>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Celebration in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We are here with Brenda Darden Wilkerson. She is the new president and CEO of the Anita Borg institute. Thank you so much for joining us. >> I'm so excited to be here. >> This is a new position for you. >> Absolutely. >> But you've obviously been involved with the Anita Borg Institute for your career. At least been aware of it. So tell us a little bit about what this appointment means to you. >> Oh, it's so exciting. It's like coming full circle back to a tech career that I started. Back to understanding the needs of women having been there. Gone through the various stages of my career and then going into education. Helping encourage women into a career in tech. And now being able to advocate for them to be able to contribute at whatever stage they're in. Whether they are just entering or whether they're one of the women who have been in tech for a long time and are getting promoted into C-suite. Or whether or not they went through traditional education pathway to get in or if they learned on their own. So it's very exciting. >> And it cannot be as hard as the challenge that you just accomplished. I'm so impressed. Getting computer science as a requirement in the Chicago School District. >> Yes, yes. >> I mean that must've been quite a battle. I can only imagine. >> It was. It was, but you know when you want something, and you believe in it, it is amazing how you find other people who believe like you do. And you form a collaborative partnership that's really about caring about people. >> Jeff: Right. >> Many of us had been in tech and we had had the challenges and myself, personally, I came about computer science accidentally. I went to college thinking I was going to go into medicine. So I was pre-med. So I only learned about computer science accidentally. And of course obviously it changed my trajectory. It's been my career path and I was fine with that. Until years later when we were working on making computer science core, I was doing some lobbying on Capital Hill on a panel with a bunch of people. One happened to be a 19 year old girl who had a story similar to mine. And I thought how could this still be happening? >> Jeff: Right, right. >> How can people not have this choice and have this exposure early in life so that they know how to choose to contribute to the thing that's changing the way we live every single day. >> So do you see it changing? I mean we talked about this so many times on theCUBE. You know, that the core curriculum is the core curriculum. It's been there forever. >> Yes, yes, yes. >> And then the funny joke, right? Go back 100 years, nothing looks familiar except if you go to the school. I mean they're still reading the same Mark Twain book, right? >> Brenda: Right, right. >> Do you see it changing 'cause computing is such a big part of everyday life now. And it should be core everywhere. I mean the fact that you got that through, do you see it changing in a broader perspective from, kind of, your point of view? >> I do, I do. Education changes slowly, unfortunately. But actually when you look at, we launched computer science for all in 2013. And now it is an initiative that is national. The Obama White House embraced it and we were so proud. And it made the knowledge of going after computer science as something that all educators should really be thinking about as early as kindergarten for our students. It is making a difference in the lives of women. I've seen girls who many times would have been talked out of getting into a technical field by high school. For the few that could trickle in and get into those one or two classes that used to be available. I'm seeing girls learn that they could be innovators as early as five, six, or seven years old. Okay, so I'm just waiting to see the world that they're going to create for us when all of them. Because now, in Chicago, they're required to have computer science to graduate. So that's everyone so that's the key. It's computer science for all. And it is making a change. Not just for the kids, but the educators. I'm seeing women educators go, I could do this? I could get in and teach computer science? I could create something? That's exciting. >> So the Anita Borg Institute does so much good work around these issues. From getting computers into the hands of kindergartners to helping women on the verge of C-suite jobs in some of the biggest tech companies in the world. Where do you want to focus? As the new president, what are some of your special pet projects that you want to look at in the upcoming years? >> So I really want to think about how we dig into intersectionality. I want to first and foremost make vivid for more women of different backgrounds, who may have traditionally been left out of the equation, that there is an opportunity here for you if you want it. Okay, so that's about listening to them. That's about building additional alliances. That's about figuring out how to partner with organizations that we're all going in the same direction, right? So that more people that bring their unique lenses and experiences can help us create solutions, products, services that serve better just because they're there. So that's the first and most important thing. But then of course to, in order to do that, we have to figure out how to accelerate the work that anitab.org does in helping companies to figure out how to solve any problems that they may be having about diversifying their work force. So that's the other half of the equation. >> Do you see that the message is resonating? And this, I mean, you've been in the tech industry for, you're a veteran of the tech industry. Let's just say it, let's just put it at that. Let's just put it at that. But do you, I mean, just in terms of what we've been saying here too is that it's a lot of the same stuff. A lot of the same biases. And then there's things like to Google Manifesto which was this year, you know? And you just think, are we really still talking about this? I mean, where are you on the spectrum of completely discouraged to hopeful and inspired? >> Oh, I'm hopeful. I mean, look around you. (laughing) Look around you at all these women who are also hopeful. I am hopeful for them. We are hopeful together. And I think many times some of the remarks or things that happen out there are just an indication that maybe we're getting closer to moving that needle, you know? Sometimes that's when you hear from people is when changes are being made. So I'm not discouraged at all. I'm very excited to be on this team. It's a very powerful team. And to create the coalitions that our women are counting on us to do. >> It's pretty interesting with a lot of the negative stuff that happens in the news. And it actually has a really bright silver lining. And that it kind of coalesces people in ways that wouldn't necessarily happen. >> That's right, that's right. >> I thought your comment kind of about overt, or no, I guess the last guest. Overt, kind of, discrimination versus, kind of, less overt. It's harder to fight the less overt. So when somebody shines a big bright light on it, it actually, in a way, is a blessing because then it surfaces this thing. >> The stuff that's kind of, you know, it's lukewarm. It's easy for people to explain away. Even if it's really obvious to most people. But when it is as overt as it's been, it's out there now. It's like now we have something that we all have to deal with. It's not, you know, we can't be lukewarm and mealy mouth about it. Let's go to work and address this because it's so obvious. So in that way it's a silver lining. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> But the culture war that we're dealing with this. With what Melinda Gates was describing as the brogrammers. The hoodie guys, the sea of white dudes. >> Yes. >> Where we think all the great ideas are coming from. >> Brenda: Yeah. >> What is you feeling on how do we combat that? >> So, you know, here's an interesting perspective. I'm going to put a call on the entertainment industry. >> Rebecca: Okay. >> To put more images out there that are representative of what's really happening, right? So, you know, I have a sister that's a lawyer. And she's older than I am. And there was a time when you just didn't see very many images of women lawyers or women doctors. But if you watch television, you watch the movies, there are plenty of those now and the numbers. People can be what they can see. But if the images out there are all about the sea of white men. Then we will fight that struggle because people are impacted by what they see. >> Rebecca: The power of representation. >> The power, absolutely. And so I'm calling on people who have the power to change the images to do so. And to show the truth of what's really going on. >> Okay, so Hollywood, are you listening? (laughing) Do you have any final advice for the young women who are here. And maybe it's their first Grace Hopper Conference. >> Yeah, yeah. >> What do you think they should do to get the most out of their experience here in Orlando this week? >> Well, first of all, I'm so glad that you're here and I want you to be encouraged that there is a sisterhood. There is a community that cares about you that has seen some of the same things, some of the challenges. And maybe you don't even know about yet. But together, we can make a better world. We can be the change agents that we already are but on a such bigger scale. So, you know, go for it. Don't ever let fear stop you. And you will make a success out of whatever you're going after. >> Those are words to live by. >> Yeah, we need to get a bigger boat though. You got 18,000 people. >> I know. >> That's right. >> You can't get that on you IM placard. >> That's right, that's right. That's a new solution for tomorrow. (laughing) >> Great, well, Brenda, thanks so much. We're so excited for you and to be here at Grace Hopper again. >> Thank you so much. I appreciate being here. >> Great event, great event. >> Okay, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick. We will have more from Grace Hopper in a little bit.

>> From the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering AT&T Spark. Now here's Jeff Frick. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco at the AT&T Spark event. It's really all about 5G and what 5G is going to enable. You know, this is a really big technology that's very, very close. I think a lot closer than most people understand. And one of the most important components of 5G is it was designed from the ground up really not so much for people-to-people communications as much as machine-to-machine communications. So we're really excited to have someone who's right in the thick of that and talk about the implications, especially another topic that we hear all the time, which is Edge computing. So it's Alicia Abella. She is the VP of Operational Automation in Program Management from AT&T Labs. Alicia, welcome. >> Thank you for having me, Jeff. >> Absolutely. So we were talking a little bit before we turn on the cameras about 5G and Edge computing. And how the two, while not directly tied together, are huge enablers of one another. I wonder if you can unpack a little bit about why is 5G such an important component to kind of the vision of Edge computing? >> Sure, absolutely. Yeah, happy to do so. So Edge computing is really about bringing processing power closer to the end device, closer to the end user, where a lot of the processing data analytics has to occur. And you want to do that because you want to be able to deliver the services and applications close to the edge, close to where the customer is, so that you can deliver on the speeds that those applications need. 5G plays a role because 5G is promising to be very fast and also very reliable and very secure. So now you've got three things to your advantage paired up with Edge to be able to deliver on a lot of these use cases that we hear a lot about when we talk about 5G, when we talk about Edge. Some example use cases are the autonomous vehicle. The autonomous vehicle is a classic example for Edge computing as well as 5G. And in fact, it illustrates a kind of continuum, because you can have processing that always has to remain in the car. Anything related to safety? That processing has to happen right on that device. The device in this case being the car. But there are other processing capabilities, like maybe updates to real-time maps. That could happen on the Edge. You still have to be near real-time, so you want to have that kind of processing and updating happening at the Edge. Then maybe you have something where you want to download some new entertainment, a movie to your car. Well, that can reside back at the data center, further away from where the device or the car is. So you've got this continuum. >> So really, what the 5G does is really open up the balance of how you can distribute that store computing and communications. It's always about latency. At the end of the day, it's always about latency. And as much as we want to get as much compute close, oh, and also, I guess power. Power and latency. >> Power and Edge actually go hand-in-hand as well. >> It's a big deal, right? >> Mhm. >> So what you're saying is, because of 5G, and the fact that now you have a much lower latency, faster connectivity port, you can now have some of that stuff maybe not at the Edge and enable that Edge device to do more, other things? >> Yes, so I often like to say that we are unleashing the device away from having it be tethered to the compute processor that's handling it and now you can go mobile. Because now what you do is, if the processing is happening on the Edge and not on the device, you save on battery life, but you also make the device more lightweight, easier to manage, easier to move around. The form factor can become smaller. So there's also an advantage to Edge computing to the device as well. >> Right. It's pretty interesting. There was an NVIDIA demo in the keynote of running a video game on the NVIDIA chips in a data center and pumping a really high resolution experience back out to the laptop screen I think is what he was using it for. And it's a really interesting use case in how when you do have these fast, reliable networks, you can shift the compute, and not just a peer compute, but the graphics, et cetera, and really start to redistribute that in lots of different ways that were just not even fathomable before. Before you had to buy the big gaming machine. You had to buy the big, giant GPU. You had to have that locally, and all that was running on your local machine. You just showed a demo where it's all running back in their data center in Santa Clara. Really opens up a huge amount of opportunity. >> That's right. So Edge computing is really distributed in nature. I mean, it is all about distribution. And distributing that compute power wherever you need it. Sprinkling it across the country of where you need it. So we've gone, there's been this pendulum shift, where we started with the mainframe, big rooms, lots of air conditioning, and then the pendulum swung over to the PC. And that client-server model. Where now you had your PC and you did your computing locally. And then it swung back the other way for Cloud computing where everything was centralized again and all that compute power was centralized. And now the pendulum is swinging back again the other way to this distributed model where now you've got your compute capabilities distributed across the country where you need it. >> Right. So interesting. I mean, networking was the last of the virtualized platform between storage and compute, and then finally networking. But if you really start to think of a world with basically infinite power, compute, infinite store, and infinite networking, basically asymptotically approaching zero pricing. Think of the world from that way. We're not there. We're never going to get to that absolute place, but it really opens up a lot of different ways to think about what you could do with that power. So I wonder if there's some other things you can share with us. At Labs, you guys are looking forward to this 5G world. What are some of the things that you see that just, wow, I would have never even thought that was even in the realm of possibility that some people are coming up with? >> Yeah. >> Any favorites? >> Oh, I think one of our favorites is certainly looking at the case of manufacturing. Even though you would think of manufacturing as very fixed, the challenge with manufacturing is that a lot of those robotics capabilities that are in the manufacturing assembly lines, for example, they're all based on wires and they can't change and upgrade what they're doing very quickly. So being able to deliver 5G, have things that are wireless, and have Edge compute capabilities that are very powerful means that they can now shift and move around their assembly lines very quickly. So that's going to help the economy. Help those businesses be able to adapt more quickly to changes in their businesses. And so that's one that is quite exciting to us. And I would say the next one that's also exciting for us would be, we talked about autonomous vehicles already, 'cause that one's kind of far out, right? >> I don't think it's as far as most people think, actually. We covered a lot of autonomous vehicle companies, and there's just so much research being done now. I don't think it's as far out as people think. >> Yes, and so I think we are definitely committed to deploying Edge compute. And in the process, from a more technical perspective, I think one of the things that we are going to be interested in doing is, and you alluded to it before, is how do you manage all of those applications and services and distribute them in a way that is economical, that we can do it at scale, that we can do it on demand? So that too is part of what's exciting about being able to deploy Edge. >> Yeah. It's pretty interesting, the manufacturing example, 'cause it came up again in the keynote to really embracing software-defined, embracing open source. And the takeaway was moving at the speed of software development, not moving at the speed of hardware development. Because software moves a lot faster. And can be more flexible. It's easy to respond to market demands, or competitive demands, or just to innovate a lot faster. So really taking that approach, and obviously a lot of conversation about you guys in the open Stack community and the open-source projects enables you and your customers to start to adapt to software-defined innovation as opposed to just pure hardware-defined innovation. >> That's right. That's right, yup. >> Alright, Alicia, I'll give you the final word. Any surprises? Oh, no, you've got a chat coming up, so why don't you give us a quick preview for what your conversation is going to be about later today? >> Yeah, thank you, Jeff. So yeah, later I'll be talking about AT&T's initiatives around encouraging women to pursue stem fields. In particular, computer science. It turns out that the number of women getting undergraduate degrees in computer science peaked in the mid-80s. And it's been going downhill since. Last year, only 17% of women were getting degrees in computer science So AT&T's mission, and what we announced today was a million dollar donation to the Girls Who Code organization. That's one of many different non-profit organizations that AT&T is involved with to make sure that we continue to encourage young women and also underrepresented minorities and others who want to get in the stem fields to get involved because technology is changing very quickly. We need people who can understand the technology, who can develop the software we talked about, and we need to get that pipeline filled up. And so we're very committed to helping the community and helping to encourage young girls to pursue degrees in stem. >> That's great. Girls Who Code is a fantastic organization. We've had 'em on. Anita Borg, I mean, there's so much good work that goes on out there, so that's a great announcement. And congratulations. >> Thank you. >> And I'm sure that's a meaningful contribution. >> Yeah, thank you. >> So Alicia, thanks for stopping by, and good luck this afternoon, and we'll see you next time. >> Thank you, Jeff. >> Alright. >> Appreciate it. >> She's Alicia, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at AT&T Spark in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat electronic music)

>> Announcer: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE! Covering SnapLogic, Innovation Day, 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in San Mateo, at what they call the crossroads, it's 92 and 101. If you're coming by and probably sitting in a traffic, look up and you'll see SnapLogic. It's their new offices. We're really excited to be here for Innovation Day. We're excited to have this CTO, James Markarian. James, great to see you and I guess, we we last talked was a couple years ago in New York City. >> Yeah that's right, and why was I there? It was like a big data show. >> That's right. >> And we we are two years later talking about big data. >> Big data, big data is fading a little bit, because now big data is really an engine, that's powering this new thing that's so exciting, which is all about analytics, and machine learning, and we're going to eventually stop saying artificial intelligence and say augmented intelligence, 'cause there's really nothing artificial about it. >> Yeah and we might stop saying big data and just talk about data because it's becoming so ubiquitous. >> Jeff: Right. >> I know that big data, it's not necessarily going away but it's sort of how we're thinking about handling it is, like kind of evolved over time, especially in the last couple of years. >> Right. >> That's what we're kind of seeing from our customers. >> 'Cause there's kind of an ingredient now, right? It's no longer this new shiny object now. It's just part of the infrastructure that helps you get everything else done. >> Yeah, and I think when you think about it, from like, an enterprise point of view, that that shift is going from experimentation to operationalizing. I think that the things you look for in experimentation, there's like, one set of things here looking for proving out the overall value, regardless maybe of cost and uptime and other things and as you operationalize you start thinking about other considerations that obviously Enterprise IT has to think about. >> Right, so if you think back to like, Hadoop Summit and Hadoop World who were first cracking their teeth, like in 2010 or around that time frame, one of the big discussions that always comes up and that was before kind of the rise of public cloud, you know which has really taken off over the last several years, there's this kind of ongoing debate between, do you move the data to the compute or do you move the compute to the data? There was always like, this monster data gravity issue which was almost insurmountable and many would say, oh, you're never going to get all your data into the cloud. It's just way too hard and way too expensive. But, now Amazon has Snowball and Snowball isn't big enough. They actually had a diesel truck that'll come and help you come move your data. Amazon rolled that thing across the stage a couple of years ago. The data gravity thing seems to be less and if you think of a world with infinite compute, infinite stored, infinite networking asyndetically approaching zero, not necessarily good news for some vendors out there but that's a world that we're eventually getting to that changes the way that you organize all this stuff. >> Yeah, I think so and so much has changed. I was fortunate to be one of the early speakers, like I used to do Worlds and everything, and I was adamantly proclaiming you know, the destiny of Hadoop as bright and shiny and there's this question about what really happened. I think that there's a kind of a few different variables that kind of shifted at the same time. One, is of course, this like glut of computing in the cloud happened and there are so many variables moving at once. It's like, How much time do you have Jeff? >> Ask them to get a couple more drinks for us. >> Seeing our lovely new headquarters here and one of the things is that there is no big data center. We have a little closet with some of the servers we keep around but mostly, everything we do is on Amazon. You're even looking at things like, commercial real estate is changing because I don't need all the cooling and the power and the space for my data center that I once had. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> I become a lot more space efficient than I used to be and so the cloud is really kind of changing everything. On the data side, you mention this like, interesting philosophical shift, going from I couldn't possibly do it in the cloud to why in the world would we not do things in the cloud. Maybe the one stall word in there being some fears about security. Obviously there's been a lot of breaches. I think that there's still a lot of introspection everyone needs to do about, are my on premise systems actually more secure than some of these cloud providers? It's really not clear that we know the answer to that. In fact, we suspect that some of the cloud providers are actually more secure because they are professionals about it and they have the best practice. >> And a whole lot of money. >> The other thing that happened that you didn't mention, that's approaching infinity and we're not quite there yet, is interconnect speeds. So it used to be the case that I have a bunch of mainframes and I have a tier rating system and I have a high speed interconnect that puts the two together. Now with fiber networks and just in general, you can run super high speed, like WAN. Especially if you don't care quite as much about latency. So if 500 millisecond latency is still okay with you. >> Great. >> You can do a heck of a lot and move a lot to the cloud. In fact, it's so good, that we went from worrying, could I do this in the cloud at all to well, why wouldn't I do somethings in Amazon and some things in Microsoft and some things in Google? Even if it meant replicating my data across all these environments. The backdrop for some of that is, we had a lot of customers and I was thinking that people would approach it this way, they would install on premise Hadoop, whether it's like Apache or Cloud Air or the other vendors and I would hire a bunch of folks that are the administrators and retire terra data and I'm going to put all my ETL jobs on there, etc. It turned out to be a great theory and the practice is real for some folks but it turned out to be moving a lot of things to kind of shifting sands because Hadoop was evolving at the time. A lot of customers were putting a lot of pressure on it, operational pressure. Again, moving from experimentation phase over to like, operational phase. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> When you don't have the uptime guarantee and I can't just hire somebody off the street to administer this, it has to be a very sharp, knowledgeable person that's very expensive, people start saying, what am I really getting from this and can I just dump it all in S3 and apply a bunch of technology there and let Amazon worry about keeping this thing up and running? People start to say, I used to reject that idea and now it's sounding like a very smart idea. >> It's so funny we talk about people processing tech all the time, right? But they call them tech shows, they don't call them people in process shows. >> Right. >> At least not the ones we go to but time and time again I remember talking to some people about the Hadoop situation and there's just like, no Hadoop people. Sometimes technology all day long. There just aren't enough people with the skills to actually implement it. It's probably changed now but I remember that was such a big problem. It's funny you talk about security and cloud security. You know, at AWS, on Tuesday night of Reinvent, they have a special, kind of a technical keynote speak and like, James Hamilton would go. In the amount of resources, and I just remember one talk he gave just on their cabling across the ocean, and the amount of resources that he can bring to bear, relative to any individual company, is so different; much less a mid-tier company or a small company. I mean, you can bring so much more resources, expertise and knowledge. >> Yeah, the economy is a scale, their just there. >> They're just crazy. >> That's right and that why you know, you sort of assume that the cloud sort of, eventually eats everything. >> Right, right. >> So there's no reason to believe this won't be one of those cases. >> So you guys are getting Extreme. So what is Snaplogic Extreme? >> Well, Snaplogic Extreme is kind of like a response to this trend of data moving from on premise to the cloud and there are some interesting dynamics of that movement. First of all, you need to get data into the cloud, first of all and we've been doing that for years. Connect to everything, dump it in S3, ADLS, etc. No problem. The thing we're seeing with cloud computing is like, there's another interesting shift. Not only is it kind of like mess for less, and let Amazon manage all this, and I probably refer to Amazon more than other vendors would appreciate. >> Right, right. They're the leaders so let's call a spade a spade. >> Yeah. >> Certainly Google and Microsoft are out there as well so those are the top three and we've acknowledged that. >> One of the interesting things about it is that you couldn't really adequately achieve on premises is the burstiness of your compute. I run at a steady state where I need, you know, 10 servers or a 100 servers, but every once in a while, I need like, 1,000 or 10,000 servers to apply to something. So what's the on premise model? Rack and stack, 10,000 machines, and it's like waiting for the great pumpkin, waiting for that workload to come that I've been waiting months and months for and maybe it never comes but I've been paying for it. I paid for a software license for the thing that I need to run there. I'm paying for the cabling and the racking and everything and the person administering. Make sure the disks are all operating in the case where it gets used. Now, all of a sudden, we are taking Amazon and they're saying, hey, pay us for what you're using. You can use reserved pricing and pay a lower rate for the things you might actually care about on a consistent basis but then I'm going to allow you to spike, and I'll just run the meter. So this has caused software vendors like us, to look at the way we charge and the way that we deploy our resources and say, hey, that's a very good model. We want to follow that and so we introduced Snaplogic Extreme, which has a few different components. Basically, it enables us to operate in these elastic environments, shift our thinking in pricing so that we don't think about like, node based or god forbid, core based pricing and say like, hey, basically pay us for what you do with your data and don't worry about how many servers it's running on. Let Snaplogic worry about spinning up and spinning down these machines because a lot of these workloads are data integration or application workloads that we know lots about. >> Right. >> So first of all, we manage these ephemeral, what we call ephemeral or elastic clusters. Second of all, the way that we distribute our workload is by generating Spark code currently. We use the same graphic environment that you use for everything but instead of running on our engines, we kind of spit out Spark code on the end that takes advantage of the massive scale out potential for these ephemeral environments. >> Right. >> We've also kind of built this in such a way that it's Spark today but it could be like, Native or some other engine like Flank or other things that come up. We really don't care like what back end engine actually is as long as it can run certain types of data oriented jobs. It's actually like lots of things in one. We combine out data acquisition and distribution capability with this like, massive elastic scale out capability. >> Yeah, it's unbelievable how you can spin that up and then of course, most people forget you need to spin it down after the event. >> James: Yeah, that's right. >> We talked to a great vendor who talked about, you know, my customer spends no money with me on the weekend, zero. >> James: Right. >> And I'm thrilled because they're not using me. When they do use me, then they're buying stuff. I think what's really interesting is how that changes. Also, your relationship with your customer. If you have a recurring revenue model, you have to continue to deliver a value. You have to stay close to your customer. You have to stay engaged because it's not a one time pop and then you send them the 15% or 20% maintenance bill. It's really this ongoing relationship and they're actually gaining value from your products each and every time you use that. It's a very different way. >> Yeah, that's right. I think it creates better relationships because you feel like, what we do is unproportionate to what they do and vise versa, so it has this fundamental fairness about it, if you will. >> Right, it's a good relationship but I want to go down another path before you turn the cameras on. Talk a little bit about the race always between the need for compute and the compute. It used to be personified best with Microsoft and Intel until we come out with a new chip and then Microsoft OS would eat up all the extra capacity and then they'd come up with a new chip and it was an ongoing thing. You made an interesting comment that, especially in the cloud world where the scale of these things is much, much bigger, that ran a world now where the compute and the storage have kind of, outpaced the applications, if you will, and there's an opportunity for the application to catch up. Oh by the way, we have this cool new thing called machine learning and augmented intelligence. I wonder if you could, is that what's going to fill or kind of rebalance the consumption pattern? >> Yeah, it seems that way and I always think about kind of like, compute and software spiraling around each other like a helix. >> Like at one point, one is leading the other and they sort of just, one eventually surpasses the other and then you need innovation on the other side. I think for a while, like if you turn the clock way back to like, when the Pentium was introduced and everyone was like, how are we ever going to use all of the compute power. >> Windows 95, whoo! >> You know, power of like the Pentium. Do I really need to run my spreadsheets 100% faster? There's no business value whatsoever in transacting faster, or like general user interface or like graphical user interfaces or rendering web pages. Then you start seeing this new glut, often led by like researchers first. Like, software applications coming up that use all of this power because in academia you can start saying, what if I did have infinite compute? What would I do differently? You see things, you know like VR and advanced gaming, come up on the consumer side. Then I think the real answer on the business side is AI and ML. The general trend I start thinking of is something I used to talk about, back in the old days, which is conversion of like, having machines work for us instead of us working for machines. The only way we're ever going to get there is by having higher and higher intelligence on the application side so that it kind of intuits more based on what it's seen before and what it knows about you, etc., in terms of the task that needs to get done. Then there's this whole new breed of person that you need in order to wield all that power because like Hadoop, it's not just natural. You don't just have people floating around like, hey, you know, I'm going to be an Uzi expert or a yarn expert. You don't run into people everyday that's like, oh, yeah, I know neural nets well. I'm a gradient descent expert or whatever you're model is. It's really going to drive like, lots of changes I think. >> Right, well hopefully it does and especially like we were talking about earlier, you know, within core curriculums at schools and stuff. We were with Grace Hopper and Brenda Wilkerson, the new head of the Anita Borg organization, was at this Chicago public school district and they're actually starting to make CS a requirement, along with biology and and physics and chemistry and some of these other things. >> Right. >> So we do have a huge, a huge dearth of that but I want to just close out on one last concept before I let you go and you guys are way on top of this. Greg talked about what you just talked about, which is making the computers work for us versus the other way around. That's where the democratization of the power that we heard a lot about the democratization of big data and the tools and now you guys you guys are talking about the democratization of the integration, especially when you have a bunch of cloud based applications that everybody has access to and maybe, needs to stitch together a different way. But when you look at this whole concept of democratization of that power, how do you see that kind of playing out over the next several years? >> Yeah, that's a very big- >> Sorry I didn't bring you a couple of beer before I brought that up. >> Oh no, I got you covered. So it's a very big, interesting question because I think that you know, first of all, it's one of these, god knows, we can't predict with a lot of accuracy how exactly that's going to look because we're sort of juxtaposing two things. One is, part of the initial move to the cloud was the failure to properly democratize data inside the enterprise, for whatever reason, and we didn't do it. Now we have the computer resources and the central, kind of web based access to everything. Great. Now we have Cambridge Analytica and like, Facebook and people really thinking about data privacy and the fact that we want ubiquitous safe access. I think we know how to make things ubiquitous. The question is, do we know how to make it safe and fair so that the right people are using the right data and the right way? It's a little bit like, you know, there's all these cautionary tales out there like, beware of AI and robotics and everything and nobody really thinks about the danger of the data that's there. It's a much more immediate problem and yet it's sort of like the silent killer until some scandal comes up. We start thinking about these different ways we can tackle it. Obviously there's great solutions for tokenization and encryption and everything at the data level but even if you have the access to it, the question is, how do you control that wildfire that could happen as soon as the horse leaves the barn. Maybe not in it's current form, but when you look at things like Blockchain, there's been a lot of predictions about how Blockchain can be used around like, data. I think that this privacy and this curation and tracking of who has the data, who has access to it and can we control it, I think you are looking at even more like, centralized and guarded access to this private data. >> Great, interesting times. >> Yeah, yeah Jeff, for sure. >> Alright James, well thanks for taking a couple of minutes with us. I really enjoyed the conversation. >> Yeah, it's always great. Thanks for having me Jeff. >> It's James on Jeff and you're watching theCUBE We're at the Snaplogic headquarters in San Mateo, California and thanks for watching. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: From San Mateo, California, it's theCUBE! Covering SnapLogic, Innovation Day, 2018. Brought to you by SnapLogic. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are in San Mateo, at what they call the crossroads, it's 92 and 101. If you're coming by and probably sitting in a traffic, look up and you'll see SnapLogic. It's their new offices. We're really excited to be here for Innovation Day. We're excited to have this CTO, James Markarian. James, great to see you and I guess, we we last talked was a couple years ago in New York City. >> Yeah that's right, and why was I there? It was like a big data show. >> That's right. >> And we we are two years later talking about big data. >> Big data, big data is fading a little bit, because now big data is really an engine, that's powering this new thing that's so exciting, which is all about analytics, and machine learning, and we're going to eventually stop saying artificial intelligence and say augmented intelligence, 'cause there's really nothing artificial about it. >> Yeah and we might stop saying big data and just talk about data because it's becoming so ubiquitous. >> Jeff: Right. >> I know that big data, it's not necessarily going away but it's sort of how we're thinking about handling it is, like kind of evolved over time, especially in the last couple of years. >> Right. >> That's what we're kind of seeing from our customers. >> 'Cause there's kind of an ingredient now, right? It's no longer this new shiny object now. It's just part of the infrastructure that helps you get everything else done. >> Yeah, and I think when you think about it, from like, an enterprise point of view, that that shift is going from experimentation to operationalizing. I think that the things you look for in experimentation, there's like, one set of things here looking for proving out the overall value, regardless maybe of cost and uptime and other things and as you operationalize you start thinking about other considerations that obviously Enterprise IT has to think about. >> Right, so if you think back to like, Hadoop Summit and Hadoop World who were first cracking their teeth, like in 2010 or around that time frame, one of the big discussions that always comes up and that was before kind of the rise of public cloud, you know which has really taken off over the last several years, there's this kind of ongoing debate between, do you move the data to the compute or do you move the compute to the data? There was always like, this monster data gravity issue which was almost insurmountable and many would say, oh, you're never going to get all your data into the cloud. It's just way too hard and way too expensive. But, now Amazon has Snowball and Snowball isn't big enough. They actually had a diesel truck that'll come and help you come move your data. Amazon rolled that thing across the stage a couple of years ago. The data gravity thing seems to be less and if you think of a world with infinite compute, infinite stored, infinite networking asyndetically approaching zero, not necessarily good news for some vendors out there but that's a world that we're eventually getting to that changes the way that you organize all this stuff. >> Yeah, I think so and so much has changed. I was fortunate to be one of the early speakers, like I used to do Worlds and everything, and I was adamantly proclaiming you know, the destiny of Hadoop as bright and shiny and there's this question about what really happened. I think that there's a kind of a few different variables that kind of shifted at the same time. One, is of course, this like glut of computing in the cloud happened and there are so many variables moving at once. It's like, How much time do you have Jeff? >> Ask them to get a couple more drinks for us. >> Seeing our lovely new headquarters here and one of the things is that there is no big data center. We have a little closet with some of the servers we keep around but mostly, everything we do is on Amazon. You're even looking at things like, commercial real estate is changing because I don't need all the cooling and the power and the space for my data center that I once had. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> I become a lot more space efficient than I used to be and so the cloud is really kind of changing everything. On the data side, you mention this like, interesting philosophical shift, going from I couldn't possibly do it in the cloud to why in the world would we not do things in the cloud. Maybe the one stall word in there being some fears about security. Obviously there's been a lot of breaches. I think that there's still a lot of introspection everyone needs to do about, are my on premise systems actually more secure than some of these cloud providers? It's really not clear that we know the answer to that. In fact, we suspect that some of the cloud providers are actually more secure because they are professionals about it and they have the best practice. >> And a whole lot of money. >> The other thing that happened that you didn't mention, that's approaching infinity and we're not quite there yet, is interconnect speeds. So it used to be the case that I have a bunch of mainframes and I have a tier rating system and I have a high speed interconnect that puts the two together. Now with fiber networks and just in general, you can run super high speed, like WAN. Especially if you don't care quite as much about latency. So if 500 millisecond latency is still okay with you. >> Great. >> You can do a heck of a lot and move a lot to the cloud. In fact, it's so good, that we went from worrying, could I do this in the cloud at all to well, why wouldn't I do somethings in Amazon and some things in Microsoft and some things in Google? Even if it meant replicating my data across all these environments. The backdrop for some of that is, we had a lot of customers and I was thinking that people would approach it this way, they would install on premise Hadoop, whether it's like Apache or Cloud Air or the other vendors and I would hire a bunch of folks that are the administrators and retire terra data and I'm going to put all my ETL jobs on there, etc. It turned out to be a great theory and the practice is real for some folks but it turned out to be moving a lot of things to kind of shifting sands because Hadoop was evolving at the time. A lot of customers were putting a lot of pressure on it, operational pressure. Again, moving from experimentation phase over to like, operational phase. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> When you don't have the uptime guarantee and I can't just hire somebody off the street to administer this, it has to be a very sharp, knowledgeable person that's very expensive, people start saying, what am I really getting from this and can I just dump it all in S3 and apply a bunch of technology there and let Amazon worry about keeping this thing up and running? People start to say, I used to reject that idea and now it's sounding like a very smart idea. >> It's so funny we talk about people processing tech all the time, right? But they call them tech shows, they don't call them people in process shows. >> Right. >> At least not the ones we go to but time and time again I remember talking to some people about the Hadoop situation and there's just like, no Hadoop people. Sometimes technology all day long. There just aren't enough people with the skills to actually implement it. It's probably changed now but I remember that was such a big problem. It's funny you talk about security and cloud security. You know, at AWS, on Tuesday night of Reinvent, they have a special, kind of a technical keynote speak and like, James Hamilton would go. In the amount of resources, and I just remember one talk he gave just on their cabling across the ocean, and the amount of resources that he can bring to bear, relative to any individual company, is so different; much less a mid-tier company or a small company. I mean, you can bring so much more resources, expertise and knowledge. >> Yeah, the economy is a scale, their just there. >> They're just crazy. >> That's right and that why you know, you sort of assume that the cloud sort of, eventually eats everything. >> Right, right. >> So there's no reason to believe this won't be one of those cases. >> So you guys are getting Extreme. So what is Snaplogic Extreme? >> Well, Snaplogic Extreme is kind of like a response to this trend of data moving from on premise to the cloud and there are some interesting dynamics of that movement. First of all, you need to get data into the cloud, first of all and we've been doing that for years. Connect to everything, dump it in S3, ADLS, etc. No problem. The thing we're seeing with cloud computing is like, there's another interesting shift. Not only is it kind of like mess for less, and let Amazon manage all this, and I probably refer to Amazon more than other vendors would appreciate. >> Right, right. They're the leaders so let's call a spade a spade. >> Yeah. >> Certainly Google and Microsoft are out there as well so those are the top three and we've acknowledged that. >> One of the interesting things about it is that you couldn't really adequately achieve on premises is the burstiness of your compute. I run at a steady state where I need, you know, 10 servers or a 100 servers, but every once in a while, I need like, 1,000 or 10,000 servers to apply to something. So what's the on premise model? Rack and stack, 10,000 machines, and it's like waiting for the great pumpkin, waiting for that workload to come that I've been waiting months and months for and maybe it never comes but I've been paying for it. I paid for a software license for the thing that I need to run there. I'm paying for the cabling and the racking and everything and the person administering. Make sure the disks are all operating in the case where it gets used. Now, all of a sudden, we are taking Amazon and they're saying, hey, pay us for what you're using. You can use reserved pricing and pay a lower rate for the things you might actually care about on a consistent basis but then I'm going to allow you to spike, and I'll just run the meter. So this has caused software vendors like us, to look at the way we charge and the way that we deploy our resources and say, hey, that's a very good model. We want to follow that and so we introduced Snaplogic Extreme, which has a few different components. Basically, it enables us to operate in these elastic environments, shift our thinking in pricing so that we don't think about like, node based or god forbid, core based pricing and say like, hey, basically pay us for what you do with your data and don't worry about how many servers it's running on. Let Snaplogic worry about spinning up and spinning down these machines because a lot of these workloads are data integration or application workloads that we know lots about. >> Right. >> So first of all, we manage these ephemeral, what we call ephemeral or elastic clusters. Second of all, the way that we distribute our workload is by generating Spark code currently. We use the same graphic environment that you use for everything but instead of running on our engines, we kind of spit out Spark code on the end that takes advantage of the massive scale out potential for these ephemeral environments. >> Right. >> We've also kind of built this in such a way that it's Spark today but it could be like, Native or some other engine like Flank or other things that come up. We really don't care like what back end engine actually is as long as it can run certain types of data oriented jobs. It's actually like lots of things in one. We combine out data acquisition and distribution capability with this like, massive elastic scale out capability. >> Yeah, it's unbelievable how you can spin that up and then of course, most people forget you need to spin it down after the event. >> James: Yeah, that's right. >> We talked to a great vendor who talked about, you know, my customer spends no money with me on the weekend, zero. >> James: Right. >> And I'm thrilled because they're not using me. When they do use me, then they're buying stuff. I think what's really interesting is how that changes. Also, your relationship with your customer. If you have a recurring revenue model, you have to continue to deliver a value. You have to stay close to your customer. You have to stay engaged because it's not a one time pop and then you send them the 15% or 20% maintenance bill. It's really this ongoing relationship and they're actually gaining value from your products each and every time you use that. It's a very different way. >> Yeah, that's right. I think it creates better relationships because you feel like, what we do is unproportionate to what they do and vise versa, so it has this fundamental fairness about it, if you will. >> Right, it's a good relationship but I want to go down another path before you turn the cameras on. Talk a little bit about the race always between the need for compute and the compute. It used to be personified best with Microsoft and Intel until we come out with a new chip and then Microsoft OS would eat up all the extra capacity and then they'd come up with a new chip and it was an ongoing thing. You made an interesting comment that, especially in the cloud world where the scale of these things is much, much bigger, that ran a world now where the compute and the storage have kind of, outpaced the applications, if you will, and there's an opportunity for the application to catch up. Oh by the way, we have this cool new thing called machine learning and augmented intelligence. I wonder if you could, is that what's going to fill or kind of rebalance the consumption pattern? >> Yeah, it seems that way and I always think about kind of like, compute and software spiraling around each other like a helix. >> Like at one point, one is leading the other and they sort of just, one eventually surpasses the other and then you need innovation on the other side. I think for a while, like if you turn the clock way back to like, when the Pentium was introduced and everyone was like, how are we ever going to use all of the compute power. >> Windows 95, whoo! >> You know, power of like the Pentium. Do I really need to run my spreadsheets 100% faster? There's no business value whatsoever in transacting faster, or like general user interface or like graphical user interfaces or rendering web pages. Then you start seeing this new glut, often led by like researchers first. Like, software applications coming up that use all of this power because in academia you can start saying, what if I did have infinite compute? What would I do differently? You see things, you know like VR and advanced gaming, come up on the consumer side. Then I think the real answer on the business side is AI and ML. The general trend I start thinking of is something I used to talk about, back in the old days, which is conversion of like, having machines work for us instead of us working for machines. The only way we're ever going to get there is by having higher and higher intelligence on the application side so that it kind of intuits more based on what it's seen before and what it knows about you, etc., in terms of the task that needs to get done. Then there's this whole new breed of person that you need in order to wield all that power because like Hadoop, it's not just natural. You don't just have people floating around like, hey, you know, I'm going to be an Uzi expert or a yarn expert. You don't run into people everyday that's like, oh, yeah, I know neural nets well. I'm a gradient descent expert or whatever you're model is. It's really going to drive like, lots of changes I think. >> Right, well hopefully it does and especially like we were talking about earlier, you know, within core curriculums at schools and stuff. We were with Grace Hopper and Brenda Wilkerson, the new head of the Anita Borg organization, was at this Chicago public school district and they're actually starting to make CS a requirement, along with biology and and physics and chemistry and some of these other things. >> Right. >> So we do have a huge, a huge dearth of that but I want to just close out on one last concept before I let you go and you guys are way on top of this. Greg talked about what you just talked about, which is making the computers work for us versus the other way around. That's where the democratization of the power that we heard a lot about the democratization of big data and the tools and now you guys you guys are talking about the democratization of the integration, especially when you have a bunch of cloud based applications that everybody has access to and maybe, needs to stitch together a different way. But when you look at this whole concept of democratization of that power, how do you see that kind of playing out over the next several years? >> Yeah, that's a very big- >> Sorry I didn't bring you a couple of beer before I brought that up. >> Oh no, I got you covered. So it's a very big, interesting question because I think that you know, first of all, it's one of these, god knows, we can't predict with a lot of accuracy how exactly that's going to look because we're sort of juxtaposing two things. One is, part of the initial move to the cloud was the failure to properly democratize data inside the enterprise, for whatever reason, and we didn't do it. Now we have the computer resources and the central, kind of web based access to everything. Great. Now we have Cambridge Analytica and like, Facebook and people really thinking about data privacy and the fact that we want ubiquitous safe access. I think we know how to make things ubiquitous. The question is, do we know how to make it safe and fair so that the right people are using the right data and the right way? It's a little bit like, you know, there's all these cautionary tales out there like, beware of AI and robotics and everything and nobody really thinks about the danger of the data that's there. It's a much more immediate problem and yet it's sort of like the silent killer until some scandal comes up. We start thinking about these different ways we can tackle it. Obviously there's great solutions for tokenization and encryption and everything at the data level but even if you have the access to it, the question is, how do you control that wildfire that could happen as soon as the horse leaves the barn. Maybe not in it's current form, but when you look at things like Blockchain, there's been a lot of predictions about how Blockchain can be used around like, data. I think that this privacy and this curation and tracking of who has the data, who has access to it and can we control it, I think you are looking at even more like, centralized and guarded access to this private data. >> Great, interesting times. >> Yeah, yeah Jeff, for sure. >> Alright James, well thanks for taking a couple of minutes with us. I really enjoyed the conversation. >> Yeah, it's always great. Thanks for having me Jeff. >> It's James on Jeff and you're watching theCUBE We're at the Snaplogic headquarters in San Mateo, California and thanks for watching. (electronic music)

(intense music) >> Hi and welcome to theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin coming to you from our Palo Alto studio. Very excited to be joined by a CUBE alumni, the CEO and president of Anita Borg, Brenda Darden Wilkerson. Welcome back to theCUBE, Brenda. >> Thanks so much for having me. >> It's great to have you here. You have been at Anita Borg for about six months. You've got a great background in the tech industry and in education. Give us some perspective of what's happening, what's new with Anita Borg? >> Well, we are very excited to be in this space at this point in history. It's very exciting. Women are alive to the possibilities of what they can contribute in tech. We can thank so many important women who are contributing to the conversation, and it is our job to make sure that they have a voice. And so we are working really hard to make sure that the perceptions that would create barriers for women contributing to tech, having a career path, taking those really important positions of power in tech, that we obliterate them and that the flood gates are open for all who want to participate. >> I love that on the website I saw the what we do, one of the things that shattering perceptions. And I thought that word shattering, that description, was really, really important. >> It is very important because you would think in 2018 that these issues that our founder, Anita Borg, talked about years and years ago, I mean she was a visionary, when she said 50/50 by 2020. And actually we are coming back from the cliff that we fell off of in terms of being our percentages in tech. We're at about 22% now, and a lot of that has to do with those perceptions. What are the images that young women see? Or people in power in tech. What are those images that continue to contribute to those barriers, and that's first and foremost the thing that we're working to change. >> When you were on theCUBE at Grace Hopper 2017, just six months or so ago, one of the things that you said that I really love was people can be what they can see. So having awareness and showing females in technology and leadership positions, showing people this power of representation is critical. >> Very much, very much so. And really all we're talking about is telling the truth. You know? It's not as though the women haven't always been there. It's not as though they aren't making huge contributions, it's just making sure that when they do the work they get the credit for it and that people get to see it. I've seen it be very important in my previous work in driving computer science. All of the stakeholders needed to understand that underrepresented people of all kinds could do tech, and they were very much impacted by the images that they saw. And so it's our job to make sure that all of those stories get told. >> So you spent 15 years in education, and you had many years before that in tech. You made a massive impact with the Computer Science For All initiative that you founded back in 2013 in Chicago. Tell us a little bit about that because it's really exploded and I'm sure really kind of exceeded your expectations. Tell us about that initiative and where it is currently today. >> I'm very excited about the initiative. I mean, really it was born out of some of my own experiences. I was a person who, in my background, I wasn't exposed to computer science until I found it accidentally in college. I mean, obviously that accident changed my whole trajectory, right? So when I found out that that was still happening to women and underrepresented students when I got into education, that was sort of the genesis of wanting to do something about it. That was when we launched Computer Science For All. And yes, now it is a national initiative. In Chicago we have a graduation requirement. Students all have to graduate with at least one year of computer science, and we're seeing that transformation. I've got students who we started with in the beginning who are graduating this year from universities with computer science, data science, information science degrees, and they are doing amazing things. They're starting companies, they're developing products, all because they had that exposure. And so it's exciting now to be on the other side, really kind of coming home full circle, back to advocate for women in tech, as I started out. To make sure that those hundreds of thousands, millions of students have access to the opportunities that we need them to have access to. >> Right, that access is such a critical thing. And you kind of think in some respects, as we were talking about earlier, you've made a massive impact in Chicago, New York City, the Obama administration got behind this. Well, you started out with a goal of reaching four hundred thousand kids in Chicago, there's now over 1.5 million. But it starts with that awareness, that this shouldn't be an elective. But kids need access to understand I can be what I can see. If I can't see it, I don't know that it's an opportunity. >> And if I don't know, if I can't touch it and know that I have access to being the creator of technology, changing the world as we know technology alone can do, then we're going to miss out on the contributions that only they can make, and so that's what makes this so exciting. When we started out, I'm thinking of the kindergartners that started that first year. They're in fourth grade now, right? What is the world going to look like when they graduate from high school? It's just going to be amazing, I can't wait. >> Yeah, we were just covering Women In Data Science a couple of weeks ago, I was mentioning to you before, and I love that event because you walk into where the main event at Stanford is held, and you just instantly feel positivity, excitement of this movement. And there's so much opportunity within data science alone, and one of the things I wanted to talk with you about is we heard a lot of people that were guests that day talk about the creative element. And we often think of the hard skills that computer scientists and data science need to have, but you found CS accidentally as you said, and one of the things that I've heard you say is the opportunity to be creative. Tell us a little bit more about what, how people, young girls can get creative and expressive creativity through computer science. >> Well, that's very important. We found that we could attract more girls into computer science when we told them that they could use these skills and this knowledge to solve problems that they cared about. You know, initially because it was such a, thought to be such a male-oriented subject, it was all about computer games and the kill games, and the girls were like, I'm not interested in that, but I want to do things that are impactful to the world, to change my society, to change my community, and you can do that with technology, and you can create something out of your own ideas from scratch, from concept, and I can see the lights go on for them, wait, I can create an app that helps my friends through a particularly difficult time with bullies. Yes, you can do that. And so, that is the exciting explosion that's about to happen. People who are really using these skills to solve problems for the human good, that's what we're going to see an increase of, because that's what many times the women bring. So Grace Hopper 2018 is coming up, what in September? >> It's September 26th through 28th this year, and it's in Houston, we're returning to Houston. We're actually even going to use the Toyota Center for our keynotes. >> And you're expecting 20 thousand people this year? >> That's right, we had 18 thousand last year, we're inviting 20 thousand this year. We're going to have over 17 tracks. Last year we had 405 concurrent sessions. The whole point is to give women an idea of how they can transform their lives, coming into technology at whatever stage they found themselves in, whether they are just seekers and are interested in learning about technology, or if they are middle career and going to that next stage or the executive level, we have something for all of them. >> So, and you give out awards, the Abie awards, at Grace Hopper. Give us a little bit of an idea of the types of categories in which women are awarded. >> So we award the top innovator, we award top educator, so wherever women find themselves, we want to bring attention to the fact that we need participation not in just what we think as the high-tech sector, but all along the pathway. People who are bringing attention to issues using technology in their community. We award all of those, people who participate in creating more of a well-rounded experience for all of us to understand what technology can do for our lives. >> And it's really everywhere, right? And that's one of the thing that I think is personally really intriguing about technology is every company now has to be a tech company. >> That's right, every company is a tech company, right? And so that's another thing that we want to make sure that people are not just thinking, oh if I'm going to get in tech I can just work for these five or 10 high-tech companies. Tech is everywhere, it's across the country, it's around the world, it's right where women are living and having their existence. And we need their contribution in those places. >> Yeah, another thing about WIDS and women, we were talking about data science that I found interesting, was some of these female leaders talking about the hard skills, the data analysis, the interpretation, but also needing to have more diversity in the analysis to remove, we all kind of come with biases, but to start having more female perspectives to really kind of open up the analyses and remove some of the biases, which was kind of something, to be honest, I've been in tech for a long time, I hadn't really thought about before. >> Yeah, and it's really shocking just how impactful some of those biases are in the data on people's everyday lives. We've heard things everywhere from as serious as different sentencing levels for people based upon the algorithms that are there, to how much things can cost more for important things like insurance, based upon the data that's there. I think the New York Times did a piece a couple weeks ago about face recognition software and those images that are in those databases. And so it's so important that we have diverse faces at the table, as a black woman, my face is likely to be misunderstood 37% of the time. Right? So to be able to have the diverse background there that will check for those images to make sure that they are more representative of the whole population is just going to make all of our lives better. >> So at Grace Hopper your audience is made up of girls maybe interested in STEM, women that you said are in many stages of their careers, on the corporate side, one of the things I read recently is that article that you wrote in Mashable called Voices of Women in Tech collaboration with Anita Borg where you talked about corporate activism, and there's some pretty significant benefits that companies can achieve by speaking out. Tell us a little bit more about that. >> Well, you know, we have a much more engaged and active population, especially the millennials, and they care what their companies care about and how they contribute or don't contribute to the causes that they care about. And so one of the most expensive things that a company will ever experience is their ability to retain great talent. And what we've seen is that millennials will decide to stay or leave based upon some of the things that companies contribute to or don't contribute to, so being able to pay attention and to get into the game of other things that are outside just the product that they produce, actually contributed to company's bottom line. >> That's pretty interesting. >> It's very interesting and very important, and knowing that is something that they can immediately put in place that impacts the success of their company. >> Absolutely, and some of the things, too, that I've heard on various CUBE shows that we've done is the millennials perspective on the gender gap. And often they'll go, I don't know why you guys are still talking about this. And we think, we don't either, but we are, and it's refreshing to hear that this next generation thinks that that is just something that is just kind of ridiculous that we're still talking about, and also how important seeing a leader, a CEO being involved in something important, is to retention, so I think that's a great message that Anita Borg can help get out there and show businesses this huge impact and benefit to you and fostering your own talent. >> Yeah, you know, and it's encouraging, as you say, the millennials are jumping in, and many more people are jumping in and giving this perspective to companies, which is actually assisting them, right? So now they don't have to feel like, okay, this is just my idea, I'm going to take a risk and jump out. They've got people who are loyal to their organization saying, I believe in this and I believe in you, let's do this together, and so definitely our job is to make sure that companies have access to all the information they need to make these, what shouldn't be hard decisions, but we're there to help them. So the 50/50 idea, you have said that, and you mentioned that earlier, that you want to see 50/50 representation of females in the next 10 years. Tell us a little bit more about kind of what's coming out the rest of 2018 from Anita Borg, and how you guys are working to help make that, help get those numbers up from where they are currently. >> So it's all about awareness, and there's a lot of awareness out there, but what we want to do is increase it. You mentioned the idea of people can't be what they can't see. Images are so powerful, and so we want to work with media outlets, we want to work with entertainment companies with writers, with producers, and say help us create the images that can turn around and tell the truth, really. I mean we're not creating a fiction. Let's just tell the truth and allow people to understand that yes, this is how this works, and let's couple that with the data that shows that the bottom lines of companies that have more diverse workforces, that have more diverse boards, are muchly improved over those that are nondiverse. And so, we are creating that awareness, we are helping our companies find out what we call, not only best practices, but many times it's better practices. We're still working towards that best practice of here's how you can make incremental steps forward. Excuse me, you mentioned 10 years, I'm a little more urgent than that. I feel like the things that we get done are the things that we're most urgent about. One of the issues about why we're still dealing with these things, it's just been sort of like let's work on it in the sweet by and by. I want to say, let's work on it in the next two years, in the next three years. Let's make some goals, let's put some metrics behind them, and those were some of the things that we help companies do. >> I love that urgency. I think it's essential, but the awareness and kind of this idea that you have of, let's just tell the truth. There's really nothing more powerful than that. But also, the imagery and the representation is critical for that. If you look back at all of your success and think back to younger Brenda, what advice would you give somebody that looks at you and goes, wow. Where do I start? What's that recommendation for shattering someone's own maybe perception of themselves in getting into technology? >> Right, I mean we have to start with the conversation that we have with ourselves, but you know, we're in this world now where there's so many great images. Find those images. You know, you can find successful women. There are so many of them. Talk to them, reach out to those of us, because we want you to succeed. We want you to participate and come on board. And so, we have a world with social media that allows people to have access to each other that we didn't have before. The most important thing is don't take no for an answer. Not only because it's just not true, but because we need you, and it is an amazing time right now where you have all these women who are standing up saying that they want change, and we're here to support them, and we're here to support you. >> Speaking of this kind of movement going on globally about we want change, with the Me Too movement, a bit of a different genesis, however, the awareness is starting to be there. You talked about needing the entertainment industry to get on board and really start ensuring that we're sharing the truth here. What opportunities do you see to deliver through Anita Borg that maybe you can leverage that's coming from the Me Too movement and all of Hollywood that's really starting to stand up and be very vocal about this? >> Well, you know, it's interesting because people ask me that question a lot, and from my own perspective, there's this awakening because those same sorts of things are happening in tech as well, we know. We've seen the stories. It's not as though we're looking aghast at what's happening to women across the way. So these things have been happening, and what is happening is people are starting to look internally to say, how can I strengthen myself and stand up like these women did? And so at AnitaB.org we are creating those opportunities for women to network, for them to get mentored. We have communities around the world where women can get together and understand what the pathway was of other women. It would have been really helpful for me to have sort of some of those breadcrumbs out in front of me, some of those examples and other people to talk to, but we provide that as part of what we do in our organization. We provide training opportunities, other experiences where people can see all across the tech ecosystem where they can come in. It's not just one way in, it's not just one pathway, and so that's going to be a really important thing to make sure that women know they have choices. >> And I think it's so important in general, but you mentioned some of the attendees at Grace Hopper are maybe women who are in transition who are maybe, had a career in something different for a while, and are now getting into tech. I'd love to maybe understand that a little bit more, maybe some of the demographics there, but how do you see, what are some of the inspirational stories maybe that you can see where a woman who was maybe mid-career or somewhere around there, just went, you know what, I am interested in this, maybe didn't have the confidence when she was younger. Any stories there that kind of jump out at you that are great examples of it's never too late? >> Absolutely, in fact that was some of my first inspiration in getting involved with taking my background in tech and sort of lighting the path for people to get in who had traditionally been shut out. My first educational experience was at a community college level. And many of those people were people who, like myself, had not been given that introductory experience of computer science in K-12 space. Maybe they went to work and did some other things, maybe they got talked out of it. You know, it's not for you. And they came back later saying, you know, maybe I could learn, maybe I could try, and so really opening up that pathway to them. I've seen people who have gone from either having no education or maybe having even a PhD in linguistics figuring out once again that creativity. How can I take that and apply that technologically to creating solutions that only I would care about or know about? And so we've seen people come from all different walks of life, different career paths, and start small. Some of them are self trained, some of them are bootcamp trained, some of them go back and get an additional education. What we do at AnitaB.org is, not only help them understand those multiple pathways, but we work with partner companies to say, you know, there are other ways for people to come in. We've got these, what, 500, 600 thousand empty positions. Why don't you take a look at some of the people who are in your industry already? If you're a bank and you've got a woman who's been working for you for 20 years, she knows your business inside out, she is loyal, she can learn the tech. So we're seeing those types of transitions take place as well. >> Fantastic, well Grace Hopper in Houston in September. Is there also Grace Hopper, there are forums in other countries? >> Yes, so we also have Grace Hopper India that takes place in November, right after the one we do here in the United States. We've also started to have one day Grace Hopper events, we call them Hopper by Once, and we are planning those out around the world. And so we're increasing, we're trying to increase people's opportunity to come and experience all of the wonderful things that are available at Grace Hopper. We hear so many wonderful things about how it's transformative in their lives to see that many women in one place, to have access to training and mentoring and networking opportunities, and we're just excited for what's to come. >> Well we're excited to see what happens in the next few months, and Brenda thanks so much for stopping by, sharing what's new with AnitaB.org, your vision for that, and the transformation that you're already helping to facilitate. >> Thank you for having me. >> Absolutely our pleasure. We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin, from our Palo Alto studios, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (intense music)

>> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. It's International Women's Day 2018. There's a ton of events happening all over the world. Check the social media stream, you'll be amazed. But we're excited to be here, downtown San Francisco, at the Accenture event. It's called Getting to Equal, 400 people, it's a packed house here at the Hotel Nikko, and we're really excited to have the authors of some really important research here as our next guests. This is Julie Sweet, the CEO of North America for Accenture. Good to see you, Julie. >> Great, thanks for having me today. >> And Ellyn Shook, the Chief Leadership and HR Officer at Accenture. Great to see you. >> Thank you, Jeff. >> All right. So Ellen, I want to start with you just cause I noticed your title, and I wrote it down, I've never seen, we do hundreds of events, thousands of interviews, I've never seen Chief Leadership and HR. Where did that title come from, and why is "Leadership" ahead of "HR"? That's a pretty significant statement. >> It is, it is, and Accenture's a talent-led business, and part of being a talent-led business is growing our people to grow our business, so leadership and leadership development is essential to our business. It's a core competency of ours, and that's why my title is Chief Leadership & Human Resources Officer. >> And Leadership before HR, meaning you really need people to get out in front. >> Yes. >> It's not about compliance, >> Yes, leaders at all levels. >> and this and that, leaders of all levels. >> Correct, correct. >> Okay, so let's talk about the research. >> Sure. >> It says, "When she rises, we all rise." I think it's pretty common, and everybody knows hopefully by this point, that diversity of opinion, diversity of teams, leads to better business outcomes. So what specifically is this piece of research, and give us a little background. >> Sure, the research, I think, is groundbreaking because never have I seen a piece of research that looks at the cultural aspects of an organization and really helps to articulate very transparently, what are the biggest accelerators in a culture for equality? And that's what the research is about. >> And you've identified, and is this an ongoing research, is this the first time it's been published, is it kind of an annual thing? >> Every year we publish a piece of research about gender equality, and this year we put a different lens on it to really look at equality for all. >> So you've identified 40 kind of key areas, but of those 40, really 14 are the big hitters. Is that accurate? >> That's correct. >> So what are some of those 14? >> Well, I would put them, we've put them in three categories. The first is bold leadership, so think about companies like Accenture who set targets and have CEOs who are very clear about their priorities. The second is comprehensive action, so think about policies and practices that are really effective. And then finally third, which I think is often under focused on, which is an empowering environment. What does it feel like to be at work every day? Do they ask you to dress a certain way? Is there flexible time for all? And it's the combination of these 14 factors that really makes a difference about creating a culture of equality where men and women advance. And what was really impressive is we saw that, in companies with these factors, women were five times more likely to advance to director or senior manager, and men were two times more likely. And so it really is about, when she rises, all rise, and that is probably one of the most exciting things about the research. >> It's really interesting, we just had Lisa on from The Modist, and you know, I would never have thought of clothing and dress as such a significant factor, but you've got that identified in that third bucket that you mentioned. And in fact, it's the number one attribute. So what are some of the other surprises that kind of came out of the research? >> Well, I think one of the surprises was that companies that, as part of comprehensive action, that implemented maternity leave only, it actually had a negative effect on women's advancement. But where companies implemented parental leave, so it was for men and women, it eliminated that negative bias. And it really goes to the importance that these policies, and actions, and the focus need to be about women and men. And when you start putting women too much in a category, like flex time is a mommy track, as opposed to flex time being something that men and women commonly do, it really changes how it feels to, does it feel inclusive every day at work? >> Right. >> Yeah, so companies really need to, I think what the research showed very strongly is that companies need to look at programs, policies, practices, and an environment that levels the playing field rather than isolating any particular gender or other form of diversity. >> But it's interesting, kind of law of unintended consequences, I think that panel that you were on earlier, one of the gentlemen said, since the not me, there's been reports of, >> Me too. >> for me too, excuse me, a lot of hashtags today. That there's been people doing, men scared of mentoring maybe that they weren't before. I don't know how true that is, but no it is kind of interesting to think, are there some kind of counter balances, as you said, if there's just maternity and not parental leave that need to be thought about? That probably people aren't thinking it through that far. >> Well and I think, one of the things as we saw in the research is that it's not about also one action, and so the way that companies really create a culture of equality is it's a combination of these factors. And you said something when we first started that I think is really important, and that was, you said, well it's really commonly known that diversity is important. And I think that people do need to understand that, we are optimistic about where we are today because, as a company, we're constantly in the c-suite. We serve in the U.S., 3/4 of the fortune 500, and as much as we're talking as a leader in digital disruption and artificial intelligence, the conversation quickly turns to people, to talent, to diversity, and so there's a real business lens that's on this, and that's the context in which we're operating. >> Right, and we can go to Grace Hooper, we do a ton of women's events as well as large conventions. And most people, I think, hopefully have figured it out, that it's not just about doing the right thing, it's about actually having better business outcomes. You get better outcomes with diversity of opinions, diversity of teams, you think about things that you just wouldn't think about. You don't have that same experience, everybody has a bias from where they come from, so you want to get some other people and have different points of view, different lenses to look at things. So it is really important. But why do you think things feel like they're changing now? What's important about, March 8th, 2018, versus say a year ago when you started doing some of this research? Is it the tipping point that it feels like, or? >> I think there's a couple of factors that are coming together right now. First of all, we're living in the digital age, and the digital age is all about innovation and innovation fast. And as you just said, you cannot innovate without diversity. Diversity is a form of, you're able to tap into creativity, and it's a source of competitive advantages for organizations in this age. But also what's happening in culture around the world, the me too movement as well as other things that are occurring for women around the world, and it's a moment in time where a movement can really start to happen. And I think, companies who look at culture as an accelerator of change are going to be the winners. >> Right, so what impacted bold leadership? We had from the Golden State Warriors on earlier and I think there's, what's great about sports teams is we all get to see them do their business. And we get to see the scoresheet at the end of the day, we don't necessarily get to see that in other companies. But really a fantastic example of new leadership coming in, made bold sweeping changes, probably a little bit of luck, which most success stories have, but you know significant top-down culture change. So how do you see cultures changing with bold leadership and old-line companies? Can the old guard flip? Do they need to bring in new blood? How are people executing bold leadership? >> Well first of all, I do think that it's not about old-line, it's not about young, it's really about leadership. And so it is very dependent on who is the CEO and what kind of a board we have, and so, we don't, both of us don't subscribe to the idea that you have to be born digital to be have a great culture >> To be digital. >> Yeah to be digital. And I would say that, one of the key things we saw in the study was around transparency of goals. And we talk a lot at Accenture about transparency creates trust. And so when you think about, how do you change a culture? Bold leadership is in part to find in the research by the willingness to set public goals, and to be transparent and that creates the trust. The trust of your employees, and the trust of the people you want to attract. And what I often will say that is, when we put out our statistics in the U.S, we're the first professional services firm, it wasn't that we had phenomenal statistics, but the fact that we were willing to put them out created trust that we were trying to change. And it helped people want to be a part of that change. >> Right. I mean you know that, you guys are in this business, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it. It's interesting, the Anita Borg organization puts out a self-assessment, we do their show, and Grace Hopper, to have companies. Again, not necessarily that they're going to score high but at least they recognize the problem, they're trying to measure it, they're trying to set a base line and make moves. We've heard that from Brian at Intel, Intel's making moves. And you guys have made a very definitive statement, write a line in the sand, at 2025, you're going to hit 50%. I believe that's the goal. >> Correct. And not only do we say that we're going to do it but we're doing something about it. And a lot of companies will say they want to achieve gender equality, but it's actually the actions that you take every single day. And then, of course, reporting on your progress, whether it's what you wanted to see or not, just the full transparency around the scorecard is important. >> Yeah, it's so critically important cause again, if you can't measure it, you can't change it. So great event here, as you look forward into 2018, I still can't believe we're a quarter of the way in to the year, it shocks me. (laughs) What are some of the priorities for 2018, if we sit down here again a year from now, where will you have moved on that measure, what are some of the things that are your top priorities around this initiative this year? >> Well I know for me, we certainly are trying to make sure that we continue to make progress, but I also think there's a growing conversation about the intersectionality of diversity, and so, it's women in color, it's race and the workforce, and so. We're a global company, but certainly in the U.S, which is part of the business I lead, we are not only focusing on gender, but the intersectionality of diversity and on race. >> Yeah and I think just broadening the conversation from gender diversity to true equality for all is really the big push for us here at Accenture now. And I think it's essential that no part of our organization or no individual gets left behind. And that's what we're really focused on. >> Well that's great, and so I want to thank you for having us, and wish you well in 2018, and really a fantastic event and super, super initiative. >> Come back in 2019 and we'll show you our progress. >> Alright. >> Exactly. >> She's Julie, she's Ellyn, and I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from International Women's Day at the Accenture event in downtown San Francisco. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Madrid, Spain it's The Cube, covering HPE Discover Madrid 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back to Madrid, everyone. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here, this is Day Two of of HPE Discover 2017. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host for the week Peter Burris. Ana Pinczuk is here, she's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of HPE Pointnext Group. >> That's right, that's right. >> Welcome back to The Cube. >> Glad to be here. >> Many time Cube alum. >> That's right, that's right. >> Pre-HPE and second time since, when did you start, in February? >> Yes, I know it's been nine months, I'm a veteran. >> You're a vet, right. (laughs) How's the gig going, you hitting your groove swing? >> Yes. >> Dave: Looked great up on stage yesterday. >> Thank you so much, yeah I appreciate it. Yeah I think we are, I came on board in February and it's been a run ever since. We launched a brand in February, so that's when I think when we sort of talked last. And then since then, we've just launched another brand which is HPE GreenLake for flexible consumption model stuff. And we've been doing a lot of great things, we've been doing partnerships with folks, I've been going out to each one of the regions talking to different customers, it's been going really well. >> Well so Pointnext has become a linchpin of HPE strategy. After the spin-merges, things became more clear when you talk about making hybrid IT simple, getting to the intelligent edge, services is now front and center. Meg talks about it, Antonio talks about it. >> That's right. >> Why is services so important and how do you see that scaling in the organization? >> So first of all, I definitely believe the world is turning to be a services-led world and I tell folks that it's really two things, it's services-led and then advisory-led, really advisory. And particularly because our customers want to really undergo these new digital journeys. I was just on stage talking to one of our customers, the Tottenham Hotspurs, and they're redoing their whole stadium and they're trying to increase the interaction and the engagement that they have with fans. So that's where services come in, and so we're really services-led that way and the second thing that's a phenomenon is really the cloud has really helped us learn to want everything instantaneously and to want things when we need them and when we think we need them. And so a lot of services is really about enabling those experiences in a consumption model. So that's the transformation I think that HPE is going through right now, just being a product company, but really moving to being services-led to deliver these digital experiences. >> Well one of the things that we've observed over the years, as folks who work with customers in thinking about their technology, is that there's a co-mingling, a bringing together of the idea of invention. And one of the things that's most attractive to me about a services-led, or acknowledging the role of services, is it really, innovation, is a two-part process. There's an invention, which is the engineering element, and enters the innovation, which is the social, the change. And one of the beauties of taking a services as opposed to a product approach, is that you end up focusing on the social change. >> That's right. >> You end up focusing on what does it mean to use this, apply it, make it happen, and it accelerates the innovation process. I'm wondering if by having a more services-approach, HP's able to look at this significant new range of problems you're going to try to address, but address them as a social innovation challenge as opposed to just getting product into market. >> Yeah, no and that's absolutely right. I'll give you another cool example, we have a customer Yoox Net-A-Porter, and they're a digital sort of online experience provider. They support brands like all of the expensive luxury brands that we know and love. And they're trying to help stores innovate, so let's say you're Prada or Marni or Louis Vuitton, they're helping provide a social experience to their luxury brand consumer. And being able to do that, not just mirroring what you would get in a store, but really innovating in how do you engage with that kind of a consumer online. And so for example, they allow you to shop online but then they'll bring the product to you, it'll be all wrapped really nice, they wait for you to try it on to make sure it's okay. So that's an example of social innovation, not just thinking about how to provide product to enable a website, but how do you actually then help a customer innovate in that whole engagement model? >> It's innovation that is made possible by a whole lot of technology combined with simple ways of introduce change, not just to consumers, but also the people who are ultimately responsible for providing that service. >> Ana: That's right, that's right, that's exactly right. >> Peter: Is that one of the basis then for thinking about Pointnext? >> It is, yeah, it is because people ask me, you know we've always done services and a lot of our services were product-attached services, you do support services, operational services, data center care, those sorts of things. And then we decided to sort of launch Pointnext, and the idea is that this is more than just what we've traditionally done as product-attached. This is really coming at it from a completely different angle, which is recognizing that there is an element of social and management of change that comes through digital. And that's why we talk about advisory-led. Part of that advisory-led is really helping companies figure out what is that new phenomenon, how do I actually shift the experience that I want to enable and how do I bring social innovation with a set of partners, too, because experiences really require us to work not just with our own products, but with software providers, with inside and others. >> Peter: And your customer's partners too. >> And our customer's partners as well, I mean who the customer is is shifting as we put this together. I'll give you an example, when we work with automotive companies, we've gotta think not just about, let's say, the car company and their connected car, but we also have to think about how the consumer of the car is going to interact with the IT environment in the car. >> How the dealers are going to sell it, >> Ana: And how the dealers are gonna sell it. >> how they're gonna make money, the whole thing. >> How they're gonna do predictive maintenance on it >> Exactly. >> So you start to think not just about one experience, but all the elements that come from that single experience. >> Well we just had Deloitte on talking about retail experiences and transforming brick and mortar stores, so that's a key part of it. So partnerships is also something critical, 'cause you can't do everything. >> Ana: That's right. >> So I want to come back to some of the invention piece. When you were up on stage talking about flexible consumption models, you know, cloud, when we went into the downturn it was kinda a tap on the shoulder. Coming out of the downturn it became a kick in the butt to a lot of tradtional IT players. So you've had to respond to that. And you have, flexible consumption models, pay-as-you-go models. So I started to make a list because we've been talking all week about two ends of the spectrum. We've got here at HPE Discover, AWS re:Invent's going on this week, completely different philosophies about what customers want and how to serve those customers. And so you've got to a great degree mimic the cloud experience. And you can't do it 100%. At the same time, the cloud can't mimic what you guys can do. So I kinda wanted to go through a list and think about where have you closed those gaps, where do you still have advantages for customers. So things like pay-as-you-go, flexible capacity, you've done a lot of work there. Can you give us the update on that and how big is that gap when you talk to customers? >> So first of all, it's interesting because when some of our competitors talk about pay-as-you-go, they start by talking about just a leasing arrangement. They say "Okay, it's a lease." And this is far beyond a lease. I think I can eliminate quite a few of our competitors, (laughs) not cloud competitors, just by saying we've gone beyond that, right. And we provide a full service. So it's the hardware, the software, the data center care, the operational management. And then we turn that service into a pay-as-you-go model. So that's the first sort of innovation and differentiation. And we do that on-prem or in a hosted environment, that's the first thing. The second thing is that part of what we do is we help to manage that environment for the customer. So in a flexible capacity model, we over-provision in a sense and we have a buffer and we understand where the customer's going, how much their utilization is, and then we automatically sort of manage that whole thing for them, up or down depending on what happens. I think the third thing, which is part of the innovation, which is a little different, is we also do the integration of other technologies into the offer. So yesterday I was talking about private backup as a service. There we've got the hardware, the software, it could be Commvault let's say backup software, all the management associated with that, including the support that you need for that, offered in an outcome-based service. So what we're doing there is we're also innovating in the metering, what we're saying is we're going to really provide you an outcome, and that outcome is a successful backup. So you don't actually have to worry about the equipment, you don't have to worry about is it infrastructure-as-a-service? You know, AWS, whatever, we're actually providing a full solution in an outcome-based. And I think that's a little bit of what differentiates us from maybe some of the solutions that are out there, from others. That said, I view this as providing the right mix to our customers, so although, yes, you can say that we're competing with the public cloud, because customers have choice, at the same time part of what we're trying to do also is bring those two together, which I think is unique for us. >> Makes more same philosophy, different approaches. >> Different approaches, and by the way, if you're customer-centric, then what you wanna do is provide customer choice and do the right thing for the customer, and to say where does it make sense to be on the public cloud, or in a private environment, and optimize for the customer benefits that you're going after. >> Well I think it's fair to say that the world has learned a lot from what AWS has done, and said "Hey, we can take that "and we can apply it to our customers' businesses "on-prem or in a hybrid environment." >> And by the way, AWS, especially with our CTP acquisition, they've been a long-term AWS partner and we're having conversations with AWS that say okay, if we're going to really focus on customers, and we're really customer-centric, then how do we work together? Not just AWS, but Microsoft and Google and others, how do we work together and look at where we can optimize our solutions to be able to do the right thing for the customer. >> So our clients are sick and tired of hearing me say this, or us say this, but we believe that where we're going is the cloud experience for your data demands. >> That's right. >> So the way we think about it and I'm wondering if you would agree, is that the first conversation we have with a customer is what's the outcome, what data is required to serve that outcome, how're you gonna package it up as a workload, and where do you naturally need to run that based on latency, other types of issues. Is that kind of how Pointnext is working with customers as well? >> Yeah absolutely right, so we wanna come in, customer in, so you wanna be able to say "What is it that you're trying to do from an outcome?" I described a backup outcome, another outcome might be I'm trying to accelerate my ability to roll out new agile solutions, or microservices-based applications. So we have that conversation with a customer, we then say okay, for that kind of workload, what are you requirements? What are you trying to do? We might also come in and actually, 'cause sometimes what people think they do and what they actually do in their environment is different. So we can come in and say okay, let me actually measure what you're doing and see what you're doing and then bring that information back to them. And then have a conversation about what to do with your workload and what makes sense. So I think it's a very close engagement with the customer, it's based on real data about what the customer's trying to do. And frankly that was one of the reasons that we made the CTP acquisition, as well, because it started to complement our portfolio. A lot of the capabilities that we had were very robust, in particular around private cloud, but just having the public cloud angle there and sort of strengthening that piece was super important to be able to have that conversation and truly enable the right mix. >> Well now that brings up the topic of multi-cloud, which kinda, to use a sports analogy, it's jump ball. It's kind of a free-for-all, everybody wants that business. I guess with the exception of some of the big cloud guys aren't interested. But certainly, Hewlett-Packard >> Peter: Well don't believe it, want to avoid it. >> Yeah well, but that's the reality is there's gonna be multiple clouds, we know this. Particularly with SaaS. So a company like Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, obviously has to play in that space. So I wonder if you could talk about the strategy there, why you feel confident that HPE is in a good position. >> Yeah well a couple things, first of all I think it's really good to be, we're somewhat independent, we're not totally independent because we've got a whole set of products, but we're somewhat independent in the sense that if we wanna be truly hybrid and enable other public and private solutions, we wanna be able to give customers choice in terms of the public domains that they can work with. And so we're sort of in a great position as a large provider and with the relations that we have in the enterprise in particular, with our customer base, to be a little bit of Switzerland and be able to say, okay, let's have that conversation about the right mix and enable these multi-cloud solutions, that's the first thing. The second thing is we have relationships and great partnerships with many of these providers. So take Microsoft, we've got an Azure relationship, an Azure stack opportunity, so we've got the ability and by the way, we do many of their applications as well. So we've got the ability to help have that conversation with our customers to say okay, do you wanna be on-prem or do you wanna be in the cloud? Even with one provider, and to do that, and so we have the opportunity to provide robust solutions even with one private and public provider. And on top of that, we've got a consultancy with our professional services. We wanna be responsive to our customers, we've got now HPE OneSphere. And with HPE OneSphere we can be data-driven and actually provide our customers a view of their environment and help to be a little bit of that Switzerland to say look, here's what would be best for you and help to have workload mobility together with OneSphere. So I think we're well-positioned, I tend to call it my stairway to Heaven. In a sense we start out at the bottom talking about infrastructure and support, and we've got great relationships there with our customers. If I launch the flexible capacity offers, we're starting to deliver outcome-based solutions. When I bring in CTP, we'd go up the stack and we now provide advisory and the consumption solutions. And with OneSphere now you go up the stacks just a little bit more and say not only are we gonna advise you and provide you those executables with consumption models, but we now have capabilities that allow you to sort of optimally choose what's the right thing for you. So I think we're well-positioned, by the way, with CTP we've got sort of a managed, sort of cloud sort of capability as well. We manage compliance and other elements. So we're able to have in our portfolio sort of value-added services above and beyond that help with multi-cloud and making sure that customers can be compliant, secure, and have the right experience on a multi-cloud environment. >> Yeah I think a lot of people that don't know CTP don't understand how deep their expertise is. They're only a few hundred people, if that. But they're rockstars. >> They're over 200 people. >> Serious thought leaders with real deep connections. I've gotta change subjects to the last topic area. As you know, The Cube from day one has always been a fan of having women on, and promoting women in tech. We first met you at the Anita Borg Institute of the Grace Hopper Conference. Meg Whitman is obviously a woman leader in tech and she's leaving HP. We've got Meg and we've got Ginni. And Ginni's coming to the end, I don't know, she's getting to the age where typically IBM retires its CEOs. You've got two prominent women in tech now leaving. Now maybe IMB will replace Ginni with a woman. HPE has chosen Antonio, great choice. But your thoughts on a leader like Meg, obviously has done some great work. But we're losing one. >> I know, and so >> How do you feel about that? >> I mean, you know, I'm very conflicted if I've gotta be honest. One one hand, as I joined HPE I had never worked for a female CEO so I've really enjoyed watching. You know it's always great to have mentors and to have people that are advocating for women, so I really enjoyed being part of Meg's organization, I'm really sorry to see her go. And she's an icon as well, so she does a lot, in fact this afternoon we're gonna be doing a session for women just here at the conference. So very sad to see her go, at the same time I think we as women, and men by the way, have a responsibility to build the next generation of leaders. And I think that's where I focus my energy and I know that I'm gonna be sort of a high profile female in the HPE environment so I feel that sense of responsibility, not just within HPE, but within the industry, to help to cultivate an environment that takes advantage of half of the population and enables innovation through them as well. So I think we've gotta get more women up there. I think part of it is really bringing up the next generation and frankly this next generation, they don't have tolerance for waiting for things, whatever, and they feel like they're super entitled to have the right and the choice >> Peter: They are. >> And they are, right. But that seems like an easy thing to say, but in some sense we come from a generation, many women as well, which have had challenges especially in the tech world, in terms of really breaking that glass ceiling. And I think we've got some amazing women and some amazing leaders as well. I'm part of the Anita Borg Board of Trustees as well, and we were at Grace Hopper and we had Debbie Sterling, some really great women that are coming up the ranks that are CEOs, that are CTOs, that are really leading the way and so I'm very hopeful that the conversation, by the way, about women in tech is really prominent right now. And that I think it'll open up opportunities for women to shine going forward and I think that should happen for HPE as well. In fact right now its me and then Archie Deskus is the CIO for HPE. So we're trying to do our part to sort of make sure that there's other women in leadership as well. >> Well you're a great example of a current and future leader. >> Thank you so much. >> Really appreciate you coming onto The Cube, Ana. >> I appreciate it, thank you. >> Great to see you again. >> Great to see you, great to see you, thank you so much. >> Alright keep it right there everyone. This is The Cube, we're live from HPE Discover Madrid, we'll be right back. 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>> Narrator: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's The Cube covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage, we are wrapping up day one of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host Jeff Frick. Jeff, it's been a great day. What's been your highlight? >> The highlight was Megan Smith. We were really excited to get her on. We tried to get her on last year. She's a really hard get. She's a super high energy, super smart lady. >> So she's the third CTO of the US. >> She's fantastic. We got to go back and read the tape, but there's probably an hours worth of material there that we could've followed up on her. I think she was definitely terrific. Also of course Brenda, the new president of Anita Borg. Doing the research on her and understanding what she accomplished at the Chicago Public School System is just phenomenal, something we've talked about time and time again. Are we turning a corner? Do people understand that computer science is a basic thing you need to learn in 2017, like biology, like math, like reading and writing and arithmetic. I think those were two terrific points of the day. >> I completely agree. We've had those veteran women of the technology industry, but then we also have had two young up-and-comers on the show, Jasmine Mustafa, who is the head of Roar for Good, which is a B Corp that makes a wearable self-defense tool, and then just now, we had Morgan Burman of Milkcrate, which does a platform that helps companies and non-profits measure and grow social and environmental impact. It's really exciting to sort of see the baton being passed, you can almost witness it being passed. >> Right, right, and it physically is. From Kelly, who we will have on Friday, to Brenda. So we're absolutely seeing it. >> Rebecca: Right. >> The other piece I'm taking away... You're hearing from Boston, and I hate to do the sports analogy, but I am anyway. Most great quarterbacks, Tom Brady, jumping out having a huge chip on their shoulder. They were passed up, they were told they couldn't do it, and they continued to excel, way more than the fair-haired people that have an easy path. So many times today, we heard about being told I can't do it and using that, internalizing that, as a force to do it. Debra, the physicist, being told by her mom overtly don't be a physicist a number of times, the Roar story again you can't do this. Even Erin Yang from Work Day said specifically I want to surprise people, I don't want them to know what I'm going to be able to do. Really, this concept of having a chip on your shoulder and taking negative feedback and turning it into a positive spin that you can feed off of, really important attribute that I don't think enough people have, they take the hit and absorb the hit instead of taking the hit and saying I'm going to prove you wrong. This does not apply to me. I think that's another thing that I did not expect to hear today but came up over and over again. >> No, I agree. We also heard, and this is really the Silicon Valley mantra right now, is Fail Fast. We've been hearing about redefining failure and one of our guests said don't even use that word, make up some sort of safe word for yourself. It's not that I failed in that endeavor, it didn't work out. But no matter what, you cannot be deterred from that. >> Right, and you got to learn and you got to move on. I tell people a lot of times, it's kind of like the old sales analogy. If your hit rate is one out of 10, that eighth call you should be excited about because that means you're almost to number 10. Don't be depressed that number eight doesn't go well, change your attitude. Eight is just one step closer to 10. Grind through one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. It is a real resilience, and that was another thing that came up is the people that win are not the smartest, they're not the fastest, they're not the most intelligent, but often they're just the most persistent. They just keep getting up. The age old saying. Give me the wisdom to worry about the things I can control and not to worry about the things I can't. It's not what happens to you, it's what you do about it. That's what you can control. You can't control what happens to you. But do you get up, do you take your hit, do you use it as motivation, do you move to the next step? Again, another great theme. Move to the next step. Take the next step and that will get you. A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step. >> That's right. That's right. Those are >> I'm cliche-ing, it's been a long week. >> This is the largest Grace Hopper ever. 18,000 attendees, 700 speakers, three days. We've got another big lineup tomorrow. We start right after the keynotes. We go through to the end of the day. Is there anything you want to highlight to our viewers that you are especially looking forward to tomorrow? >> What am I especially looking forward to tomorrow? Just another good day. The great thing about this show is you don't really know what you're going to get. >> It's true! >> A lot of the names, you don't know who they are. You don't necessarily know the companies. I think we will have a number of the Women of Vision award winners, which is always good. It's such an atypical tech show, which is why I love it. >> Rebecca: Which is why it's so fun! >> And we've got to get you warmed up, >> I know, it's freezing in here! >> Out into the heat. >> It's so true, it's so true. >> Alright well let's wrap it up. Great day, Rebecca. >> Great day it's always so much fun to cohost alongside you. >> Thanks for coming down. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Jeff Frick, we will have more from Grace Hopper tomorrow! >> Jeff: Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's the Cube covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here at the Orange County Convention Center. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We are joined by Aysegul Gunduz, she is a professor at the University of Florida-College of Engineering. Thanks so much for joining us. >> No, thank you for having me. >> So, congratulations are in order, because you are a ABIE Award winner, which is awards given out by the Anita Borg Institute, and you have been given the Denice Denton Emerging Leader Award. So, tell us a little about, about your award. >> Well, thank you for asking. We've heard a lot about Grace Hopper and Anita Borg throughout the conference, but Denice Denton, she was actually very close friends with Anita. And she was a leader in her field, her field was development of polymers, and she worked on the first development of RAM. But she was actually the first ever dean of a college of engineering at a major university... >> Rebecca: First ever woman. >> First woman dean, yes, so she became dean at the University of Washington, and then she actually became chancellor at University of California, but just beyond her research she really promoted and lifted the people around her, so she was a big proponent of minority issues. So, she supported females, she supported international students, and she was openly gay, so she really had a big influence on the LGBTQ community, so I just wanted to, you know, just recognize her and say that how honored I am to have my name mentioned alongside hers. This award is given to a junior faculty member that has done significant research and also has had an impact on diversity as well. >> So, let's start talking... >> Denice is a great inspiration. >> Yes! The award given an homage to Denice, so your research is about detecting neurological disorders. So, tell our viewers a little bit more about what you're doing. >> Sure, I'm an electrical engineer by training, who does brain research for a living, so this confuses a lot of people, but I basically tell them that our brains have bioelectric fields that generate biopotential signals that we can record and we're really trying to decipher what these signals are trying to tell us. So, we are really trying to understand and treat neurological disorders as well as psychiatric disorders, so I work with a lot of neurosurgical patient populations that receive electrode implants as part of their therapy, and we are trying to now improve these technologies so that we can record these brain signals and decode them in real time, so that we can adapt things like deep brain stimulation for the current pathology that these patients are having. So, deep brain stimulation, currently, is working like, think of an AC and it's working on fan mode so its current, you know, constantly blowing cold air into the room, even though the room might be just the perfect temperature, so we are basically trying to listen to the brain signals and only deliver electricity when the patient is having a pathology, so this way we are basically turning the AC onto the auto mode, so that once they are actually not having symptoms, unnecessary electrical, it is not delivered into their brains, so pace makers, when they invented were functioning that way, so people realized they could stimulate the heart, and the person would not have a cardiac arrest, but now we know that we can detect the heart pulse very easily, so someone thought about 'OK, so when we don't detect the pulse, heartbeat, let's only stimulate the pace maker then,' so that's what we're trying to adapt to the neuro-technologies. >> And what is the patient response? I mean I imagine that's incredible. So, these are people who suffer from things like Parkinson's disease, Tourette's syndrome, I mean, it's a small patient population that you're working with now, but what are you finding? >> So, first of all, our patients are very gracious to volunteer for our studies, we find that, for instance, in Tourette's syndrome we can actually detect when people are having tics, involuntary tics, that is characteristic of Tourette's syndrome. We find that we can differentiate that from voluntary movements, so we can really deliver the stimulation when they are having these symptoms, so this is a paroxysmal disorder, they really don't need continuous stimulation. So, that's one thing that we're developing. We find that in essential tremor, again, when people aren't having tremor we can detect that and stop the stimulation and only deliver it when necessary. We're working on a symptom called freezing of gaits in Parkinson's disease so people define this as the, having the will to walk, but they feel like their feet are glued to the floor so this can cause a lot of falls, and at that, really, age this can be very, very dangerous. So, we can actually tell from the brain when people are walking and then we turn the stimulation in this particular area only during that time so as to prevent any falls that might happen. >> So, it's really changing their life and how they are coping with this disease. >> Yes, true, and it really makes going to work in the morning (laughs) very, very exciting for us. >> So, another element of the ABIE Award is that you are helping improve diversity in your field and in Denice Denton, in the spirit of Denice Denton, helping young women and minorities rise in engineering. >> Yes, so, I'm going to talk about this in my keynote session tomorrow, but I really just realized that all my confidence throughout engineering school was due to the fact that I actually had a female undergraduate advisor, and once I came to that realization, I joined Association for Academic Women at the University of Florida, which was established in 1974, because these pioneering women fought for equal pay for male and female faculty on campus, and this is still honored today, so I'm very honored to be serving the Association as its president today. All of our membership dues go to dissertation awards for female doctoral students that are, you know, emerging scholars in their fields, and I also approached the National Science Foundation and they supported the funding for me to generate a new emerging STEM award for female students in the STEM fields. So, you know, that is my contribution. >> So, you're passing it on... >> I hope so. >> the help and the mentoring that you received as young faculty member. >> I truly hope so. >> I mean, (stammers) right now we're so focused on the technology companies but on campuses, on the undergraduate and graduate school campuses, how big a problem is this, would you say? >> So, I'm a faculty in biomedical engineering, so, in our field we actually have some of the highest female to male ratios compared to other engineering fields. People attribute this to the fact that females like to contribute to the society, so, they like to work on problems, they like to work on problems that have a societal impact and I think working with, basically, you know, disorders in any branch of medicine, it really fires, fires up female students, but yes, when we go to other departments such as electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, the ratio is really, really small. And it still is a problem and therefore we are really trying to mobilize, you know, all female faculty, just to be present, just the fact that you're there, that you're a successful female in this field... >> Rebecca: The role models. >> Yeah, really makes an impact, you know, I think, the most repeated quote at this meeting is that 'You can't be what you can't see." So, we're really trying to support female faculty. So, we're tying to retain female faculty, so that, you know, the younger generation of females can see that they can and the will do it as well. >> You can't be what you can see, I love that. Those are words to live by. >> Right. >> Yeah. Well, thank you so much Aysegul, this is a pleasure, pleasure meeting you, pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you so much, pleasure's mine. >> We'll be back with more from Grace Hopper just after this.

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome to day one of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. Welcome back to theCUBE, I should say. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We have just seen some really great keynote addresses. We had Faith Ilee from Stanford University. Melinda Gates, obviously the co-founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. We also had Diane Green, the founder of VMware. Jeff, what are your first impressions? >> You know, I love comin' to this show. It's great to be workin' with you again, Rebecca. I thought the keynotes were really good. I've seen Diane Green speak a lot and she's a super smart lady, super qualified, changed the world of VMware. She's not always the greatest public speaker, but she was so comfortable up there. She so felt in her element. It was actually the best I'd ever seen. For me, I'm not a woman, but I'm a dad of two daughters. It was really fun to hear the lessons that some of these ladies learned from their father that they took forward. So, I was really hap-- I admit, I'm feelin' the pressure to make sure I do a good job on my daughters. >> Make sure those formative experiences are the right ones, yes. >> It's just interesting though how people's early foundation sets the stage for where they go. I thought Dr. Sue Black, who talked about the morning she woke up and her husband threatened to kill her. So, she just got out of the house with her two kids and started her journey then. Not in her teens, not in her twenties, not in college. Obviously well after that, to get into computer science and to start her tech journey and become what she's done now. Now she's saving the estate where the codebreakers were in World War II, so phenomenal story. Melinda Gates, I've never seen her speak. Then Megan Smith, always just a ton of energy. Before she was a CTO for the United States, that was with the Obama administration. I don't think she hung around as part of the Trump Administration. She brings such energy, and now, kind of released from the shackles of her public service and her own thing. Great to see her up there. It's just a terrific event. The energy that comes from, I think, a third of the people here are young women. Really young, either still in college or just out of college. Really makes for an atmosphere that I think is unique in all the tech shows that we cover. >> I completely agree. I think the energy really is what sets the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing apart from all the other conferences. First of all, there's just many more women who come to this. The age, as you noted, it's a lot lower than your typical tech conference. But, I also just think what is so exciting about this conference is that it is this incredible mix of positivity. let's get more women in here, let's figure out ways to get more women interested in computer science and really working on their journey as tech leaders. But, also really understanding what we're up against in this industry. Understanding the bro-grammar culture, the biases that are really creating barriers for women to get ahead, and actually to even enter into the industry itself. Then, also there's the tech itself, so we have these women who are talking about these cool products that they're making and different pathways into artificial intelligence and machine-learning, and what they're doing. So, it's a really incredible conference that has a lot of different layers to it. >> It's interesting, Dr. Fei-Fei Li was talking a lot about artificial intelligence, and the programming that goes into artificial intelligence, and kind of the classic Google story where you use crowdsourcing and run a bunch of photographs through an algorithm to teach it. But, she made a really interesting point in all this discussion about, is it the dark future of AI, where they take over the world and kill us all? Or, is it a positive future, where it frees us up to do more important things and more enlightened things. She really made a good point that it's, how do you write the algorithms? How are we training the computers to do what we do? Women bring a different perspective. Diversity brings a different perspective. To bake that into the algorithms up front is so, so important to shape the way the AI shapes the evolution of our world. So, I found that to be a really interesting point that she brought up that I don't think is talked about enough. People have to write the algorithms. People have to write the stuff that trains the machines, so it's really important to have a broad perspective. You are absolutely right, and I think she actually made the point even broader than that in the sense of is if AI is going to shape our life and our economy going forward-- >> Which it will, right? >> Which it will. Then, the fact that there are so few women in technology, this is a crisis. Because, if the people who are the end-users and who are going to either benefit or be disadvantaged by AI aren't showing up and aren't helping create it, then yes, it is a crisis. >> Right. And I think the other point that came up was to bake more computer science into other fields, whether it's biology, whether it's law, education. The application of AI, the application of computer science in all those fields, it's much more powerful than just computing for the sake of computing. I think that's another way hopefully to keep more women engaged. 'Cause a big part of the issue is, not only the pipeline at the lead, but there's a lot of droppage as they go through the process. So, how do you keep more of 'em involved? Obviously, if you open it up across a broader set of academic disciplines, by rule you should get more retention. The other thing that's interesting here, Rebecca. This is our fourth year theCUBE's been at Grace Hopper's since way back in Phoenix in 2014, ironically, when there was also a big Microsoft moment at that show that we won't delve back into. But, it's a time of change. We have Brenda Darden Wilkerson, the brand new president of the Anita Borg organization. Telle Whitney's stepping down and she's passing the baton. We'll have them both on. So, again, Telle's done a great job. Look what she's created in the team. But, always fun to have fresh blood. Always fun to bring in new energy, new point of view, and I'm really excited to meet Brenda. She's done some amazing things in the Chicago Public School System, and if you've ever worked in a public school district, not a really easy place to innovate and bring change. >> Right, no, of course. Yeah, so our lineup of guests is incredible this week. We've got Sarah Clatterbuck, who is a CUBE alum. We have a woman who is the founder of Roar, which is a self-defense wearable technology. We're going to be looking at a broad array of the women technologists who are leading change in the industry, but then also leading it from a recruitment and retention point of-- >> So, should be a great three days, looking forward to it. >> I am as well. Excellent. Okay, so please keep joining us. Keep your channel tuned in here to theCUBE"s coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Jeff Frick. We will see you back here shortly. (light, electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida it's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper's Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference, here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Vipul Nagrath. He is the Global CIO at ADP, a provider of human resources management software in New York. Welcome, Vipul. >> Thank you. >> It's great to have you on the show. So, before the cameras were rolling, you were talking about how this is your first ever Grace Hopper. How do you find things? >> I think this is exciting. Just the sheer numbers: 18,000 attendees, all the various different companies that are represented over here, the talent. I'm here with a sizeable team, there's about 30 of us. Many of my colleagues have been walking the floor and they've been just thoroughly impressed with the talent that they're meeting and the people that they're talking to. We're here actively recruiting. We've actually been doing on-site interviews. So, we're looking for top talent and if we can find it right here at the show, we'll do it. >> So, there are a lot of tech conferences that you attend, but what is it about Grace Hopper in particular? >> Well, this one specifically, one of our initiatives is around diversity and inclusion. So, what better place to come than Grace Hopper if you want to talk about diversity and inclusion? In addition to that, is we were talking earlier, right? The marketplace that engineering and tech and computer science is going to go into, the need is actually only increasing. Everything is run by software today or very shortly will be. In the end, every company's becoming a software company and offering some other services with it. We're all headed that way. Yet, the talent pool's actually getting tighter and smaller, yet more jobs are going to be created in that industry. So, I think it's a phenomenal and wonderful opportunity, and specifically from a Grace Hopper perspective and the Anita Borg perspective, is get more women involved in this. The pie is going to get bigger, and I think women have an opportunity to gain more of that share of that pie. >> So, is ADP doing anything to actively engage more women earlier in their career trajectories to get them interested in this area? >> There are a number of multiple- Sorry, there's a multiple set of initiatives that we have. In fact, I was joined here at this conference with our Chief Diversity Officer. She's also responsible for corporate social responsibility. So, diversity and inclusion is really huge for her, not just for us at ADP, but she actually has a larger message for the entire industry. So, she's pushing that agenda. So, there are actually many different things that we're working on. >> And as a human resources company that message can get through. >> Exactly. >> So, talk to me. We always hear about the business case for diversity and inclusion. How do you view it? >> How do I view it, is I start with, again, top talent, and then it's thought diversity. When you bring multiple disciplines in together, bring people with multiple backgrounds in together, even a different point of view, you realize, or I think you open up and realize that you might have had some blinders on some things. Now you start really getting rid of those blinders. Instead of them being blinders, they turn into opportunities. I think if you have too many people thinking exactly the same way, doing exactly the same thing, you fall into a not-so-good method, right? You fall into a not-so-good idea of just really channeling the same idea over and over and over again. >> The groupthink that is a big problem in so many companies. So, how do diverse teams work together in your experience? You talked about seeing wider perspectives and different kinds of ideas and insights that you wouldn't necessarily get if it's just a bunch of similar people from similar backgrounds, similar races, all one gender, sitting in a room together. How do these teams work together in your experience? >> Well, what I believe in is you got to put these teams together and you got to empower them. Absolutely, there's a stated goal. There is an outcome. There is a result we have to achieve. Give 'em the outcome, give 'em the goal, give 'em a loose framework, and then give 'em guiding principles. Then, after that: team, go ahead. You're empowered to do the right thing. But, these goals will be aggressive, right? We may want to make something two orders of magnitude faster. That's no small task. We may want to expand our capabilities so that we can handle six times the load that we handled today. That's no small task. So, they're very large goals to achieve, but they just have to go out and do them. If you leave that creativity to the team, and you let everyone bring in what their different viewpoints, some that have expertise today, and some that don't necessarily have expertise in it but they're really good programmers or they're really good software developers. So, they can learn from those folks that have the expertise, then develop a new solution that's more powerful than the one that exists today. >> What are some of the most exciting things you're working on at ADP right now? >> Well, me personally, we're going through a huge transformation in my group within ADP. That transformation is really just implementing more of what I just talked about, is these small, nimble teams that are multidisciplinary, and they're given, again, guiding principles and goals, and they go out and be creative and be innovative, and figure out how to do this. >> So, what your customers expect on the pipeline though, in terms of products coming out of ADP, and helping them manage their human capital? >> Sure, well actually, we have a lot of exciting, new, and innovative products coming out of our company, which in the coming months, in the coming years, will be released and put into production. But, basically, they should expect a better way to work. 'Cause that is our job. We're really out there to make work better. >> Rebecca: And more inclusive, too, and more, okay. >> All those things actually just go into being and making work better. Inclusion is in there, diversity is in there, creativity is in there, innovation is in there, stability is in there. But, all of that makes work better. >> Is there more pressure on a company like ADP to walk the walk? Because, you are a human capital management company. That is your bread and butter. >> I believe there is, sure. Just naturally, yes, there is. >> So, what is your advice to companies out there? I know you said your Chief Diversity Officer had a wider message to companies about the importance of diversity and inclusive teams. What would you say from your perspective as CIO? >> From my perspective, again, I do believe that diversity, that inclusion, makes for a more powerful team, makes for a wider understanding of what we're actually trying to do. So, I would just encourage others to do that, too, and not be very narrow-minded. >> Great. Well, Vipul, it has been so much fun talking to you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you. >> We will have more from the Orange County Convention Center, Grace Hopper, just after this. (light, electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (light, electronic music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Grace Hopper Conference here in Orlando, Florida. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by Joanna Parke. She is the Group Managing Director, North America, at ThoughtWorks based in Chicago. Thanks so much for joining us, Joanna. >> Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here. >> Your company is being honored for the second year in a row as a top company for women technologists by the Anita Borg Institute. Tell our viewers what that means. >> Yeah, we're incredibly proud and super humble to be recognized again for the second year in a row. Our journey towards diversity and inclusivity really began about eight or nine years ago. It started with the top leadership of the company saying that this is a crisis in our industry, and we need to take a stand and we need to do something about it. So, it's been a long journey. It's not something that we started a couple of years ago, so there's been a lot of work by many people over the years to get us to where we are today, and we still feel that we have a long way to go. There's still a lot to do. >> So, being recognized as a top company for women technologists, it obviously means there are many women who work there. But, what else can a woman technologist looking for a job expect at ThoughtWorks? >> So, we think about, not just the aspects of diversity, which is what is the make up of your work for us look like, but also put equal if not more importance on inclusivity. So, you can go out and you can make all sorts of efforts to hire women or minorities into your company, but if you don't have a culture and an environment in which they feel welcome and they feel like they can succeed and they can bring themselves to work, then that success won't be very lasting. So, we've focused not only on the recruiting process but also our culture, our benefits, the environment in which we work. We are a software development company and we come from a history of agile software practices, which means that we work together in a very people-oriented and collaborative way. So, in some ways we had a little bit of a head start in that, by working in that way, our culture was already built to be more team-focused and collaborative and inclusive, so that was a good advantage for us when we got started. >> So, how else do you implement these best practices of the collaboration and the inclusivity? Because, I mean, it is one thing to say that we want everyone to have a voice at the table, but it's harder to pull off. >> It is, absolutely. So, a couple things that we've done over our history, one is just starting with open conversation. We talk a lot about unconscious bias, we do education and training through the workforce, we try to encourage those uncomfortable conversations that really create breakthroughs in understanding. We look for people that are open and curious in the interview process, and we feel like if you are open to having your views about the world challenged, that's a really good sign. So, that's kind of one step. Then, I think, when bad behavior arrives, which it always does, it's how you react and how you deal with it. So, making it clear to everyone that behavior that excludes or belittles others on the team is not tolerated. That's not the kind of culture that we want to build. It's on ongoing process. >> So, how do you call out the bad behavior, because that's hard to do, particularly if you're a junior employee. >> Yes, so we try and create a safe environment where people feel like, if I have an issue with someone on my team, particularly if it's someone more senior than me, we have a complete open-door and flat organization. So, anyone can pick up the phone and call me or our CEO or whoever they feel comfortable talking to. I think, what happens is, when that happens and people see action being taken, whether it's feedback being given or a more serious action, then it reinforces the fact that it's okay to speak up and that you are going to be heard and listened to. >> One of the underlying themes of this conference is that women technologists have a real responsibility to have a voice in this industry, and to shape how the future of software progresses. Can you talk a little bit more about that, about what you've seen and observed and also the perspective of ThoughtWorks on this issue? >> Absolutely, we all have seen the power that technology has in transforming our society, and that is only going to grow over time. It's not going away. So, it really impacts every aspect of our life, whether it's healthcare or how we interact with our family or how we go to work every day. Having a diverse set of perspectives that reflects the makeup of our society is so important. I was really impressed by Dr. Faith Ilee's keynote on Wednesday morning-- >> She's at Stanford. >> Yeah, Stanford and at Google right now as well. She spoke about the importance of having diverse voices in the field of artificial intelligence. She said, no other technology reflects its designers more than AI, and it is so critical that we have that diverse set of voices that are involved in shaping that technology. >> Is it almost too much though? As a woman technologist, not only do you have to be a trailblazer and put up with a lot of bias and sexism in the industry, and then you have this added responsibility. What's your advice to women in the field? Particularly the young women here who are at their first Grace Hopper. >> Absolutely, our CEO-- Sorry, our CTO, Rebecca Parsons, often says that the reason that she put up with it for so many years is because she's a geek, and because she's passionate about technology. So, when you're in those trying times, being able to connect with your passion and know that you're making a difference is so important. Because, if it's just something that you view as a job, or a way to make a living, you don't have that level of passion to get you through some of the hardships. So, I think, for me, that sense of responsibility is kind of a motivating and driving force. The good news is it will get easier over time. As we make progress in our industry, you don't feel so alone. You start to have other women and other marginalized groups around you that you can connect with and share experiences. >> What are some of the most exciting projects you're working on at ThoughtWorks? >> We really try to cover a broad landscape of technology. We think of ourselves as early adopters that can spot the trends in the industry and help bring them into the enterprise. So, we're doing some really exciting things in the machine-learning space, around predictive maintenance, understanding when machine parts are going to fail and being able to repair them ahead of time. Things like understanding customer insights through data. I think those areas are emerging and super exciting. >> Excellent. What are you looking for? Are you here recruiting? >> Absolutely. >> And, with a top company sticker on your booth, I'm sure that you are highly sought after. What are you looking for in a candidate? >> We for a long time have articulated our strategy in three words: attitude, aptitude, and integrity. Because we feel like if we can find a person that has a passion for learning, the ability to learn, and the right attitude about that, we can work with that, right? The world of technology is changing so fast, so even if you know the tech of today, if you don't have that passion and ability to learn, you're not going to be able to keep up. So, we really look for people in terms of those character traits and those people are the kind of people that are successful and thrive at ThoughtWorks. >> If you look at the data, it looks as though there is a looming talent shortage. Are you worried about that at ThoughtWorks? What's your-- >> Absolutely. There is a huge talent gap. It's growing by the day. We see it at our clients as well as ourselves. For me, it really comes down to the responsibility of society as well as companies to invest in upscaling our workforce. We have seen some clients take that investment and realize that the skills they needed in their workforce a few years ago look very different from what they're going to need into the future. So, we believe strongly in investing in and training and upscaling our employees. We help work with our clients to do so as well. But, I think we can't rely on the existing educational system to create all of the talent that we're going to need. It's really going to take investment, I believe, from society and from companies. >> And on the job training. >> Absolutely. There's no replacement for that, right? You can do the kind of academic and educational studies but there's no replacement for once you get into the real world and you're with people and the day to day challenges arise. >> Excellent. Well, Joanna, thanks so much for coming on. It was a real pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you, it was my pleasure. >> We will have more from the Orange County Convention Center, the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing just after this. (light, electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube! Covering Veritas Vision, 2017. Brought to you by Veritas. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage and we're here covering, wall-to-wall coverage of Veritas Vision 2017, hashtag: VtasVision. I'm Dave Vellante, with Stu Miniman. Lynn Lucas is here. She's the CMO of Veritas; welcome to The Cube. >> I am so excited to be on The Cube for the first time. Thank you for joining us. >> Well, thank you for having us. We're really excited to have you. We were talking off camera and this morning, in our open, about Richard Branson, the keynote. Very inspiring, so interesting, and then you got an opportunity to interview him and it was really substantive. So what was that like, what was it like meeting him, what was he like backstage? Share it with our audience. >> Absolutely. So, first, I, it really was an honor. The man has, when you do the research on him, the number of businesses he's created and disrupted is really amazing when you go back and look at it. The record industry, phone industry, airline industry. I mean, it goes on and on and he's still doing it. What I was most struck with, though, is that he's really humble and approachable. So we spent about 20 minutes with him in the backstage, and he was just a very genuine person. Very concerned, as you and your listeners may have heard, in the keynote, about the impact of the hurricanes. Really committed to philanthropy now, and what I loved is that he really understood what Veritas is doing with data, and he was able to really quickly connect that with how it might help on important issues that he's concerned about, namely climate change, making communities part of businesses, and so forth. It was fantastic. >> Well, I thought he did a really good job, and you guys did a really good job, because he's like, wow, Richard Branson, big name. But why is he at Veritas Vision? And he came, he talked about his agenda, he talked about the hurricane, he connected it to data, to climate change, and he very, like I said off camera, in a non-self-promoting way, let us know very quietly that yeah, of course the fee that I'm getting here I'm donating to the cause, and you should donate too. Right, and it was just really, congratulations on such a good get. >> Well, we were thrilled to have him and really honored to have him, and I truly felt that he understands the importance technology is playing. He actually told us that they were without cell phone and any kind of internet connection right after the hurricane for about, I think what he said was about seven days, and he said it was a very weird, disconnected feeling, because it's become so prevalent in our lives, and then when they all left and got on his plane to go back to London to mobilize aid for the British Virgin Islands, he said that he looked back in the plane, and he said every single person is on their phone like this. And it's such an interesting and powerful tool though, for generating interest in, unfortunately, the very horrible events that have happened, and so the social media, the connectivity that we all experience and getting that word out, I think he really connected with what we do as technologists here, and he had a really fascinating conversation with us about his interest in flying cars, so he's seeing potential for flying cars in the next few years and as a way to perhaps help us reduce carbon emissions and he's excited about technology. So I think he had a lot of fun. >> And we should mention, I think, Bill Coleman and Veritas is matching contributions and then you have extended that through his non-profit? >> Correct, so Bill Coleman also is a great philanthropist like Richard is, and ever since he's arrived here at Veritas he's been very lean-forward with making sure that Veritas is giving back. It was part of the culture, but I really feel that Bill has augmented that, and so for these recent set of disasters, hurricane Harvey, hurricane Irma, Veritas has set up a funding, and then we are doing double matching, and what we did after the unfortunate hurricane Irma came through is Virgin Unite is donating to the BBI's. We've added that to the list of charities and double matching that, as well. >> So people can go to Virgin Unite and donate, or they can donate through your website as well? >> They should go to Virgin Unite and donate, they should go to the, there's also the American Red Cross in the Houston area and the Miami area that are doing donations. Donate, you know, direct through them. >> So please, take a moment, if you can. Donate often, you know, every little bit helps for sure. Okay, so let's get into it. Quite a show, second year of Veritas. It's the rebirth of Veritas, and Veritas, in our view, how do you feel, give us the sort of rundown on the show. >> Oh, I, ah, fantastic. The feedback from the customers, which is what I'm really most concerned about here has been, this year, last year was a great coming out, but this Veritas is much more innovative than we ever thought you could be. We heard the predictions around 360 Data Management last year, but wow, you've delivered. You've got a new set of exciting announcements around what we're doing to move to the cloud. Clearly, the partnership with Microsoft is a huge part of that. New innovations in SDS. And so we've seen a great rise in attendance this year, in terms of our customers, and we've had a fabulous new set of sponsors, which I'm just thrilled to have here. Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, which I think shows the strength of what we're doing to help customers as they move to the cloud, and they really are transforming their datacenter environment. >> So, talk a little bit about digital, as a marketing pro. Every customer we talked to is going through, if you talk to the C-level, they're going through digital transformations; it's real. As a CMO, you're living in a digital transformation. What does it mean from a marketing perspective? How are you addressing, you know, these trends and taking advantage of them? >> It's crucial. I spend most of my time with my staff thinking about: how do we advance our own digital expertise and take advantage of the data that we too have. Really, CMOs are in command of so much data around customers, or should be in command of so much data around customers, in a good way, to provide more content that is directed at what their problems are. I think we've all experienced the uncomfortable feeling where maybe you Google something and suddenly you're getting ad after ad after ad from a company, and it might have been an accidental Google search, right? So we can use it for good in that way, understanding our customers. We're on a real digitization journey. It's a big word, but what it means for me in marketing at Veritas is really advancing and investing in our marketing infrastructure. One of the new things that we've just done is a complete underpinning reboot of Veritas.com, which the audience can see has gone live right here, for Vision. Making the site more personalized and more relevant to those that are visiting it. >> Yeah, Lynn, one of the things we've been digging into a little bit is you have a lot of existing customers with, you know, a very strong legacy. There's all these new trends, and you threw out lots of, you know, really interesting data. You know, the IOT with 269 times greater data than the datacenter, ah, how do you balance, kind of, helping customers, you know, get more out of what they have but bringing them along, showing them the vision, you know, helping them along that path to the future? Because, you know, change is difficult. >> It is, but you know, I have to say, and I think Mike Palmer said this as well, at one point, actually, when I've visited customers, I've been in, this year, I've been to Australia, I've been to France, been to Germany, London, Singapore, all over in the US, and talking to a lot of our existing customers, and what they're telling us is really that: we want your help in moving forward. So, we really embrace our existing customers. We're not in the business of trying to go around them. But they're our best advocates, and I think as a marketer, it's really key to understand that, is your existing customers are your best advocates. So we're helping them understand what we're doing for them today and also helping them learn how they can be advocates and heroes maybe to other parts of the business with some of these new technologies. >> Yeah, that's a great point. I'd love for you to expand on, you know, in IT it was always: up, the admin for my product is kind of where I'm selling, and how do I get up to the C-suite? Conversations we've been having this week, there's a lot of the, you know, cloud strategy, the GDPR, you know, digitization. It's, you know, the person who might have boughten that backup is pulling in other members of the team. Talk to us a little bit about, you know, the dynamics inside the company, where Veritas is having those conversations. >> Yeah, I think actually you brought up GDPR, and that's a perfect example. So GDPR is a regulation that is going to impact any company that is holding data about a European Union citizen, and it's an area that Veritas can really solve problems in, but we didn't know a lot of the legal and compliance buyers, which often are the ones making the purchase decisions in this case. We have been so thrilled to see that our existing advocates in the backup space have been bringing us into conversations and in Europe, what we've done so successfully now is actually bring the two groups together in roundtables and have our current customers bring us into conversations with legal and compliance. And it's creating, for them, stronger connections within the business, and that makes them more relevant to their bosses and those other lines of business, and there's a lot of proactive or positive feedback around that, that I think is what marketers and sales should be thinking about. It's not about how to go around, it's about how do I bring you with me. >> So, as you go around the world, I wonder if, again, another marketing, marketing to me, is very challenging; you've got a hard job. Marketers, I don't have the marketing DNA. But you want to maintain your relevance. You're a 30-plus year old company. Take something like GDPR. How do you think about the content that you serve up your audience? You can scare 'em to death, you know? That's what a lot of people are doing. You can educate them, but it's kind of deep and wonky. How are you thinking about that transfer of knowledge, you know, for the benefit of customers and obviously, ultimately, for the benefit of Veritas? >> So the way I think about that is B to H. Business to Human. So at the end of the day, you know, we talk about B to B marketing or B to C marketing. It's B to H, now, and what I mean by that is: at the end of the day, we're all human, individuals, we have a lot coming at us, as you've pointed out, with information and data, so what we've done is definitely not a scare tactic. Yes, GDPR is coming. But I think that in marketing, my philosophy is: let's work on how we can help you in the positive. I don't believe in the fear, uncertainty and doubt. And what we've done is approach it as we would hope to be approached, which is: let's give you some practical information simply, in amounts that you can absorb. And let's face it, I think Josie was the one that said this, our attention span is about that of a goldfish. I can't remember if it was plus or minus one second. And so, what we've actually gotten great feedback on is that we've broken the GDPR regulation down into very simple parts, and we've said: hey, here are the five parts. Here's how we're relevant and can help you. And we've done that in pieces that are as simple as a one-page infographic. We can obviously go a lot more complex, but at the beginning, when you're researching a topic, you're not looking for the 40-page white paper anymore. You're looking for what we call "snackable" pieces of content that get you interested. >> Yeah, that was good. I remember that infographic from the session yesterday. It was sort of, you know, discover and then four other steps and then, you know, made it sound simple. Even though we know it's more complicated, but at least it allows a customer to frame it. Okay, I think I can now get my arms around these. I understand there's a lot of depth beneath each of them, but it helps me at least begin to clock it. Another topic we want to talk about is women in tech. We had a great conversation with Alicia Johnson from Accenture about WAVE, which is Women and Veritas Empowered. Right? Talk about, again, the relevance of those programs generally and I want to ask you some follow-up questions. >> Sure, so I'm a big believer in those types of programs. We want to sponsor those here and bring together our own Veritas female engineering community, but also our customers that are here. I think that while we would all like it to be a world where we were at a neutral, bias-free, we're not quite there yet. And I think programs that bring people together, whether it's gender or any other dimension, are important to get people to connect in a community, share with each other, learn from each other, and so, I do hope one day for my daughter, who's 11, perhaps that this is a non-topic, but until it isn't, I think the power of sharing is important, and so I'm really pleased to have WAVE. It's our second year having WAVE. It was a bigger program with Accenture sponsoring it. And we look forward to continuing to do that. Veritas also will have a big presence at the Anita Borg Institute, which is coming up next month, as well. >> Yeah, and The Cube will be there, of course. It'll be our, what, fourth year there, Stu? So it's a big show for us and we're obviously big supporters of the topic; we tend to talk about it a lot. And I think, you know, Lynn, your point is right. Hopefully by the time our daughters are grown up, we won't be talking about it, but I think it's important to talk about now. >> Lynn: It is. >> And one of the things that Accenture laid out is that, by 2025, their objective is to have 50 percent, you know, women on staff, and I think it was 25 percent women in leadership positions. I was impressed and struck, and I wonder if you can comment as a C-level executive, struck by the emphasis on P&L management, which, you know, tends to be a man's world. But, thoughts on that and you, as a C-level executive, you know, women in that position? >> Yeah, and again, it's one of these things where I'll have to say it's a little both uncomfortable, but obviously I feel that it is still important to talk about because I wish we were at a place where we didn't have to. I'm really proud of Veritas, because we have myself and Michelle Vanderhar on Bill's staff. So Bill has been a promoter of having diversity on his own direct staff, and I think that top down approach is super important in Silicon Valley and any business that there's real support for that. And Michelle Vanderhar is our chief council, which has, in many cases, not been a position where you would have seen a lady leading that. So we work on that at Veritas, and I personally believe it and I think Mr. Branson said that, as well, in his keynote as well this morning. When we have diversity, we have a breadth of ideas that makes it just a better place to work, and frankly, I think, leads to better innovation in whatever field that you're in. >> Lynn, last question I wanted to ask you, the tagline of the conference is: the truth in information. So much gets talked about, you know, what's real news? You know, what's fake? What do you want people, as the takeaway for Veritas and the show? The truth in information is our rallying cry, and you're right, I think it couldn't be more timely. We're not here to take a particular political stance, but what we find is in the business world, the companies are struggling with: where do I find what's really relevant? Let me give you a story. I was in France earlier this year, sitting with a CIO of one of the very largest oil and gas companies in France. Happens to be a lady who was formerly the chief data officer and she'd moved from that position into the CIO position. And when we talk about the truth in information, the example that she gave us which was so striking is that they've been doing the scans of the Earth, and actually the streets of Paris, for 50, 60 years, to understand the infrastructure, what they may have, and so forth, and at this point, with all of that data, they literally are having a hard time understanding what, out of all of these pieces of information, these topographical scans that they have, is relevant anymore. And this is the same story that I've heard in pharmaceutical companies that are doing drug tests. This is the same story that you would hear in, frankly, media companies that are doing filming, and are trying and all of this is digitized. So, when we talk about that with our customers, it really resonates, is that with so much coming at us, it's hard, in business as well as it is in our consumer lives, to really know: what do I have that's relevant? And I think the opportunity Veritas has is to help customers with a single data management platform, start to get a handle on that and be able to be much more efficient and productive. >> Alright, Lynn Lucas, we have to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on The Cube. We really appreciate it. >> Thank you! I really enjoyed my first time. I can't wait to be back on again, and hope to have you guys here next year, Vision 2018. >> We'd love to be here. Alright, bringing you the truth, from Veritas Vision, this is The Cube. We'll be right back. (uptempo musical theme)

>> Announcer: Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. (uptempo techno music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media, this is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with our guest host inside the community, Keith Townsend who's with CTO advisors, and our next guest is Bask Iyer, who's the SVP and CIO of VMware. Both of you, welcome to theCUBE. Your first host as an analyst here on theCUBE, Keith, thanks for coming on. Bask, great to see you again. >> Thank you, good to see you. >> You're not like just any old CIO. You're at VMware, it's a big company, it's a vendor in the landscape, but you also have been on the other side. You've been a practitioner, you've run for over decades, real infrastructure, really going back through the cycles of innovation. Now you're on this side serving customers on the other in this transformation stage. What a couple years it's been. Since last year when you were on theCUBE, we talked about digital transformation, eating your own dog food. First question is, what's changed this year with VMware? Obviously, a lot going on with the technologies, post-federation world. What's going on technically in the landscape for VMware? 'Cause I know you guys do a lot of early stuff inside VMware. >> Yeah, so, I think we are eating even more dog food. In fact, we are calling it drinking your own champagne because I don't like dog food, even if you make it, I'm not going to eat dog food. I've been drinking a lot of champagne. What that puts you as an IT practitioner is, I mean, you're showcasing private cloud, you're showcasing hybrid, and most of the things that we are talking about we have influence from inside. You can go to the executive staff and say, "I need to go to Amazon, I need to go to Google, "I need to connect, "I cannot be locked into a single cloud strategy "or a device strategy," and so on. I feel like our team is very much part of it. Our team is also getting more into new product development. We've developed a whole line of mobile technologies right now that makes it easier to sell something like AirWatch. It's easier to always talk about applications. Here's what you can do with applications on the mobile side. >> A lot of, certainly VMware as a company has changed, but some big executives have departed. Carl, Bill Fog, among others. Sanjay is still there, but he had the AirWatch, but now, this any cloud, any application, any device. This is not a new messaging, but there's been some product turnover. V sphere has been changing, V cloud air, we're not hearing much about that, more management layer. How has that impacted some of the champagne or your own internal incubation of the technologies? What's new there, what's shifted? >> Yeah, so what you are seeing is the change in technology is even faster, and I keep telling my team is yesterday's news wraps fish. So unless it changes, why are we here? I love the fact that we are pushing technology. The thing I see in my experience is technology always changes, but the last few years, it's faster and faster, and I don't think it's going to slow down. What has changed from last year to this year is we were the leaders in private cloud last time. I came and talked about how VMworld has one of the biggest private clouds. All the hands-on lab is run on our private clouds. But we want to go beyond that, we want to go from private cloud, hook it to the public cloud, or any cloud. I want to come back. And if you think about, when I talk to the CIO friends, while they like every cloud provider, they don't want to necessarily be locked into anybody. It's a big fear everybody has, and for people who don't believe it can happen, I've been here long enough. In the 2000, we had these guys called ASPs, if you remember. >> John: Applicant Service Providers. >> Artifice migrated to the ASP providers, and a lot of them went out of business because they lowered, they were all competing for the bottom line. Not that that's going to happen in the public cloud story, but different workloads have different needs, and you want to provide the maximum flexibility as possible. If you run a private cloud effectively, even as of today, it's definitely more cost-effective than any public cloud, but you may not want to do that. So, what do you go and tell my colleagues to say, you want a public cloud, you got it. You want Amazon, you got it. You want IBM, you got it. >> John: Choice. >> Choice. And I think VMware, if you remember, made our mark by giving the choice for you, so you can in on HP, you can go in Dell, you can go in on NetApp, you can go in on EMC. Even when EMC was the owner, still the owner, we still did not exclude you from running it on a competitive. >> And that built the ecosystem, basically. >> That built the ecosystem, the things that you see here. And Michael reiterated it today, so we are going to be available on every cloud, every platform, that helps, it creates a lot of money for people. And for CIO, just go back into the practitioner, that's what I want. I may stick to a vendor, but don't lock me in. That should be my choice. >> So, talking about fast change, VMware, infrastructure-focused company from the outside, internally, you have to deal with both developers and infrastructure guys. Martin Casedel famously said that developers are much more involved with that purchasing cycle. How has the relationship with your internal developers and your infrastructure folks? >> It's very good. I mean, but I can see Martin's point. I've worked on other companies where the developers actually worked around the infrastructure folks, because you won't get the things provisioned on time. If you run an effective infrastructure, which we do, I actually challenged my developers, developers reporting to me as well, and say, "Do whatever you want, "because I want to know what you like doing." And a lot of them work on our infrastructure because it is effective. If you do a good job, people will want to use somebody who manages (indistinct talking), but it's not true in most of the cases. Most of our infrastructure is still run the old IT way, where people just say, you know, it's going to take me years. I have to fill out the paperwork for me to get the virtual machine, I'm out of here. What I internally see is my developers actually do a lot of development, continuous development. We roll out ASAP, not that it's a big use, everybody seems to do it. But we have zero issues on infrastructure. I mean, we never talked about infrastructure, we never talked about is this going to be available, not available, how does disaster recovery work? That's what developers want. They want to just worry about continuous improvement, continuous development, does it work on mobile. Infrastructure should just handle it, right? We're able to do that internally, but I'm also telling people use Docker. I mean, it's a good one, use Containers. Use Amazon web services, use IBM. 'Cause you don't want to restrict-- >> The freedom of choice is really, >> The freedom of choice is very important. The developers are in charge. >> Bask: Exactly. >> We're pretty much on that whole. >> That's like invisible infrastructure is there to support what developers do. >> Invisible infrastructure is invisible only until it's broken. But your point is well taken, yeah. >> DevOps is great, but you still need five-nines ops, so operational focus we've seen this year, where I'm kind of smelling the theme this year is all about Dev, the operational side of cloud. So I got to ask you, we were in our, last week at a meeting at SiliconANGLE offices, we're talking about, oh, VMware. And I'm like, guys, it's all about the SDDC experience. They're like, what the hell's SDDC? Okay, it's a software defiant data center. But that was the theme a couple years ago, and then, someone else raised their hand, and what the hell does SDDC mean anyway? I want to ask you what does SDDC experience, we heard it on the keynote, actually mean? >> So, I think Ragoud defined it well as in order to react to the needs of today, you cannot hope to put in a hardware and hope that box runs. You need to free the intelligence away from the box. Let me give a practical example. You get attacks from security. Typically, their response is buy my box, put it in, and it'll take care of it. Humans cannot respond to the speed at which these attacks are happening, so you have to write algorithms, so that's software. So, the attacks to be done in software. The configuration has to be done in software. The whole idea is freeing the intelligence from all the boxes you have, and define a software layer on top of it because software will trump hardware. I mean, you need good hardware, let's not, I mean, things have to run some way. >> One experience is the guy gets to go to the beach because everything's automated? That's one experience, automated. >> That's one experience, yeah, I just think you get more work. I always say you should hire smart but lazy people because they will automate what they're doing. But what ends up happening is no good deed goes unpunished, so you just get more to do. But look, in my own case, I did every job in IT. I started in hardware, automated it, people said can you do software? Yeah, I can do it. Well, you automated this. Can you do DSEIO, can you do end-user computing? Can you run real estate, can you run shared services, can you do this? Your job becomes bigger. I don't think I'm going to sit on the beach, but you're doing more-- >> Yeah, but you're freed, essentially. I use that as a metaphor, but the idea of the beach is being excited about not being in the weeds fixing stuff and being, tired all the time. >> See, I get to do this, right? I talk to customers. The only reason I get to do this is because my infrastructure's working. If it's not working, I'm not mistaken, I have to go back and fix it. If you free up your time, then you go talk to your customers, your advisory panel. They've given me internet of things as another business unit to run. It's exciting, you're getting to the front office but I never forget it's because your back office is working. >> Stole a little bit about thunder by mentioning internet of things. Talking to customers and one of the things when I talk to customers is internet of things. What are some of the challenges you've had internally around internet of things and how has VMware solved some of those challenges. >> Yeah, so a lot of internet of things. It's coming out of hype cycle now into reality so a lot of talks where how do you control the home thermostat. Your Amazon Echo device and so and so, but what is happening now is buildings have to be automated and they have to get another 30% more efficiency. You only get 30% more efficiency. It's not just turning the light bulbs off and on when you want. You want to know what's your occupancy and do I really need this bigger building all the time. That requires intelligence. So if you have intelligence, you can really figure out do I need 400 buildings or do you need only 100 buildings. And the reason I picked something Monday as buildings is that's where a lot of people spend a lot of their money in actual buildings. For example, so the thing I tell from the IT standpoint is I think we have gone from kind of pilot stages to now you're going to get go to scale. When you get to scale, it's not fun anymore. It has to work all the time. It has to be secure. So I was talking to a bunch of CIOs a week ago and I told them how many of you have multi printers. Multi scanners and the multi devices. Everybody says that. So how many of you know that they send information on whether the toner is out to the manufacturer? Everybody puts their hands up. How many of you know that it's not sending the whole thing that you're standing over to the manufacturer? And people said, "Does it happen?" I said, I don't know. I don't know if it doesn't happen or it doesn't happen. >> John: It's a question. >> This is where you need to pay attention because your coffee machine is going to say you're out of coffee beans. Are they just sending that information or not? If you take it seriously, manufacturing. The folks actually work around IT sometimes because they don't want IT to slow it down. So if IT doesn't get involved internal things right now. Define the architecture and so on. You're opening a door for shadow IT. >> I want to just drill down that you mention IT going slow but that's exactly the point. Machine learning AI and software. There's been a huge acceleration of things like asking those kinds of questions and the infrastructure has been slowing. Certainly the network has, so for all the CXO out there. Whether it's CIO, chief data officer, chief compliant. There's a lot of CXO's out there. They're trying to figure it out. So what's you're advice to them and looking at the message of multi cloud and inter clouding and all that stuff. They got a job to do. At the end of the day they don't really care what a VMware is doing in the business. They want to know what their business is doing. How do they apply the stuff going on here at VMworld if you had to look at this VMworld this year and talk to the CXOs. What's in it for them? What's your thoughts? >> The first thing I say is have the curiosity. What happens in my job is I hear so many vaperware that you become skeptical. The problem with skeptical and being too pragmatic is your mind becomes close. So when you look at interrupt things you say, ah, is that really going to to happen. I got things to do. I can't worry about it. You can't have that. That's how you let the sass get out of your hand. That's how you come back later on the cloud. That's why BYD happened. Because we started to think Blackberry is good enough. You don't need any other phones. So you need to have this open mindset, so internal things, I tell people. >> John: Be opened. >> Be open. There's a tornado coming here and you better be involved. Now to be involved you have to take a solution for them. You can't go and say stop all projects. Let me look at architectural. Let me review them. So I tell them go with an architecture. So couple of things I tell them is there's so many gateways, so many sensors, you need to go with some ways to manage these gateways. Because like it or not they're coming to you and they're going to expect you to manage it. After the initial set up is done, they're going to say, "Hey, IT guy, you run it for me." You better be there. Go with an architect, so it's a private cloud, public cloud or it's a combination. How you manage Edge? So I tell people to get involved and there's couple of things that we're doing is manage your gateways with software. Go with the cloud in the box for IoTs, so people can give it to our manufacturing guy or your operations guy. You need to take something there. You need to be involved. >> So balancing the hopeful and the optimist. I'm hopeful that this may happen with the pragmatic. I got to make it make it run at scale, which is good. This is all about scale now with cloud. It kind of brings back the kind of looking back at history of IT which you would certainly be involved in. Lived personally is you see a sprawl of something. PCs, LANs whatever and then consolidation. Single throat to choke. Single pane of glass. These are the buzz words. We're seeing that now. We're seeing there's been a sprawl of APIs, a sprawl of microservices. A sprawl of mobile. Now are we getting to that phase where we got to manage it. >> Bask: Yeah. So you're hearing things like single, choke to throat, single pane of glass for management. What's your thoughts on that and this is really mind boggling to the customer because the CXOs are out there going. Hell, I still got to get top line revenue in these new apps for my banking app or my oil and gas application. So right now we're in a really interesting position. How do you describe that environment and what do you prescribe specifically to that CXO? >> It's a challenge or opportunity depending on how you look at it. It's very exciting to me that you have all these things exploring and there's so much more you can do in the business. So if you're an IT practitioner or CTO, this is a good time to be excited and add value to it. If you get too pragmatic, you're going to lose it or if you're a blocker. Say please hang on. Let me define the architecture for you. Let me do this for you. You're going to lose it because people are going to work around you. And my belief is the CIOs I meet right now are a lot more progressive. They realize the mistakes they made by being a little to pragmatic sometimes on technology. Not getting on it and they are jumping onboard. So the hope is I'm at a stage in my career where I want to make sure my community of CIOs do the right thing and I'm telling them this is coming. >> So you're seeing progressive mindset now-- >> I'm seeing very, very progressive minds. I see a ton more CIOs who are acting like the digital guys, pushing it and so on. The other thing to remember is, it's not always about technology. You can do the pilots but to make a change. You need people, process and technology and the CIOs are best equipped to do that. So the best for the company is to make sure you get the right CIOs. The people that are involved in the technology change start going around. >> So from a technology perspective. A lot of great news from, at least exciting news coming from Pat this morning. >> Yeah. Cloud services, cloud foundation. With your team internally, which product or what direction are you most excited to enable your team? >> Anything that makes my development go faster, I'm excited so that's why I'm interested in cloud foundation and cloud services, very much because I don't have to think about where to go and I can do it faster, good, right. The things I'm very excited about is you haven't seen the end user computing announcement which comes tomorrow or the day after. It's fantastic. I believe that enterprise mobility has not really not happened. I mean you've got what two to three million applications on the android store and the app has gone up to three million on the Apple store. But you go to most enterprises, they'll just give the email and calendar. >> John: Right. >> Email and calendar, we give access in 1999 with Blackberrys because for 17 years, You're still getting email and a calendar on your iPhone now instead of the Blackberry. That's not good progress. People haven't been created to look at mobilized enterprise platforms to develop. That's going to change. I think people are going to wake up and say how we make productive on the phone. I challenge my team and we come up the 50 yard at productivity applications. That should take a long time to develop and I can show sometime. When I showed the VCI, they also didn't want it. They wanted to go to one place to approve all the purchase orders. They don't want to go to SAP and Oracle and Sales Force and 40 different places to approve. So the mobile the revolution I think is starting to happen. In enterprise it's very, very light. You'll see that. I mean you don't want to be carrying necessarily these when you're traveling, right. >> I want to ask you, we have about a minute left and more of a personnel kind of conversation we're seeing in the industry. And one of the things that we're very passionate about SiliconANGLE is our new fellowship with the Crown Truth, our partner. We have this new fellowship called the Tech truth where we're funding fellowships in journalism. We're also going to be at the Anita Borg conflict in November for the third year. Where we're funding a special assignment on women in tech. >> Bask: Yeah. >> IT has been one of those areas where it's been mostly male dominated like developers. But yet IT isn't the old stack and rack anymore like it used to be. It's changing, shifting. How has the role of STEM and Women in Tech in science changed IT? Can you share some, I know you're involved with Anita Borg. >> Bask: Yeah. >> Thoughts on that because this is again, it's not just the IT anymore. IT is now at a global stance. Your thoughts on women in tech. >> Yeah, in the sense. We haven't done enough. I mean we are, most companies are talking and I guess compared to where we were. We make progress. It's not good enough. Having 20% in tech when you can go up to 50% is not good. The thing with STEM I say sometimes, we say we support science and sometimes we mislead women. I know a lot of people with science degrees, women with science degrees in biology or something else who are not getting employment like the coders. So we got to get through the language. Are you looking for coders? Are you looking for STEM? >> Coders. >> Right. >> Well now you have different analytics and you sort of. There's new stuff going on that's interesting. Right, I mean like coders. Not to say biology, doctors. >> I think it's really unfair if you tell people we let science possible and women actually go to classes. And they come out, the first question we ask is do you know Python? Do you know this? I'm not saying it's right or wrong that's what the industry is doing. >> John: Yeah. >> And you need to actually respect every science but if not, don't mislead people. So that's one. Silicon Valley has a problem with older gentlemen, older people. >> John: Agism. >> Agism, so that's an issue. There are not too many African Americans in Silicon Valley. So these are the elephants. I think the first steps is we haven't talk about these things. People are afraid to talk about it. That's not a good sign. You got to come back and put it, I mean, Anita Borg, I liked them because they're put the show on the table. Which is the first step and it's like an alcoholic. You are to say I'm basking in alcoholic. If you don't even say that. We're not solving it. >> I got to tell you. I was there last year. This will be our third year. It is 12,000 women and it's a great time. It's the great time-- >> Yeah, my daughter's is going. I wanted to go alone but we have to do more. So I don't want to sound down on the last minute. We've made definite progress but if you go to most Silicon Valley companies, we can't say we've done it. >> Well my wife and I just talked about men from Mars, that whole stick, but the role of IT is a lot. First there is a lot of women that are involved in tech but necessarily coding as you said, because a lot of roles in IT are changing. For instance, the data science role moves to data analyst which by the way is the F ford base. So that's kind of becoming an IT role. >> Right. Very interesting some of these jobs personas per say-- >> Yeah, yeah so last one I'll leave it with you is they could log the help desk. We used outsource the help desk. We used to treat it as not important whatever and then we find that a lot of knowledge workers are struggling for simple stuff. That can fit in my PC so that I can do my job. So we brought it back like how the Apple have genius bars. We have our own things inside but we recruited it from a organization call You're Up. And what they do is there are a lot of kids from under privileged families who don't get to finish high school. So why can't they work on help desk? Why do you need a degree? Why can't they go to a finishing school? I've worked with a lot of them. They're very passionate about what they do, very satisfying so we can talk for hours, 'cause I'm very passionate about this. We should do more with under privileged folks. We should do more with diversity in the true sense of the word. >> We'd love to have you. We're going to recruit you as a volunteer for our theCUBE team in Silicon Valley. We're doing a lot of coverage there. Certainly the fellowship has been great and we're going to be at Anita Borg Grace Hopper celebration in Houston. theCUBE will there. I'm John Furrier here with Keith Townsend. Here live at VMworld breaking it down sharing all the data. CIOs are really interested in the Cloud and certainly got the play book. Bask thanks so much for sharing your insight again. Great, great insight. Thanks for sharing the data. >> Thank you John for sharing-- >> We'll be right back with more live coverage from Las Vegas from VMworld 2012. This is SiliconANGLES theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back. (uptempo techno music)