Zeus, is there advice that you would want to give users, or when you're talking to customers, what's the profile of somebody that is handling their data, and leveraging it well? >> I don't always really hand it well. (all laughing) But I think the advice I'd give is you want to simplify and automate as much as you can, and ruthlessly automate. I think if you're trying to do things the old way, you're going to wind up falling behind. And so, I suppose to your question, what's the profile of a company that's doin' it well. It's one that's actually able to roll up new services quickly, and you see that in a lot of the big name cloud companies. They always new things comin' and new things goin', and they're able to transform the way they deal with customers and employees. That's the hallmark of a company that's using it's data well. Ones that aren't, frankly, we've seen a lot of 'em go out of business, right, over the last few years. And so, I think from an IT perspective, you want to embrace automation, embrace machine learning, right, embrace this concept of single pane of glass for your particular domain. Because what it lets you do is, it becomes a tool to help you do your job better. There's certain things people are good at and there's certain things people aren't, and connecting the dots, and terabits, petabytes of, bits of data isn't one of 'em. So, I think from an IT perspective, you want to automate, and you want to embrace machine learning, because it's going to be your best friend, and it's going to help you keep your skillset current. >> Yeah, and I would just pick up on that and say that the answer isn't constraining, to a large extent it's really embracing data diversity. Like the answer to mass data fragmentation isn't homogenization of your data, or limiting particular data types. The proliferation of different data types is a direct result of organizations trying to be more agile, and trying to be more nimble. So, the answer isn't sort of constraining data. The answer is making the strategic investments in the right tools, in sort of in some of the right policies and governance, if you will. So, that you keep everybody strategically going in the right direction in this sort of federated diverse type of environment. >> Yeah, if you look at any market in IT, well, really even in the consumer world, where there has been choice, it's create a rising tide for everybody. >> Right. >> The question is, you can't have it be chaotic. >> Right. >> Right, and so you're bringing a level of order to a world that was historically chaotic, and that untethers people to make whatever choice they want and use the best possible tools. >> Yeah. >> Right. >> Peter, I go back to the promise of big data, was that I was going to turn that proliferation of volume, velocity of data from a, oh my god, that's a problem, and flip it on its head, and become an opportunity for how we can leverage data. Give me the final word. How do we connect the dot from where that was a few years ago to this mass data fragmentation world today. >> Yeah, and the answer to that is don't treat, don't make big data sort of the three guys over in the corner who are the data scientist. Embrace big data. Embrace all your data types. So, our message, as the Hadoop and NoSQL data management folks, is simply, look Hadoop and NoSQL are a key part of your overall data strategy. Embrace those, include those in your overall strategy, and make sure you're basically taking the right contextual picture of what you're trying to do. Include all your different data types. Hadoop and NoSQL are contributors to mass data fragmentation, but as part of that salute, if they're part of the problem, then they need to be part of the solution, both from a data standpoint and from a solution standpoint. So, that's really the message that we're driving is that, embrace all your different data types, put the appropriate systems in place, take the right sort of approach to consolidating and solidifying your overall data strategy. >> All right, well, Peter and Zeus, thanks so much for sharing >> Thank you. the latest update. Absolutely, data at the center of it all, and need to embrace those new tools and opportunities out there. All right, I'm Stu Miniman. And be sure to check out thecube.net for all of our research and shows that we'll be at. And thank you, as always, for watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

(techno music) >> Narrator: Live from Chicago, Illinois, its theCUBE. Covering LeMon 2018. Brought to you by VeeAM. >> Welcome back to the windy city everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events. We track the signal, extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with co-host Stu Miniman. This is our second year here at VeeAMON. Hashtag Veeamon, simple enough. Kate Hutchison is here, she's the CMO of VeeAm. >> Yes, thank you very much for having me. Its a pleasure to be here. >> You're very welcome, thanks so much for taking time out of your busy schedule, great show. You've painted the town in green. >> We certainly have. (laughs) >> So VeeAM obviously didn't need your expert help in creating awareness in places like this. >> Kate: Yes. >> And having a persona around around the green team. Awesome. Your background, Riverbed, Polycom, VMware, Citrix, BEA, some rockstar companies. You've got a lot of experience there. Why did you come to Veeam, and why now? >> Yes, so I was attracted to VeeAM for many reasons. We have some, as you know, some stellar attributes as a company. We've been talking about our net promoter score of 73, which is three and half times the industry average. And of course the executive team themselves, and meeting them and really wanting to be a part of that team. So that was a huge reason for me joining, but as it relates to my career and my background and what I thought I could bring to VeeAM. Very much about enterprise marketing. So I've spent about the last 20 years in the industry, as you mentioned the company names. Really helping those companies build the powerhouse brand, and so I just love being a company who is known for one thing, but is very successful that being known for something that's even broader and more strategic. And that's why I wanted to join the company. >> You mentioned the phrase powerhouse brand. What is a powerhouse brand, and how do you go about building it? >> Well everybody probably has a different definition of a powerhouse brand, but having spent a good 15 years in the Bay area, Silicon Valley, when you're walking around Silicon Valley and you say who you work for and everyone recognizes it, you're working for a powerhouse brand. That hasn't been the case with VeeAM. Now we're very strong, we do our research. We come out pretty strong it Europe, but in terms of our brand awareness in North America we have a ways to go there. Again, and I think because when it comes to building a brand and a powerhouse brand, enterprises really rely on customers to do that. To really leverage the voice of customers, to get the word out and to get the customers to go on record to talk about the power and value of VeeAM. Because when customers go on to talk about it, there really is no better marketing that you can do. >> Ya Kate, one of the things I saw. VeeAM started out with the geeks, and I say that in the most loving terms. People that did virtualization. >> Kate: Yes. >> VeeAM solved a problem, simple, huge adoption in that market, but as we've been talking about all day here, data protection is going up the stack. >> Kate: It is. >> It's hitting the seed sweep more, so. >> Kate: Yes. >> Maybe you could explain to a lot of our audience are the techies and they're like I don't understand this brand in marketing things. >> Kate: Sure. >> We just want the next little containers and things there. >> Kate: Absolutely. >> So why the brand elevation? >> So, first and foremost, we're known for one thing in the industry, as it relates to our product. It just works, and we're not leaving that behind, and certainly the enterprise cares a lot about the product, but as we go into the enterprise space, there's some things that an enterprise customer is going to look for, that an SMB may not. Enterprise is one of the assured company that they're doing business with, has long term viability. They want to make sure that there's plenty of addressable market and headroom for them to go far and above, beyond their sights of, a billion in our case. The other thing is, enterprise customers have a different way of engaging with that company, as it relates to the selling motion. So whether it's our partners, our alliance partners, our resellers, our sales teams directly, they want to be able to work with them as trusted advisors, and they want our folks to be able to anticipate their needs, well ahead of when they actually encounter them. So, we're talking a lot about a journey for our customers. We've been talking about intelligent data management, and the five stages of getting to that. So its really, its building on our core. Which has been SMB and commercial, but also now, up leveling the story, and by the way, the technologists at all companies of all sizes, want to be doing more to influence the outcomes, the business outcomes. So we're telling a story that we think will resonate with them and there's always plenty of click downs into the technology if you want it. (laughs) >> So you guys are putting a lot of emphasis on the up leveling. As Stu mentioned, CXO is becoming more aware of the data protection problem. >> Kate: Yes. >> Its becoming a board level topic. >> Kate: Yes. >> So I think I get the why now. >> Kate: Yes. >> My question is, why VeeAM? And what is the brand promise that you're going to bring to that enterprise? >> So I think, traditionally, VeeAM has been thought of as more of an S&B and commercial play. So the why now is that we have a much broader portfolio then we had a few years ago, and yet we're thought of as just back up and replication. Now, we're building on what our reputation is and back up and replication, but we want to take customers to where we know the puck is going. So for example, as enterprise customers want to take advantage of public clouds, of manage clouds, of SAS applications, they need to be able to get control of all their data. That's the one thing we hear over and over. I don't know where all my data is. Right? So they need to have a platform that can give them that visibility and that aggregated view, that single paint of glass. Then they're going to eventually want to take advantage of being able to move workloads into places where it makes more sense to have them. In cases where there needs to be tighter protection, or in the case of archive data, that they don't need to spend a lot of money on primary storage. It just depends on what our customers want to do. And, ultimately, to be able to move to more of a behavior based way of managing that data. For example, if we see malware crossing that network we can immediately respond and make sure that those workloads are secure. It could also happen as it relates to weather systems and being able to have the data be smart enough to sense and respond where it needs to move to. >> We saw some slides this morning that Peter McKay was showing, like off the platform slide, and I tweeted out that we learned years ago, working with Eric Brinyawlson and Andy McAfee that platforms beat products. >> Kate: Yes. >> So, talk about the importance of platforms through the enterprise. >> Yes, so first of all you cannot be a platform provider without an ecosystem that's embracing and extending the value, and we're working with our ecosystem through the API's, the application programming interfaces, that we make available to them so that they can integrate with our products, and actually allow our platform to be able to be the most complete platform for intelligent data management. That is not all coming from VeeAm, we are very heavily dependent on our ecosystem. >> Dave: Right. >> So that's really the crux of how important a platform is because customers have a lot of technology already in their environments. They want to make sure that if I'm buying something from you, that it'll integrate into my existing environment so I don't have to do a complete rip and replace. That's a very expensive proposition. So, we have been investing and we have thousands of technology partners that are embracing our API's and again, extending the value of our platform. >> I don't want to jump in but, I was going to ask you how you add value to those partners, and it's not just the product and the features, and doing what you say you're going to do from a product standpoint, it's having that platform that makes it easy to integrate, >> Kate: That's right. >> And creating that scale effect, that flyaway effect. >> Absolutely, and a solution that is better together. So, customers really like buying solutions that are already packaged and integrated as it might relate to Cysco and VeeAM or HPE and VeeAM or NetApp and VeeAM. That's what we've been doing with those partners in particular and really going to market together, and that is a preferred way for many customers to buy. >> Or IBM and VeeAM, or Microsoft and VeeAM, >> Yes >> Botanics and VeeAM. VMware and Veeam, we don't want to leave anybody out. >> Kate: We don't want to leave anyone out. Those three that I mentioned, we're on their price list and we are reselling. >> So that's the difference. >> Yes. That's the difference >> Okay, that's really the point. >> Yes. >> Okay. >> So my question is, as you go up the stack a bit, talk about platforms and things like orchestration, >> Kate: yes >> the swim lanes get a little bit muddy, because if you talk about those same partners, the VMware, Microsoft, the Newtanics of the world. >> Kate: Yes. >> They want to own a lot of those pieces in the multi cloud world. >> Kate: Yes. >> Maybe you can help explain that. >> I think we're all probably saying some of the same words, but defining them a little differently. So when we talk about orchestration, it's very much about allowing workloads to move seamlessly across multi-clouds. To do that while the data is secure and protected, and eventually introduce, we have partnerships today that allow us to leverage artificial intelligence. So that those workloads can move seamlessly without any disruption to the business as they're moving to the right location. So yes, I think you hear a lot of the terms, but as you drill down into it and you double click on what does that mean for, in your environment, it's a little different. >> So when VeeAM decided to expand deeper into the enterprise, it's putting its money where its mouth is. I mean Robby brought in Peter McKay, he brought in a number of folks on the sale side with enterprise, now yourself. >> Kate: Yes. >> We saw Dave Russel up on stage today. >> Kate: Yes. >> He's got some enterprise jobs. >> I'm looking forward to working with him. >> You're not just talking to talk, you're walking to walk. Which is great to see, and thinking about the total available market, its a TAM expansion move, can you address that at all? >> Kate: Yes. >> I know you guys are very research oriented, as a company. >> Kate: Yes. >> You have relationships with all the big research houses. What do you see from a taman standpoint. >> Yes, so, remember that our proposition is to have the most complete platform for intelligent data management. By virtue of saying that, it really means we have to look at adjacent markets for additional capabilities to put into our platform, to ensure that we remain ahead of the competition as it relates to intelligent data management. We're looking at various adjacent markets. Whether that be through a build buyer partner strategy. So one of the largest market opportunities in an adjacency is the cloud infrastructure as a service market. It's huge. Its about 90 billion. It's got a very fast clip in terms of its compounded annual growth rate, and we've already made some pretty great progress there, both organically, as well as through the acquisition of N2WS. When we move into fast growing market segments like that, and we have many others that are adjacent as well, it's creating an addressable market of about 30 billion for us as we look out into 2022. So we're pretty excited about that, and again, that gets back to making those investments so that an enterprise customer feels confident betting their business on us. We have that scale ability. We have that addressable market, and we are increasingly helping our folks on the front lines become trusted advisors to our customers. >> In your estimation, I know some of this is hard when you're doing the analysis >> Kate: Yes. >> I used to do that for a living so I know. In your estimation is that sort of an approximation of spend, or does it include what we look at, as the money that's left on the table by the global 2000 because they have inadequate data protection. Presume it does not include that. >> Kate: Yeah. >> Because if it did, it would probably be a trillion. >> Kate: Right >> But I wonder if you can add some color to it. >> Well I think as we get into an era of compliance, we have GDPR coming down this month, I think companies are taking a new look at what does it really mean to ensure that I know where all my data is, that I ensure it's protected, that I'm sure that it's secure, and that it's in compliance. I think you're seeing more attention, more money. You mentioned earlier that this is becoming more of a sea level issue, and I think in an era of compliance and regulations that are coming down, you're going to see that only increase. >> One of the interesting things that we saw about VeeAM when we were looking at the show here, you're almost, how do I say it, a tweener. You're still kind of a startup, but you're one of the bigger companies in the space. There's a lot of buzz and energy, and customer interest >> Yes. >> In this all market thing. How do you look at yourself compared to some of the legacy giants, >> Yeah. >> And some of the new startups? >> So we are a very fast growing company. We posted 40 percent growth in Q4. We were at 36% year over year. I mean off the very big numbers. I haven't seen these numbers since I was at VMware. So that is a rapid growth company that grows up quickly when it's growing at that clip, so I think there's a part of us that's extremely paranoid about the competition and looking at some of the new entrance to make sure that we are really staying ahead and innovating, continuing to innovate. Then we look at some being legacy companies that have been in this space, and we see in some cases, a downward trend in their revenue and in their investments in this era, in this area. Again, I think it's a healthy balance of innovative and paranoid, and recognizing that customers want the solution that VeeAM offers, and they do want to be able to migrate off of the legacy systems that are out there. We are seeing that time and again. We just showed, this morning in the general session, we showed a Royal Caribbean video and that was a case where they abandoned their legacy system to go with VeeAM. >> Well that's quite a story. Nearly a billion dollars, growing at 35 plus percent a year. You got to look to companies like Service Now, Work Day. >> Kate: Yes. >> You're in that rare-ified air. Well Kate thanks so much for coming. >> Absolutely. >> Congratulations on the new role. >> Thank you. >> Really excited to see you sort of take VeeAM up into that new stratosphere. >> I'm very excited to be here. >> It's great to be part of VeeAMON 2018. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll be right back with our next guess, right after this short break. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge 18, here in Las Vegas. I'm your hose, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost, Dave Vellante. We're joined by Josh Kahn. He is the General Manager of Platforms, ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE again. >> Yeah, really excited to be here. Thanks for being here and thanks for being part of our event. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. >> It's been a lot of fun. >> Newly minted. >> Yeah that's right. (laughing) >> Yes, congrats on the recent promotion. So tell us about your new role. >> Yeah, so I run the Platform Business Unit. We use the word platform a lot of different ways at ServiceNow and I think we're trying to get a little bit more clear about that. On the one hand, our platform is the core foundation that all of our applications and all of our customers' applications are built on. It's also a way that independent software vendors and our customers can build their own applications. So what my group is trying to do is really be more thoughtful and structured about how we go about gathering those requirements from our customers and our independent software vendor partners and make sure we're bringing the products to market that meet their needs, and that we're doing all of the things across the board as a company we need to do to make them successful because there's a lot that goes into long-term customer success from the sales teams to the solutions consultants to professional services and the Customer Success Management Team. We're bringing all those things to make sure that, as our customers are building applications, we're helping them be successful. >> I remember we had Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee on and they were making a point. This was years ago when they wrote their, I think, most recent book. They were saying platforms beat products, I'm like, okay, what do you mean? Look, you can make a great living doing products, but we are entering a platform era. It reminds me of the old Scott McNealy, car dealers versus car makers. If you want to be a car maker in this day and age, unfortunately Sun Microsystems never became that car maker, but you've got to have a platform. What's your perspective on all that? >> I totally agree. I think that every customer I talk to is looking for fewer, more strategic vendors and partners, and they're really saying, hey, be a strategic partner to me. Digital transformation is everywhere. Disruption is everywhere, and they're saying, hey, we need a few people we can really count on to help us build a strategy and execute on that strategy to get to the next place. Isolated, independent pieces of software tend to have a hard time becoming one of those strategic vendors, and I think the more you can be thought of as a platform, the more different kinds of workloads run on the same common shared infrastructure that provide shared data services, that can provide simple ways to get work across each other, the more value that you can bring and the more you can be thought of in that strategic partner realm. >> So you guys are a platform of platforms, we use that terminology a lot, and I think there's no question that for a lot of the C-level executives, particularly the CIOs that I talk to, you are becoming, ServiceNow is becoming a strategic platform provider. Who else is in there? Let's throw some... IBM, because of its huge services in certain industries, for sure, SAP because of its massive ERP estate. I mean, I don't know, Oracle, maybe, but it feels different, but maybe in some cases. Who do you see as your peers? >> The category of players that are in this space are really people that are investing big in the Cloud and investing big in intelligence and automation. And, I think, a lot of times automation can have kind of a negative connotation to it, but we really believe that automation can be used to serve people in the workplace and to make the world work better for people, not just make the world of work work without people. So when you look around at the people that are moving into that strategic realm, it's Cloud players, people who are providing either Cloud infrastructure or Cloud functions, a wide set of microservices capabilities, and people providing applications software as a service that start to cover a broader and broader portfolio. Clearly, Workday is thought of oftentimes as a strategic partner to their customers, because they provide a human capital management capability that's broader than just being a data repository. Salesforce is clearly a strategic partner to the sales and marketing organizations. The reality, though, is a lot of work that happens in the Enterprise cuts across these things, and so there's an opportunity for us to work with the Saleforces and the Workdays and the Googles and the Amazon Web Services of the world to help bring all of those things together. I think that what customers want is not only strategic technology providers, but strategic technology providers that will work with each other to solve customers' problems. >> John Donahoe on, I guess it was Tuesday, was saying we're very comfortable being that horizontal layer. We don't have to be the top layer, although I would observe that the more applications you develop, the more interesting the whole landscape becomes. >> Yeah, well, I think that's absolutely true. We're in the early stages of this, right? If you look at the amount of money that's spent in IT in the enterprise sector and then you start adding up all of these areas that I just mentioned, Cloud and SAS, it's still a very small amount of that overall spent. So clearly, big legacy technology vendors are incredibly relevant still today, but the challenge they'll have is making sure they stay relevant as this tide shifts to more Cloud, more intelligence, more automation in the workplace. >> I wonder if you could walk us through the process that you go through when you are working closely with customers, collaborating, trying to figure out what their problems are and solve them and then also solve the problems they don't even know they have, that you can provide solutions for. >> Actually, it's amazing, because in a lot of cases, the innovation, and this has been a phenomenal week, because I've gotten to meet with so many customers and see what they're doing. And what tends to happen with ServiceNow is the IT organization, oftentimes, it starts there. The IT organization brings it in for IT service management, and people start using that to request things that they need from IT, and they very quickly say, man, I have a process that would really benefit from exactly what you just did. Can you build my application on that? And so there starts to become this tidal wave of people asking the IT organization if they can start hosting applications on the platform. I'll give you one example from a company called Cox Automotive. Donna Woodruff, who's an innovation leader there and leads the ServiceNow platform team, found a process where they had a set of safety checks they do at all these remote sites as part of a car auctions, and it was a very spreadsheet-driven process that involved a lot of people doing manual checks, but it also had regulatory implications, insurance implications, and workplace happiness implications. And they were able to take this, put it on ServiceNow, and automate a lot of that process, make it faster, I should say digitize it, 'cause you still need the people going through and doing the checks, but were able to digitize it and make that person's job that much better. These applications are all over the place. They're in shared email inboxes, they're in Excel spreadsheets, they're in legacy applications. We don't actually have to go drive the innovation and the ideas. They end up coming to the ServiceNow platform owners and our customers. >> I'd like you to comment on some of the advantages of the platform and maybe some of the challenges that you face. When I think about enterprise software, I would generally characterize enterprise software as not a great user experience, oftentimes enterprise software products don't play well with other software products. They're highly complex. Oftentimes there's lots of customerization required, which means it's really hard to go from one state to another. Those are things that you generally don't suffer from. Are there others that give you advantages? And what are maybe some of the challenges that you face? >> I think it's true. Enterprise software, you used to have to train yourself to it. It's like, hey, we're going to roll out the new system. How are we going to train all the users? But you don't do that with the software we use in the consumer world. You download it from the app store and you start using it. If you can't figure it out, it's not going to go. >> You aint going to use it. >> Josh: Exactly right. So we put a lot of that thought process from the consumer world into our technology, but not just the technology we provide. We're trying to make it easier for our customers to then provide that onto their internal and external customers as well. Things like the Mobile Application Builder that we showed earlier today, that's coming in Madrid, it's an incredibly simple way to build a beautiful mobile application for almost anything in the workplace. And, again, as I was saying before, a lot of the ideas for applications come from people in the workplace. We've got to make it easy enough for them to not only to identify what the application potential is, but then build something that's amazing. What we're trying to do is put a lot of those design concepts, not just into the end products we sell, but into tools and technology that are part of the platform and the Platform Business Unit so that our customers can build something just like it in terms of experience, usability, simplicity, and power without having to have as many developers as we do. >> You and I have known each other for a number of years now, and just as we observed the other day, off camera, that you've been forced into a lot of challenges. I say forced, but welcomed a lot of challenges. >> I love it, I love it. >> All right, I mean, it's like, hey, I'll take that. No problem. You've had a variety of experiences at large companies. Things you've learned, opportunities ahead, maybe advice you'd give for others, like the hard stuff. >> I think one of the biggest things I've learned here, particularly at ServiceNow, is just the importance of staying focused on customers rather than competitors. I think a lot of times when you're in the business roles or strategy roles, you can really think a lot about who am I competing against, and you can forget that you really just need to solve the customer's problem as well as you possibly can. Be there for them when they need it. Have something that's compelling that addresses their needs, and stay laser-focused on what works for them, and at the end of the day you're got be successful. So that's a strategy we've really tried to take to heart at ServiceNow, is put the customers at the center of everything we do. We don't worry that much about competitors. They're out there and we know they're there and we study them, but it's really the customer that gets us up every morning. >> You know, it's interesting, I've had this, as well as John Furrier has, had this conversation with Andy Jassy a lot, and they're insanely focused on the customer where he says, even though he'll say, we get into a competitive situation, we'll take on anybody, but his point was both methods can work. Your former company, I would put into the very competitive, Oracle, I think, is the same way. Microsoft maybe used to me, maybe that's changing, but to a great extent would rip your face off if you were a competitor. My question is this: Is the efficacy of the head-to-head, competitive drive as effective as it used to be, and are we seeing a change toward a customer-centric success model? >> I think there's two things going on. I think one is once a market really kind of reaches maturity, the competitive dynamic really heats up. >> Dave: 'Cause you got to gain share. >> Yeah, you got to gain share. And today, in the Cloud world, in the intelligence world, there's just so much opportunity that you could just keep going for a long time before you even bump into people. I think in mature markets it's different, so I think a lot of times, partly at EMC, that was one of the dynamics we had is a very, very mature market on on-premise storage, and so you had to go head-to-head every time. But I think there's also the changing tenor of the world. People have a lot less, they don't care for that kind of dialogue as much anymore. They don't like it when you come in and talk bad about anybody else. So I think there's both dynamics at one, and the markets we're in, they're so new, they're growing so fast that it's not as important, but also, people don't care for it. I don't think it helps, if anything, sometimes it makes people wonder if they ought to be, oh, I didn't think about talking to them, maybe we should go call the competitor you just mentioned. (laughing) so, all that said, when you get into a fight, you got to fight hard and you got to come with the best stuff, so I think that's the reality. >> Dave: Great answer. >> That's a good note to end on. Thanks so much, Josh, for coming on theCUBE again. It's been a real pleasure having you here. >> All right. Thank you, I really appreciate it. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge 18 just after this. (techy music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube covering ServiceNow Knowledge 2018. Brought to you by ServiceNow. >> Welcome back everyone to theCube's live coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge18 here in Las Vegas. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my cohost Dave Vellante. We're joined by Dave Wright. He is the chief innovation officer at ServiceNow. Thanks so much for coming on the program. >> It's a pleasure, always a pleasure. >> Good to see you again Dave. >> Good to see you as well. >> Yeah, you've been around the block. You've been around theCube a few times. >> Around the block, a bad way of putting it but yeah. (laughing) >> So chief innovation officer, we've had a lot of great new product launches at this show. What are you most excited about, and what are you already thinking about when you go back to your office? >> So I think what's been interesting to me is the different way of engaging now, we've got the concept of virtual agent technology and I don't just mean the fact that we've got virtual agents. The fact that it starts to give people alternatives and it gives people alternative ways to come into the system, whether it be through our interface or whether it be through someone else's interface, I start to wonder, what'll happen going forward as we get more and more bot type technologies out. How will you have that one interface that works with all those to get that information back of the chain? How will you almost have a single interface that allows you to connect to all these bots and solve your problems? Because the benefits kind of two fold. One is the bot technology you get from being a customer to coming in and actually doing a request. But the other is you'll eventually be able to take that same technology and apply it to the fulfilled user so the power user because if I'm doing something and I can have an agent that's helping me do it, almost like the agent assist concept, you saw this morning. If I can take that to a next level and have AI running on top of that, then I can make work easier for the people coming in but I can actually improve the people that are in the system and make them more effective. >> Go ahead. >> Go ahead, follow up please. >> No, I was just going to ask about, how you get your ideas? So you're here, you're interacting with customers, you're seeing how they're using your product. So is it interviewing customers to find out their pain points? Is it really just watching, I mean you're the chief innovation officer. How do you spark your own creativity? >> It's a really weird answer. I get most of it off kids, most of it off my kids. So I can tell you a story. We were in Barnes and Noble the other week and they had albums in the, plastic twelve inch albums. >> Rebecca: They're coming back. >> And they cost more than they use to. >> Dave Vellante: Yeah really. >> So I called the kids over, I said look, let's get educated. This is what I use to play music on. And now we moved to CD's and you guys miss CD's and this is why you guys buy music. Now I've got a 12 year old and seven year old. And the 12 year old was saying, well, we don't buy music. And I said yeah, and I thought, no you don't, you rent music. And then my youngest daughter said, why would you want to own a song forever? And I was like, this is interesting. We started having a discussion, >> These are deep, these are deep questions. >> It was while other kids we're over having a sleepover and they're all eating pizza and they were talking about the concept of having a job. They said, how do you decide what you want to do for the rest of your life and how do you do that? And we we're talking about how you do something, you get better. You go to another company, you get better at doing it. You go to another company. And one of them said, it sounds really boring just like doing the same thing. And then one of them had the best answer. She said, don't you think it's a waste of your time? And I said, why is it a waste? And she said, because if you're really good at something, why should you just do it for one company? And I was like, oh so, you're going to be a contactor. (laughing) But what I realize was because this whole generation don't need to own things, they just need to use things, so they don't need to know how to do something, they just know they want to do it. And they don't need to own something, they just need temporary access to it. Then it got me thinking when you talk about where could work go to. Do you get a whole concept of the gig economy becoming a gig enterprise. Because we've got a lot of people in work who've got all these different skills but we force them to do one job. And it might be that someone's doing a job but they've got skills that would be applicable outside of that job but they never get to use them. So have we seen the first generation arrive now where they expect everything to be tass based? And then it gives you control over your own career. Because then you say, well, actually I'm not good at this but I can start a bid for work. I can say to people, hey I'm only a three on a skills racing but if you don't need any complex, I'll take it cause I get to learn. So it's a whole new dynamic and I think when you ask whereabout ideas come from, some of the first stage ideas or the first horizon, I think they come form customers. Some of the second horizon, they come from people who aren't working. It's just trying to imagine how they all develop and whereabout that all goes. >> So you surround yourself with millennials? >> Not even millennials. >> Dave Vellante: They're kind of pre post millennials. >> Almost like the linksters, almost the people who've been born connected. It's definitely a Gen Z thing but it's beyond millennials. I think the millennials had a certain expectation around well it's kind of a negative connotation but before they were called millennials, people use to refer to it as the entitlement generation. And it wasn't because they were entitled, it was because they felt they just got access to everything. So it's like with my kids, they're kind of Gen Z and one of them is a linkster, but you never go to them and say, they never come to you and say, hey, I want to watch a movie and you go, great, let's go to Blockbuster's, let's rent it. They expect it to be just available on demand, available all the time. And that was what I think the kind of millennial generation started being entitled to access to data, then I think you went to the generation where it was everything always connected, no concept of banword. But now I think it's the, the real thing that's changing is the concept of ownership and I think that's where you start to see things like, will the car industry ever be the same because if you don't need to own a car because you're not driven by the same passions that people who own cars are driven by, it's just a way of communicating you don't need a garage on your house, you may as well park the car somewhere else. It comes when you need it. It can change the way cities are laid out. I mean there's so many different routes you can go down with this. >> SO how does that innovation, how does that knowledge that you gain get into ServiceNow products and services? >> That all comes back then to how you, how people are going to face new management dynamics or how people are going to manage things like IOT devices? How are people going to deal with managing work if it is a task based economy? How are people going to start to think about not just working in a system of record, or not just working in a system of engagements, but how are they going to start to build that mesh or that web that links all these different things together? And I think that's where our strand comes. Our strand comes in the ability to be able to link systems of records together. To link users with those backend systems, to be able to manage those complex work processes. That's kind of the core elements. Also I think when you look at what Fred Crasick when he built the platform and he had the whole work flow engine and it is that engine that's kind of the key pallet to the whole company. >> I think the metaphor of mesh, sometimes we talk about a matrix of digital services that becomes ubiquitous beyond a cloud of remote services, is really transforming to this mesh of digital capabilities that are everywhere that do things that Clouds don't do. They sense, they react, they respond, they read, they hear. It's an amazing time that we're entering in innovation. Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson when they wrote the book Second Machine Age talked about Moore's Law, power innovation but they also talked about the innovation curve reshaping from going from Linears Moore's Law which we've marched to the cadence of Moore's Law for decades in this industry to reshaping, to an expediential curve. And I wonder if we could get your thoughts. We've paused that it's accommodation of sort of data applying machine intelligence to that data and then leveraging Cloud economics at scale is really where the innovation is going to come from in the future. What are your thoughts on that? >> So let me try to understand the question. So you're talking about not actually the way that you've seen the growth from a process prospective but the way you actually see the growth from a machine learning capability being able to analyze that data? >> Applying that layer of machine learning. Maybe use that mesh metaphor, that top level. You know you've got horizontal technology services but then there's this new AI layer on top. The data is the fuel for that AI. >> Absolutely, I think it's the I think people can't even imagine what they can do with that data, people can't even contemplate some of the decisions they can make and it's when people start to look at things in completely different ways, it's when people start to say, well, if we apply machine learning to a user interface for example, could we come up with a better user interface because now if we understand how people interact with the system, could we actually build a better system? Or you see people starting to have this whole butterfly effect around the way that artificial intelligence works. So the best example I heard was from, I was actually at a convention with a girl called Louis Chang and she was talking to me about it. But they were speaking to hospitals. They we're talking about self drive cars and the application machine learning of being able to help cars drive. And they were saying the interest in knock on effect of this was a hospital saying it was going to be a real problem for them having self drive cars. And she said, why's it going to be a problem? And the problem was, if you look across the whole America you have about 20 people a day die because they can't get replacement organs. But 37 percent of the organs come from car crashes. So if you take car crashes out of the equation. So what they were investing in was actually looking at how they do cloning technology for organs. So no one would ever imagine (mumbled speaking) and this is going to improve cloning technology so much. And I think AI's in the same place. Everyone's using it in such a small area that they don't even see the potential of what they could do with it, they don't have any concept of what they could be starting to look at and how they could start to spot transvaterian people. Even on a base level, I was speaking to one of our customers the other night, and they managed to put an AI system in place that when they got a call in off the description of the call they could work out what the customer satisfaction was going to be and if it was going to be a bad satisfaction figure, they could preemp that and put different agents that were more skilled on that particular issue. And they said a few years ago all they were interested in was maybe one day we'll be able to categorize something asymmetrically. But now they can predict how well something's going to be resolved. >> It's very hard to predict isn't it? I mean who would of thought that Alexa would of emerged as one of the best if not the best natural language processing systems or that images of cats on the internet would lead to facial recognition in technology. >> That one especially. >> Could of never predicted that. So, but because you're such a clear thinker and a strategic thinker, I want to ask you to make some predictions. I'm going to run some things by you. You talked about autonomous vehicles for awhile. Do you believe that owning in the future, pick whatever time frame you want, that owning and driving your own car will become the exception? >> Yeah I think it will probably be the people who, well okay, so I definitely think driving your own car will become the exception. I think some people will always want that sense of ownership until we get to a generation that doesn't. I think they'll always be a hard core of people who do want to own and do want to drive and do want that experience, but I think you've already got the issue where congestion's such a level in most areas. Is there any enjoyment out of driving? So I love driving, I love sports cars, I collect them. But if someone said, hey you've got two options, you can sit in a high performance sports car to go to LA or you can sit in a Tesla and it will drive itself and you can read a book. I'm getting in the Tesla. (laughing) >> How about retail? Right for disruption, do you think that large retail stores will essentially, not essentially, it's never complete, but will largely go away? >> I think it depends on the nature of the experience. So I think for a lot of goods that are consumable goods, I can kind of see that going away. I don't think it will go away for luxury goods. I don't think it will go away fully for fashion. I think people always like to look at things and understand things and check fits but for some things that are high consumables maybe even for electronics, I can see those going or I can see it going for things where it's worn product. So something like a shop that just sells sneakers. I can see someone could easily offer a range and say, well look, here's what we sell. When you order something, we'll automatically ship you one size up, one size down, or two variations of color and it will be a free system return the ones you don't want. I think the whole experience of ordering one thing and hoping it works out, I think that will go away. It will be concept of ordering a group of things or maybe it will be applying to artificial intelligence to say, hey you've asked for this color, but we know that people who also ask for that color like this color as well. We're going to ship you them both. You can see how it goes and send us the one back you don't like. >> Okay, let's see. Will machines make better diagnosis than doctors? I've got to say I think you will get to a point where that will happen. Especially if it's things where it's image processing, where it's x-ray processing, MRI processing. Where it's something like process of mental health, then I don't know. Maybe, I'd probably rather have my mental health treated by a person than a questionnaire. But yeah I think the things we're using, image recognition, or things where you're looking at patent distribution or you're looking at even like virus distribution or virus structure, then I think those areas I think you will get to a point where diagnostic issue is better. But you look at where artificial intelligence is from diagnostics now and you go on doctor google and search for something, you know, everything finished with the bottom line, or it could be cancer. >> Dave Vennari: Yeah, you're dead. >> What about will there ever be a revolt, you know in the sense of, technology is so pervasive, and people just say forget it, I'm sick of just being tracked, I just kind of want to have a human to human connection and, >> Dave Vellante: Dream on. >> So are we done for? >> I was speaking to a girl who works for me, Menesha, and she was saying, we were talking on Friday and she said, hey, I was having a coffee with nother girl Cass, and Menesha's in Seattle and Cass in is San Francisco, and I said, oh was she in Seattle or were you in San Francisco and Menesha's a lot younger than me, and she went, no we weren't in the same room. We were just like doing it over video like a virtual coffee. And I was like what, so you both get coffee and sit and have a conversation? And she was like, oh yeah. >> Dave Vellante: Alright, I've got one more, I've got one more. >> Okay, let's hear it, let's hear it. >> Alright last one, it's great, thanks for playing along. >> I know this is fun. >> Financial services is an industry that really hasn't been disrupted. DO you feel like the banks will lose control, the major banks will lose control of payment systems? >> I think there's a lot of conversations now around how much those payment systems open up. Because if you, let's say you do a transaction with Amazon, you do a transaction with Google, how hard would it be for every transaction to be done that way? So rather than, if your setting off a payment for I don't know, gas bills or a car loan payments, rather than giving your bank details, why not give your PayPal details or your Amazon account details or your Google details? That could be, reduce all the banking transactions down to one interface. I think that could happen. I think you could get, well obviously you're already seeing the rise of Blockchain and I'm not a Blockchain expert. I'm itching to find a used case for us with Blockchain but I can't find it yet. But for direct transactions, if both sources can trust each other than yeah, that direct transaction between those two sources, I think that's completely possible. I think there's also areas where, you've seen happen in the past where a banking faces issues from retail coming into banking, so sometimes you'll get the big supermarket chains, especially in Europe they say, okay you're going to get (foreign name) or you're going to get Tesco's Bank, because they've got all our customer loyalty, they've got people waiting to give discounts to if they bank with them, so they can instantly bring, if you said to your shopping account base, hey, if you bank with me we'll give you 20 dollars a week off your grocery shopping, you could probably ring 10 million customers straight away. So I think banking's challenged from other industries that want to get into it, from places where you'll actually go and do each transactions now and from where places where you'll just go and order stuff online and you could filter all that through one place, I think they'll still always be the commercial side of banking. There's always going to be the stocks and bonds, there's still going to be the wealth management, but props for transactional banking, you could start to see a decline. >> Fantastic, thank you. >> I love this futurist talk, it's been a lot of fun. Thank you so much for coming on theCube Dave. >> Alright, thanks for having me, always a pleasure. >> Dave Vellante: Great to see you. >> We will have more from ServiceNow Knowledge18 theCube's live coverage just after this. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage and this is day three of our coverage of the inaugural Dell Technologies World. We're in the home stretch. Stu Miniman and Dave Vellante joining you, with Alison Dew, the newly minted CMO of Dell. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me, good to be here. >> So, you've been with Dell for a long time. >> 10 years >> You know the drill, you know the culture. But, 23 days as CMO? >> Yes >> Well congratulations. You were on stage today, awesome show. >> Thank you, I couldn't be more delighted. Great experience for me personally. Great show for our customers. >> Yeah, I'll bet. I mean, and you brought in some outside speakers this year, which has not been typical of this show, at least the legacy EMC world, and certainly Dell World did that. >> Stu: Dell World did, definitely. >> Alison: Dell World did do it more, you know. >> Yep, Bill Clinton, we saw some other amazing speakers. >> Elon Musk >> Elon Musk, I remember the year Elon came. >> So that's good, and you got to interview Ashton Kutcher >> Yeah >> Which was quite amazing. He's an unbelievable-- people don't know, he's an investor, he's kind of a geek. >> Alison: Yep >> Even though he's, you know >> An engineer by training? >> Right, so what'd you think of his discussion? >> I mean, I thought it was fantastic and, as you said, I think people don't quite realize how involved in technology he actually is. And also, how well and successful his businesses have been. And then, equally important, the work that he's doing with his foundation and the way he's using technology for really important human causes. I don't think he gets enough credit for that, so it was great to sit on stage and have that conversation. It was super fun. >> Yeah, cause we know him from That 70's Show. >> I know, I like That 70's Show. >> And he's a goofball, and he comes across He's a great actor, lot of fun. >> Yeah, there was one of the lines I actually really loved from the presentation. It's that he looks for companies that have counter-intuitive thesis because if you're doing something that everybody else is, then chances are somebody is going to catch you and everything else like that. You also had to talk about geeks. You know, John Rose and Ray O'Farrell, up there. Share a little bit about some commonalities you saw between these speakers, and some of the unconventional things they're doing. >> So, I completely agree. I love the point of talking, there's so much hype in the space. And that's why I think that line is so important. And so, the big commonality that we're really seeing and talking about this year in particular is we've been talking for years about data as the rocket fuel of the economy and of business transformation, and now we're really talking about data combined with those emerging technologies. So, things like AI, IOT, Blockchain, which are really taking that data and unlocking the business value because for years, there's been this hype about big data, but I don't think the reality has quite been there. And now as those technologies catch up, we're really starting to see some practical applications and use cases and that's why I thought, in particular, John Rose's section on AI and how we're seeing some of those really emerging practical applications was so interesting and fun and tied really well to Ashton's talk track. >> You know, that's a good point. I mean, I feel like we started covering the big data trend really early on. And I feel like big data was like the warm up. It's cheaper now to collect all this data. Now that we have all this data, we're going to apply machine intelligence to that data. We're going to scale it, with cloud economics and that's really what's going to drive value and innovation. What are your thoughts on that? >> Absolutely. We talked this morning on the stage even about some of the companies, large and small, who are really doing that. I think one of the examples that's really interesting Wal-Mart using Blockchain technology to decrease the amount of time from seven days to mere seconds that it takes them to identify the source of food contamination. Really interesting things where, a couple of years ago even, frankly even 18, 20 months ago, that would have been a promise, but maybe not a reality. And so that's what I think is really exciting. Finally. >> It's something that's actually resonated with me this week. We've talked for my entire career, there's the journeys. And it was like, a lot of times it's the journey of the technology. A couple of years ago, digital transformation was "Okay, is it real? Isn't it?" Every customer I talk to, they understand making it real as you said in the keynote, where they're going. What kind of feedback are you getting from people at the show? >> So one of the things I talked about briefly on Monday, but I think is really important, is this promise and the hope and the optimism of digital transformation. And yet also, the fear behind it as well. Through some of the work that we've done in our own research for Realizing 2030, we're really seeing that about 50% of our respondents say they believe in the power of the human machine partnership, which means that 50% don't. And all of the data questions are really divided and polarizing like that. And as a lifelong researcher, that's really interesting to me because it says that there's something going on there. And yet, at the same time, we're seeing over 85% of the respondents that we talk to who say they're committed to becoming a software defined company in five years. So this idea of "I know what I want to do "I know what it means to transform an industry, "And yet, I'm still not really sure that's going to "do me or my business good. "I'm not really sure what that means for "myself or my employees, getting really practical. "Obviously about the technologies, "that's what we do, "but the examples of how people can do "that better from a business perspective." That's a lot of the customer conversation that I've had over this week. >> But you're an optimist. You believe the world would be a better place as a result of machines. >> Yes, I do and we do. Are you an optimist? >> I am, I think there's some obviously some challenges but there's no question. Stu and I talk about this all the time, on theCUBE, that machines have always replaced humans throughout history. For the first time now, it's on cognitive functions, but the gap is creativity and eduction. So I am an optimist if we invest in the right places and I think there's an opportunity for public policy to really get involved. Leadership from companies like yours and others, politicians, of course. >> Dave and I did an event a couple of years ago with Andy McAfee and Erik Brynjolfssono, you had Andy here. Cause it's really it's not just the technology, it's technology and people, and those have to go together. And Dave said, there's policy and there's so many different layers of this that have to go into it. >> And I think we're just starting to really enter into that. On that optimist versus the robots are coming to get us spectrum, obviously there are things that we have to look out for as leaders, as society, as businesses. And yet, even if you look at the example from this morning, where Ashton is talking about minimizing child sexual trafficking and using AI and machine learning to one, arrest many of the perpetrators of these crimes, as well as free thousands of children from sexual slavery. I mean, you hear those examples, and it's hard not to be an optimist. >> I want to ask you about your digital transformation and how that's being led inside of Dell, what it means to you. >> So, obviously, we are two huge companies that came together. So when we talk about digital transformation, and what that really means, have a very different way of operating and working with IT and being in a different business model, we know that really well. One of the things that's really interesting for me personally, as the CMO for 23 days, is one of the biggest line items in my budget is actually for our own marketing digital transformation. Obviously, Dell in particular, had many, many years starting in the consumer and small business, and then growing up to larger businesses, of direct marketing. And we have a great relationship with our customers, but we also have all of these legacy systems and processes and way that work is done and now as we come together with EMC and we start to build Dell Technologies, the idea of what a data driven marketing engine can be, that possibility is something that we're also working to build ourselves. And so, everything from "how do we build our "own data lake to actually bring all "of these sources of data together? "How do we clean up that data?" is something that I'm pretty deeply into myself. There's a lot of that work going on across the company, and then for me personally, as CMO. Big initiative. >> So it's customer experience as part of it, but it's also a new way to work. >> Exactly. And it sounds so trite in a way to say the technology is the easy part, but the really hard part begins when the technology is finished. And I really believe that because if I look at my own team and my own teams experience, there's so many places where they've been doing marketing one way for a very long time. And if you come in and you ask them to do something differently, that's actually a pretty hard thing to do. And the only way to unlock the power of the data and the power of the new technologies, is to actually change how work is done. And I know it's an analogy that's overused, but if you'd ask the taxi dispatch "Are you important to the taxi business?" they would have said "Yes, of course "I'm the most important person in this chain." That's how taxis get to customers. And then along comes Uber, and suddenly you don't need that. You have to really think differently about that and as a leader, that's exciting and also really hard. >> I don't know if you've ever heard Sanjay Poonen talk about change, he says there's three reactions to change. Either run from it, fight it, or you embrace it. That's it. And the third is the only way to go. >> It's the only way. >> How about messaging? I'm sensing different messaging. Much more around the business, maybe a little bit less on the products. Plenty of product stuff here, but the high level stuff. What's your philosophy on messaging? >> I used to say "I'm a person that "believes in shades of gray" and about seven years ago I had to stop saying that. (laughs) >> But the truth is, I am a person who believes in shades of gray and I almost always believe that the answer is somewhere in the middle. So you get in marketing into these debates about is it these thought leadership and high level conversations or is it about product messaging and selling what's on the truck? And the honest truth is, you have to do both. You have to set a vision, you have to build the brand, you have to talk about the business and where we're going from a business perspective. As we talk about things like 2030, that's a really lean into the future conversation. At the same time, we also want to sell you some PCs and some servers and some storage and some data protection, so we need to do that well, too. And frankly, we need to get better as a marketing machine, as a company, and as salespeople, in terms of talking to customers. The right conversation at the right time. Again, sounds like marketing 101, but it's actually quite hard to do. When do you want to have a connected cities conversation? When do you want to just talk about how to modernize your data center? >> It's true, we always talk about above the line and below the line. When you're talking above the line, you might be speaking one language and below the line, another language. You try to mix the two, it doesn't work. >> Right, exactly. >> You have to target the appropriate audience. >> The conversation one of the women on my team started talking about this and I thought it really made sense was macro-conversations, micro-conversations. So to get out of this advertising vernacular, and I grew up in the ad industry, sort of above the line, below the line, and those were always two departments who didn't even talk to each other and usually hated each other. Instead of above the line, below the line, what's the macro-conversation? How are we talking about Realizing 2030? How are we talking about digital transformation? And then what are some of those micro-conversations where I'm going to talk to you about what are the personas that you have in your work force? And lets talk about some in user compute technology together with something really simple, like a monitor, that's going to help them be more productive. Those things don't have to fight with each other, you just have to be honest about when you're doing each one. >> Target them in the right place. >> Alison, we're getting to the end of the show here. >> Yeah, I can talk a lot. >> First of all, New Media Row here gave us the biggest set. We've done this show for nine years, we're super excited. The therapy dogs next door-- >> I love the therapy dogs. >> Are really fun to see, but every once in a while, give a little bit of color in the background here. For people that didn't get to come and experience in person, I know the sessions are online, but give us some of the flavors and some of the fun things you've seen and what would we expect from you in the future? >> I think this is just one of the most fun shows. I mean, obviously it's important for us to set our vision, it's important for people to come into the hands on labs, and the training, and the breakouts, and to learn and to engage. But, you see things like the beanbags and sitting out there, the therapy dogs, and my team does want me to say that every year we get new beanbag covers so we don't recycle those. And then really experience the fun in the Solutions Expo and talking about the way that we're taking trash, plastic trash, out of oceans and making art with it, so we can talk about our sustainable supply chain in an interesting way. I think, I'm biased, but I think this is the best show in terms of actual education and vision, but also some fun. Hopefully you guys think so too. >> Well, Sting. >> And Walk the Moon. Do you guys know who Walk the Moon is? >> Yes. >> I don't. >> Me neither. (laughs) >> Come on and dance with me. >> Oh, okay. Alright, great. >> I'm a child of the 80's, what can I say? >> Alright, so 23 days on the job, what should we be watching from you, your team, and Dell? >> So, as we talked about in the very beginning, this is our first Dell Technologies World, so obviously, we have just gone through some of the biggest integration of large tech companies in the history. And we're really proud of how successful that integration has been, and yet we also still have so much work to do around telling that integrated story. Yes, Dell and Dell EMC, but also together with VM, we're a pivotal RSA Secureworks, and the extend is strategically aligned businesses. And so that's what you'll see us really lean into is "How do we tell "that story more effectively?" We're continuing to invest in the brand, so a lot of the work that you've seen with Jeffrey Wright and those TV spots we launched again in March, and just making sure that people understand what the Dell Technologies family actually is. >> So really a more integrated story. But something that Dell always tried to tell, but you didn't have the portfolio to tell it. Now you do, so that's got to be exciting for you. >> It is exciting, yeah. >> Great. Alison, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. >> My pleasure. Cheers, thanks. >> Alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World in Vegas. We'll be right back.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live in Las Vegas. Day two of Dell Technologies World. I am Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, my cohost. And we're excited to welcome to theCUBE for the first time the CIO of TGen, Translational Genomics, James Lowey. James, welcome to theCUBE. >> Ah, thank you so much, it's great being here. >> So, genomics, really interesting topic that we want to get into and understand. How are you making IT and digital and workforce transformation real in it, but get give our viewers and overview of TGen. It started out about 16 years ago as a very collaborative effort within Arizona and really grew. Talk to us about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, TGen is a nonprofit biomedical research institute based in Phoenix, Arizona. As you mentioned, we've been around about 16 years. We were, the inception of the institute was really built around bringing biomedical technology into the sate of Arizona. And we're fortunate enough to have a really visionary and gifted leader in Dr. Jeffrey Trent, who is one of the original guys to sequence the human completely for the first time. So I don't know if you get any better street cred than that when it comes to genomics. >> And you mentioned, before we went live, give our viewers an overview of what it took to sequence the human genome in terms of time and money and now, how 15 years later, how fast it can be done. >> Yeah, so, you know we've moved from a point where it costs billions of dollars and took many years to complete the first sequence to today where it takes a little bit over a day and about $3 thousand. So it's really the democratization of the technology is driving clinical application, which, in turn, is going to benefit all of us. >> Yeah, James, genomics is one of those areas, when we talk about there is the opportunity of data, but there's also the challenge of data, because you've got to, I have to imagine, orders of magnitude more data than your typical company does, so talk to us a little bit about the role of data inside your organization. >> Well, data is our lifeblood. I mean, we've been generating terascale then petascale for many years now. And the fact is, is every time you sequence a patient you're generating about 4 terabytes of data for one patient. So if you're doing 100 patients, do the math, or you're doing a thousand patients. We're talking just an immense volume of data. And really, data is what drives us because that information that's encoded in our genome is nothing but data, right? It's turning our analog selves into a digital format that then we can interrogate to come up with better treatments to help patients. >> Can you bring this inside? When you talk about the infrastructure that enables that. You know, what I was teasing out with the last question, it's not just about storing data, you need to be able to access the data, you need to be able to share data. So as the CIO, what's your purview? Give us a little bit of a thumbnail sketch as to what your organization-- >> Oh yeah, yeah, no that's great. You know, so we've been a long time Isilon customer. The scale-out storage is what really has enabled us to be successful. Our partnership with Dell EMC has spanned many years and we're fortunate enough to have enough visibility within the organization to get early access to technologies. And really, that's really important because the science moves faster than the IT. So having things like scale-out, super fast flash, you know, having new Intel processors, all these things are what really enable us to do our job and to be successful. >> How have, you've been with TGen for a long time now, you've been the CIO for about three years. Talk to us about the transformation of the technology and how you've evolved it to not just facilitate digital transformation and IT transformation, but I imagine security transformation with human genetic data is of paramount importance. >> You know, that's a really good point. Security is always on my mind, for obvious reasons because I would say there's nothing more personally identifiable than your genome. There's the laws around these things still have not been totally codified. So we're sitting at a point today where we're still uncertain to how exactly best protect this very, very important data. But to that end, we tend to fail in the closed state of doing things, everything's encrypted. You know, we are big believers in identity management and making sure that the right people have access to the right data at the right time. We've utilized SecureWorks, for instance, for perimeter, logging, and to get their expertise. 'Cause one of the things I've learned in my tenure as CIO is that it's really all about the people and they're what drive your success. And so I'm fortunate enough to have a team that's amazing. These folks are some of the best people in their field and really do a great job at helping us, protect the data, get access to the data, as well as thinking about what the next iteration is going to look like. >> When you look at, just as a whole, the security and data protection, you think about everybody, if they get those home kits, or things like that, how has that evolved the last few years? I'm curious if that impacts your business. >> Well, I think it does impact our business insofar as it creates awareness. And you know, I think it's really fantastic when I attend a cocktail party or something and people come up and ask, say, "You know, should I get the 23andMe Ancestry?" And they're really engaged and interested and wanting to learn about these things. And I think that's going to spur questions to be asked when they go in to be treated by a physician. Which is really important. I think, I'm a believer that we should own our own data, especially our genomic data, because what's more personal than that? And so we have a lot of challenges ahead, I think, in IT in particular, in protecting, storing, and providing that data to patients. >> Just a quick followup, I'm sure you secure stuff. What's the cocktail answer for that? If, you know, should I get that? Can I trust this company? Is my insurance company and everybody else going to get that? What do you advise the average consumer? >> I would say read the terms of use agreement very carefully. >> so the theme of the event, James, make it real. You know, few things are more real than our own data, our own genomes, what does that theme mean to you from an application perspective? How are you making digital transformation real? And things like the alliance with City of Hope to impact disease study and cures? What is that reality component to you? >> Yeah, it has, you know, I really like the make it real theme, and I think it's something that we are doing every day. I think it just speaks to, you know, taking technology, applying it for meaningful use, to actually make a difference, and to do something that has real impact. And I think that at TGen, I've been empowered to build systems that can do that, that can help our scientists and ultimately help patients. You mentioned City of Hope. We're, our alignment with them is amazing. They have just hired a Chief Digital Officer as they go through a digital transformation of their own. And you know, we're on board in striving to help them go through this process because, as you might be aware, everything's about the data. And that's where we have to focus. >> James, if you go back, you talked about your scale-out architecture with Isilon. How do you report back to the business as to the results you're doing? What are the, do you have any hero metrics or things that you point out that says this is why we're successful. This is why we've made the right decision. This is why we should be doing this in the future. >> Well, I think we're especially fortunate that we can measure our success in people's lives. So, meeting a kid who's in full remission from brain cancer who was treated using drugs that were derived from being sequenced and run through our labs and then our computational infrastructure and having them say thank you, I think is pretty much a metric that I don't know how you can beat that. >> Talk about making it real. That's where it's really impactful. I'd love to understand your thoughts as you continue to evolve your transformation as a company. We've heard a lot about emerging technologies and what Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, is doing to enable organizations and customers to be able to realize what's possible with artificial intelligence, machine learning, IoT. What are your thoughts about weaving in those emerging technologies to make what TGen delivers even more impactful. >> Well you just said three of my favorite things that I'm spending a lot of time thinking about. You know, artificial intelligence is going to be absolutely, is required to interrogate the vast amounts of data that are being created. I mean, this is all unstructured data, so you have to have systems that can store and present that data in such a way that you're going to be able to do something meaningful. IoT is another area where we're spending a lot of time and energy in what we believe is like quantitative medicine. So basically taking measurements all the time to see about changes and then using that to hopefully gain insight into treatment of diseases. You know, machine learning and some of these technologies are also absolutely going to be critical, especially when we start building out drug databases and being able to match the patient with the drug. >> Yeah, James, bring us inside to your organization a little bit. What kind of skill sets do you have to have to architect, operate, a theme of this show, they've got Andy McAfee, who's from MIT, we've spoken to, it's about people and machines. You can't have one without the other. You need to be able to marry those two. How does an organization like yours get ready for that and move forward? >> Yeah, it's a really good point. I think the technology enables the people, and you have to have the right people to help make the decisions and what technologies you get and apply. And I think that the skill sets that we look for is generally people who have a broad view of the world. You know, people who are particular experts, at least in the IT side are of limited use, because we need people to be able to switch gears quickly and to think about problems holistically. So I'd say most of the IT folks are working several different disciplines and are really good at that. On the scientific side it's a little different. We're looking for data scientists all the time. So if anybody's watching and wants to come work for a great place, TGen, look us up. Because that's really where we're headed. You know, we have a lot of biologists, we have a lot of molecular biologists, we have people who do statistics, but it's not quite the same as data science. So that's kind of the new area that we're really focused on. >> All right, so James, one of the things I always love to ask when I get a CIO here is, when you're talking to your peers in the industry, how do you all see the role of the CIO changing? What are some of the biggest challenges that you're facing? >> So, yeah, it's a great question. I think the role's changing towards being empowered in the business. And I think that as that has to be part of the transformation. Is you have to be aligned completely with what your objectives are. And we're fortunate, you know, we are. And I feel very lucky to have a boss and a boss's boss who both understand the importance and the value that we bring to the organization. I also see that in the industry, especially in healthcare, a need for folks who are focused beyond just the EMR and daily IT things, to really start looking beyond maybe where you're comfortable. I know that I stretch my boundaries, and I think that in order to be successful as a CIO I think that's what you're going to have to do. I think you're going to have to push the envelope. You're going to have to look for new technologies and new ways to make a difference. >> So last question, big impact that TGen has made to the state of Arizona. I read on LinkedIn that you like building high-performance teams. What are some of the impacts that this has made for Arizona but also maybe as an example for other states to look to be inspired to set up something similar? >> That's really a great question. I think, you know, Arizona made an investment, and the way that it's easy to measure. So if you come down to the TGen building and realize that that building was the first building that is now surrounded by buildings, including a full-on cancer center, that's all in downtown Phoenix. And it's almost the if you build it they will come, but it's not just the infrastructure, it really is about the people and identifying the right folks to come in and help build that, to invest in them and to provide basically the opportunity for success. You know, Arizona has really been fortunate, I think, in being able to build out this amazing infrastructure around biotechnology. And you know, but we're just getting going. I mean, we are, we've only been doing this for about 16 years and I look forward to the next 16. >> Well thanks so much, James, for stopping by and talking about how you're applying technologies, not just from Dell EMC but others as well to make transformation real, to make it real across IT, digital, workforce, security, and doing something that's really literally has the opportunity to save lives. Thanks so much. >> Well thank you very much, it's been a pleasure. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin, with my cohost Stu Miniman. We are live day two of Dell Technologies World. We'll be back after a lunch break. We'll see you then.