>>Okay, welcome back everyone to the cubes coverage here at AWS reinvent 2021, our annual conference here with the cube goes out the ground. We're in person live in person, also a hybrid event online as well. A lot of great content flowing day one in the books keynotes out there, big news wall-to-wall coverage I'm shot for a year. Hosts got a great segment here with AWS marketplace and revolution, how customers are buying and deploying their technologies, DB orbit, and GM radio's marketplace and control services. And Chris Casey, worldwide ed, a business development of data exchange for AWS gentlemen, welcome to the cube, John, >>Thanks for having us >>Pleasure to be here. So I'm a huge fan of the marketplace. People know that I believe that ultimately it's going to be automated at anyway, and that procurement and enterprises as they buy and as people work together and the big theme this year is kind of this whole purpose built stack, where SAS is going to be a lot of integrations where people are working together. You see multiple partners plugging in and snapping into AWS. That was a big part of Adam's keynote today. So this really kind of lays a perfect foundation for the path that you guys have been on, which is partnering, go to market buying and consuming technology. So what's the update. Give us a, uh, an overview high level, Steven of marketplace. >>Yeah, John. And again, thanks for having us. It's awesome to be here, meeting with customers and partners again for the first time in a couple of years, great to be meeting in person and interacting. So we're super excited about where we're going with the marketplace, as you all probably know, customers in every industry are really thinking about how they transform their business using modern technology. And it's not just about the technology that they're building themselves. It's also the tools that they want to get from their partners, which we're super excited to be able to offer them on marketplace. We're about to have our ten-year anniversary. We launched the first version of marketplace in April of 2012. And back then, you know, it was a very simple e-commerce website that builders could come and buy Amazon machine instances and pay by the hour running popular, open source package or operating system software, but we've come an awful long way since then and changed the surface area of the business quite a bit, um, from a product type perspective, we now offer, uh, our partners the opportunity to list and meter their SAS solutions. >>Um, adding to the army base, we allow partners to vend their container images, and we have some new updates I'll share with you in just a second on that this year in 2019 customers asked us for the same experience that they have buying software to apply to the way they licensed data. So we launched AWS data exchange in 2019, and then in 2020 last year, we, we, we recognize that customers wanted to be able to bundle professional services offerings and with the software that they buy. So we launched a professional services offering type two. And then when you start to combine that with all of the different procurement motions that we now support, it's no longer just the self-service e-commerce capabilities, but when customers want to privately negotiate deals with their vendors, they can do so with our private offer capability, which we were the first to launch in 2000, which we then complemented in 2018 with the ability for customers to negotiate with the channel partner, reseller a managed service provider of their choice. So when you start to combine all of these different product type offerings and ways, our partners can go to market through marketplace in an automated way with all of these procurement options. We now have 2000 sellers listing more than 12,000 offerings on the marketplace, which more than 325,000 customers around the world buy either directly from the seller or from the channel partner of their choice. And when you add all that up, we've seen this year alone, billions of products and services sold through the market. >>Wow. What a rocket ship from a catalog to a full-blown comprehensive consumption environment, which by the way, the market wants that fast speed, speed, time to market. Okay. So give me the update a year at reinvent. What announcement did you guys just announced that the partner summit this week? What's the, what's the news. Yeah. So there's a couple of, >>Um, we'll talk about one and then I'll hand it over to Chris to talk about the data exchange announcements. But the first announcement we made at the partner keynote yesterday was around our container offering. So in 2018, we launched the ability for partners to list container based offerings. So their software and containers, whether it be net app Druva, um, Palo Alto or others who are having their security or other software and containers that could then be deployed by customers into the AWS managed container environments. So that could be deployed into Amazon EKS, ECS, or AWS far gate, which is great for customers who run their container workloads and our managed services. But we have a lot of customers who run their own Kubernetes environments either on, um, on AWS, on premises or using another one of the, um, Kubernetes platforms that are out there like red hat open shift. >>So we're a lot of customers just said, I also want that third-party software to be easily deployable into my own Kubernetes environment. So we were super happy to announce on Monday what we call now, the AWS marketplace for containers anywhere, which allows our partners like Apollo Alto or a CrowdStrike or a Cisco to list containers on the marketplace that can be deployed into any Kubernetes environment that the customer is running, whether that be on, on AWS, on premises, into VM-ware Tansu red hat, OpenShift, rancher, um, or wherever they, wherever they're running their Kubernetes workloads. So that's super exciting. And then we have a couple of announcements on data exchange, ed that Chris talk about also >>The dictionary. I'm going to come back to the containers with some really important things I want to drill into. Go ahead. >>There's two pretty significant, which we believe at game-changing capabilities that we've recently announced with data exchange. The first one is AWS data exchange for API APIs, and really why this is quite significant is customers had told us that not a lot, not all of their data use cases were really geared towards them consuming full flat files, which is what we launched data exchange with in terms of a delivery capability two years ago. And so with AWS data exchange for APIs, customers can come and procure an API from a third party data provider and only procure the data that they need via an API request response. Um, what, why this is so significant is for data providers, they can bring their API APIs to AWS data exchange, make them really easily available for data subscribers to find and subscribe to. And then for data subscriber, they're interacting with that API in the same way that they're interacting with other AWS APIs and they can enjoy the same governance and control characteristics using services like I am in CloudTrail. >>Um, so that flexibility in a new delivery type is, is, is really meaningful for data subscribers. The second, uh, announcement that we we really went into yesterday was the preview of Amazon data exchange for Amazon Redshift. And this capability gives customers, um, data subscribers, the ability to access data in the data warehouse supported by Amazon Redshift. And the unique aspect about this is the data subscriber. Doesn't actually have to copy the data out of Amazon Redshift if they don't want to, they can query the data directly. And what's really meaningful for them. There is they know that they're actually querying the latest data that the data provider has because they're actually querying the same data warehouse table that the data provider is publishing into data. Providers really love this, especially those ones, those data providers that were already using Amazon Redshift to store their data, because now they don't have to manage the entitlements and subscription aspects of really making their data available to as many of their data consumers as possible. >>So basically what you're saying is it makes it easier for them to keep an update. They don't have to worry about merchandising that service. They just have API APIs rolled in and the other one is for developers to actually integrate new API APIs into their role and whatever services they're building. Is that right? >>Yeah. And it's, it's really the ultimate flexibility for a developer coming to AWS data exchange. If their use case warrants, them consuming a full dataset, you know, maybe they want to look at 10 years of stock history, you know, using file-based data delivery and immutable copies of those files through our S3 object, data sharing capabilities is fit for their use case. Um, but if they want to dynamically interact with data, AWS data exchange for API APIs is a brand new delivery capability that is really unlocking. And we hope we're really excited to see the innovation >>It's like you're bringing the API economy even further to the customer base on the third party. The question I have for both of you guys on the containers and the API is security because, you know, we've seen with containers, approved containers, being vetted, making sure that they're not going to have any malware in there or API is making sure everything's clean and tight. What's the, what are they? What's the security concerns. Can you share how you guys are talking about that? For sure. >>So it's probably comes as no surprise to you or folks who might be listening or tuning in that security has always been AWS is number one priority. We build it into everything we do. This offering is no different. We scan all of the container images that are published to our catalog before they're exposed to customers for any kind of known vulnerabilities. We're monitoring our catalog every single day now against new ones that might come out and customers actually tell us, it's one of the things that they like about buying software on marketplace, better than let's say other third party repositories that don't have the same level of vetting because they can kind of build that constant trust, um, into, >>And trust is a key cause you can get containers anywhere. You don't know where it's from. So you guys are actually vetting the containers, making sure they're certified. So to speak with Amazon's security check. >>We, we, we are indeed. And, uh, we have a number of security ISV who are participating in both our containers in our containers anywhere. It's one of the most high-performing categories for us. As I said before, we have vendors like CrowdStrike and Cisco and Palo Alto who are, you know, um, um, vending, various different endpoint and network security, um, uh, offerings >>It's my catalogs are for, I mean, this is what trust is all about. Making sure that you guys can put your name behind it in the marketplace. Okay. Let's take it through the consumption. What's the current state of the art with the marketplace with enterprises, you guys have a lot of programs. We're constantly hearing great things about the go to market with joint selling on the top tier. Uh, I think there's like the top tier category. And then you've got all kinds of other incentives for companies to deploy the marketplace and sell their stuff, >>Right? So we're, we're really starting to hit our stride with, uh, co-selling with our partners and some of our, um, you know, our top, most performing partners, they into every feature and capability and incentive program that we develop. Um, give us a lot of feedback on it. Just like we work backwards from customer needs to help them transform their procurement. We work backwards from our partner needs to help them optimize their go to market channel. And, uh, you know, we take feedback from our partners, uh, very seriously. And then we build things like private offers when they want to custom negotiate deals with their customers or channel partner, private offers when they want to do that with the channel partner of their choice. And we're just continuing to listen to that feedback and, and helping them grow their business. And, and, and frankly, you know, while a lot of partners love that we're able to help get them new customers. One of their favorite things about co-selling with us is that they're able to close larger contracts faster because they're doing that in concert with the AWS field teams and taking advantage of the fact that the customer's already building on AWS. >>So I know we've got a couple minutes left. I want to get this out there because I heard it I'd have to add him prior to re-invent. And he said, quote, we don't want, cus customers don't want to reinvent the wheel. And they see, that's why this whole purpose built kind of thing is getting traction. What do you guys got in the marketplace? That's what you'd call leveraging stuff has been built. So customers don't have to rebuild things. >>Yeah. I mean, if you just look back to the very beginning of marketplace, when we launched the marketplace of Amazon machine instances, it was basically pre-built armies that customers could deploy into their own accounts already running the third-party software that they wanted. And when I think about where we're going with things like procurement governance, uh, we developed a thing called a private marketplace where customers could curate the various different solutions from our catalog that they want, because they want to be able to control who in their enterprise can buy what, and that's just a whole bunch of manual work that they would have had to do and reinvent the wheel from every customer to every customer. And instead we just delivered them the capability to do that same with our managed entitlements capability, where they can share entitlements across AWS accounts, within their own organizational, without having to manually track who's used how much of what, and report that back to the seller to make sure that they're compliant with the terms and conditions. We handle all that. So our customers don't have to continue to reinvent that. >>Why? Well, because it's like open source concept. It's like you're building on things that are already built. You can build on top of it. As you guys see these recipes get, or workflows get rolled out, you put them back in the microwave. >>That's right. Always learning from customers and partners. And while we've grown quite a bit, 2000 sellers, 325,000 customers and billions of dollars of products and services sold, we still have so much more to go >>Between data exchange and what you guys got going on. It's not, it's not, it's complex as it gets more and more complex. I know you guys are abstracting away the complexity and the heavy lifting for customers. What's on the horizon for you guys. What are you tackling next? What's the next mountain you're going to climb on. >>There's still more automation we can drive into the co-selling motion. And, uh, um, uh, so that's one, there's more procurement and governance, uh, capabilities that we think we're going to be able to add to customers. Basically what they're telling us is are the chief procurement officers that we face off with. They want to be able to get the best deal at the lowest price, uh, with the best and most favorable terms and conditions. So we're trying to work backwards from that need to make sure we have the right category selection, wherever they might want it, whether it be an infrastructure provider or a line of business, um, uh, a line of business solution and make sure they're able to get exactly that >>Chris, back to you for your vision. I honestly, analytics is a big part of SAS and platform billing and metering and where the data is. Data exchange. Almost imagine that's going to have a nice headroom to it in terms of what you can do with data exchange. Yeah. >>If you look at the announcements we've recently made and sort of our vision for data exchanges to help any AWS customer find subscribe to and use third party data in the cloud. And these two recent announcements really help on that use portion where someone can actually create, you know, shorten the time to value for them using some of our analytics services like Amazon Redshift. So we'll continue to innovate there and listen to customers in terms of their feedback and how we can help them really integrate their data pipelines with the rest of the AWS ecosystem. But we're also continuing to invest in the find and subscribe to portion. Steven talked about some of the automation and we've built data exchange on top of the lot of the plumbing and building blocks that AWS marketplace already had, which was a pretty significant leg up for us, but certainly the way in which people discover and find new datasets that might help them in an analytics problem is certainly an area that, you know, we're going to continue to lean into. >>And exchange has been around for a long, long time. Now it's in the cloud generation and I think you guys have such a great job in the marketplace and this next gen has more and more platform. Specific products are coming out. Partners are snapping together, a lot more integration. So a lot more action coming on integration I can imagine. Right. That's right. Definitely. Right. Thanks for coming on the cube. Really appreciate it, Steve. A great to see you. >>Appreciate it. Thanks for having us always a pleasure. >>Great to have all the action from Amazon here, marketplace continuing to be the preferred way to consume and deploy technology, and soon to be an integration hub for this next generation cloud. I'm Jeff, where to keep your watching the queue of the leader in worldwide tech coverage. Be right back.

>>and welcome to this cube conversation. I'm john for a host of the queue here in Palo alto California. We've got two great remote guests to talk about, some big news hitting with scalability and Hewlett Packard enterprise drill, MCAT ceo of sexuality and chris Tinker, distinguished technologist from H P E. Hewlett Packard enterprise U room chris, Great to see you both. Cube alumni's from an original gangster days. As we say Back then when we started almost 11 years ago. Great to see you both. >>It's great to be back. >>So let's see. So >>really compelling news around kind of this next generation storage, cloud native solution. Okay. It's a, it's really kind of an impact on the next gen. I call, next gen devops meets application, modern application world and some, we've been covering heavily, there's some big news here around sexuality and HP offering a pretty amazing product. You guys introduced essentially the next gen piece of it are pesca, we'll get into in a second. But this is a game changing announcement you guys announces an evolution continuing I think it's more of a revolution but I think you know storage is kind of abstraction layer of evolution to this app centric world. So talk about this environment we're in and we'll get to the announcement which is object store for modern workloads but this whole shift is happening jerome, this is a game changer to storage, customers are gonna be deploying workloads. >>Yeah skeleton. Really I mean I personally really started working on Skele T more than 10 years ago 15 now And if we think about it I mean cloud has really revolutionized IT. and within the cloud we really see layers and layers of technology. I mean we all started around 2006 with Amazon and Google and finding ways to do initially we was consumer it at very large scale, very low incredible reliability and then slowly it creeped into the enterprise and at the very beginning I would say that everyone was kind of wizards trying things and and really coupling technologies together uh and to some degree we were some of the first wizard doing this But we're now close to 15 years later and there's a lot of knowledge and a lot of experience, a lot of schools and this is really a new generation, I'll call it cloud native, you can call it next year and whatever, but there is now enough experience in the world, both at the development level and at the infrastructure level to deliver truly distributed automate systems that run on industry standard service. Obviously good quality server deliver a better service than the service. But there is now enough knowledge for this to truly go at scale and call this cloud or call this cloud native. Really the core concept here is to deliver scalable I. T at very low cost, very high level of reliability. All based on software. We've we've been participated in this solution but we feel that now the draft of what's coming is at the new level and it was time for us to think, develop and launch a new product that specifically adapted to that. And chris I will let you comment on this because customers or some of them you can add a custom of you to that. >>Well, you know, you're right. You know, I've been in there have been like you have been in this industry for uh, well a long time, a little longer to 20, years. This HPV and engineering and look at the actual landscape has changed with how we're doing scale out, suffered to find storage for particular workloads and were a catalyst has evolved. Here is an analytic normally what was only done in the three letter acronyms and massively scale out politics name, space, file systems, parallel file systems. The application space has encroached into the enterprise world where the enterprise world needed a way to actually take a look at how to help simplify the operations. How do I actually be able to bring about an application that can run in the public cloud or on premise or hybrid. Be able to actually look at a workload off my stat that aligns the actual cost to the actual analytics that I'm going to be doing the work load that I'm going to be doing and be able to bridge those gaps and be able to spin this up and simplify operations. And you know, and if you if you are familiar with these parallel fossils, which by the way we we actually have on our truck. I do engineer those. But they are they are they are they have their own unique challenges. But in the world of enterprise where customers are looking to simplify operations, then take advantage of new application, analytic workloads, whether it be sparred may so whatever it might be right. If I want to spend the Mongol BB or maybe maybe a last a search capability, how do I actually take those technologies embrace a modern scale out storage stack that without without breaking the bank but also provide a simple operations. And that's that's why we look for object storage capabilities because it brings us this massive parallelization. Thank you. >>Well, before we get into the product, I want to just touch on one thing from you mentioned and chris you, you brought up the devoPS piece, next gen, next level, whatever term you use it is cloud Native. Cloud Native has proven that deVOPS infrastructure as code is not only legit being operationalized in all enterprises, add security in there. You have def sec ops this is the reality and hybrid cloud in particular has been pretty much the consensus. Is that standard. So or de facto saying whatever you want to call it, that's happening. Multi cloud on the horizon. So these new workloads have these new architectural changes, cloud on premises and edge, this is the number one story and the number one challenge, all enterprises are now working on how do I build the architecture for the cloud on premises and edge. This is forcing the deVOPS team to flex and build new apps. Can you guys talk about that particular trend and is and is that relevant here? >>Yeah, I, I not talk about uh really storage anywhere and cloud anywhere. And and really the key concept is edged to go to cloud. I mean we all understand now that the Edge will host a lot of data and the edges many different things. I mean it's obviously a smartphone, whatever that is, but it's also factories, it's also production, it's also, you know, moving uh moving machinery, trains, playing satellites, um that that's all the Edge cars obviously uh and a lot of that, I will be both produced and processed there. But from the Edge you will want to be able to send that uh for analysis for backup for logging to a court. And that core could be regional maybe not, you know, one call for the whole planet, but maybe one corporate region uh state in the US. Uh and then from there, you will also want to push some of the data to probably cloud. Uh One of the things that we see more and more is that the the our data center, the disaster recovery is not another physical data center, it's actually the cloud and that's a very efficient infrastructure, very cost efficient. Especially so really it's changing the padding on how you think about storage because you really need to integrate these three layers in a consistent approach, especially around the topic of security because you want the data to be secure all along the way and the data is not just data data and who can access the data, can modify the data. What are the conditions that allow modification or automatically ratios that are in some cases it's super important that data be automatically raised 10 years and all this needs to be transported fromage Co two cloud. So that that's one of the aspects, another aspect that resonates for me with what you said is a word you didn't say but it's actually crucial this whole revolution. It's kubernetes mean Cuban it isn't now a mature technology and it's just, you know, the next level of automaticity operation for distributed system Which we didn't have five or 10 years ago and that is so powerful that it's going to allow application developers to develop much faster system that can be distributed again edge to go to crowd because it's going to be an underlying technology that spans the three layers >>chris your thoughts. Hybrid cloud, I've been, I've been having conscious with the HP folks for got years and years on hybrid clouds now here. >>Well, you know, and it's exciting in a layout, right? So if you look at like a whether it be enterprise virtualization that is a scale out gender purpose fertilization workload. Whether the analytic workloads, whether we know data protection is a paramount to all of this orchestration is paramount. Uh if you look at that depth laptops absolutely you mean securing the actual data. The digital last set is absolutely paramount. And if you look at how we do this, look at the investments we're making we're making. And if you look at the collaborative platform development which goes to our partnership with reality it is we're providing them an integral aspect of everything we do. Whether we're bringing as moral which is our suffer be used orchestration. Look at the veneer of its control plane controlling kubernetes being able to actually control the african area clusters in the actual backing store for all the analytics. And we just talked about whether it be a web scale out That is traditionally using politics. Name space has now been modernized to take advantage of newer technologies running an envy me burst buffers or 100 gig networks with slingshot network at 200 and 400 gigabit. Looking at how do we actually get the actual analytics the workload to the CPU and have it attached to the data at rest? Where is the data? How do we land the data and how do we actually align essentially locality, locality of the actual asset to the compute. This is where, you know, we can leverage whether it be a juror or google or name your favorite hyper scaler, leverage those technologies leveraging the actual persistent store and this is where scale it is with this object store capability has been an industry trend setter, uh setting the actual landscape of how to provide an object store on premise and hybrid cloud running into public cloud but be able to facilitate data mobility and tie it back to and tie it back to an application. And this is where a lot of things have changed in the world of the, of analytics because the applications, the newer technologies that are coming on the market have taken advantage of this particular protocol as three so they can do web scale massively parallel concurrent workloads, >>you know what, let's get into the announcement, I love cool and relevant products and I think this hits the Mark Scaletta you guys have are Tesco which is um, just announced and I think, you know, we obviously we reported on it. You guys have a lightweight, true enterprise grade object store software for kubernetes. This is the announcement, Jerome. Tell us about it. >>What's the big >>deal? Cool and >>relevant? Come on, >>this is cool. All right, tell us >>I'm super excited. I'm not sure that it did. That's where on screen, but I'm super, super excited. You know, we, we introduced the ring 11 years ago and this is our biggest announcements for the past 11 years. So yes, do pay attention. Uh, you know, after after looking at all these trends and understanding where we see the future going, uh, we decided that it was time to embark block. So there's not one line of code that's the same as the previous generation product. They will both could exist. They both have space in the market, uh, and artist that was specifically this design for this cloud native era. And what we see is that people want something that's lightweight, especially because it had to go to the edge. They still want the enterprise grade, the security is known for and it has to be modern. What we really mean by modern is uh, we see object storage now being the primary storage for many application more and more applications and so we have to be able to deliver the performance that primary storage expects. Um this idea of skeletons serving primary storage is actually not completely new When we launched guilty 10 years ago, the first application that we were supporting West consumer email for which we were and we are still today the primary story. So we have we know what it is to be the primary store, we know what's the level of reliability you need to hit. We know what, what latest thinking and latency is different from fruit, but you really need to optimize both. Um, and I think that's still today. We're the only object storage company that protects that after both replication and the red recording because we understand that replication is factor the recording is better and more larger file were fast in terms of latency doesn't matter so much. So we, we've been bringing all that experience but really rethinking a product for that new generation that really is here now. And so we're truly excited against a little bit more about the product. It's a software was guilty is a software company and that's why we love to partner with HP who's producing amazing service. Um, you know, for the record and history, the very first deployment of skeleton in 2000 and 10 was on the HP service. So this is a, a long love story here. Um, and so to come back to artistic, uh, is lightweight in the sense that it's easy to use. We can start small, we can start from just one server or 11 VM instance. I mean start really small. Can grow infinitely. The fact that we start small, we didn't, you know, limit the technology because of that. Uh, so you can start from one too many. Um, and uh, it's contaminated in the sense that it's completely Cuban, it is compatible. It's communities orchestrated. It will deploy on many Cuban distributions. We're talking obviously with Admiral, we're also talking with Ponzu and with the other in terms of uh, communities distribution will also be able to be run in the cloud. I'm not sure that there will be many uh, true production deployment of artists in the club because you already have really good object storage by the cloud providers. But when you are developing something and you want to test their, um, you know, just doing it in the cloud is very practical. So you'll be able to deploy our discount communities cloud distribution and it's modern object storage in the sense that its application century. A lot of our work is actually validating that our storage is fit for a single purpose application and making sure that we understand the requirement of this application that we can guide our customers on how to deploy. And it's really designed to be the primary storage for these new workloads. >>The big part of the news is your relationship with Hewlett Packard Enterprises? Some exclusivity here as part of this announced, you mentioned, the relationship goes back many, many years. We've covered your relationship in the past chris also, you know, we cover HP like a blanket. Um, this is big news for h P E as >>well. >>What is the relationship talk about this? Exclusivity could you share about the partnership and the exclusivity piece? >>Well, the partnership expands into the pan HPV portfolio. We look we made a massive investment in edge IOT devices. Uh, so we actually have, how do we align the cost to the demand for our customers come to us wanting to looking at? Uh think about what we're doing with green, like a consumption based modeling, they want to be able to be able to consume the asset without having to do a capital outlay out of the gate uh, number to look at, you know, how do you deploy? Technology really demand? It depends on the scale. Right? So in a lot of your web skill, you know, scale out technologies, uh, putting them on a diet is challenging, meaning how skinny can you get it getting it down into the 50 terabyte range and then the complexities of those technologies at as you take a day one implementation and scale it out over, you know, you know, multiple iterations of recorders. The growth becomes a challenge. So, working with scalability, we we believe we've actually cracked this nut. We figured out how to a number one, how to start small but not limited customers ability to scale it out incrementally or grotesquely grotesque. A you can depending on the quarters the month, whatever whatever the workload is, how do you actually align and be able to consume it? Uh So now, whether it be on our edge line products are D. L. Products go back there. Now what the journalist talking about earlier, you know, we ship a server every few seconds. That won't be a problem. But then of course into our density optimized compute with the Apollo product. Uh This where uh our two companies have worked in an exclusivity where the, the scaly software bonds on the HP ecosystem. Uh and then we can of course provide you our customers the ability to consume that through our Green link financial models or through a complex parts of >>awesome. So jerome and chris who's the customer here? Obviously there's an exclusive period talk about the target customer. And how do customers get the product? How do we get the software? And how does this exclusivity with HP fit into it? >>Yeah. So there's really three types of customers and we really, we've worked a lot with a company called use design to optimize the user interface for each of the three types of customers. So we really thought about each uh customer role and providing with each of them the best product. Uh So the first type of customer application owners who are deploying application that requires an object storage in the back end. They typically want a simple objects to of one application. They wanted to be temple and work. I mean yesterday they want no freedom to just want an object store that works and they want to be able to start as small as they start with their application. Often it's, you know, the first department, maybe a small deployment. Um, you know, applications like backup like female rubric or uh, analytics like Stone Carver, tikka or false system now available as a software. Uh, you know, like Ceta does a really great department or nass that works very well. That means an object store in the back end of high performance computing. Wake up file system is an amazing file system. Um, we also have vertical application like broad peak, for example, who provides origin and view the software, the broadcasters. So all these applications, they request an object store in the back end and you just need a simple, high performance, working well object store and I'll discuss perfect. The second type of people that we think will be interested by artists. Uh essentially developers who are currently developing some communities of collaborative application your next year. Um and as part of their development stack, um it's getting better and better when you're developing a cloud native application to really target an object storage rather than NFS as you're persistently just, you know, think about generations of technologies and um, NFS and file system were great 25 years ago. I mean, it's an amazing technology. But now when you want to develop a distributed scalable application, objects toys a better fit because it's the same generation and so same thing. I mean, you know, developing something, they need uh an object so that they can develop on so they wanted very lightweight, but they also want the product that they're enterprise or their customers will be able to rely on for years and years on and this guy is really great for today. Um, the third type of customer are more architecture with security architects that are designing, uh, System where they're going to have 50 factories, 1000 planes, a million cars are going to have some local storage, which will they want to replicate to the core and possibly also to the club. And uh, as the design is really new generation workloads that are incredibly distributed. But with local storage, uh, these guys are really grateful for that >>and talk about the HP exclusive chris what's the, how does that fit into? They buy through sexuality. Can they get it for the HP? Are you guys working together on how customers can procure >>place? Yeah. Both ways they can procure it through security. They can secure it through HP. Uh, and it is the software stack running on our density, optimized compute platforms which you would choose online does. And to provide an enterprise quality because if it comes back to it in all of these use cases it's how do we align up into a true enterprise step? Um bringing about multi Tennessee, bringing about the fact that, you know, if you look at like a local racial coding, uh one of the things that they're bringing to it so that we can get down into the deal 3 25. So with the exclusivity, uh you actually get choice and that choice comes into our entire portfolio, whether it be the edge line platform, the D. L 3:25 a.m. B. Processing stack or the intel deal three eighties or whether whether it be the Apollo's or Alexa, there's there's so many ample choices there that facilitates this and it just allows us to align those two strategies >>awesome. And I think the kubernetes pieces really relevant because, you know, I've been interviewing folks practitioners um and kubernetes is very much maturing fast. It's definitely the centerpiece of the cloud native, both below the line, if you will under the hood for the, for the infrastructure and then for apps, um they want to program on top of it. That's critical. I mean, jeremy, this is like this is the future. >>Yeah. And if you don't mind, like to come back for a minute on the exclusive with HP. So we did a six month exclusive and the very reason we could do this is because HP has suffered such wrath of server portfolio and so we can go from, you know, really simple, very cheap, you know, HDD on the L 3 80 means a machine that retails for a few $4. I mean it's really like Temple System 50 terabyte. Uh we can have the dl 3 25. That uh piece mentioned there is really a powerhouse. All envy any uh slash uh all the storage is envy any uh very fast processors or uh you know, dance large large system like the Apollo 4500. So it's a very large breath of portfolio. We support the whole portfolio and we work together on this. So I want to say that you know, one of the reasons I want to send kudos to HP for for the breath of the silver lining rio as mentioned, um Jessica can be ordered from either company, hand in hand together. So anyway you'll see both of us uh and our field is working incredibly well together. >>We'll just on that point, I think just for clarification, uh was this co design by scalability and H P E. Because chris you mentioned, you know, the configuration of your systems. Can you guys quickly talk about the design, co design >>from from from the code base? The software entirely designed and developed by security from a testing and performance. So this really was a joint work with HP providing both hardware and manpower so that we could accelerate the testing phase. >>You know, chris H P E has just been doing such a great job of really focused on this. And you know, I've been Governor for years before it was fashionable the idea of apps working no matter where it lives. Public Cloud data center Edge, you mentioned. Edge line has been around for a while. You know, apps centric, developer friendly cloud first has been an H P E. Kind of guiding first principle for many, many years. >>But it has and you know, you know as our our ceo internal areas cited by 2022 everything will be able to be consumed as a service in our portfolio. Uh And then this stack allows us the simplicity and the consume ability of the technology and degranulation of it allows us to simplify the installation, simplify the actual deployment bringing into a cloud ecosystem. But more importantly for the end customer, they simply get an enterprise quality product running on identity optimized stack that they can consume through a orchestrated simplistic interface. That's that's cos that's what they're warning for today is where they come to me and asked hey how do I need a, I've got this new app new project and you know it goes back to who's actually coming, it's no longer the I. T. People who are actually coming to us, it's the lines of business. It's it's that entire dimension of business owners coming to us going this is my challenge and how can you HP help us And we rely on our breath of technology but also a breath of partners to come together and are of course reality is hand in hand and are collaborative business unit are collaborative storage product engineering group that actually brought this market. So we're very excited about this solution >>chris thanks for that input. Great insight, Jerome, congratulations on a great partnership with H. P. E. Obviously um great joint customer base congratulations on the product release here. Big moving the ball down the field as they say new functionality, clouds cloud native object store, phenomenal um So wrap wrap wrap up the interview. Tell us your vision for scalability in the future of storage. >>Yeah. Yeah I start I mean skeleton is going to be an amazing leader is already um but yeah so you know I have three themes that I think will govern how storage is going and obviously um Mark Andrews had said it software is everywhere and software is eating the world so definitely that's going to be true in the data center in storage in particular. Uh But the free trends that are more specific. First of all I think that security performance and agility is now basic expectation. It's not you know, it's not like an additional feature. It's just the best table, stakes, security performance and a job. Um The second thing is and we've talked about it during this conversation is edged to go you need to think your platform with Edge Co and cloud. You know you don't want to have separate systems separate design interface point for edge and then think about corn and think about clouds and then think about the divers. All this needs to be integrated in the design. And the third thing that I see as a major trend for the next 10 years is that a sovereignty uh more and more. You need to think about where is the data residing? What are the legal challenges? What is the level of protection against who are you protected? What what is your independence uh strategy? How do you keep as a company being independent from the people? You need to be independent. And I mean I say companies, but this is also true for public services. So these these for me are the three big trends. I do believe that uh software find distributed architecture are necessary for these tracks. But you also need to think about being truly enterprise grade. And there has been one of our focus with the design of a fresca. How do we combine a lot with product With all of the security requirements and that our sovereignty requirements that we expect to have in the next 10 years? >>That's awesome. Congratulations on the news scale. D Artois ca the big release with HP exclusive um, for six months, chris tucker, distinguished engineer at H P E. Great to ceo, jeremy, katz, ceo sexuality. Great to see you as well. Congratulations on the big news. I'm john for the cube. Thanks for watching. >>Mhm. >>Yeah.

from around the globe it's thecube covering space and cyber security symposium 2020 hosted by cal poly hello and welcome to thecube's coverage we're here hosting with cal poly an amazing event space in the intersection of cyber security this session is defending satellite and space infrastructure from cyber threats got two great guests we've got major general john shaw combined four space component commander u.s space command and vandenberg air force base in california and roland cuello who's the ceo of maverick space systems gentlemen thank you for spending the time to come on to this session for the cal poly space and cyber security symposium appreciate it absolutely um guys defending satellites and space infrastructure is the new domain obviously it's a war warfighting domain it's also the future of the world and this is an important topic because we rely on space now for our everyday life and it's becoming more and more critical everyone knows how their phones work and gps just small examples of all the impacts i'd like to discuss with this hour this topic with you guys so if we can have you guys do an opening statement general if you can start with your opening statement we'll take it from there thanks john and greetings from vandenberg air force base we are just down the road from cal poly here on the central coast of california and uh very proud to be part of this uh effort and part of the partnership that we have with with cal poly on a number of fronts um i should uh so in in my job here i actually uh have two hats that i wear and it's i think worth talking briefly about those to set the context for our discussion you know we had two major organizational events within our department of defense with regard to space last year in 2019 and probably the one that made the most headlines was the stand-up of the united states space force that happened uh december 20th last year and again momentous the first new branch in our military since 1947 uh and uh it is a it's just over nine months old now as we're making this recording uh and already we're seeing a lot of change uh with regard to how we're approaching uh organizing training and equipping on a service side or space capabilities and so i uh in that with regard to the space force the hat i wear there is commander of space operations command that was what was once 14th air force when we were still part of the air force here at vandenberg and in that role i'm responsible for the operational capabilities that we bring to the joint warfighter and to the world from a space perspective didn't make quite as many headlines but another major change that happened last year was the uh the reincarnation i guess i would say of united states space command and that is a combatant command it's how our department of defense organizes to actually conduct warfighting operations um most people are more familiar perhaps with uh central command centcom or northern command northcom or even strategic command stratcom well now we have a space com we actually had one from 1985 until 2002 and then stood it down in the wake of the 9 11 attacks and a reorganization of homeland security but we've now stood up a separate command again operationally to conduct joint space operations and in that organization i wear a hat as a component commander and that's the combined force-based component command uh working with other all the additional capabilities that other services bring as well as our allies that combined in that title means that uh i under certain circumstances i would lead an allied effort uh in space operations and so it's actually a terrific job to have here on the central coast of california uh both working the uh how we bring space capabilities to the fight on the space force side and then how we actually operate those capabilities it's a point of joint in support of joint warfighters around the world um and and national security interests so that's the context now what el i i also should mention you kind of alluded to john you're beginning that we're kind of in a change situation than we were a number of years ago and that space we now see space as a warfighting domain for most of my career going back a little ways most of my my focus in my jobs was making sure i could bring space capabilities to those that needed them bringing gps to that special operations uh soldier on the ground somewhere in the world bringing satellite communications for our nuclear command and control bringing those capabilities for other uses but i didn't have to worry in most of my career about actually defending those space capabilities themselves well now we do we've actually gone to a point where we're are being threatened in space we now are treating it more like any other domain normalizing in that regard as a warfighting domain and so we're going through some relatively emergent efforts to protect and defend our capabilities in space to to design our capabilities to be defended and perhaps most of all to train our people for this new mission set so it's a very exciting time and i know we'll get into it but you can't get very far into talking about all these space capabilities and how we want to protect and defend them and how we're going to continue their ability to deliver to warfighters around the globe without talking about cyber because they fit together very closely so anyway thanks for the chance to be here today and i look forward to the discussion general thank you so much for that opening statement and i would just say that not only is it historic with the space force it's super exciting because it opens up so much more challenges and opportunities for to do more and to do things differently so i appreciate that statement roland your opening statement your your job is to put stuff in space faster cheaper smaller better your opening statement please um yes um thank you john um and yes you know to um general shaw's point you know with with the space domain and the need to protect it now um is incredibly important and i hope that we are more of a help um than a thorn in your side um in terms of you know building satellites smaller faster cheaper um you know and um definitely looking forward to this discussion and you know figuring out ways where um the entire space domain can work together you know from industry to to us government even to the academic environment as well so first would like to say and preface this by saying i am not a cyber security expert um we you know we build satellites um and uh we launch them into orbit um but we are by no means you know cyber security experts and that's why um you know we like to partner with organizations like the california cyber security institute because they help us you know navigate these requirements um so um so i'm the ceo of um of maverick space systems we are a small aerospace business in san luis obispo california and we provide small satellite hardware and service solutions to a wide range of customers all the way from the academic environment to the us government and everything in between we support customers through an entire you know program life cycle from mission architecture and formulation all the way to getting these customer satellites in orbit and so what we try to do is um provide hardware and services that basically make it easier for customers to get their satellites into orbit and to operate so whether it be reducing mass or volume um creating greater launch opportunities or providing um the infrastructure and the technology um to help those innovations you know mature in orbit you know that's you know that's what we do our team has experienced over the last 20 years working with small satellites and definitely fortunate to be part of the team that invented the cubesat standard by cal poly and stanford uh back in 2000 and so you know we are in you know vandenberg's backyard um we came from cal poly san luis obispo um and you know our um our hearts are fond you know of this area and working with the local community um a lot of that success um that we have had is directly attributable um to the experiences that we learned as students um working on satellite programs from our professors and mentors um you know that's you know all you know thanks to cal poly so just wanted to tell a quick story so you know back in 2000 just imagine a small group of undergraduate students you know myself included with the daunting task of launching multiple satellites from five different countries on a russian launch vehicle um you know many of us were only 18 or 19 not even at the legal age to drink yet um but as you know essentially teenagers we're managing million dollar budgets um and we're coordinating groups um from around the world um and we knew that we knew what we needed to accomplish um yet we didn't really know um what we were doing when we first started um the university was extremely supportive um and you know that's the cal poly learn by doing philosophy um i remember you know the first time we had a meeting with our university chief legal counsel and we were discussing the need to to register with the state department for itar nobody really knew what itar was back then um and you know discussing this with the chief legal counsel um you know she was asking what is itar um and we essentially had to explain you know this is um launching satellites as part of the um the u.s munitions list and essentially we have a similar situation you know exporting munitions um you know we are in similar categories um you know as you know as weapons um and so you know after that initial shock um everybody jumped in you know both feet forward um the university um you know our head legal counsel professors mentors and the students um you know knew we needed to tackle this problem um because you know the the need was there um to launch these small satellites and um you know the the reason you know this is important to capture the entire spectrum of users of the community um is that the technology and the you know innovation of the small satellite industry occurs at all levels you know so we have academia commercial national governments we even have high schools and middle schools getting involved and you know building satellite hardware um and the thing is you know the the importance of cyber security is incredibly important because it touches all of these programs and it touches you know people um at a very young age um and so you know we hope to have a conversation today um to figure out you know how do we um create an environment where we allow these programs to thrive but we also you know protect and you know keep their data safe as well thank you very much roland appreciate that uh story too as well thanks for your opening statement gentlemen i mean i love this topic because defending the assets in space is is as obvious um you look at it but there's a bigger picture going on in our world right now and generally you kind of pointed out the historic nature of space force and how it's changing already operationally training skills tools all that stuff is revolving you know in the tech world that i live in you know change the world is a topic they use that's thrown around a lot you can change the world a lot of young people we have just other panels on this where we're talking about how to motivate young people changing the world is what it's all about with technology for the better evolution is just an extension of another domain in this case space is just an extension of other domains similar things are happening but it's different there's a huge opportunity to change the world so it's faster there's an expanded commercial landscape out there certainly government space systems are moving and changing how do we address the importance of cyber security in space general we'll start with you because this is real it's exciting if you're a young person there's touch points of things to jump into tech building hardware to changing laws and and everything in between is an opportunity and it's exciting and it's truly a chance to change the world how does the commercial government space systems teams address the importance of cyber security so john i think it starts with with the realization that as i like to say that cyber and space are bffs uh there's nothing that we do on the cutting edge of space that isn't heavy reliant heavily reliant on the cutting edge of cyber and frankly there's probably nothing on the cutting edge of cyber that doesn't have a space application and when you realize that you see how how closely those are intertwined as we need to move forward at at speed it becomes fundamental to to the to answering your question let me give a couple examples we one of the biggest challenges i have on a daily basis is understanding what's going on in the space domain those on the on the on the surface of the planet talk about tyranny of distance across the oceans across large land masses and i talk about the tyranny of volume and you know right now we're looking out as far as the lunar sphere there's activity that's extending out to the out there we expect nasa to be conducting uh perhaps uh human operations in the lunar environment in the next few years so it extends out that far when you do the math that's a huge volume how do you do that how do you understand what's happening in real time in within that volume it is a big data problem by the very definition of that that kind of effort to that kind of challenge and to do it successfully in the years ahead it's going to require many many sensors and the fusion of data of all kinds to present a picture and then analytics and predictive analytics that are going to deliver an idea of what's going on in the space arena and that's just if people are not up to mischief once you have threats introduced into that environment it is even more challenging so i'd say it's a big data problem that we'll be enjoying uh tackling in the years ahead a second example is you know we if i if i had to if we had to take a vote of what were the most uh amazing robots that have ever been designed by humans i think that spacecraft would have to be up there on the list whether it's the nasa spacecraft that explore other planets or the ones that we or gps satellites that that amazingly uh provide a wonderful service to the entire globe uh and beyond they are amazing technological machines that's not going to stop i mean all the work that roland talked about at the at the even even that we're doing it at the kind of the microsoft level is is putting cutting-edge technology into smaller packages you can to get some sort of capability out of that as we expand our activities further and further into space for national security purposes or for exploration or commercial or civil the the cutting edge technologies of uh artificial intelligence uh and machine to machine engagements and machine learning are going to be part of that design work moving forward um and then there's the threat piece as we try to as we operate these these capabilities how these constellations grow that's going to be done via networks and as i've already pointed out space is a warfighting domain that means those networks will come under attack we expect that they will and that may happen early on in a conflict it may happen during peace time in the same way that we see cyber attacks all the time everywhere in many sectors of of activity and so by painting that picture you kind of get you we start to see how it's intertwined at the very very base most basic level the cutting edge of cyber and cutting edge of space with that then comes the need to any cutting edge cyber security capability that we have is naturally going to be needed as we develop space capabilities and we're going to have to bake that in from the very beginning we haven't done that in the past as well as we should but moving forward from this point on it will be an essential ingredient that we work into all of our new capability roland we're talking about now critical infrastructure we're talking about new capabilities being addressed really fast so it's kind of chaotic now there's threats so it's not as easy as just having capabilities because you've got to deal with the threats the general just pointed out but now you've got critical infrastructure which then will enable other things down down the line how do you protect it how do we address this how do you see this being addressed from a security standpoint because you know malware these techniques can be mapped in as extended into into space and takeovers wartime peacetime these things are all going to be under threat that's pretty well understood i think people kind of get that how do we address it what's your what's your take yeah you know absolutely and you know i couldn't agree more with general shaw you know with cyber security and space being so intertwined um and you know i think with fast and rapid innovation um comes you know the opportunity for threats especially um if you have bad actors um that you know want to cause harm and so you know as a technology innovator and you're pushing the bounds um you kind of have a common goal of um you know doing the best you can um and you know pushing the technology balance making it smaller faster cheaper um but a lot of times what entrepreneurs and you know small businesses and supply chains um are doing and don't realize it is a lot of these components are dual use right i mean you could have a very benign commercial application but then a small you know modification to it and turn it into a military application and if you do have these bad actors they can exploit that and so you know i think the the big thing is um creating a organization that is you know non-biased that just wants to kind of level the playing field for everybody to create a set standard for cyber security in space i think you know one group that would be perfect for that you know is um cci um you know they understand both the cybersecurity side of things and they also have you know at cal poly um you know the the small satellite group um and you know just having kind of a a clearinghouse or um an agency where um can provide information that is free um you know you don't need a membership for and to be able to kind of collect that but also you know reach out to the entire value chain you know for a mission and um making them aware um of you know what potential capabilities are and then how it might um be you know potentially used as a weapon um and you know keeping them informed because i think you know the the vast majority of people in the space industry just want to do the right thing and so how do we get that information free flowing to you know to the us government so that they can take that information create assessments and be able to not necessarily um stop threats from occurring presently but identify them long before that they would ever even happen um yeah that's you know general i want to i want to follow up on that real quick before we go to the next talk track critical infrastructure um you mentioned you know across the oceans long distance volume you know when you look at the physical world you know you had you know power grids here united states you had geography you had perimeters uh the notion of a perimeter and the moat this is and then you had digital comes in then you have we saw software open up and essentially take down this idea of a perimeter and from a defense standpoint and that everything changed and we had to fortify those critical assets uh in the u.s space increases the same problem statement significantly because it's you can't just have a perimeter you can't have a moat it's open it's everywhere like what digital's done and that's why we've seen a slurge of cyber in the past two decades attacks with software so this isn't going to go away you need the critical infrastructure you're putting it up there you're formulating it and you've got to protect it how do you view that because it's going to be an ongoing problem statement what's the current thinking yeah i i think my sense is a mindset that you can build a a firewall or a defense or some other uh system that isn't dynamic in his own right is probably not heading in the right direction i think cyber security in the future whether it's for our space systems or for other critical infrastructure is going to be a dynamic fight that happens at a machine-to-machine um a speed and dynamic um i don't think it's too far off where we will have uh machines writing their own code in real time to fight off attacks that are coming at them and by the way the offense will probably be doing the same kind of thing and so i i guess i would not want to think that the answer is something that you just build it and you leave it alone and it's good enough it's probably going to be a constantly evolving capability constantly reacting to new threats and staying ahead of those threats that's the kind of use case just to kind of you know as you were kind of anecdotal example is the exciting new software opportunities for computer science majors i mean i tell my young kids and everyone man it's more exciting now i wish i was 18 again it's so so exciting with ai bro i want to get your thoughts we were joking on another panel with the dod around space and the importance of it obviously and we're going to have that here and then we had a joke it's like oh software's defined everything it says software's everything ai and and i said well here in the united states companies had data centers and they went to the cloud and they said you can't do break fix it's hard to do break fix in space you can't just send a tech up i get that today but soon maybe robotics the general mentions robotics technologies and referencing some of the accomplishments fixing things is almost impossible in space but maybe form factors might get better certainly software will play a role what's your thoughts on that that landscape yeah absolutely you know for for software in orbit um you know there's there's a push for you know software-defined radios um to basically go from hardware to software um and you know that's that that's a critical link um if you can infiltrate that and a small satellite has propulsion on board you could you know take control of that satellite and cause a lot of havoc and so you know creating standards and you know that kind of um initial threshold of security um you know for let's say you know these radios you know communications and making that um available um to the entire supply chain to the satellite builders um and operators you know is incredibly key and you know that's again one of the initiatives that um that cci is um is tackling right now as well general i want to get your thoughts on best practices around cyber security um state of the art today uh and then some guiding principles and kind of how the if you shoot the trajectory forward what what might happen uh around um supply chain there's been many stories where oh we outsourced the chips and there's a little chip sitting in a thing and it's built by someone else in china and the software is written from someone in europe and the united states assembles it it gets shipped and it's it's corrupt and it has some cyber crime making i'm oversimplifying the the statement but this is what when you have space systems that involve intellectual property uh from multiple partners whether it's from software to creation and then deployment you get supply chain tiers what are some of the best practices that you see involving that don't stunt the innovation but continues to innovate but people can operate safely what's your thoughts yeah so on supply chain i think i think the symposium here is going to get to hear from lieutenant general jt thompson uh from space missile system center down in los angeles and and uh he's a he's just down the road from us there uh on the coast um and his team is is the one that we look to really focus on as he acquires and develop again bake in cyber security from the beginning and knowing where the components are coming from and and properly assessing those as you as you put together your space systems is a key uh piece of what his team is focused on so i expect we'll hear him talk about that when it talks to i think she asked the question a little more deeply about how do the best practices in terms of how we now develop moving forward well another way that we don't do it right is if we take a long time to build something and then you know general general jt thompson's folks take a while to build something and then they hand it over to to to me and my team to operate and then they go hands-free and and then and then that's you know that's what i have for for years to operate until the next thing comes along that's a little old school what we're going to have to do moving forward with our space capabilities and with the cyber piece baked in is continually developing new capability sets as we go we actually have partnership between general thompson's team and mine here at vandenberg on our ops floor or our combined space operations center that are actually working in real time together better tools that we can use to understand what's going on the space environment to better command and control our capabilities anywhere from military satellite communications to space domain awareness sensors and such and so and we're developing those capabilities in real time it's a dev and and with the security pieces so devsecops is we're practicing that in in real time i think that is probably the standard today that we're trying to live up to as we continue to evolve but it has to be done again in close partnership all the time it's not a sequential industrial age process while i'm on the subject of partnerships so general thompson's and team and mine have good partnerships it's part partnerships across the board are going to be another way that we are successful and that uh it means with with academia in some of the relationships that we have here with cal poly it's with the commercial sector in ways that we haven't done before the old style business was to work with just a few large um companies that had a lot of space experience well we need we need a lot of kinds of different experience and technologies now in order to really field good space capabilities and i expect we'll see more and more non-traditional companies being part of and and organizations being part of that partnership that will work going forward i mentioned at the beginning that um uh allies are important to us so everything that uh that role and i've been talking about i think you have to extrapolate out to allied partnerships right it doesn't help me uh as a combined force component commander which is again one of my jobs it doesn't help me if the united states capabilities are cyber secure but i'm trying to integrate them with capabilities from an ally that are not cyber secure so that partnership has to be dynamic and continually evolving together so again close partnering continually developing together from the acquisition to the operational sectors with as many um different sectors of our economy uh as possible are the ingredients to success general i'd love to just follow up real quick i was having just a quick reminder for a conversation i had with last year with general keith alexander who was does a lot of cyber security work and he was talking about the need to share faster and the new school is you got to share faster and to get the data you mentioned observability earlier you need to see what everything's out there he's a real passionate person around getting the data getting it fast and having trusted partners so that's not it's kind of evolving as i mean sharing is a well-known practice but with cyber it's sensitive data potentially so there's a trust relationship there's now a new ecosystem that's new for uh government how do you view all that and your thoughts on that trend of the sharing piece of it on cyber so it's i don't know if it's necessarily new but it's at a scale that we've never seen before and by the way it's vastly more complicated and complex when you overlay from a national security perspective classification of data and information at various levels and then that is again complicated by the fact you have different sharing relationships with different actors whether it's commercial academic or allies so it gets very very uh a complex web very quickly um so that's part of the challenge we're working through how can we how can we effectively share information at multiple classification levels with multiple partners in an optimal fashion it is certainly not optimal today it's it's very difficult even with maybe one industry partner for me to be able to talk about data at an unclassified level and then various other levels of classification to have the traditional networks in place to do that i could see a solution in the future where our cyber security is good enough that maybe i only really need one network and the information that is allowed to flow to the players within the right security environment um to uh to make that all happen as quickly as possible so you've actually uh john you've hit on yet another big challenge that we have is um is evolving our networks to properly share with the right people at the right uh clearance levels as at speed of war which is what we're going to need yeah and i wanted to call that out because this is an opportunity again this discussion here at cal poly and around the world is for new capabilities and new people to solve the problems and um it's again it's super exciting if you you know you're geeking out on this it's if you have a tech degree or you're interested in changing the world there's so many new things that could be applied right now roland will get your thoughts on this because one of the things in the tech trends we're seeing this is a massive shift all the theaters of the tech industry are are changing rapidly at the same time okay and it affects policy law but also deep tech the startup communities are super important in all this too we can't forget them obviously the big trusted players that are partnering certainly on these initiatives but your story about being in the dorm room now you got the boardroom and now you got everything in between you have startups out there that want to and can contribute and you know what's an itar i mean i got all these acronym certifications is there a community motion to bring startups in in a safe way but also give them a ability to contribute because you look at open source that proved everyone wrong on software that's happening now with this now open network concept the general is kind of alluding to which is it's a changing landscape your thoughts i know you're passionate about this yeah absolutely you know and i think um you know as general shaw mentioned you know we need to get information out there faster more timely and to the right people um and involving not only just stakeholders in the us but um internationally as well you know and as entrepreneurs um you know we have this very lofty vision or goal uh to change the world and um oftentimes um you know entrepreneurs including myself you know we put our heads down and we just run as fast as we can and we don't necessarily always kind of take a breath and take a step back and kind of look at what we're doing and how it's touching um you know other folks and in terms of a community i don't know of any formal community out there it's mostly ad hoc and you know these ad hoc communities are folks who let's say have you know was was a student working on a satellite um you know in college and they love that entrepreneurial spirit and so they said well i'm gonna start my own company and so you know a lot of the these ad hoc networks are just from relationships um that are that have been built over the last two decades um you know from from colleagues that you know at the university um i do think formalizing this and creating um kind of a you know clearinghouse to to handle all of this is incredibly important yeah um yeah there's gonna be a lot of entrepreneurial activity no doubt i mean just i mean there's too many things to work on and not enough time so i mean this brings up the question though while we're on this topic um you got the remote work with covid everyone's working remotely we're doing this remote um interview rather than being on stage works changing how people work and engage certainly physical will come back but if you looked at historically the space industry and the talent you know they're all clustered around the bases and there's always been these areas where you're you're a space person you're kind of working there and there's jobs there and if you were cyber you were 10 in other areas over the past decade there's been a cross-pollination of talent and location as you see the intersection of space general start with you you know first of all central coast is a great place to live i know that's where you guys live but you can start to bring together these two cultures sometimes they're you know not the same maybe they're getting better we know they're being integrated so general can you just share your thoughts because this is uh one of those topics that everyone's talking about but no one's actually kind of addressed directly um yeah john i i think so i think i want to answer this by talking about where i think the space force is going because i think if there was ever an opportunity or inflection point in our department of defense to sort of change culture and and try to bring in non-traditional kinds of thinking and and really kind of change uh maybe uh some of the ways that the department of defense has does things that are probably archaic space force is an inflection point for that uh general raymond our our chief of space operations has said publicly for a while now he wants the us space force to be the first truly digital service and uh you know what we what we mean by that is you know we want the folks that are in the space force to be the ones that are the first adopters or the early adopters of of technology um to be the ones most fluent in the cutting edge technological developments on space and cyber and and other um other sectors of the of of the of the economy that are technologically focused uh and i think there's some can that can generate some excitement i think and it means that we probably end up recruiting people into the space force that are not from the traditional recruiting areas that the rest of the department of defense looks to and i think it allows us to bring in a diversity of thought and diversity of perspective and a new kind of motivation um into the service that i think is frankly is is really exciting so if you put together everything i mentioned about how space and cyber are going to be best friends forever and i think there's always been an excitement in them you know from the very beginning in the american psyche about space you start to put all these ingredients together and i think you see where i'm going with this that really changed that cultural uh mindset that you were describing it's an exciting time for sure and again changing the world and this is what you're seeing today people do want to change world they want a modern world that's changing roy look at your thoughts on this i was having an interview a few years back with a tech entrepreneur um techie and we were joking we were just kind of riffing and we and i said everything that's on star trek will be invented and we're almost there actually if you think about it except for the transporter room you got video you got communicators so you know not to bring in the star trek reference with space force this is digital and you start thinking about some of the important trends it's going to be up and down the stack from hardware to software to user experience everything your thoughts and reaction yeah abs absolutely and so you know what we're seeing is um timeline timelines shrinking dramatically um because of the barrier to entry for you know um new entrants and you know even your existing aerospace companies is incredibly low right so if you take um previously where you had a technology on the ground and you wanted it in orbit it would take years because you would test it on the ground you would verify that it can operate in space in a space environment and then you would go ahead and launch it and you know we're talking tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to do that now um we've cut that down from years to months when you have a prototype on the ground and you want to get it launched you don't necessarily care if it fails on orbit the first time because you're getting valuable data back and so you know we're seeing technology being developed you know for the first time on the ground and in orbit in a matter of a few months um and the whole kind of process um you know that that we're doing as a small business is you know trying to enable that and so allowing these entrepreneurs and small small companies to to get their technology in orbit at a price that is sometimes even cheaper than you know testing on the ground you know this is a great point i think this is really an important point to call out because we mentioned partnerships earlier the economics and the business model of space is doable i mean you do a mission study you get paid for that you have technology you can get stuff up up quickly and there's a cost structure there and again the alternative was waterfall planning years and millions now the form factors are different now again there may be different payloads involved but you can standardize payloads you got robotic arms all this is all available this brings up the congestion problem this is going to be on the top of mind the generals of course but you got the proliferation okay of these constellation systems you have more and more tech vectors i mean essentially that's malware i mean that's a probe you throw something up in space that could cause some interference maybe a takeover general this is the this is the real elephant in the room the threat matrix from new stuff and new configurations so general how does the proliferation of constellation systems change the threat matrix so i i think the uh you know i guess i'm gonna i'm gonna be a little more optimistic john than i think you pitched that i'm actually excited about these uh new mega constellations in leo um i'm excited about the the growing number of actors that are that are going into space for various reasons and why is that it's because we're starting to realize a new economic engine uh for the nation and for human society so the question is so so i think we want that to happen right when uh um when uh we could go to almost any any other domain in history and and and you know there when when air traffic air air travel started to become much much more commonplace with many kinds of uh actors from from private pilots flying their small planes all the way up to large airliners uh you know there there was a problem with congestion there was a problem about um challenges about uh behavior and are we gonna be able to manage this and yes we did and it was for the great benefit of society i could probably look to the maritime domain for similar kinds of things and so this is actually exciting about space we are just going to have to find the ways as a society and it's not just the department of defense it's going to be civil it's going to be international find the mechanisms to encourage this continued investment in the space domain i do think the space force uh will play a role in in providing security in the space environment as we venture further out as as economic opportunities emerge uh wherever they are um in the in the lunar earth lunar system or even within the solar system space force is going to play a role in that but i'm actually really excited about the those possibilities hey by the way i got to say you made me think of this when you talked about star trek and and and space force and our technologies i remember when i was younger watching the the next generation series i thought one of the coolest things because being a musician in my in my spare time i thought one of the coolest things was when um commander riker would walk into his quarters and and say computer play soft jazz and there would just be the computer would just play music you know and this was an age when you know we had we had hard uh um uh media right like how will that that is awesome man i can't wait for the 23rd century when i can do that and where we are today is is so incredible on those lines the things that i can ask alexa or siri to play um well that's the thing everything that's on star trek think about it almost invented i mean you got the computers you got the only thing really is the holograms are starting to come in you got now the transporter room now that's physics we'll work on that right right so there's a there is this uh a balance between physics and imagination but uh we have not exhausted either well um personally everyone that knows me knows i'm a huge star trek fan all the series of course i'm an original purist but at that level but this is about economic incentive as well roland i want to get your thoughts because you know the gloom and doom you got to think about the the bad stuff to make it good if i if i put my glass half full on the table there's economic incentives just like the example of the plane and the air traffic there's there's actors that are more actors that are incented to have a secure system what's your thoughts to general's comments around the optimism and and the potential threat matrix that needs to be managed absolutely so and you know one of the things that we've seen over the years um as you know we build these small satellites is a lot of the technology you know that the general is talking about um you know voice recognition miniaturized chips and sensors um started on the ground and i mean you know you have you know your iphone um that about 15 years ago before the first iphone came out um you know we were building small satellites in the lab and we were looking at cutting-edge state-of-the-art magnetometers and sensors um that we were putting in our satellites back then we didn't know if they were going to work and then um a few years later as these students graduate they go off and they go out to under you know other industries and so um some of the technology that was first kind of put in these cubesats in the early 2000s you know kind of ended up in the first generation iphone smartphones um and so being able to take that technology rapidly you know incorporate that into space and vice versa gives you an incredible economic advantage because um not only are your costs going down um because you know you're mass producing you know these types of terrestrial technologies um but then you can also um you know increase you know revenue and profit um you know by by having you know smaller and cheaper systems general let's talk about that for real quickly it's a good point i want to just shift it into the playbook i mean everyone talks about playbooks for management for tech for startups for success i mean one of the playbooks that's clear from in history is investment in r d around military and or innovation that has a long view spurs innovation commercially i mean just there's a huge many decades of history that shows that hey we got to start thinking about these these challenges and you know next you know it's in an iphone this is history this is not like a one-off and now with space force you get you're driving you're driving the main engine of innovation to be all digital you know we we riff about star trek which is fun but the reality is you're going to be on the front lines of some really new cool mind-blowing things could you share your thoughts on how you sell that people who write the checks or recruit more talent well so i first i totally agree with your thesis that the that you know national security well could probably go back an awful long way hundreds to thousands of years that security matters tend to drive an awful lot of innovation and creativity because um you know i think the the probably the two things that drive drive people the most are probably an opportunity to make money uh but only by beating that out are trying to stay alive um and uh and so i don't think that's going to go away and i do think that space force can play a role um as it pursues uh security uh structures you know within the space domain to further encourage economic investment and to protect our space capabilities for national security purposes are going to be at the cutting edge this isn't the first time um i think we can point back to the origins of the internet really started in the department of defense and with a partnership i should add with academia that's how the internet got started that was the creativity in order to to meet some needs there cryptography has its roots in security but we use it uh in in national security but now we use it in for economic reasons and meant and a host of other kinds of reasons and then space itself right i mean we still look back to uh apollo era as an inspiration for so many things that inspired people to to either begin careers in in technical areas or in space and and so on so i think i think in that same spirit you're absolutely right i guess i'm totally agreeing with your thesis the space force uh will be and a uh will have a positive inspirational influence in that way and we need to to realize that so when we are asking for when we're looking for how we need to meet capability needs we need to spread that net very far look for the most creative solutions and partner early and often with those that that can that can work on those when you're on the new frontier you've got to have a team sport it's a team effort you mentioned the internet just anecdotally i'm old enough to remember this because i remember the days that was going on and said the government if the policy decisions that the u.s made at that time was to let it go a little bit invisible hand they didn't try to commercialize it too fast and but there was some policy work that was done that had a direct effect to the innovation versus take it over and next you know it's out of control so i think you know i think this this just a cross-disciplinary skill set becomes a big thing where you need to have more people involved and that's one of the big themes of this symposium so it's a great point thank you for sharing that roland your thoughts on this because you know you got policy decisions we all want to run faster we want to be more innovative but you got to have some ops view now mostly ops people want things very tight very buttoned up secure the innovators want to go faster it's the yin and yang that's that's the world we live in how's it all balanced in your mind yeah um you know one of the things um that may not be apparently obvious is that you know the us government and department of um of defense is one of the biggest investors in technology in the aerospace sector um you know they're not the traditional venture capitalists but they're the ones that are driving technology innovation because there's funding um you know and when companies see that the us governments is interested in something businesses will will re-vector um you know to provide that capability and in the i would say the more recent years we've had a huge influx of private equity venture capital um coming into the markets to kind of help augment um you know the government investment and i think having a good partnership and a relationship with these private equity venture capitalists and the us government is incredibly important because the two sides you know can can help collaborate and kind of see a common goal but then also too on um you know the other side is you know there's that human element um and as general shaw was saying it's like not you know not only do companies you know obviously want to thrive and do really well some companies just want to stay alive um to see their technology kind of you know grow into what they've always dreamed of and you know oftentimes entrepreneurs um are put in a very difficult position because they have to make payroll they have to you know keep the lights on and so sometimes they'll take investment um from places where they may normally would not have you know from potentially foreign investment that could potentially you know cause issues with you know the you know the us supply chain well my final question is the best i wanted to say for last because i love the idea of human space flight i'd love to be on mars i'm not sure i'll be able to make it someday but how do you guys see the possible impacts of cyber security on expanding human space flight operations i mean general this is your wheelhouse this is urine command putting humans in space and certainly robots will be there because they're easy to go because they're not human but humans in space i mean you're starting to see the momentum the discussion uh people are are scratching that itch what's your take on that how do we see making this more possible well i i think we will see we will see uh commercial space tourism uh in the future i'm not sure how wide and large a scale it will become but we'll we will see that and um part of uh i think the mission of the space force is going to be probably to again do what we're doing today is have really good awareness of what's going on the domain to uh to to to ensure that that is done safely and i think a lot of what we do today will end up in civil organizations to do space traffic management and safety uh in in that uh arena um and uh um it is only a matter of time uh before we see um humans going even beyond the you know nasa has their plan the the artemis program to get back to the moon and the gateway initiative to establish a a space station there and that's going to be an exploration initiative but it is only a matter of time before we have um private citizens or private corporations putting people in space and not only for tourism but for economic activity and so it'll be really exciting to watch it would be really exciting and space force will be a part of it general roland i want to thank you for your valuable time to come on this symposium i really appreciate it final uh comment i'd love to you to spend a minute to share your personal thoughts on the importance of cyber security to space and we'll close it out we'll start with you roland yeah so i think that the biggest thing um i would like to try to get out of this you know from my own personal perspective is um creating that environment that allows um you know the the aerospace supply chain small businesses you know like ourselves be able to meet all the requirements um to protect um and safeguard our data but also um create a way that you know we can still thrive and it won't stifle innovation um you know i'm looking forward um to comments and questions um you know from the audience um to really kind of help um you know you know basically drive to that next step general final thoughts the importance of cyber security to space i'll just i'll go back to how i started i think john and say that space and cyber are forever intertwined they're bffs and whoever has my job 50 years from now or 100 years from now i predict they're going to be saying the exact same thing cyber and space are are intertwined for good we will always need the cutting edge cyber security capabilities that we develop as a nation or as a as a society to protect our space capabilities and our cyber capabilities are going to need space capabilities in the future as well general john shaw thank you very much roland cleo thank you very much for your great insight thank you to cal poly for putting this together i want to shout out to the team over there we couldn't be in person but we're doing a virtual remote event i'm john furrier with thecube and siliconangle here in silicon valley thanks for watching

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's "theCUBE" covering Space and Cybersecurity Symposium 2020 hosted by Cal Poly. >> I want to welcome to theCUBE's coverage, we're here hosting with Cal Poly an amazing event, space and the intersection of cyber security. This session is Defending Satellite and Space Infrastructure from Cyber Threats. We've got two great guests. We've got Major General John Shaw of combined force space component commander, U.S. space command at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and Roland Coelho, who's the CEO of Maverick Space Systems. Gentlemen, thank you for spending the time to come on to this session for the Cal Poly Space and Cybersecurity Symposium. Appreciate it. >> Absolutely. >> Guys defending satellites and space infrastructure is the new domain, obviously it's a war-fighting domain. It's also the future of the world. And this is an important topic because we rely on space now for our everyday life and it's becoming more and more critical. Everyone knows how their phones work and GPS, just small examples of all the impacts. I'd like to discuss with this hour, this topic with you guys. So if we can have you guys do an opening statement. General if you can start with your opening statement, we'll take it from there. >> Thanks John and greetings from Vandenberg Air Force Base. We are just down the road from Cal Poly here on the central coast of California, and very proud to be part of this effort and part of the partnership that we have with Cal Poly on a number of fronts. In my job here, I actually have two hats that I wear and it's I think, worth talking briefly about those to set the context for our discussion. You know, we had two major organizational events within our Department of Defense with regard to space last year in 2019. And probably the one that made the most headlines was the standup of the United States Space Force. That happened December 20th, last year, and again momentous, the first new branch in our military since 1947. And it's just over nine months old now, as we're makin' this recording. And already we're seein' a lot of change with regard to how we are approaching organizing, training, and equipping on a service side for space capabilities. And so, with regard to the Space Force, the hat I wear there is Commander of Space Operations Command. That was what was once 14th Air Force, when we were still part of the Air Force here at Vandenberg. And in that role, I'm responsible for the operational capabilities that we bring to the joint warfighter and to the world from a space perspective. Didn't make quite as many headlines, but another major change that happened last year was the reincarnation, I guess I would say, of United States Space Command. And that is a combatant command. It's how our Department of Defense organizes to actually conduct war-fighting operations. Most people are more familiar perhaps with Central Command, CENTCOM or Northern Command, NORTHCOM, or even Strategic Command, STRATCOM. Well, now we have a SPACECOM. We actually had one from 1985 until 2002, and then stood it down in the wake of the 9/11 attacks and a reorganization of Homeland Security. But we've now stood up a separate command again operationally, to conduct joint space operations. And in that organization, I wear a hat as a component commander, and that's the combined force-based component command working with other, all the additional capabilities that other services bring, as well as our allies. The combined in that title means that under certain circumstances, I would lead in an allied effort in space operations. And so it's actually a terrific job to have here on the central coast of California. Both working how we bring space capabilities to the fight on the Space Force side, and then how we actually operate those capabilities in support of joint warfighters around the world and national security interests. So that's the context. Now what also I should mention and you kind of alluded to John at your beginning, we're kind of in a changed situation than we were a number of years ago, in that we now see space as a war-fighting domain. For most of my career, goin' back a little ways, most of my focus in my jobs was making sure I could bring space capabilities to those that needed them. Bringing GPS to that special operations soldier on the ground somewhere in the world, bringing satellite communications for our nuclear command and control, bringing those capabilities for other uses. But I didn't have to worry in most of my career, about actually defending those space capabilities themselves. Well, now we do. We've actually gone to a point where we're are being threatened in space. We now are treating it more like any other domain, normalizing in that regard as a war-fighting domain. And so we're going through some relatively emergent efforts to protect and defend our capabilities in space, to design our capabilities to be defended, and perhaps most of all, to train our people for this new mission set. So it's a very exciting time, and I know we'll get into it, but you can't get very far into talking about all these space capabilities and how we want to protect and defend them and how we're going to continue their ability to deliver to warfighters around the globe, without talking about cyber, because they fit together very closely. So anyway, thanks for the chance to be here today. And I look forward to the discussion. >> General, thank you so much for that opening statement. And I would just say that not only is it historic with the Space Force, it's super exciting because it opens up so much more challenges and opportunities to do more and to do things differently. So I appreciate that statement. Roland in your opening statement. Your job is to put stuff in space, faster, cheaper, smaller, better, your opening statement, please. >> Yes, thank you, John. And yes, to General Shaw's point with the space domain and the need to protect it now is incredibly important. And I hope that we are more of a help than a thorn in your side in terms of building satellites smaller, faster, cheaper. Definitely looking forward to this discussion and figuring out ways where the entire space domain can work together, from industry to U.S. government, even to the academic environment as well. So first, I would like to say, and preface this by saying, I am not a cybersecurity expert. We build satellites and we launch them into orbit, but we are by no means cybersecurity experts. And that's why we like to partner with organizations like the California Cybersecurity Institute because they help us navigate these requirements. So I'm the CEO of Maverick Space Systems. We are a small aerospace business in San Luis Obispo, California. And we provide small satellite hardware and service solutions to a wide range of customers. All the way from the academic environment to the U.S. government and everything in between. We support customers through an entire program life cycle, from mission architecture and formulation, all the way to getting these customer satellites in orbit. And so what we try to do is provide hardware and services that basically make it easier for customers to get their satellites into orbit and to operate. So whether it be reducing mass or volume, creating greater launch opportunities, or providing the infrastructure and the technology to help those innovations mature in orbit, that's what we do. Our team has experience over the last 20 years, working with small satellites. And I'm definitely fortunate to be part of the team that invented the CubeSat standard by Cal Poly and Stanford back in 2000. And so, we are in VandenBerg's backyard. We came from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and our hearts are fond of this area, and working with the local community. A lot of that success that we have had is directly attributable to the experiences that we learned as students, working on satellite programs from our professors and mentors. And that's all thanks to Cal Poly. So just wanted to tell a quick story. So back in 2000, just imagine a small group of undergraduate students, myself included, with the daunting task of launching multiple satellites from five different countries on a Russian launch vehicle. Many of us were only 18 or 19, not even at the legal age to drink yet, but as essentially teenagers we were managing million-dollar budgets. And we were coordinating groups from around the world. And we knew what we needed to accomplish, yet we didn't really know what we were doing when we first started. The university was extremely supportive and that's the Cal Poly learn-by-doing philosophy. I remember the first time we had a meeting with our university chief legal counsel, and we were discussing the need to register with the State Department for ITAR. Nobody really knew what ITAR was back then. And discussing this with the chief legal counsel, she was asking, "What is ITAR?" And we essentially had to explain, this is, launching satellites is part of the U.S. munitions list. And essentially we had a similar situation exporting munitions. We are in similar categories as weapons. And so, after that initial shock, everybody jumped in both feet forward, the university, our head legal counsel, professors, mentors, and the students knew we needed to tackle this problem because the need was there to launch these small satellites. And the reason this is important to capture the entire spectrum of users of the community, is that the technology and the innovation of the small satellite industry occurs at all levels, so we have academia, commercial, national governments. We even have high schools and middle schools getting involved and building satellite hardware. And the thing is the importance of cybersecurity is incredibly important because it touches all of these programs and it touches people at a very young age. And so, we hope to have a conversation today to figure out how do we create an environment where we allow these programs to thrive, but we also protect and keep their data safe as well. >> Thank you very much Roland. Appreciate that a story too as well. Thanks for your opening statement. Gentlemen, I mean I love this topic because defending the assets in space is obvious, if you look at it. But there's a bigger picture going on in our world right now. And general, you kind of pointed out the historic nature of Space Force and how it's changing already, operationally, training, skills, tools, all that stuff is evolving. You know in the tech world that I live in, change the world is a topic they use, gets thrown around a lot, you can change the world. A lot of young people, and we have other panels on this where we're talkin' about how to motivate young people, changing the world is what it's all about technology, for the better. Evolution is just an extension of another domain. In this case, space is just an extension of other domains, similar things are happening, but it's different. There's huge opportunity to change the world, so it's faster. There's an expanded commercial landscape out there. Certainly government space systems are moving and changing. How do we address the importance of cybersecurity in space? General, we'll start with you because this is real, it's exciting. If you're a young person, there's touch points of things to jump into, tech, building hardware, to changing laws, and everything in between is an opportunity, and it's exciting. And it is truly a chance to change the world. How does the commercial government space systems teams, address the importance of cybersecurity? >> So, John, I think it starts with the realization that as I like to say, that cyber and space are BFFs. There's nothing that we do on the cutting edge of space that isn't heavily reliant on the cutting edge of cyber. And frankly, there's probably nothing on the cutting edge of cyber that doesn't have a space application. And when you realize that and you see how closely those are intertwined as we need to move forward at speed, it becomes fundamental to answering your question. Let me give a couple examples. One of the biggest challenges I have on a daily basis is understanding what's going on in the space domain. Those on the surface of the planet talk about tyranny of distance across the oceans or across large land masses. And I talk about the tyranny of volume. And right now, we're looking out as far as the lunar sphere. There's activity that's extending out there. We expect NASA to be conducting perhaps human operations in the lunar environment in the next few years. So it extends out that far. When you do the math that's a huge volume. How do you do that? How do you understand what's happening in real time within that volume? It is a big data problem by the very definition of that kind of effort and that kind of challenge. And to do it successfully in the years ahead, it's going to require many, many sensors and the fusion of data of all kinds, to present a picture and then analytics and predictive analytics that are going to deliver an idea of what's going on in the space arena. And that's just if people are not up to mischief. Once you have threats introduced into that environment, it is even more challenging. So I'd say it's a big data problem that we'll enjoy tackling in the years ahead. Now, a second example is, if we had to take a vote of what were the most amazing robots that have ever been designed by humans, I think that spacecraft would have to be up there on the list. Whether it's the NASA spacecraft that explore other planets, or GPS satellites that amazingly provide a wonderful service to the entire globe and beyond. They are amazing technological machines. That's not going to stop. I mean, all the work that Roland talked about, even that we're doin' at the kind of the microsat level is putting cutting-edge technology into small a package as you can to get some sort of capability out of that. As we expand our activities further and further into space for national security purposes, or for exploration or commercial or civil, the cutting-edge technologies of artificial intelligence and machine-to-machine engagements and machine learning are going to be part of that design work moving forward. And then there's the threat piece. As we operate these capabilities, as these constellations grow, that's going to be done via networks. And as I've already pointed out space is a war-fighting domain. That means those networks will come under attack. We expect that they will and that may happen early on in a conflict. It may happen during peace time in the same way that we see cyber attacks all the time, everywhere in many sectors of activity. And so by painting that picture, we start to see how it's intertwined at the very, very most basic level, the cutting edge of cyber and cutting edge of space. With that then comes the need to, any cutting edge cybersecurity capability that we have is naturally going to be needed as we develop space capabilities. And we're going to have to bake that in from the very beginning. We haven't done that in the past as well as we should, but moving forward from this point on, it will be an essential ingredient that we work into all of our capability. >> Roland, we're talkin' about now, critical infrastructure. We're talkin' about new capabilities being addressed really fast. So, it's kind of chaotic now there's threats. So it's not as easy as just having capabilities, 'cause you've got to deal with the threats the general just pointed out. But now you've got critical infrastructure, which then will enable other things down the line. How do you protect it? How do we address this? How do you see this being addressed from a security standpoint? Because malware, these techniques can be mapped in, extended into space and takeovers, wartime, peace time, these things are all going to be under threat. That's pretty well understood, and I think people kind of get that. How do we address it? What's your take? >> Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I couldn't agree more with General Shaw, with cybersecurity and space being so intertwined. And, I think with fast and rapid innovation comes the opportunity for threats, especially if you have bad actors that want to cause harm. And so, as a technology innovator and you're pushing the bounds, you kind of have a common goal of doing the best you can, and pushing the technology bounds, making it smaller, faster, cheaper. But a lot of times what entrepreneurs and small businesses and supply chains are doing, and don't realize it, is a lot of these components are dual use. I mean, you could have a very benign commercial application, but then a small modification to it, can turn it into a military application. And if you do have these bad actors, they can exploit that. And so, I think that the big thing is creating a organization that is non-biased, that just wants to kind of level the playing field for everybody to create a set standard for cybersecurity in space. I think one group that would be perfect for that is CCI. They understand both the cybersecurity side of things, and they also have at Cal Poly the small satellite group. And just having kind of a clearing house or an agency where can provide information that is free, you don't need a membership for. And to be able to kind of collect that, but also reach out to the entire value chain for a mission, and making them aware of what potential capabilities are and then how it might be potentially used as a weapon. And keeping them informed, because I think the vast majority of people in the space industry just want to do the right thing. And so, how do we get that information free flowing to the U.S. government so that they can take that information, create assessments, and be able to, not necessarily stop threats from occurring presently, but identify them long before that they would ever even happen. Yeah, that's- >> General, I want to follow up on that real quick before we move to the next top track. Critical infrastructure you mentioned, across the oceans long distance, volume. When you look at the physical world, you had power grids here in the United States, you had geography, you had perimeters, the notion of a perimeter and a moat, and then you had digital comes in. Then you have, we saw software open up, and essentially take down this idea of a perimeter, and from a defense standpoint, and everything changed. And we have to fortify those critical assets in the U.S. Space increases the same problem statement significantly, because you can't just have a perimeter, you can't have a moat, it's open, it's everywhere. Like what digital's done, and that's why we've seen a surge of cyber in the past two decades, attacks with software. So, this isn't going to go away. You need the critical infrastructure, you're putting it up there, you're formulating it, and you got to protect it. How do you view that? Because it's going to be an ongoing problem statement. What's the current thinking? >> Yeah, I think my sense is that a mindset that you can build a firewall, or a defense, or some other system that isn't dynamic in its own right, is probably not headed in the right direction. I think cybersecurity in the future, whether it's for space systems, or for other critical infrastructure is going to be a dynamic fight that happens at a machine-to-machine speed and dynamic. I don't think that it's too far off where we will have machines writing their own code in real time to fight off attacks that are coming at them. And by the way, the offense will probably be doing the same kind of thing. And so, I guess I would not want to think that the answer is something that you just build it and you leave it alone and it's good enough. It's probably going to be a constantly-evolving capability, constantly reacting to new threats and staying ahead of those threats. >> That's the kind of use case, you know as you were, kind of anecdotal example is the exciting new software opportunities for computer science majors. I mean, I tell my young kids and everyone, man it's more exciting now. I wish I was 18 again, it's so exciting with AI. Roland, I want to get your thoughts. We were joking on another panel with the DoD around space and the importance of it obviously, and we're going to have that here. And then we had a joke. It's like, oh software's defined everything. Software's everything, AI. And I said, "Well here in the United States, companies had data centers and then they went to the cloud." And then he said, "You can do break, fix, it's hard to do break, fix in space. You can't just send a tech up." I get that today, but soon maybe robotics. The general mentions robotics technologies, in referencing some of the accomplishments. Fixing things is almost impossible in space. But maybe form factors might get better. Certainly software will play a role. What's your thoughts on that landscape? >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, for software in orbit, there's a push for software-defined radios to basically go from hardware to software. And that's a critical link. If you can infiltrate that and a small satellite has propulsion on board, you could take control of that satellite and cause a lot of havoc. And so, creating standards and that kind of initial threshold of security, for let's say these radios, or communications and making that available to the entire supply chain, to the satellite builders, and operators is incredibly key. And that's again, one of the initiatives that CCI is tackling right now as well. >> General, I want to get your thoughts on best practices around cybersecurity, state-of-the-art today, and then some guiding principles, and kind of how the, if you shoot the trajectory forward, what might happen around supply chain? There's been many stories where, we outsource the chips and there's a little chip sittin' in a thing and it's built by someone else in China, and the software is written from someone in Europe, and the United States assembles it, it gets shipped and it's corrupt, and it has some cyber, I'm making it up, I'm oversimplifying the statement. But this is what when you have space systems that involve intellectual property from multiple partners, whether it's from software to creation and then deployment. You got supply chain tiers. What are some of best practices that you see involving, that don't stunt the innovation, but continues to innovate, but people can operate safely. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, so on supply chain, I think the symposium here is going to get to hear from General JT Thompson from space and missile system center down in Los Angeles, and he's just down the road from us there on the coast. And his team is the one that we look to to really focus on, as he fires and develops to again bake in cybersecurity from the beginning and knowing where the components are coming from, and properly assessing those as you put together your space systems, is a key piece of what his team is focused on. So I expect, we'll hear him talk about that. When it talks to, I think, so you asked the question a little more deeply about how do the best practices in terms of how we now develop moving forward. Well, another way that we don't do it right, is if we take a long time to build something and then General JT Thompson's folks take a while to build something, and then they hand it over to me, and my team operate and then they go hands free. And then that's what I have for years to operate until the next thing comes along. That's a little old school. What we're going to have to do moving forward with our space capabilities, and with the cyber piece baked in is continually developing new capability sets as we go. We actually have partnership between General Thompson's team and mine here at Vandenberg on our ops floor, or our combined space operation center, that are actually working in real time together, better tools that we can use to understand what's going on in the space environment to better command and control our capabilities anywhere from military satellite communications, to space domain awareness, sensors, and such. And we're developing those capabilities in real time. And with the security pieces. So DevSecOps is we're practicing that in real time. I think that is probably the standard today that we're trying to live up to as we continue to evolve. But it has to be done again, in close partnership all the time. It's not a sequential, industrial-age process. While I'm on the subject of partnerships. So, General Thompson's team and mine have good partnerships. It's partnerships across the board are going to be another way that we are successful. And that it means with academia and some of the relationships that we have here with Cal Poly. It's with the commercial sector in ways that we haven't done before. The old style business was to work with just a few large companies that had a lot of space experience. Well, we need a lot of kinds of different experience and technologies now in order to really field good space capabilities. And I expect we'll see more and more non-traditional companies being part of, and organizations, being part of that partnership that will work goin' forward. I mentioned at the beginning that allies are important to us. So everything that Roland and I have been talking about I think you have to extrapolate out to allied partnerships. It doesn't help me as a combined force component commander, which is again, one of my jobs. It doesn't help me if the United States capabilities are cybersecure, but I'm tryin' to integrate them with capabilities from an ally that are not cybersecure. So that partnership has to be dynamic and continually evolving together. So again, close partnering, continually developing together from the acquisition to the operational sectors, with as many different sectors of our economy as possible, are the ingredients to success. >> General, I'd love to just follow up real quick. I was having just a quick reminder for a conversation I had with last year with General Keith Alexander, who does a lot of cybersecurity work, and he was talking about the need to share faster. And the new school is you got to share faster to get the data, you mentioned observability earlier, you need to see what everything's out there. He's a real passionate person around getting the data, getting it fast and having trusted partners. So that's not, it's kind of evolving as, I mean, sharing's a well known practice, but with cyber it's sensitive data potentially. So there's a trust relationship. There's now a new ecosystem. That's new for government. How do you view all that and your thoughts on that trend of the sharing piece of it on cyber? >> So, I don't know if it's necessarily new, but it's at a scale that we've never seen before. And by the way, it's vastly more complicated and complex when you overlay from a national security perspective, classification of data and information at various levels. And then that is again complicated by the fact you have different sharing relationships with different actors, whether it's commercial, academic, or allies. So it gets very, very complex web very quickly. So that's part of the challenge we're workin' through. How can we effectively share information at multiple classification levels with multiple partners in an optimal fashion? It is certainly not optimal today. It's very difficult, even with maybe one industry partner for me to be able to talk about data at an unclassified level, and then various other levels of classification to have the traditional networks in place to do that. I could see a solution in the future where our cybersecurity is good enough that maybe I only really need one network and the information that is allowed to flow to the players within the right security environment to make that all happen as quickly as possible. So you've actually, John you've hit on yet another big challenge that we have, is evolving our networks to properly share, with the right people, at the right clearance levels at the speed of war, which is what we're going to need. >> Yeah, and I wanted to call that out because this is an opportunity, again, this discussion here at Cal Poly and around the world is for new capabilities and new people to solve the problems. It's again, it's super exciting if you're geeking out on this. If you have a tech degree or you're interested in changin' the world, there's so many new things that could be applied right now. Roland, I want to get your thoughts on this, because one of the things in the tech trends we're seeing, and this is a massive shift, all the theaters of the tech industry are changing rapidly at the same time. And it affects policy law, but also deep tech. The startup communities are super important in all this too. We can't forget them. Obviously, the big trusted players that are partnering certainly on these initiatives, but your story about being in the dorm room. Now you've got the boardroom and now you got everything in between. You have startups out there that want to and can contribute. You know, what's an ITAR? I mean, I got all these acronym certifications. Is there a community motion to bring startups in, in a safe way, but also give them ability to contribute? Because you look at open source, that proved everyone wrong on software. That's happening now with this now open network concept, the general was kind of alluding to. Which is, it's a changing landscape. Your thoughts, I know you're passionate about this. >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think as General Shaw mentioned, we need to get information out there faster, more timely and to the right people, and involving not only just stakeholders in the U.S., but internationally as well. And as entrepreneurs, we have this very lofty vision or goal to change the world. And oftentimes, entrepreneurs, including myself, we put our heads down and we just run as fast as we can. And we don't necessarily always kind of take a breath and take a step back and kind of look at what we're doing and how it's touching other folks. And in terms of a community, I don't know of any formal community out there, it's mostly ad hoc. And, these ad hoc communities are folks who let's say was a student working on a satellite in college. And they loved that entrepreneurial spirit. And so they said, "Well, I'm going to start my own company." And so, a lot of these ad hoc networks are just from relationships that have been built over the last two decades from colleagues at the university. I do think formalizing this and creating kind of a clearing house to handle all of this is incredibly important. >> And there's going to be a lot of entrepreneurial activity, no doubt, I mean there's too many things to work on and not enough time. I mean this brings up the question that I'm going to, while we're on this topic, you got the remote work with COVID, everyone's workin' remotely, we're doin' this remote interview rather than being on stage. Work's changing, how people work and engage. Certainly physical will come back. But if you looked at historically the space industry and the talent, they're all clustered around the bases. And there's always been these areas where you're a space person. You kind of work in there and the job's there. And if you were cyber, you were generally in other areas. Over the past decade, there's been a cross-pollination of talent and location. As you see the intersection of space, general we'll start with you, first of all, central coast is a great place to live. I know that's where you guys live. But you can start to bring together these two cultures. Sometimes they're not the same. Maybe they're getting better. We know they're being integrated. So general, can you just share your thoughts because this is one of those topics that everyone's talkin' about, but no one's actually kind of addressed directly. >> Yeah, John, I think so. I think I want to answer this by talkin' about where I think the Space Force is going. Because I think if there was ever an opportunity or an inflection point in our Department of Defense to sort of change culture and try to bring in non-traditional kinds of thinking and really kind of change maybe some of the ways that the Department of Defense does things that are probably archaic, Space Force is an inflection point for that. General Raymond, our Chief of Space Operations, has said publicly for awhile now, he wants the U.S. Space Force to be the first truly digital service. And what we mean by that is we want the folks that are in the Space Force to be the ones that are the first adopters, the early adopters of technology. To be the ones most fluent in the cutting edge, technologic developments on space and cyber and other sectors of the economy that are technologically focused. And I think there's some, that can generate some excitement, I think. And it means that we'll probably ended up recruiting people into the Space Force that are not from the traditional recruiting areas that the rest of the Department of Defense looks to. And I think it allows us to bring in a diversity of thought and diversity of perspective and a new kind of motivation into the service, that I think is frankly really exciting. So if you put together everything I mentioned about how space and cyber are going to be best friends forever. And I think there's always been an excitement from the very beginning in the American psyche about space. You start to put all these ingredients together, and I think you see where I'm goin' with this. That this is a chance to really change that cultural mindset that you were describing. >> It's an exciting time for sure. And again, changing the world. And this is what you're seeing today. People do want to change the world. They want a modern world that's changing. Roland, I'll get your thoughts on this. I was having an interview a few years back with a technology entrepreneur, a techie, and we were joking, we were just kind of riffing. And I said, "Everything that's on "Star Trek" will be invented." And we're almost there actually, if you think about it, except for the transporter room. You got video, you got communicators. So, not to bring in the "Star Trek" reference with Space Force, this is digital. And you start thinking about some of the important trends, it's going to be up and down the stack, from hardware to software, to user experience, everything. Your thoughts and reaction. >> Yeah, absolutely. And so, what we're seeing is timelines shrinking dramatically because of the barrier to entry for new entrants and even your existing aerospace companies is incredibly low, right? So if you take previously where you had a technology on the ground and you wanted it in orbit, it would take years. Because you would test it on the ground. You would verify that it can operate in a space environment. And then you would go ahead and launch it. And we're talking tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars to do that. Now, we've cut that down from years to months. When you have a prototype on the ground and you want to get it launched, you don't necessarily care if it fails on orbit the first time, because you're getting valuable data back. And so, we're seeing technology being developed for the first time on the ground and in orbit in a matter of a few months. And the whole kind of process that we're doing as a small business is trying to enable that. And so, allowing these entrepreneurs and small companies to get their technology in orbit at a price that is sometimes even cheaper than testing on the ground. >> You know this is a great point. I think this is really an important point to call out because we mentioned partnerships earlier, the economics and the business model of space is doable. I mean, you do a mission study. You get paid for that. You have technology that you get stuff up quickly, and there's a cost structure there. And again, the alternative was waterfall planning, years and millions. Now the form factors are doing, now, again, there may be different payloads involved, but you can standardize payloads. You've got robotic arms. This is all available. This brings up the congestion problem. This is going to be on the top of mind of the generals of course, but you've got the proliferation of these constellation systems. You're going to have more and more tech vectors. I mean, essentially that's malware. I mean, that's a probe. You throw something up in space that could cause some interference. Maybe a takeover. General, this is the real elephant in the room, the threat matrix from new stuff and new configurations. So general, how does the proliferation of constellation systems change the threat matrix? >> So I think the, you know I guess I'm going to be a little more optimistic John than I think you pitched that. I'm actually excited about these new mega constellations in LEO. I'm excited about the growing number of actors that are going into space for various reasons. And why is that? It's because we're starting to realize a new economic engine for the nation and for human society. So the question is, so I think we want that to happen. When we could go to almost any other domain in history and when air travel started to become much, much more commonplace with many kinds of actors from private pilots flying their small planes, all the way up to large airliners, there was a problem with congestion. There was a problem about, challenges about behavior, and are we going to be able to manage this? And yes we did. And it was for the great benefit of society. I could probably look to the maritime domain for similar kinds of things. And so this is actually exciting about space. We are just going to have to find the ways as a society, and it's not just the Department of Defense, it's going to be civil, it's going to be international, find the mechanisms to encourage this continued investment in the space domain. I do think that Space Force will play a role in providing security in the space environment, as we venture further out, as economic opportunities emerge, wherever they are in the lunar, Earth, lunar system, or even within the solar system. Space Force is going to play a role in that. But I'm actually really excited about those possibilities. Hey, by the way, I got to say, you made me think of this when you talked about "Star Trek" and Space Force and our technologies, I remember when I was younger watchin' the Next Generation series. I thought one of the coolest things, 'cause bein' a musician in my spare time, I thought one of the coolest things was when Commander Riker would walk into his quarters and say, "Computer play soft jazz." And there would just be, the computer would just play music. And this was an age when we had hard media. Like how will that, that is awesome. Man, I can't wait for the 23rd century when I can do that. And where we are today is so incredible on those lines. The things that I can ask Alexa or Siri to play. >> Well that's the thing, everything that's on "Star Trek," think about it, it's almost invented. I mean, you got the computers, you got, the only thing really is, holograms are startin' to come in, you got, now the transporter room. Now that's physics. We'll work on that. >> So there is this balance between physics and imagination, but we have not exhausted either. >> Well, firstly, everyone that knows me knows I'm a huge "Star Trek" fan, all the series. Of course, I'm an original purist, but at that level. But this is about economic incentive as well. Roland, I want to get your thoughts, 'cause the gloom and doom, we got to think about the bad stuff to make it good. If I put my glass half full on the table, this economic incentives, just like the example of the plane and the air traffic. There's more actors that are incented to have a secure system. What's your thoughts to general's comments around the optimism and the potential threat matrix that needs to be managed. >> Absolutely, so one of the things that we've seen over the years, as we build these small satellites is a lot of that technology that the General's talking about, voice recognition, miniaturized chips, and sensors, started on the ground. And I mean, you have your iPhone, that, about 15 years ago before the first iPhone came out, we were building small satellites in the lab and we were looking at cutting-edge, state-of-the-art magnetometers and sensors that we were putting in our satellites back then. We didn't know if they were going to work. And then a few years later, as these students graduate, they go off and they go out to other industries. And so, some of the technology that was first kind of put in these CubeSats in the early 2000s, kind of ended up in the first generation iPhone, smartphones. And so being able to take that technology, rapidly incorporate that into space and vice versa gives you an incredible economic advantage. Because not only are your costs going down because you're mass producing these types of terrestrial technologies, but then you can also increase revenue and profit by having smaller and cheaper systems. >> General, let's talk about that real quickly, that's a good point, I want to just shift it into the playbook. I mean, everyone talks about playbooks for management, for tech, for startups, for success. I mean, one of the playbooks that's clear from your history is investment in R&D around military and/or innovation that has a long view, spurs innovation, commercially. I mean, just there's a huge, many decades of history that shows that, hey we got to start thinking about these challenges. And next thing you know it's in an iPhone. This is history, this is not like a one off. And now with Space Force you're driving the main engine of innovation to be all digital. You know, we riff about "Star Trek" which is fun, the reality is you're going to be on the front lines of some really new, cool, mind-blowing things. Could you share your thoughts on how you sell that to the people who write the checks or recruit more talent? >> First, I totally agree with your thesis that national security, well, could probably go back an awful long way, hundreds to thousands of years, that security matters tend to drive an awful lot of innovation and creativity. You know I think probably the two things that drive people the most are probably an opportunity to make money, but beating that out are trying to stay alive. And so, I don't think that's going to go away. And I do think that Space Force can play a role as it pursues security structures, within the space domain to further encourage economic investment and to protect our space capabilities for national security purposes, are going to be at the cutting edge. This isn't the first time. I think we can point back to the origins of the internet, really started in the Department of Defense, with a partnership I should add, with academia. That's how the internet got started. That was the creativity in order to meet some needs there. Cryptography has its roots in security, in national security, but now we use it for economic reasons and a host of other kinds of reasons. And then space itself, I mean, we still look back to Apollo era as an inspiration for so many things that inspired people to either begin careers in technical areas or in space and so on. So I think in that same spirit, you're absolutely right. I guess I'm totally agreeing with your thesis. The Space Force will have a positive, inspirational influence in that way. And we need to realize that. So when we are asking for, when we're looking for how we need to meet capability needs, we need to spread that net very far, look for the most creative solutions and partner early and often with those that can work on those. >> When you're on the new frontier, you got to have a team sport, it's a team effort. And you mentioned the internet, just anecdotally I'm old enough to remember this 'cause I remember the days that it was goin' on, is that the policy decisions that the U.S. made at that time was to let it go a little bit invisible hand. They didn't try to commercialize it too fast. But there was some policy work that was done, that had a direct effect to the innovation. Versus take it over, and the next thing you know it's out of control. So I think there's this cross-disciplinary skillset becomes a big thing where you need to have more people involved. And that's one of the big themes of this symposium. So it's a great point. Thank you for sharing that. Roland, your thoughts on this because you got policy decisions. We all want to run faster. We want to be more innovative, but you got to have some ops view. Now, most of the ops view people want things very tight, very buttoned up, secure. The innovators want to go faster. It's the ying and yang. That's the world we live in. How's it all balance in your mind? >> Yeah, one of the things that may not be apparently obvious is that the U.S. government and Department of Defense is one of the biggest investors in technology in the aerospace sector. They're not the traditional venture capitalists, but they're the ones that are driving technology innovation because there's funding. And when companies see that the U.S. government is interested in something, businesses will revector to provide that capability. And, I would say the more recent years, we've had a huge influx of private equity, venture capital coming into the markets to kind of help augment the government investment. And I think having a good partnership and a relationship with these private equity, venture capitalists and the U.S. government is incredibly important because the two sides can help collaborate and kind of see a common goal. But then also too, on the other side there's that human element. And as General Shaw was saying, not only do companies obviously want to thrive and do really well, some companies just want to stay alive to see their technology kind of grow into what they've always dreamed of. And oftentimes entrepreneurs are put in a very difficult position because they have to make payroll, they have to keep the lights on. And so, sometimes they'll take investment from places where they may normally would not have, from potentially foreign investment that could potentially cause issues with the U.S. supply chain. >> Well, my final question is the best I wanted to save for last, because I love the idea of human space flight. I'd love to be on Mars. I'm not sure I'm able to make it someday, but how do you guys see the possible impacts of cybersecurity on expanding human space flight operations? I mean, general, this is your wheelhouse. This is your in command, putting humans in space and certainly robots will be there because they're easy to go 'cause they're not human. But humans in space. I mean, you startin' to see the momentum, the discussion, people are scratchin' that itch. What's your take on that? How do we see makin' this more possible? >> Well, I think we will see commercial space tourism in the future. I'm not sure how wide and large a scale it will become, but we will see that. And part of the, I think the mission of the Space Force is going to be probably to again, do what we're doin' today is have really good awareness of what's going on in the domain to ensure that that is done safely. And I think a lot of what we do today will end up in civil organizations to do space traffic management and safety in that arena. And, it is only a matter of time before we see humans going, even beyond the, NASA has their plan, the Artemis program to get back to the moon and the gateway initiative to establish a space station there. And that's going to be a NASA exploration initiative. But it is only a matter of time before we have private citizens or private corporations putting people in space and not only for tourism, but for economic activity. And so it'll be really exciting to watch. It'll be really exciting and Space Force will be a part of it. >> General, Roland, I want to thank you for your valuable time to come on this symposium. Really appreciate it. Final comment, I'd love you to spend a minute to share your personal thoughts on the importance of cybersecurity to space and we'll close it out. We'll start with you Roland. >> Yeah, so I think the biggest thing I would like to try to get out of this from my own personal perspective is creating that environment that allows the aerospace supply chain, small businesses like ourselves, be able to meet all the requirements to protect and safeguard our data, but also create a way that we can still thrive and it won't stifle innovation. I'm looking forward to comments and questions, from the audience to really kind of help, basically drive to that next step. >> General final thoughts, the importance of cybersecurity to space. >> I'll go back to how I started I think John and say that space and cyber are forever intertwined, they're BFFs. And whoever has my job 50 years from now, or a hundred years from now, I predict they're going to be sayin' the exact same thing. Cyber and space are intertwined for good. We will always need the cutting edge, cybersecurity capabilities that we develop as a nation or as a society to protect our space capabilities. And our cyber capabilities are going to need space capabilities in the future as well. >> General John Shaw, thank you very much. Roland Coelho, thank you very much for your great insight. Thank you to Cal Poly for puttin' this together. I want to shout out to the team over there. We couldn't be in-person, but we're doing a virtual remote event. I'm John Furrier with "theCUBE" and SiliconANGLE here in Silicon Valley, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE covering space in cybersecurity symposium 2020 hosted by Cal Poly. >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the space and cybersecurity symposium, 2020 hosted by Cal Poly where the intersection of space and security are coming together. I'm John Furrier, your host with theCUBE here in California. I want to welcome our featured guest, Lieutenant General, John F. Thompson with the United States Space Force approach to cybersecurity. That's the topic of this session. And of course he's the commander of the space and missile system center in Los Angeles Air Force Base. Also heading up Space Force. General, thank you for coming on. I really appreciate to you kicking this off. Welcome to the symposium. >> Hey, so thank you very much, John, for that very kind introduction. Also very much thank you to Cal Poly for this opportunity to speak to this audience today. Also a special shout out to one of the organizers, Dustin Debrun, for all of his work, helping get us to this point. Ladies and gentlemen as a John mentioned, I'm JT Thompson. I lead the 6,000 men and women of the United States Space Force's Space and Missile System Center, which is headquartered here at Los Angeles Air Force Base and El Segundo. If you're not quite sure where that's at, it's about a mile and a half from LAX. This is our main operating location, but we do have a number of other operating locations around the country. We're about 500 people at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and an about another 500 people on the front range of the Rockies between Colorado Springs and Denver plus a smattering of other much smaller operating locations nationwide. We're responsible for acquiring, developing and sustaining the United States Space Force's, critical space assets. That includes the satellites in the space layer and also on the ground layer our ground segments to operate those satellites. And we also are in charge of procuring launch services for the US Space Force and a number of our critical mission partners across the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. Just as a couple of examples of some of the things we do, if you're unfamiliar with our work we developed and currently sustain the 31 satellite GPS constellation that satellite constellation, while originally intended to help with global navigation, those GPS signals have provided trillions of dollars in unanticipated value to the global economy over the past three decades. GPS is everywhere. I think everybody realizes that. Agriculture, banking, the stock market, the airline industry, separate and distinct navigation systems. It's really pervasive across both capabilities for our Department of Defense and capabilities for our economy and individuals, billions of individuals across our country and the planet. Some of the other work we do for instance, in the communications sector, secure communications satellites that we designed and build that link America's sons and daughters serving in the military around the world and really enable real time support and comms for our deployed forces. And those of our allies. We also acquire infrared missile warning satellites that monitor the planet for missile launches that provide advanced warning to the US Homeland and to our allies in case some of those missile launches are nefarious. On a note, that's probably a lot closer to home, maybe a lot closer to home than many of us want to think about here in the state of California. In 2018, SMC jumped through a bunch of red tape and bureaucracy to partner with the US Forest Service during two of the largest wildfires in the state's history, the Camp and Woolsey fires in Northern California. As those fires spread out of control, we created processes on the fly to share data from our missile warning satellites. Those are satellites that are systems that are purpose built to see heat sources from thousands of miles above the planet. And we collaborated with the US Forest Service so that firefighters on the ground could track those fires more in real time and better forecast fires and where they were spreading, thereby saving lives and property by identifying hotspots and flareups for firefighters. That data that we were able to working with our contractors pass to the US Forest Service and authorities here in California, was passed in less than an hour as it was collected to get it into the hands of the emergency responders, the first responders as quickly as possible and doing that in an hour greatly surpassed what was available from some of the other assets in the airborne and ground-based fire spotters. It was really instrumental in fighting those fires and stopping their spread. We've continued that involvement in recent years, using multiple systems to support firefighters across the Western US this fall, as they battled numerous wildfires that unfortunately continue. Working together with the US Forest Service and with other partners we'd like to think that we've made a difference here, but there's still a lot more work to go. And I think that we should always be asking ourselves what else can space data be used for and how can we more rapidly get that space data to stakeholders so that they can use it for purposes of good, if you will. How else can we protect our nation? How else can we protect our friends and allies? I think a major component of the discussion that we will have throughout this conference is that the space landscape has changed rapidly and continues to change rapidly. Just over the past few years, John and I were talking before we went live here and 80 nations now have space programs. Nearly 80 space faring nations on the planet. If you just look at one mission area that the Department of Defense is interested in, and that's small launch, there are currently over 100 different small launch companies within the US industrial base vying for commercial DoD and civil payload capabilities, mostly to lower earth orbit. It's truly a remarkable time. If you factor in those things like artificial intelligence and machine learning, where we're revolutionizing really, the ways that we generate process and use data. It's really remarkable. In 2016, so if you think about this four years ago, NASA estimated that there were 28 terabytes of information transiting their space network each day. And that was four years ago. Obviously we've got a lot of desire to work with a lot of the people in the audience in this conference, we need to work with big thinkers, like many of you to answer questions on how best we apply data analytics to extract value and meaning from that data. We need new generations of thinkers to help apply cutting edge theories of data mining, cyber behaviorism, and Internet of Things 2.0, it's just truly a remarkable time to be in the space business and the cyber aspects of the space business are truly, truly daunting and important to all of us. Integrating cyber security into our space systems, both commercial and government is a mandate. it's no longer just a nice to have as the US Space Force and Department of the Air Force leadership has said many times over the past couple of years, space is becoming congested and contested. And that contested aspect means that we've got to focus on cyber security in the same way that the banking industry and cyber commerce focus on cybersecurity day in and day out. The value of the data and services provided is really directly tied to the integrity and availability of that data and services from the space layer, from the ground control segments associated with it. And this value is not just military, it's also economic and it's not just American, it's also a value for the entire world, particularly our allies, as we all depend upon space and space systems. Your neighbors and friends here in California that are employed at the space and missile system center work with network defenders. We work with our commercial contractors and our systems developers, our international allies and partners to try and build as secure and resilient systems as we can from the ground up that keep the global comments of space free and open for exploration and for commerce as John and I were talking earlier, before we came online, there's an aspect of cybersecurity for space systems, especially for some of our legacy systems, that's more, how do we bolt this on? Cause we fielded those space systems a number of years ago, and the challenges of cybersecurity in the space domain have grown. So we have a part that we have to worry about, bolting it on, but then we have to worry about building it in as we field new systems and build in a flexibility that realizes that the cyber threat or the cybersecurity landscape will evolve over time. It's not just going to be stagnant. There will always be new vulnerabilities and new threat vectors that we all have to look at. Look, as Secretary Barrett, who is our secretary of the air force likes to say most Americans use space before they have their first cup of coffee in the morning. The American way of life really depends on space. And as part of the United States Space Force, we work with defense leaders, our Congress joint, and international military teammates and industry to ensure American leadership in space. I really thank you for this opportunity to address the audience today, John, and thanks so much to Cal Poly for letting me be one of the speakers at this event. I've really looked forward to this for several months. And so with that, I look forward to your questions as we kind of move along here. >> General, thank you very much for those awesome introductory statement. For the folks watching on the stream, Brigadier General Carthan's going to be in the chat, answering any questions, feel free to chat away. He's the vice commander of Space and Missile System Center, he'll be available. A couple of comments from your keynote before I get to my questions. Cause it just jumped into my head. You mentioned the benefits of say space with the fires in California. We're living that here. That's really realtime. That's a benefit. You also mentioned the ability for more people launching payloads into space. I'm only imagined Moore's law smaller, faster, cheaper applies to rockets too. So I'm imagining you have the benefits of space and you have now more potential objects flying out sanctioned and maybe unsanctioned. So is it going to be more rules around that? This is an interesting question cause it's exciting Space Force, but for all the good there is potentially bad out there. >> Yeah. So John, I think the basics of your question is as space becomes more congested and contested, is there a need for more international norms of how satellites fly in space? What kind of basic features satellites have to perhaps de orbit themselves? What kind of basic protections should all satellites be afforded as part of a peaceful global commons of space? I think those are all fantastic questions. And I know that US and many allied policy makers are looking very, very hard at those kinds of questions in terms of what are the norms of behavior and how we field, and field as the military term. But how we populate using civil or commercial terms that space layer at different altitudes, lower earth orbit, mid earth orbit, geosynchronous earth orbit, different kinds of orbits, what the kind of mission areas we accomplished from space. That's all things that need to be definitely taken into account as the place gets a little bit, not a little bit as the place gets increasingly more popular day in and day out. >> I'm super excited for Space Force. I know that a new generation of young folks are really interested in it's an emerging, changing great space. The focus here at this conference is space and cybersecurity, the intersection. I'd like to get your thoughts on the approach that a space force is taking to cybersecurity and how it impacts our national goals here in the United States. >> Yeah. So that's a great question John, let me talk about it in two basic ways. At number one is an and I know some people in the audience, this might make them a little bit uncomfortable, but I have to talk about the threat. And then relative to that threat, I really have to talk about the importance of cyber and specifically cyber security, as it relates to that threat. The threats that we face really represented a new era of warfare and that new era of warfare involves both space and cyber. We've seen a lot of action in recent months from certain countries, notably China and Russia that have threatened what I referred to earlier as the peaceful global commons of space. For example, it threw many unclassified sources and media sources. Everybody should understand that the Russians have been testing on orbit anti-satellite capabilities. It's been very clear if you were following just the week before last, the Department of Defense released its 2020 military and security developments involving the People's Republic of China. And it was very clear that China is developing ASATs, electronic jammers, directed energy weapons, and most relevant to today's discussion, offensive cyber capabilities. There are kinetic threats that are very, very easy to see, but a cyber attack against a critical command and control site or against a particular spacecraft could be just as devastating to the system and our war fighters in the case of GPS and important to note that that GPS system also impacts many civilians who are dependent on those systems from a first response perspective and emergency services, a cyber attack against a ground control site could cause operators to lose control of a spacecraft or an attacker could feed spoofed data to assist them to mislead operators so that they sent emergency services personnel to the wrong address. Attacks on spacecraft on orbit, whether directly via a network intrusion or enabled through malware introduced during the system's production while we're building the satellite can cripple or corrupt the data. Denial-of-service type attacks on our global networks obviously would disrupt our data flow and interfere with ongoing operations and satellite control. If GPS went down, I hesitate to say it this way, cause we might elicit some screams from the audience. But if GPS went down a Starbucks, wouldn't be able to handle your mobile order, Uber drivers wouldn't be able to find you. And Domino's certainly wouldn't be able to get there in 30 minutes or less. So with a little bit of tongue in cheek there from a military operations perspective, it's dead serious. We have become accustomed in the commercial world to threats like ransomware and malware. And those things have unfortunately become commonplace in commercial terrestrial networks and computer systems. However, what we're seeing is that our adversaries with the increased competition in space these same techniques are being retooled, if you will, to use against our national security space systems day in and day out. As I said, during my opening remarks on the importance of cyber, the value of these systems is directly tied to their integrity. If commanders in the field, firefighters in California or baristas in Starbucks, can't trust the data they're receiving, then that really harms their decision making capabilities. One of the big trends we've recently seen is the move towards proliferated LEO constellations, obviously Space X's Starlink on the commercial side and on the military side, the work that DARPA and my organization SMC are doing on Blackjack and Casino, as well as some space transport layer constellation work that the space development agency is designing are all really, really important types of mesh network systems that will revolutionaries how we plan and field war fighting systems and commercial communications and internet providing systems. But they're also heavily reliant on cybersecurity. We've got to make sure that they are secured to avoid an accident or international damage. Loss of control of these constellations really could be catastrophic from both a mission perspective or from a satellites tumbling out of low earth orbit perspective. Another trend is introductions in artificial intelligence and machine learning, onboard spacecraft are at the edge. Our satellites are really not so much hardware systems with a little software anymore in the commercial sector and in the defense sector, they're basically flying boxes full of software. And we need to ensure that data that we're getting out of those flying boxes full of software are helping us base our decisions on accurate data and algorithms, governing the right actions and that those systems are impervious to the extent possible to nefarious modifications. So in summation, cybersecurity is a vital element of everything in our national security space goals. And I would argue for our national goals, writ large, including economic and information dimensions, the Space Force leadership at all levels from some of the brand new second lieutenants that general Raymond swore in to the space force this morning, ceremonially from the air force associations, airspace and cyberspace conference to the various highest levels, General Raymond, General DT Thompson, myself, and a number of other senior leaders in this enterprise. We've got to make sure that we're all working together to keep cyber security at the forefront of our space systems cause they absolutely depend on it. >> You mentioned hardware, software threats, opportunities, challenges. I want to ask you because you got me thinking of the minute they're around infrastructure. We've heard critical infrastructure, grids here on earth. You're talking about critical infrastructure, a redefinition of what critical infrastructure is, an extension of what we have. So I'd love to get your thoughts about Space Force's view of that critical infrastructure vis-a-vis the threat vectors, because the term threat vectors has been kicked around in the cyberspace. Oh you have threat vectors. They're always increasing the surface area. If the surface area is from space, it's an unlimited service area. So you got different vectors. So you've got new critical infrastructure developing real time, really fast. And you got an expanded threat vector landscape. Putting that in perspective for the folks that aren't really inside the ropes on these critical issues. How would you explain this and how would you talk about those two things? >> So I tell you, just like, I'm sure people in the security side or the cybersecurity side of the business in the banking industry feel, they feel like it's all possible threat vectors represent a dramatic and protect potentially existential threat to all of the dollars that they have in the banking system, to the financial sector. On the Department of Defense side, we've got to have sort of the same mindset. That threat vector from, to, and through space against critical space systems, ground segments, the launch enterprise, or transportation to orbit and the various different domains within space itself. Like I mentioned before, LEO, MEO and GEO based satellites with different orbits, all of the different mission areas that are accomplished from space that I mentioned earlier, some that I did mention like a weather tactical or wide band communications, various new features of space control. All of those are things that we have to worry about from a cyber security threat perspective. And it's a daunting challenge right now. >> Yeah, that's awesome. And one of the things we've been falling on the hardware side on the ground is the supply chain. We've seen, malware being, really put in a really obscure hardware. Who manufactures it? Is it being outsourced? Obviously government has restrictions, but with the private sector, you mentioned China and the US kind of working together across these peaceful areas. But you got to look at the supply chain. How does the supply chain in the security aspect impact the mission of the US space Force? >> Yeah. Yeah. So how about another, just in terms of an example, another kind of California based historical example. The very first US Satellite, Explorer 1, was built by the jet propulsion laboratory folks, not far from here in El Segundo, up in Pasadena, that satellite, when it was first built in the late 50s weighing a little bit, over 30 pounds. And I'm sure that each and every part was custom made and definitely made by US companies. Fast forward to today. The global supply chain is so tightly coupled, and frankly many industries are so specialized, almost specialized regionally around the planet. We focus every day to guarantee the integrity of every component that we put in our space systems is absolutely critical to the operations of those satellites and we're dependent upon them, but it becomes more difficult and more difficult to understand the heritage, if you will, of some of the parts that are used, the thousands of parts that are used in some of our satellites that are literally school bus sized. The space industry, especially national security space sector is relatively small compared to other commercial industries. And we're moving towards using more and more parts from non US companies. Cybersecurity and cyber awareness have to be baked in from the beginning if we're going to be using parts that maybe we don't necessarily understand 100% like an Explorer one, the lineage of that particular part. The environmental difficulties in space are well known. The radiation environment, the temperature extremes, the vacuum, those require specialized component. And the US military is not the only customer in that space. In fact, we're definitely not the dominant customer in space anymore. All those factors require us along with our other government partners and many different commercial space organizations to keep a very close eye on our supply chains, from a quality perspective, a security perspective and availability. There's open source reporting on supply training intrusions from many different breaches of commercial retailers to the infectious spread of compromised patches, if you will. And our adversaries are aware of these techniques. As I mentioned earlier, with other forms of attack, considering our supply chains and development networks really becomes fair game for our adversaries. So we have to take that threat seriously. Between the government and industry sectors here in the US. We're also working with our industry partners to enact stronger defenses and assess our own vulnerabilities. Last fall, we completed an extensive review of all of our major contracts here at Space and Missile System Center to determine the levels of cyber security requirements we've implemented across our portfolio. And it sounds really kind of businessy geeky, if you will. Hey, we looked at our contracts to make sure that we had the right clauses in our contracts to address cybersecurity as dynamically as we possibly could. And so we found ourselves having to add new language to our contracts, to require system developers, to implement some more advanced protective measures in this evolving cyber security environment. So that data handling and supply chain protections from contract inception to launch and operations were taken into account. Cyber security really is a key performance parameter for us now. Performance of the system, It's as important as cost, it's as important as schedule, because if we deliver the perfect system on time and on cost, it can perform that missile warning or that communications mission perfectly, but it's not cyber secure. If it's doesn't have cyber protections built into it, or the ability to implement mitigations against cyber threats, then we've essentially fielded a shoe box in space that doesn't do the CA the war fighter or the nation any good. Supply chain risk management is a major challenge for us. We're doing a lot to coordinate with our industry partners. We're all facing it head on to try and build secure and trusted components that keep our confidence as leaders, firefighters, and baristas as the case may be. But it is a challenge. And we're trying to rise to that challenge. >> This is so exciting this new area, because it really touches everything. Talk about geeking out on the tech, the hardware, the systems but also you put your kind of MBA hat on you go, what's the ROI of extra development and how things get built. Because the always the exciting thing for space geeks is like, if you're building cool stuff, it's exciting, but you still have to build. And cybersecurity has proven that security has to be baked in from the beginning and be thought as a system architecture. So you're still building things, which means you got to acquire things, you got to acquire parts, you got acquire build software and sustain it. How is security impacting the acquisition and the sustainment of these systems for space? >> Yeah. From initial development, through planning for the acquisition, design, development, our production fielding and sustainment, it impacts all aspects of the life cycle, John. We simply, especially from the concept of baking in cybersecurity, we can't wait until something is built and then try and figure out how to make it cyber secure. So we've moved way further towards working side by side with our system developers to strengthen cybersecurity from the very beginning of a systems development, cyber security, and the resilience associated with it really have to be treated as a key system attribute. As I mentioned earlier, equivalent with data rates or other metrics of performance. We like to talk in the space world about mission assurance and mission assurance has always sort of taken us as we technically geek out. Mission assurance has always taken us to the will this system work in space. Can it work in a vacuum? Can it work in as it transfers through the Van Allen radiation belt or through the Southern hemisphere's electromagnetic anomaly? Will it work out in space? And now from a resiliency perspective, yeah, it has to work in space. It's got to be functional in space, but it's also got to be resistant to these cybersecurity threats. It's not just, I think a General D.T Thompson quoted this term. It's not just widget assurance anymore. It's mission assurance. How does that satellite operator that ground control segment operate while under attack? So let me break your question a little bit, just for purposes of discussion into really two parts, cybersecurity, for systems that are new and cybersecurity for systems that are in sustainment are kind of old and legacy. Obviously there's cyber vulnerabilities that threatened both, and we really have to employ different strategies for defensive of each one. For new systems. We're desperately trying to implement across the Department of Defense and particularly in the space world, a kind of a dev sec ops methodology and practice to delivering software faster and with greater security for our space systems. Here at SMC, we have a program called enterprise ground services, which is a toolkit, basically a collection of tools for common command and control of different satellite systems, EGS as we call it has an integrated suite for defensive cyber capabilities. Network operators can use these tools to gain unprecedented insight to data flows and to monitor space network traffic for anomalies or other potential indicators of a bad behavior, malicious behavior, if you will, it's rudimentary at this point, but because we're using DevSecOps and that incremental development approach, as we scale it, it just becomes more and more capable. Every product increment that we feel. Here at LA Air Force Base, we have the United Space Force's West Coast Software Factory, which we've dubbed the Kobayashi Maru. They're using those agile DevOps software development practices to deliver a space awareness software to the combined space operations center. Affectionately called the CSpock that CSpock is just on the road from Cal Poly there in San Luis Obispo at Vandenberg Air Force Base. They've so securely linked the sea Spock with other space operation centers around the planet, our allies, Australia, Canada, and the UK. We're partnering with all of them to enable secure and enhanced combined space operations. So lots of new stuff going on as we bake in new development capabilities for our space systems. But as I mentioned earlier, we've got large constellations of satellites on orbit right now. Some of them are well in excess of a decade or more or old on orbit. And so the design aspects of those satellites are several decades old. But we still have to worry about them cause they're critical to our space capabilities. We've been working with an air force material command organization called CROWS, which stands for the Cyber Resiliency Office for Weapon Systems to assess all of those legacy platforms from a cyber security perspective and develop defensive strategies and potential hardware and software upgrades to those systems to better enable them to live through this increasingly cybersecurity concerned era that we currently live in. Our industry partners have been critical to both of those different avenues. Both new systems and legacy systems. We're working closely with them to defend and upgrade national assets and develop the capabilities to do similar with new national assets coming online. The vulnerabilities of our space systems really kind of threatened the way we've done business in the past, both militarily and in the case of GPS economically. The impacts of that cybersecurity risk are clear in our acquisition and sustainment processes, but I've got to tell you, as the threat vectors change, as the vulnerabilities change, we've got to be nimble enough, agile enough, to be able to bounce back and forth. We can't just say, many people in the audience are probably familiar with the RMF or the Risk Management Framework approach to reviewing the cyber security of a system. We can't have program managers and engineers just accomplish an RMF on a system. And then, hey, high five, we're all good. It's a journey, not a destination, that's cybersecurity. And it's a constant battle rhythm through our weapon systems lifecycle, not just a single event. >> I want to get to this commercial business needs and your needs on the next question. But before I go there, you mentioned agile. And I see that clearly because when you have accelerated innovation cycles, you've got to be faster. And we saw this in the computer industry, mainframes, mini computers, and then we started getting beyond maybe when the internet hit and PCs came out, you saw the big enterprises, the banks and government start to work with startups. And it used to be a joke in the entrepreneurial circles is that, there's no way if you are a startup you're ever going to get a contract with a big business enterprise. Now that used to be for public sector and certainly for you guys. So as you see startups out there and there's acquisition involved, I'm sure would love to have a contract with Space Force. There's an ROI calculation where if it's in space and you have a sustainment view and it's software, you might have a new kind of business model that could be attractive to startups. Could you share your thoughts on the folks who want to be a supplier to you, whether they're a startup or an existing business that wants to be agile, but they might not be that big company. >> John, that's a fantastic question. We're desperately trying to reach out to those new space advocates, to those startups, to those what we sometimes refer to, within the Department of Defense, those non traditional defense contractors. A couple of things just for thinking purposes on some of the things that we're trying to highlight. Three years ago, we created here at Space and Missile System Center, the Space Enterprise Consortium to provide a platform, a contractual vehicle, really to enable us to rapidly prototype, development of space systems and to collaborate between the US Space Force, traditional defense contractors, non traditional vendors like startups, and even some academic institutions. SPEC, as we call it, Space Enterprise Consortium uses a specialized contracting tool to get contracts awarded quickly. Many in the audience may be familiar with other transaction agreements. And that's what SPEC is based on. And so far in just three years, SPEC has awarded 75 different prototyping contracts worth over $800 million with a 36% reduction in time to award. And because it's a consortium based competition for these kinds of prototyping efforts, the barrier to entry for small and nontraditional, for startups, even for academic institutions to be able to compete for these kinds of prototyping has really lowered. These types of partnerships that we've been working through on spec have really helped us work with smaller companies who might not have the background or expertise in dealing with the government or in working with cyber security for their systems, both our developmental systems and the systems that they're designing and trying to build. We want to provide ways for companies large and small to partner together in support kind of mutually beneficial relationships between all. Recently at the Annual Air Force Association conference that I mentioned earlier, I moderated a panel with several space industry leaders, all from big traditional defense contractors, by the way. And they all stressed the importance of building bridges and partnerships between major contractors in the defense industry and new entrance. And that helps us capture the benefits of speed and agility that come with small companies and startups, as well as the expertise and specialized skill sets of some of those larger contractors that we rely on day in and day out. Advanced cyber security protections and utilization of secure facilities are just a couple of things that I think we could be prioritizing more so in those collaborations. As I mentioned earlier, the SPEC has been very successful in awarding a number of different prototyping contracts and large dollar values. And it's just going to get better. There's over 400 members of the space enterprise consortium, 80% of them are non traditional kinds of vendors. And we just love working with them. Another thing that many people in the audience may be familiar with in terms of our outreach to innovators, if you will, and innovators that include cyber security experts is our space pitch day events. So we held our first event last November in San Francisco, where we awarded over a two day period about $46 million to 30 different companies that had potentially game changing ideas. These were phase two small business innovative research efforts that we awarded with cash on the spot. We're planning on holding our second space pitch day in the spring of 2021. We're planning on doing it right here in Los Angeles, COVID-19 environment permitting. And we think that these are fantastic venues for identifying and working with high-speed startups, and small businesses who are interested in really, truly partnering with the US Air Force. It's, as I said before, it's a really exciting time to be a part of this business. And working with the innovation economy is something that the Department of Defense really needs to do in that the innovation that we used to think was ours. That 80% of the industrial base innovation that came from the Department of Defense, the script has been flipped there. And so now more than 70%, particularly in space innovation comes from the commercial sector, not from the defense business itself. And so that's a tsunami of investment and a tsunami of a capability. And I need to figure out how to get my surfboard out and ride it, you know what I mean? >> Yeah, It's one of those things where the script has been flipped, but it's exciting because it's impacting everything. When you're talking about systems architecture? You're talking about software, you're talking about a business model. You're talking about dev sec opsx from a technical perspective, but now you have a business model innovation. All the theaters are exploding in innovation, technical, business, personnel. This brings up the workforce challenge. You've got the cyber needs for the US Space Force, It's probably great ROI model for new kinds of software development that could be priced into contracts. That's a entrepreneurial innovation, you've got the business model theater, you've got the personnel. How does the industry adopt and change? You guys are clearly driving this. How does the industry adjust to you? >> Yeah. So I think a great way to answer that question is to just talk about the kind of people that we're trying to prioritize in the US Space Force from an acquisition perspective, and in this particular case from a cybersecurity perspective. As I mentioned earlier, it's the most exciting time to be in space programs, really since the days of Apollo. Just to put it in terms that maybe have an impact with the audience. From 1957 until today, approximately 9,000 satellites have been launched from the various space varying countries around the planet. Less than 2000 of those 9,000 are still up on orbit and operational. And yet in the new space regime players like Space X have plans to launch, 12,000 satellites for some of their constellations alone. It really is a remarkable time in terms of innovation and fielding of space capabilities and all of those space capabilities, whether they're commercial, civil, or defense are going to require appropriate cybersecurity protections. It's just a really exciting time to be working in stuff like this. And so folks like the folks in this audience who have a passion about space and a passion about cybersecurity are just the kind of people that we want to work with. Cause we need to make sure our systems are secure and resilient. We need folks that have technical and computing expertise, engineering skills to be able to design cyber secure systems that can detect and mitigate attacks. But we also, as you alluded to, we need people that have that business and business acumen, human networking background, so that we can launch the startups and work with the non traditional businesses. Help to bring them on board help, to secure both their data and our data and make sure our processes and systems are free as much as possible from attack. For preparation, for audience members who are young and maybe thinking about getting into this trade space, you got to be smart on digital networking. You got to understand basic internet protocols, concepts, programming languages, database design. Learn what you can for penetration or vulnerability testing and a risk assessment. I will tell you this, and I don't think he will, I know he will not mind me telling you this, but you got to be a lifelong learner and so two years ago, I'm at home evening and I get a phone call on my cell phone and it's my boss, the commander of Air Force Space command, General, J. Raymond, who is now currently the Chief of Space Operations. And he is on temporary duty, flying overseas. He lands where he's going and first thing he does when he lands is he calls me and he goes JT, while I was traveling, I noticed that there were eBooks available on the commercial airliner I was traveling on and there was an ebook on something called scrumming and agile DevSecOps. And I read it, have you read it? And I said, no, sir. But if you tell me what the title of the book is, I will read it. And so I got to go to my staff meeting, the very next week, the next time we had a staff meeting and tell everybody in the staff meeting, hey, if the four star and the three star can read the book about scrumming, then I'm pretty sure all of you around this table and all our lieutenants and our captains our GS13s, All of our government employees can get smart on the scrumming development process. And interestingly as another side, I had a telephone call with him last year during the holidays, where he was trying to take some leave. And I said, sir, what are you up to today? Are you making eggnog for the event tonight or whatever. And the Chief of Space Operations told me no, I'm trying to teach myself Python. I'm at lesson two, and it's not going so well, but I'm going to figure this out. And so that kind of thing, if the chief of staff or the Chief of Space Operations can prioritize scrumming and Python language and innovation in his daily schedule, then we're definitely looking for other people who can do that. And we'll just say, lower levels of rank throughout our entire space force enterprise. Look, we don't need people that can code a satellite from scratch, but we need to know, we need to have people that have a basic grasp of the programming basics and cybersecurity requirements. And that can turn those things into meaningful actions, obviously in the space domain, things like basic physics and orbital mechanics are also important spaces, not an intuitive domain. So under understanding how things survive on orbit is really critical to making the right design and operational decisions. And I know there's probably a lot, because of this conference. I know there's probably a whole lot of high speed cybersecurity experts out in the audience. And I need those people in the US Space Force. The country is counting on it, but I wouldn't discount having people that are just cyber aware or cyber savvy. I have contracting officers and logisticians and program managers, and they don't have to be high end cybersecurity experts, but they have to be aware enough about it to be able to implement cyber security protections into our space systems. So the skill set is really, really broad. Our adversaries are pouring billions of dollars into designing and fielding offensive and destructive space, cybersecurity weapons. They repeatedly shown really a blatant disregard of safety and international norms for good behavior on orbit. And the cyber security aspects of our space systems is really a key battleground going forward so that we can maintain that. As I mentioned before, peaceful global comments of space, we really need all hands on deck. If you're interested in helping in uniform, if you're interested in helping, not in uniform, but as a government employee, a commercial or civil employee to help us make cyber security more important or more able to be developed for our space systems. And we'd really love to work with you or have you on the team to build that safe and secure future for our space systems. >> Lieutenant General John Thompson, great insight. Thank you for sharing all that awesome stories too, and motivation for the young next generation. The United States Space Force approach to cybersecurity. Really amazing talk, thank you for your time. Final parting question is, as you look out and you have your magic wand, what's your view for the next few years in terms of things that we could accomplish? It's a super exciting time. What do you hope for? >> So first of all, John, thanks to you and thanks to Cal Poly for the invitation and thanks to everybody for their interest in cybersecurity, especially as it relates to space systems, that's here at the conference. There's a quote, and I'll read it here from Bernard Schriever, who was the founder, if you will, a legend in a DoD space, the founder of the Western development division, which was a predecessor organization to Space and Missile System Center, General Schriever, I think captures the essence of how we see the next couple of years. "The world has an ample supply of people "who can always come up with a dozen good reasons "why new ideas will not work and should not be tried, "but the people who produce progress are breed apart. "They have the imagination, "the courage and the persistence to find solutions." And so I think if you're hoping that the next few years of space innovation and cybersecurity innovation are going to be upon a pony ride at the County fair, then perhaps you should look for another line of work, because I think the next few years in space and cybersecurity innovation are going to be more like a rodeo and a very dynamic rodeo as it goes. It is an awesome privilege to be part of this ecosystem. It's really an honor for me to be able to play some small role in the space ecosystem and trying to improve it while I'm trying to improve the chances of the United States of America in a space war fighting environment. And so I thank all of you for participating today and for this little bit of time that you've allowed me to share with you. Thank you. >> Sir, thank you for your leadership and thank you for the time for this awesome event, Space and Cyber Cybersecurity Symposium 2020, I'm John Furrier on behalf of Cal Poly, thanks for watching. (mellow music)

>>C G technology is focused on data where we have long believed that data is in our DNA. We help maximize humanity's potential by delivering world class, precision engineered data solutions developed through sustainable and profitable partnerships. Included in our offerings are hard disk drives. As I'm sure many of you know, ah, hard drive consists of a slider also known as a drive head or transducer attached to a head gimbal assembly. I had stack assembly made up of multiple head gimbal assemblies and a drive enclosure with one or more platters, or just that the head stacked assembles into. And while the concept hasn't changed, hard drive technology has progressed well beyond the initial five megabytes, 500 quarter inch drives that Seagate first produced. And, I think 1983. We have just announced in 18 terabytes 3.5 inch drive with nine flatters on a single head stack assembly with dual head stack assemblies this calendar year, the complexity of these drives further than need to incorporate Edge analytics at operation sites, so G Edward stemming established the concept of continual improvement and everything that we do, especially in product development and operations and at the end of World War Two, he embarked on a mission with support from the US government to help Japan recover from its four time losses. He established the concept of continual improvement and statistical process control to the leaders of prominent organizations within Japan. And because of this, he was honored by the Japanese emperor with the second order of the sacred treasure for his teachings, the only non Japanese to receive this honor in hundreds of years. Japan's quality control is now world famous, as many of you may know, and based on my own experience and product development, it is clear that they made a major impact on Japan's recovery after the war at Sea Gate. The work that we've been doing and adopting new technologies has been our mantra at continual improvement. As part of this effort, we embarked on the adoption of new technologies in our global operations, which includes establishing machine learning and artificial intelligence at the edge and in doing so, continue to adopt our technical capabilities within data science and data engineering. >>So I'm a principal engineer and member of the Operations and Technology Advanced Analytics Group. We are a service organization for those organizations who need to make sense of the data that they have and in doing so, perhaps introduce a different way to create an analyzed new data. Making sense of the data that organizations have is a key aspect of the work that data scientist and engineers do. So I'm a project manager for an initiative adopting artificial intelligence methodologies for C Gate manufacturing, which is the reason why I'm talking to you today. I thought I'd start by first talking about what we do at Sea Gate and follow that with a brief on artificial intelligence and its role in manufacturing. And I'd like them to discuss how AI and machine Learning is being used at Sea Gate in developing Edge analytics, where Dr Enterprise and Cooper Netease automates deployment, scaling and management of container raised applications. So finally, I like to discuss where we are headed with this initiative and where Mirant is has a major role in case some of you are not conversant in machine learning, artificial intelligence and difference outside some definitions. To cite one source, machine learning is the scientific study of algorithms and statistical bottles without computer systems use to effectively perform a specific task without using explicit instructions, relying on patterns and inference Instead, thus, being seen as a subset of narrow artificial intelligence were analytics and decision making take place. The intent of machine learning is to use basic algorithms to perform different functions, such as classify images to type classified emails into spam and not spam, and predict weather. The idea and this is where the concept of narrow artificial intelligence comes in, is to make decisions of a preset type basically let a machine learn from itself. These types of machine learning includes supervised learning, unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning and in supervised learning. The system learns from previous examples that are provided, such as images of dogs that are labeled by type in unsupervised learning. The algorithms are left to themselves to find answers. For example, a Siris of images of dogs can be used to group them into categories by association that's color, length of coat, length of snout and so on. So in the last slide, I mentioned narrow a I a few times, and to explain it is common to describe in terms of two categories general and narrow or weak. So Many of us were first exposed to General Ai in popular science fiction movies like 2000 and One, A Space Odyssey and Terminator General Ai is a I that can successfully perform any intellectual task that a human can. And if you ask you Lawn Musk or Stephen Hawking, this is how they view the future with General Ai. If we're not careful on how it is implemented, so most of us hope that is more like this is friendly and helpful. Um, like Wally. The reality is that machines today are not only capable of weak or narrow, a I AI that is focused on a narrow, specific task like understanding, speech or finding objects and images. Alexa and Google Home are becoming very popular, and they can be found in many homes. Their narrow task is to recognize human speech and answer limited questions or perform simple tasks like raising the temperature in your home or ordering a pizza as long as you have already defined the order. Narrow. AI is also very useful for recognizing objects in images and even counting people as they go in and out of stores. As you can see in this example, so artificial intelligence supplies, machine learning analytics inference and other techniques which can be used to solve actual problems. The two examples here particle detection, an image anomaly detection have the potential to adopt edge analytics during the manufacturing process. Ah, common problem in clean rooms is spikes in particle count from particle detectors. With this application, we can provide context to particle events by monitoring the area around the machine and detecting when foreign objects like gloves enter areas where they should not. Image Anomaly detection historically has been accomplished at sea gate by operators in clean rooms, viewing each image one at a time for anomalies, creating models of various anomalies through machine learning. Methodologies can be used to run comparative analyses in a production environment where outliers can be detected through influence in an automated real Time analytics scenario. So anomaly detection is also frequently used in machine learning to find patterns or unusual events in our data. How do you know what you don't know? It's really what you ask, and the first step in anomaly detection is to use an algorithm to find patterns or relationships in your data. In this case, we're looking at hundreds of variables and finding relationships between them. We can then look at a subset of variables and determine how they are behaving in relation to each other. We use this baseline to define normal behavior and generate a model of it. In this case, we're building a model with three variables. We can then run this model against new data. Observations that do not fit in the model are defined as anomalies, and anomalies can be good or bad. It takes a subject matter expert to determine how to classify the anomalies on classify classification could be scrapped or okay to use. For example, the subject matter expert is assisting the machine to learn the rules. We then update the model with the classifications anomalies and start running again, and we can see that there are few that generate these models. Now. Secret factories generate hundreds of thousands of images every day. Many of these require human toe, look at them and make a decision. This is dull and steak prone work that is ideal for artificial intelligence. The initiative that I am project managing is intended to offer a solution that matches the continual increased complexity of the products we manufacture and that minimizes the need for manual inspection. The Edge Rx Smart manufacturing reference architecture er, is the initiative both how meat and I are working on and sorry to say that Hamid isn't here today. But as I said, you may have guessed. Our goal is to introduce early defect detection in every stage of our manufacturing process through a machine learning and real time analytics through inference. And in doing so, we will improve overall product quality, enjoy higher yields with lesser defects and produce higher Ma Jin's. Because this was entirely new. We established partnerships with H B within video and with Docker and Amaranthus two years ago to develop the capability that we now have as we deploy edge Rx to our operation sites in four continents from a hardware. Since H P. E. And in video has been an able partner in helping us develop an architecture that we have standardized on and on the software stack side doctor has been instrumental in helping us manage a very complex project with a steep learning curve for all concerned. To further clarify efforts to enable more a i N M l in factories. Theobald active was to determine an economical edge Compute that would access the latest AI NML technology using a standardized platform across all factories. This objective included providing an upgrade path that scales while minimizing disruption to existing factory systems and burden on factory information systems. Resource is the two parts to the compute solution are shown in the diagram, and the gateway device connects to see gates, existing factory information systems, architecture ER and does inference calculations. The second part is a training device for creating and updating models. All factories will need the Gateway device and the Compute Cluster on site, and to this day it remains to be seen if the training devices needed in other locations. But we do know that one devices capable of supporting multiple factories simultaneously there are also options for training on cloud based Resource is the stream storing appliance consists of a kubernetes cluster with GPU and CPU worker notes, as well as master notes and docker trusted registries. The GPU nodes are hardware based using H B E l 4000 edge lines, the balance our virtual machines and for machine learning. We've standardized on both the H B E. Apollo 6500 and the NVIDIA G X one, each with eight in video V 100 GP use. And, incidentally, the same technology enables augmented and virtual reality. Hardware is only one part of the equation. Our software stack consists of Docker Enterprise and Cooper Netease. As I mentioned previously, we've deployed these clusters at all of our operations sites with specific use. Case is planned for each site. Moran Tous has had a major impact on our ability to develop this capability by offering a stable platform in universal control plane that provides us, with the necessary metrics to determine the health of the Kubernetes cluster and the use of Dr Trusted Registry to maintain a secure repository for containers. And they have been an exceptional partner in our efforts to deploy clusters at multiple sites. At this point in our deployment efforts, we are on prem, but we are exploring cloud service options that include Miranda's next generation Docker enterprise offering that includes stack light in conjunction with multi cluster management. And to me, the concept of federation of multi cluster management is a requirement in our case because of the global nature of our business where our operation sites are on four continents. So Stack Light provides the hook of each cluster that banks multi cluster management and effective solution. Open source has been a major part of Project Athena, and there has been a debate about using Dr CE versus Dr Enterprise. And that decision was actually easy, given the advantages that Dr Enterprise would offer, especially during a nearly phase of development. Cooper Netease was a natural addition to the software stack and has been widely accepted. But we have also been a work to adopt such open source as rabbit and to messaging tensorflow and tensor rt, to name three good lab for developments and a number of others. As you see here, is well, and most of our programming programming has been in python. The results of our efforts so far have been excellent. We are seeing a six month return on investment from just one of seven clusters where the hardware and software cost approached close to $1 million. The performance on this cluster is now over three million images processed per day for their adoption has been growing, but the biggest challenge we've seen has been handling a steep learning curve. Installing and maintaining complex Cooper needs clusters in data centers that are not used to managing the unique aspect of clusters like this. And because of this, we have been considering adopting a control plane in the cloud with Kubernetes as the service supported by Miranda's. Even without considering, Kubernetes is a service. The concept of federation or multi cluster management has to be on her road map, especially considering the global nature of our company. Thank you.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP Discover Virtual experience Brought to you by HP >>Hi, welcome to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020 Virtual experience. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to welcome from scale any one of our long Time Cube alumni. We have, all specially the chief product officer at agility. Hey, Paul, welcome back to the Cube. >>Hi, Lisa. It's been a long time, and it's just wonderful to be back. Thank you. >>This is our new virtual cube that appear where everybody is very socially distant but socially connected. So since it's been a while since we've had you on and your peers from stability tell us a little bit about scale and then we'll dive into what you're doing with HP, >>Okay? Absolutely. Let me give you kind of a pop down recap of where we're at. So interestingly, we're now it 10 year old company. We actually celebrated our never anniversary last year. Um, we still have our flagship product, the Ring, which we launched originally in 2000 and 10 that is distributed file and object storage software. But about three years ago, we added a second product called Zenko, which is for multi cloud data management. We do continue to invest in the ring a lot, both on the file side and the object side. The current release now is Ring eight. The target market for this is pretty broad, but we really focus on financial services institutions. That's a big base for us. We have something like half of the world's banks, about 60% of the world service providers, a lot of government institutions. But what's been fastest growing for us now is healthcare. We have a lot of growth there in medical imaging and genomics research. And then I guess the last thing I'll add is that partners are just super important to us. We continue to certify and test with SDI Solutions. I think we have 80 of them now deployed and ready to go. But there's a real focus here now on partners like Said Era and with a Iot and Splunk VM HP East or one. So those partners are critical to our business and we just love to partner with them. >>Do you been partners with HP for quite a while? Tell me about the evolution of the partnership as you've evolved your technology. >>Yeah, absolutely. It's interesting, cause I just noted this Ah, a couple of weeks ago. The company is 10 years old. We've been partners with HP for over half of that. It's about 5.5 years. The way to think about this is that we have a worldwide OM relationship with HP for the Apollo 4000 server line. The official name for our product is HP Apollo 4000 systems with scale itty ring scalable storage. Also quite a mouthful, but very descriptive. Ah, and then we work very closely with the HP storage and big data teams. I'm very tied into the product side, talking to the product managers, but also the marketing side and very much so. On the sales side, we've had super success with them in Europe, also here in the US, and there's growing business, but also in a P J in Japan. Specifically, >>you mentioned that one of the doctors right now that's really urging a healthcare and given the fact that we are three months into a global pandemic, anything that's interesting that you want to share in terms of how skeleton is helping some of your health care customers rapidly pivot in this very unprecedented time. >>Yeah, I would say that there's a couple of very notable trends here. The 1st 1 started a few years ago. We really, honestly didn't focus so much on health care until about 2000 and 17 18. But since that time, we now have something like 40 hospital hospital systems globally using our product and notably on H P E servers. Uh, and that's to retain medical images for long term retention. These are things like digital diagnostic images. MRI's CAT scans CT scans. These hospitals are mandated to keep them for a long term right, sometimes for five years, 10 years or even page patient Lifetime. I would say the newer thing that we're seeing now just in the last year or so is genomics research. There's so much concentration now on pharmaceutical and biotechnology around genomics. That data tends to be very voluminous, you know, it can go from hundreds of terabytes and petabytes, and moreover, they need to run simulations on that to do you know, fast iteration on different drug research. We've now been applied to that problem, and a lot of times we do it with a partner or something like a fast tier one file system and then us as the archive here. But we're seeing that the popularity of that just wrote tremendously within hospitals, hospital groups and also just dedicated research for biotechnology. >>The vault. You talked about volumes there, and the volumes are growing and growing each year as his retention periods, depending on the type of data, the type of of ah, imagery, for example. But from a use case perspective, what is it that you're helping your health care customers achieve? Is it is it backup targets? Is it disaster? Recovery is speed of access All the above. >>Yeah, so where we focus in health care is really on the unstructured data. This is all the file content that they deal with, you know, in a hospital. Think about all the different medical image studies that they have, things like digital files for CAT scans and MRI's. These are becoming huge files, you know. One multi slice X ray or digital scan, for example, can be gigabytes in size and profile, and that's per patient. Now think about the number of patients and the right attention of all of that. It's a perfect use case for what we do, which is capacity optimized storage for long term retention. But we can also be used for other things. For example, backups of the electronic patient records. Those are typically stored in databases, but they need to be backed up. What we found is that we're an ideal long term backup target. So the way hospitals look at us is that they can consolidate multiple use cases, undo our ring system on HP. They can grow it over time. They could just keep adding servers, and typically what they do is they start with a single use case, what they think of as a single modality, perhaps an imaging. And then they grow over time to encompass more and more and eventually think about a comprehensive image management system within a hospital. But those are popular today. Hospitals are also starting to look at other use cases. Obviously, we mentioned genomics, but hybrid cloud is coming at them as well. >>Talk to me about that as we see growing volumes of data, different types of modalities, lots of urgent need to you, said backup data, So data protection is critical. But as as healthcare organizations move to multi cloud, how considerate Ian HP help facilitate that migration? >>Yeah, So what we've noticed is, you know, there's both a feeling that they're fast and they're slow to embrace the public clouds. But one of the things that's obvious is that from a sass perspective, software as a service, they've really embraced it. Most of the big EMR systems, the electronic medical records, are already SAS based, so they are there, and in fact they're probably already multi cloud. But on the data management side, that's where we focus. And we hear a lot of use cases that would involve taking older data from on Prem and perhaps archiving it long term in a HIPAA compliant cloud in the US, for example, for long term retention. But there are other things. For example, they may want to push some data that they've generated on Prem to a public cloud like Amazon or azure, and do some kind of computing against it. Perhaps an analytic service, some kind of image recognition or, you know, image pattern detection. Um, the 3rd 1 that we see now in hybrid cloud is their interest in having second copies of the data so that they can continue operations. Right? I think we all know that hospitals have an absolute uptime need. They need to be running 24 by seven. One of the things that's starting to happen is rather than a second physical data center. They established a second site in a public cloud on and then they stage their applications and we can help with HP. Move the data from on Prem to the public cloud to have this sort of cloud disaster recovery solution. >>So cloud here interesting topic. Do you see there that in healthcare in particular, that hospitals and healthcare organizations are getting less concerned about cloud from a security perspective and more open to it as an enabler of scale? >>I think what they've seen is that the cloud vendors have really matured in terms of providing all of the hardening that you want in terms of data, privacy and data security. You know, 10 years ago, if you looked at the cloud, you would have been extremely nervous about putting your data up there. But now all of the right principles are there in terms of multi tenancy. Ah, secure authentication based on very strong keys. Encryption of the data. One of the first healthcare customers we worked with was completely ready to do this. But then, of course, they said, the images that we store in the cloud must be infected. So we were able to work in collaboration with them, to develop encryption and actually use their own management service for encrypting those images so that our system or the HP servers don't store the keys for encryption. So I would say yes, It's a combination of the cloud's becoming super mature. Some of them are now certified and compliant for this use case on, the customers are just sort of. They passed the first step of trying it on there really to sort of go into these use cases a little bit more broadly. >>And so with that maturity of the technologies and the more the willingness on the part of the customer to try and tell me how to HP and scale a go to market together. >>Yeah, so what we do is we've really focused on specific market verticals, healthcare being one of them, but there are others. Financial services is where we've had other success with them. The way we do it is that we first start by building very specific swim lanes. In HP parlance, that helps aimed the Salesforce on where we can provide a great solution not only with Ring but perhaps with complementary software. Like I mentioned H p e store once for data protection backup. They have other partner solutions that we just love to work with. Vendors like Wicca. Iot has a wonderful fast file system that is now useful in biotech. Um, and they use a system like the ring for storing the data from their file system and the snapshots in that. But the way it's been organized is really by vertical and to go and have specialized kind of teams that understand how to sell that message. We jointly sell with them, so their teams and our teams Goto calls together. It's obviously been very virtual, but we've usually collaborated very extensively in the field working kind of air cover at the marketing level, and now one of the newer things with obviously the new way of working is lots of virtual events were not only doing a discover virtual experience, but we started doing more and more webinars, especially with HP and these other joint part >>and carries in this new virtual era where everything like, he said, This is how we're communicating now. And thankfully, we have the technology. Couple questions on that related to sales and engagement. One. What are some of the things that the sales team but the joint sales teams are hearing now from customers that might be changing requirements given the Koven situation? First >>question. Yeah, I think what one of the things we've certainly seen is that almost nothing has slowed down in these industries. I mean, we're focused on industries that seem to kind of think long term, right? I obviously healthcare. They're dealing with the current crisis as much as they can. But what we've seen is that there still planning, right, so they want to build their I T infrastructure. They're certainly thinking about how to leverage hybrid cloud. I think that's it becomes very clear that they see that as not only a way to offer new services in the future, but also to save money today. They're very interested in that right. How can they save on capital expenses and human talent is an example. I think those have been the themes for us. You know, we do have some exposure to industries that might have a little bit more, you know, sensitivity to the current climate, things like travel related services. But honestly, it's been minor. And what we're finding is that even those companies are still investing in this kind of technology, really to think about the 2 to 3 and you're being horizon and beyond. >>Have you done any any messaging, your positioning changes? I know you also in product marketing or corporate marketing that relate to customers. You know, everybody prepares for different types of disruptions or natural disasters. But now we have this invisible disruptor. Any change in your messaging, your positioning either at stability or with the partnership with HP that will help customers understand if you're not on this journey yet, why they need to be >>so, Yeah, we have looked at how we message the technology and the solution, especially in the light of the pandemic. You know, we stayed true to kind of a top level hybrid cloud data management message, but underneath the covers, what do customers care about? They care about a solution that you provide, but they also care about what they pay for it. Let's let's be honest. One of the things we've done very historically is to have a very simplified pricing model. It's based on usable protected capacity. So the user says I have a petabytes of data. That's the license fee. It's not based on how much disk they have or how many copies they want to create or how many sites they want to spread it across. So one of the things we want to do is make that a little bit more clear. Eso that's come out a bit more in our messaging in recent months. The second is that what we feel is that customers really want to know us as a company. They want to feel assured that were here, that will support them in all cases and that were available at all times. And what that's translated into is a more of a customer community focus. We are very much carrying about, you know, our customers. We see them invest in our systems today, but they also continue to expand. So we're doing things like new community portals where they can engage us in discourse. They can ask questions live. We're online. We have a lot of tips and knowledge available for them. So I would say that those are the two changes that we put in our messaging, both on pricing and on a community involved >>and where community involvement is concerned. It's even more critical now because we can't get together face to face and have conversations or meetings or conferences as chief product officer. Imagine that was a lot of what you were doing before. Tell me what it is from your perspective to engage with the community, to engage with sales and your partners during this TBD timeframe of we don't know when we're going to get back together. What do you find? It works really well for continuing continuing that engagement. >>Yeah, I think the keyword for me has just been transparency. You know, customers have always bonded to know, really, what's what's going on behind the scenes. How does the tech work? Right? What's the architecture? And I think now what we're seeing is there sort of a ramp up on that. For example, what's very important for community is for people to know what's coming right? They want to know the roadmaps. They want to be alerted to new things that are not only the next quarter, but in the next year. Right? So I think that's our focus here is to make this community a place where people can learn absolutely everything so that they can plan not only for the next year, but like we said there, they're thinking three years and beyond. So we're going to do our best to be totally transparent and be expressed as we can possibly be >>transparent entrusted. Paul, those are two great words to end on. We Thank you so much for joining us on the Cube, sharing what's new at stability and with the HP partnership. >>It's been a pleasure. Lisa. Thank you for your time. >>Likewise. For my guest, Paul Scott. Sally, I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020. The virtual experience. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Sand Hill Road to the heart of Silicon Valley it's the cute presenting the people first Network insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders when I'm John Ferrari with the cube I'm the co-host also the founder of Silicon angle me we are here on Sand Hill Road at Mayfield for the people first conversations I'm John furry with the cube weird Allen being global CTO and IT of innovation at Procter & Gamble formerly the same position at coca-cola has done a lot of innovations over the years also a reference account back in the day for web methods when they call on the financing of that one of the most famous IPOs which set the groundwork for web services and has a lot of history going back to the 80s we were just talking about it welcome this conversation on people first network thank you for inviting me so the people first network is all about people and it's great to have these conversations you're old school you were doing some stuff back on the 80s talking about doing RPA 3270 you've been old school here yeah I go back to APL as my first programming language went through the the third generation languages and of course the old 30 to 70 emulation which is what we know today is our PA one of the cool things I was excited to hear some of your background around your history web methods you were a reference call for venture financing of web methods which was financed on the credit card for the two founders husband and wife probably one of the most successful I appeals but more importantly at the beginning of the massive wave that we now see with web services this is early days this was very early days when I was at DHL we were looking at what we're gonna do for the future and in fact we built one of the first object-oriented frameworks in C++ at the time because that was all that was available to us or the best was available we rejected Corbis and we said look if we're gonna go this direction and one of my developers found web methods found philip merrick it was literally at the time working out of his garage and had this technology that was going to allow us to start moving into this object-oriented approach and I remember the day Robin Vasan form a field called and said hey I'm thinking about investing in web methods what do you think about it and not only was it one of the first startups that I ever worked with but it's actually the first time I met anybody in the venture community way back in nineteen I think 1997 is what had happened and that was a computing time in computer science and then the rest is history and then XML became what it became lingua franca for the web web services now Amazon Web Services you see in cloud computing micro services kubernetes service meshes this is a new stack that's being developed in the cloud and this is the new generation you've seen many waves and at Procter & Gamble formerly coca-cola you're the same role you have to navigate this so what's different now what's different say 15 20 years ago how are you looking at this market how you implementing some of the IT and infrastructure and software development environments I think what's change is you know when we got into the the early 2000s Nicolas car came out and said IT doesn't matter and I think anybody that was an IT had this very objectionable response initially but when you step back and you looked at it what she realised was in many cases IT didn't matter and those were those areas that were non-competitive those things that could be commoditized and it was completely right the reality is IT has always mattered that technology does give you a competitive advantage in certain markets and certain capabilities for a company but back then we had to go out and we had to purchase equipment we had to configure the equipment there was a lot of heavy lifting in corporations just did not want to invest the capital so they outsource the stuff wholesale I think General Motors was the first one that just out sourced everything and was followed by other companies including Procter & Gamble the decision at that time was probably right but as we go forward and we see what's happened with corporations we see the valuations of corporations the amount of return on equity based on the on the capital that's being invested we can see that data is important we can see that agility flexibility is key to competing in the future and therefore what's changing is we are now moving into an age of away from ERP so we're moving into an age away from these outsource providers on a wholesale basis and using it selectively to drive down costs and allowing us to free up money in order to invest in those things that are most important to the company so you're saying is that the folks naturally the server consolidation they've bought all this gear all this software over you know 18-month rollouts before they even see the first implementation those are the glory days of gravy trains for the vendor's yeah not good for the practitioners but you're saying that the folks who reinvested are investing in IT as a core competency are seeing a competitive advantage they certainly are you know I think I made the statement front of a number of the vendors and a few years ago and people were not comfortable with it but what I said was like you gone are the ears of these 10 20 million dollar deals gone are the ears of the million two million dollar deals we're in the ear of throwaway technology I need to be able to use and invest in technology for a specific purpose for a specific period of time and be able to move on to the next one it's the perfect time for startups but startups shouldn't be looking at the big picture they should be looking at the tail on these investments let me try things let me get out in the market let me have a competitive advantage in marketing which is most important to me or in supply chain those are the areas that I can make a difference with my consumers and my customers and that's where the investments have to go so just in constant of throwaway technology and you know you'd also be said of you know being more agile though interesting to look at the cloud SAS business model if Amazon for us I think that's the gold standard where they actually lower prices on a per unit basis and increase more services and value but in the aggregate you're still paying more but you have more flexibility and that's kind of a good tell sign so that you're seeing that ability to reuse either the infrastructure that's commoditized to shift the value this is are people having a hard time understanding this so I want to get your reaction to how should I tea leaders understand that the wave of cloud the wave of machine learning what a I can bring to the table these new trends how how should leaders figure this out is there a playbook as there are things that you've learned that you could share you know that there's really a playbook it's still early on everyone's looking for one cloud fits all the reality is whether it's Google whether it's Amazon whether it's Microsoft whether it's IBM all clouds are different all clouds have our special are purpose-built for different solutions and I think as an IT leader you have to understand you're not going to take everything and lift and shift that's what we used to do we're now in the position where we have to deconstruct our business we have to understand the services the capabilities that we want to bring to market and not lock ourselves in its building blocks its Legos we're in the period of Legos putting these things together in different manners in order to create new solutions if we try to lock ourselves in the past of how we've always financed things how we've always built things then we're not going to be any better off in the new world than we were in the old alan i want to get your reaction to to two words our PA and containers well as i said earlier our PA is 3270 emulation from the 1980s and for those of us that are old enough to remember that i I still remember scraping the the old green screens and and putting a little process around it it what's nice though is that we have moved forward machine learning and AI and other other capabilities are now present so that we can do this I actually played around with neural nets probably back in 1985 with an Apollo computer so that tells you how far back I go but technologies change processing speeds change everything the technology trends are allowing us to now to do these things the question that we have is also a moral dilemma is are we trying to replace people or are we trying to make improvements and I think that you don't look at our PA as a way simply to replace work it's a way to enhance what we're doing in order to create new value for the customer or for the consumer in our case I think in the in the area of containers you know again been around for a while been around for a while it's just another another approach that we're not we don't want lock in we don't want to be dependent on specific vendors we want the portability we want the flexibility and I think as we start moving containers out to the edge that's where we're gonna start seeing more value as the business processes and the capabilities are spread out again the idea of centralized cloud computing is very good however it doesn't need to be distributed what's interesting I find about the conversation here is that you mentioned a couple things earlier you mentioned the vendors locking you in and saying here's the ERP buy this and with this you have to have a certain process because this is our technology you got to use it this way and you were slave to their their tech on your process serve their tech with containers and say orchestration you now the ability to manage workloads differently and so an interesting time there's that does that change the notion of rip and replace lift and shift because if I a container I could just put a container around it and not have to worry about killing the old to bring in the new this is on the fundamental kind of debate going on do you have to kill the old to bring in the new well you need to kill the old sometimes just because it's old it's time to go other times you do need to repackage it and other times I hate to say it you do need to lift and shift if you're a legacy organization they have a long history such as most of the manufacturing companies in the world today we can't get rid of old things that quickly we can't afford to a lot of the processes are still valid as we're looking to the future we certainly are breaking these things down into services we're looking to containerize these things we're looking to move them into areas where we can compute where we want to when we want to at the right price we're just at the beginning of that journey in the industry I still think there's about five to seven years to go to get there now I'll talk about the role of the edge role of cloud computing as it increases the surface area of IT potentially combined with the fact that IT is a competitive advantage bring those two notions together what's the role of the people because you used to have people that would just manage the rack and stack I'm provisioning some storage I'm doing this as those stovepipes start to be broken down when the service area of IT is bigger how does that change the relationship of the people involved you know you win with people at the end of the day you don't win with technology you know a company of such as Proctor and Gamble and I think what's happened if you look at historically the ERP vendors came out probably 99 2000 and it used to be and remember these I'm old to be honest with you but I remember that we used to have to worry about the amount of memory we were managing we had to be able to tune databases in all of this and the vendors went ahead and they started automating all those processes with the idea that we can do it better than a human and a lot of people a lot of the technology talent then started leaving the organizations and organizations were left with people that we're focusing on process and people a process excuse me process and the the the business which is very good because you need the subject matter experts going forward we have to reinvest in people our people have the subject matter expertise they have some technology skills that they've developed over the years and they've enhanced it on their own but we're in this huge change right now where we have to think different we have to act different and we have to behave differently so doubling down on people is the best thing that you can do and the old outsource model of outsourcing everything kind of reduces the core competency of the people yeah now you got to build it back up again exactly I mean we when we left at P&G 15 years ago about 5,000 people left the organization when we outsource them when we outsource the technology to our partner at that time now it's time we're starting to bring it back in we've brought the network team back in and stood up our own sock in our own NOC for the first time in years just this past year we're doing the same thing by moving things out to the cloud more and more is moving to the cloud we're setting up our own cloud operations and DevOps capabilities I can tell you having been on both sides of it it's a lot harder to be able to bring it back in than it is to take it out and you know interesting proctoring games well known as being a very intimate with the data very data-driven company the data is valuable and having that infrastructure NIT to support the data that's important what's your vision on the data future of the data in the world well I think data is has a value to itself but when you tie it to products you tie it to your customers and consumers it's even more valuable and we're in the process now of things that we used to do completely internally with our own technology or technology partners we're now moving all of that out into the cloud now and I must say cloud its clouds plural again going back to certain clouds are better for certain things so you're seeing a dramatic shift we have a number of projects underway that are in the cloud space but for customers and consumers number of cloud projects in the way for our own internal employees it's all about collecting the data processing the data protecting that data because we take that very seriously and being able to use it to make better decisions I want to get your reaction on two points and two quite lines of questioning here because I think it's very relevant on the enterprise side you're a big account for the big whales the old ERP so the big cloud providers so people want to sell you stuff at the same time you're also running IT innovation so you want to play with the new shiny new toys and experiments start up so if startups want to get your attention and big vendors want to sell to you the tables have kind of turned it's been good this is a good it's a good buyers market right now in my opinion so what's your thoughts on that so you know start with the big companies what do they got to do to win you over well they got to look like how they got to engage and for startups how do they get your attention I think the biggest thing for either startup or large companies understanding the company you're dealing with whether it's Procter & Gamble whether it's coca-cola whether it was DHL if you understand how I operate if you understand how decisions are made if you understand how I'm organized that's gonna give you an a competitive advantage now the large corporations understand this because they've been around through the entire journey of computing with these large corporations the startups need to step back and take a look and see where do I add that competitive advantage many times when you're selling to a large corporate you're not selling to a large corporate you're selling two divisions you're selling two functions and that's how you get in I've been working with startups as I said back since web methods and it was just a two-person company but we brought them in for a very specific capability I then took web methods with me when I left DHL I took them to GE when I left GE I took them to ing because I trusted them and they matured along the way I think finding that right individual that has the right need is the key and working it slowly don't think you're gonna close the deal fast if you're start-up know it's gonna take some time and decide if that's in your best interest or not slow things down focus don't try to boil the ocean over too many of them try to boy you're right Jimmy people try to boil the ocean get that win one win will get you another one which will get you another win and that's the best way to succeed get that beachhead Ellen so if you could go back and knowing what you know now and you're breaking into the IT leadership's position looking forward what would you do differently can do a mulligan hey what would you do differently well you know I think one of the one of the dangers of being an innovator in IT is that you really are risk taker and taking risks is counterculture to corporations so I think I would probably try to get by in a little bit more I mean someone once told me that you know you see the force through the trees before anybody else does your problem is you don't bring people along with you so I think I would probably slow down a little bit not in the adoption of technology but I'd probably take more time to build the case to bring people along a lot faster so that they can see it and they can take credit for it and they can move that needle as well yeah always sometimes early adopters and pioneers had the arrows on the back as they say I've had my share now thanks for sharing your experience what's next for you what's the next mountain you're going to climb well I think that as we're looking forward latency is still an issue you know we have to find a way to defeat latency we're not going to do it through basic physics so we're gonna have to change our business models change our technology distribution change everything that we're doing consumers and customers are demanding instant access to enhanced information through AI and m/l right at the point where they want it and that means we're now dealing with milliseconds and nanoseconds of having to make decisions so I'm very interested in looking at how are we going to change consumer behavior and customer behavior by combining a lot of the new technology trends that are underway and we have to do it also with the security in mind now before we security was secondary now as we're seeing with all of the hacks and the malware and everything that's going on in the world we have to go in and think a little bit different about how we're gonna do that so I'm very much engaged in working with a lot of startups I live here in the Silicon Valley I commute to Cincinnati for Procter & Gamble I'm spending time and just flew in from tel-aviv literally an hour ago I'm in the middle of all the technology hotspots trying to find that next big thing and it's a global it's global innovation happens everywhere and anywhere the venture community if you look at the amount of funds it used to be invested out of the Silicon Valley versus the rest of the world it continues to be on a downward trend not because the funding isn't here in the Silicon Valley but because everyone is recognizing that innovation and technology is developed everywhere in the world Alan Bain was the CTO global CTO and IT innovator there at the cube conversation here in San Hill Road I'm John for a year thanks for watching you

>> From the SiliconANGLE media office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE! Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi, everybody, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. You know, big data workloads have evolved, and the infrastructure that runs big data workloads is also evolving. Big data, AI, other emerging workloads need infrastructure that can keep up. Welcome to this special CUBE Conversation with Patrick Osborne, who's the vice president and GM of big data and secondary storage at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, @patrick_osborne. Great to see you again, thanks for coming on. >> Great, love to be back here. >> As I said up front, big data's changing. It's evolving, and the infrastructure has to also evolve. What are you seeing, Patrick, and what's HPE seeing in terms of the market forces right now driving big data and analytics? >> Well, some of the things that we see in the data center, there is a continuous move to move from bare metal to virtualized. Everyone's on that train. To containerization of existing apps, your apps of record, business, mission-critical apps. But really, what a lot of folks are doing right now is adding additional services to those applications, those data sets, so, new ways to interact, new apps. A lot of those are being developed with a lot of techniques that revolve around big data and analytics. We're definitely seeing the pressure to modernize what you have on-prem today, but you know, you can't sit there and be static. You gotta provide new services around what you're doing for your customers. A lot of those are coming in the form of this Mode 2 type of application development. >> One of the things that we're seeing, everybody talks about digital transformation. It's the hot buzzword of the day. To us, digital means data first. Presumably, you're seeing that. Are organizations organizing around their data, and what does that mean for infrastructure? >> Yeah, absolutely. We see a lot of folks employing not only technology to do that. They're doing organizational techniques, so, peak teams. You know, bringing together a lot of different functions. Also, too, organizing around the data has become very different right now, that you've got data out on the edge, right? It's coming into the core. A lot of folks are moving some of their edge to the cloud, or even their core to the cloud. You gotta make a lot of decisions and be able to organize around a pretty complex set of places, physical and virtual, where your data's gonna lie. >> There's a lot of talk, too, about the data pipeline. The data pipeline used to be, you had an enterprise data warehouse, and the pipeline was, you'd go through a few people that would build some cubes and then they'd hand off a bunch of reports. The data pipeline, it's getting much more complex. You've got the edge coming in, you've got, you know, core. You've got the cloud, which can be on-prem or public cloud. Talk about the evolution of the data pipeline and what that means for infrastructure and big data workloads. >> For a lot of our customers, and we've got a pretty interesting business here at HPE. We do a lot with the Intelligent Edge, so, our Edgeline servers in Aruba, where a a lot of the data is sitting outside of the traditional data center. Then we have what's going on in the core, which, for a lot of customers, they are moving from either traditional EDW, right, or even Hadoop 1.0 if they started that transformation five to seven years ago, to, a lot of things are happening now in real time, or a combination thereof. The data types are pretty dynamic. Some of that is always getting processed out on the edge. Results are getting sent back to the core. We're also seeing a lot of folks move to real-time data analytics, or some people call it fast data. That sits in your core data center, so utilizing things like Kafka and Spark. A lot of the techniques for persistent storage are brand new. What it boils down to is, it's an opportunity, but it's also very complex for our customers. >> What about some of the technical trends behind what's going on with big data? I mean, you've got sprawl, with both data sprawl, you've got workload sprawl. You got developers that are dealing with a lot of complex tooling. What are you guys seeing there, in terms of the big mega-trends? >> We have, as you know, HPE has quite a few customers in the mid-range in enterprise segments. We have some customers that are very tech-forward. A lot of those customers are moving from this, you know, Hadoop 1.0, Hadoop 2.0 system to a set of essentially mixed workloads that are very multi-tenant. We see customers that have, essentially, a mix of batch-oriented workloads. Now they're introducing these streaming type of workloads to folks who are bringing in things like TensorFlow and GPGPUs, and they're trying to apply some of the techniques of AI and ML into those clusters. What we're seeing right now is that that is causing a lot of complexity, not only in the way you do your apps, but the number of applications and the number of tenants who use that data. It's getting used all day long for various different, so now what we're seeing is it's grown up. It started as an opportunity, a science project, the POC. Now it's business-critical. Becoming, now, it's very mission-critical for a lot of the services that drives. >> Am I correct that those diverse workloads used to require a bespoke set of infrastructure that was very siloed? I'm inferring that technology today will allow you to bring those workloads together on a single platform. Is that correct? >> A couple of things that we offer, and we've been helping customers to get off the complexity train, but provide them flexibility and elasticity is, a lot of the workloads that we did in the past were either very vertically-focused and integrated. One app server, networking, storage, to, you know, the beginning of the analytics phase was really around symmetrical clusters and scaling them out. Now we've got a very rich and diverse set of components and infrastructure that can essentially allow a customer to make a data lake that's very scalable. Compute, storage-oriented nodes, GPU-oriented nodes, so it's very flexible and helps us, helps the customers take complexity out of their environment. >> In thinking about, when you talk to customers, what are they struggling with, specifically as it relates to infrastructure? Again, we talked about tooling. I mean, Hadoop is well-known for the complexity of the tooling. But specifically from an infrastructure standpoint, what are the big complaints that you hear? >> A couple things that we hear is that my budget's flat for the next year or couple years, right? We talked earlier in the conversation about, I have to modernize, virtualize, containerizing my existing apps, that means I have to introduce new services as well with a very different type of DevOps, you know, mode of operations. That's all with the existing staff, right? That's the number one issue that we hear from the customers. Anything that we can do to help increase the velocity of deployment through automation. We hear now, frankly, the battle is for whether I'm gonna run these type of workloads on-prem versus off-prem. We have a set of technology as well as services, enabling services with Pointnext. You remember the acquisition we made around cloud technology partners to right-place where those workloads are gonna go and become like a broker in that conversation and assist customers to make that transition and then, ultimately, give them an elastic platform that's gonna scale for the diverse set of workloads that's well-known, sized, easy to deploy. >> As you get all this data, and the data's, you know, Hadoop, it sorta blew up the data model. Said, "Okay, we'll leave the data where it is, "we'll bring the compute there." You had a lot of skunk works projects growing. What about governance, security, compliance? As you have data sprawl, how are customers handling that challenge? Is it a challenge? >> Yeah, it certainly is a challenge. I mean, we've gone through it just recently with, you know, GDPR is implemented. You gotta think about how that's gonna fit into your workflow, and certainly security. The big thing that we see, certainly, is around if the data's residing outside of your traditional data center, that's a big issue. For us, when we have Edgeline servers, certainly a lot of things are coming in over wireless, there's a big buildout in advent of 5G coming out. That certainly is an area that customers are very concerned about in terms of who has their data, who has access to it, how can you tag it, how can you make sure it's secure. That's a big part of what we're trying to provide here at HPE. >> What specifically is HPE doing to address these problems? Products, services, partnerships, maybe you could talk about that a little bit. Maybe even start with, you know, what's your philosophy on infrastructure for big data and AI workloads? >> I mean, for us, we've over the last two years have really concentrated on essentially two areas. We have the Intelligent Edge, which is, certainly, it's been enabled by fantastic growth with our Aruba products in the networks in space and our Edgeline systems, so, being able to take that type of compute and get it as far out to the edge as possible. The other piece of it is around making hybrid IT simple, right? In that area, we wanna provide a very flexible, yet easy-to-deploy set of infrastructure for big data and AI workloads. We have this concept of the Elastic Platform for Analytics. It helps customers deploy that for a whole myriad of requirements. Very compute-oriented, storage-oriented, GPUs, cold and warm data lakes, for that matter. And the third area, what we've really focused on is the ecosystem that we bring to our customers as a portfolio company is evolving rapidly. As you know, in this big data and analytics workload space, the software development portion of it is super dynamic. If we can bring a vetted, well-known ecosystem to our customers as part of a solution with advisory services, that's definitely one of the key pieces that our customers love to come to HP for. >> What about partnerships around things like containers and simplifying the developer experience? >> I mean, we've been pretty public about some of our efforts in this area around OneSphere, and some of these, the models around, certainly, advisory services in this area with some recent acquisitions. For us, it's all about automation, and then we wanna be able to provide that experience to the customers, whether they want to develop those apps and deploy on-prem. You know, we love that. I think you guys tag it as true private cloud. But we know that the reality is, most people are embracing very quickly a hybrid cloud model. Given the ability to take those apps, develop them, put them on-prem, run them off-prem is pretty key for OneSphere. >> I remember Antonio Neri, when you guys announced Apollo, and you had the astronaut there. Antonio was just a lowly GM and VP at the time, and now he's, of course, CEO. Who knows what's in the future? But Apollo, generally at the time, it was like, okay, this is a high-performance computing system. We've talked about those worlds, HPC and big data coming together. Where does a system like Apollo fit in this world of big data workloads? >> Yeah, so we have a very wide product line for Apollo that helps, you know, some of them are very tailored to specific workloads. If you take a look at the way that people are deploying these infrastructures now, multi-tenant with many different workloads. We allow for some compute-focused systems, like the Apollo 2000. We have very balanced systems, the Apollo 4200, that allow a very good mix of CPU, memory, and now customers are certainly moving to flash and storage-class memory for these type of workloads. And then, Apollo 6500 were some of the newer systems that we have. Big memory footprint, NVIDIA GPUs allowing you to do very high calculations rates for AI and ML workloads. We take that and we aggregate that together. We've made some recent acquisitions, like Plexxi, for example. A big part of this is around simplification of the networking experience. You can probably see into the future of automation of the networking level, automation of the compute and storage level, and then having a very large and scalable data lake for customers' data repositories. Object, file, HTFS, some pretty interesting trends in that space. >> Yeah, I'm actually really super excited about the Plexxi acquisition. I think it's because flash, it used to be the bottleneck was the spinning disk, flash pushes the bottleneck largely to the network. Plexxi gonna allow you guys to scale, and I think actually leapfrog some of the other hyperconverged players that are out there. So, super excited to see what you guys do with that acquisition. It sounds like your focus is on optimizing the design for I/O. I'm sure flash fits in there as well. >> And that's a huge accelerator for, even when you take a look at our storage business, right? So, 3PAR, Nimble, All-Flash, certainly moving to NVMe and storage-class memory for acceleration of other types of big data databases. Even though we're talking about Hadoop today, right now, certainly SAP HANA, scale-out databases, Oracle, SQL, all these things play a part in the customer's infrastructure. >> Okay, so you were talking before about, a little bit about GPUs. What is this HPE Elastic Platform for big data analytics? What's that all about? >> I mean, we have a lot of the sizing and scalability falls on the shoulders of our customers in this space, especially in some of these new areas. What we've done is, we have, it's a product/a concept, and what we do is we have this, it's called the Elastic Platform for Analytics. It allows, with all those different components that I rattled off, all great systems in of their own, but when it comes to very complex multi-tenant workloads, what we do is try to take the mystery out of that for our customers, to be able to deploy that cookie-cutter module. We're even gonna get to a place pretty soon where we're able to offer that as a consumption-based service so you don't have to choose for an elastic type of acquisition experience between on-prem and off-prem. We're gonna provide that as well. It's not only a set of products. It's reference architectures. We do a lot of sizing with our partners. The Hortonworks, CloudEra's, MapR's, and a lot of the things that are out in the open source world. It's pretty good. >> We've been covering big data, as you know, for a long, long time. The early days of big data was like, "Oh, this is great, "we're just gonna put white boxes out there "and off the shelf storage!" Well, that changed as big data got, workloads became more enterprise, mainstream, they needed to be enterprise-ready. But my question to you is, okay, I hear you. You got products, you got services, you got perspectives, a philosophy. Obviously, you wanna sell some stuff. What has HPE done internally with regard to big data? How have you transformed your own business? >> For us, we wanna provide a really rich experience, not just products. To do that, you need to provide a set of services and automation, and what we've done is, with products and solutions like InfoSight, we've been able to, we call it AI for the Data Center, or certainly, the tagline of predictive analytics is something that Nimble's brought to the table for a long time. To provide that level of services, InfoSight, predictive analytics, AI for the Data Center, we're running our own big data infrastructure. It started a number of years ago even on our 3PAR platforms and other products, where we had scale-up databases. We moved and transitioned to batch-oriented Hadoop. Now we're fully embedded with real-time streaming analytics that come in every day, all day long, from our customers and telemetry. We're using AI and ML techniques to not only improve on what we've done that's certainly automating for the support experience, and making it easy to manage the platforms, but now introducing things like learning, automation engines, the recommendation engines for various things for our customers to take, essentially, the hands-on approach of managing the products and automate it and put into the products. So, for us, we've gone through a multi-phase, multi-year transition that's brought in things like Kafka and Spark and Elasticsearch. We're using all these techniques in our system to provide new services for our customers as well. >> Okay, great. You're practitioners, you got some street cred. >> Absolutely. >> Can I come back on InfoSight for a minute? It came through an acquisition of Nimble. It seems to us that you're a little bit ahead, and maybe you say a lot a bit ahead of the competition with regard to that capability. How do you see it? Where do you see InfoSight being applied across the portfolio, and how much of a lead do you think you have on competitors? >> I'm paranoid, so I don't think we ever have a good enough lead, right? You always gotta stay grinding on that front. But we think we have a really good product. You know, it speaks for itself. A lot of the customers love it. We've applied it to 3PAR, for example, so we came out with some, we have VMVision for a 3PAR that's based on InfoSight. We've got some things in the works for other product lines that are imminent pretty soon. You can think about what we've done for Nimble and 3PAR, we can apply similar type of logic to Elastic Platform for Analytics, like running at that type of cluster scale to automate a number of items that are pretty pedantic for the customers to manage. There's a lot of work going on within HPE to scale that as a service that we provide with most of our products. >> Okay, so where can I get more information on your big data offerings and what you guys are doing in that space? >> Yeah, so, we have, you can always go to hp.com/bigdata. We've got some really great information out there. We're in our run-up to our big end user event that we do every June in Las Vegas. It's HPE Discover. We have about 15,000 of our customers and trusted partners there, and we'll be doing a number of talks. I'm doing some work there with a British telecom. We'll give some great talks. Those'll be available online virtually, so you'll hear about not only what we're doing with our own InfoSight and big data services, but how other customers like BTE and 21st Century Fox and other folks are applying some of these techniques and making a big difference for their business as well. >> That's June 19th to the 21st. It's at the Sands Convention Center in between the Palazzo and the Venetian, so it's a good conference. Definitely check that out live if you can, or if not, you can all watch online. Excellent, Patrick, thanks so much for coming on and sharing with us this big data evolution. We'll be watching. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And thank you for watcihing, everybody. We'll see you next time. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE. (fast techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to this special CUBEConversation here in the Palo Alto CUBE studio. I'm John Furrier, the co-host, theCUBE co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media. In theCUBE we're here with Alan Cohen, CUBE alumni, joining us today for a special segment on the future of technology and the impact to society. Always good to get Alan's commentary, he's the Chief Commercial Officer for Illumio, industry veteran, has been through many waves of innovation and now more than ever, this next wave of technology and the democratization of the global world is upon us. We're seeing signals out there like cryptocurrency and blockchain and bitcoin to the disruption of industries from media and entertainment, biotech among others. Technology is not just a corner industry, it's now pervasive and it's having some significant impacts and you're seeing that in the news whether it's Facebook trying to figure out who they are from a data standpoint to across the board every company. Alan, great to see you. >> Always great to be here, I always feel like, I can't tell whether I'm at the big desk at ESPN or I've got the desk chair at CNBC, but that's what it's like being on theCUBE. >> Great to have you on extracting the signal noises, a ton of noise out there, but one of things of the most important stories that we're tracking is, that's becoming very obvious, and you're seeing it everywhere from Meed to all aspects of technology. Is the impact of technology to people in society, okay you're seeing the election, we all know what that is, that's now a front and center in the big global conversation, the Russian's role of hacking, the weaponizing of data, Facebook's taking huge brand hits on that, to emerging startups, and the startup game that we're used to in Silicon Valley is changing. Just the dynamics, I mean cryptocurrency raises billions of dollars but yet (laughs) something like 10, 20% of it's been hacked and stolen. It's a really wild west kind of environment. >> Well it's a very different environment. John, you and I have been in the technology industry certainly for a whole bunch of lines under our eyes over the years have gone there. My friend Tom Friedman has this phrase that he says, "Everybody's connected and nobody's in control," so the difference is that, as you just said, the tech industry is not a separate industry. The tech industry is in every product and service. Cryptocurrency is like, the concept of that money is just code. You know, our products and services are just code, it raises a couple of really core issues. Like for us on the security point of view, if I don't trust people with the products they're selling me, that I feel like they're going to be hacked, including my personal data, so your product now includes my personal information, that's a real problem because that could actually melt down commerce in a real way. Obviously the election is if I don't trust the social systems around it, so I think we're all at an, and I'd like to say world is still kind of like iRobot moment, and if you remember iRobot, it's like, people build all these robots to serve humankind and then one day the robots wake up and they go, "We have our own point of view on how things are going to work" and they take over, and I think whether it's the debate about AI, whether cryptocurrency's good or bad, or more importantly, the products and services I use, which are now all digitally connected to me, whether I trust them or not is an issue that I think everyone in our industry has to take a step back because without that trust, a lot of these systems are going to stop growing. >> Chaos is an opportunity, I think that's been quoted many times, a variety-- >> You sound like Jeff Goldblum in like Jurassic Park, yeah. (laughing) >> So chaos is upon us, but this is an opportunity. The winds are shifting, and that's an opportunity for entrepreneurs. The technology industry has to start working for us but we've got to be mindful of these blind spots and the blind spots are technology for good not necessarily just for profits, so that also is a big story right now. We see things like AI for good, Intel has been doing a lot of work on that area, and you see stars dedicated to societal impact, then young millennials, you see the demographic shift where they want to work on stuff that empowers people and changes society so a whole kind of new generation revolution and kind of hippie moment, if you look at the 60s, what the 60s were, right? >> Well there's people out in the street protesting, right? There were a couple of million women out in the street this weekend, so we are in that kind of moment again, people are not happy with things. >> And I believe this is a signal of a renaissance, a change, a sea change at enormous levels, so I want to get your thoughts on this. As technology goes out in mainstream, certainly from a security standpoint, your business Illumio is in that now where there's not a lot of control, just like you were mentioning before we came on that all the spends happening but no one has more than 4% market share. These are dynamics and this is not just within one vertical. What's your take on this, how do you view this sea change that's upon us, this tech revolution? >> Well, you know, think about it. You and I grew up in the era where clients server took over from main frame, right? So remember there was this big company called IBM and they owned a lot of the industry, and then it blew up for client server and then there were thousands of companies and it consolidated its way down, but when those thousands of new companies, like you didn't know what was going to be Apollo and what was going to be Oracle right? Like you didn't know how that was going to work out, there was a lot of change and a lot of uncertainty. I think now we're seeing this on a scale like that's 10x of this that there's so much innovation and there's so much connectedness going on very rapidly, but no one is in control. In the security market, you know, what's happening in our world is like, people said, okay I have to reestablish control over my data, I've lost that control, and I've lost it for good reasons, meaning I've evolved to the cloud, I've evolved to the app economy, I've done all of these things, and I've lost it for bad reasons because like am I, like I'm not really running my data center the way I should. We're in the beginning of a move in of people kind of reasserting that control, but it's very hard to put the genie back in the bottle because the world itself is so much more dynamic and more distributed. >> It's interesting, I've been studying communities and online communities for over a decade in terms of dynamics. You know, from the infrastructural level, how packets move to a human interaction. It's interesting, you mentioned that we're all connected and no one's in control, but you now see a ground swell of organic self-forming networks where communities are starting to work together. You kind of think about the analog world when we grew up without computers and networks, you kind of knew everyone, you knew your neighbor, you knew who the town loony was, you kind of knew things and people watch each other's kids and parents sat from the porch, let the kid play, that's the way that I grew up, but it was still chaotic but yet somewhat controlled by the group. So I got to ask you, when you see things like cryptocurrency, things like KYC, know your customer, anti money laundering, which is, you know these are policy based things, but we're in a world now where, you know, people don't know who their neighbors are. You're starting to see a dynamic where people are-- >> Put the phone down. >> Asserting themselves to know their neighbor, to know their customer, to have a connected tissue with context and so your trust and reputation become super important. >> Well I think people are really, so like every time there is a shift in technology, there's scary stuff. There's the fuddy-duddy moment where people are saying, "Oh we can't use that," or "I don't know that," and you know, clearly we're in this kind of new kam-ree and explosion of this cloud mobile blah blah blah type of computing thing and ... Blah blah blah is always a good intersection when you don't have a term. Then things form around it, and just as you said, so if you think about 25 years ago, right, people created The WELL and there was community writing first bulletin boards and like now we have Facebook and you go through a couple of generations and for a while, things feel out of control and then it reforms. I personally am an optimist. Ultimately I believe in the inherent goodness of people, but inherent goodness leaves you open and then, you know, could be manipulated, and people figure these things out. Whether it's cryptocurrency or AI, they are really exciting technologies that don't have any ground rules, right? What's going to happen I believe is that people are going to reestablish ground rules, they're going to figure out some of the core issues, and some of these things may make it, and some of these things may not make it. Like cryptocurrency, like I don't know whether it makes it or not, but certainly the blockchain as a technology we're going to be incorporating in what we do, and maybe the blockchain replaces VPNs and last generation's way of protecting zeros and ones. If AI is figuring out how to read an MRI in five minutes, it's a good thing, and if the AI is teaching you how to exclude old folks for me finding jobs, it's a bad thing. I think as technology forms, there's always Spectre and 007, right? There's always good and bad sides and you know, I think if you believe-- >> I'm with you on that. I think value shifts and I think ultimately it's like however you want to look at it will shift to something, value activity will be somewhere else. Behind me in the bookshelf is a book called The World is Flat and you're quoted in it a lot as a futurist because you have inherently that kind of view, well that's not what you do for a living, but you're kind of in an opt-- >> Alan: Marketing, futurist, kind of same thing. >> Thomas Friedman, the book, that was a great book and at that time, it was game changing. If you take that premise into today where we are living in a flat world and look at cryptocurrency, and then over with the geo political landscape, I mean I just can't see why the Federal Reserve wouldn't reign in this cryptocurrency because if Japan's going to control a bunch of, or China, it's going to be some interesting conversations. I mean I would be like all over that if I was in the Federal Reserve. >> I think people-- Look, cryptocurrency's really interesting and I think people a little over-rotated. If you look at the amount of GDP that's invested in cryptocurrency, it's like, I don't know, there might've been, you know 20 years ago the same amount involved invested in Beanie Babies, right? I mean things show up for a while and the question is is it sustainable over time? Now I'm trained as an economist, you and I have had this conversation, so I don't know how you have a series of monetary without kind of governmental backing, I just don't understand. But I do understand that people find all kinds of interesting ways to trade, and if it's an exchange, like I mean what's the difference between gold and cryptocurrency? Somebody has ascribed a value to something that really has no efficacy outside of its usage. Yeah I mean you can make a filling or bracelets out of gold but it doesn't really mean anything except people agree to a unit of value. If people do that with cryptocurrency, it does have the ability to become a real currency. >> I want to pick your perspective on this being an economist, this is is the hottest area of cryptocurrency, it's also known as token economics, is a concept. >> Alan: Token economics. >> You know that's an area that theCUBE, with CUBE coins, experimenting with tokens. Tokens technically are used for things in mobile and whatnot but having a token as a utility in a network is kind of the whole concept, so the big trend that we're seeing and no one's really talking about this yet is instead of having a CTO, Chief Technology Officer, they're looking for a CEO, a Chief Economist Officer, because what you're seeing with the MVP economy we're living in and this gamification which became growth hack which didn't really help users, the notion of decentralized applications and token economics can open the door for some innovation around value and it's an economic problem, how you have a fiscal policy of your token, there's a monetary policy, what's it tied to? A product and a technology, so you now have a now a new, twisted, intertwined mechanism. >> Well you have it as part of this explosion, right? We're at a period of time, it feels like there's a great amount of uncertainly because everything's, you know, there's a lot of different forces and not everybody's in control of them, and you know, it's interesting. Google has this architecture, they call it BeyondCorp, where the concept is like networks are not trusted so I will just put my trust in this device, Duo Security's a great example of a company that's built a technology, a security technology around it which is completely antithetical to everything we know about networks and security. They're saying everything's the internet, I'll just protect the device that it's on. It's a kind of perfect architecture for a world like where nobody is in charge, so just isolate those, buy this, what is a device? It's a token too, it's a person, your iPhone's your personal token. Then over time, systems will form around it. I think we just have to, we always have to learn how to function in a different type of economy. I mean democracy was a new economy 250 years ago that kind of screwed around with most of the world, and a lot of people didn't think it would make it, in fact we went through two World War wars that it was a little on the edge whether democracy was going to make it and it seems to have done okay, like it was pretty good IPO to buy into. You know, in 1776. But it's always got risks and struggles with it. I think if, ultimately it comes together, it's whether a large group of people can find a way to function socially, economically, and with their personal safety in these systems. >> You bring up a great point, so I want to go to the next level in this conversation which is around-- >> Alan: You've got the wrong guy if you're going to the next level because I just tapped out. >> No, no, no we'll get you there. It's my job to get you there. The question is that everyone always wants to look at, whether it's someone looking at the industry or actors inside the industries across the board, mainly the tech and we'll talk about tech, is the question of are we innovating? You brought up some interesting nuances that we talk about with token economics. I mean Steve Jobs had the classic presentation where he had street signs, technology meets liberal arts. That's a mental image that people who know Steve Jobs, know Apple, was a key positioning point for Apple at that time which was let's make computers and technology connect with society, liberal arts. But we were just talking about is the business impact of technology, the economics, and that's just not like just some hand waving, making technology integrate with business. You're in the security business, There are some gamification technology, gamification that's business built into the products. So the question is, if we have the integration of business, technology, economics, policy, society rolling into the product definitions of innovation, does that change the lens and the aperture of what innovation is? >> I think it does, right? The IT industry's somewhere between three and four trillion dollars depends on how it counts in. It grows pretty slowly, it grows by a low single digit. That tells me as composite, like is that, that slow growth is a structural signal about how consumers of technology think in a macro sense. On a micro sense, things shift very rapidly, right? New platforms show up, new applications show up, all kinds of things show up. What I don't think we have done yet, to your point, is in this new integrated world, the role of technology is not just technology anymore. I don't think, you know you said you need Chief Economical Officer, what about Chief Political Officer? What about a Chief Social Officer? How many heads of HR make decisions about the insertion of systems into their business? And that's what this kind of iRobot concept is in my mind which is that you know, we are exceeding control of things that used to be done by human beings to systems and when you see control, the social mores, the political mores, the cultural mores, and the human emotional mores have to move with it. We don't tend to think about things like that. We're like, "I win and my competitors lose." Like technology used to be much more of a zero sum, my tech's better than yours. But the question is not just is my tech better than yours, is my customer better off in their industry for the consumption of my technology of inserting it into their offering or their service? You know what, that is probably going to be the next area of study. The other thing that's very important in whether, any of you have read Peter Thiel's book Zero to One, the nature of competition technology used to feel like a flat playing field and now the other thing that's rising is do you have super winners? And then what is the power of the super winners? So you mentioned whether it's Facebook or Google or Amazon or you know, or Microsoft, the FANG companies right? Their roles are so much more significant now than the Four Horsemen of the Nasdaq were in 2000 when you had Intel and Cisco and Oracle and Saht-in it's a different game. >> You're seeing that now. That's a good point, so you're reinforcing kind of this notion that the super players if you will are having an impact, you're mentioning the confluence of these new sectors, you know, government, policy, social are new areas. The question is, this sounds like a strategic imperative for the industry, and we're early so it's not like there's a silver bullet or is there, it doesn't sound like there, so to me that's not really in place yet, I mean. >> Oh no. We're not even in alpha. We have demo code for the new economy and we're trying to get the new model funded. >> John: That's the demo version, not the real version. It's the classic joke. >> Yeah this not the alpha or the beta version that like you're going to go launch it. If people think they're launching it, I think it's a little preliminary and you know, it's not just financial investment, it's like do I buy in? I'll tell you something that's really interesting. I've been visiting a bunch of our customers lately and the biggest change I'd say in the last two years is they now have to prove to their customers they're going to be good custodians of their data. Think about that, like you could go to any digital commerce you do, any website you use and you give them basically the ticket to the Furrier family privacy, you do, but you don't spend a lot of time questioning whether they're really going to protect your data. That has changed. And it's really changing in B2B and in government organizations. >> The role of data to us is regulation, GDPR in Europe, but this is a whole new dynamic. >> It's not just my data because I'm worried about my credit card getting hacked, I'm worried about my identity. Like am I going to show up as a meme in some social media feed that's substituted for the news? I don't want to use the FN word, but you know what I mean? It is a really brave new world. It's like a hyper-democracy and a hyper-risky state at the same time. >> We're living in an area of massive pioneering, new grounds, this is new territory so there's a lot of strategic imperatives that are yet not defined. So now let's take it to how people compete. We were talking before we came on camera, you mentioned the word we're in an MVP economy, minimum viable product concept, and you're seeing that being a standard operating procedure for essentially de-risking this challenge. The old way of you know, build it, ship it, will it work? We're seeing the impact from Hollywood to big tech companies to every industry. >> Well you've got a coffee mug for a company that does both. Amazon does MVP in entertainment, like we'll create one pilot and see if it goes as opposed to ordering a season for 17 million dollars to hey, let's try this feature and put it out on AWS. What's interesting is I don't think we've completely tilted but the question is will buyers of technology, of entertainment products, of any product start to say, "I'll try it." You know like, look, I've done four startups and I always know there's somebody I can go to get and try my early product. There are people that just have an appetite, right? The Jeffrey Moores, early adapter, all the way to the left of the-- >> They'll buy anything new. >> They'll try it, they're interested, they have the time and the resources, or they're just intellectually curious. But it was always a very small group of people in the IT industry. What I think that the MVP economy is starting to do is look, I Kickstarted my wallet. I don't know if I'm the only person who bought that skinny little wallet on Kickstarter, it doesn't matter to me, it had appeal. >> What's the impact of the MVP economy? Is it going to change to the competitive landscape like Peter Thiel was suggesting? Does it change the economics? Does it change the makeup of the team? All of the above? What's your thoughts on how this is going to impact? Certainly the encumbrance will seem to be impacted or not. >> I think two things happen. One, it attacks the structural way markets work. If you go back to classical economics, land, labor, and capital, and people who own those assets, now you add information as a fourth. If those guys were around now they would say that would be the fourth core asset, production, I'm sorry, means of production is the term. The people who can dominate that would dominate a market. Now that that's flattened out, you know, I think it pushes against the traditional structures and it allows new giants to kind of show up overnight. I mean the e-commerce market is rife with companies that have, like look at Stich Fix. A company driven by AI, fashions, tries to figure out what you like, sends it to you every month, just had a monster IPO. We invented, by the way the Spiegal Catalog, except like with a personal assistant and you know, it's changed that in just a short number of years. I think two things happen. One is you'll get new potential giants but certainly new players in the market quickly. Two, it'll force a change in the business model of every company. If you're in a cab in any city in the world, I'm not saying whether the app works there or not, Uber and Lyft has forced every cab company to show you here's the app to call the cab. They haven't quite caught up to the rest of the experience. What I think happens is ultimately, the larger players in an industry have to accommodate that model. For people like me, people who build companies or large technology companies, we may have to start thinking about MVPing of features early on, working with a small group, which is a little what the beta process is but now think about it as a commercial process. Nobody does it, but I bet sure a lot of people will be doing it in five years. >> I want to get your take on that approach because you're talking about really disrupting, re-imagining industry, the Spiegal catalog now becomes digital with technology, so the role of technology in business, we kind of talked about the intertwine of that and its nuance, it's going to get better in my opinion. But specifically the IT, the information technology industry is being disrupted. Used to be like a department, and the IT department will give you your phone on your desk, your PC on your desk or whatever, now that's being shattered and everyone that's participating in that IT industry is evolving. What's your take on the IT industry's disruption? >> Well look, it started 20 years ago when Marc Benioff and Salesforce decided to sell the sales forces instead of IT people, right? They went around to the end buyer. I don't think it's a new trend, I think a lot of technology leaders now figure out how to go to the business buyer directly and make their pitch and interestingly enough, the business buyer, if the IT team doesn't get on board, will do that. >> John: Because of cloud computing and ... >> Because of everything. The modern analog I think in our world is that the developers are increasingly in control. Like my friend Martin Casado up in Andreessen talks about this a lot. The traditional model on our industry is you build a product, you launch it, you launch your company, you work with the traditional analyst firms, you try to get a little bit of halo, you get customer references, those are the things you do and there was a very wall structured, for example, enterprise buying cycle. >> And playbook. >> Playbook, and there's the challenger sale and there's Jeffrey Moore and there's like seeing God. You've got your textbooks on how it's been done. As everything turns into code, the people who work with code for a living increasingly become the front end of your cycle and if you can get to them, that changes. Like I mean think about like, you know, Tom wrote about this actually in The World is Flat, like Linux started as a patchy. It didn't start with the IT department, it started with developers and there was the Linux foundation and now Linux is everything. >> There's a big enemy called the big mini computer, and not operating systems and work stations. >> Wiped out whole parts of Boston and other parts of the world, right? >> Exactly, that's why I moved out here. >> You filed client's server out here. >> I filed a smell of innovation. No but this is interesting because this location of industries is happening, so with that, so they also on the analog, so Martin's at Andreessen, so we'll do a little VC poke there at the VCs because we love them of course, they're being dislocated-- >> I don't (mumbles) my investors. >> Well no, their playbook is being challenged. Here's an example, go big or go home investment thesis seems not to be working. Where if you get too much cash on the front end, with the MVP economy we were just riffing on and with the big super powers, the Amazons and the Googles, you can't just go big or go home, you're going to be going home more than going big. >> I think they know that. I mean Dee-nuh Suss-man who's I think Chief Investment Officer at Nasdaq has a very well known talking line that there are half as many public companies as there were 10 years ago, so the exit scenario for our industry is a little bit different. We now have things like acqui-hires, right we have other models for monetization, but I think what the flip side of it is, we're in the-- >> Adapt or die because the value will shift. Liquidity's changing, which acqui-hires-- >> I think the investment community gets it completely and they spend a lot more time with the developer mindset. In fact I think there's been a doubling down focus on technical founders versus business founders for companies for just that reason because as everything turns to code, you got to hang out with the code community. I think there are actually-- >> You think there'll be more doubling down on technical founders? You do, okay. >> Yeah I think because that is ultimately the shift. There are business model shifts, but it's, you know, I mean like Uber was a business model shift, I mean the technology was the iPhone and GPS and they wrote an app for it, but it was a business model shift, so it can be a business model shift. >> And then scale. >> And then scale and then all of those other things. But I think if you don't think about developers when you're in our, and it's like we built Illumio because a developer could take the product and get started. I mean you can, developers actually can write security policy with our product because there's a class of customers, where as not everyone where that matters. There's other people where the security team is in charge or the infrastructure team is in charge but I think everything is based on zeros and ones and everything is based on code and if you're not sensitive to how code gets bought, consumed, I mean there's a GitHub economy which is I don't even have to write the code, I'll go look at your code and maybe use pieces of it, which has always been around. >> Software disruption is clear. Cloud computing is scale. Agile is fast, and with de-risking capabilities, but the craft is coming back and some will argue, we've talked about on theCUBE before is that, you know, the craftsmanship of software is moving to up the stack in every industry, so-- >> I think it's more like a sports league. I love the NBA, right? In the old days, your professional team, you'd scout people in college. Now they used to scout them in high school, now they're scouting kids in middle school. >> (laughs) That's sad. >> Well what it says is that you have to-- >> How can you tell? >> You know but they can, right? I think you know, your point about it craft, you're going to start tracking developers as they go through their career and invest and bet on them. >> Don't reveal our secrets to theCUBE. We have scouts everywhere, be careful out there. (laughs) >> But think about that, imagine it's like there's such a core focus on hiring from college, but we had an intern from high school two years ago. We hire freshman. >> Okay so let's go, I want to do a whole segment on this but I want to just get this point because we're both sports fans and we can riff on sports all day long. >> I'm just not getting the chance >> And the greatness of Tom Brady >> to talk about the Patriots. >> And Tom Brady's gotten his sixth finger attached to his hands for his sixth ring coming up. No but this is interesting. Sports is highly data driven. >> Alan: Yep. >> Okay and so what you're getting at here, with an MVP economy, token economics is more of a signal, not yet mainstream, but you can almost go there and think okay data driven gives you more accuracy so if you can bring data driven to the tech world, that's kind of an interesting point. What's your thoughts on that? >> Yeah I mean look, I think you have to track everything. You have to follow things, and by the way, we have great tools now, you can track people through LinkedIn. There's all kinds of vehicles to tracking individuals, you track products, you track everything, and you know look, we were talking about this before we went on the show right, people make decisions based on analytics increasingly. Now the craft part is what's interesting and I'm not the complete expert, I'm on the business side, I'm not an engineer by training, but look a lot of people understand a great developer is better than five bad developers. >> Well Mark Andris' 10x is a classic example of that. >> There's clearly a star system involved, so if I think in middle school or in high school, you're going to be a good developer, and I'm going to track your career through college and I'm going to try to figure out how to attach. That's why we started hiring freshmen. >> Well my good friend Dave Girouard started a company that does that, will fund the college education for people that they want to bet on. >> Sure, they're just taking an option in them. >> Yeah, option on their earnings. Exactly. >> They are. >> It sounds like token economics to me. (laughs) >> You know you can sell anything. We are in that economy, you can sell those pieces. The good news is I think it can be a great flattener, meaning that it can move things back more to a meritocracy because if I'm tracking people in high school, I'm not worrying whether they're going to go to Stanford or Harvard or Northwestern, right? I'm going to track their abilities in an era and it's interesting, speaking about craft, you know, what are internships? They're apprenticeships. I mean it is a little bit like a craft, right? Because you're basically apprenticing somebody for a future payout for them coming to work for you and being skilled because they don't know anything when they come and work, I shouldn't say that, they actually know a lot of things. >> Alan, great to have you on theCUBE as always, great to come in and get the update. We'll certainly do more but I'd like to do a segment on you on the startup scene and sort of the venture capital dynamics, we were tracking that as well, we've been putting a lot of content out there. We believe Silicon Valley's a great place. This mission's out there, we've been addressing them, but we really want to point the camera this year at some of the great stuff, so we're looking forward to having you come back in. My final question for you is a personal one. I love having these conversations because we can look back and also look forward. You do a lot of mentoring and you're also helping a lot of folks in the industry within just your realm but also startups and peers. What's your advice these days? Because there's a lot of things, we just kind of talked a lot of it. When people come to you for advice and say, "Alan, I got a career change," or "I'm looking at this new opportunity," or "Hey, I want to start a company," or "I started a company," how is your mentoring and your advisory roles going on these days? Can you share things that you're advising? Key points that people should be aware of. >> Well look, ultimately ... I never really thought about it, you just asked the question so, ultimately, I think to me it comes down to own your own fate. What it means is like do something that you're really passionate about, do something that's going to be unique. Don't be the 15th in any category. Jack Welch taught us a long time ago that the number one player in a market gets 70% of the economic value, so you don't want to play for sixth place. It's like Ricky Bobby said, if you're not first, you're last. (John chuckles) I mean you can't always be first, but you should play for that. I think for a lot of companies now, I think they have to make sure that, and people participating, make sure that you're not playing the old playbook, you're not fighting yesterday's battle. Rhett Butler in Gone With the Wind said, "There's a lot of money in building up an empire, "and there's even more money in tearing it down." There are people who enter markets to basically punish encumbrance, take share because of innovation, but I think the really inspirational is you know, look forward five years and find a practical but aggressive path to being part of that side of history. >> So are we building up or are we taking down? I mean it seems to me, if I'm not-- >> You're always doing both. The ocean is always fighting the mountains, right? That is the course of, right? And then new mountains come up and the water goes someplace else. We are taking down parts of the client server industry, the stack that you and I built a lot of our personal career of it, but we're building this new cloud and mobile stack at the same time. And you're point is we're building a new currency stack and we're going to have to build a new privacy stack. It's never, the greatest thing about our industry is there's always something to do. >> How has the environment of social media, things out there, we're theCUBE, we do our thing with events, and just in general, change the growth plans for individuals if you were, could speak to your 23 year old self right now, knowing what you know-- >> Oh I have one piece of advice I give everybody. Take as much risk as humanly possible in your career earlier on. There's a lot of people that have worked with me or worked for me over the years, you know people when they get into their 40s and they go, "I'm thinking about doing a startup," I go, "You know when you got two kids in college "and you're trying to fund your 401K, "working for less cash and more equity may not be "the most comfortable conversation in your household." It didn't work well in my household. I mean I'm like Benjamin Button. I started in big companies, I'm going to smaller companies. Some day it's just going to be me and a dog and one other guy. >> You went the wrong way. >> Yeah I went the wrong way and I took all the risk later. Now I was lucky in part that the transition worked. When I see younger folks, it's always like, do the riskiest thing humanly possible because the penalty is really small. You have to find a job in a year, right? But you know, you don't have the mortgage, and you don't have the kids to support. I think people have to build an arc around their careers that's suitable with their risk profile. Like maybe you don't buy into bitcoin at 19,000. Could be wrong, could be 50,000 sometime, but you know it's kind of 11 now and it's like-- >> Yeah don't go all in on 19, maybe take a little bit in. It's the play and run-- >> Dollar cost averaging over the years, that's my best fidelity advice. I think that's what's really important for people. >> What about the 45 year old executive out there, male or female obviously, the challenges of ageism? We're in economy, a gig economy, whatever you want to call, MVP economics, token economics, this is a new thing. Your advice to someone who's 45 who just says "Hey you're too old for our little hot startup." What should they do? >> Well being on the other side of that history I understand it firsthand. I think that you have an incumbent role in your career to constantly re-educate yourself. If you show up, whether you're a 25, 35, 45, 55, or 65, I hope I'm not working when I'm 75, but you never know right? (mumbles) >> You'll never stop working, that's my prediction. >> But you know have you mastered the new skills? Have you reinvented yourself along the way? I feel like I have a responsibility to feed the common household. My favorite part of my LinkedIn profile, it says, "Obedient worker bee at the Cohen household," because when I go home, I'm not in charge. I've always felt that it's up to me to make sure I'm not going to be irrelevant. That to me is, you know, that to me, I don't worry about ageism, I worry about did I-- >> John: Relevance. >> Yeah did I make myself self-obsolescent? I think if you're going to look at your career and you haven't looked at your career in 15 years and you're trying to do something, you may be starting from a deficit. So the question, what can I do? Before I make that jump, can I get involved, can I advise some small companies? Could I work part time and on the weekends and do some things so that when you finally make that transition, you have something to offer and you're relevant in the dialogue. I think that's, you know, nobody trains you, right? We're not good as an industry-- >> Having a good community, self-learning, growth mindset, always be relevant is not a bad strategy. >> Yeah, I mean because I find increasingly, I see people of all ages in companies. There is ageism, there is no doubt. There's financial ageism and then there's kind of psychological bias ageism, but if you keep yourself relevant and you are the up to speed in your thing, people will beat a path to want to work for you because there's still a skill gap in our industry-- >> And that's the key. >> Yeah, make sure that you're on the right side of that skill gap, and you will always have something to offer to people. >> Alan, great to have you come in the studio, great to see you, thanks for the commentary. It's a special CUBEConversation, we're talking about the future of technology impact the society and a range of topics that are emerging, we're on a pioneering, new generational shift and theCUBE is obviously covering the most important stories in Silicon Valley from figuring out what fake news is to impact to the humans around the world and again, we're doing our part to cover it. Alan Cohen, CUBEConversation, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)