>>Bach from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering KWS executive sub brought to you by extension. >>Welcome back everyone to the cubes live coverage of the Accenture executives summit here in Las Vegas, part of AWS reinvent. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. We're joined by two guests for this segment. We have Mamadou BA. He is the senior director of cloud technology at Anthem. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Mamadou and Sean mulch and Donnie, he is AWS security lead at Accenture. Thank you so much Sean. Thank you for having us. Rebecca, glad to be with you. So let's start with you mama. Do tell our viewers a little bit about Anthem, the business. >>Sure. So Anthem is a healthcare company. We're serving around 40 million members and we're committed to simplifying healthcare and make it more accessible and affordable for people. >>So committed to simplifying healthcare, which is, I'm imagining the driving force for your cloud journey, but, but what were some of the other factors that led you to the cloud? It's >>really, we want to make healthcare more accessible for people and more affordable. We want to meet our consumers where they are and meet them using mediums that they want us to use. So it's going through all the data we have. We have 40 million members who serving today looking at the data and find the ways to build customized and personalized experiences to meet them where they are and how they want to be met and also improve to health care for them. >>So what kinds of personalized customized experiences are you talking about and what does the cloud enable? >>So really when you look at, we have a variety of members, young children to adults and people who are Medicare and Medicaid, they have various needs. When you look at people's medical needs, you look at their financial needs, their social needs. What works for me might not work for your, might not work for him. So it's understanding the person as a whole and meeting them where they want to be a mentor really. >>So Sean, how does does, does Accenture, what does Accenture bring to this partnership? How are you helping Anthem realize its goals? >>Sure. So, I mean, I would say this happens under the guise of cloud and at Anthem broadly as well. Right? So Accenture, Anthem is, has Accenture is one of its largest partners. We're proud to be one of, have Anthem is one of our largest clients of course, and all the way from a lot of the outsourcing operations from the business operations side providing cost-effective business operations for addressing all those millions of subscribers that they have to of course helping them innovate both within cloud, within a lot of their other technology needs on premise from a lot of, they're from a lot of like transformations in technology. That's, I would say that covers the gamut specifically within, I'd say where we're helping both strategically and operationally on a strategic front. This includes mapping some of the business needs to um, how to various cloud technologies, uh, where it's a multicloud and a hybrid cloud approach, but also specifically on AWS and, and also about how we can help empower Anthem to realize its cloud journey and potential there with their workforce. >>We, their cloud technology organization and how we empower that movement going forward. Uh, there are a number of other drivers on the operational side and that includes of course, minimizing any future technical debt. Um, and that's, that's a big journey of course, or a big pattern. I would say that that is prevalent across multiple clients, but also realizing comprehensive monitoring, save preventive guardrails for services that then allows developers to have the freedom to experiment, to enable rapid prototyping. And also of course, uh, transparent, uh, operations from a cost perspective. So these would be a couple of ways. >>So mama, do you talk about the ways in which you are innovating in this cloud space? What are, what are some of the most exciting projects that you're working on? Right. So >>we have a, a large number of projects, but NTM as a whole, since we're serving 40 plus million members, we have thousands of applications, petabytes of data. So some of the projects we're working on today, we have a landing zone on AWS and we have some applications in AWS. What we need to meet our application teams. Also internally, we need to help them focus on the business drivers focused on healthcare. So we're working on providing them a nimble platform so they're not worried about day to day it and providing them a self service catalog. And we understand that there's a lot of complexity in healthcare or when you have all this data you need to make sure it's secure. There's a lot of regulatory challenges, so we don't want our application teams to have to deal with all those things. So it's really putting together, identifying the services, AI services, machine learning services, container and serverless, and building a framework for them to have access to all those services that are preapproved and make those self-service for the application teams. >>So that's our service catalog project and allowed them to use all that in an AWS account where they're self sufficient. So we were working closely with Accenture on their end. What we found was while the technology is very valuable, the people and process aspect of it, it's we have to get alignment across all the internal divisions, working closely and bringing our security teams on the table, our data teams, our operation teams, and working together to say how can we empower our developers internally to focus on business deliverables? So building that catalog, provide them a reference, a provider for reference architecture or reference implementation, identifying skills gaps and recognizing them, working with HR to hire new talent and reskill our existing talent, but also leveraging our partners to bring in that talent and give us various ways of looking at the same problem. >>So I saw you Shawn, nodding along with what a lot of mama do was talking about in terms of the alignment. Can you talk about that challenge and how you work with clients to make sure that you are bringing people along? Because the people and the processes are the most important part, but they're often the hardest part too. >>They're are definitely the hardest part. And of course we, I mean behind every grade success story, there's so many challenges, right? And, and one of the things we do of course is not just try to bring our best people that are technically sharp for Anthem, but that understand the client that understand the business needs. For example, it's not just about technology, but it's also about how it's applied to support certain business operations like mergers and acquisitions or as a strategy grows from one cloud to multi-cloud. So it's about bringing those folks that help align or understand those goals organizationally and how they're realized technically. In addition to that, I would say it's also bonding very, very, very closely with leadership, with architects, with operations personnel and the developers and engineers at Anthem to work side by side and realizing many of these goals or many of our shared goals and Anthem's overall vision. And >>the good thing there is really the cloud is aligned with the corporate strategy. So there's a lot of leadership alignment. And what we found is really trying to find that balance between autonomy and alignment. One, the teams to be autonomous. We're providing them with self-service, want them to innovate and get to market quickly, but we also want them to be aligned with the company and enterprise best practices and regulatory standards, so it's a fine balance, but I think we're making great progress with our partners. The processes are being reevaluated. Every process we were saying because we've done it this way for all these years and we were successful at doing it, doesn't mean that that's the way forward. We want to bring everyone together and think of a process holistically, not this is my team, I'm doing this and passing it to the next team. It's bring your best people and let's solve the problem together. >>Right. At the same time, I would say it's not siloed again between say architecture, operations and security either before or after. It's about bringing, I would say these, these three legs of that stool together or are together throughout the process and I think that's something we've done as well. One of the things we've done is establish a tiger team essentially right for to, to power through some of our challenges as we build out a new landing zone. As we move towards implementing some of these self capabilities and plan for migration of I would say a hundreds or potentially thousands of applications to the cloud. It's about getting security to shape policy, getting buy in from there as well. Ensuring that when design decisions are made from an architecture perspective, we take into consideration not just the operational side of Anthem but the operational arm of Accenture that supports and enables some of that work as well and how we can make that their lives easier and how we can make a, minimize any risks of the business, any disruptions, outages, et cetera, by way of good design and by getting their buy in and making sure that every internal stakeholders are, >>yeah. Yeah. Really our um, our emphasis is on quality by design, by bringing the right stakeholders, help architect it properly, and then have some process control and monitoring in place and having some key metrics that we look at. How long is it taking a developer to get an AWS account? How long does it take them to get access to a service that they need to meet? That business function letter is an AI service or a server less the application that they're trying to build. Evaluating those and then trying to improve our process >>and by keeping everyone in the loop, I mean it's this dynamic process that is that I'm sure is very complicated, but by with everyone on the same page, they then feel more engaged in the process and that they matter more, which, which also I'm sure drives productivity. Yes. >>Times w whenever you have a lot of people, sometimes there's no agreement on the decision, but you have to be at a point where when you come to an agreement, you might not have a hundred percent consensus all the time, but if 70 or 80% agree, the other people still feel included, their needs have been heard, their concerns will be addressed one way or the other, and they're willing to move forward with the group. It's not because I didn't get my way. I'm not supporting the business. They understand that and there's some trade offs. >>So I wanted to, I want to switch gears here and talk a little bit about security because health health care data represents some of the biggest security breaches of industry data. So how, how biz cloud infrastructure and your security processes and practices help help counteract that. >>Sure. So before you even get in the account do account is designed to meet all our Hampton security best practices and are based on our AWS agreement. Those best practices listed on there and working with our partners to make sure that by the time you get in an account, it's secure, you only have access to services we gave you. And for each of those services we do a full analysis on it, look at the various attack patterns. For instance, I do encryption and just ensure that the developers have a safe environment to experiment and develop. That's why we're building the self service catalog. It's a self service, but we put the services in there after we evaluated them, we feel comfortable with them. Some services, let's say some HIPAA eligible services. We want to ensure if your application is a HIPAA applicate eligible application, you, you're using those services, so having to control them process in place before you even get to account once you get it. And we have detective and preventive controls in place to alert us in case of any, anyone trying to use a service they're not supposed to use. >>Sean, I want to ask you about some research that Accenture did in 2017 the healthcare industry will be one of the top two industries to face the most digital disruption and the next three years. This was part of the technology vision survey. What, how, how do you even begin to to talk to clients through this, hold their hands through this enormously disruptive period in the healthcare industry. What's your advice and what do you think about the role of big data and analytics going forward? >>Right, absolutely. I think so. There's definitely a tremendous amount of disruption and then it's where a number of large, some of our large clients enterprises really have to go through their own transformational process, their own disruption process for the better, right. As you have a number of different start ups as you have a number of different new entrance into the field and one of the things they cloud technologies do is oftentimes it's not necessarily a first mover advantage, but it's, it's actually the lowest common denominator that if you're not using some of these services, whether it's the predictive capabilities for example, or some of the other analytics capabilities that are offered. So whether it's predict, whether it's Sage maker, et cetera, within AWS and other capabilities, these are really the new foundation and so many companies either no matter of size are actually leveraging these to build for a better experience. And one of the things we are looking at is how we can work with our clients to actually get them there as soon as possible and or use that again as the lowest common denominator and build their own differentiators bill bring to bear some of their experience throughout. Uh, I would say a years potentially decades been valuable experience products of services and actually turbocharge them for lack of a better word, >>mamma do large scale cloud transformation, innovation. This is a monumental challenge. How do you, but it's also a balancing act. How do you make sure that you are balancing the needs in adjacent areas like applications and onboarding and dev ops? How do you, >>so it's, it's really having that alignment and everyone understanding that this is a part of our corporate mission. We're trying to improve health care and reduce the cost, make it more affordable, improve people's lives. So all the teams that are leaders are coming together. Like you mentioned, we have a cloud tiger team and saying for my business unit or my application teams, these are the capabilities I need to support on AWS can do enterprise build up platform for me so I can focus on my business. So it's bringing people together, understanding where they are. Some application teams are more mature than others. Finding really ways to understand our internal customers. Also because we have many application teams and business divisions and having a process while working with, you can have application migration, we can help you migrate to the cloud, but that's not the goal. >>We want to help you understand the services you're using. It's enabling the application teams and providing them with a reference architecture or sometimes reference implementation team. We have a cloud enablement team for instance, where it's an internal consulting group where you go in and say, this is my application, helped me find the best way to move this application to cloud and the best way to improve it over time. So it's bringing everyone together and working closely with HR, the training teams, the vendor management teams, there's, it's almost everyone has to come together to scale this. If it's one team, it's easy to do it, but when you want to make it enterprise wide you have to really scale it and have the leaders aligned. Everyone contributing to it. It is all about alignment. >>It is. It is. It definitely is. Great. Yeah. Just wanted to comment earlier about the piece on security as well. Right, so we talked about, of course he talked about mama was talked about the service catalog, service introduction, so one of the things we do is as part of that alignment, getting everybody's thoughts in terms of how we see this working. Looking at that picture holistically, also looking at what is the, what is the consumer experience? Was the desired experience, is that how do we secure that? How do we make sure that it's frictionless and internally, how does that translate into all of the giving the developers freedom and having those guard but still having some guardrails in place as well as some comprehensive visibility and monitoring. There are about a good dozen services if not more, that provide different points of data metrics, alarms within AWS, but how do we do all of this at scale, at Anthem scale, and then back to the self service perspective. Not just enable security and as part of the organization to monitor, but how every part of the organization is accountable for ensuring security, be it an application team, be it part of the dev sec ops process, be at the networking teams, infrastructure teams, et cetera. So how is everybody informed and how do we bring that level of self service, not just from an application onboarding or migration perspective, but also from a security perspective. >>Yeah. Yeah. It's all about really enabling the application teams also because we can tell you you need to do these five things before you go to production, but if you don't know how to do them, you will not get to production. Instead of doing that, providing you some references, providing you have people you can talk to that can help you go through that. And everyone collaborating as let's help this application team get to production instead of we need to do these things before we approve you. Great. And they're from an alignment perspective. Again, we've gotten folks from cloud strategy, operating model and governance, architecture, um, operations, the actual network team, uh, in different parts of security. Yeah. Database of course, database, data, warehouses, et cetera. And then different parts of security, be it all the way from encryption, key management, the preventive side of things to more of the operational side as well. >>And how all of these folks come together with, if I may add some fantastic executive support on the end in front, um, across, across our board, um, to make things a reality. And I think it's been, we didn't, we didn't start with that model. We did that model out of necessity because when we started our cloud journey, we did have multiple teams taking care of their area. They did their job properly, but then there were some tickets waiting in queues. And it was when you look at the end to end process, it was slowing down the application teams. So we said, how do we help accelerate this stuff? Let's bring everyone together. Not, I did my work and I'm giving it to the next year, but let's collaborate and make sure we're doing the work as one team. >>Well, mama do. Sean, thank you so much. I've really fascinating conversation about re-imagining healthcare and how the cloud helps us do that. Thank you. Thank you so much for having us. Stay tuned for more of the cubes live coverage of the Accenture executive summit coming up in just a little bit.

(upbeat techno music) >> Hey everyone, and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of Snowflake Summit '22 live from Caesar's Forum in beautiful, warm, and sunny Las Vegas. I'm Lisa Martin. I got the Chris and Chris show, next. Bear with me. Chris Degnan joins us again. One of our alumni, the Chief Revenue Officer at Snowflake. Good to have you back, Chris. >> Thank you for having us. >> Lisa: Chris Grusz also joins us. Director of Business Development AWS Marketplace and Service Catalog at AWS. Chris and Chris, welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. Good to be back in person. >> Isn't it great. >> Chris G: It's so much better. >> Chris D: Yeah. >> Nothing like it. So let's talk. There's been so much momentum, Chris D, at Snowflake the last few years. I mean the momentum at this show since we launched yesterday, I know you guys launched the day before with partners, has been amazing. A lot of change, and it's like this for Snowflake. Talk to us about AWS working together with Snowflake and some of the benefits in it from your customer. And then Chris G, I'll go to you for the same question. >> Chris G: Yep. >> You know, first of all, it's awesome. Like, I just, you know, it's been three years since I've had a Snowflake Summit in person, and it's crazy to see the growth that we've seen. You know, I can't, our first cloud that we ever launched on top of was, was AWS, and AWS is our largest cloud, you know, in in terms of revenue today. And they've been, they just kind of know how to do it right. And they've been a wonderful partner all along. There's been challenges, and we've kind of leaned in together and figured out ways to work together, you know, and to solve those challenges. So, been a wonderful partnership. >> And talk about it, Chris G, from your perspective obviously from a coopetition perspective. >> Yep. >> AWS has databases, cloud data forms. >> Chris G: Yeah. >> Talk to us about it. What was the impetus for the partnership with Snowflake from AWS's standpoint? >> Yeah, well first and foremost, they're building on top of AWS. And so that, by default, makes them a great partner. And it's interesting, Chris and I have been working together for, gosh, seven years now? And the relationship's come a really long way. You know, when we first started off, we were trying to sort out how we were going to work together, when we were competing, and when we're working together. And, you know, you fast forward to today, and it's just such a good relationship. Because both companies work backwards from customers. And so that's, you know, kind of in both of our DNA. And so if the customer makes that selection, we're going to support them, even from an AWS perspective. When they're going with Snowflake, that's still a really good thing for AWS, 'cause there's a lot of associated services that Snowflake either integrates to, or we're integrating to them. And so, it's really kind of contributed to how we can really work together in a co-sell motion. >> Talk to us, talk about that. The joint GOTO market and the co-selling motion from Snowflake's perspective, how do customers get engaged? >> Well, I think, you know, typically we, where we are really good at co-selling together is we identify on premise systems. So whether it's, you know, some Legacy UDP system, some Legacy database solution, and they want to move to the cloud? You know, Amazon is all in on getting everyone to the cloud. And I think that's their approach they've taken with us is saying we're really good at accelerating that adoption and moving all these, you know, massive workloads into the cloud. And then to Chris's point, you know, we've integrated so nicely into things like SageMaker and other tool sets. And we, we even have exciting scenarios where they've allowed us to use, you know, some of their Amazon.com retail data sets that we actually use in data sharing via the partnership. So we continue to find unique ways to partner with our great friends at Amazon. >> Sounds like a very deep partnership. >> Chris D: Yeah. Absolutely. >> Chris G: Oh, absolutely, yeah. We're integrating into Snowflake, and they're integrating to AWS. And so it just provides a great combined experience for our customers. And again, that's kind of what we're both looking forward from both of our organizations. >> That customer centricity is, >> Yeah. >> is I think the center of the flywheel that is both that both of you, your companies have. Chris D, talk about the the industry's solutions, specific, industry-specific solutions that Snowflake and AWS have. I know we talked yesterday about the pivot from a sales perspective >> Chris D: Yes. >> That snowflake made in recent months. Talk to us about the industries that you are help, really targeting with AWS to help customers solve problems. >> Yeah. I think there's, you know, we're focused on a number of industries. I think, you know, some of the examples, like I said, I gave you the example of we're using data sharing to help the retail space. And I think it's a really good partnership. Because some of the, some companies view Amazon as a competitor in the retail space, and I think we kind of soften that blow. And we actually leverage some of the Amazon.com data sets. And this is where the partnership's been really strong. In the healthcare space, in the life sciences space, we have customers like Anthem, where we're really focused on helping actually Anthem solve real business problems. Not necessarily like technical problems. It's like, oh no, they want to get, you know, figure out how they can get the whole customer and take care of their whole customer, and get them using the Anthem platform more effectively. So there's a really great, wonderful partnership there. >> We've heard a lot in the last day and a half on theCUBE from a lot of retail customers and partners. There seems to be a lot of growth in that. So there's so much change in the retail market. I was just talking with Click and Snowflake about Urban Outfitters, as an example. And you think of how what these companies are doing together and obviously AWS and Snowflake, helping companies not just pivot during the pandemic, but really survive. I mean, in the beginning with, you know, retail that didn't have a digital presence, what were they going to do? And then the supply chain issues. So it really seems to be what Snowflake and its partner Ecosystem is doing, is helping companies now, obviously, thrive. But it was really kind of like a no-go sort of situation for a lot of industries. >> Yeah, and I think the neat part of, you know, both the combined, you know, Snowflake and AWS solution is in, a good example is DoorDash, you know. They had hyper growth, and they could not have handled, especially during COVID, as we all know. We all used DoorDash, right? We were just talking about it. Chipotle, like, you know, like (laughter) and I think they were able to really take advantage of our hyper elastic platforms, both on the Amazon side and the Snowflake side to scale their business and meet the high demand that they were seeing. And that's kind of some of the great examples of where we've enabled customer growth to really accelerate. >> Yeah. Yeah, right. And I'd add to that, you know, while we saw good growth for those types of companies, a lot of your traditional companies saw a ton of benefit as well. Like another good example, and it's been talked about here at the show, is Western Union, right? So they're a company that's been around for a long time. They do cross border payments and cross currency, you know, exchanges, and, you know, like a lot of companies that have been around for a while, they have data all over the place. And so they started to look at that, and that became an inhibitor to their growth. 'Cause they couldn't get a full view of what was actually going on. And so they did a lengthy evaluation, and they ended up going with Snowflake. And, it was great, 'cause it provided a lot of immediate benefits, so first of all, they were able to take all those disparate systems and pull that into Snowflake. So they finally had a single source of the truth, which was lacking before that. So that was one of the big benefits. The second benefit, and Chris has mentioned this a couple times, is the fact that they could use data sharing. And so now they could pull in third data. And now that they had a holistic view of their entire data set, they could pull in that third party data, and now they could get insights that they never could get before. And so that was another large benefit. And then the third part, and this is where the relationship between AWS and Snowflake is great, is they could then use Amazon SageMaker. So one of the decisions that Western Union made a long time ago is they use R for their data science platform, and SageMaker supports R. And so it really allowed them to dovetail the skill sets that they had around data science into SageMaker. They could now look across all of Snowflake. And so that was just a really good benefit. And so it drove the cost down for Western Union which was a big benefit, but the even bigger benefit is they were now able to start to package and promote different solutions to their customers. So they were effectively able to monetize all the data that they were now getting and the information they were getting out of Snowflake. And then of course, once it was in there, they could also use things like Tableau or ThoughtSpot, both of which available in AWS Marketplace. And it allowed them to get all kinds of visualization of data that they never got in the past. >> The monetization piece is, is interesting. It's so challenging for organizations, one, to get that single source view, to be able to have a customer 360, but to also then be able to monetize data. When you're in customer conversations, how do you help customers on that journey, start? Because the, their competitors are clearly right behind them, ready to take first place spot. How do you help customers go, all right this is what we're going to do to help you on this journey with AWS to monetize your data? >> I think, you know, it's everything from, you know, looking at removing the silos of data. So one of the challenges they've had is they have these Legacy systems, and a lot of times they don't want to just take the Legacy systems and throw them into the cloud. They want to say, we need a holistic view of our customer, 360 view of our customer data. And then they're saying, hey, how can we actually monetize that data? That's where we do everything from, you know, Snowflake has the data marketplace where we list it in the data marketplace. We help them monetize it there. And we use some of the data sets from Amazon to help them do that. We use the technologies like Chris said with SageMaker and other tool sets to help them realize the value of their data in a real, meaningful way. >> So this sounds like a very strategic and technical partnership. >> Yeah, well, >> On both sides. >> It's technical and it's GOTO market. So if you take a look at, you know, Snowflake where they've built over 20 integrations now to different AWS services. So if you're using S3 for object storage, you can use Snowflake on top of that. If you want to load up Snowflake with Glue which is our ETL tool, you can do that. If you want to use QuickSite to do your data visualization on top of Snowflake, you can do that. So they've built integration to all of our services. And then we've built integrations like SageMaker back into Snowflake, and so that supports all kinds of specific customer use cases. So if you think of people that are doing any kind of cloud data platform workload, stuff like data engineering, data warehousing, data lakes, it could be even data applications, cyber security, unistore type things, Snowflake does an excellent job of helping our customers get into those types of environments. And so that's why we support the relationship with a variety of, you know, credit programs. We have a lot of co-sell motions on top of these technical integrations because we want to make sure that we not only have the right technical platform, but we've got the right GOTO market motion. And that's super important. >> Yeah, and I would add to that is like, you know one of the things that customers do is they make these large commitments to Amazon. And one of the best things that Amazon did was allow those customers to draw down Snowflake via the AWS Marketplace. So it's been wonderful to his point around the GOTO market, that was a huge issue for us. And, and again, this is where Amazon was innovative on identifying the ways to help make the customer have a better experience >> Chris G: Yeah. >> Chris D: and put the customer first. And this has been, you know, wonderful partnership there. >> Yeah. It really has. It's been a great, it's been really good. >> Well, and the customers are here. Like we said, >> Yep. >> Yes. Yes they are. >> we're north of 10,000 folks total, and customers are just chomping at the bit. There's been so much growth in the last three years from the last time, I think I heard the 2019 Snowflake Summit had about 1500 people. And here we are at 10,000 plus now, and standing-room-only keynote, the very big queue to get in, people turned away, pushed back to an overflow area to be able to see that, and that was yesterday. I didn't even get a chance to see what it was like today, but I imagine it was probably the same. Talk about the, when you're in customer conversations, where do you bring, from a GTM perspective, Where do you bring Snowflake into the conversation? >> Yeah >> Obviously, there's Redshift there, what does that look like? I imagine it follows the customer's needs, challenges. >> Exactly. >> Compelling events. >> Yeah. We're always going to work backwards from the customer need, and so that is the starting point for kindling both organizations. And so we're going to, you know, look at what they need. And from an AWS perspective, you know, if they're going with Snowflake, that's a very good thing. Right? 'Cause one of the things that we want to support is a selection experience to our AWS customers and make sure that no matter what they're doing, they're getting a very good, supported experience. And so we're always going to work backwards from the customer. And then once they make that technology decision, then we're going to support them, as I mentioned, with a whole bunch of co-sell resources. We have technical resources in the field. We have credit programs and in, you know, and, of course, we're going to market in a variety of different verticals as well with Snowflake. If you take a look at all the industry clouds that Snowflake has spun up, financial services and healthcare, and media entertainment, you know, those are all very specific use cases that are very valuable to an AWS customer. And AWS is going more and more to market on a vertical approach, and so Snowflake really just fits right in with our overall strategy. >> Right. Sounds like very tight alignment there. That mission alignment that Frank talked about yesterday. I know he was talking about that with respect to customers, but it sounds like there's a mission alignment between AWS and Snowflake. >> Mission alignment, yeah. >> I live that every week. (laughter) >> Sorry if I brought up a pain point. >> Yeah. Little bit. No. >> Guys, what's, in terms of use cases, obviously we've been here for a couple days. I'm sure you've had tremendous feedback, >> Chris G: Yeah. >> from, from customers, from partners, from the ecosystem. What's next, what can we expect to hear next? Maybe give us a preview of re:Invent in the few months. >> Preview of re:Invent. Yeah. No, well, one of the things we really want to start doing is just, you know, making the use case of, of launching Snowflake on AWS a lot easier. So what can we do to streamline those types of experiences? 'Cause a lot of times we'll find that customers, once they buy a third party solution like Snowflake, they have to then go through a whole series of configuration steps, and what can we do to streamline that? And so we're going to continue to work on that front. One of the other places that we've been exploring with Snowflake is how we work with channel partners. And, you know, when we first launched Marketplace it was really more of an app store model that was ISVs on one side and channel partners on the other, and there wasn't really a good fit for channel partners. And so four years ago we retrofitted the platform and have opened it up to resellers like an SHI or SIs like Salam or Deloitte who are top, two top SIs for Snowflake. And now they can use Marketplace to resell those technologies and also sell their services on top of that. So Snowflake's got a big, you know, practice with Salam, as I mentioned. You know, Salam can now sell through Marketplace and they can actually sell that statement of work and put that on the AWS bill all by virtue of using Marketplace, that automation platform. >> Ease of use for customers, ease of use for partners as well. >> Yes. >> And that ease of use is it's no joke. It's, it's not just a marketing term. It's measurable and it's about time-to-value, time-to-market, getting customers ahead of their competition so that they can be successful. Guys, thanks for joining me on theCUBE today. Talking about AWS and >> Nice to be back. Nice to be back in person. >> Isn't it nice to be back. It's great to be actually sitting across from another human. >> Exactly. >> Thank you so much for your insights, what you shared about the partnership and where it's going. We appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Cool. Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right guys. For Chris and Chris, I'm Lisa Martin, here watching theCUBE live from Las Vegas. I'll be back with my next guest momentarily, so stick around. (Upbeat techno music)

>>Machine intelligence is everywhere. AI is being embedded into our everyday lives, through applications, process automation, social media, ad tech, and it's permeating virtually every industry and touching everyone. Now, a major issue with machine learning and deep learning is trust in the outcome. That is the black box problem. What is that? Well, the black box issue arises when we can see the input and the output of the data, but we don't know what happens in the middle. Take a simple example of a picture of a cat or a hotdog for you. Silicon valley fans, the machine analyzes the picture and determines it's a cat, but we really don't know exactly how the machine determined that. Why is it a problem? Well, if it's a cat on social media, maybe it isn't so onerous, but what if it's a medical diagnosis facilitated by a machine? And what if that diagnosis is wrong? >>Or what if the machine is using deep learning to qualify an individual for a home loan and that person applying for the loan gets rejected. Was that decision based on bias? If the technology to produce that result is opaque. Well, you get the point. There are serious implications of not understanding how decisions are made with AI. So we're going to dig into the issue and the topic of how to make AI explainable and operationalize AI. And with me are two guests today, Shea speaky, who's the co-founder and COO of cognitive scale and long time friend of the cube and newly minted CEO of cognitive scale. Bob pitchy, Yano, gents. Welcome to the cube, Bob. Good to see you again. Welcome back on. >>Thanks for having us >>Say, let me start with you. Why did you start the company? I think you started the company in 2013. Give us a little history and the why behind cognitive scale. >>Sure. David. So, um, look, I spent some time, um, you know, through multiple startups, but I ended up at IBM, which is where I met Bob. And one of the things that we did was the commercialization of IBM Watson initially. And that led to, uh, uh, thinking about how do you operationalize this because of the, a lot of people thinking about data science and machine learning in isolation, building models, you know, trying to come up with better ways to deliver some kind of a prediction, but if you truly want to operationalize it, you need to think about scale that enterprises need. So, you know, we were in the early days, enamored by ways, I'm still in landed by ways. The application that takes me from point a to point B and our view is look as you go from point a to point B, but if you happen to be, um, let's say a patient or a financial services customer, imagine if you could have a raise like application giving you all the insights that you needed telling you at the right moment, you know, what was needed, the right explanation so that it could guide you through the journey. >>So that was really the sort of the thesis behind cognitive scale is how do you apply AI, uh, to solve problems like that in regulated industries like health care management services, but do it in a way that it's done at scale where you can get, bring the output of the data scientists, application developers, and then those insights that can be powered into those end applications like CRM systems, mobile applications, web applications, applications that consumers like us, whether it be in a healthcare setting or a financial services setting can get the benefit of those insights, but have the appropriate sort of evidence and transparency behind it. So that was the, that was the thesis for. >>Got it. Thank you for that. Now, Bob, I got to ask you, I knew you couldn't stay in the sidelines, my friend. So, uh, so what was it that you saw in the marketplace that Lord you back in to, to take on the CEO role? >>Yeah, so David is an exciting space and, uh, you're right. I couldn't stay on the sideline stuff. So look, I always felt that, uh, enterprise AI had a promise to keep. Um, and I don't think that many enterprises would say, you know, with their experience that yeah, we're getting the value that we wanted out of it. We're getting the scale that we wanted out of it. Um, and we're really satisfied with what it's delivered to us so far. So I felt there was a gap in keeping that promise and I saw cognitive scale as an important company and being able to fill that gap. And the reason that that gap exists is that, you know, enterprise AI, unlike AI, that relates to one particular conversational service or one particular small narrow domain application is really a team sport. You know, it involves all sorts of roles, um, and all sorts of aspects of a working enterprise. >>That's already scaled with systems of engagement, um, and, and systems of record. And we show up in the, with the ability to actually help put all of that together. It's a brown field, so to speak, not a Greenfield, um, and where Shea and Matt and Minosh and the team really focused was on what are the important last mile problems, uh, that an enterprise needs to address that aren't necessarily addressed with any one tool that might serve some members of that team? Because there are a lot of great tools out there in the space of AI or machine learning or deep learning, but they don't necessarily help come together to, to deliver the outcomes that an enterprise wants. So what are those important aspects? And then also, where do we apply AI inside of our platform and our capabilities to kind of take that operationalization to the next level, uh, with, you know, very specific insights and to take that journey and make it highly personalized while also making it more transparent and explainable. >>So what's the ICP, the ideal customer profile, is it, is it highly regulated industries? Is it, is it developers? Uh, maybe you could parse that a little bit. >>Yeah. So we do focus in healthcare and in financial services. And part of the reason for that is the problem is very difficult for them. You know, you're, you're working in a space where, you know, you have rules and regulations about when and how you need to engage with that client. So the bar for trust is very, very high and everything that we do is around trusted AI, which means, you know, thinking about using the data platforms and the model platforms in a way to create marketplaces, where being able to utilize that data is something that's provisioned in permission before we go out and do that assembly so that the target customer really is somebody who's driving digital transformation in those regulated industries. It might be a chief digital officer. It might be a chief client officer, customer officer, somebody who's really trying to understand. I have a very fragmented view of my member or of my patient or my client. And I want to be able to utilize AI to help that client get better outcomes or to make sure that they're not lost in the system by understanding and more holistically understanding them in a more personalized way, but while always maintaining, you know, that that chain of trust >>Got it. So can we get into the product like a little bit more about what the product is and maybe share, you can give us a census to kind of where you started and the evolution of the portfolio >>Look where we started there is, um, the application of AI, right? So look, the product and the platform was all being developed, but our biggest sort of view from the start had been, how do you get into the trenches and apply this to solve problems? And as well, pointed out, one of the areas we picked was healthcare because it is a tough industry. There's a lot of data, but there's a lot of regulation. And it's truly where you need the notion of being able to explain your decision at a really granular level, because those decisions have some serious consequences. So, you know, he started building a platform out and, um, a core product is called cortex. It's the, it's a software platform on top of this. These applications are built, but to our engagements over the last six, seven years, working with customers in healthcare, in financial services, some of the largest banks, the largest healthcare organizations, we have developed a software product to essentially help you scale enterprise AI, but it starts with how do you build these systems? >>Building the systems requires us to provide tooling that can help developers take models, data that exists within the enterprise, bring it together, rapidly, assemble this, orchestrate these different components, stand up. These systems, deploy these systems again in a very complex environment that includes, you know, on-prem systems as well as on the cloud, and then be able to done on APIs that can plug into an application. So we had to essentially think of this entire problem end to end, and that's poor cortex does, but extremely important part of cortex that didn't start off. Initially. We certainly had all the, you know, the, the makings of a trusted AI would be founded the industry wasn't quite ready over time. We've developed capabilities around explainability being able to detect bias. So not only are you building these end to end systems, assembling them and deploying them, you have as a first-class citizen built into this product, the notion of being able to understand bias, being able to detect whether there's the appropriate level of explainability to make a decision and all of that's embedded within the cortex platform. So that's what the platform does. And it's now in its sixth generation as we >>Speak. Yeah. So Dave, if you think about the platform, it really has three primary components. One is this, uh, uh, application development or assembly platform that fits between existing AI tools and models and data and systems of engagement. And that allows for those AI developers to rapidly visualize and orchestrate those aspects. And in that regard were tremendous partners with people like IBM, Microsoft H2O people that provide aspects that are helping develop the data platform, the data fabric, things like the, uh, data science tools to be able to then feed this platform. And then on the front end, really helping transform those systems of engagement into things that are more personalized with better recommendations in a more targeted space with explainable decisions. So that's one element that's called cortex fabric. There's another component called cortex certify. And that capability is largely around the model intelligence model introspection. >>It works, uh, across things that are of cost model driven, but other things that are based on deterministic algorithms, as well as rule-based algorithms to provide that explainability of decisions that are made upstream before they get to the black box model, because organizations are discovering that many times the data has, you know, aspects of dimensions to it and, and, and biases to it before it gets to the model. So they want to understand that entire chain of, of, uh, of decisioning before it gets there. And then there's the notion of some pew, preacher rated applications and blueprints to rapidly deliver outcomes in some key repeating areas like customer experience or like lead generation. Um, those elements where almost every customer we engage with, who is thinking about digital transformation wants to start by providing better client experience. They want to reduce costs. They want to have operational savings while driving up things like NPS and improving the outcomes for the people they're serving. So we have those sets of applications that we built over time that imagine that being that first use application, that starter set, that also trains the customer on how to you utilize this operational platform. And then they're off to the races building out those next use cases. So what we see as one typical insertion place play that returns value, and then they're scaling rapidly. Now I want to cover some secret sauce inside of the platform. >>Yeah. So before you do, I think, I just want to clarify, so the cortex fabric, cause that's really where I wanted to go next, but the cortex fabric, it seems like that's the way in which you're helping people operationalize inject use familiar tooling. It sounds like, am I correct? That the cortex certify is where you're kind of peeling the onion of that complicated, whether it's deep learning or neural networks, which is that's where the black box exists. Maybe you could tell us, you know, is that where the secret sauce lives, if not, where is it? And if >>It actually is in all places right though. So there's some really important, uh, introductions of capabilities, because like I mentioned, many times these, uh, regulated industries have been developed and highly fragmented pillars. Just think about the insurance companies between property casualty and personal lines. Um, many times they have grown through acquisition. So they have these systems of record that are, that are really delivering the operational aspects of the company's products, but the customers are sometimes lost in the scenes. And so they've built master data management capabilities and data warehouse capabilities to try to serve that. But they find that when they then go to apply AI across some of those curated data environments, it's still not sufficient. So we developed an element of being able to rapidly assemble what we call a profile of one. It's a very, very intimate profile around declared data sources, uh, that relate to a key business entity. >>In most cases, it's a person, it's a member, it's a patient, it's a client, but it can be a product for some of our clients. It's real estate. Uh, it's a listing. Um, you know, it can be someone who's enjoying a theme park. It can be someone who's a shopper in a grocery store. Um, it can be a region. So it's any key business entity. And one of the places where we applied our AI knowledge is by being able to extract key information out of these declared systems and then start to make longitudinal observations about those systems and to learn about them. And then line those up with prediction engines that both we supply as well as third parties and the customers themselves supply them. So in this theme of operationalization, they're constantly coming up with new innovations or a new model that they might want to interject into that engagement application. Our platform with this profile of one allows them to align that model directly into that profile, get the benefits of what we've already done, but then also continue to enhance, differentiate and provide even greater, uh, greater value to that client. IBM is providing aspects of those models that we can plug in. And many of our clients are that's really >>Well. That's interesting. So that profile of one is kind of the instantiation of that secret sauce, but you mentioned like master data management data warehouse, and, you know, as well as I do Bob we've we've we've decades of failures trying to get a 360 degree view for example of the customer. Uh, it's just, just not real time. It's not as current as we would want it to be. The quality is not necessarily there. It's a very asynchronous process. Things have changed the processing power. You and I have talked about this a lot. We have much more data now. So it's that, that, that profile one. So, but also you mentioned curated apps, customer experience, and lead gen. You mentioned those two, uh, and you've also talked about digital transformation. So it sounds like you're supporting, and maybe this is not necessarily the case, but I'm curious as to what's going on here, maybe supporting more revenue generation in the early phases than say privacy or compliance, or is it actually, do you have use cases for both? >>It's all, it's all of it. Um, and, and shake and, you know, really talk passionately about some of the things we've helped clients do, like for instance, uh, J money. Why don't you talk about the, the hospital, um, uh, uh, you know, discharge processes. >>Absolutely. So, so, you know, just to make this a bit more real, they, you know, when you talk about a profile on one, it's about understanding of patient, as I said earlier, but it's trying to bring this notion of not just the things that you know about the patient you call that declared information. You can find the system in, you can find this information in traditional EMR systems, right? But imagine bringing in, uh, observed information, things that you observed an interaction with the patient, uh, and then bring in inferences that you can then start drawing on top of that. So to bring this to a live example, imagine at the point of care, knowing when all the conditions are right for the patient to be discharged after surgery. And oftentimes as you know, those, if all the different evidence of the different elements that don't come together, you can make some really serious mistakes in terms of patient discharge, bad things can happen. >>Patient could be readmitted or even worse. That could be a serious outcome. Now, how do you bring that information at the point of care for the person making a decision, but not just looking at the information, you know, but also understanding not just the clinical information, but the social, the socioeconomic information, and then making sure that that decision has the appropriate evidence behind it. So then when you do make that decision, you have the appropriate sort of, uh, you know, the guidance behind it for audit reasons, but also for ensuring that you don't have a bad outcome. So that's the example Bob's talking about, where we have a flight this in real settings, in, in healthcare, but also in financial services and other industries where you can make these decisions based on the machine, telling you with a lot of detail behind it, whether this is the right decision to be made, we call this explainability and the evidence that's needed. >>You know, that's interesting. I, I, I'm imagining a use case in my mind where after a patient leaves, so often there's just a complete disconnect with the patient, unless that patient has problems and goes back, but that patient might have some problems, but they forget it's too much of a pain in the neck to go back, but, but the system can now track this and we could get much more accurate information and that could help in future diagnoses and, and also decision-making for a patient in terms of, of outcomes and probability of success. Um, question, what do you actually sell? So it's a middleware product. It's a, how do I license it? >>It's a, it's a, uh, it's a software platform. So we sell software, um, and it is deployed in the customer's cloud environment of choice. Uh, of course we support complete hybrid cloud capabilities. Um, we support native cloud deployments on top of Microsoft and Amazon and Google. And we support IBM's hybrid cloud initiative with red hat OpenShift as well, which also puts us in a position to both support those public cloud environments, as well as the customer's private cloud environments. So constructed with Kubernetes in that environment, um, which helps the customer also re you know, realize the value of that operational appar operationalization, because they can modify those applications and then redeploy them directly into their cloud environment and start to see those as struck to see those spaces. Now, I want to cover a couple of the other components of the secret sauce, if I could date to make sure that you've got a couple other elements where some real breakthroughs are occurring, uh, in these spaces. >>Um, so Dave, you and I, you know, we're passionate about the semiconductor industry, uh, and you know, we know what is, you know, happening with regard to innovation and broadening the people who are now siliconized their intellectual property and a lot of that's happening because those companies who have been able to figure out how to manufacture or how to design those semiconductors are operationalizing those platforms with our customers. So you have people like apple who are able to really break out of the scene and do things by utilizing utilities and macros their own knowledge about how things need to work. And it's just, it's very similar to what we're talking about doing here for enterprise AI, they're operationalizing that construction, but none of those companies would actually start creating the actual devices until they go through simulation and design. Correct. Well, when you think about most enterprises and how they develop software, they just immediately start to develop the code and they're going through AB testing, but they're all writing code. >>They're developing those assets. They're creating many, many models. You know, some organizations say 90% of the models they create. They never use some say 50, and they think that's good. But when you think about that in terms of, you know, the capital that's being deployed, both on the resources, as well as the infrastructure, that's potentially a lot of waste as well. So one of the breakthroughs is, uh, the creation of what we call synthetic data and simulations inside of our, of our operational platform. So cortex fabric allows someone to actually say, look, this is my data pattern. And because it's sensitive data, it might be, you know, PII. Um, we can help them by saying, okay, what is the pattern of that data? And then we can create synthetic data off of that pattern for someone to experiment with how a model might function or how that might work in the application context. >>And then to run that through a set of simulations, if they want to bring a new model into an application and say, what will the outcomes of this model be before I deployed into production, we allow them to drive simulations across millions or billions of interactions to understand what is that model going to be effective. Was it going to make a difference for that individual or for this application or for the cost savings goal and outcomes that I'm trying to drive? So just think about what that means in terms of that digital transformation officers, having the great idea, being in the C-suite and saying, I want to do this with my business. Oftentimes they have to turn around to the CIO or the chief data officer and say, when can you get me that data? And we all know the answer to that question. They go like this, like the, yeah, I've got a couple other things on the plate and I'll get to that as soon as I can. >>Now we're able to liberate that. Now we're able to say, look, you know, what's the concept that you're trying to develop. Let's create the synthetic data off of that environment. We have a Corpus of data that we have collected through various client directions that many times gets that bootstrapped and then drive that through simulation. So we're able to drive from imagination of what could be the outcome to really getting high confidence that this initiative is going to have a meaningful value for the enterprise. And then that stimulates the right kind of following and the right kind of endorsement, uh, throughout really driving that change to the enterprise and that aspect of the simulations, the ability to plan out what that looks like and develop those synthetic aspects is another important element that the secret sauce inside of cortex fabric, >>Back to the semiconductor innovation, I can do that very cheaply. I think, I think I I'm thinking AWS cloud, I could experiment using graviton or maybe do a little bit of training with some, you know, new processors and, and then containerize it, bring it back to my on-premise state and apply it. Uh, and so, uh, just a as you say, a much more agile environment, um, yeah, >>Speed efficiency, um, and the ability to validate the hypothesis that, that started the process. >>Guys, think about the Tam, the total available market. Can we have that discussion? How big is that? >>I mean, if you think about the spend across, uh, the healthcare space and financial services, we're talking about hundreds of billions, uh, in that, in terms of what the enterprise AI opportunity, as in just those spaces. And remember financial services is a broad spectrum. So one of the things that we're actually starting to roll out today in fact, is a SAS service that we developed. That's based on top of our offerings called trust star trust star.ai, and trust star is a set of personalized insights that get delivered directly to the loan officer inside of, uh, an institution who's trying to, uh, really match, uh, lending to someone who wants to buy a property. Um, and when you think about many of those organizations, they have very, very high demand. They've got a lot of information, they've got a lot of regulation they need to adhere to. >>But many times they're very analytically challenged in terms of the tools they have to be able to serve those needs. So what's happening with new listings, what's happening with my competitors, what's happening. As people move from high tax states, where they want to potentially leave into new, more attractive toxin and opportunity-based environments where they're not known to those lending institutions that maybe, you know, they're, they're trying to be married up with. So we've developed a set of insights that are, is, this is a subscription service trust r.ai, um, which goes directly to the loan officer. And then we use our platform behind the scenes to use things like the home disclosure act, data, MLS data, other data that is typically Isagenix to those sources and providing very customized insights to help that buyer journey. And of course, along the way, we can identify things like are some of the decisions more difficult to explain, are there potential biases that might be involved in that environment as people are applying for mortgages, and we can really drive growth through inclusion for those lending institutions, because they might just not understand that potential client well enough, that we can identify the kind of things that they can do to know them better. >>And the benefit is really to hold there, right? And shale, I'll let you jump in, but to me, it's twofold. There. One is, you know, you want to have accurate decisions. You want to have low risk decisions. And if you want to be able to explain that to an individual that may get rejected, here's why, um, and, and it wasn't because of bias. It was because of XYZ and you need to work on these things, but go ahead shape. >>Now, this is going to add that point here, Dave, which is a double-faced point on the dam. One of the things that, and the reason why, you know, industries like healthcare, financial services spending billions, it's not because they look at AI in isolation, they actually looking at the existing processes. So, you know, established disciplines like CRM or supply chain procurement, whether it is contact center and so on. And the examples that we gave you earlier, it's about infusing AI into those existing applications, existing systems. And that's, what's creating the left because what's been missing so far is the silos of data and you traditional traditional transaction systems, but this notion of intelligence that can be infused into the systems and that's, what's creating this massive market opportunity for us. >>Yeah. And I think, um, I think a lot of people just misunderstood in the, or in the early, early days of the AI, you know, new AI when we came out of the AI winter, if you will, people thought, okay, the incumbents are in big trouble now because they are not, they're not AI developers, but really what you guys are showing is it's not about building your own AI. It's about applying AI and having the tools to do so. The incumbents actually have a huge advantage because they've got the systems in place. They can, if they, if they're smart, they can infuse AI and then extract value out of that for their customers. >>And that's why, you know, companies like, uh, like IBM are an investor in a great partner in this space. Anthem is an investor, uh, you know, of the company, but also, you know, someone who can utilize the capabilities, Microsoft, uh, Intel, um, you know, we've been, we've been, uh, you know, really blessed with a great backing Norwest venture partners, um, obviously is, uh, an investor in us as well. So, you know, we've seen the ability to really help those organizations think about, um, you know, where that future lies. But one of the things that is also, you know, one of the gaps in the promises when a C-suite executive like a digital transformation officer, chief digital chief customer officer, they're having their idea, they want to be accountable to that idea. They're having that idea in the boardroom. And they're saying, look, I think I can improve my customer satisfaction and, uh, by 20 points and decrease the cost of my call center by 20 or 30 or 50 points. >>Um, but they need to be able to measure that. So one of the other things that, uh, we've done a cognitive scale is help them understand the progress that they're making across those business goals. Um, now when you think about this people like Andrew Nang, or just really talking about this aspect of goal oriented AI, don't start with the problem, start with what your business goal is, start with, what outcome you're trying to drive, and then think about how AI helps you along that goal. We're delivering this now in our product, our version six product. So while some people are saying, yeah, this is really the right way to potentially do it. We have those capabilities in the product. And what we do is we identify this notion of the campaign, an AI campaign. So when the case that I just gave you where the chief digital officer is saying, I want to drive customer satisfaction up. >>I want to have more explainable decisions, and I want to drive cost down. Maybe I want to drive, call avoidance. Um, you know, and I want to be able to reduce a handling time, um, to drive those costs down, that is a campaign. And then underneath that campaign, there's all sorts of missions that support that campaign. Some of them are very long running. Some of them are very ephemeral. Some of them are cyclical, and we have this notion of the campaign and then admission planner that supports the goals of that campaign, showing that a leader, how they're doing against that goal by measuring the outcomes of every interaction against that mission and all the missions against the campaign. So, you know, we think accountability is an important part of that process as well. And we've never engaged an executive that says, I want to do this, but I don't want to be accountable to the result, but they're having a hard time identifying I'm spending this money. >>How do I ensure that I'm getting the return? And so we've put our, you know, our secret sauce into that space as well. And that includes, you know, the information around the trustworthiness of those, uh, capabilities. Um, and I should mention as well, you know, when we think about that aspect of the responsible AI capabilities, it's really important. The partnerships that we're driving across that space, no one company is going to have the perfect model intelligence tool to be able to address an enterprise's needs. It's much like cybersecurity, right? People thought initially, well, I'll do it myself. I'll just turn up my firewall. You know, I'll make my applications, you know, uh, you know, roll access much more granular. I'll turn down the permissions on the database and I'll be safe from cybersecurity. And then they realized, no, that's not how it was going to work. >>And by the way, the threats already inside and there's, long-term persistent code running, and you have to be able to scan it, have intelligence around it. And there are different capabilities that are specialized for different components of that problem. The same is going to be turnaround responsible and trustworthy AI. So we're partnered with people like IBM, people like Microsoft and others to really understand how we take the best of what it is that they're doing partner with the best, uh, that they're doing and make those outcomes better for clients. And then there's also leaders like the responsible AI Institute, which is a non-profit independent organization who were thinking about a new rating systems for, um, the space of responsible and trusted AI, thinking about things like certifications for professionals that really drive that notion of education, which is an important component of addressing the problem. And we're providing the integration of our tools directly with those assessments and those certifications. So if someone gets started with our platform, they're already using an ecosystem that includes independent thinkers from across the entire industry, um, including public sector, as well as the private sector, to be able to be on the cutting edge of what it's going to take to really step up to the challenge in that space. >>Yeah. You guys got a lot going on. I mean, you're eight years in now and you've got now an executive to really drive the next scale. You mentioned Bob, some of your investors, uh, Anthem, IBM Norwest, uh, I it's Crunchbase, right? It says you've raised 40 million. Is that the right number? Where are you in fundraising? What can you tell? >>Um, they're a little behind where we are, but, uh, you know, we're staged B and, uh, you know, we're looking forward to now really driving that growth. We're past that startup phase, and now we're into the growth phase. Um, and we're seeing, you know, the focus that we've applied in the industries, um, really starting to pay off, you know, initially it would be a couple of months as a customer was starting to understand what to be able to do with our capabilities to address their challenges. Now we're seeing that happen in weeks. So now is the right time to be able to drive that scalability. So we'll be, you know, looking in the market of how we assemble that, uh, you know, necessary capability to grow. Um, Shay and I have worked, uh, in the past year of, uh, with the board support of building out our go to market around that space. >>Um, and in the first hundred days, it's all about alignment because when you're going to go through that growth phase growth phase, you really have to make sure that things were pointed in the right direction and pointed together in the right direction, simplifying what it is that we're doing for the market. So people could really understand, you know, how unique we are in this space, um, and what they can expect out of an engagement with us. Um, and then, you know, really driving that aspect of designing to go to market. Um, and then scaling that. >>Yeah, I think I, it sounds like you've got, you got, if you're, if you're in down to days or weeks in terms of the ROI, it sounds like you've got product market fit nailed. Now it's about sort of the next phase is you really driving your go to market and the science behind how your dimension and your, your sales productivity, and you can now codify what you've learned in that first phase. I like the approach. A lot of, a lot of times you see companies, of course, this comes out of the west coast, east coast guy, but you see the double, double, triple, triple grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, and then, and then churn becomes that silent killer of the S the software company. I think you guys, it sounds you've, you've taken a much, much more adult-like approach, and now you're ready to really drive that scale. I think it's the new formula really for success for hitting escape velocity. Guys, we got to go, but thanks so much. Uh, uh, Bob, I'll give you the last word, w w w what you mentioned some of your a hundred day priorities. Maybe you can summarize that and what should we be looking for as Martin? >>I mean, I, I think, I think the, you know, the, our measures of success are our clients measure success and the same for our partners. So we're not doing this alone, we're doing it with system integrator partners, and we're doing it with a great technology partners in the market as well. So this is a part about keeping that promise for enterprise AI. And one of the things that I'll say just in the last couple of minutes is, you know, this is not just a company with a great vision and great engineers to develop out this great portfolio, but it's a company with great values, great commitments to its employees and the marketplace and the communities we serve. So I was attracted to the culture of this company, as well as I was, uh, to the, uh, innovation and what they mean to the, to the space of a, >>And I said, I said, I'll give you last word. Actually, I got a question for Shea you Austin based, is that correct? >>But we have a global presence, obviously I'm operating out of Austin, other parts of the U S but, uh, offices in, in, uh, in the UK, as well as in India, >>You're not moving to tax-free Texas. Like everybody else. >>I've got to, I've got an important home, uh, and life in Connecticut cell. I'll be traveling back and forth between Connecticut and Austin, but keeping my home there. >>Thanks for coming on and best of luck, we want to follow your progress and really appreciate your time today. Good luck. >>Thank you, Dave. All right. >>Thank you for watching this cube conversation. This is Dave Volante. We'll see you next time.

>>Um, okay, thanks to the studio there for the handoff. Appreciate it. We're here for breaking news and it's exciting that we have who's the managing director. Google is breaking some hard news here, Dave. We want to bring him in and get commentary while we end up Dave too. Honestly, the story here is cloud city. We are in the cloud city and all, thanks for coming on remotely into our physical hybrid set here. Thanks for coming >>On. Thank you, John. And very excited to be here. What Juliet. >>Well, we got Bon Jovi ready to play. Everyone's waiting for that concert in the year. The only thing standing between bunch of LV and all the great stuff. So a lot of people watching. Thanks for coming on, sir. So you guys got some big news, um, first Erickson partners with you guys on 5g platform, deal with Anthem, as well as, uh, open ran Alliance. You guys are joining huge, a Testament to the industry. I see Google with all your innovation you guys have in the big three cloud hyperscalers. Obviously you guys invented SRE, so you know, you no stranger to large scale. What's the news. Let's tell us why this Erickson news is so important. Let's start with the Erickson announcement. >>Sure. So John, I mean, we are very excited today to finally bring to the market, the strategic partnership that we've been building with Erickson for the last few months, uh, the partnership to recent retreat, which is very important to the industry is you're actually doing this in conjunction with very large CSPs. So it's not been in isolation. You are in fact in the press release that we have already launched something to get the big telecom Italia in Italy, because you will see that also in the past. And really the partnership is on three pillars. Number one, how can CSBs monetize 5g and edge, which is the real team at the moment using Google clouds solutions like the edge computing platform and, and POS, and Erikson's cutting edge 5g components, 5g solutions. And if we can onboard these together at the CSP, such as telecom Italia, that creates massive pain to market efficiency. So that's 0.1 because speed and agility is key John, but then point to it also unlocks a lot of edge use cases for a bunch of verticals, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, so on, which are already starting to launch together with that. Excellent. And so that's the second pillar. And then the final pillar of course, is this continuously cloud native innovation that you just highlighted. John, we are going to try and double down on it between ourselves and Ericsson to really time created this cloud native application suite or 5g or whatever. >>Talk about the innovations around cloud, because the message we're hearing him this year at mobile world Congress, is that the public cloud is driving the innovation. And, you know, I can be a little bit over the top. So the telcos are slow. They're like glaciers, they move slow, but they're just moving packets. They are there. They're moving the network around. The innovation is happening on top. So there's some hardened operations operating the networks. Now you have a build concept cloud native enables that. So you've got containers. You can put that encapsulate that older technology and integrated in. So this is not a rip and replace. Someone has to die to win. This is a partnership with the tellers. Can you share your thoughts on that piece? >>Smart Antone's photo? We believe that it's a massive partnership opportunity. There's zero conflict or tensions in this sort of ecosystem. And the reason for that is when you talk about that containerization and right once and deploy everywhere type architecture that we are trying to do, that's where the cloud native really helps. Like when you create Ericsson 5g solutions with the operators, adjust telecom Italia, once you build a solution, you don't have to worry about, do I need to kick it back again and again, but every deployment, as long as your mantra, genetics and working, you shouldn't be able to have the same experience. >>Yeah, I'm John. I talk all the time in the cube about how developers are really going to drive the edge. You're clearly doing that with your distributed cloud, building out a telco cloud. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how you see that evolving. A lot of the AI that's done today is done in the cloud. A lot of modeling being done. When you think about edge, you think about AI inferencing, you think about all these monetization opportunities. How are you thinking about that? >>So I think David, first of all, it's a fan best six Sigma in how we are looked in at analytics at the edge, right? So we, uh, we have realized that is a very, very, uh, uh, uh, data computing, heavy operation. So certainly the training of the models is still going to stay in cloud for the foreseeable future. But the influencing part that you mentioned is there something that we can offer to the edge? Why is that so important in the pandemic era, think of running a shop or a factory floor, completely autonomously meeting zero minimal human intervention. And if you want to look at an assembly line and look at AI influencing as a way to find out assembly line defects on products in manufacturing, that's very difficult problem to solve unless you actually create those influencing models at the edge. So creating that ecosystem of an Erickson and a Google cloud carrier gives you that edge placement of the workloads that would fit right next to our factory floor in our manufacturing example. And then on top of that, you could run that AI influence thing to really put in the hands of the manufacturer, a visual inspection capability to just bring this to life. >>Great. Thank you for that. And now the other piece of the announcement of course, is the open, open ran. We've been talking about that all weekend and you know, you well, remember when cloud first came out, people were concerned about security. Of course. Now everybody's asking the question, can we still get the reliability and the security that we're used to with the telcos? And of course over time we learned that you guys actually pretty good at security. So how do you see the security component, maybe first talk about the open ran piece, why that's important and how security fits? >>Sure. So first of all, open trend is something that we have taken great interest in the last year or so as it started evolving. And the reason for that is fairly simple. Dave, this aggregation of networks has been happening for some time in the radio layer. We believe that's the final frontier of sort of unlocking and dis-aggregating that radio layer. And why is it so important? 80% of the operators spend globally is on radio. 80% is on radio. If you disaggregate that. And if the internet synergies for your CSP partners and clients, that meant you have standard purpose hardware standard for software with open interfaces, number one, massive difference in VCO. Number two, the supply chain gets streamlined and become still really, really simple way to manage a fairly large distribution. That's about to get larger in 5g and the capital clarity that 5g needs. >>You're thinking of tens of thousands of micro cells and radio cells going everywhere. And having that kind of standardized hardware software with openings of Essex is an extremely important cost dimension to every new site finished that the reason we got to exact open brand was you can now run for a lot of API APIs on the radio net, cetera, that then certainly brings a whole developer community on the radio later. That then helps you do a bunch of things like closed loop automation for network optimization, as well as potentially looking at monetization opportunities by hyper personalizing, yours and mine experiences at the waist level from the self-doubt. And so that really is what is driving us towards this open grind paper. Come on, we go and >>Got a minute and a half. I want to get your thoughts real quick on, on open source and the innovation. Um, Danielle Royston, who's the CEO of telco, Dr. She's at a keynote today. And she mentioned that the iPhone 14 years ago was launched. Okay. And you think about open and you mentioned proprietary with the 5g and having Iran be more commodity and industry standard. That's going to lower the costs increase the surface here of infrastructure. Everyone wins because everyone wants more connectivity options. Software is going to be the key to success for the telco industry. And open source is driving. That is Android. The playbook that you guys pioneered, obviously at Google with the smart phones was very successful. How is that a playbook or an indicator to what could happen at telecom? >>Absolutely. John and the parallel and analogy that you raised is photon. Be believed in the telco world and tossed multi cloud as a unifying software development layer. The app development platform is the way that people will start to drive this innovation, whether it's radio or whether it's in the core or whether it's on the side of pups, same software planning, everywhere that really allows you that whole development models that we are familiar with, but on the telecom side. And that's where we are seeing some massive innovation opportunities for systems to come on board. >>That's great stuff. And I was just heard someone in the hallway just yesterday and say, you want to be the smartphone. You don't want to be the Blackberry going forward. That's pretty much the consensus here at mobile world Congress. I'm all. Thank you for coming on and sharing the hard news and Google regulations on the Erickson Anthem platform, a deal as well as the open Ranton Alliance. Uh, congratulations. Good to see you. And by the way, you'll be keynoting tomorrow on the cube featured segment. So >>Watch that in there. Thank you, John. Thank you. Glad >>To be here. Benching director telecom, industry, solicitor, Google, obviously player. He's managing that business. Big opportunities for Google because they have the technology. They got the chops, Dave, and we're going to now bring this Daniel. Russia says here when to bring up on the stage, Bon Jovi is about to go on behind us Bon Jovi's here. And this is like a nightclub, small intimate setting here in cloud city. Dave Bon. Jovi's right there. He's going to come on stage after we close down here, but first let's bring up the CEO of telco. Dr. And yeah, it was great to see she's hot off the keynote. We're going to see you to Mike. Great to see you. Oh, it's great to be there. We're going to see you tomorrow for an official unpacking of the keynote, but thanks for coming by and closing, >>Swinging by. I never closed down the show. It's been a big, it's been a big day-to-day at MWC and in cloud city, really starting to get packed. I mean, everyone's coming in the band's warming up. You can kind of hear it. Um, I think Elon Musk is about to go on as well. So I mean, it's really happening all the buzz about cloud city out there in the hallway. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I think everyone's talking about it. I'm really, really excited with how it's going. >>Well, this is awesome. While we got you here, we want to put you to work being the cube analyst for the segment. You just heard Google. Uh, we broke them in for a breaking news segment. So hard news Erickson partnership. We're in the factory, former Erickson booth. They're not even here, it's now the Calco VR booth, but that's a relation. And then open ran again, open source, you got five G you got open source all happening. What's your take on this? >>You see, you know, there's two big. And I, I talked about it, my keynote this morning, and there's two big technological changes that are happening in our industry simultaneously. And I don't think we could have had it MWC 21. I certainly wanted to make it about the public cloud. I think I'm sort of successful in doing that. And I think the other piece is open ramp, right? And I think these two big shifts are happening and, um, I'm really thrilled about it. And so, yeah, >>Well I loved your keynote. We were here, live. Chloe was here filling in for Dave while David was going to do some research and some breaking stories to you are on stage. And we were talking well, he's like, there's trillions of dollars, John on the table. And I was making the point, the money is at the middle of the table and it's changing hands if people don't watch it. And then you onstage that this trillions of dollars, this is a real competitive shift with dollars on the table. And you've got cultural collision. You got operators and builders trying to figure out it feels like dev ops is coming in here. Yeah. I mean, what's the, what's the holistic vibe. What's >>The, yeah, I think my message is about, we can use the software and specifically the software, the public cloud to double your ARPU without massive cap X expenditure. And I think the CSPs is always viewed to get the increase in ARPU. I got to build out the network. I got to spend a lot of money. And with these two technologies that require might be dropped. And then in exchange for doubling our poo, why not? We should do that. Absolutely. >>You know, your message has been pretty clear that you got to get on, on the wave that arrived the way you're going to become driftwood. As John said yesterday. And I think it's pretty, it's becoming pretty clear that that's the case for the telcos. I feel like Danielle, that they were entering this decade, perhaps with a little bit more humility than they have in the past. And then, you know, maybe, especially as it relates to developers, we're just talking about building out the edge. We always talk about how developers are really going to be a key factor in the edge. And that's not a wheelhouse necessarily. It's obviously they're going to have to partner for that to have going to have to embrace cloud native. I mean, it's pretty clear that your premise is right on it. We'll see how long it takes, but if it, if they don't move fast, you know, what's going to happen. Well, I >>Think you look at it from the enterprise's perspective. And I think we just heard Google talking about it. We need to provide a tech stack that the enterprises can write to now, historically they haven't had this opportunity historically that CSPs have provided it. Now you're going to be able to write against Google's tech stack. And that's something that is documented. It's available. There's developers out there that know it. Um, and so I think that's the big opportunity and this might be the big use case that they've been looking for with 5g and looking forward to 16th. And so it's a huge opportunity for CSS. >>I think that's an important point because you got to place bets. And if I'm betting on Google or Amazon, Microsoft, okay. Those are pretty safe bets, right. Those guys are going to be around. >>I mean, they're like, no, don't trust the hyperscalers. I'm like, um, are you guys nuts? If they're safe, right. Safe >>Bets in terms of your investment in technology, now you got to move fast. Yeah. That's the other piece of it. You've got to change your business model. >>Well, you gotta be in the right side of history too. I mean, I mean, what is trust actually really mean? The snowflake trust Amazon, it sure did to get them where they are. Um, but now that's a >>Great example, John. It really is because there's a company that can move fast, but at the same time they compete with the same time they add incremental value. And so yeah, >>Here, the, you can see the narrative like, oh no, we're partnering telcos. Aren't bad. No one needs to die to bring in the new containers. Do we'll help them manage that operational legacy. But if they don't move, they're going to have an asset. That'll get rolled up into a SPAC or some sort of private equity deal. And because the old model of building cap backs and extract rents is kind of shifting because the value shifting. So to me, I think this is what we're watching still kind of unknown. Danielle Love to get your thoughts on this because if the value shifts to services, which is a consumption model like cloud, yeah. Then you can, don't have to try and extract the rents out of the cap ex >>Yeah. I don't think you need to own the entire stack to provide value. And I think that's where we are today in telco, right there. I mean, nuts and bolts of the stack, the servers, you know, the cabling, everything. And I'm like, stand on the shoulders of these amazing tech giants that have solved, you know, mega data centers, right. Huge data centers at scale, and just leverage their, their investment and uh, for your own benefit, it starts to focus. And we heard, um, all talking about it starts to focus on your subscriber and driving a great experience for us. Right? Yeah. Well, you're >>Talking about that many times they can do, but you're right. If the conversation hasn't has to go beyond, okay, we're just conductivity. It's gotta be ongoing and be like, oh, it's $10 a month for roaming charges. Ah, great. Yeah. Tick that box, right? It's those value added services that you're talking about and it's an infinite number of those that can be developed. And that's where the partnerships come in a creativity in the industry. It's just >>A blank piece of paper for, well, we, you know, everyone thinks Google knows everything about you, right. We've had the experience on our phone where they're serving of ads and you're like, how did you write Facebook? But you know, who knows more about us than, than Google or your mother, even your telco, you take your phone with you everywhere. Right? And so it's time to start unlocking all of that knowledge and using it to provide >>A really great, by the way, congratulations on the CEO to Toby and the investment a hundred million dollars. That's a game changer statement again, back to the billing. And there's a good, there's a whole new chain, even all up and down the stack of solutions, great stuff. And I want to unpack that tomorrow. I don't hold that. We're going and we're going to meet tomorrow. I want, I wanna want to leave that to stay >>In the data for a second, because you made the point before in your keynote as well. That it's, that it's the data that drives the value of these companies. Why is it that apple, Amazon, Google Facebook now trillion dollar evaluations. It's all about the data and the telcos have the data, but they can't figure out how to turn that into valuation. >>There's two parts of the data problem, which is number one, the data is trapped in on-premise siloed systems that are not open. You can't connect them and they certainly can't do without. And we talked about it, I think yesterday, you know, millions of dollars of expenditure. And I think the other piece that's really interesting is that it's not connected to a mechanism to get it out in a timely manner, right? This is data that's aging by the minute. And when it takes you weeks to get the insight it's useless. Right? And so to Togi we announced the launch to Togi, I'll get a little to Tokyo plug in there, right. To Toby is connecting that insight to the charger, to the engagement engine and getting it out to subscribers. I think that's the beginning of this connection. I think it's a hard problem to solve and would have been solved already. >>But I think the key is leveraging the public cloud to get your data out of on-premise and, and mashing it up against these great services that Google and Azure and Amazon provides to drive it into the hands of the subscriber, make it very actionable, very monetizeable right at the end, that's what they want. More ARPU, more revenue. Right. And you know, we heard some keynotes from GSA yesterday, some big, big guys, you know, talking about how, you know, it's not fair that these other communication platforms are not regulated. You know, telco is heavily regulated and they're like, it's not fair. And I'm like, yep. It's not fair. That's like right. South complaining about it and start treating your customers better. So they are, they're happy to give you more. >>Yeah. And I think that's the message about the assets do, um, well, one thing I will say is this mobile world Congress is that we've been having a lot of fun here in cloud city. I have to ask you a personal question. Have you been having fun? You look great on the keynote of spring to your staff, cloud cities. Beautiful. Spectacular here. Give us some highlights, personal highlights from your trip. So far, >>Number one, I'm, I'm psyched that the keynote is delivered and, and done. I mean, I think it takes my blood pressure down a blind, um, you know, the spring in my step, I wore these fun little tennis shoes and, and that was really fun, but yeah, I'm having, I'm having, I think a lot of things, great conversations. Yes. The attendance has reduced, um, you know, usually you see hundreds of people from the big group carriers, especially the European groups and yeah, the attendance is reduced, but the senior guys are here, right. The senior leadership teams are in the booth or having meetings, running amazing conversations. I think the last year we really did live a decade in one year. I think they woke up to the power of the public cloud. I mean, there was no way that they got business done without cloud based tools. And I think the light bulb went off, I think I'm right in the right moment. Awesome. Do you think that, >>Do you think that they'd think in there, like left money on the table because you look at the pandemic, there were three categories of companies, losers, people who held the line struggled and then winners. Yeah. Big time tailwind booming. Obviously the zooms of the world telcos did well. They were up and running. Uh, this, this was good. You think we might've left some money on the table? They could have done more. >>Yeah. I think the ones that were, you know, people talk about digital transformation where digital telco we're digitally enabled, but I think the pandemic really tested this. Right. Can you deliver a contactless SIM or do you need to go to a store in person to get to go pick it up? And I had a broken SIM during the pandemic. My provider made me go to the store and I'm like, is it even open? And so I heard other stories of telcos that were very digitally enabled, right. They were using Uber to deliver Sims, all sorts of fun, crazy stuff and new ideas. And they were able to pivot right. Agile. And so I think, I think that was a really big telemedicine booming. So >>If you were in a digital business during the pandemic in general, you're out of business maybe unless you were telco, but I think you're right. I think the light bulb went off. It was an aha moment. And they said, oh, if >>We don't, I mean, I am not kidding. Right. As an ex CEO where I was trying to collect signatures on renewals, right. Here's a DocuSign, which for the world is like, duh. I mean, our school uses DocuSign. I had telcos that required an in-person signature, right. In some country once a month on Tuesday between 10 and two. And I'm like, how are you doing business? Like that? That's like the dark ages. >>Yeah. This is where the crypto guys got it right. With know your customer. Right. >>Because they have the data. Well, there's a lot of things that come in wrong. We don't want to get the whole show on that, but then you have great to have you drop biopsy Bon Jovi's here. How did you get Bon Jovi? Huge fan, New Jersey boy Patriots fan. We'd love it. Well, >>Yeah. I mean, who doesn't love Bon Jovi. Right. Um, we knew we wanted a rocker, right. Rock and roll is all about challenging the status quo. Um, that, I mean, since the beginning and that's what we're doing here, right. We're really challenging. Like the way things have been done in telco kind of just shattering the glass ceiling and lots of different ways. Right. Calling the old guys dinosaurs. I'm sure those guys love me. Right. I mean, how much do they hate me right now? Or they're like that girl? Oh, we're punk >>Rock. They're rock and roll. Right, right. I mean, maybe we should have gotten the clash >>Right. Black flag. Right. I'm a little bit old. >>Accessible. Still >>Edgy. Yeah. So really excited to get them here. Um, I've met him before. Um, and so hopefully he'll remember me. It's been a couple of years since I've seen him. So can't wait to connect with him again. I think we have Elon Musk coming up and that's going to be, it's always exciting to hear that guy talk. So >>Yeah, it could be inspiration off after you've talked to space, space X and kind to star lake. >>Right. I mean, those guys are launching rockets and deploying satellites. And >>I think that's really interesting for >>Rural right. In telco. Right. Being able to deploy very quickly in rural where the, maybe the cost, um, you know, per gig doesn't make sense. You know, the cost for deployment of tower. I think, I mean, that's an interesting idea right there. It's exciting. It's exciting. >>He's inspirational. I think a lot of people look at the younger generation coming into this issue. Why are we doing things? A lot of people are questioning and they see the cloud. They're saying, oh, Hey, you're a B, why are we doing this? This is such an easier, better way. Yeah. I think eventually the generation shifts >>It's coming. I'm so excited to be a part of it. Yeah. Great, >>Great leadership. And I want to say that you are real innovative, glad to have us here and presenting with you here. >>Awesome team. I'm psyched to have you guys. We talked last night about how great this partnership has said. Yeah. >>Cuba's keep us rocking inside the cloud city. The streets of the city are packed in here. All stuff. Great stuff. Thanks for coming on. Thanks. Bon Jovi is here. We've got a shot. A bunch of we do we have a screenshot of Bon Jovi? Yup. There it is. Okay. He's about to come on stage and uh, we're gonna take a break here. We're gonna take and send it back to Adam and the team in the studio. Thanks guys.

>> Announcer: From around the globe. >> (upbeat music) It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, welcome back everyone to the Cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of the cube. Got a great guest, Rick Smith, CTO of IBM Anthem client team. Rick. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> Yeah. Thank you, John. Nice to see you as well, virtually. >> First introduce yourself, what you do there, what's going on on your plate these days, honestly, COVID, we're coming out of it soon. Take a minute to introduce yourself. >> Yeah, so I've got about 15 years in the seat with Anthem. Previous to that I worked at Pretty university as the CTO in Indiana. So haven't really left, but started working with Anthem as a technical architect, eventually moved into the CTO role and have been part of, you know, a long journey with them that started at a managed services agreement in 2005. And here we are in 2021. So I've been through a lot of changes they've made to improve themselves and move into digitalization. And certainly the changes we've made too to accommodate that as we went through the years. >> Awesome. Well, thanks for that setup. I really want to dig into this expansion of project Cirrus. You guys have had a multi decade partnership with IBM and then last year you launched this expansion, project Cirrus. Can you describe this project? And what does it mean? And this new term I've heard, enterprise hybrid cloud as a service. Sounds very interesting. >> Yeah. So that's my term. I'm hoping you made it patent or something like that. But the reality is you hear our CEO talk and say that 75% of corporate workloads are not in the cloud yet. Right? And Anthem is no different, right? So they starting to go into cloud and those kinds of things. But they said to us, you know, "Hey, we've got a long series of excellence with you from a delivery perspective, reliability perspective is kind of the bedrock of what we do, but we don't want to be in the data center business, right? And we want to transform and move to cloud. We want to become a more of an AI company and these kinds of things. And we said, well, we think we can actually put together a program... Excuse me, program for you to allow you to do that, right? And so we formed something called project Cirrus which is really an expansion of our partnership. So if I look back, John, we did about 80% of the end-to-end delivery for Anthem from a managed services perspective. In other words, they did a few pieces and we said, we think we could improve that if we had the entire 100%. And so project Cirrus was about, you know, extending from 80% to 100%. It was also about taking a series of applications that were important to them and actually say, we'll actually take them on and transform them 100% all the way to cloud and take advantage of new things. It was about a commitment to closing those data centers, right? So they have five strategic data centers. And about 24,000 hosts that we said we will actually commit to getting those, you know, getting you out of the data centers and moving those to either IBM cloud or close to IBM cloud if you will, I'll come back to that in a minute. And we'll also build something called ATEC, Anthem Technology Excellent Center, if you will. And that's near and dear to my heart because that's sort of my baby, right? So it's a transformation engine and we can talk a little bit more about that in a second. But he said the key to this for us is that, if we look at our trend line, John, over the number of years with Anthem, when we started about 2007 looking at this data, we've grown the number of hosts. We've had to manage, over 600% during that time period. But we've driven down high priority incidents by over 90%. So think about that. You know, this is really important for them to have resiliency and stability in their organization. You know, huge acceleration number of hosts, but drive down the a P zero incidents, if you will. And they said, we need to maintain that and continue to improve upon that. Right? >> Yeah. >> So Cirrus was a commitment to take that further, right? Start driving AAN, AI into the operations, if you will in everything that we do. So Anthem is transforming to do AI and machine learning for their members. We're committed to transforming and doing the same kind of thing on our operational side if you will. >> Yeah, that's awesome. And I think one of the things that's interesting that jumps out at me just as you're talking, first of all super exciting that project you got out there, a lot going on to unpack, but let's do that. I mean, what I hear you saying which is getting me kind of all triggered in a good way is you got transformation going on and innovation same time. You're innovating with this new enterprise hybrid clouds of service concept. You take in more efficiency, you're doing the classic transformational things, making things more efficient, all that good stuff for agility, but it's actually innovative. So this idea of an enterprise hybrid cloud as a service is pretty innovative because now you're talking about things with AI and scale that come into play, right? So you got the setup, you got it moving into being innovative but scales right there. What is this enterprise hybrid cloud as a service? Because is it just agility, is it the AI piece? Where do you see that going? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Right? And you're a great stuff, man, Johnson. (Smith laughs) So again, Anthem's not ready to move all of their workload to cloud, right? And we recognize (indistinct)is going to be out of the data center business. So how can we take non traditional workloads, right? Get them close to cloud, right? Get them very close to cloud, get us out of the managing the data center and actually allow us to move seamlessly from non traditional workloads into cloud. And so what we did was something we think is very innovative. This is the enterprise hybrid cloud piece for me, right? 'Cause normally hybrid cloud says, you have a client data center location and you have cloud. We marry the two together. We said, you're not going to have a data center location anymore. We're going to have our data centers, you know, IBM cloud. And we're actually going to put some dedicated space right next to cloud. And when I say next to cloud, I literally mean within a few feet. And we're going to bring these non traditional workloads there, we're going to take the network operation brain and bring it there. And we're going to allow you then to basically be able to move seamlessly from that to directly into cloud and improve operations at the same time. There's other a side benefit to this too. The other unintended sort of benefit is that what any organization, right? That you find stuff in the data center that hasn't been looked at for a long period of time, right? Application teams haven't looked at it, et cetera, et cetera. We're literally touching every single host. Right? So this gives us an opportunity to also work with our teams and find things that really can just be thrown away. Right? And this is great because we're actually making them more efficient, optimizing the cost structures as we go about it. >> Yeah. I mean the operational model changes me. You mentioned that just that whole point about you're kind of doing some discovery on apps, this becomes kind of sets the table for AI ops which is just code word for day two operations or full cloud native environments, which now you're seeing cloud native include legacy. Yes. Because you can put containers into the mix and you can then create these integration points that you don't have to kind of get rid of the old to bring in the new. So the dimension of what's going on here is pretty interesting, right? When you start thinking about that, "Okay. I can modernize the same time as connect two existing systems." >> That's exactly right. And we put the things very close to one another. And if there's any concerns over data security compliance or healthcare regulated industry, of course, we can have the workloads located in the best location to ensure that security is in place. Right? So that's what's beautiful about it, right? We can kind of hit every layer that's possible from having it just as secure as completely privatized to going directly over to public cloud or connecting the two together as we go along. >> Well, you're definitely a pioneer. I love that enterprise hybrid cloud as a service. I think that's something that's relevant. We're living in a hybrid world. I mean, the cube, we used to go to events now it's virtual events, but when now the events come back, they're hybrid events. Every company is experiencing this phenomenon on hybrid something, not just technology. The ops got to adapt, so super cool. You mentioned something that was your baby. I want to get back to you. And you said you want to talk about, I want to just bring that up. This Anthem technology excellence center is your baby. ATech I think you said for short. >> Yeah. We call it Atech for short. And really, John, we said that it's got to be more than just taking that other 20% that we don't run today. And we're doing some very innovative things moving non-traditional workloads. Like I said, all that kind of stuff was very cool, right? But we need a transformation engine, right? And we need the ability to transform skills. Like upscale the people at Anthem as well as IBM, right there on the account team, it's a big account. We want to think of new ways to work together. Right? Traditional managed services is like, what? Someone cuts a ticket and says, "Give me X by her seat." Right? That's the traditional model. And we said, that's not good enough. We need to collaborate better together. And we are willing to redefining how we form our teams to work with Anthem. Right? So if we want to form, for example, a product ownership team that builds it, runs it, maintains it. And that team has Anthem plus IBM together. we're going to use ATEC as a vehicle to design that and drive it and make sure they have all the skills they need within that group to do that. Right? That's new ways of working together. And it's also to drive things like site reliability engineering, right? Cloud service management operations, make sure that Anthem has the right training, make sure we work together on these kinds of things. So it's really kind of an exciting thing. And it's intended to be a co-created model, right? So we actually work with the Anthem, we co-create using IBM garage methodologies and then the idea is to coast staff it, but it's tended to be a thin layer of world-class engineering. That's really the whole point of it. And yeah, I'm super excited about that. As you move forward, yeah. >> While you're speaking our language, the cube we'd love the co-creation we do with media. It's always fun to create content together. And sometimes in real time put it together like we're doing now. And it creates a bond. I mean, I got to bring this up because this is becoming more and more obvious. And now mainstream, the notion of co-creation, the notion of ecosystems and ecosystems really meaning network effect and integrating with other parties, right? Companies and our systems. If you look at the underlying business model as a systems management software bottle. Okay. So with that, these ecosystems, the network effect. If you build together, you stay together. I mean, this is a different mindset. It's different dynamic. It's a different relationship that companies are now looking for in what used to be called suppliers. Are you supplying something? Are you building together? Right. So this seems to be the theme. Can you expand on this new trend? >> Right. And get away from the strict racing, this person does, this person does that. Instead, we build a team together that has all the skills necessary and that team owns a product life cycle. They build it, run it and maintain it. And that's changing the way we deliver services from IBM perspective significantly, right? Because that's not our traditional model but that's what we're doing. So we're really out in the front end, on the front edge if you will. Changing that model completely. And it's one of the most exciting things for me, you know, as far as going forward. >> You know, this whole idea of partnerships has always kind of been there but now it gets modernized and uplifted if you will, to a new level. And it really is about watching each other's backs too when you have that kind of... 'Cause we're talking about like pushing the envelope on probably the biggest confluence of tech trends I've ever seen in my career. And I've seen many big waves, you know, from the different revolutions and inflection points. Now it's sort of all coming together, right? At scale too, it's happening very fast. I mean, the change over is happening in years that once you took decades before. So it's really is a team approach. >> Yeah. There's no doubt about it. And I see it every day in the work we're doing. And it's like, for example, at Atech where we're working with the data scientists at the Anthem, we're thinking of new ways to build things they've never done before. We're hoping to enable their science, enable the things they want to do for digitization standpoint, the same token I'm taking, you know, a data scientist and putting them on the operation side too. Right? So we're doing both these kinds of things together. And really I didn't say this before, but this whole thing is about driving automation, right? Driving down, no human touch, soft service, automation. That is kind of been the linchpin of this. And I also want to say John, that doing this all during a pandemic, you know, we signed our new agreement together with them at a quarter, at the end of March in 2020. And we went live in August 1st with all the changes, the extra 20% capacity to over 300 plus applications completely, started Atech from co-creation in a pandemic. And we both agreed as a company, I give great credit to our client and to the numbers involved that everyone set up front and during March. The pandemic's not an excuse to get anything done. So, we're going to go forward and make it happen. That's probably the thing I'm most proud about. That was just... It's crazy when you think of how big the project was and do pull it off during a pandemic. >> Yeah. There's going to be two sides of the street and this one, this pandemics over the ones who made it through and refactored and or innovated. Cause it's not just about being and having a tale, it's about taking advantage of the situation and the ones who didn't do anything. Whether they were in the cloud or not, that's not to me. That's not the issue of you're in the cloud you had an advantage. >> It's not. Right. >> But there's going to be two sides of the streets. And I think the one thing that the pandemic has shown us and I'd love to get your reaction as a final comment here is that when you pull back when the pandemic, it showed all the scabs, it shows everything. And you can see what's obvious and it becomes a forcing function. Necessity's the mother of all invention as expression goes so you can see what's worth doubling down on and you can see the productivity gains and that becomes clear. >> Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's good and bad with everything, right? Pros and cons, like you said, and you know, one of the cons I think is the having to schedule all interactions is definitely a con, right? Because when you spend time not only with the client virtually but in person, you do get the advantage of having, you know, chalk talks and things like that. They're not scheduled. Right? So that's definitely one of the cons side, but one of the pro side is it did provide some focus, right? Kind of extreme focus and on what's important and allowed us to, you know, I think dove some bonds with the Anthem leadership team and the application teams doing it virtually over cameras like this that maybe happen at a larger scale than they might have normally been because the pandemic kind of allowed us to do that and made that happen. >> Great stuff, Rick, great insight. Great to have you on the cube as always. Great to talk tech, talk business, talk about the transformation and innovation and the cloud scale. Thanks for coming on Rick Smith, CTO of the IBM Anthem client team. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> You're welcome. Thanks John. >> Okay. Cube coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John. For your host of the cube. Thanks for watching. (soft music) (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hello and welcome back to the cube's ongoing coverage of IBM Think 2021, the virtual edition. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm excited to introduce our next segment. We're going to dig into the intersection of machines and humans and the changing nature of work, worker productivity, and the potential of humans. With me is Glenn Finch, who is the global managing partner for data and AI at IBM Glenn, great to see you again. Thanks for coming on. >> Dave. Good to be with you, always a lot of fun to chat. >> I'm interested in this concept that you've been working on about amplifying worker potential. You've got humans, you've got digital workers coming together. Maybe you could talk a little bit about what you're seeing at that intersection. >> You know, it's interesting for most of my career I've always thought about amplifying human worker potential. And, you know, I would say over the last five years, you know we start to think about this concept of digital workers and amplifying their potential so that human potential can extend even further. What's cool is when we get them both to work together: amplifying digital worker potential, amplifying human worker potential, to radically change how service is experienced by an end consumer. I mean, that's really the winner is when you start seeing the end consumer, the end user fundamentally feeling the difference in the experience. >> I mean, a lot of the, you see a lot of the trade press and the journalists, they like to focus on the sort of the negative of automation. But when you talk to people who have implemented things take, for example, RPA, they're so happy that they're not having to do these menial tasks anymore. And then it's sort of the interesting discussion is, okay, well, what are you doing with your free time? What are you doing with your weekends? So how should we be thinking about that? What you, what you called amplifying human worker potential, what has to occur for that outcome? >> And you know, that all my life I've spent time making money for people, right? And this last year I was involved in a project where it, it fundamentally changed is tied to answer that exact question. You know, the service men and women in America who are willing to risk their lives, you know for our country, they file claims for medical benefits. And on average, it would take 15 days to get a response. We actually, for about 70 or 80% of them we've taken that down to like 15 minutes. And to do that, you can't just drop in a RPA. You can't just drop in AI. You, it's not one thing, right? It's this, it's this seamless interaction between digital workers and human workers, right? So that a lot of the more routine mundane tasks can be done by AI and, and robotics, but all of the really hard complex cases that only a human being can adjudicate, that's what the folks that were doing the more mundane work can go focus on. So, I mean, that's what makes me come to work every day is if I can change the life of a service man or woman that was willing to risk their lives for our country. So that that's, that's the concept. Now, the critical piece of what I said, it's not about implementing AI and robotics anymore, because a lot of that starts to get very rote, but picking up on, okay, we've liberated this block of human capability. How do we reposition it? How do we re-skill it? How do we get them to focus on new things? That's just as important the human change aspect, incredibly important. >> Yeah. I mean, that's interesting, because you're right. I mean, the downside, you mentioned RPA a lot of it is paving the cow path and you know the human in the loop piece has been has been missing and that's obviously changing. But what about the flip side of that equation? Where, you know, you asked the question, okay what can humans do that machines can't do? That equation you know, continues to evolve, but maybe you could talk about where you've amplified the digital worker potential. >> Yeah. So, you know, one of our clients has Anthem and you know, they've been on a variety of programs with us to talk about this, but, you know we just recorded, you know, another session with them for Think where the Chief Technology Officer came and talked about how they wanted to radically change their member experience. And when you think about the last year, I mean, I don't know, Dave, I know you travel a lot cause I see you in all the places that I'm in. But I don't know if you remember, like 15 months ago if you had to wait on the phone for two minutes you thought it was an eternity, right? You're like, what's the matter with me? I'm a frequent flyer. I deserve a better service than this. Then as COVID started roll around, those wait times were two hours, and then 30 days into COVID, if you got a call back within two days or two weeks, it was a blessing, right? So all of our expectations changed in an instant, right? So I have to say over the last 12 to 15 months that's where we've been spending a lot of our time in all of those human contact, human touch places to radically transition the ability to be responsive and touch people with the same experience that we had 15 months ago to get an answer back in two minutes. You can't get enough people right now to do that. And so we're forced to make sure that the digital experience is what that needs to be. So the digital worker has to be up and on, and extending the brand experience the same way that the human worker was back when everybody could be at a call center. That make sense, Dave? >> Yeah. I mean, what I think I like about this conversation Glenn is it's not an either/or, it's not a zero-sum game, which it kind of, they sort of used to be, I mean we've talked about this before humans and machines have always replaced humans at certain tasks, but it never really had cognitive tasks. And that's why I think there's a lot of fear out there, but what you're talking about is, is a potential to amplify both human and digital capabilities. And I think that people might look at that and say, well, wait a minute. Isn't it a zero-sum game, but it but it's not. Explain why. >> Yeah. So we're never finding the zero-sum game, because there is always something for people to do, right? And so, you know I talked about the one amplification of digital worker at Anthem. Let me switch to an amplification of a human worker. So state of Rhode Island, you know, we had the great honor to work with their governor and their department of health and human services around again, around the whole COVID thing. We started out just answering basic questions and helping with contact racing. And then, from there, we moved into, you know helping them with their data in AI, being able to answer questions. Why are there hotspots? Why, you know, should I shut this portion of the city down? Should I shut bars down? Should I do this? And the governor and the health and human services director were constantly saying in press briefings in the morning. Well, you know, we learned from our partners IBM that we want to consider this, right? And we did pinpoint vaccinations and other things like that. To me, that's that whole continuum. So, you know, we liberated some people from one spot. They went to work in another spot, all human beings guided by AI. So, you know, I think this is all about, you know for the first time in our lives, being able to realize sort of the, the vaulted member experience or client experience that everybody's already talked about using a blend of digital workers and human workers. It's just, it's all about the experience I think. >> I mean, you're, you're laying out some really good outcomes and you mentioned some of the, you know, the folks in the military, the healthcare examples and I'm struck because if you think about the, look at the numbers, I mean the productivity gains over the last 20 years particularly in the US and Europe, it's not the case for China because their productivity is exploding, but but it's gone down. And so when you think about the big problems that we face in society: climate change, income inequality, I mean these are big chewy problems that, you know aren't going to, humans, you just can't throw humans at the problem that's, that's been been proven. And I'm curious as to if, you know how you see it in terms of some of those other outcomes of, and the potential that is there. And, can you give us a glimpse as to what tech is involved underneath all of this? >> Sure. So, you know the first one outcomes you know that whole picture changes with the business cycle, right? I'd love to tell you that it's always these three outcomes, but, you know during downturns and business cycles cost-based outcomes are, you know, are paramount, because people are thinking about survival, right? In upticks, people are worried about, you know converting new business, growth, they're worried about net promoter score, they're worried about experience score. And then over the last 12 to 18 months, you know we've seen this whole concept of carbon footprint and sustainability all tied into the outcomes. So, hey, did you realize that shifting these 22 legacy applications from here to the cloud would reduce your carbon footprint by 3%? No. Right? And so, the big hitters are always, you know, the, the cost metric, the sort of time to value or the whole cycle time and the process and net promoter score. Those are generally in all of the, you know all the plays, obviously the bookends, you know around what's happening with, you know, the the economy, what's happening with carbon, what's happening with sustainability are always in there. Now on the technology side, boy, that's the cool part about working for IBM, right? Is that there's a new thing that shows up on my door every two weeks from either the math and science labs, or from a new ecosystem partner. And that's one of the things that I will say about you know, over the last 12 to 15 months, you've seen this massive shift from IBM to go away from pure blue, to embrace the whole ecosystem. So, you know, Dave the stuff I work with every day is you know, AI, computer vision, blockchain, automation, quantum, connected operations, not just software robots but now human robots, digital twin, all these things where we are digitally rendering what used to be a very paper-based legacy, right? So, boy, I couldn't be more excited to be a part of that. And then now with the opening up to all the hyperscalers, the Microsoft, the Google, the Amazon, the, you know, Salesforce, Adobe, all those folks, it's like a candy store. And quite honestly, my single greatest challenge is to kind of bring all of that together and point it at a series of three or four buyers at a chief marketing officer, experience officer for the whole customer piece. At a chief human resource officer around the town piece and at a CFO or a chief procurement officer for finance and supply chain. I'm sorry to answer, so, you know, long-winded, but it's, it's awesome out there. >> That was a great answer. And I think, you know, I joked the other day, Glenn that Milton Friedman must be turning over in his grave because he said, you know the only job of a company is to make profits for its shareholders and increase shareholder value. But, ironically, you know things like ESG, sustainability, climate change, they actually make business sense. So it's really not antithetical to, you know Friedman economics necessarily, but it's a good business. And I think, I think the other thing that I'm excited about is that there is some like deep tech we're seeing an explosion of of something as fundamental as processing power like we've never seen before, but he talks about, you know Moore's law being dead well, okay. With the doubling of of processor performance every 24 months, we're now at a quadrupling when you include GPU's and NPUs and accelerators and all that. I mean, that is going to power the the next wave of machine intelligence. And that really is exciting. >> Yeah. I, you know, it's I feel blessed every day to come to work that you know, I can, amass all these technologies and change how human beings experience service. I mean that's, man, that whole service experience that's what I've lived for, for, you know two and a half decades in my career, is to not to just to make and deploy stuff that's cool technically, but to change people's lives. I mean, that's it for me, that's, you know, that's that's the way that I want to ride, so I couldn't be more excited to do that stuff. >> Well Glenn thanks so much for coming on your passion shows right through the camera. And hopefully we're, face-to-face, you know, sometime soon maybe, maybe later on this year, but for sure. Knock on wood, 2022. All right. Hey, great to see you, thank you so much >> Dave. Same to you, thanks. Have a great rest of the day. >> All right, thank you. And thanks for following along with our continuing broadcast of IBM Think 2021, you're watching the cube the leader, digital tech coverage, be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021 brought to you by IBM. >> Hi, welcome back everyone to the Cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of the cube. Got a great guest, Rick Smith, CTO of IBM Anthem client team. Rick. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> Yeah. Thank you, John. Nice to see you as well, virtually. >> First introduce yourself, what you do there, what's going on on your plate these days, honestly, COVID, we're coming out of it soon. Take a minute to introduce yourself. >> Yeah, so I've got about 15 years in the seat with Anthem. Previous to that I worked at Pretty university as the CTO in Indiana. So haven't really left, but started working with Anthem as a technical architect, eventually moved into the CTO role and have been part of, you know, a long journey with them that started at a managed services agreement in 2005. And here we are in 2021. So I've been through a lot of changes they've made to improve themselves and move into digitalization. And certainly the changes we've made too to accommodate that as we went through the years. >> Awesome. Well, thanks for that setup. I really want to dig into this expansion of project Sirius. You guys have had a multi decade partnership with IBM and then last year you launched this expansion, project Sirus. Can you describe this project? And what does it mean? And this new term I've heard, enterprise hybrid cloud as a service. Sounds very interesting. >> Yeah. So that's my term. I'm hoping you made it patent or something like that. But the reality is you hear our CEO talk and say that 75% of corporate workloads are not in the cloud yet. Right? And Anthem is no different, right? So they starting to go into cloud and those kinds of things. But they said to us, you know, "Hey, we've got a long series of excellence with you from a delivery perspective, reliability perspective is kind of the bedrock of what we do, but we don't want to be in the data center business, right? And we want to transform and move to cloud. We want to become a more of an AI company and these kinds of things. And we said, well, we think we can actually put together a program... Excuse me, program for you to allow you to do that, right? And so we formed something called project Sirius which is really an expansion of our partnership. So if I look back, John, we did about 80% of the end-to-end delivery for Anthem from a managed services perspective. In other words, they did a few pieces and we said, we think we could improve that if we had the entire 100%. And so project Sirius was about, you know, extending from 80% to 100%. It was also about taking a series of applications that were important to them and actually say, we'll actually take them on and transform them 100% all the way to cloud and take advantage of new things. It was about a commitment to closing those data centers, right? So they have five strategic data centers. And about 24,000 hosts that we said we will actually commit to getting those, you know, getting you out of the data centers and moving those to either IBM cloud or close to IBM cloud if you will, I'll come back to that in a minute. And we'll also build something called ATEC, Anthem Technology Excellent Center, if you will. And that's near and dear to my heart because that's sort of my baby, right? So it's a transformation engine and we can talk a little bit more about that in a second. But he said the key to this for us is that, if we look at our trend line, John, over the number of years with Anthem, when we started about 2007 looking at this data, we've grown the number of hosts. We've had to manage, over 600% during that time period. But we've driven down high priority incidents by over 90%. So think about that. You know, this is really important for them to have resiliency and stability in their organization. You know, huge acceleration number of hosts, but drive down the a P zero incidents, if you will. And they said, we need to maintain that and continue to improve upon that. Right? >> Yeah. >> So Sirius was a commitment to take that further, right? Start driving AAN, AI into the operations, if you will in everything that we do. So Anthem is transforming to do AI and machine learning for their members. We're committed to transforming and doing the same kind of thing on our operational side if you will. >> Yeah, that's awesome. And I think one of the things that's interesting that jumps out at me just as you're talking, first of all super exciting that project you got out there, a lot going on to unpack, but let's do that. I mean, what I hear you saying which is getting me kind of all triggered in a good way is you got transformation going on and innovation same time. You're innovating with this new enterprise hybrid clouds of service concept. You take in more efficiency, you're doing the classic transformational things, making things more efficient, all that good stuff for agility, but it's actually innovative. So this idea of an enterprise hybrid cloud as a service is pretty innovative because now you're talking about things with AI and scale that come into play, right? So you got the setup, you got it moving into being innovative but scales right there. What is this enterprise hybrid cloud as a service? Because is it just agility, is it the AI piece? Where do you see that going? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Right? And you're a great stuff, man, Johnson. (Smith laughs) So again, Anthem's not ready to move all of their workload to cloud, right? And we recognize (indistinct)is going to be out of the data center business. So how can we take non traditional workloads, right? Get them close to cloud, right? Get them very close to cloud, get us out of the managing the data center and actually allow us to move seamlessly from non traditional workloads into cloud. And so what we did was something we think is very innovative. This is the enterprise hybrid cloud piece for me, right? 'Cause normally hybrid cloud says, you have a client data center location and you have cloud. We marry the two together. We said, you're not going to have a data center location anymore. We're going to have our data centers, you know, IBM cloud. And we're actually going to put some dedicated space right next to cloud. And when I say next to cloud, I literally mean within a few feet. And we're going to bring these non traditional workloads there, we're going to take the network operation brain and bring it there. And we're going to allow you then to basically be able to move seamlessly from that to directly into cloud and improve operations at the same time. There's other a side benefit to this too. The other unintended sort of benefit is that what any organization, right? That you find stuff in the data center that hasn't been looked at for a long period of time, right? Application teams haven't looked at it, et cetera, et cetera. We're literally touching every single host. Right? So this gives us an opportunity to also work with our teams and find things that really can just be thrown away. Right? And this is great because we're actually making them more efficient, optimizing the cost structures as we go about it. >> Yeah. I mean the operational model changes me. You mentioned that just that whole point about you're kind of doing some discovery on apps, this becomes kind of sets the table for AI ops which is just code word for day two operations or full cloud native environments, which now you're seeing cloud native include legacy. Yes. Because you can put containers into the mix and you can then create these integration points that you don't have to kind of get rid of the old to bring in the new. So the dimension of what's going on here is pretty interesting, right? When you start thinking about that, "Okay. I can modernize the same time as connect two existing systems." >> That's exactly right. And we put the things very close to one another. And if there's any concerns over data security compliance or healthcare regulated industry, of course, we can have the workloads located in the best location to ensure that security is in place. Right? So that's what's beautiful about it, right? We can kind of hit every layer that's possible from having it just as secure as completely privatized to going directly over to public cloud or connecting the two together as we go along. >> Well, you're definitely a pioneer. I love that enterprise hybrid cloud as a service. I think that's something that's relevant. We're living in a hybrid world. I mean, the cube, we used to go to events now it's virtual events, but when now the events come back, they're hybrid events. Every company is experiencing this phenomenon on hybrid something, not just technology. The ops got to adapt, so super cool. You mentioned something that was your baby. I want to get back to you. And you said you want to talk about, I want to just bring that up. This Anthem technology excellence center is your baby. ATech I think you said for short. >> Yeah. We call it Atech for short. And really, John, we said that it's got to be more than just taking that other 20% that we don't run today. And we're doing some very innovative things moving non-traditional workloads. Like I said, all that kind of stuff was very cool, right? But we need a transformation engine, right? And we need the ability to transform skills. Like upscale the people at Anthem as well as IBM, right there on the account team, it's a big account. We want to think of new ways to work together. Right? Traditional managed services is like, what? Someone cuts a ticket and says, "Give me X by her seat." Right? That's the traditional model. And we said, that's not good enough. We need to collaborate better together. And we are willing to redefining how we form our teams to work with Anthem. Right? So if we want to form, for example, a product ownership team that builds it, runs it, maintains it. And that team has Anthem plus IBM together. we're going to use ATEC as a vehicle to design that and drive it and make sure they have all the skills they need within that group to do that. Right? That's new ways of working together. And it's also to drive things like site reliability engineering, right? Cloud service management operations, make sure that Anthem has the right training, make sure we work together on these kinds of things. So it's really kind of an exciting thing. And it's intended to be a co-created model, right? So we actually work with the Anthem, we co-create using IBM garage methodologies and then the idea is to coast staff it, but it's tended to be a thin layer of world-class engineering. That's really the whole point of it. And yeah, I'm super excited about that. As you move forward, yeah. >> While you're speaking our language, the cube we'd love the co-creation we do with media. It's always fun to create content together. And sometimes in real time put it together like we're doing now. And it creates a bond. I mean, I got to bring this up because this is becoming more and more obvious. And now mainstream, the notion of co-creation, the notion of ecosystems and ecosystems really meaning network effect and integrating with other parties, right? Companies and our systems. If you look at the underlying business model as a systems management software bottle. Okay. So with that, these ecosystems, the network effect. If you build together, you stay together. I mean, this is a different mindset. It's different dynamic. It's a different relationship that companies are now looking for in what used to be called suppliers. Are you supplying something? Are you building together? Right. So this seems to be the theme. Can you expand on this new trend? >> Right. And get away from the strict racing, this person does, this person does that. Instead, we build a team together that has all the skills necessary and that team owns a product life cycle. They build it, run it and maintain it. And that's changing the way we deliver services from IBM perspective significantly, right? Because that's not our traditional model but that's what we're doing. So we're really out in the front end, on the front edge if you will. Changing that model completely. And it's one of the most exciting things for me, you know, as far as going forward. >> You know, this whole idea of partnerships has always kind of been there but now it gets modernized and uplifted if you will, to a new level. And it really is about watching each other's backs too when you have that kind of... 'Cause we're talking about like pushing the envelope on probably the biggest confluence of tech trends I've ever seen in my career. And I've seen many big waves, you know, from the different revolutions and inflection points. Now it's sort of all coming together, right? At scale too, it's happening very fast. I mean, the change over is happening in years that once you took decades before. So it's really is a team approach. >> Yeah. There's no doubt about it. And I see it every day in the work we're doing. And it's like, for example, at Atech where we're working with the data scientists at the Anthem, we're thinking of new ways to build things they've never done before. We're hoping to enable their science, enable the things they want to do for digitization standpoint, the same token I'm taking, you know, a data scientist and putting them on the operation side too. Right? So we're doing both these kinds of things together. And really I didn't say this before, but this whole thing is about driving automation, right? Driving down, no human touch, soft service, automation. That is kind of been the linchpin of this. And I also want to say John, that doing this all during a pandemic, you know, we signed our new agreement together with them at a quarter, at the end of March in 2020. And we went live in August 1st with all the changes, the extra 20% capacity to over 300 plus applications completely, started Atech from co-creation in a pandemic. And we both agreed as a company, I give great credit to our client and to the numbers involved that everyone set up front and during March. The pandemic's not an excuse to get anything done. So, we're going to go forward and make it happen. That's probably the thing I'm most proud about. That was just... It's crazy when you think of how big the project was and do pull it off during a pandemic. >> Yeah. There's going to be two sides of the street and this one, this pandemics over the ones who made it through and refactored and or innovated. Cause it's not just about being and having a tale, it's about taking advantage of the situation and the ones who didn't do anything. Whether they were in the cloud or not, that's not to me. That's not the issue of you're in the cloud you had an advantage. >> It's not. Right. >> But there's going to be two sides of the streets. And I think the one thing that the pandemic has shown us and I'd love to get your reaction as a final comment here is that when you pull back when the pandemic, it showed all the scabs, it shows everything. And you can see what's obvious and it becomes a forcing function. Necessity's the mother of all invention as expression goes so you can see what's worth doubling down on and you can see the productivity gains and that becomes clear. >> Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's good and bad with everything, right? Pros and cons, like you said, and you know, one of the cons I think is the having to schedule all interactions is definitely a con, right? Because when you spend time not only with the client virtually but in person, you do get the advantage of having, you know, chalk talks and things like that. They're not scheduled. Right? So that's definitely one of the cons side, but one of the pro side is it did provide some focus, right? Kind of extreme focus and on what's important and allowed us to, you know, I think dove some bonds with the Anthem leadership team and the application teams doing it virtually over cameras like this that maybe happen at a larger scale than they might have normally been because the pandemic kind of allowed us to do that and made that happen. >> Great stuff, Rick, great insight. Great to have you on the cube as always. Great to talk tech, talk business, talk about the transformation and innovation and the cloud scale. Thanks for coming on Rick Smith, CTO of the IBM Anthem client team. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> You're welcome. Thanks John. >> Okay. Cube coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John. For your host of the cube. Thanks for watching. (soft music) (upbeat music)

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the special presentation from theCUBE, where we're exploring the future of cloud and its business impact in the coming decade, kind of where we've come from and where we're going. My name is Dave Vellante, and with me is a CIO/CTO/COO, and longtime colleague, Dan Sheehan. Hello, Dan, how're you doing? >> Hey, Dave, how are you doing? Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. So folks, Dan has been in the technology industry for a number of years. He's overseen, you know, large-multi, tens of millions of dollar ERP application development efforts, He was a CIO of a marketing, you know, direct mail company. Dan, we met at ADVO, it seems like such a (snickers) long time ago. >> Yeah, that was a long time ago, back in Connecticut. Back in the early 2000s. >> Yeah, ancient days. But pretty serious data for back then, you know, the early 2000s, and then you did a six-year stint as a EVP and CIO at Dunkin' Brands. I remember I came out to see you when I was starting Wikibon and trying to understand. >> Oh yeah. >> You know, what the CIOs cared about. You were so helpful and thanks for that. And that was a big deal. I mean, Dunkin', 17,000 points of distribution. I mean, that was sort of a complicated situation, right? >> Oh yeah. >> So, great experience. >> I mean, when you get involved with franchisees and trying to make everybody happy, yes, that was a lot of fun. >> And then you had a number of other roles, one was as COO at Modell's, and then to fast-forward, Beacon Health. You were EVP and CIO there. And you also, it looked like you had a kind of a business and operational role. You helped the company get acquired by Anthem Blue Cross. So awesome, congrats on that. That must've been a great experience. >> It was. A year of my life, yes. (both laugh) >> You're still standing. So anyway, you can see Dan, he's like this multi-tool star, he's seen a lot of changes in the technology business. So Dan, again, welcome back. Dan Sheehan. >> Oh, thank you. >> So when you started in your career, you know, there was no cloud, right? I mean, you had to do everything. It's funny, I remember I was... You probably know Bill Rucci, CIO of Hartford Steam Boiler. I remember we were talking one day, and this again was pre-cloud and he said, you know, I'm thinking, do I really need to manage my own email? I mean, back then, we did everything. So you had to provision infrastructure so you could write apps, and that was important. That frustrated CFOs, but it was a necessary piece of the value chain. So how have you seen that sort of IT value contribution shift over the years? Let's start there. >> Ah, well, I think it comes down to demand versus capacity. If you look at where companies want to go, they want to do a lot with technology. Technology has taken on a larger role. It's no longer and has not been a, so to speak, cost center. So I think the demand for making change and driving a company forward or reducing costs, there are other executives, peers to the CIO, to the CTO that are looking to do more, and when it comes to doing more, that means more demand, and you step back and you look at what the CIO has for capacity. Looking at Quick Solution's data, solutions in the cloud is appealing, and there are, you know, times where other functions talk to a vendor and see that they can get a vertical solution done pretty quickly. They go off and take that on, or it could be, you know, a ServiceNow capability that you want to implement across the company, and you do that just like an ERP type of roll up. But the bottom line is there are solutions out there that have pushed, I would say the IT organization to look at their capacity versus demand, and sometimes you can get things done quicker with a cloud type of solution. >> So how did you look at that shadow IT as a CIO? Was it something that kind of ticked you off or like you're sort of implying that it made you better? >> Well, I think it does ultimately make you better, but I think you have to partner with the functions because if you don't, you get these types of scenarios, and I've been involved in these just as well. You are busy with, you know, fulfilling your objectives as the leader of IT, and then you get a knock on the door from, let's say marketing or operations, and they say, hey, we just purchased this X solution and we want to integrate it with A, B and C. Well, that was not on the budget or on the IT roadmap or the IT strategy that was linked to the IT, I'm sorry, to the business strategy, and all of a sudden now you have more demand versus the capacity, and then you have to go start reprioritizing. So it's more of, yeah, kind of disrupted, but at the same time, it pushed, you know, the needle of the company forward. But it's all about just working together to make it happen. And that's a lot of, you know, hard conversations when you have to start reprioritizing capacity. >> Well, so let's talk about that alignment. I mean, there's always been a sort of a schism between IT and its ability to deliver, manage demand, and the business will always want you to go faster. They want IT to develop the systems, you know, of course, for less and then they want you to eat the cost of maintaining them, so (chuckles) there's been that tension. But in many ways, that CIO's job is alignment. I mean, it seems to me anyway that schism has certainly narrowed and the cloud's been been part of that, but what do you see as that trajectory over the years and where do you see it going? >> Well, I think it's going to continue to move forward, and depending upon the service, you know, companies are going to take advantage of those services. So yes, some of the non-mission critical capabilities that you would want to move out to the cloud or have somebody else do it, so to speak, that's going to continue to happen because they should be able to do it a lot cheaper than you can, just like use you mentioned a few moments ago about email. I did not want to maintain, you know, exchange service and keeping that all up and running. I moved quickly to Microsoft 365 and that's been a world of difference, but that's just one example. But when you have mission critical apps, you're going to have to make a decision if you want to continue to house them in-house or push them out to an AWS and house them there. So maybe you don't need a large data center and you can utilize some of the best and brightest around security, around managing size of the infrastructure and getting some of their engineering help, which can help. So it just depends upon the application, so to speak, or a function that you're trying to support. And you got to really look at your enterprise architecture and see where that makes sense. So you got to have a hybrid. I see and I have, you know, managed towards a hybrid way of looking at your architecture. >> Okay, so obviously the cloud played a role in that change, and of course, you were in healthcare too so you had to be somewhat careful, >> Yep. >> With the cloud. But you mentioned this hybrid architecture. I mean, from a technologist standpoint and a business standpoint, what do you want out of, you know, you hear a hybrid, multi, all the buzz words. What are you looking for then? Is it a consistent experience? Is it a consistent security? Or is it sort of more horses for courses, where you're trying to run a workload in the right place? What's your philosophy on that? >> Well, I mean, all those things matter, but you're looking at obviously, cost, you're looking at engagement. How does these services engage? Whether it's internal employees or external clients who you're servicing, and you want to get to a cost structure that makes sense in terms of managing those services as well as those mission critical apps. So it comes down to looking at the dollars and cents, as well as what type of services you can provide. In many cases, if you can provide a cheaper and increase the overall services, you're going to go down that path. And just like we did with ServiceNow, I did that at Beacon and also at DentaQuest two healthcare companies. We were able to, you know, remove duplicated, so to speak, ticketing systems and move to one and allow a better experience for the internal employee. They can do self-service, they can look at metrics, they can see status, real-time status on where their request was. So that made a bigger difference. So you engaged the employee differently, better, and then you also reduce your costs. >> Well, how about the economics? I mean, your experience that cloud is cheaper. You hear a lot of the, you know, a lot of the legacy players are saying, oh, no cloud's super expensive. Wait till you get that Amazon bill. (laughs) What's the truth? >> Well, I think there's still a lot of maturing that needs to go on, because unfortunately, depending upon the company, so let's use a couple of examples. So let's look at a startup. You look at a startup, they're probably going to look at all their services being in the cloud and being delivered through a SaaS model, and that's going to be an expense, that's going to be most likely a per user expense per month or per year, however, they structure the contract. And right out of the gate, that's going to be a top line expense that has to be managed going forward. Now you look at companies that have been around for a while, and two of the last companies I worked with, had a lot of technical debt, had on-prem applications. And when you started to look at how to move forward, you know, you had CFOs that were used to going to buy software, capitalize in that software over, you know, five years, sometimes three years, and using that investment to be capitalized, and that would sit below the line, so to speak. Now, don't get me wrong, you still have to pay for it, it's just a matter of where it sits. And when you're running a company and you're looking at the financials, not having that cost on your operational expenses, so to speak, if you're not looking at the depreciation through those numbers, that was advantageous to a CFO many years ago. Now you come to them and say, hey, we're going to move forward with a new HR system, and it's all increasing the expense because there's nothing else to capitalize. Those are different conversations, and all of a sudden your expenses have increased, and yes, you have to make sure that the businesses behind you, with respects to an ROI and supporting it. >> Yeah, so as long as the value is there, and that's a part of the alignment. I want to ask you about cloud pricing strategies because you mentioned ServiceNow, you know, Salesforce is in there, Workday. If you look at the way these guys price, it's really not true cloud pricing in a way, cause they're going to have you sign up for an annual license, you know, a lot of times you got pay up front, or if you want a discount, you're going to have to sign up for two years or three years. But now you see guys like Snowflake coming in, you know, big high-profile IPO. They actually charge you on a consumption-based model. What are your thoughts on that? Do you see that as sort of a trend in the coming decade? >> No, I absolutely think it's going to be on a trend, because consumption means more transactions and more transactions means more computing, and they're going to look at charging it just like any other utility charges. So yes, I see that trend continuing. Did a big deal with UltiPro HR, and yeah, that was all based upon user head count, but they were talking about looking at their payroll and changing their costing on payroll down the road. With their merger, or they went from being a public company to a private company, and now looking to merge with Kronos. I can see where time and attendance and payroll will stop being looked at as a transaction, right? It's a weekly or bi-weekly or monthly, however the company pays, and yes, there is dollars to be made there. >> Well, so let me ask you as a CIO and a business, you know, COO. One of the challenges that you hear with the cloud is okay, if I get my Amazon bill, it's something that Snowflake has talked about, where you know, to me, it's the ideal model, but on the other hand, the transparency is not necessarily there. You don't know what it's going to be at the end of (mumbles) Would you rather have more certainty as to what that bill's going to look like? Or would you rather have it aligned with consumption and the value to the business? >> Well, you know, that's a great question, because yes, I mean, budgets are usually built upon a number that's fixed. Now, no, don't get me wrong. I mean, when I look at the wide area network, the cost for internet services, yes, sometimes we need to increase and that means an increase in the overall cost, but that consumption, that transactional, that's going to be a different way of having to go ahead and budget. You have to budget now for the maximum transactions you anticipate with a growth of a company, and then you need to take a look at that you know, if you're budgeting. I know we were on a calendar fiscal year, so we started up budgeting process in August and we finalized at sometime in the end of October, November for the proceeding year, and if that's the case, you need to get a little bit better on what your consumptions are going to be, because especially if you're a public company, going out on the street with some numbers, those numbers could vary based upon a high transaction volume and the cost, and maybe you're not getting the results on the top end, on the revenue side. So I think, yeah, it's going to be an interesting dilemma as we move forward. >> Yeah. So, I mean, it comes back to alignment, doesn't it? I mean, I know in our small example, you know, we're doing now, we were used to be physical events with theCUBE, now it's all virtual events and our Amazon bill is going through the roof because we're supporting all these users on these virtual events, and our CFO's like, well, look at this Amazon bill, and you say, yeah, but look at the revenue, it's supporting. And so to your point, if the revenue is there, if the ROI is there, then it makes sense. You can kind of live with it because you're growing with it, but if not, then you really got to question it. >> Yeah. So you got to need to partner with your financial folks and come up with better modeling around some of these transactional services and build that into your modeling for your budget and for your, you know, your top line and your expenses. >> So what do you think of some of these SaaS companies? I mean, you've had a lot of experience. They're really coming at it from largely an application perspective, although you've managed a lot of infrastructure too. But we've talked about ServiceNow. They've kind of mopped up in the ITSM. I mean, there's nobody left. I mean, ServiceNow has sort of taken over the whole (mumbles) You know, Salesforce, >> Yeah. >> I guess, sort of similarly, sort of dominating the CRM space. You hear a lot of complaints now about, you know, ServiceNow pricing. There is somebody the other day called them the Oracle of ITSM. Do you see that potentially getting disrupted by maybe some cloud native developers who are developing tools on top? You see in, like, for instance, Datadog going after Splunk and LogRhythm. And there seem to be examples popping up. Well, what's your take on all this? >> No, absolutely. I think cause, you know, when we were talking about back when I first met you, when I was at the ADVO, I mean, Oracle was on it's, you know, rise with their suite of capabilities, and then before you know it, other companies were popping up and took over, whether it was Firstbeat, PeopleSoft, Workday, and then other companies that just came into play, cause it's going to happen because people are going to get, you know, frustrated. And yes, I did get a little frustrated with ServiceNow when I was looking at a couple of new modules because the pricing was a little bit higher than it was when I first started out. So yes, when you're good and you're able to provide the right services, they're going to start pricing it that way. But yes, I think you're going to get smaller players, and then those smaller players will start grabbing up, so to speak, market share and get into it. I mean, look at Salesforce. I mean, there are some pretty good CRMs. I mean, even, ServiceNow is getting into the CRM space big time, as well as a company like Sugar and a few others that will continue to push Salesforce to look at their pricing as well as their services. I mean, they're out there buying up companies, but you just can't automatically assume that they're going to, you know, integrate day one, and it's going to take time for some of their services to come and become reality, so to speak. So yes, I agree that there will be players out there that will push these lager SaaS companies, and hopefully get the right behaviors and right pricing. >> I've said for years, Dan, that I've predicted that ServiceNow and Salesforce are on a collision course. It didn't really happen, but it's starting to, because ServiceNow, the valuation is so huge. They have to grow into other markets much in the same way that Salesforce has. So maybe we'll see McDermott start doing some acquisitions. It's maybe a little tougher for ServiceNow given their whole multi-instance architecture and sort of their own cloud. That's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. >> Yeah. Yeah. You got to play in that type of architecture, let's put it that way. Yes, it'll be interesting to see how that does play out. >> What are your thoughts on the big hyperscalers; Amazon, Microsoft, Google? What's the right strategy there? Do you go all in on one cloud like AWS or are you more worried about lock-in? Do you want to spread your bets across clouds? How real is multi-cloud? Is it a strategy or more sort of a reality that you get M and A and you got shadow IT? What's your take on all that? >> Yeah, that's a great question because it does make you think a little differently around you know, where to put all your eggs. And it's getting tougher because you do want to distribute those eggs out to multiple vendors, if you would, service providers. But, you know, for instance we had a situation where we were building a brand new business intelligence data warehouse, and we decided to go with Microsoft as its core database. And we did a bake-off on business analytic tools. We had like seven of them at Beacon and we ended up choosing Microsoft's Power BI, and a good part of that reason, not all of it, but a good part of it was because we felt they did everything else that the Tableau's and others did, but, you know, Microsoft would work to give, you know, additional capabilities to Power BI if it's sitting on their database. So we had to take that into consideration, and we did and we ended up going with Power BI. With Amazon, I think Amazon's a little bit more, I'll put it horizontal, whereby they can help you out because of the database and just kind of be in that data center, if you would, and be able to move some of your homegrown applications, some of your technical debt over to that, I'll say cloud. But it'll get interesting because when you talk about integration, when you talk about moving forward with a new functionality, yeah, you have to put your architecture in a somewhat of a center point, and then look to see what is easier, cheaper, cost-effective, but, you know, what's happening to my functionality over the next three to five years. >> But it sounds like you'd subscribe to a horses for courses approach, where you put the right workload in the right cloud, as opposed to saying, I'm going to go all in on one cloud and it's going to be, you know, same skillset, same security, et cetera. It sounds like you'd lean toward the former versus going all in with, you know, MANO cloud. >> Yeah, I guess again, when I look at the architecture. There will be major, you know, breaks if you would. So yes, there is somewhat of a, you know, movement to you know, go with one horse. But, you know, I could see looking back at the Beacon architecture that we could, you know, lift and put the claims adjudication capabilities up in Amazon and then have that conduct, you know, the left to right claims processing, and then those transactions could then be moved into Microsoft's data warehouse. So, you know, there is ways to go about spreading it out so that you don't have all those eggs in one basket and that you reduce the amount of risk, but that weighed heavily on my mind. >> So I was going to ask you, how much of a factor lock-in is it? It sounds like it's more, you know, spreading your eggs around, as you say and reducing your risk as opposed to, you know, worried about lock-in, but as a CIO, how worried are you about lock-in? Where is that fit in the sort of decision tree? >> Ah, I mean, I would say it's up there, but unfortunately, there's no number one, there's like five number ones, if you would. So it's definitely up there and it's something to consider when you're looking at, like you said, the cost, risk integration, and then time. You know, sometimes you're up against the time. And again, security, like I said. Security is a big key in healthcare. And actually security overall, whether you're retail, you're going to always have situations no matter what industry, you got to protect the business. >> Yeah, so I want to ask you about security. That's the other number one. Well, you might've been a defacto CSO, but kind of when we started in this business security was the problem of the security teams, and you know, it's now a team sport. But in thinking about the cloud and security, how big of a concern is the cloud? Is it just more, you're looking for consistency and be able to apply the corporate edicts? Are there other concerns like the shared responsibility model? What are your thoughts on security in the cloud? >> Well, it probably goes back to again, the industry, but when I looked at the past five years in healthcare, doing a lot of work with the CMS and Medicaid, Medicare, they had certain requirements and certain restrictions. So we had to make sure that we follow those requirements. And when you got audited, you needed to make sure that you can show that you are adhering to their requirements. So over the past, probably two years with Amazon's government capabilities that those restrictions have changed, but we were always looking to make sure that we owned and managed how we manage the provider and member data, because yes, we did not want to have obviously a breach, but we wanted to make sure we were following the guidelines, whether it's state or federal, and then and even some cases healthcare guidelines around managing that data. So yes, top of mind, making sure that we're protecting, you know, in my case so we had 37 million members, patients, and we needed to make sure that if we did put it in the cloud or if it was on-prem, that it was being protected. And as you mentioned, recently come off of, I was going to say Amazon, but it was an acquisition. That company that was looking at us doing the due diligence, they gave us thumbs up because of how we were managing the data at the lowest point and all the different levels within the architecture. So Anthem who did the acquisition, had a breach back in, I think it was 2015. That was top of mind for them. We had more questions during the due diligence around security than any other functional area. So it is critical, and I think slowly, some of that type of data will get up into the cloud, but again, it's going to go through some massive risk management and security measures, and audits, because how fragile that is. >> Yeah, I mean, that could be a deal breaker in an acquisition. I got two other questions for you. One is, you know, I know you follow the technologies very closely, but there's all the buzz words, the digital transformation, the AI, these new SaaS models that we talked about. You know, a lot of CIOs tell me, look, Dave, get the business right and the technology is the easy part. It's people, it's process. But what are you seeing in terms of some of this new stuff coming out, there's machine learning, you know, obviously massive scale, new cloud workloads. Anything out there that really excites you and that you could see on the horizon that could be, you know, really change agents for the next decade? >> Yeah, I think we did some RPA, robotics on some of the tasks that, you know, where, you know, if the analysis types of situations. So I think RPA is going to be a game changer as it continues to evolve. But I agree with what you just said. Doing this for quite a while now, it still comes down to the people. I can get the technology to do what it needs to do as long as I have the right requirements, so that goes back to people. Making sure we have the partnership that goes back to leadership and the people. And then the change management aspects. Right out of the gate, you should be worrying about how is it going to affect and then the adoption and engagement. Because adoption is critical, because you can go create the best thing you think from a technology perspective, but if it doesn't get used correctly, it's not worth the investment. So I agree, whether it's digital transformation or innovation, it still comes down to understanding the business model and injecting and utilizing technology to grow or reduce costs, grow the business or reduce costs. >> Yeah, usage really means value. Sorry, my last question. What's the one thing that vendors shouldn't do? What's the vendor no-no that'll alienate CIO's? >> To this day, I still don't like, there's a company out there that starts with an O. I still don't like it to that, every single technology module, if you would, has a separate sales rep. I want to work with my strategic partners and have one relationship and that single point of contact that spark and go back into their company and bring me whatever it is that we're looking at so that I don't get, you know, for instance from that company that starts with an O, you know, 17 calls from 17 different sales reps trying to sell me 17 different things. So what irritates me is, you know, you have a company that has a lot of breadth, a lot of, you know, capability and functional, you know that I may want. Give me one person that I can deal with. So a single point of contact, then that makes my life a lot easier. >> Well, Dan Sheehan, I really appreciate you spending some time on theCUBE, it's always a pleasure catching up with you and really appreciate you sharing your insights with our audience. Thank you. >> Oh, thank you, David. I appreciate the opportunity. You have a great day. >> All right. You too. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE on Cloud. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after the short break. Awesome, Dan.

>> Go on my lead. >> Dan: All right, very good. >> Five, four. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the special presentation from theCUBE, where we're exploring the future of cloud and its business impact in the coming decade, kind of where we've come from and where we're going. My name is Dave Vellante, and with me is a CIO/CTO/COO, and longtime colleague, Dan Sheehan. Hello, Dan, how're you doing? >> Hey, Dave, how are you doing? Thank you for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. So folks, Dan has been in the technology industry for a number of years. He's overseen, you know, large-multi, tens of millions of dollar ERP application development efforts, He was a CIO of a marketing, you know, direct mail company. Dan, we met at ADVO, it seems like such a (snickers) long time ago. >> Yeah, that was a long time ago, back in Connecticut. Back in the early 2000s. >> Yeah, ancient days. But pretty serious data for back then, you know, the early 2000s, and then you did a six-year stint as a EVP and CIO at Dunkin' Brands. I remember I came out to see you when I was starting Wikibon and trying to understand. >> Oh yeah. >> You know, what the CIOs cared about. You were so helpful and thanks for that. And that was a big deal. I mean, Dunkin', 17,000 points of distribution. I mean, that was sort of a complicated situation, right? >> Oh yeah. >> So, great experience. >> I mean, when you get involved with franchisees and trying to make everybody happy, yes, that was a lot of fun. >> And then you had a number of other roles, one was as COO at Modell's, and then to fast-forward, Beacon Health. You were EVP and CIO there. And you also, it looked like you had a kind of a business and operational role. You helped the company get acquired by Anthem Blue Cross. So awesome, congrats on that. That must've been a great experience. >> It was. A year of my life, yes. (both laugh) >> You're still standing. So anyway, you can see Dan, he's like this multi-tool star, he's seen a lot of changes in the technology business. So Dan, again, welcome back. Dan Sheehan. >> Oh, thank you. >> So when you started in your career, you know, there was no cloud, right? I mean, you had to do everything. It's funny, I remember I was... You probably know Bill Rucci, CIO of Hartford Steam Boiler. I remember we were talking one day, and this again was pre-cloud and he said, you know, I'm thinking, do I really need to manage my own email? I mean, back then, we did everything. So you had to provision infrastructure so you could write apps, and that was important. That frustrated CFOs, but it was a necessary piece of the value chain. So how have you seen that sort of IT value contribution shift over the years? Let's start there. >> Ah, well, I think it comes down to demand versus capacity. If you look at where companies want to go, they want to do a lot with technology. Technology has taken on a larger role. It's no longer and has not been a, so to speak, cost center. So I think the demand for making change and driving a company forward or reducing costs, there are other executives, peers to the CIO, to the CTO that are looking to do more, and when it comes to doing more, that means more demand, and you step back and you look at what the CIO has for capacity. Looking at Quick Solution's data, solutions in the cloud is appealing, and there are, you know, times where other functions talk to a vendor and see that they can get a vertical solution done pretty quickly. They go off and take that on, or it could be, you know, a ServiceNow capability that you want to implement across the company, and you do that just like an ERP type of roll up. But the bottom line is there are solutions out there that have pushed, I would say the IT organization to look at their capacity versus demand, and sometimes you can get things done quicker with a cloud type of solution. >> So how did you look at that shadow IT as a CIO? Was it something that kind of ticked you off or like you're sort of implying that it made you better? >> Well, I think it does ultimately make you better, but I think you have to partner with the functions because if you don't, you get these types of scenarios, and I've been involved in these just as well. You are busy with, you know, fulfilling your objectives as the leader of IT, and then you get a knock on the door from, let's say marketing or operations, and they say, hey, we just purchased this X solution and we want to integrate it with A, B and C. Well, that was not on the budget or on the IT roadmap or the IT strategy that was linked to the IT, I'm sorry, to the business strategy, and all of a sudden now you have more demand versus the capacity, and then you have to go start reprioritizing. So it's more of, yeah, kind of disrupted, but at the same time, it pushed, you know, the needle of the company forward. But it's all about just working together to make it happen. And that's a lot of, you know, hard conversations when you have to start reprioritizing capacity. >> Well, so let's talk about that alignment. I mean, there's always been a sort of a schism between IT and its ability to deliver, manage demand, and the business will always want you to go faster. They want IT to develop the systems, you know, of course, for less and then they want you to eat the cost of maintaining them, so (chuckles) there's been that tension. But in many ways, that CIO's job is alignment. I mean, it seems to me anyway that schism has certainly narrowed and the cloud's been been part of that, but what do you see as that trajectory over the years and where do you see it going? >> Well, I think it's going to continue to move forward, and depending upon the service, you know, companies are going to take advantage of those services. So yes, some of the non-mission critical capabilities that you would want to move out to the cloud or have somebody else do it, so to speak, that's going to continue to happen because they should be able to do it a lot cheaper than you can, just like use you mentioned a few moments ago about email. I did not want to maintain, you know, exchange service and keeping that all up and running. I moved quickly to Microsoft 365 and that's been a world of difference, but that's just one example. But when you have mission critical apps, you're going to have to make a decision if you want to continue to house them in-house or push them out to an AWS and house them there. So maybe you don't need a large data center and you can utilize some of the best and brightest around security, around managing size of the infrastructure and getting some of their engineering help, which can help. So it just depends upon the application, so to speak, or a function that you're trying to support. And you got to really look at your enterprise architecture and see where that makes sense. So you got to have a hybrid. I see and I have, you know, managed towards a hybrid way of looking at your architecture. >> Okay, so obviously the cloud played a role in that change, and of course, you were in healthcare too so you had to be somewhat careful, >> Yep. >> With the cloud. But you mentioned this hybrid architecture. I mean, from a technologist standpoint and a business standpoint, what do you want out of, you know, you hear a hybrid, multi, all the buzz words. What are you looking for then? Is it a consistent experience? Is it a consistent security? Or is it sort of more horses for courses, where you're trying to run a workload in the right place? What's your philosophy on that? >> Well, I mean, all those things matter, but you're looking at obviously, cost, you're looking at engagement. How does these services engage? Whether it's internal employees or external clients who you're servicing, and you want to get to a cost structure that makes sense in terms of managing those services as well as those mission critical apps. So it comes down to looking at the dollars and cents, as well as what type of services you can provide. In many cases, if you can provide a cheaper and increase the overall services, you're going to go down that path. And just like we did with ServiceNow, I did that at Beacon and also at DentaQuest two healthcare companies. We were able to, you know, remove duplicated, so to speak, ticketing systems and move to one and allow a better experience for the internal employee. They can do self-service, they can look at metrics, they can see status, real-time status on where their request was. So that made a bigger difference. So you engaged the employee differently, better, and then you also reduce your costs. >> Well, how about the economics? I mean, your experience that cloud is cheaper. You hear a lot of the, you know, a lot of the legacy players are saying, oh, no cloud's super expensive. Wait till you get that Amazon bill. (laughs) What's the truth? >> Well, I think there's still a lot of maturing that needs to go on, because unfortunately, depending upon the company, so let's use a couple of examples. So let's look at a startup. You look at a startup, they're probably going to look at all their services being in the cloud and being delivered through a SaaS model, and that's going to be an expense, that's going to be most likely a per user expense per month or per year, however, they structure the contract. And right out of the gate, that's going to be a top line expense that has to be managed going forward. Now you look at companies that have been around for a while, and two of the last companies I worked with, had a lot of technical debt, had on-prem applications. And when you started to look at how to move forward, you know, you had CFOs that were used to going to buy software, capitalize in that software over, you know, five years, sometimes three years, and using that investment to be capitalized, and that would sit below the line, so to speak. Now, don't get me wrong, you still have to pay for it, it's just a matter of where it sits. And when you're running a company and you're looking at the financials, not having that cost on your operational expenses, so to speak, if you're not looking at the depreciation through those numbers, that was advantageous to a CFO many years ago. Now you come to them and say, hey, we're going to move forward with a new HR system, and it's all increasing the expense because there's nothing else to capitalize. Those are different conversations, and all of a sudden your expenses have increased, and yes, you have to make sure that the businesses behind you, with respects to an ROI and supporting it. >> Yeah, so as long as the value is there, and that's a part of the alignment. I want to ask you about cloud pricing strategies because you mentioned ServiceNow, you know, Salesforce is in there, Workday. If you look at the way these guys price, it's really not true cloud pricing in a way, cause they're going to have you sign up for an annual license, you know, a lot of times you got pay up front, or if you want a discount, you're going to have to sign up for two years or three years. But now you see guys like Snowflake coming in, you know, big high-profile IPO. They actually charge you on a consumption-based model. What are your thoughts on that? Do you see that as sort of a trend in the coming decade? >> No, I absolutely think it's going to be on a trend, because consumption means more transactions and more transactions means more computing, and they're going to look at charging it just like any other utility charges. So yes, I see that trend continuing. Did a big deal with UltiPro HR, and yeah, that was all based upon user head count, but they were talking about looking at their payroll and changing their costing on payroll down the road. With their merger, or they went from being a public company to a private company, and now looking to merge with Kronos. I can see where time and attendance and payroll will stop being looked at as a transaction, right? It's a weekly or bi-weekly or monthly, however the company pays, and yes, there is dollars to be made there. >> Well, so let me ask you as a CIO and a business, you know, COO. One of the challenges that you hear with the cloud is okay, if I get my Amazon bill, it's something that Snowflake has talked about, where you know, to me, it's the ideal model, but on the other hand, the transparency is not necessarily there. You don't know what it's going to be at the end of (mumbles) Would you rather have more certainty as to what that bill's going to look like? Or would you rather have it aligned with consumption and the value to the business? >> Well, you know, that's a great question, because yes, I mean, budgets are usually built upon a number that's fixed. Now, no, don't get me wrong. I mean, when I look at the wide area network, the cost for internet services, yes, sometimes we need to increase and that means an increase in the overall cost, but that consumption, that transactional, that's going to be a different way of having to go ahead and budget. You have to budget now for the maximum transactions you anticipate with a growth of a company, and then you need to take a look at that you know, if you're budgeting. I know we were on a calendar fiscal year, so we started up budgeting process in August and we finalized at sometime in the end of October, November for the proceeding year, and if that's the case, you need to get a little bit better on what your consumptions are going to be, because especially if you're a public company, going out on the street with some numbers, those numbers could vary based upon a high transaction volume and the cost, and maybe you're not getting the results on the top end, on the revenue side. So I think, yeah, it's going to be an interesting dilemma as we move forward. >> Yeah. So, I mean, it comes back to alignment, doesn't it? I mean, I know in our small example, you know, we're doing now, we were used to be physical events with theCUBE, now it's all virtual events and our Amazon bill is going through the roof because we're supporting all these users on these virtual events, and our CFO's like, well, look at this Amazon bill, and you say, yeah, but look at the revenue, it's supporting. And so to your point, if the revenue is there, if the ROI is there, then it makes sense. You can kind of live with it because you're growing with it, but if not, then you really got to question it. >> Yeah. So you got to need to partner with your financial folks and come up with better modeling around some of these transactional services and build that into your modeling for your budget and for your, you know, your top line and your expenses. >> So what do you think of some of these SaaS companies? I mean, you've had a lot of experience. They're really coming at it from largely an application perspective, although you've managed a lot of infrastructure too. But we've talked about ServiceNow. They've kind of mopped up in the ITSM. I mean, there's nobody left. I mean, ServiceNow has sort of taken over the whole (mumbles) You know, Salesforce, >> Yeah. >> I guess, sort of similarly, sort of dominating the CRM space. You hear a lot of complaints now about, you know, ServiceNow pricing. There is somebody the other day called them the Oracle of ITSM. Do you see that potentially getting disrupted by maybe some cloud native developers who are developing tools on top? You see in, like, for instance, Datadog going after Splunk and LogRhythm. And there seem to be examples popping up. Well, what's your take on all this? >> No, absolutely. I think cause, you know, when we were talking about back when I first met you, when I was at the ADVO, I mean, Oracle was on it's, you know, rise with their suite of capabilities, and then before you know it, other companies were popping up and took over, whether it was Firstbeat, PeopleSoft, Workday, and then other companies that just came into play, cause it's going to happen because people are going to get, you know, frustrated. And yes, I did get a little frustrated with ServiceNow when I was looking at a couple of new modules because the pricing was a little bit higher than it was when I first started out. So yes, when you're good and you're able to provide the right services, they're going to start pricing it that way. But yes, I think you're going to get smaller players, and then those smaller players will start grabbing up, so to speak, market share and get into it. I mean, look at Salesforce. I mean, there are some pretty good CRMs. I mean, even, ServiceNow is getting into the CRM space big time, as well as a company like Sugar and a few others that will continue to push Salesforce to look at their pricing as well as their services. I mean, they're out there buying up companies, but you just can't automatically assume that they're going to, you know, integrate day one, and it's going to take time for some of their services to come and become reality, so to speak. So yes, I agree that there will be players out there that will push these lager SaaS companies, and hopefully get the right behaviors and right pricing. >> I've said for years, Dan, that I've predicted that ServiceNow and Salesforce are on a collision course. It didn't really happen, but it's starting to, because ServiceNow, the valuation is so huge. They have to grow into other markets much in the same way that Salesforce has. So maybe we'll see McDermott start doing some acquisitions. It's maybe a little tougher for ServiceNow given their whole multi-instance architecture and sort of their own cloud. That's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. >> Yeah. Yeah. You got to play in that type of architecture, let's put it that way. Yes, it'll be interesting to see how that does play out. >> What are your thoughts on the big hyperscalers; Amazon, Microsoft, Google? What's the right strategy there? Do you go all in on one cloud like AWS or are you more worried about lock-in? Do you want to spread your bets across clouds? How real is multi-cloud? Is it a strategy or more sort of a reality that you get M and A and you got shadow IT? What's your take on all that? >> Yeah, that's a great question because it does make you think a little differently around you know, where to put all your eggs. And it's getting tougher because you do want to distribute those eggs out to multiple vendors, if you would, service providers. But, you know, for instance we had a situation where we were building a brand new business intelligence data warehouse, and we decided to go with Microsoft as its core database. And we did a bake-off on business analytic tools. We had like seven of them at Beacon and we ended up choosing Microsoft's Power BI, and a good part of that reason, not all of it, but a good part of it was because we felt they did everything else that the Tableau's and others did, but, you know, Microsoft would work to give, you know, additional capabilities to Power BI if it's sitting on their database. So we had to take that into consideration, and we did and we ended up going with Power BI. With Amazon, I think Amazon's a little bit more, I'll put it horizontal, whereby they can help you out because of the database and just kind of be in that data center, if you would, and be able to move some of your homegrown applications, some of your technical debt over to that, I'll say cloud. But it'll get interesting because when you talk about integration, when you talk about moving forward with a new functionality, yeah, you have to put your architecture in a somewhat of a center point, and then look to see what is easier, cheaper, cost-effective, but, you know, what's happening to my functionality over the next three to five years. >> But it sounds like you'd subscribe to a horses for courses approach, where you put the right workload in the right cloud, as opposed to saying, I'm going to go all in on one cloud and it's going to be, you know, same skillset, same security, et cetera. It sounds like you'd lean toward the former versus going all in with, you know, MANO cloud. >> Yeah, I guess again, when I look at the architecture. There will be major, you know, breaks if you would. So yes, there is somewhat of a, you know, movement to you know, go with one horse. But, you know, I could see looking back at the Beacon architecture that we could, you know, lift and put the claims adjudication capabilities up in Amazon and then have that conduct, you know, the left to right claims processing, and then those transactions could then be moved into Microsoft's data warehouse. So, you know, there is ways to go about spreading it out so that you don't have all those eggs in one basket and that you reduce the amount of risk, but that weighed heavily on my mind. >> So I was going to ask you, how much of a factor lock-in is it? It sounds like it's more, you know, spreading your eggs around, as you say and reducing your risk as opposed to, you know, worried about lock-in, but as a CIO, how worried are you about lock-in? Where is that fit in the sort of decision tree? >> Ah, I mean, I would say it's up there, but unfortunately, there's no number one, there's like five number ones, if you would. So it's definitely up there and it's something to consider when you're looking at, like you said, the cost, risk integration, and then time. You know, sometimes you're up against the time. And again, security, like I said. Security is a big key in healthcare. And actually security overall, whether you're retail, you're going to always have situations no matter what industry, you got to protect the business. >> Yeah, so I want to ask you about security. That's the other number one. Well, you might've been a defacto CSO, but kind of when we started in this business security was the problem of the security teams, and you know, it's now a team sport. But in thinking about the cloud and security, how big of a concern is the cloud? Is it just more, you're looking for consistency and be able to apply the corporate edicts? Are there other concerns like the shared responsibility model? What are your thoughts on security in the cloud? >> Well, it probably goes back to again, the industry, but when I looked at the past five years in healthcare, doing a lot of work with the CMS and Medicaid, Medicare, they had certain requirements and certain restrictions. So we had to make sure that we follow those requirements. And when you got audited, you needed to make sure that you can show that you are adhering to their requirements. So over the past, probably two years with Amazon's government capabilities that those restrictions have changed, but we were always looking to make sure that we owned and managed how we manage the provider and member data, because yes, we did not want to have obviously a breach, but we wanted to make sure we were following the guidelines, whether it's state or federal, and then and even some cases healthcare guidelines around managing that data. So yes, top of mind, making sure that we're protecting, you know, in my case so we had 37 million members, patients, and we needed to make sure that if we did put it in the cloud or if it was on-prem, that it was being protected. And as you mentioned, recently come off of, I was going to say Amazon, but it was an acquisition. That company that was looking at us doing the due diligence, they gave us thumbs up because of how we were managing the data at the lowest point and all the different levels within the architecture. So Anthem who did the acquisition, had a breach back in, I think it was 2015. That was top of mind for them. We had more questions during the due diligence around security than any other functional area. So it is critical, and I think slowly, some of that type of data will get up into the cloud, but again, it's going to go through some massive risk management and security measures, and audits, because how fragile that is. >> Yeah, I mean, that could be a deal breaker in an acquisition. I got two other questions for you. One is, you know, I know you follow the technologies very closely, but there's all the buzz words, the digital transformation, the AI, these new SaaS models that we talked about. You know, a lot of CIOs tell me, look, Dave, get the business right and the technology is the easy part. It's people, it's process. But what are you seeing in terms of some of this new stuff coming out, there's machine learning, you know, obviously massive scale, new cloud workloads. Anything out there that really excites you and that you could see on the horizon that could be, you know, really change agents for the next decade? >> Yeah, I think we did some RPA, robotics on some of the tasks that, you know, where, you know, if the analysis types of situations. So I think RPA is going to be a game changer as it continues to evolve. But I agree with what you just said. Doing this for quite a while now, it still comes down to the people. I can get the technology to do what it needs to do as long as I have the right requirements, so that goes back to people. Making sure we have the partnership that goes back to leadership and the people. And then the change management aspects. Right out of the gate, you should be worrying about how is it going to affect and then the adoption and engagement. Because adoption is critical, because you can go create the best thing you think from a technology perspective, but if it doesn't get used correctly, it's not worth the investment. So I agree, whether it's digital transformation or innovation, it still comes down to understanding the business model and injecting and utilizing technology to grow or reduce costs, grow the business or reduce costs. >> Yeah, usage really means value. Sorry, my last question. What's the one thing that vendors shouldn't do? What's the vendor no-no that'll alienate CIO's? >> To this day, I still don't like, there's a company out there that starts with an O. I still don't like it to that, every single technology module, if you would, has a separate sales rep. I want to work with my strategic partners and have one relationship and that single point of contact that spark and go back into their company and bring me whatever it is that we're looking at so that I don't get, you know, for instance from that company that starts with an O, you know, 17 calls from 17 different sales reps trying to sell me 17 different things. So what irritates me is, you know, you have a company that has a lot of breadth, a lot of, you know, capability and functional, you know that I may want. Give me one person that I can deal with. So a single point of contact, then that makes my life a lot easier. >> Well, Dan Sheehan, I really appreciate you spending some time on theCUBE, it's always a pleasure catching up with you and really appreciate you sharing your insights with our audience. Thank you. >> Oh, thank you, David. I appreciate the opportunity. You have a great day. >> All right. You too. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE on Cloud. Keep it right there. We'll be back with our next guest right after the short break. Awesome, Dan.

>>From around the globe covering Google cloud. Next on there. >>Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the cube coverage of Google cloud. Next 20 on air it's week seven of nine. Google of course took their event that was supposed to be in person and Moscone, spread it out online. It's all available on demand. Every Tuesday they've been dropping it in the cube. We've got a great lineup that we're going to share with you of our coverage thought event. This is our analysis segment, joining me to help dig into where Google cloud is. Everything happening in the ecosystem. Having to bring in Dave Alante and John furrier, our co-founders co-CEOs and, uh, always hosts of the program, John and Dave. Uh, it was, uh, it was great last year being in the middle of the show floor, uh, with the whole team and the great glam beautiful booth that Google built well, we're remote, but we're still in the middle of all the topics, the big waves and everything like that. So thanks so much for joining me and look forward to digging into it. >>Hey Stu, great to see you remotely. We got to get these events back. His virtual events are nine weeks, three weeks for Ws all day events. DockerCon virtual orders, nobody ecosystem support. I mean, this is really an interesting time and I think Google has laid out an interesting experiment with their multi. I call it summer of cloud program nine weeks with just a sustained demand for your attention. It's going to been a challenge. >>The question always, John, can they keep their attention? John, you laid out, you know, the cube three 65 were, there is 365 days a year, help extract the signal from the noise, help engage with the community. So absolutely want to kind of peel back the onion and see what we think of the event. But let let's, let's start with Google. Dave, you know, you've been digging through the numbers as you always do. Uh, we're we're more than a year since Thomas Kurian came in and you know, what are you hearing? What's the data showing you as to, you know, where Google really sits in the marketplace? How are they doing >>Well still you're right. I mean, Thomas curious now I think he's about 18 months in and in one of my previous breaking analysis, I kind of laid out a four point plan for, for Google. And we can talk about sort of how they're doing there, but, but really the first one is product maturity and there's, there's a number of things that we can assess as it relates to product maturity. The second we talk about it all the time is, is, is go to market. I think the third one is really around differentiation. How does Google uniquely differentiate from the other cloud service providers? And I think the fourth and we saw this earlier this year with Looker is, you know, Google's got a war chest and you know, they can use that to really beef up the cloud. And I think if, if, if you, if you look at it, you know, Google's done a pretty good job with things like fed ramp. >>I mean, these are table stakes in the big cloud. You know, they're starting to do more things around SAP of VMware, uh, windows. I mean, again, these are basic things that you have to do as part of any large cloud provider. I think the other thing we talked about go to market, they've done a number of things there. Karen's really focused on partnerships. He wants to be a hundred percent channel, uh, at the same time they're hiring salespeople. I think they're up over 1500 salespeople right now, uh, which is, you know, we're getting there. I think it was less than that. Obviously when he came on, that's kind of the benchmark, although we don't really know exactly what, what the numbers are. They've kind of launched into public sector. They see what's happening with Amazon there, they see great opportunities. They see, you know, what, what Microsoft is doing. And so public sector, they have to put out bakeoffs so you gotta be in there and at differentiations still a lot of, okay, how can we leverage alphabet our search business and retail, our business and healthcare, um, and edge things like autonomous vehicles. There's, there's some opportunities there. And then as I said, they're doing some M and a two plus billion dollars for Looker, you know, great capability. So I think they're, they're executing on those four and we can talk about what that means in terms of, you know, revenue and position in the market. >>Well, yeah, Dave, maybe it makes sense to let let's, let's walk through the revenue, just so that people understand, you know, where they sit for the longest time it's been, you know, the number three or the number four where Alibaba said, uh, compared to them, but they are still far behind, uh, AWS and Azure. Uh, and have they been closing the gap at all? >>Well, if guys, if you could bring up that chart, that first one, uh, this is are, we really are estimates. You remember now AWS, every quarter gives us a clean number for their infrastructure as a service. And what we've got here is an estimate for full year 2018, 2019 that's calendar year, the growth rates, and then, uh, with a trailing 12 month view. And I think there's a couple of points here. One is you can see the growth. Google grew 89% last year. They were 70% in Q one 59% in Q two. So, so even though it's somewhat declining, they're growing faster than both Azure and AWS, of course, from a smaller base. I think the other thing, if you, if you go back and look at 2019, relative to AWS, Google was one 10th, the size of AWS. Now they're, you know, there's only eight X, so they're starting to close that gap, but still very much a, a quite a distance from the leaders. >>Yeah. Uh, John, maybe if we look at Google under Thomas Currian, of course there's been a real, uh, growth in hiring. So, you know, you're there in the Valley, John, we know lots of really smart people that have joined Google's great enterprise, uh, you know, pedigrees there as well as the ecosystem, uh, that, that wants to be able to partner with Google. You know, what are you seeing? What are you hearing? I like one of the interviews that you did, uh Suneel prody, uh, it was, it was the number two over at Nutanix. Uh, and now we've got an important role in Google cloud, >>Google hiring great people. I got to say, one of the things I'm impressed with is I've always liked the product people. They have great product chops. I'll ask the Google has come from a position of strength on the tech side being Google. Um, and, but the enterprise business is hard too, and they got to hire more enterprise DNA. They're trying to do that at the same time. They're trying to make the table stakes stuff done, move fast during the product side. And then at the same time, create the game changing product with like ant those for instance, um, and then have all those new features. So they're running as fast as they can. Um, they're building product as fast as they can. So you got, you know, developer and operator efficiency, which I love the strategy. However, when you run that fast, there's definitely debt. >>You take on both technical and market debt around trying to make a shortcut. So Google to me, the word in the Valley is great stuff with the people. Product is awesome, getting better, good product people, but still those enterprise features product reliability in terms of not sunsetting products early to, you know, making sure the right support levels are there. These are like the little details that make the difference between an enterprise player and someone who is essentially, you know, moving too fast, get new products being to agile. So yeah, it's a double edged sword for Google. We've said this all the time, but overall I'd give them a solid number three position and still haven't seen the breakout yet. I think ant those can be that if they keep pushing on this operator efficiency, but I just don't think the enterprise is ready for Google yet. And I think there's issues there. >>Yeah. John, you bring up a great point. I know the last couple of times we've been at the show, I feel like I'm scratching my head. It was like, wait, when did lift and shift become sexy? Yes, you want to meet the enterprises where they are, but how is that different from the message that we hear from Microsoft that we hear from AWS? Uh, one of the bigger announcements during the infrastructure week, uh, was about a new program, the rapid assessment and migration plan or ramp, uh, to help customers get from where they are, where they need to be. Uh, it's interesting because of course, if you, you know, for reinvent for years, we had all the systems integrators, helping customers move and migrate, uh, both AWS and Azure have lots of migration solutions out there. So, you know, how will Google differentiate themselves and make different there? >>Well, they don't, they don't really know. I mean, they have put stuff down on paper, but here's the problem that Google has to overcome to make it a truly a fast growing cloud player. They got to nail the product features that they need to be in the marketplace. And the ecosystem really wants to work with Google. I see retail is lay up for them and they're doubling down on that. They've got smart people working on this, but the ecosystem and adding product features are two major heavy lifts ecosystems about moneymaking. At the end of the day. I know that sounds kind of greedy in this era of empathy and missions and values, but at the end of the day, if you're not making your ecosystem money, which means keep products around support for a certain number of >>Years and have incentives economically for people to build software. They're not going to work on your platform. And I think Google needs to understand that. Clearly. I just don't see it. I mean, I just don't see people saying, I love Google so much. I'm making so much cash and success. Um, and they got some good products. You know, I, like I said, products on ecosystem are things they're going to ratchet up super fast. Well, there's a couple of places, a couple of partners they violated, like I said, durian wants to be a hundred percent channel-based channel fulfillment. And when you talk to the channel, they do tell you, yo Google there they're being aggressive. Deloitte, you know, they chart chart out as a big partner HCL. Now of course, those guys are all working with everybody, but they're starting to put resources around that in terms of training and certification. >>And of course, other, you know, much smaller resellers and partners. So that's, that's interesting, right? That being really super channel friendly, that's a differentiator to your point, John, that's making be do that because they're not coming from a position of strength channel. No, they are channel friendly. Can, you can say you're channel friendly, but if your product doesn't work, the channel will reject you instantly. They're, they're a, they're a tough critic and they need to have reliability. So again, this is not really a problem with Google. It's just a product is evolving fast at the same time, they're trying to roll out a channel. So if you want to have a good rental strategy, you gotta have a good one posture and programs, but the product has to be enabling and reliable. And if someone's building software on top of a cloud platform and stuff doesn't work or changes, that's more cost more cost means more training, more hiring. >>If someone leaves, how does it scale? These are like really important things around channel. Cause they have to sell to the customer and support their name's on the line. So again, channels and easy to say thing to do, but to actually do it with a product is hard. And I think Google has that challenge. And again, it's a challenge that they overcome. It will be a great opportunity. Well, and I think that's a good point because it wasn't, it was 2019 when I was like VMware SAP, full blown windows support. I mean, that's, that's really late to the game. And so as I say, product maturity is critical, but there are some, some winners there obviously in analytics, uh, I think big query as get, gets very, very high marks. So there's, there's some real pockets of, of, of positive positivity there. But you know, I would agree though, the maturity is a key factor for the channel to really go on. >>Well, right. If you look, John, you mentioned anthro Santos was the story last year. Uh, and it's, we're all talking about multicloud. Uh, much of the multi-cloud discussion has been, uh, due to Kubernetes. And if it wasn't for Google, we wouldn't have Kubernetes. The concern of course, is that Google took it, it open source. The CNCF took it as a foundation and customers went nuts with it and the other public cloud and even, you know, smaller cloud providers are getting as if not more value than Google is. So what you hear in the back channels, when you say, boy, Google brought this technology out district really help enable their platform. Well, AWS is still winning. AWS has plenty of solutions. They've got interesting things to get, you know, deep solutions, leveraging Kubernetes. Uh, and if you look at Google, they announced anthros last year, it's gone through some updates this year. >>Uh, you know, you both mentioned, uh, working with the partners. One of the things that jumped out at me, uh, there's now something called ant those attached clusters, which means that if I have somebody else's, you know, Kubernetes that is fully certified, I can, I can plug that in and work with Anthem. It was one of the gaps that I saw last year. You hear Google saying, we're partnering with VMware, we're partnering pivotal, but here's. And if you want to use OpenShift or PKS, you know, you need to come over to work with Anthem here. We are understanding that customers are going to have multiple environments and often multiple different Kubernetes solutions out there. Uh, you know, Dave, you mentioned like VMware, of course is a really important solution. VMware moving along and supporting more Kubernetes. Uh, and the, the update for the solution is the Google cloud VMware engine. >>And absolutely the number one use case they talked about is take your VMs, get them in the cloud and then start using those data and analytic services that are in the public cloud. So we're seeing some maturity here, but you know, Dave, if we look at the multicloud market, you know, it, Google's not the first company that typically comes to mind, you know, VMware, red hat, even Microsoft probably are a little bit higher on people's thoughts. You know, what have you been seeing? It's an area we've been spending a lot of time last couple of years hybrid and multicloud. >>Well, we have some data on this guys, if you would pull up that next graphic and this, this is observing data from our data partner ETR and what this shows on the vertical axis is the spending momentum. So are you spending more or less? And then it's really a net score, which in other words, to subtract the less from the morning when we have leftover that's, the vertical axis high is higher, is better. And then the horizontal axis is markets, bear really presence in the data set, and you can see the hyperscaler guys, you know, that's where you want to be Microsoft AWS. They're always sort of separating from the pack. You'd love to see Google. Is there a hyperscaler out there with those guys, but they're not one of the interesting things that we're seeing in the dataset Stu and John VMware cloud on AWS has really popped up. >>So this thing of this notion of hybrid as part of the cloud ecosystem and multi-cloud is really starting to have legs. And you can also see red hat with, with open shift and believe it or not even OpenStack as a telco, you see in that pop up as well as VMware cloud, which is comprises cloud foundation and other components. So you see that hybrid and multicloud zone. And I think, I think you got to put Google, you know, right there, you can see where IBM and Oracle are for just for context, they don't have the momentum, they don't have the market presence in cloud, but they have a cloud. So that's kind of how the landscape is. And I think Google, from a standpoint of ant dos, they, again, they have to be trying to be open, leverage their Coopernetties chops and try to differentiate from certainly AWS. I think your point is right on, I think Microsoft has a pretty strong story there, but Google's got a clean story and they're investing and I think it's a good position for them. Not as, not as good as the other two, but you're when you're coming from behind, you have to try to differentiate and they are. >>Yeah, well, Dave, you've always said the rich get richer when these markets, but now with COVID that they are getting richer. Amazon honestly, stock I'm billion trillion, $2 billion valuation for Apple Google on the cloud side. This is, I think that if they had more product leadership in certain areas, I think they'd be doing more, more with their cloud, but they have some IP that could come out of this post COVID growth strategy for them, where it could be a game changer. So if you look at security and you look at identity, and one of the things that caught my attention in the anthesis announcement was this, uh, this, uh, identity service that they have, which is like, uh, open ID kind of connect thing. Identity will be critical because Google has so much IP around, um, you know, um, user login information around the mobile on the mobile side. >>I mean, Jennifer Lynn on this many times that they could leverage that and really helped the edge secure. And from a user access standpoint, having identification in the Anthem would be great. And this whole modern application trend is kind of where the puck is going. So you're there kind of skating to that puck area. And also they're focused on operators. This multicloud thing hits a home run with operators, because if you can create an abstraction layer between multiple clouds and have this modern kind of top layer to it, you're in a good position, but the insiders here in Silicon Valley and in the industry that I talked, they were all saying that Google has huge IP in their network. They have a very solid network. So what's interesting to me, as a Google can take leverage some of those network pain points and then bring anthesis that connective tissue. They got a real opportunity, but they've got to pull it off, right? So covert hitting, probably the worst thing that could have happened to Google because they were just a couple feet from the goal line on this, on this market in terms of really exploding. But I think they're well positioned. I'm not down on Google at all. >>I think that, you know, I'm glad you brought that up, John, because I think Cove was a two edged sword for them. I just published last week in my breaking analysis this weekend, actually that there were three big tailwinds insecurity as a result of coal go away. And identity was one of those cloud of course, was, was the other one. And then endpoint security was the third. And so that's a, that's, that's a, you know, kind of good news for, for, for identity. The flip side of it is if you go back and look at where Amazon and Microsoft were in terms of their growth, relative to where Google is now, Amazon and Microsoft appear to have been growing larger. Now these things go in an S curve, you know, it's kind of an old guy that starts out slow and then gets really steep. So we may actually see Google accelerate. Uh, but >>I think you wait in that it may have to wait until after COVID. So it's really a Jewish store, good news on the identity side. And Google's well positioned, but necessarily bad news from a growth standpoint. Well, there's three areas to that. You know, you and I have been riffing on lately and we've, haven't published a lot yet because we're going to wait until we have our event cube con event in October. But there's three areas, I think ant those points too. And they even say this kind of in their own way, um, multicloud, which is customers, connecting customers anywhere and finding device and whatnot. So customer connection points, customer enterprises, improved developer, modernized developer, the developer market, and then three operators, three areas that are all moving trains. They're all shifting under their feet. So I think they're doing great on developer side because they have great traction. >>We've covered that with coop con and other areas have done amazing work operator efficiency, no problem. I think they got a lot of great credit there and are building and adding new stuff. It's the customer piece that's weak. They, I think they really got to continue to double down on what is the customer deployment, because let's face it, enterprise customers aren't as savvy as Google or the hyperscaler. So when you roll into main street enterprise, especially with Cova Dave, as you pointed out, are they sitting there really grokking Coobernetti's on bare metal? And at those they're like, shit, how do I keep my network alive? So it, I just think isn't a long yet operationally on the customer side. And I think that is a weakness, um, and on Google's formula and they got to just make that easier. >>Yeah, no, no great, great points there. Absolutely. In, in talking to a lot of the cloud customers, if they already have an existing relationship that's expanding or accelerating, that is a lot easier than choosing a new environment. So as Dave said, the rich get richer. Um, I mentioned that at, at the start, this is week seven of nine of what Google is doing. Um, we want to get both your, your viewpoints on this event, how they laid it out nine weeks, it's all done on demand. I know when they had the opening keynote, there was a decent rally point. You saw the usual Twitter stream out there. They had a nice median analyst program that kicked off at the beginning. For me personally, there's been some stuff that I've gone back infrastructure week. I watch this week for app modernization. There's definitely some announcements that I'm digging into, but I think overall what I see out there is people rallied at the beginning and then they kind of forgot that the event was going on. Um, you know, what are you seeing? You know, what, what's the new best practice on, you know, how long should an event be? How do you deliver it? How do you get engagement? >>Well, I mean, just to, you know, Tim, Dave will weigh in, but I'm pretty hardcore on my criticism of most of these virtual events, mainly because virtual event platforms and virtual event executions or whatnot, well known as a first kind of generation problem. No one's really been under this kind of disruption when they got to replicate their business value as quickly in an environment they weren't optimized or have the personnel for. So you're seeing a lot of gaps in these virtuals, kinda like multi-cloud and high, where you have tens of different definitions of how to do it. I think Google went to nine weeks cause they really didn't know what to do. And they left a lot of their ecosystem hanging out there because normally Google next is a huge show with great content presentations. Everything's up on YouTube anyway. So on demand is not a build value. >>The real value of Google next was the face to face interactions. The show floor, the ecosystem, the expo hall that is completely absent from the show here. And this is consistent with other events. And honestly, it's over nine weeks, Amazon re-invent, it's going to be over three weeks. And last year they had a music festival. How are they going to replicate that again, this is a huge negative shift for these vendors because they rely so much on these events to get the word out. So it's really hard. Um, so I, I I'm really impressed with the nine week program and the sense of kind of staging it out and kind of the summer of cloud, I would have done things a little bit differently if I was them in terms of making it more exciting, but it's just really difficult to command attention for the audience over nine weeks. >>And I think that's, if they had to go back and do a Mulligan, I would've, they would've probably would've done more activation around the digital rather than a bunch of on demand video. So at least I did something and didn't cancel now the good news is there's a slew of news. We can collaborate on, um, the virtual spaces, the internet. So people are talking, it's just that it's all distributed. No one knows who's there, right? So it's not like an industry event. It's just an online collection of videos like on YouTube. So I felt that lack of intimacy was probably my, my biggest critique. Um, but again, I think he just wanted to move forward and get this behind them. >>I think you nailed it, John. I mean, on the one hand they made it harder for themselves stretching it out over nine weeks. On the other hand, they kind of took the easy way out is putting it up on all on demand. I guess they have analyst programs too, but I felt like they, weren't certainly not even close to what you have in physical. And it's really hard to obviously replicate physical, but I've seen other programs where the intimacy with the analyst and the journalist was much higher and opportunities to have interactions with executives. I felt it was just a little bit removed, actually quite a bit removed would have loved to have seen just a more intimate one-on-one activity. Maybe not one-on-one, but, but one, one to many with a smaller group of analysts and journalists, I think that would have gone a long way. Um, and that, that was missing for me anyway. >>I mean, they could have done nine micro events every week with like a rallying point is to pointed out, um, just really a difficult, I mean, who, who was executing this event? I mean, they have an events team that's used to doing physical events, Moscone and whatever. It's just, they didn't, I don't think had the time to figure it out. Be honest with you. I mean, Google is a company known for search relevance, find what you're looking for and uh, organizing content. I just think they didn't do a good job at all. And I think I didn't have any much attention cycles to it because I was kind of keying in the news, but I didn't know where my friends were. Who's rallying is Stu there. I didn't even, do's tweeting, I'm not following it. Or I missed his tweet. So there's a lot of asynchronous, um, stuff going on with was no, you know, gravity around a community or ecosystem kind of moment where I could schedule an hour at 10 o'clock or multiple times >>Does the day to check in and go to the watering hole or some stuff, >>You know, hub or instance like that. So, you know, something that we're thinking a lot about David's, you know, and I think this is a moving, moving target, but what's clear is that you can create synchronicity and still have the asynchronous programs. So at least we learned that with the Docker con event that we did and the software that we're building. So, you know, virtual events, isn't about just the events, but what happens on inside the event, outside the event, after the event, I think people are too hung up on this. I got to have a portal walled garden model. So I think it's going to be a learning curve for everybody. And I think Google may or may not do nine weeks. We'll see what re-invent does with three weeks. How do you keep people's attention? But three weeks when they're not in Vegas? >>Well, you know, no, I think that physical or virtual, it's your opportunity to write the narrative, to set the tone or set the narrative. And you're seeing this with the conventions, with the political conventions, you know, they're, they're actually, you know, you don't necessarily watch the whole thing, but you get a good sense, you know, post virtual event, what the narrative is. And I think that's cause you know, the media picks it up and I think it's, it's imperative to really do a good job of interacting with the media. You know, the analysts, the ecosystem, the partners, I haven't talked to a ton of partners who have been totally engaged other than, you know, their one-on-one activity. So I think there's an opportunity there to, to really write that narrative, to set that narrative and keep it alive and that, that entices people to go back and watch the man. Then I didn't feel that hook here. >>Yeah, here's the problem that I see with has Google has this problem and Docker con did not have the problem and you know, self-serving, we did that software, but we designed it for this purpose. When I go to an event, you do guys too. But personally, when I go to an event face to face, I like to get a sense of what the collective group at the event is thinking. I fly there, I'm present. I can see the presentation. I can see the pack breakout sessions. I know it's not back. I can get a sense visually. And with my senses on what the collective voice of the group is at an event, does it suck? Is it good? How's the band? What it's, what's the hallway conversation. So I can feel that I had none of that with Google next. Okay. Like, I didn't know, five, no, I had no other than some random things on Twitter, I had no sense what the collective ecosystem thought of the event. >>And I think a lot of the events have that problem where you can do both. You could have the rallying moment where there's a group collective coming together and send people to do that and still have the asynchronous consumption, organizing the content. But that's one of the main benefits. What is what's, what's going on with it? What's the voice of this collective? How are people thinking about this? And who's there? Who can I connect with and maybe follow up with, I didn't feel that this was simply a bunch of videos posted fundamental. Yeah, absolutely. John, >>If you can't feel that energy, is there a Slack channel, is there some chat group, uh, is there some way that, that you can be involved? Uh, definitely a missed opportunity, especially Google's got great collaboration tools. They're tied into all of our calendars would have been something that they could, uh, make ways that we could engage and find out. All right, John and Dave, thank you so much for helping us, uh, you know, really dig through a lot, going on. As we said, this nine week event, uh, we we've got a playlist, uh, that we're, we're going to be broadcasting for some of the key executives. Got, got a lot of the news here. And after this week, which was at modernization, we do have a couple other interviews that will be, uh, coming out, uh, when we have them, but be sure to check out the cube.net, uh, for all the upcoming, as well as search, to be able to find the previous, uh, content there, reach out to at furrier at diva launch date, or meet at Stu for any feedback or comments. We'd love to get your feedback, especially in these times when we can't all be together. So thanks John and Dave for joining and I'm Stu Miniman. Thank you for watching the cube.

Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE, covering IBM Think, brought to you by IBM. >> We're back. You're watching theCUBE and our coverage of IBM Think 2020, the digital IBM thinking. We're here with Jamie Thomas, who's the general manager of strategy and development for IBM Systems. Jamie, great to see you. >> It's great to see you as always. >> You have been knee deep in qubits, the last couple years. And we're going to talk quantum. We've talked quantum a lot in the past, but it's a really interesting field. We spoke to you last year at IBM Think about this topic. And a year in this industry is a long time, but so give us the update what's new in quantum land? >> Well, Dave first of all, I'd like to say that in this environment we find ourselves in, I think we can all appreciate why innovation of this nature is perhaps more important going forward, right? If we look at some of the opportunities to solve some of the unsolvable problems, or solve problems much more quickly, in the case of pharmaceutical research. But for us in IBM, it's been a really busy year. First of all, we worked to advance the technology, which is first and foremost in terms of this journey to quantum. We just brought online our 53 qubit computer, which also has a quantum volume of 32, which we can talk about. And we've continued to advance the software stack that's attached to the technology because you have to have both the software and the hardware thing, right rate and pace. We've advanced our new network, which you and I have spoken about, which are those individuals across the commercial enterprises, academic and startups, who are working with us to co-create around quantum to help us understand the use cases that really can be solved in the future with quantum. And we've also continued to advance our community, which is serving as well in this new digital world that we're finding ourselves in, in terms of reaching out to developers. Now, we have over 300,000 unique downloads of the programming model that represents the developers that we're touching out there every day with quantum. These developers have, in the last year, have run over 140 billion quantum circuits. So, our machines in the cloud are quite active, and the cloud model, of course, is serving us well. The data's, in addition, to all the other things that I mentioned. >> So Jamie, what metrics are you trying to optimize on? You mentioned 53 qubits I saw that actually came online, I think, last fall. So you're nearly six months in now, which is awesome. But what are you measuring? Are you measuring stability or coherence or error rates? Number of qubits? What are the things that you're trying to optimize on to measure progress? >> Well, that's a good question. So we have this metric that we've defined over the last year or two called quantum volume. And quantum volume 32, which is the capacity of our current machine really is a representation of many of the things that you mentioned. It represents the power of the quantum machine, if you will. It includes a definition of our ability to provide error correction, to maintain states, to really accomplish workloads with the computer. So there's a number of factors that go into quantum volume, which we think are important. Now, qubits and the number of qubits is just one such metric. It really depends on the coherence and the effect of error correction, to really get the value out of the machine, and that's a very important metric. >> Yeah, we love to boil things down to a single metric. It's more complicated than that >> Yeah, yeah. >> specifically with quantum. So, talk a little bit more about what clients are doing and I'm particularly interested in the ecosystem that you're forming around quantum. >> Well, as I said, the ecosystem is both the network, which are those that are really intently working with us to co-create because we found, through our long history in IBM, that co-creation is really important. And also these researchers and developers realize that some of our developers today are really researchers, but as you as you go forward you get many different types of developers that are part of this mix. But in terms of our ecosystem, we're really fundamentally focused on key problems around chemistry, material science, financial services. And over the last year, there's over 200 papers that have been written out there from our network that really embody their work with us on this journey. So we're looking at things like quadratic speed up of things like Monte Carlo simulation, which is used in the financial services arena today to quantify risk. There's papers out there around topics like trade settlements, which in the world today trade settlements is a very complex domain with very interconnected complex rules and trillions of dollars in the purview of trade settlement. So, it's just an example. Options pricing, so you see examples around options pricing from corporations like JPMC in the area of financial services. And likewise in chemistry, there's a lot of research out there focused on batteries. As you can imagine, getting everything to electric powered batteries is an important topic. But today, the way we manufacture batteries can in fact create air pollution, in terms of the process, as well as we want batteries to have more retention in life to be more effective in energy conservation. So, how do we create batteries and still protect our environment, as we all would like to do? And so we've had a lot of research around things like the next generation of electric batteries, which is a key topic. But if you can think, you know Dave, there's so many topics here around chemistry, also pharmaceuticals that could be advanced with a quantum computer. Obviously, if you look at the COVID-19 news, our supercomputer that we installed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for instance, is being used to analyze 8000 different compounds for specifically around COVID-19 and the possibilities of using those compounds to solve COVID-19, or influence it in a positive manner. You can think of the quantum computer when it comes online as an accelerator to a supercomputer like that, helping speed up this kind of research even faster than what we're able to do with something like the Summit supercomputer. Oak Ridge is one of our prominent clients with the quantum technology, and they certainly see it that way, right, as an accelerator to the capacity they already have. So a great example that I think is very germane in the time that we find ourselves in. >> How 'about startups in this ecosystem? Are you able to-- I mean there must be startups popping up all over the place for this opportunity. Are you working with any startups or incubating any startups? Can you talk about that? >> Oh yep. Absolutely. There's about a third of our network are in VC startups and there's a long list of them out there. They're focused on many different aspects of quantum computing. Many of 'em are focused on what I would call loosely, the programming model, looking at improving algorithms across different industries, making it easier for those that are, perhaps more skilled in domains, whether that is chemistry or financial services or mathematics, to use the power of the quantum computer. Many of those startups are leveraging our Qiskit, our quantum information science open programming model that we put out there so it's open. Many of the startups are using that programming model and then adding their own secret sauce, if you will, to understand how they can help bring on users in different ways. So it depends on their domain. You see some startups that are focused on the hardware as well, of course, looking at different hardware technologies that can be used to solve quantum. I would say I feel like more of them are focused on the software programming model. >> Well Jamie, it was interesting hear you talk about what some of the clients are doing. I mean obviously in pharmaceuticals, and battery manufacturers do a lot of advanced R and D, but you mentioned financial services, you know JPMC. It's almost like they're now doing advanced R and D trying to figure out how they can apply quantum to their business down the road. >> Absolutely, and we have a number of financial institutions that we've announced as part of the network. JPMC is just one of our premiere references who have written papers about it. But I would tell you that in the world of Monte Carlo simulation, options pricing, risk management, a small change can make a big difference in dollars. So we're talking about operations that in many cases they could achieve, but not achieve in the right amount of time. The ability to use quantum as an accelerator for these kind of operations is very important. And I can tell you, even in the last few weeks, we've had a number of briefings with financial companies for five hours on this topic. Looking at what could they do and learning from the work that's already done out there. I think this kind of advanced research is going to be very important. We also had new members that we announced at the beginning of the year at the CES show. Delta Airlines joined. First Transportation Company, Amgen joined, a pharmaceutical, an example of pharmaceuticals, as well as a number of other research organizations. Georgia Tech, University of New Mexico, Anthem Insurance, just an example of the industries that are looking to take advantage of this kind of technology as it matures. >> Well, and it strikes me too, that as you start to bring machine intelligence into the equation, it's a game changer. I mean, I've been saying that it's not Moore's Law driving the industry anymore, it's this combination of data, AI, and cloud for scale, but now-- Of course there are alternative processors going on, we're seeing that, but now as you bring in quantum that actually adds to that innovation cocktail, doesn't it? >> Yes, and as you recall when you and I spoke last year about this, there are certain domains today where you really cannot get as much effective gain out of classical computing. And clearly, chemistry is one of those domains because today, with classical computers, we're really unable to model even something as simple as a caffeine molecule, which we're all so very familiar with. I have my caffeine here with me today. (laughs) But you know, clearly, to the degree we can actually apply molecular modeling and the advantages that quantum brings to those fields, we'll be able to understand so much more about materials that affect all of us around the world, about energy, how to explore energy, and create energy without creating the carbon footprint and the bad outcomes associated with energy creation, and how to obviously deal with pharmaceutical creation much more effectively. There's a real promise in a lot of these different areas. >> I wonder if you could talk a little bit about some of the landscape and I'm really interested in what IBM brings to the table that's sort of different. You're seeing a lot of companies enter this space, some big and many small, what's the unique aspect that IBM brings to the table? You've mentioned co-creating before. Are you co-creating, coopertating with some of the other big guys? Maybe you could address that. >> Well, obviously this is a very hot topic, both within the technology industry and across government entities. I think that some of the key values we bring to the table is we are the only vendor right now that has a fleet of systems available in the cloud, and we've been out there for several years, enabling clients to take advantage of our capacity. We have both free access and premium access, which is what the network is paying for because they get access to the highest fidelity machines. Clearly, we understand intently, classical computing and the ability to leverage classical with quantum for advantage across many of these different industries, which I think is unique. We understand the cloud experience that we're bringing to play here with quantum since day one, and most importantly, I think we have strong relationships. We have, in many cases, we're still running the world. I see it every day coming through my clients' port vantage point. We understand financial services. We understand healthcare. We understand many of these important domains, and we're used to solving tough problems. So, we'll bring that experience with our clients and those industries to the table here and help them on this journey. >> You mentioned your experience in sort of traditional computing, basically if I understand it correctly, you're still using traditional silicon microprocessors to read and write the data that's coming out of quantum. I don't know if they're sitting physically side by side, but you've got this big cryogenic unit, cables coming in. That's the sort of standard for some time. It reminds me, can it go back to ENIAC? And now, which is really excites me because you look at the potential to miniaturize this over the next several decades, but is that right, you're sort of side by side with traditional computing approaches? >> Right, effectively what we do with quantum today does not happen without classical computers. The front end, you're coming in on classical computers. You're storing your data on classical computers, so that is the model that we're in today, and that will continue to happen. In terms of the quantum processor itself, it is a silicon based processor, but it's a superconducting technology, in our case, that runs inside that cryogenics unit at a very cold temperature. It is powered by next-generation electronics that we in IBM have innovated around and created our own electronic stack that actually sends microwave pulses into the processor that resides in the cryogenics unit. So when you think about the components of the system, you have to be innovating around the processor, the cryogenics unit, the custom electronic stack, and the software all at the same time. And yes, we're doing that in terms of being surrounded by this classical backplane that allows our Q network, as well as the developers around the world to actually communicate with these systems. >> The other thing that I really like about this conversation is it's not just R and D for the sake of R and D, you've actually, you're working with partners to, like you said, co-create, customers, financial services, airlines, manufacturing, et cetera. I wonder if you could maybe kind of address some of the things that you see happening in the sort of near to midterm, specifically as it relates to where people start. If I'm interested in this, what do I do? Do I need new skills? Do I need-- It's in the cloud, right? >> Yeah. >> So I can spit it up there, but where do people get started? >> Well they can certainly come to the Quantum Experience, which is our cloud experience and start to try out the system. So, we have both easy ways to get started with visual composition of circuits, as well as using the programming model that I mentioned, the Qiskit programming model. We've provided extensive YouTube videos out there already. So, developers who are interested in starting to learn about quantum can go out there and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We've got over 40 assets already recorded out there, and we continue to do those. We did one last week on quantum circuits for those that are more interested in that particular domain, but I think that's a part of this journey is making sure that we have all the assets out there digitally available for those around the world that want to interact with us. We have tremendous amount of education. We're also providing education to our business partners. One of our key network members, who I'll be speaking with later, I think today, is from Accenture. Accenture's an example of an organization that's helping their clients understand this quantum journey, and of course they're providing their own assets, if you will, but once again, taking advantage of the education that we're providing to them as a business partner. >> People talk about quantum being a decade away, but I think that's the wrong way to think about it, and I'd love your thoughts on this. It feels like, almost like the return coming out of COVID-19, it's going to come in waves, and there's parts that are going to be commercialized thoroughly and it's not binary. It's not like all of a sudden one day we're going to wake, "Hey, quantum is here!" It's really going to come in layers. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, I definitely agree with that. It's very important, that thought process because if you want to be competitive in your industry, you should think about getting started now. And that's why you see so many financial services, industrial firms, and others joining to really start experimentation around some of these domain areas to understand jointly how we evolve these algorithms to solve these problems. I think that the production level characteristics will curate the rate and pace of the industry. The industry, as we know, can drive things together faster. So together, we can make this a reality faster, and certainly none of us want to say it's going to be a decade, right. I mean, we're getting advantage today, in terms of the experimentation and the understanding of these problems, and we have to expedite that, I think, in the next few years. And certainly, with this arms race that we see, that's going to continue. One of the things I didn't mention is that IBM is also working with certain countries and we have significant agreements now with the countries of Germany and Japan to put quantum computers in an IBM facility in those countries. It's in collaboration with Fraunhofer Institute or miR Scientific Organization in Germany and with the University of Tokyo in Japan. So you can see that it's not only being pushed by industry, but it's also being pushed from the vantage of countries and bringing this research and technology to their countries. >> All right, Jamie, we're going to have to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and give us the update. It's always great to see you. Hopefully, next time I see you, it'll be face to face. >> That's right, I hope so too. It's great to see you guys, thank you. Bye. >> All right, you're welcome. Keep it right there everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. Be back right after this short break. (gentle music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape all right buddy welcome to this cute conversation my name is Dave Ville on time or the co-host of the cube and we're gonna have a conversation to really try to explore does infrastructure matter you hear a lot today I've ever since I've been in this business I've heard Oh infrastructure is dead hardware is dead but we're gonna explore that premise and with me is Randy Arsenault and Steve Kenaston they're both global market development execs at IBM guys thanks for coming in and let's riff thanks for having us Dave so here's one do I want to start with the data we were just recently at the MIT chief data officer event 10 years ago that role didn't even exist now data is everything so I want to start off with you here this bro my data is the new oil and we've said you know what data actually is more valuable than oil oil I can put in my car I can put in my house but I can't put it in both data is it doesn't follow the laws of scarcity I can use the same data multiple times and I can copy it and I can find new value I can cut cost I can raise revenue so data in some respects is more valuable what do you think right yeah I would agree and I think it's also to your point kind of a renewable resource right so so data has the ability to be reused regularly to be repurposed so I would take it even further we've been talking a lot lately about this whole concept that data is really evolving into its own tier so if you think about a traditional infrastructure model where you've got sort of compute and network and applications and workloads and on the edge you've got various consumers and producers of that data the data itself has those pieces have evolved the data has been evolving as well it's becoming more complicated it's becoming certainly larger and more voluminous it's better instrumented it carries much more metadata it's typically more proximal with code and compute so the data itself is evolving into its own tier in a sense so we we believe that we want to treat data as a tier we want to manage it to wrap the services around it that enable it to reach its maximum potential in a sense so guys let's we want to make this interactive in a way and I'd love to give you my opinions as well as links are okay with that but but so I want to make an observation Steve if you take a look at the top five companies in terms of market cap in the US of Apple Google Facebook Amazon and of course Microsoft which is now over a trillion dollars they're all data companies they've surpassed the bank's the insurance companies the the Exxon Mobil's of the world as the most valuable companies in the world what are your thoughts on that why is that I think it's interesting but I think it goes back to your original statement about data being the new oil the and unlike oil Ray's said you can you can put it in house what you can't put it in your car you also when it's burnt it's gone right but with data you you have it around you generate more of it you keep using it and the more you use it and the more value you get out of it the more value the company gets out of it and so as those the reason why they continue to grow in value is because they continue to collect data they continue to leverage that data for intelligent purposes to make user experiences better their business better to be able to go faster to be able to new new things faster it's all part of part of this growth so data is one of the superpowers the other superpower of course is machine intelligence or what everybody talks about as AI you know it used to be that processing power doubling every 18 months was what drove innovation in the industry today it's a combination of data which we have a lot of it's AI and cloud for scaling we're going to talk about cloud but I want to spend a minute talking about AI when I first came into this business AI was all the rage but we didn't have the amount of data that we had today we don't we didn't have the processing power it was too expensive to store all this data that's all changed so now we have this emerging machine intelligence layer being used for a lot of different inks but it's sort of sitting on top of all these workloads that's being injected into databases and applications it's being used to detect fraud to sell us more stuff you know in real time to save lives and I'm going to talk about that but it's one of these superpowers that really needs new hardware architectures so I want to explore machine intelligence a little bit it really is a game changers it really is and and and tying back to the first point about sort of the the evolution of data and the importance of data things like machine learning and adaptive infrastructure and cognitive infrastructure have driven to your point are a hard requirement to adapt and improve the infrastructure upon which that lives and runs and operates and moves and breathes so we always had Hardware evolution or development or improvements and networks and the basic you know components of the infrastructure being driven again by advances in material science and silicon etc well now what's happening is the growth and importance and and Dynamis city of data is far outpacing the ability of the physical sciences to keep pace right that's a reality that we live in so therefore things like you know cognitive computing machine learning AI are kind of bridging the gap almost between the limitations we're bumping up against in physical infrastructure and the immense unlocked potential of data so that intermediary is really where this phenomenon of AI and machine learning and deep learning is happening and you're also correct in pointing out that it's it's everywhere I mean it's imbuing every single workload it's transforming every industry and a fairly blistering pace IBM's been front and center around artificial intelligence in cognitive computing since the beginning we have a really interesting perspective on it and I think we bring that to a lot of the solutions that we offer as well Ginni Rometty a couple years ago actually use the term incumbent disruptors and when I think of that I think about artificial intelligence and I think about companies like the ones I mentioned before that are very valuable they have data at their core most incumbents don't they have data all over the place you know they might have a bottling plant at the core of the manufacturing plant or some human process at the core so to close that gap artificial intelligence from the incumbents the appointees they're gonna buy that from companies like IBM they're gonna you know procure Watson or other AI tools and you know or maybe you know use open-source AI tools but they're gonna then figure out how to apply those to their business to do whatever fraud detection or recommendation engines or maybe even improve security and we're going to talk about this in detail but Steve this there's got to be new infrastructure behind that we can't run these new workloads on infrastructure that was designed 30 40 years ago exactly I mean I think I am truly fascinated by with this growth of data it's now getting more exponential and why we think about why is it getting more exponential it's getting more exponential because the ease at which you can actually now take advantage of that data it's going beyond the big financial services companies the big healthcare companies right we're moving further and further and further towards the edge where people like you and I and Randi and I have talked about the maker economy right I want to be able to go in and build something on my own and then deliver it to either as a service as a person a new application or as a service to my infrastructure team to go then turn it on and make something out of that that infrastructure it's got to come down in cost but all the things that you said before performance reliability speed to get there intelligence about data movement how do we get smarter about those things all of the underlying ways we used to think about how we managed protect secure that it all has evolved and it's continuing to evolve everybody talks about the journey the journey to cloud why does that matter it's not just the cloud it's also the the componentry underneath and it's gonna go much broader much bigger much faster well and I would just add just amplify what Steve said about this whole maker movement one of the other pressures that that's putting on corporate IT is it's driving essentially driving product development and innovation out to the end to the very edge to the end user level so you have all these very smart people who are developing these amazing new services and applications and workloads when it gets to the point where they believe it can add value to the business they then hand it off to IT who is tasked with figuring out how to implement it scale it protect it secured debt cetera that's really where I believe I um plays a key role or where we can play a key role add a lot of values we understand that process of taking that from inception to scale and implementation in a secure enterprise way and I want to come back to that so we talked about data as one of the superpowers an AI and the third one is cloud so again it used to be processor speed now it's data plus AI and cloud why is cloud important because cloud enables scale there's so much innovation going on in cloud but I want to talk about you know cloud one dot o versus cloud two dot o IBM talks about you know the new era of cloud so what was cloud one dot o it was largely lift and shift it was taking a lot of crap locations and putting him in the public cloud it was a lot of tests in dev a lot of startups who said hey I don't need to you know have IT I guess like the cube we have no ID so it's great for small companies a great way to experiment and fail fast and pay for you know buy the drink that was one dot o cloud to dot all to datos is emerging is different it's hybrid it's multi cloud it's massively distributed systems distributed data on Prem in many many clouds and it's a whole new way of looking at infrastructure and systems design so as Steve as you and I have talked about it's programmable so it's the API economy very low latency we're gonna talk more about what that means but that concept of shipping code to data wherever it lives and making that cloud experience across the entire infrastructure no matter whether it's on Prem or in cloud a B or C it's a complicated problem it really is and when you think about the fact that you know the big the big challenge we started to run into when we were talking about cloud one always shadow IT right so folks really wanted to be able to move faster and they were taking data and they were actually copying it to these different locations to be able to use it for them simply and easily well once you broke that mold you started getting away from the security and the corporate furnance that was required to make sure that the business was safe right it but it but it but following the rules slowed business down so this is why they continued to do it in cloud 2.0 I like the way you position this right is the fact that I no longer want to move data around moving data it within the infrastructure is the most expensive thing to do in the data center so if I can move code to where I need to be able to work on it to get my answers to do my AI to do my intelligent learning that all of a sudden brings a lot more value and a lot more speed and speed as time as money rate if I can get it done faster I get more valuable and then just you know people often talk about moving data but you're right on you the last thing you want to do is move data in just think about how long it takes to back up the first time you ever backed up your iPhone how long it took well and that's relatively small compared to all the data in a data center there's another subtext here from a standpoint of cloud 2.0 and it involves the edge the edge is a new thing and we have a belief inside of wiki bond and the cube that we talk about all the time that a lot of the inference is going to be done at the edge what does that mean it means you're going to have factory devices autonomous vehicles a medical device equipment that's going to have intelligence in there with new types of processors and we'll talk about that but a lot of the the inference is that conclusions were made real-time and and by the way these machines will be able to talk to each other so you'll have a machine to machine communication no humans need to be involved to actually make a decision as to where should I turn or you know what should be the next move on the factory floor so again a lot of the data is gonna stay in place now what does that mean for IBM you still have an opportunity to have data hubs that collect that data analyze it maybe push it up to the cloud develop models iterate and push it back down but the edge is a fundamentally new type of approach that we've really not seen before and it brings in a whole ton of new data yeah that's a great point and it's a market phenomenon that has moved and is very rapidly moving from smartphones to the enterprise right so right so your point is well-taken if you look in the fact is we talked earlier that compute is now proximal to the data as opposed to the other way around and the emergence of things like mesh networking and you know high bandwidth local communications peer-to-peer communications it's it's not only changing the physical infrastructure model and the and the best practices around how to implement that infrastructure it's also fundamentally changing the way you buy them the way you consume them the way you charge for them so it's it's that shift is changing and having a ripple effect across our industry in every sense whether it's from the financial perspective the operational perspective the time to market perspective it's also and we talked a lot about industry transformation and disruptors that show up you know in an industry who work being the most obvious example and just got an industry from the from the bare metal and recreate it they are able to do that because they've mastered this new environment where the data is king how you exploit that data cost-effectively repeatably efficiently is what differentiates you from the pack and allows you to create a brand new business model that that didn't exist prior so that's really where every other industry is going you talking about those those those big five companies in North America that are that are the top top companies now because of data I often think about rewind you know 25 years do you think Amazon when they built Amazon really thought they were going to be in the food service business that the video surveillance business the drone business all these other book business right maybe the book business right but but their architecture had to scale and change and evolve with where that's going all around the data because then they can use these data components and all these other places to get smarter bigger and grow faster and that's that's why they're one of the top five this is a really important point especially for the young people in the audience so it used to be that if you were in an industry if you were in health care or you were in financial services or you were in manufacturing you were in that business for life every industry had its own stack the sales the marketing the R&D everything was wired to that industry and that industry domain expertise was really not portable across businesses because of data and because of digital transformations companies like Amazon can get into content they can get into music they can get it to financial services they can get into healthcare they can get into grocery it's all about that data model being portable across those industries it's a very powerful concept that you and I mean IBM owns the weather company right so I mean there's a million examples of traditional businesses that have developed ways to either enter new markets or expand their footprint in existing markets by leveraging new sources of data so you think about a retailer or a wholesale distributor they have to very accurately or as accurately as possible forecast demand for goods and make sure logistically the goods are in the right place at the right time well there are million factors that go into that there's whether there's population density there's local cultural phenomena there's all sorts of things that have to be taken into consideration previously that would be near impossible to do now you can sit down again as an individual maker I can sit down at my desk and I can craft a model that consumes data from five readily available public api's or data sets to enhance my forecast and I can then create that model execute it and give it to two of my IT guy to go scale-out okay so I want to start getting into the infrastructure conversation again remember the premise of this conversation it doesn't read for structure matter we want to we want to explore that oh I start at the high level with with with cloud multi-cloud specifically we said cloud 2.0 is about hybrid multi cloud I'm gonna make a statements of you guys chime in my my assertion is that multi cloud has largely been a symptom of multi-vendor shadow IT different developers different workloads different lines of business saying hey we want to we want to do stuff in the cloud this happened so many times in the IT business all and then I was gonna govern it how is this gonna be secure who's got access control on and on and on what about compliance what about security then they throw it over to IT and they say hey help us fix this and so itea said look we need a strategy around multi cloud it's horses for courses maybe we go for cloud a for our collaboration software cloud B for the cognitive stuff cloud C for the you know cheap and deep storage different workloads for different clouds but there's got to be a strategy around that so I think that's kind of point number one and I T is being asked to kind of clean up this stuff but the future today the clouds are loosely coupled there may be a network that connects them but there's there's not a really good way to take data or rather to take code ship it to data wherever it lives and have it be a consistent well you were talking about an enterprise data plane that's emerging and that's kind of really where the opportunity is and then you maybe move into the control plane and the management piece of it and then bring in the edge but envision this mesh of clouds if you will whether it's on pram or in the public cloud or some kind of hybrid where you can take metadata and code ship it to wherever the data is leave it there much smaller you know ship five megabytes of code to a petabyte of data as opposed to waiting three months to try to ship you know petabytes to over the network it's not going to work so that's kind of the the spectrum of multi cloud loosely coupled today going to this you know tightly coupled mesh your guys thoughts on that yeah that's that's a great point and and I would add to it or expand that even further to say that it's also driving behavioral fundamental behavioral and organizational challenges within a lot of organizations and large enterprises cloud and this multi cloud proliferation that you spoke about one of the other things that's done that we talked about but probably not enough is it's almost created this inversion situation where in the past you'd have the business saying to IT I need this I need this supply chain application I need this vendor relationship database I need this order processing system now with the emergence of this cloud and and how easy it is to consume and how cost-effective it is now you've got the IT guys and the engineers and the designers and the architects and the data scientists pushing ideas to the business hey we can expand our footprint and our reach dramatically if we do this so you've get this much more bi-directional conversation happening now which frankly a lot of traditional companies are still working their way through which is why you don't see you know 100% cloud adoption but it drives those very productive full-duplex conversations at a level that we've never seen before I mean we encounter clients every day who are having these discussions are sitting down across the table and IT is not just doesn't just have a seat at the table they are often driving the go-to-market strategy so that's a really interesting transformation that we see as well in addition to the technology so there are some amazing things happening Steve underneath the covers and the plumbing and infrastructure and look at we think infrastructure matters that's kind of why we're here we're infrastructure guys but I want to make a point so for decades this industry is marked to the cadence of Moore's law the idea that you can double processing speeds every 18 months disk drive processors disk drives you know they followed that curve you could plot it out the last ten years that started to attenuate so what happened is chip companies would start putting more cores on to the real estate well they're running out of real estate now so now what's happening is we've seen this emergence of alternative processors largely came from mobile now you have arm doing a lot of offload processing a lot of the storage processing that's getting offloaded those are ARM processors in video with GPUs powering a lot of a lot of a is yours even seeing FPGAs they're simple they're easy them to spin up Asics you know making a big comeback so you've seen these alternative processes processors powering things underneath where the x86 is and and of course they're still running applications on x86 so that's one sort of big thing big change in infrastructure to support this distributed systems the other is flash we saw flash basically take out spinning disk for all high-speed applications we're seeing the elimination of scuzzy which is a protocol that sits in between the the the disk you know and the rest of the network that's that's going away you're hearing things like nvme and rocky and PCIe basically allowing stores to directly talk to the so now a vision envision this multi-cloud system where you want to ship metadata and code anywhere these high speed capabilities interconnects low latency protocols are what sets that up so there's technology underneath this and obviously IBM is you know an inventor of a lot of this stuff that is really gonna power this next generation of workloads your comments yeah I think I think all that 100% true and I think the one component that we're fading a little bit about it even in the infrastructure is the infrastructure software right there's hardware we talked a lot talked about a lot of hardware component that are definitely evolving to get us better stronger faster more secure more reliable and that sort of thing and then there's also infrastructure software so not just the application databases or that sort of thing but but software to manage all this and I think in a hybrid multi cloud world you know you've got these multiple clauses for all practical purposes there's no way around it right marketing gets more value out of the Google analytic tools and Google's cloud and developers get more value out of using the tools in AWS they're gonna continue to use that at the end of the day I as a business though need to be able to extract the value from all of those things in order to make different business decisions to be able to move faster and surface my clients better there's hardware that's gonna help me accomplish that and then there are software things about managing that whole consetta component tree so that I can maximize the value across that entire stack and that stack is multiple clouds plus the internal clouds external clouds everything yeah so it's great point and you're seeing clear examples of companies investing in custom hardware you see you know Google has its own ship Amazon its own ship IBM's got you know power 9 on and on but none of this stuff works if you can't manage it so we talked before about programmable infrastructure we talked about the data plane and the control plane that software that's going to allow us to actually manage these multiple clouds as at least a quasi single entity you know something like a logical entity certainly within workload classes and in Nirvana across the entire you know network well and and the principal or the principle drivers of that evolution of course is containerization right so the containerization phenomenon and and you know obviously with our acquisition of red hat we're now very keenly aware and acutely plugged into the whole containerization phenomenon which is great we're you're seeing that becoming almost the I can't think of us a good metaphor but you're seeing containerization become the vernacular that's being spoken in multiple different types of reference architectures and use case environments that are vastly different in their characteristics whether they're high throughput low latency whether they're large volume whether they're edge specific whether they're more you know consolidated or hub-and-spoke models containerization is becoming the standard by which those architectures are being developed and with which they're being deployed so we think we're very well-positioned working with that emerging trend and that rapidly developing trend to instrument it in a way that makes it easier to deploy easier to instrument easier to develop so that's key and I want to sort of focus now on the relevance of IBM one side one thing that we understand because that that whole container is Asian think back to your original point Dave about moving data being very expensive and the fact that the fact that you want to move code out to the data now with containers microservices all of that stuff gets a lot easier development becomes a lot faster and you're actually pushing the speed of business faster well and the other key point is we talked about moving code you know to the data as you move the code to the data and run applications anywhere wherever the data is using containers the kubernetes etc you don't have to test it it's gonna run you know assuming you have the standard infrastructure in place to do that and the software to manage it that's huge because that means business agility it means better quality and speed alright let's talk about IBM the world is complex this stuff is not trivial the the more clouds we have the more edge we have the more data we have the more complex against IBM happens to be very good at complex three components of the innovation cocktail data AI and cloud IBM your customers have a lot of data you guys are good with data it's very strong analytics business artificial intelligence machine intelligence you've invested a lot in Watson that's a key component business and cloud you have a cloud it's not designed to compete not knock heads and the race to zero with with the cheap and deep you know storage clouds it's designed to really run workloads and applications but you've got all three ingredients as well you're going hard after the multi cloud world for you guys you've got infrastructure underneath you got hardware and software to manage that infrastructure all the modern stuff that we've talked about that's what's going to power the customers digital transformations and we'll talk about that in a moment but maybe you could expand on that in terms of IBM's relevance sure so so again using the kind of maker the maker economy metaphor bridging from that you know individual level of innovation and creativity and development to a broadly distributed you know globally available work loader or information source of some kind the process of that bridge is about scale and reach how do you scale it so that it runs effectively optimally is easily managed Hall looks and feels the same falls under the common umbrella of services and then how do you get it to as many endpoints as possible whether it's individuals or entities or agencies or whatever scale and reach iBM is all about scale and reach I mean that's kind of our stock and trade we we are able to take solutions from small kind of departmental level or kind of skunkworks level and make them large secure repeatable easily managed services and and make them as turnkey as possible our services organizations been doing it for decades exceptionally well our product portfolio supports that you talk about Watson and kind of the cognitive computing story we've been a thought leader in this space for decades I mean we didn't just arrive on the scene two years ago when machine learning and deep learning and IO ste started to become prominent and say this sounds interesting we're gonna plant our flag here we've been there we've been there for a long time so you know I kind of from an infrastructure perspective I kind of like to use the analogy that you know we are technology ethos is built on AI it's built on cognitive computing and and sort of adaptive computing every one of our portfolio products is imbued with that same capability so we use it internally we're kind of built from AI for AI so maybe that's the answer to this question of it so what do you say that somebody says well you know I want to buy you know my flash storage from pure AI one of my bi database from Oracle I want to buy my you know Intel servers from Dell you know whatever I want to I want to I want control and and and I gotta go build it myself why should I work with IBM do you do you get that a lot and how do you respond to that Steve I think I think this whole new data economy has opened up a lot of places for data to be stored anywhere I think at the end of the day it really comes down to management and one of the things that I was thinking about as you guys were we're conversing is the enterprise class or Enterprise need for things like security and protection that sort of thing that rounds out the software stack in our portfolio one of the things we can bring to the table is sure you can go by piece parts and component reform from different people that you want right and in that whole notion around fail-fast sure you can get some new things that might be a little bit faster that might be might be here first but one of the things that IBM takes a lot of pride was a lot of qual a lot of pride into is is the quality of their their delivery of both hardware and software right so so to me even though the infrastructure does matter quite a bit the question is is is how much into what degree so when you look at our core clients the global 2,000 right they want to fail fast they want to fail fast securely they want to fail fast and make sure they're protected they want to fail fast and make sure they're not accidentally giving away the keys to the kingdom at the end of the day a lot of the large vendor a lot of the large clients that we have need to be able to protect their are their IP their brain trust there but also need the flexibility to be creative and create new applications that gain new customer bases so the way I the way I look at it and when I talk to clients and when I talk to folks is is we want to give you them that while also making sure they're they're protected you know that said I would just add that that and 100% accurate depiction the data economy is really changing the way not only infrastructure is deployed and designed but the way it can be I mean it's opening up possibilities that didn't exist and there's new ones cropping up every day to your point if you want to go kind of best to breed or you want to have a solution that includes multi vendor solutions that's okay I mean the whole idea of using again for instance containerization thinking about kubernetes and docker for instance as a as a protocol standard or a platform standard across heterogeneous hardware that's fine like like we will still support that environment we believe there are significant additive advantages to to looking at IBM as a full solution or a full stack solution provider and our largest you know most mission critical application clients are doing that so we think we can tell a pretty compelling story and I would just finally add that we also often see situations where in the journey from the kind of maker to the largely deployed enterprise class workload there's a lot of pitfalls along the way and there's companies that will occasionally you know bump into one of them and come back six months later and say ok we encountered some scalability issues some security issues let's talk about how we can develop a new architecture that solves those problems without sacrificing any of our advanced capabilities all right let's talk about what this means for customers so everybody talks about digital transformation and digital business so what's the difference in a business in the digital business it's how they use data in order to leverage data to become one of those incumbent disruptors using Ginny's term you've got to have a modern infrastructure if you want to build this multi cloud you know connection point enterprise data pipeline to use your term Randy you've got to have modern infrastructure to do that that's low latency that allows me to ship data to code that allows me to run applet anywhere leave the data in place including the edge and really close that gap between those top five data you know value companies and yourselves now the other piece of that is you don't want to waste a lot of time and money managing infrastructure you've got to have intelligence infrastructure you've got to use modern infrastructure and you've got to redeploy those labor assets toward a higher value more productive for the company activities so we all know IT labor is a chop point and we spend more on IT labor managing Leung's provisioning servers tuning databases all that stuff that's gotta change in order for you to fund digital transformations so that to me is the big takeaway as to what it means for customer and we talked about that sorry what we talked about that all the time and specifically in the context of the enterprise data pipeline and within that pipeline kind of the newer generation machine learning deep learning cognitive workload phases the data scientists who are involved at various stages along the process are obviously kind of scarce resources they're very expensive so you can't afford for them to be burning cycles and managing environments you know spinning up VMs and moving data around and creating working sets and enriching metadata that they that's not the best use of their time so we've developed a portfolio of solutions specifically designed to optimize them as a resource as a very valuable resource so I would vehemently agree with your premise we talked about the rise of the infrastructure developer right so at the end of the day I'm glad you brought this topic up because it's not just customers it's personas Pete IBM talks to different personas within our client base or our prospect base about why is this infrastructure important to to them and one of the core components is skill if you have when we talk about this rise of the infrastructure developer what we mean is I need to be able to build composable intelligent programmatic infrastructure that I as IT can set up not have to worry about a lot of risk about it break have to do in a lot of troubleshooting but turn the keys over to the users now let them use the infrastructure in such a way that helps them get their job done better faster stronger but still keeps the business protected so don't make copies into production and screw stuff up there but if I want to make a copy of the data feel free go ahead and put it in a place that's safe and secure and it won't it won't get stolen and it also won't bring down the enterprise's is trying to do its business very key key components - we talked about I infused data protection and I infused storage at the end of the day it's what is an AI infused data center right it needs to be an intelligent data center and I don't have to spend a lot of time doing it the new IT person doesn't want to be troubleshooting all day long they want to be in looking at things like arm and vme what's that going to do for my business to make me more competitive that's where IT wants to be focused yeah and it's also we just to kind of again build on this this whole idea we haven't talked a lot about it but there's obviously a cost element to all this right I mean you know the enterprise's are still very cost-conscious and they're still trying to manage budgets and and they don't have an unlimited amount of capital resources so things like the ability to do fractional consumption so by you know pay paper drink right buy small bits of infrastructure and deploy them as you need and also to Steve's point and this is really Steve's kind of area of expertise and where he's a leader is kind of data efficiency you you also can't afford to have copy sprawl excessive data movement poor production schemes slow recovery times and recall times you've got a as especially as data volumes are ramping you know geometrically the efficiency piece and the cost piece is absolutely relevant and that's another one of the things that often gets lost in translation between kind of the maker level and the deployment level so I wanted to do a little thought exercise for those of you think that this is all you know bromide and des cloud 2.0 is also about we're moving from a world of cloud services to one where you have this mesh which is ubiquitous of of digital services you talked about intelligence Steve you know the intelligent data center so all these all these digital services what am I talking about AI blockchain 3d printing autonomous vehicles edge computing quantum RPA and all the other things on the Gartner hype cycle you'll be able to procure these as services they're part of this mesh so here's the thought exercise when do you think that owning and driving your own vehicle is no longer gonna be the norm right interesting thesis question like why do you ask the question well because these are some of the disruptions so the questions are designed to get you thinking about the potential disruptions you know is it possible that our children's children aren't gonna be driving their own car it's because it's a it's a cultural change when I was 16 year olds like I couldn't wait but you started to see a shifted quasi autonomous vehicles it's all sort of the rage personally I don't think they're quite ready yet but it's on the horizon okay I'll give you another one when will machines be able to make better diagnosis than doctors actually both of those are so so let's let's hit on autonomous and self-driving vehicles first I agree they're not there yet I will say that we have a pretty thriving business practice and competency around working with a das providers and and there's an interesting perception that a das autonomous driving projects are like there's okay there's ten of them around the world right maybe there's ten metal level hey das projects around the world what people often don't see is there is a gigantic ecosystem building around a das all the data sourcing all the telemetry all the hardware all the network support all the services I mean building around this is phenomenal it's growing at a had a ridiculous rate so we're very hooked into that we see tremendous growth opportunities there if I had to guess I would say within 10 to 12 years there will be functionally capable viable autonomous vehicles not everywhere but they will be you will be able as a consumer to purchase one yeah that's good okay and so that's good I agree that's a the time line is not you know within the next three to five years all right how about retail stores will well retail stores largely disappeared we're we're rainy I was just someplace the other day and I said there used to be a brick-and-mortar there and we were walking through the Cambridge Tseng Galleria and now the third floor there's no more stores right there's gonna be all offices they've shrunken down to just two floors of stores and I highly believe that it's because you know the brick you know the the retailers online are doing so well I mean think about it used to be tricky and how do you get in and and and I need the Walmart minute I go cuz I go get with Amazon and that became very difficult look at places like bombas or Casper or all the luggage plate all this little individual boutique selling online selling quickly never having to have to open up a store speed of deployment speed of product I mean it's it's it's phenomenal yeah and and frankly if if Amazon could and and they're investing billions of dollars and they're trying to solve the last mile problem if Amazon could figure out a way to deliver ninety five percent of their product catalog Prime within four to six hours brick-and-mortar stores would literally disappear within a month and I think that's a factual statement okay give me another one will banks lose control traditional banks lose control of the payment systems you can Moselle you see that banks are smart they're buying up you know fin tech companies but right these are entrenched yeah that's another one that's another one with an interesting philosophical element to it because people and some of its generational right like our parents generation would be horrified by the thought of taking a picture of a check or using blockchain or some kind of a FinTech coin or any kind of yeah exactly so Bitcoin might I do my dad ask you're not according I do I don't bit going to so we're gonna we're waiting it out though it's fine by the way I just wanted to mention that we don't hang out in the mall that's actually right across from our office I want to just add that to the previous comment so there is a philosophical piece of it they're like our generation we're fairly comfortable now because we've grown up in a sense with these technologies being adopted our children the concept of going to a bank for them will be foreign I mean it will make it all have no context for the content for the the the process of going to speak face to face to another human it just say it won't exist well will will automation whether its robotic process automation and other automation 3d printing will that begin to swing the pendulum back to onshore manufacturing maybe tariffs will help to but again the idea that machine intelligence increasingly will disrupt businesses there's no industry that's safe from disruption because of the data context that we talked about before Randy and I put together a you know IBM loves to use were big words of transformation agile and as a sales rep you're in the field and you're trying to think about okay what does that mean what does that mean for me to explain to my customer so he put together this whole thing about what his transformation mean to one of them was the taxi service right in the another one was retail so and not almost was fencers I mean you're hitting on on all the core things right but this transformation I mean it goes so deep and so wide when you think about exactly what Randy said before about uber just transforming just the taxi business retailers and taxis now and hotel chains and that's where the thing that know your customer they're getting all of that from data data that I'm putting it not that they're doing work to extract out of me that I'm putting in so that autonomous vehicle comes to pick up Steve Kenaston it knows that Steve likes iced coffee on his way to work gives me a coupon on a screen I hit the button it automatically stops at Starbucks for me and it pre-ordered it for me you're talking about that whole ecosystem wrapped around just autonomous vehicles and data now it's it's unbeliev we're not far off from the Minority Report era of like Anthem fuck advertising targeted at an individual in real time I mean that's gonna happen it's almost there now I mean you just use point you will get if I walk into Starbucks my phone says hey why don't you use some points while you're here Randy you know so so that's happening at facial recognition I mean that's all it's all coming together so and again underneath all this is infrastructure so infrastructure clearly matters if you don't have the infrastructure to power these new workloads you're drugged yeah and I would just add and I think we're all in agreement on that and and from from my perspective from an IBM perspective through my eyes I would say we're increasingly being viewed as kind of an arms dealer and that's a probably a horrible analogy but we're being used we're being viewed as a supplier to the providers of those services right so we provide the raw materials and the machinery and the tooling that enables those innovators to create those new services and do it quickly securely reliably repeatably at a at a reasonable cost right so it's it's a step back from direct engagement with consumer with with customers and clients and and architects but that's where our whole industry is going right we are increasingly more abstracted from the end consumer we're dealing with the sort of assembly we're dealing with the assemblers you know they take the pieces and assemble them and deliver the services so we're not as often doing the assembly as we are providing the raw materials guys great conversation I think we set a record tends to be like that so thank you very much for no problem yeah this is great thank you so much for watching everybody we'll see you next time you're watching the cube

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley. HOLLOWAY ALTO, California It is a cube conversation. >> Welcome to this Special Cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California at the Cube Studios at the Cube headquarters. I'm John for the host, like you were a Dustin Kirkland product manager and Google friend of the Cuban. The community with Cooper Netease been on the Cube Cube alumni. Dustin. Welcome to the Cube conversation. >> Thanks. John's a beautiful studio. I've never been in the studio and on the show floor a few times, but this is This is fun. >> Great to have you on a great opportunity to chat about Cooper Netease yet of what you do out some product man's working Google. But really more importantly on this conversation is about the fifth anniversary, the birthday of Cuba Netease. Today we're celebrating the fifth birthday of Cooper Netease. Still, it's still a >> toddler, absolutely still growing. You think about how you know Lennox has been around for a long time. Open stack has been around these other big projects that have been around for, you know, going on decades and Lenox this case and Cooper nineties. It's going so fast, but It's only five years old, you know. >> You know, I remember Adam Open Stack event in Seattle many, many years ago. That was six years ago. Pubes on his 10th year. So many of these look backs moments. This is one of them. I was having a beer with Lou Tucker. J J Kiss Matic was like one of the first comes at the time didn't make it, But we were talking about open stagger like this Cooper Netease thing. This is really hot. This paper, this initiative this could really be the abstraction layer to kind of bring all this cloud Native wasn't part of the time, but it was like more of an open stack. Try and move up to stack. And it turned out it ended up happening. Cooper Netease then went on to change the landscape of what containers did. Dr. Got a lot of credit for pioneering that got the big VC funding became a unicorn, and then containers kind of went into a different direction because of Cooper duties. >> Very much so. I mean, the modernization of software infrastructure has been coming for a long time, and Cooper nutty sort of brings it all brings it all together at this point, but putting software into a container. We've been doing that different forest for for a lot of time, uh, for a long time, but But once you have a lot of containers, what do you do with that? Right? And that was the problem that Cooper Nettie solved so eloquently and has, you know, now for a couple of years, and it just keeps getting better. >> You know, you mentioned modernization. Let's talk about that because I think the modernization the theme is now pretty much prevalent in every vertical. I'll be in D. C. Next week for the Amazon Webster was public sector Summit, where modernization of governments and nations are being discussed. Education, modernization of it. We've seen it here. The media business that were participating in is about not where you store the code. It's how you code. How you build is a mindset shift. This has been the rial revelation around the Dev Ops Movement Infrastructures Code, now called Cloud Native. Share your thoughts on this modernization mindset because it really is how you build. >> Yeah, I think the cross pollination actually across industries and we even we see that even just in the word containers, right and all the imagery around shipping and shipping containers, we've applied these age old concepts that have been I don't have perfected but certainly optimized over decades of, actually centuries or millennia of moving things across water in containers. Right. But we apply that to software and boom. We have the step function difference in the way that we we manage and we orchestrated and administer code. That's one example of that cross pollination, and now you're talking about, like optimizing optimized governments or economies but being able to maybe then apply other concepts that we've come a long way in computer science do de bop set a good example? You know, applying Dev ops principles to non computer feels. Just think about that for a second. >> It's mind blowing. And if you think about also the step function you mentioned because I think this actually changed a lot of the entrepreneurial landscape as well and also has shaped open source and, you know, big news this this quarter is map are going to shut down due one of the biggest do players. Cloudera merge with Horton Works fired their CEO, the founder Michael. So has retired, Some say forced out. I don't think so. I think it's more of his time. I'm Rodel still there. Open source is a business model, you know. Can we be the red hat for her? Duped the red? Not really kind of the viable, but it's evolving. So open source has been impacted by this step function. There's a business impact. Talk about the dynamics with step function both on the business side and on how software's built specifically open source. >> You know, you and I have been around open source for a long, long time. I think it started when I was in college in the late nineties on then through my career at IBM. And it's It's interesting how on the fringe open source was for so long and such so so much of my BM career. And then early time spent onside it at Red Hat. It was it was something that was it was different, was weird. It was. It was very much fringe where the right uh, but now it's in mainstream and it's everywhere, and it's so mainstream that it's almost the defacto standard to just start with open source. But you know, there's some other news that's been happening lately that she didn't bring up. But it's a really touchy aspect of open source right now on that's on some of the licenses and how those licenses get applied by software, especially databases. When offered as a service in the cloud. That's one of the big problems. I think that that's that we're we're working within the open >> source, summarize the news and what it means. What's what's happening? What's the news and what's the really business? Our technical impact to the licensing? What's the issue? What's the core issue? >> Yeah, eso without taking judgment any any way, shape or form on this, the the the TL D are on. This is a number of open source database is most recently cockroach D. B. I have adopted a different licensing model that is nonstandard from an open source perspective. Uh, and from one perspective, they're they're adopting these different licensing models because other vendors can take that software and offered as a service, yes, and in some some cases, like Amazon like Sure, you said, uh, and offered as a as a service, uh, and maybe contribute. Maybe pay money to the smaller startup or the open source community behind it. But not necessarily. Uh, and it's in some ways is quite threatening to open source communities and open source companies on other cases, quite empowering. And it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out. The tension between open sourcing software and eventually making money off of it is something that we've we've seen for, you know, at least 25. >> And it continues to go on today, and this is, to me a real fascinating area that I think is going to be super important to keep an eye on because you want to encourage contribution and openness. Att the same time we look at the scale of just the Lenox foundations numbers. It's pretty massive in terms of now, the open source contribution. When you factor in even China and other nations, it's it's on exponential growth, right? So is it just open source? Is the model not necessarily a business? Yeah. So this is the big question. No one knows. >> I think we crossed that. And open source is the model. Um, and this is where me is a product manager. That's worked around open source. I've spent a lot of time thinking about how to create commercial offerings around open source. I spent 10 years at Economical, the first half of which, as an engineer, the second half of which, as a product manager around, uh, about building services, commercial services around 12 And I learned quite a few things that now apply absolutely to communities as well as to a number of open source startups. That that I've advised on DH kind of given them some perspective on maybe some successful and unsuccessful ways to monetize that that opens. >> Okay, so doesn't talk about Let's get back to Coburg. And so I think this is the next level Talk track is as Cooper Netease has established itself and landed in the industry and has adoption. It's now an expansion votes the land adopted expand. We've seen adoption. Now it's an expansion mode. Where does it go from here? Because you look at the tale signs things like service meshes server. Listen, you get some interesting trends that going to support this expansionary stage of uber netease. What is your view about the next expansion everyway what >> comes next? Yeah, I I think I think the next stage is really about democratizing communities for workloads that you know. It's quite obvious where when communities is the right answer at the scale of a Google or a Twitter or Netflix or, you know, some of these massive services that it is obviously and clearly the best answer to orchestrating containers. Now I think the next question is, how does that same thing that works at that massive scale Also worked for me as a developer at a very small scale helped me develop my software. My small team of five or 10 people. Do I need a coup? Burnett. He's If I'm ah five or 10 person startup. Well, I mean, not the original sort of borde vision of communities. It's probably overkill, but actually the tooling has really advanced, and we now >> have >> communities that makes sense on very small scales. You've got things like a three s from from Rancher. You've got micro Kates from from my colleagues at economical other ways of making shrinking communities down to something that fits, perhaps on devices perhaps at the edge, beyond just the traditional data center and into remote locations that need to deploy manage applications >> on the Cooper Netease clustering the some of the tech side. You know, we've seen some great tech trends as mentioned in Claudia Horton. Works and map Our Let's Take Claudia and Horton work. Remember back in the old days when it was booming? Oh, they were so proud to talk about their clusters. I stood up all these clusters and then I would ask them, Well, what do you doing with it? Well, we're storing data. I think so. That became kind of this use case where standing up the cluster was the use case and they're like, OK, now let's put some data in it. It's a question for you is Coburn. Eddie's a little bit different. I'm not seeing they were seeing real use cases. What are people standing up? Cuban is clusters for what specific Besides the same Besides saying I've done it. Yeah, What's the what's the main use case that you're seeing this that has real value? >> Yeah, actually, there's you just jog t mind of really funny memory. You know, back in those big data days, I was CEO of a startup. We were encrypting data, and we were helping encrypt healthcare data for health care companies and the number of health care companies that I worked with at that time who said they had a big data problem and they had all of I don't know, 33 terabytes worth of worth of data that they needed to encrypt. It was kind of humorous sometimes like, Is that really a big, big data problem? This fits on a single disc, you know, Uh, but yeah, I mean, it's interesting how >> that the hype of of the tech was preceding. The reality needs needs, says Cooper Nettie. So I have a Cuban Eddie's cluster for blank. Fill in the blank. What are people saying? >> Yeah, uh, it's It's largely about the modernization. So I need to modernize my infrastructure. I'm going to adopt the platform. That's probably not, er, the old er job, a Web WebSphere type platform or something like that. I'm investing in hardware investing in Software Middle, where I'm investing in people, and I want all of those things to line up with where industry is going from a software perspective, and that's where Cooper Nighties is sort of the cornerstone piece of that Lennox Of course, that's That's pretty well established >> canoes delivery in an integration piece of is that the pipeline in was, that was the fit on the low hanging fruit use cases of Cooper Netease just development >> process. Or it's the operations it's the operations of now got software that I need to deploy across multiple versions, perhaps multiple sites. Uh, I need to handle that upgrade ideally without downtime in a way that you said service mash in a way that meshes together makes sense. I've got a roll out new certificates I need to address the security, vulnerability, thes air, all the things that Cooper and I used to such a better job at then, what people were doing previously, which was a whole lot of four loops, shell strips and sshh pushing, uh, pushing tar balls around. Maybe Debs or rpm's around. That is what Cooper not he's actually really solves and does an elegant job of solving as just a starting point. And that's just the beginning and, you know, without getting ve injury here, you know, Anthros is the thing that we had at Google have built around Cooper Netease that brings it to enterprise >> here the other day did a tweet. I called Anthem. I just typing too fast. I got a lot of crap on Twitter for that mission. And those multi cloud has been a big part of where Cubans seems to fit. You mentioned some of the licensing changes. Cloud has been a great resource for a lot of the new Web scale applications from all kinds of companies. Now, with several issues seeing a lot more than capabilities, how do you see the next shift with data State coming in? Because God stateless date and you got state full data. Yeah, this has become a conversation point. >> Yeah, I think Kelsey Hightower has said it pretty eloquently, as he usually does around the sort of the serval ist movement and lets lets developers focus on just their code and literally just their code, perhaps even just their function in just their piece of code, without having to be an expert on all of the turtles all the way, all the way down. That's the big difference about service have having written a couple of those functions. I can I can really invest my time on the couple of 100 lines of code that matter and not choosing a destro choosing a cougar Nati is choosing, you know, all the stack underneath. I simply choose the platform where I'm gonna drop that that function, compile it, uploaded and then riff and rub. On that >> fifth anniversary, Cooper Netease were riffing on Cooper Netease. Dustin Circle here inside the Cube Cube Alumni you were recently at the coop con in overseas in Europe, Barcelona, Barcelona, great city. Keeps been there many times. Do was there covering for us. Couldn't make this trip, Unfortunately, had a couple daughter's graduating, so I didn't make the trip. Sorry, guys. Um, what was the summary? What was the takeaway? Was the big walk away from that event? What synthesized? The main stories were the most important stories being >> told. >> Big news, big observations. >> It was a huge event to start with. It was that fear of Barcelona. Um, didn't take over the whole space. But I've been there a number of times from Mobile World Congress. But, you know, this is this is cube con in the same building that hosts all of mobile world Congress. So I think 8,000 attendees was what we saw. It's quite celebratory. You know, I think we were doing some some pre fifth birthday bash celebrations, Key takeaways, hybrid hybrid, Cloud, multi Cloud. I think that's the world that we've evolved into. You know, there was a lot of tension. I think in the early days about must stay on. Prem must go to the cloud. Everything's there's gonna be a winner and a loser and everything's gonna go one direction or another. I think the chips have fallen, and it's pretty obvious now that the world will exist in a very hybrid, multi cloud state. Ultimately, there's gonna be some stuff on Prem that doesn't move. There's going to be some stuff better hosted in one arm or public clouds. That's the multi cloud aspect, Uh, and there will be stubborn stuff at the edge and remote locations and vehicles on oil rigs at restaurants and stores and >> so forth. What's most exciting from a trans statement? What do you what? What's what's getting you excited from what you see on the landscape out there? >> So the tying all of that to Cooper Netease, Cuban aunties, is the thing that basically normalizes all of that. You write your application put it in a container and expect to communities to be there to scale that toe. Operate that top grade that to migrate that over time. From that perspective, Cooper nineties has really ticked, ticked all the boxes, and you've got a lot of choices now about which companies here, you're going to use it and where >> beyond communities, a lot of variety of projects coop flow, you got service messes out there a lot of difference. Project. What's What's a dark horse? What's something that sets out there that people should be paying attention to? That you see emerging? That's notable. That should be paying attention. To >> think is a combination of two things. One is pretty obvious, and that's a ML is coming like a freight train and is sort of the next layer of excitement. I think after Cooper, Netease becomes boring, which hopefully if we've done our jobs well, that communities layer gets settled and we'll evolve. But the sort of the hockey stick hopefully settles down and it becomes something super stable. Uh, the application of machine learning to create artificial intelligence conclusions, trends from things that is sort of the next big trend on then I would say another one If you really want the dark horse. I think it's around communications. And I think it's around the difference in the way that we communicate with one another across all forms of media voice, video chat, writing, how we interact with people, how we interact with our our tools with our software and in fact, how our software in Iraq's with us in our software acts with with other software that communications industry is, it's ripe for some pretty radical disruption. And you know some of the organizations and they're doing that. It's early early days on those >> changes. Final point you mentioned earlier in our conversation here about how Dev Ops is influencing impacting non tech and computer science. Really? What did you mean by that? >> Uh, well, I think you brought up unexpectedly and that that you were looking at the way Uh, some other industries are changing, and I think that cross pollination is actually quite quite powerful when you take and apply a skill and expertise you have outside of your industry. But it adds something new and interesting, too, to your professional environment. That's where you get these provocative operations. He's really creative, innovative things that you know. No one really saw it coming. >> Dave Ops principles apply to other disciplines. Yeah, agility. That's that's pointing down waterfall based processes. That's >> one phenomenal example. Imagine that for governments, right to remove some of the like the pain that you and I know. I've got to go and renew my license. My birthday's coming up. I gotta go to renew my driver's license. You know much. I'm dreading going to the the DMV Root >> Canal driver's license on the same. Exactly >> how waterfall is that experience. And could we could we beam or Mohr Agile More Dev Autopsy and some of our government across >> the U. S. Government's procurement practices airbase upon 1990 standards they still want Request a manual, a physical manual for every product violent? Who does that? >> I know that there are organizations trying to apply some open source principles to government. But I mean, think about, you know, just democracy and how being a little bit more open and transparent in the way that we are in open source code, the ability to accept patches. I have a side project, a passion for brewing beer and I love applying open source practices to the industry of brewing. And that's an example of where use professional work, Tio. Compliment a hobby. >> All right, we got to bring some cubic private label, some Q beer. >> If you like sour beer, I'm in the sour beer. >> That's okay. We like to get the pus for us. Final question for you. Five years from now, Cooper needs to be 10 years old. What's the world gonna look like when we wake up five years from now with two Cuban aunties? >> Yeah, I think, uh, I don't think we're struggling with the Cooper nutties. Uh, the community's layer. At that point, I think that's settled science, inasmuch as Lennox is pretty settled. Science, Yes, there's a release, and it comes out with incremental features and bug fixes. I think Cuban aunties is settled. Science management of of those containers is pretty well settled. Uh, five years from now, I think we end up with software, some software that that's writing software. And I don't quite mean that in the way That sounds scary, uh, and that we're eliminating developers, but I think we're creating Mohr powerful, more robust software that actually creates that that software and that's all built on top of the really strong, robust systems we have underneath >> automation to take the heavy lifting. But the human creation still keeping one of the >> humans Aaron the look it's were We're many decades away from humans being out of the loop on creative processes. >> Dustin Kirkland, he a product manager of Google Uh, Cooper Netease guru also keep alumni here in the studio talking about the coup. Burnett. He's 50 year anniversary. Of course, the kid was president creation during the beginning of the wave of communities. We love the trend we love Cloud would left home a tec. I'm Sean for here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Google Cloud Next '19. Brought to you by Google Cloud and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco in Moscone South. We're on the ground floor here at Google Next, Google's Cloud conference. I'm chatting with Stu Miniman; Dave Vellante's also hosting. He's out there getting stories. Our next two guests: Dana Berg, Chief Operating Officer of SADA and Chris Lehman, Head of Engineering for SADA. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining us. We're here on the ground floor. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> This is exciting. I feel like a movie star right here. >> It's game day here. All the tech athletes are out, Dave. If you look at the show, look at the demographics, hardcore developers, lot of IT, leaders also here, cloud architects, a lot of people trying to figure it out. We heard the keynote. Google is bringing a lot to the table. So what's new with you guys? You guys recently sold your Microsoft business, going all-in on Google. Talk about that relationship. >> We are. This is a brand new day for SADA. The energy around this place, where we are in the market, and where we are with the expanded attendance here has actually reaffirmed our business strategy to go all-in with Google. I don't know if you are aware but SADA has been around for almost 20 years. Historically have always been leaders in bringing people to the cloud even before there was really much of a cloud. We were a you know a pilot partner within Microsoft and Google and had a great thriving Microsoft business but an even bigger Google business and you know, we looked at the tea leaves, we looked at where we wanted to be, and aligned with a company that shared our mission and values and it was a clear choice. We chose Google. We made a very specific and deliberate act to sell off our Microsoft business so that we could take the horsepower of all of our engineering staff and apply them to Google. >> It's interesting you know, we've been around for 10 years doing theCUBE, go to a lot of events, I mean Dave Vellante, Stu, and I have been around for 30 years covering the IT, you guys 20 years. You guys have seen many ways of innovation come and go. Now you're going all in on Google. What is it about this wave right now that made that decision? What do you guys see? You're seeing something early here. Expand on that. Give us some color commentary because there's a wave here, right? A lot of people try. It's a combination of things. I mean, we saw the client-server thing. We saw that movement. Also the internet, we saw the web, mobile, now it's cloud. What's the big wave? What are you guys riding? >> I think there's a couple of things and I think it's unique to, philosophically, how we think of our real special relationship with Google. There is a momentum, right, and not to quote like a Bernie Sanders, but, seems like there's a revolution going on here, right, and, you know, I think, you know, what we see when we look around and we hear conversations and even with our customers, the way that we're all winning together is because we're winning the hearts and minds of the people inside of our customer base that are actually the ones responsible for inventing and the ones responsible for building, so when we're in board rooms and we're selling and along with Google, we're talking with developers, we're talking with designers, we're talking about people that are actually driving the vision for these business applications. We're not always talking to the CIO down like some of our other competitors seems to have only been able to sell that way. We're talking about the people responsible for not only constructing it but maintaining it. So that revolution is there. These folks are bubbling that up and they're seeing the real value inside of Google and what is that value from our point of view, and why did we make such a bold statement just to stick with Google is, and we saw Thomas today echo this, I think there's very few cloud providers that are bold enough to actually lead with the fact that we want our customers to have full choice whether you're using GCP or not. We want to build, architect, and manufacture a product offering that allows you to keep your stuff in your data centers, move your stuff to AWS. That power of choice is really not like what we've never heard anywhere else. >> And then on top of that, too, you got an application renaissance, right? A whole new way of coding, infrastructure that's programmable and going away, I mean if you think about what that does to the existing infrastructures, they can now mix and match and rearchitect everything from scratch and accelerate the app movement. >> Well, that's absolutely true, and a lot of that has to do with the fact that there are managed services in the cloud which makes it dramatically easier to build applications of course, so there's no question about that. Some of the offerings on GCP are particularly attractive for our clients, particularly the managed Kubernetes service. That's where we're seeing perhaps most of the interest that we're seeing, like that's a very common theme. Also the ML stack is an area that our customers are very interested in. >> Chris, can you bring us in some of those customer environments, you know, one of the things you hear, you know, most customers, it's, "I've got my application portfolio." Modernizing that is pretty challenging. There are some things that are kind of easy, some things that take a lot more work, but, you know, migration is one of those things that makes most people that have been in IT a while cringe because there's always the devil in the details and something goes wrong once you've got 95 percent done. What are you seeing, what's working, what's not working, how's the role of data changing, and all of that? >> I think migrations are usually more complex than they at first appear and so even with best intentions thinking that customers can just move their workloads seamlessly to the cloud have actually in practice been more challenging. So some of the areas that we find challenges are around data migration, especially in the context of zero downtime. That's always more difficult than with applications. So that's definitely an area that were we're spending a lot of time working with our customers to deliver. >> Just to add to that, I have to keep reminding myself of the name, but obviously the Anthos announcement today sounds incredibly intriguing as a lower barrier of effort to actually migrate. Our customers have been trying to really absorb and take a hold of Kubernetes and can it containerize methods for a long time. Some are having a harder time doing it than others. I think Anthos promises to make that endeavor much, much easier, and I think about as we leave here this week and we go back and we reeducate our own engineering teams as well as our customers, I think we might see some highly accelerated project timelines go from here down to here. >> And the demo that Jennifer Lynn did was pretty impressive. I mean, running inside of containers, whether it's VMs, and then having service patches on the horizon coming to the table is going to change the implementation delivery piece too in a massive way. I mean, you've got-- >> Oh, absolutely. >> Code, build, run on the cloud side, but this this kind of changes the equation on your end. Can you guys share the insight into that equation, because Google's clearly posturing to be partner friendly. You guys are a big partner now. You're going all-in. This is an interesting dynamic because you can focus on solving customers' problems. All this heavy lifting kind of goes away. Talk about the impact to you as a partner when you look at Anthem, Anthem migrate in particular, some of these migration challenges with containers and Kubernetes seems like it's a perfect storm right now to kind of jump in and do more, faster. >> Yeah. >> Well, it's certainly very interesting. Well, we'll want to take a really hard look at it. I mean, a very, very cool announcement. Moving to containers in the source prior to the migration obviously solves a lot of challenges so for that reason, it's definitely a move forward. >> And I think... You know, we always talk about, in this industry, the acceleration for consumption, but really that's a poor way of saying... Probably what we should be saying is an acceleration of value. So we're constantly in this battle to try and deliver value to our customers faster. That's what our customers want, right, and in essence we see Anthos as being potentially a big game-changer there so that, you know, our CIOs that we're talking with can show to their various stakeholders that they are making very good proactive moves into the cloud at lower-caught barriers of entry, right? >> Yeah. So, you brought up the the ML piece of Google. Wondering if you could help share a little bit on that. When I think back two years ago, you know, data was really at the core of what a lot of what Google was talking about. I was actually surprised not to hear a lot of it on the main stage this morning, but you know, AI, ML, what are you doing, what are your customers doing, does Google have leadership in the space? >> Google certainly has leadership in the space. Our customers, I think, relatively universally, think that their ML stack is the strongest among the competitors, but I think in practice what we're finding is there's a lot more urgency as far as just literal data migrations off of their data centers into the cloud, and I foresee a lot more AI and ML work as more move in. >> John: Yeah. >> So you might, in our booth here, not to give a plug, but we've got a booth down at the end with a full-fledged racing car, just to talk about the art of the possible with AI and ML. Our engineering teams in the race teams that we sponsor, they're there, the driver's there, you should go down and talk to 'em. We've taken all the race telemetry data for the last six months and all of his races and practices, we've aggregated that data all into GCP, run AI and ML algorithms on it to provide his racing team some very predictive ways that he can get better and that team can get better, and so I'd invite just anybody that wants to go there and take a look at, even if you're in banking, or if you're in retail, or if you're in health care, take a look at some of how that was done, because it's a very, very powerful way, to answer your question, head and shoulders down why Google is actually accelerating and exceeding in AI. >> And one of the things that Thomas Kurian showed onstage was the recent Hack-a-Thon they had with the college students with the NCAA data of the game that just finished, and throughout that experience, this is a core theme of GCP, and now Anthos, which is getting data in and using it easily, and scaling at a scale level that seems unprecedented. So this team seems to be the application... The new differentiator. >> I think it is. I think that announcement, obviously the big three takeaways for us, certainly, scale, unmatched. Certainly speed and migration with Anthos. If I could highlight one other, I was incredibly pleased with, well I've been pleased since Thomas' arrival in general by bringing an enterprise class strategy within sight of Google that I think are going to respond well to our enterprise customers, and part of enterprise class is also making sure that their partner community has amazing enhancement programs that really incentivize those partners that are actually in the full managed services space from cradle to grave, lifetime customer value. So we're very excited about even further announcements this week that no doubt have been inspired by Thomas to try and really take advantage of their partner community that are in the business of cradle to grave support of customers. >> You feel comfortable with Thomas. He's taught a lot of customers, he knows the enterprise. >> We've had an opportunity to meet with him. We've had some shared customers that have had a great privilege of getting to know him and support us and collectively them. >> John: He knows the partner equation pretty well, and the enterprise. >> Without a doubt. >> It's about partnering, because there's a monetization, the shared go to markets together. Talk about the importance of that and what's it like to be a partner. >> Yeah, without a doubt, again, you know, his embrace of the open-source community that you saw today, really taking advantage of highlighting partner value is wonderful, but I think Thomas, above anything else, knows that Google needs to scale. They need to scale, and then they have to have breadth and they have to have depth, and, you know, to get to where Google needs to be over the course of the next two, three years, it's wonderful, it's refreshing, it's 100% accurate that Google knows and Thomas knows that the path to do that is via partners; partners that share in Google's vision, that are 100% aligned to the same things that Google is aligned with, and I think that's why I'm so thankful to be at SADA, large in part, because all of the things that we care about in terms of our customer success as well as Google's success, we all share that, so it's a great trifecta. >> It's a ground-floor opportunity. Congratulations. Guys, talk about your business. What's going on? You've got some new offices I heard you opened up. What's going on in the state of the business? Obviously the Google focus you're excited about obviously. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> There, at the beginning, I called Google the dark horse. I think with the tech that they have and the renewed focus on the enterprise, building on what Diane Greene had put foundationally, Thomas is meeting with hundreds of customers. He's so busy he doesn't have time to come on theCUBE, but he'll come on soon, but he's focused. This is now a great opportunity. Talk about your business. What's the state of the union there? Give an update. >> I can take that one if you don't mind. >> Go ahead. >> You can add poetic color if you want. (laughing) Yeah, so as I said, we're entering a new journey for SADA in light of renewed focus, renewed conviction to Google. We are investing more than we ever have into the common belief that Google is the one to beat in terms of momentum, drive, and ultimately winning the hearts and the minds of who we've talked about. So, over the last four months, we've opened five new offices in New York, Austin, Chicago, Denver. Our headquarters is in Los Angeles, and just recently, we just opened a brand new office in Toronto, so we can really help our Canadian customers really see the the same type of white-glove treatment we provide those customers in the States and so that's why, well, I wasn't earlier, but I'm walking around with a Canadian flag. We're very excited about the presence that we're going to have in Canada >> Its "Toronno." I always blow and I call it "Toron-to," being the American that I am. It's "Toronno." >> Dana: Glad you said it right. Good. >> Now, on the engineering side, so you guys are on the front lines as also a sales, development, there's also customer relationship, engineering side, so I'm sure you guys are hiring. There's some hard problems to solve out there. Can you guys share some color commentary on the type of solutions you guys are doing? What's the heavy? What solutions are you solving, problems that you're solving for customers, what are the key things that you got going on? >> Yeah. >> Well, a lot of cloud migrations, a lot of web and application development, custom development, and data pipelines. I'd say those are really the three key focus areas that we're working on at the moment. >> One other thing, too: so... we believe that we want 100% customer retention, always, and that goes above and beyond an implementation. So the other big area of investments that we're making is in a whole revamped technical account management team, so for those of our GCP customers that have had the privilege, we've had the privilege of working with and for, we are building out a team of individuals that will, well beyond the project, stay with that customer, work with them weekly, monthly, quarterly, and try to always find ways to expand and move workloads into the cloud. We think that provides stickiness. We think that provides ultimate value to try and help our customers identify where else they can take full advantage of the cloud, and it's a fairly new program, and large in part I just want to thank Thomas and the partner team for new programs that are coming out to help us so that we can actually reinvest in things that go you know throughout the lifecycle of the customer. So, very, very good stuff. >> Dana, Chris, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. We'll check out your booth, the car's there, with the data. Bring that data exhaust to the table, pun intended. >> Yes. >> Analyzing with Google Cloud, Anthos. Good commentary. Thanks for sharing. >> Really appreciate being on board. Thanks for having us. >> Alright, great. CUBE coverage here live on the floor in San Francisco. Google Next 2019. This is Google's cloud conference. Customers are here. A lot of developers. More action, live on the day one of three days of coverage after this short break. Stay with us. (theCUBE Theme)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (bright music) >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, joined by Justin Warren, and you're watching SiliconANGLE's production of the Cube here at VMworld 2017. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Sometimes people ask me, "Stu, you guys are doing so many interviews, isn't it tiring?" I say well, but I get really good guests, and that makes my job really easy. We've had lots of customers on, I've been enjoying just as many others. One of the people that I've gotten to get to know through the VMware community, I'm thrilled to be able to bring back on the program, is Steve Herrod, who's now the managing director of General Catalyst. Steve, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you, I feel like a veteran of this program, I love being on it. >> Yeah, I remember back when we created one of our first what we called Sizzle Videos, we had B roll from you, and Pat Gelsinger before he was on the VMware side, so you are always welcome on our program. We're glad that we could find time that fit on both of our schedules. You made a guest appearance, a younger Steve Herrod maybe, in the keynote had a lot of us laughing, so. >> Yeah, that was fun to be back. I think the story's kind of interesting. I don't know if it got lost in the dialogue a little bit, but the idea was something seemed super novel at the time, and then it becomes kind of the new normal, right, and I think that was the point he was trying to make. And it was, it was truly the case back in the early years of VMware, trying to convince people to do these virtual machines was ridiculous. Now it's about all these other topics. >> I think back, you know, I've worked with VMware for 15 years, I think back to how many people I explained what is virtualization. When vMotion first came out, the awe and excitement on everybody's, but it's 2017, come on. Virtualization's like the legacy. Now it's cloud, and developers, and blockchain, and everything. >> Steve: Containers and serverless! >> Stu: Serverless. >> That's right. >> Well, I guess they brought up serverless before I did, so that's great. Steve, what's happening in your world these days, what are some of the big conversations? >> Yeah, this's obviously one of my favorite conferences to come back to also, just to really see what's going on at a top level. Mostly because of the customers that are here, and then, obviously the infrastructure vendors. But I don't know, I feel like as I get older and go through this industry longer, you see a lot of the new things that are popping up, and for me it's always been about heterogeneity. And when we started VMware, what actually mattered was you had different vendors of servers, and like, it caused chaos by having different server vendors. That's kind of tamed, yeah exactly, there's like the BIOS or the HAL, and Windows had to change, or something. And like, no one talks about that whatsoever now, but if you just kind of squint your eyes a little bit, the heterogeneity is now am I in a public cloud, or private cloud? Or maybe, do I put my software into a container versus a VM? So I just, I always like looking at what is the heterogeneity, and then what are the real customers supposed to do with it? How do they navigate it and what companies can be built to help you sort of smooth it out and use the different things. I've been doing that all my life, and continue to look for companies that do that. >> Yeah, that mix of different things in customers, particularly Enterprise customers, who have like nine of everything. It seems like with VMware and the AWS now being more, well, we're friends now. Whereas previously it was like, oh no, you have to pick one or the other. It's like the heterogeneous nature of things, is that well, actually no, we need to work with multiple of, you all need to play nicely with each other, otherwise we can't use you. Because even if I, you know, MNA, for example, I go and buy someone, they might have something different. And that seems to get lost a bit. The vendors seem to focus a lot on greenfields. So do you think that this kind of, we're friends and yes, you can use both of us, and it's all good, do you think that's the way it should always have been and that's going to be good for customers, they're going to adopt this and want more than they might have with something that was like, no, no, you have to choose. >> I think that's absolutely right. The way I've seen people doing things, the customer always wins. That's kind of, every time I have a startup who's gotten created and they have a great customer, and they say, you know, blank vendor won't work with us, I have them call the customer and tell them to tell their other vendor, work with this startup. And the good news is any company that's successful is super customer-centric and they do listen. I think in this case, it's really fascinating. If you think about it, it used to be, like, you've been covering this forever, it used to be VMware was about server consolidation. And that's like the furthest thing from anyone's mind now, right, now it's, the real limiter to doing these new things tends to be people and operational skills. And so the idea that you can use the same way you're used to working with infrastructure, the same way that you grade storage, and the same way you think about it, and then apply to a world that just kind of outsources all of the underlying goo that they used to do on the servers, it makes a ton of sense from a VMware customer standpoint. And yeah, obviously as you look at the relationships you have with Google or with Amazon, you know, they're very incented to have new cloud services that people are able to consume, and the number one problem for them is how do you get, like, real important apps to leverage these new services. So it's symbiotic in the sense that maybe some of these existing apps, as you start to morph them, they can leverage a Amazon or a Google service. And so it's helpful on the needs of the public clouds as well. >> One of the areas where the heterogeneity of the environment causes even more complexity is security. So I know that that's something you've looked at awhile, we've talked to some of the companies that you work with. Heck, I think, you know, IoT, the surface area, is just changing by orders of magnitude. Security, top issue being discussed here. You know, Pat Gelsinger got up on stage and says, hey, I need to apologize for the industry because we failed you. (laughing) So you know, Steve, why haven't your portfolio companies fixed all of this yet? (laughing) >> Why do you still have security issues? >> Stu: What's your take on what VMware is doing, and yeah. >> I mean, it's obviously something people, if there was the Cube in 1981, it would have been talking about security (laughing) as a challenge. But I do think, you know, things have changed quite a bit as of late. I think the number of really advanced attackers, you know, truly nation states or organized crime going after it, it's the same reason that robbers rob banks, cause it's where the money is. And so I think the sophistication has gone up. At the same time, when the complexity of the environment has gone up a ton as well. And so I would say if we were in the good old days of less sophisticated attackers and like, a closed-in data center with no roaming mobile phones or SaaS, like, we'd probably be in pretty good shape. But a combination of those has really made it take to the next level. I think, you know, I think you have to really look at the complexity of those changes right now. I think the fact that there is a public cloud and a private cloud and that you have a device that has certain characteristics and then you have your server, it leads to the heterogeneity that we were talking about before. And so I really obsess over companies that can come in, like VMware is certainly trying to do as well, but that really try and come in and make something where a single way of thinking about security applies wherever stuff is running. And I think it's just too complex to have to have different admins, different policies, different everything. And certainly, if nothing else, it'll keep you from moving faster and leveraging the full cloud models. >> Yeah, given that security is, has been, it's been an issue for forever. It seems like that's something that just doesn't change. Is that due to the fact that we haven't actually done anything about it the right way, or do you think that it's just an inherent situation that is not going away because the problem is humans? And the problem is always humans, everything is a people problem. But in this case, is security, is it just going to be something that we have to manage rather than solve? >> I personally think that, I'm pretty optimistic we can do so, so much better than we have. I think it's always been- >> Justin: We are coming off a pretty low bar, so. (laughing) >> I thrive under low expectations. (laughing) So it's really good. But on a serious note, I think that a lot of the way that people looked at security has always been the cat and mouse game, where it's, I'm trying to stay ahead of the other guy, whether it's zero days, or whether it's, I mean, now we're getting malware infected through ad networks that show up on your favorite websites and through emails, like, the sophistication of spam attacks, or phishing attacks, are just ridiculous now. I mean, it looks so realistic. So I'm just a big advocate of let's totally think a different way about how we do security. And one thing I talk about often and I'm really obsessed with is the notion of, okay, we're always going to try and stop the bad stuff from hitting, but now we actually have to stop it from doing damage once it's in. And that's whether it's the segmentation that goes on in the network or whether it's, I have companies that are really focused on doing it in web browsers, the notion that you really have to sandbox and keep things in place is something I think is going to be a big step forward. Even like a database level right now, whenever you hear, I broke into Anthem Health and stole like six million records, like maybe we have row by row encryption, or maybe we have ways that, again, try your best not to have them happen, but when they do, let's just stop the damage from being as big as it is. So a model like that I think will be a really important part of the security posture going forward, which just people haven't put enough effort into. >> Okay. >> Steve, we've talked to you the last few years about developers. This year, I know they've got a hackathon, but I don't see as many hoodies, there's no longer a developer track, even, Pivotal made an announcement this morning, I'm like, come on, they didn't bring James Waters out? Rob Mees like all dressed up, looking proper, with the blue shirt and you know, the blazer and everything, so, where are the developers for the community here? >> Well, I do know, like when we were first starting to introduce a developer track, the day we announced the spring acquisition, for those that were around for that, there was complete stares and just like, this audience is a great, great audience, mostly focused on infrastructure, and thus, you know, it really wasn't a good fit there. So I think part of it is just knowing your audience, knowing that the goal of this particular conference is to make IT-enabled development of apps in a new way. So I think it's very smart that it's changed the focus quite a bit. But I do think, you know, when you have this type of solution, you're trying to solve all the problems in the hypervisor layer or in the management tools layers that you have, I think, as you go and think, like, take the security model a little bit further, some interesting announcements and good things going on here, but I'm kind of obsessed also with how do we make developers do a better job of having the applications being protected in the first place? And so there's a lot of research and interesting startups that are around self-protecting software. And it's like really putting it at an even higher level in the stack. And that's something that you would do at an infrastructure layer. It's something you would actually do at a developer conference or a developer focus. So I think you got to just be careful that you know your audience, you're certainly talking about the right solutions, but you're aware of the different approaches to doing this. Especially for things like dev ops, you really need to really immerse yourself with how people are developing and shipping their software to get the solutions in place. >> Yeah, it does feel like VMware has stopped apologizing for existing, so, you know, sort of bringing developers and saying, you know, we have a developer track, it's sort of like, oh wait, no, no, no, we're cool, really, we're cool. Whereas letting that go feels more like, no, no, we know who we are, and this is our audience. We will be the best us we can be rather than trying to be someone else. >> I think the buzz I've gotten just from walking around as you all said as well, this has been a very positive VMworld, and again, it's not only not being apologetic, but it's also like real announcements and real partnerships that are shipping. You know, obviously the Amazon and Google being big ones, but just across the board. Yeah, there's a lot of positive, if you even look at like the top tracks that are going on, it's VMware on AWS. So there's like real progress, and I think there's real interest in that side of things that makes you not have to focus on some of the developer stuff that might have been focused on in the past. >> Yeah, well certainly they're doing well on things like NSX and VSAN, which just seem to be selling like hotcakes. >> Yeah, those are- >> So that helps. And customers love it. >> Very interesting, yeah. >> Yeah Steve, speaking of the public clouds, I mean, this year we're finally starting to see some of these things come together. For a few years, we were almost like, oh, you know, messaging was like, they don't exist, or they're book sellers, or you know, if they win, we all lose, and everything. I was at the AWS summit in New York City a couple of weeks ago, and there's a couple of sessions done by VMware, Amazon's in the booth, Andy Jassy gets a big applause here. Last year, I've been at re:Invent for a number of years, that big AWS show. I know you've been there for years, starting to see some of the people that, you know, were early in this community playing there, how do you see those worlds colliding, the landscape, the competition, the coopetition, you know, what interests you there these days? >> I think it's pretty clear, and people have been talking about this for a while, but it's more clear to me than ever that, you know, there's always a swing back and forth of decentralized, centralized, I think, I think what we're really trying to find out is what are the boundaries going to be between applications that live in the public cloud and applications that stay on premises. And it's usually tracking some level of certifications, some level of data movement, all the things that you all have talked about before. But I think, you know, whether it's 50% is in the public cloud or 80% or 20%, I think that's where these lines are being drawn now. And it's very obvious that customers who want some of the benefits of the public cloud are going to be using more, and VMware needs to be the guider to help them get there. And likewise, Amazon and Google, they'd love to have more of the on-premises workloads and have a way to really speak to those more valuable, in many cases, applications. So it makes perfect sense, this is like this, I guess, battle that'll be going on forever. And I don't want to forget this either. What I think is also fascinating is, we also have these, you know, people talk about edge computing, but whatever it is, there's increasingly powerful devices, network connected, even further from the data centers. So I think we're going to have, in the end we're going to have like these edge device things, you're going to have your own data center, and then you're going to have a plethora of public clouds and SaaS offerings. And I think, again, just getting back to the master theme, how do you tame and let people effectively use these different layers and protect them? That's going to be where I think a lot of interesting companies are born. >> Yeah, great point. Cause sometimes people conflate some of these things. Cause for me it was, the public cloud kind of pulled from the data center, and now you've got the edge kind of pulling, >> Steve: Yeah, the other way. >> You know, that relation from the public cloud and that interesting dynamic and, you know, where a customer lives. What's the role of IT in the future? What's the role of the CIO? Is there some of the things, did you look at those pieces? >> I try to, you know, I actually tried to create this, I tried to make this nerdy formula, like, the number one question for IT has traditionally been like, where should I run stuff to be most cost effective, most responsive from a time standpoint to my customers, that I can secure it, based on the type of data, that I can pass certain certifications. So in many ways, when we got started with VMware, it was all about, let's take inventory of all my applications and bucket them and choose which bucket could be virtualized, which had to stay native. Now they're bucketizing them and saying, which ones could run in the public cloud, which ones need to be rewritten? And I think at the end of the day, an IT, a good IT team will know the business value and the, like, the goal of these applications and then help provide the easiest way to run them and the right place for what they're trying to do. Again, whether it's these end devices or whether it is their own data centers or elsewhere, I think the idea that they're a broker of services, some of which they provide themselves and some of which they outsource, I think that's the modern IT role. >> Yeah, that's quite a substantial change from what IT has traditionally done. And there has been, talking to customers and service providers and vendors, there has been a shift in ability, I think. But it feels like it's still only just getting started, rather than it being, you know, well advanced. Is that what you're seeing as well? >> It's a real shift, like you're saying, I think it's, we used to say it's like moving from the builder of services to the broker or services. So I do think that's a good analogy, where it used to be, if I don't build it myself, I can't offer support for it, I can't do cost controls, I can't offer it quickly. And so now I think they're just realizing their job is to get you the best thing for what you need to do. And again, some percentage of that time, it is by building it themselves. >> Justin: Yeah, okay. >> Steve, I'll give the final word with a wildcard, you know, VR, AR, AI, ML, blockchain, Ethereum, you know, what's exciting you these days? What things are you looking, yeah, John Furrier's going to run up here and tell you about the ICO soon I think. (laughing) But you know, you're down from the Valley, what's real, what's interesting, especially from your technology standpoint? >> I have an awesome job, much like you, I get to meet interesting people all day long. And all of them have interesting ideas of where the world is going. All of them are optimists, they think they're going to be the one to deliver it, so I love that part of it. But cutting through what's real and what's hype versus not is really the core job. I guess for you as well. (laughing) So I would just say, as with the traditional Gartner cycle, things get so overblown, and then reality settles in, and then they go forward. I probably get five pitches a week on this is machine learning for blah, and if you even knew a little bit about AI and ML, you realize, no, you're using stats. Like, it's just being used to so many ways. And we used to do it with the cloud, cloud washing it was called at the time. So anyway, I do think there's a lot of really substantive things going on. I love the blockchain work. I think it's also been a little overinflated, but the idea that you can do distributive brokering and keep consistency is going to play out in all sorts of areas. Maybe John's ICO will be a sign of the future for the core piece there. But I'm a big fan of what's going on with the combination of proper machine learning that's successful by near-humans and that has cloud resources to back it. I think it's those two things, you have to have both of them to really just start attacking a lot of problems. And we look at, certainly I look at the ones as they apply to security and to things like that, but they apply across everything from medical to almost every other part of our life. So I see a lot of those right now, and I think it's going to be a pretty big change as we head forward. >> Awesome, well Steve Herrod, always a pleasure to have you on the program. Thanks so much for joining us. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. The Cube will be back with lots more coverage from VMworld 2017. Thanks for watching the Cube. (bright music)