(light airy music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase, AI and machine learning. "Top Startups Building Generative AI on AWS." This is season three, episode one of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem, talking about AI machine learning. We have three great guests Bratin Saha, VP, Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Services at Amazon Web Services. Tom Mason, the CTO of Stability AI, and Aidan Gomez, CEO and co-founder of Cohere. Two practitioners doing startups and AWS. Gentlemen, thank you for opening up this session, this episode. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So the topic is hype versus reality. So I think we're all on the reality is great, hype is great, but the reality's here. I want to get into it. Generative AI's got all the momentum, it's going mainstream, it's kind of come out of the behind the ropes, it's now mainstream. We saw the success of ChatGPT, opens up everyone's eyes, but there's so much more going on. Let's jump in and get your early perspectives on what should people be talking about right now? What are you guys working on? We'll start with AWS. What's the big focus right now for you guys as you come into this market that's highly active, highly hyped up, but people see value right out of the gate? >> You know, we have been working on generative AI for some time. In fact, last year we released Code Whisperer, which is about using generative AI for software development and a number of customers are using it and getting real value out of it. So generative AI is now something that's mainstream that can be used by enterprise users. And we have also been partnering with a number of other companies. So, you know, stability.ai, we've been partnering with them a lot. We want to be partnering with other companies as well. In seeing how we do three things, you know, first is providing the most efficient infrastructure for generative AI. And that is where, you know, things like Trainium, things like Inferentia, things like SageMaker come in. And then next is the set of models and then the third is the kind of applications like Code Whisperer and so on. So, you know, it's early days yet, but clearly there's a lot of amazing capabilities that will come out and something that, you know, our customers are starting to pay a lot of attention to. >> Tom, talk about your company and what your focus is and why the Amazon Web Services relationship's important for you? >> So yeah, we're primarily committed to making incredible open source foundation models and obviously stable effusions been our kind of first big model there, which we trained all on AWS. We've been working with them over the last year and a half to develop, obviously a big cluster, and bring all that compute to training these models at scale, which has been a really successful partnership. And we're excited to take it further this year as we develop commercial strategy of the business and build out, you know, the ability for enterprise customers to come and get all the value from these models that we think they can get. So we're really excited about the future. We got hugely exciting pipeline for this year with new modalities and video models and wonderful things and trying to solve images for once and for all and get the kind of general value and value proposition correct for customers. So it's a really exciting time and very honored to be part of it. >> It's great to see some of your customers doing so well out there. Congratulations to your team. Appreciate that. Aidan, let's get into what you guys do. What does Cohere do? What are you excited about right now? >> Yeah, so Cohere builds large language models, which are the backbone of applications like ChatGPT and GPT-3. We're extremely focused on solving the issues with adoption for enterprise. So it's great that you can make a super flashy demo for consumers, but it takes a lot to actually get it into billion user products and large global enterprises. So about six months ago, we released our command models, which are some of the best that exist for large language models. And in December, we released our multilingual text understanding models and that's on over a hundred different languages and it's trained on, you know, authentic data directly from native speakers. And so we're super excited to continue pushing this into enterprise and solving those barriers for adoption, making this transformation a reality. >> Just real quick, while I got you there on the new products coming out. Where are we in the progress? People see some of the new stuff out there right now. There's so much more headroom. Can you just scope out in your mind what that looks like? Like from a headroom standpoint? Okay, we see ChatGPT. "Oh yeah, it writes my papers for me, does some homework for me." I mean okay, yawn, maybe people say that, (Aidan chuckles) people excited or people are blown away. I mean, it's helped theCUBE out, it helps me, you know, feed up a little bit from my write-ups but it's not always perfect. >> Yeah, at the moment it's like a writing assistant, right? And it's still super early in the technologies trajectory. I think it's fascinating and it's interesting but its impact is still really limited. I think in the next year, like within the next eight months, we're going to see some major changes. You've already seen the very first hints of that with stuff like Bing Chat, where you augment these dialogue models with an external knowledge base. So now the models can be kept up to date to the millisecond, right? Because they can search the web and they can see events that happened a millisecond ago. But that's still limited in the sense that when you ask the question, what can these models actually do? Well they can just write text back at you. That's the extent of what they can do. And so the real project, the real effort, that I think we're all working towards is actually taking action. So what happens when you give these models the ability to use tools, to use APIs? What can they do when they can actually affect change out in the real world, beyond just streaming text back at the user? I think that's the really exciting piece. >> Okay, so I wanted to tee that up early in the segment 'cause I want to get into the customer applications. We're seeing early adopters come in, using the technology because they have a lot of data, they have a lot of large language model opportunities and then there's a big fast follower wave coming behind it. I call that the people who are going to jump in the pool early and get into it. They might not be advanced. Can you guys share what customer applications are being used with large language and vision models today and how they're using it to transform on the early adopter side, and how is that a tell sign of what's to come? >> You know, one of the things we have been seeing both with the text models that Aidan talked about as well as the vision models that stability.ai does, Tom, is customers are really using it to change the way you interact with information. You know, one example of a customer that we have, is someone who's kind of using that to query customer conversations and ask questions like, you know, "What was the customer issue? How did we solve it?" And trying to get those kinds of insights that was previously much harder to do. And then of course software is a big area. You know, generating software, making that, you know, just deploying it in production. Those have been really big areas that we have seen customers start to do. You know, looking at documentation, like instead of you know, searching for stuff and so on, you know, you just have an interactive way, in which you can just look at the documentation for a product. You know, all of this goes to where we need to take the technology. One of which is, you know, the models have to be there but they have to work reliably in a production setting at scale, with privacy, with security, and you know, making sure all of this is happening, is going to be really key. That is what, you know, we at AWS are looking to do, which is work with partners like stability and others and in the open source and really take all of these and make them available at scale to customers, where they work reliably. >> Tom, Aidan, what's your thoughts on this? Where are customers landing on this first use cases or set of low-hanging fruit use cases or applications? >> Yeah, so I think like the first group of adopters that really found product market fit were the copywriting companies. So one great example of that is HyperWrite. Another one is Jasper. And so for Cohere, that's the tip of the iceberg, like there's a very long tail of usage from a bunch of different applications. HyperWrite is one of our customers, they help beat writer's block by drafting blog posts, emails, and marketing copy. We also have a global audio streaming platform, which is using us the power of search engine that can comb through podcast transcripts, in a bunch of different languages. Then a global apparel brand, which is using us to transform how they interact with their customers through a virtual assistant, two dozen global news outlets who are using us for news summarization. So really like, these large language models, they can be deployed all over the place into every single industry sector, language is everywhere. It's hard to think of any company on Earth that doesn't use language. So it's, very, very- >> We're doing it right now. We got the language coming in. >> Exactly. >> We'll transcribe this puppy. All right. Tom, on your side, what do you see the- >> Yeah, we're seeing some amazing applications of it and you know, I guess that's partly been, because of the growth in the open source community and some of these applications have come from there that are then triggering this secondary wave of innovation, which is coming a lot from, you know, controllability and explainability of the model. But we've got companies like, you know, Jasper, which Aidan mentioned, who are using stable diffusion for image generation in block creation, content creation. We've got Lensa, you know, which exploded, and is built on top of stable diffusion for fine tuning so people can bring themselves and their pets and you know, everything into the models. So we've now got fine tuned stable diffusion at scale, which is democratized, you know, that process, which is really fun to see your Lensa, you know, exploded. You know, I think it was the largest growing app in the App Store at one point. And lots of other examples like NightCafe and Lexica and Playground. So seeing lots of cool applications. >> So much applications, we'll probably be a customer for all you guys. We'll definitely talk after. But the challenges are there for people adopting, they want to get into what you guys see as the challenges that turn into opportunities. How do you see the customers adopting generative AI applications? For example, we have massive amounts of transcripts, timed up to all the videos. I don't even know what to do. Do I just, do I code my API there. So, everyone has this problem, every vertical has these use cases. What are the challenges for people getting into this and adopting these applications? Is it figuring out what to do first? Or is it a technical setup? Do they stand up stuff, they just go to Amazon? What do you guys see as the challenges? >> I think, you know, the first thing is coming up with where you think you're going to reimagine your customer experience by using generative AI. You know, we talked about Ada, and Tom talked about a number of these ones and you know, you pick up one or two of these, to get that robust. And then once you have them, you know, we have models and we'll have more models on AWS, these large language models that Aidan was talking about. Then you go in and start using these models and testing them out and seeing whether they fit in use case or not. In many situations, like you said, John, our customers want to say, "You know, I know you've trained these models on a lot of publicly available data, but I want to be able to customize it for my use cases. Because, you know, there's some knowledge that I have created and I want to be able to use that." And then in many cases, and I think Aidan mentioned this. You know, you need these models to be up to date. Like you can't have it staying. And in those cases, you augmented with a knowledge base, you know you have to make sure that these models are not hallucinating. And so you need to be able to do the right kind of responsible AI checks. So, you know, you start with a particular use case, and there are a lot of them. Then, you know, you can come to AWS, and then look at one of the many models we have and you know, we are going to have more models for other modalities as well. And then, you know, play around with the models. We have a playground kind of thing where you can test these models on some data and then you can probably, you will probably want to bring your own data, customize it to your own needs, do some of the testing to make sure that the model is giving the right output and then just deploy it. And you know, we have a lot of tools. >> Yeah. >> To make this easy for our customers. >> How should people think about large language models? Because do they think about it as something that they tap into with their IP or their data? Or is it a large language model that they apply into their system? Is the interface that way? What's the interaction look like? >> In many situations, you can use these models out of the box. But in typical, in most of the other situations, you will want to customize it with your own data or with your own expectations. So the typical use case would be, you know, these are models are exposed through APIs. So the typical use case would be, you know you're using these APIs a little bit for testing and getting familiar and then there will be an API that will allow you to train this model further on your data. So you use that AI, you know, make sure you augmented the knowledge base. So then you use those APIs to customize the model and then just deploy it in an application. You know, like Tom was mentioning, a number of companies that are using these models. So once you have it, then you know, you again, use an endpoint API and use it in an application. >> All right, I love the example. I want to ask Tom and Aidan, because like most my experience with Amazon Web Service in 2007, I would stand up in EC2, put my code on there, play around, if it didn't work out, I'd shut it down. Is that a similar dynamic we're going to see with the machine learning where developers just kind of log in and stand up infrastructure and play around and then have a cloud-like experience? >> So I can go first. So I mean, we obviously, with AWS working really closely with the SageMaker team, do fantastic platform there for ML training and inference. And you know, going back to your point earlier, you know, where the data is, is hugely important for companies. Many companies bringing their models to their data in AWS on-premise for them is hugely important. Having the models to be, you know, open sources, makes them explainable and transparent to the adopters of those models. So, you know, we are really excited to work with the SageMaker team over the coming year to bring companies to that platform and make the most of our models. >> Aidan, what's your take on developers? Do they just need to have a team in place, if we want to interface with you guys? Let's say, can they start learning? What do they got to do to set up? >> Yeah, so I think for Cohere, our product makes it much, much easier to people, for people to get started and start building, it solves a lot of the productionization problems. But of course with SageMaker, like Tom was saying, I think that lowers a barrier even further because it solves problems like data privacy. So I want to underline what Bratin was saying earlier around when you're fine tuning or when you're using these models, you don't want your data being incorporated into someone else's model. You don't want it being used for training elsewhere. And so the ability to solve for enterprises, that data privacy and that security guarantee has been hugely important for Cohere, and that's very easy to do through SageMaker. >> Yeah. >> But the barriers for using this technology are coming down super quickly. And so for developers, it's just becoming completely intuitive. I love this, there's this quote from Andrej Karpathy. He was saying like, "It really wasn't on my 2022 list of things to happen that English would become, you know, the most popular programming language." And so the barrier is coming down- >> Yeah. >> Super quickly and it's exciting to see. >> It's going to be awesome for all the companies here, and then we'll do more, we're probably going to see explosion of startups, already seeing that, the maps, ecosystem maps, the landscape maps are happening. So this is happening and I'm convinced it's not yesterday's chat bot, it's not yesterday's AI Ops. It's a whole another ballgame. So I have to ask you guys for the final question before we kick off the company's showcasing here. How do you guys gauge success of generative AI applications? Is there a lens to look through and say, okay, how do I see success? It could be just getting a win or is it a bigger picture? Bratin we'll start with you. How do you gauge success for generative AI? >> You know, ultimately it's about bringing business value to our customers. And making sure that those customers are able to reimagine their experiences by using generative AI. Now the way to get their ease, of course to deploy those models in a safe, effective manner, and ensuring that all of the robustness and the security guarantees and the privacy guarantees are all there. And we want to make sure that this transitions from something that's great demos to actual at scale products, which means making them work reliably all of the time not just some of the time. >> Tom, what's your gauge for success? >> Look, I think this, we're seeing a completely new form of ways to interact with data, to make data intelligent, and directly to bring in new revenue streams into business. So if businesses can use our models to leverage that and generate completely new revenue streams and ultimately bring incredible new value to their customers, then that's fantastic. And we hope we can power that revolution. >> Aidan, what's your take? >> Yeah, reiterating Bratin and Tom's point, I think that value in the enterprise and value in market is like a huge, you know, it's the goal that we're striving towards. I also think that, you know, the value to consumers and actual users and the transformation of the surface area of technology to create experiences like ChatGPT that are magical and it's the first time in human history we've been able to talk to something compelling that's not a human. I think that in itself is just extraordinary and so exciting to see. >> It really brings up a whole another category of markets. B2B, B2C, it's B2D, business to developer. Because I think this is kind of the big trend the consumers have to win. The developers coding the apps, it's a whole another sea change. Reminds me everyone use the "Moneyball" movie as example during the big data wave. Then you know, the value of data. There's a scene in "Moneyball" at the end, where Billy Beane's getting the offer from the Red Sox, then the owner says to the Red Sox, "If every team's not rebuilding their teams based upon your model, there'll be dinosaurs." I think that's the same with AI here. Every company will have to need to think about their business model and how they operate with AI. So it'll be a great run. >> Completely Agree >> It'll be a great run. >> Yeah. >> Aidan, Tom, thank you so much for sharing about your experiences at your companies and congratulations on your success and it's just the beginning. And Bratin, thanks for coming on representing AWS. And thank you, appreciate for what you do. Thank you. >> Thank you, John. Thank you, Aidan. >> Thank you John. >> Thanks so much. >> Okay, let's kick off season three, episode one. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (light airy music)

>> Narrator: TheCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music intro) (logo background tingles) >> Hi everybody, welcome back to day three of MWC23, my name is Dave Vellante and we're here live at the Theater of Barcelona, Lisa Martin, David Nicholson, John Furrier's in our studio in Palo Alto. Lot of buzz at the show, the Mobile World Daily Today, front page, Netflix chief hits back in fair share row, Greg Peters, the co-CEO of Netflix, talking about how, "Hey, you guys want to tax us, the telcos want to tax us, well, maybe you should help us pay for some of the content. Your margins are higher, you have a monopoly, you know, we're delivering all this value, you're bundling Netflix in, from a lot of ISPs so hold on, you know, pump the brakes on that tax," so that's the big news. Lockheed Martin, FOSS issues, AI guidelines, says, "AI's not going to take over your job anytime soon." Although I would say, your job's going to be AI-powered for the next five years. We're going to talk about data, we've been talking about the disaggregation of the telco stack, part of that stack is a data layer. John Kreisa is here, the CMO of Couchbase, John, you know, we've talked about all week, the disaggregation of the telco stacks, they got, you know, Silicon and operating systems that are, you know, real time OS, highly reliable, you know, compute infrastructure all the way up through a telemetry stack, et cetera. And that's a proprietary block that's really exploding, it's like the big bang, like we saw in the enterprise 20 years ago and we haven't had much discussion about that data layer, sort of that horizontal data layer, that's the market you play in. You know, Couchbase obviously has a lot of telco customers- >> John: That's right. >> We've seen, you know, Snowflake and others launch telco businesses. What are you seeing when you talk to customers at the show? What are they doing with that data layer? >> Yeah, so they're building applications to drive and power unique experiences for their users, but of course, it all starts with where the data is. So they're building mobile applications where they're stretching it out to the edge and you have to move the data to the edge, you have to have that capability to deliver that highly interactive experience to their customers or for their own internal use cases out to that edge, so seeing a lot of that with Couchbase and with our customers in telco. >> So what do the telcos want to do with data? I mean, they've got the telemetry data- >> John: Yeah. >> Now they frequently complain about the over-the-top providers that have used that data, again like Netflix, to identify customer demand for content and they're mopping that up in a big way, you know, certainly Amazon and shopping Google and ads, you know, they're all using that network. But what do the telcos do today and what do they want to do in the future? They're all talking about monetization, how do they monetize that data? >> Yeah, well, by taking that data, there's insight to be had, right? So by usage patterns and what's happening, just as you said, so they can deliver a better experience. It's all about getting that edge, if you will, on their competition and so taking that data, using it in a smart way, gives them that edge to deliver a better service and then grow their business. >> We're seeing a lot of action at the edge and, you know, the edge can be a Home Depot or a Lowe's store, but it also could be the far edge, could be a, you know, an oil drilling, an oil rig, it could be a racetrack, you know, certainly hospitals and certain, you know, situations. So let's think about that edge, where there's maybe not a lot of connectivity, there might be private networks going in, in the future- >> John: That's right. >> Private 5G networks. What's the data flow look like there? Do you guys have any customers doing those types of use cases? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> And what are they doing with the data? >> Yeah, absolutely, we've got customers all across, so telco and transportation, all kinds of service delivery and healthcare, for example, we've got customers who are delivering healthcare out at the edge where they have a remote location, they're able to deliver healthcare, but as you said, there's not always connectivity, so they need to have the applications, need to continue to run and then sync back once they have that connectivity. So it's really having the ability to deliver a service, reliably and then know that that will be synced back to some central server when they have connectivity- >> So the processing might occur where the data- >> Compute at the edge. >> How do you sync back? What is that technology? >> Yeah, so there's, so within, so Couchbase and Couchbase's case, we have an autonomous sync capability that brings it back to the cloud once they get back to whether it's a private network that they want to run over, or if they're doing it over a public, you know, wifi network, once it determines that there's connectivity and, it can be peer-to-peer sync, so different edge apps communicating with each other and then ultimately communicating back to a central server. >> I mean, the other theme here, of course, I call it the software-defined telco, right? But you got to have, you got to run on something, got to have hardware. So you see companies like AWS putting Outposts, out to the edge, Outposts, you know, doesn't really run a lot of database to mind, I mean, it runs RDS, you know, maybe they're going to eventually work with companies like... I mean, you're a partner of AWS- >> John: We are. >> Right? So do you see that kind of cloud infrastructure that's moving to the edge? Do you see that as an opportunity for companies like Couchbase? >> Yeah, we do. We see customers wanting to push more and more of that compute out to the edge and so partnering with AWS gives us that opportunity and we are certified on Outpost and- >> Oh, you are? >> We are, yeah. >> Okay. >> Absolutely. >> When did that, go down? >> That was last year, but probably early last year- >> So I can run Couchbase at the edge, on Outpost? >> Yeah, that's right. >> I mean, you know, Outpost adoption has been slow, we've reported on that, but are you seeing any traction there? Are you seeing any nibbles? >> Starting to see some interest, yeah, absolutely. And again, it has to be for the right use case, but again, for service delivery, things like healthcare and in transportation, you know, they're starting to see where they want to have that compute, be very close to where the actions happen. >> And you can run on, in the data center, right? >> That's right. >> You can run in the cloud, you know, you see HPE with GreenLake, you see Dell with Apex, that's essentially their Outposts. >> Yeah. >> They're saying, "Hey, we're going to take our whole infrastructure and make it as a service." >> Yeah, yeah. >> Right? And so you can participate in those environments- >> We do. >> And then so you've got now, you know, we call it supercloud, you've got the on-prem, you've got the, you can run in the public cloud, you can run at the edge and you want that consistent experience- >> That's right. >> You know, from a data layer- >> That's right. >> So is that really the strategy for a data company is taking or should be taking, that horizontal layer across all those use cases? >> You do need to think holistically about it, because you need to be able to deliver as a, you know, as a provider, wherever the customer wants to be able to consume that application. So you do have to think about any of the public clouds or private networks and all the way to the edge. >> What's different John, about the telco business versus the traditional enterprise? >> Well, I mean, there's scale, I mean, one thing they're dealing with, particularly for end user-facing apps, you're dealing at a very very high scale and the expectation that you're going to deliver a very interactive experience. So I'd say one thing in particular that we are focusing on, is making sure we deliver that highly interactive experience but it's the scale of the number of users and customers that they have, and the expectation that your application's always going to work. >> Speaking of applications, I mean, it seems like that's where the innovation is going to come from. We saw yesterday, GSMA announced, I think eight APIs telco APIs, you know, we were talking on theCUBE, one of the analysts was like, "Eight, that's nothing," you know, "What do these guys know about developers?" But you know, as Daniel Royston said, "Eight's better than zero." >> Right? >> So okay, so we're starting there, but the point being, it's all about the apps, that's where the innovation's going to come from- >> That's right. >> So what are you seeing there, in terms of building on top of the data app? >> Right, well you have to provide, I mean, have to provide the APIs and the access because it is really, the rubber meets the road, with the developers and giving them the ability to create those really rich applications where they want and create the experiences and innovate and change the way that they're giving those experiences. >> Yeah, so what's your relationship with developers at Couchbase? >> John: Yeah. >> I mean, talk about that a little bit- >> Yeah, yeah, so we have a great relationship with developers, something we've been investing more and more in, in terms of things like developer relations teams and community, Couchbase started in open source, continue to be based on open source projects and of course, those are very developer centric. So we provide all the consistent APIs for developers to create those applications, whether it's something on Couchbase Lite, which is our kind of edge-based database, or how they can sync that data back and we actually automate a lot of that syncing which is a very difficult developer task which lends them to one of the developer- >> What I'm trying to figure out is, what's the telco developer look like? Is that a developer that comes from the enterprise and somebody comes from the blockchain world, or AI or, you know, there really doesn't seem to be a lot of developer talk here, but there's a huge opportunity. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And, you know, I feel like, the telcos kind of remind me of, you know, a traditional legacy company trying to get into the developer world, you know, even Oracle, okay, they bought Sun, they got Java, so I guess they have developers, but you know, IBM for years tried with Bluemix, they had to end up buying Red Hat, really, and that gave them the developer community. >> Yep. >> EMC used to have a thing called EMC Code, which was a, you know, good effort, but eh. And then, you know, VMware always trying to do that, but, so as you move up the stack obviously, you have greater developer affinity. Where do you think the telco developer's going to come from? How's that going to evolve? >> Yeah, it's interesting, and I think they're... To kind of get to your first question, I think they're fairly traditional enterprise developers and when we break that down, we look at it in terms of what the developer persona is, are they a front-end developer? Like they're writing that front-end app, they don't care so much about the infrastructure behind or are they a full stack developer and they're really involved in the entire application development lifecycle? Or are they living at the backend and they're really wanting to just focus in on that data layer? So we lend towards all of those different personas and we think about them in terms of the APIs that we create, so that's really what the developers are for telcos is, there's a combination of those front-end and full stack developers and so for them to continue to innovate they need to appeal to those developers and that's technology, like Couchbase, is what helps them do that. >> Yeah and you think about the Apples, you know, the app store model or Apple sort of says, "Okay, here's a developer kit, go create." >> John: Yeah. >> "And then if it's successful, you're going to be successful and we're going to take a vig," okay, good model. >> John: Yeah. >> I think I'm hearing, and maybe I misunderstood this, but I think it was the CEO or chairman of Ericsson on the day one keynotes, was saying, "We are going to monetize the, essentially the telemetry data, you know, through APIs, we're going to charge for that," you know, maybe that's not the best approach, I don't know, I think there's got to be some innovation on top. >> John: Yeah. >> Now maybe some of these greenfield telcos are going to do like, you take like a dish networks, what they're doing, they're really trying to drive development layers. So I think it's like this wild west open, you know, community that's got to be formed and right now it's very unclear to me, do you have any insights there? >> I think it is more, like you said, Wild West, I think there's no emerging standard per se for across those different company types and sort of different pieces of the industry. So consequently, it does need to form some more standards in order to really help it grow and I think you're right, you have to have the right APIs and the right access in order to properly monetize, you have to attract those developers or you're not going to be able to monetize properly. >> Do you think that if, in thinking about your business and you know, you've always sold to telcos, but now it's like there's this transformation going on in telcos, will that become an increasingly larger piece of your business or maybe even a more important piece of your business? Or it's kind of be steady state because it's such a slow moving industry? >> No, it is a big and increasing piece of our business, I think telcos like other enterprises, want to continue to innovate and so they look to, you know, technologies like, Couchbase document database that allows them to have more flexibility and deliver the speed that they need to deliver those kinds of applications. So we see a lot of migration off of traditional legacy infrastructure in order to build that new age interface and new age experience that they want to deliver. >> A lot of buzz in Silicon Valley about open AI and Chat GPT- >> Yeah. >> You know, what's your take on all that? >> Yeah, we're looking at it, I think it's exciting technology, I think there's a lot of applications that are kind of, a little, sort of innovate traditional interfaces, so for example, you can train Chat GPT to create code, sample code for Couchbase, right? You can go and get it to give you that sample app which gets you a headstart or you can actually get it to do a better job of, you know, sorting through your documentation, like Chat GPT can do a better job of helping you get access. So it improves the experience overall for developers, so we're excited about, you know, what the prospect of that is. >> So you're playing around with it, like everybody is- >> Yeah. >> And potentially- >> Looking at use cases- >> Ways tO integrate, yeah. >> Hundred percent. >> So are we. John, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Always great to see you, my friend. >> Great, thanks very much. >> All right, you're welcome. All right, keep it right there, theCUBE will be back live from Barcelona at the theater. SiliconANGLE's continuous coverage of MWC23. Go to siliconangle.com for all the news, theCUBE.net is where all the videos are, keep it right there. (cheerful upbeat music outro)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Supercloud 2. This is Dave Vellante. We're here exploring the intersection of data and analytics in the future of cloud and data. In this segment, we're going to look deeper into the life sciences business with Jesse Cugliotta, who leads the Healthcare and Life Sciences industry practice at Snowflake. And Nicholas Nick Taylor, who's the executive director of Informatics at Ionis Pharmaceuticals. Gentlemen, thanks for coming in theCUBE and participating in the program. Really appreciate it. >> Thank you for having us- >> Thanks for having me. >> You're very welcome, okay, we're go really try to look at data sharing as a use case and try to understand what's happening in the healthcare industry generally and specifically, how Nick thinks about sharing data in a governed fashion whether tapping the capabilities of multiple clouds is advantageous long term or presents more challenges than the effort is worth. And to start, Jesse, you lead this industry practice for Snowflake and it's a challenging and vibrant area. It's one that's hyper-focused on data privacy. So the first question is, you know there was a time when healthcare and other regulated industries wouldn't go near the cloud. What are you seeing today in the industry around cloud adoption and specifically multi-cloud adoption? >> Yeah, for years I've heard that healthcare and life sciences has been cloud diverse, but in spite of all of that if you look at a lot of aspects of this industry today, they've been running in the cloud for over 10 years now. Particularly when you look at CRM technologies or HR or HCM, even clinical technologies like EDC or ETMF. And it's interesting that you mentioned multi-cloud as well because this has always been an underlying reality especially within life sciences. This industry grows through acquisition where companies are looking to boost their future development pipeline either by buying up smaller biotechs, they may have like a late or a mid-stage promising candidate. And what typically happens is the larger pharma could then use their commercial muscle and their regulatory experience to move it to approvals and into the market. And I think the last few decades of cheap capital certainly accelerated that trend over the last couple of years. But this typically means that these new combined institutions may have technologies that are running on multiple clouds or multiple cloud strategies in various different regions to your point. And what we've often found is that they're not planning to standardize everything onto a single cloud provider. They're often looking for technologies that embrace this multi-cloud approach and work seamlessly across them. And I think this is a big reason why we, here at Snowflake, we've seen such strong momentum and growth across this industry because healthcare and life science has actually been one of our fastest growing sectors over the last couple of years. And a big part of that is in fact that we run on not only all three major cloud providers, but individual accounts within each and any one of them, they had the ability to communicate and interoperate with one another, like a globally interconnected database. >> Great, thank you for that setup. And so Nick, tell us more about your role and Ionis Pharma please. >> Sure. So I've been at Ionis for around five years now. You know, when when I joined it was, the IT department was pretty small. There wasn't a lot of warehousing, there wasn't a lot of kind of big data there. We saw an opportunity with Snowflake pretty early on as a provider that would be a lot of benefit for us, you know, 'cause we're small, wanted something that was fairly hands off. You know, I remember the days where you had to get a lot of DBAs in to fine tune your databases, make sure everything was running really, really well. The notion that there's, you know, no indexes to tune, right? There's very few knobs and dials, you can turn on Snowflake. That was appealing that, you know, it just kind of worked. So we found a use case to bring the platform in. We basically used it as a logging replacement as a Splunk kind of replacement with a platform called Elysium Analytics as a way to just get it in the door and give us the opportunity to solve a real world use case, but also to help us start to experiment using Snowflake as a platform. It took us a while to A, get the funding to bring it in, but B, build the momentum behind it. But, you know, as we experimented we added more data in there, we ran a few more experiments, we piloted in few more applications, we really saw the power of the platform and now, we are becoming a commercial organization. And with that comes a lot of major datasets. And so, you know, we really see Snowflake as being a very important part of our ecology going forward to help us build out our infrastructure. >> Okay, and you are running, your group runs on Azure, it's kind of mono cloud, single cloud, but others within Ionis are using other clouds, but you're not currently, you know, collaborating in terms of data sharing. And I wonder if you could talk about how your data needs have evolved over the past decade. I know you came from another highly regulated industry in financial services. So what's changed? You sort of touched on this before, you had these, you know, very specialized individuals who were, you know, DBAs, and, you know, could tune databases and the like, so that's evolved, but how has generally your needs evolved? Just kind of make an observation over the last, you know, five or seven years. What have you seen? >> Well, we, I wasn't in a group that did a lot of warehousing. It was more like online trade capture, but, you know, it was very much on-prem. You know, being in the cloud is very much a dirty word back then. I know that's changed since I've left. But in, you know, we had major, major teams of everyone who could do everything, right. As I mentioned in the pharma organization, there's a lot fewer of us. So the data needs there are very different, right? It's, we have a lot of SaaS applications. One of the difficulties with bringing a lot of SaaS applications on board is obviously data integration. So making sure the data is the same between them. But one of the big problems is joining the data across those SaaS applications. So one of the benefits, one of the things that we use Snowflake for is to basically take data out of these SaaS applications and load them into a warehouse so we can do those joins. So we use technologies like Boomi, we use technologies like Fivetran, like DBT to bring this data all into one place and start to kind of join that basically, allow us to do, run experiments, do analysis, basically take better, find better use for our data that was siloed in the past. You mentioned- >> Yeah. And just to add on to Nick's point there. >> Go ahead. >> That's actually something very common that we're seeing across the industry is because a lot of these SaaS applications that you mentioned, Nick, they're with from vendors that are trying to build their own ecosystem in walled garden. And by definition, many of them do not want to integrate with one another. So from a, you know, from a data platform vendor's perspective, we see this as a huge opportunity to help organizations like Ionis and others kind of deal with the challenges that Nick is speaking about because if the individual platform vendors are never going to make that part of their strategy, we see it as a great way to add additional value to these customers. >> Well, this data sharing thing is interesting. There's a lot of walled gardens out there. Oracle is a walled garden, AWS in many ways is a walled garden. You know, Microsoft has its walled garden. You could argue Snowflake is a walled garden. But the, what we're seeing and the whole reason behind the notion of super-cloud is we're creating an abstraction layer where you actually, in this case for this use case, can share data in a governed manner. Let's forget about the cross-cloud for a moment. I'll come back to that, but I wonder, Nick, if you could talk about how you are sharing data, again, Snowflake sort of, it's, I look at Snowflake like the app store, Apple, we're going to control everything, we're going to guarantee with data clean rooms and governance and the standards that we've created within that platform, we're going to make sure that it's safe for you to share data in this highly regulated industry. Are you doing that today? And take us through, you know, the considerations that you have in that regard. >> So it's kind of early days for us in Snowflake in general, but certainly in data sharing, we have a couple of examples. So data marketplace, you know, that's a great invention. It's, I've been a small IT shop again, right? The fact that we are able to just bring down terabyte size datasets straight into our Snowflake and run analytics directly on that is huge, right? The fact that we don't have to FTP these massive files around run jobs that may break, being able to just have that on tap is huge for us. We've recently been talking to one of our CRO feeds- CRO organizations about getting their data feeds in. Historically, this clinical trial data that comes in on an FTP file, we have to process it, take it through the platforms, put it into the warehouse. But one of the CROs that we talked to recently when we were reinvestigate in what data opportunities they have, they were a Snowflake customer and we are, I think, the first production customer they have, have taken that feed. So they're basically exposing their tables of data that historically came in these FTP files directly into our Snowflake instance now. We haven't taken advantage of that. It only actually flipped the switch about three or four weeks ago. But that's pretty big for us again, right? We don't have to worry about maintaining those jobs that take those files in. We don't have to worry about the jobs that take those and shove them on the warehouse. We now have a feed that's directly there that we can use a tool like DBT to push through directly into our model. And then the third avenue that's came up, actually fairly recently as well was genetics data. So genetics data that's highly, highly regulated. We had to be very careful with that. And we had a conversation with Snowflake about the data white rooms practice, and we see that as a pretty interesting opportunity. We are having one organization run genetic analysis being able to send us those genetic datasets, but then there's another organization that's actually has the in quotes "metadata" around that, so age, ethnicity, location, et cetera. And being able to join those two datasets through some kind of mechanism would be really beneficial to the organization. Being able to build a data white room so we can put that genetic data in a secure place, anonymize it, and then share the amalgamated data back out in a way that's able to be joined to the anonymized metadata, that could be pretty huge for us as well. >> Okay, so this is interesting. So you talk about FTP, which was the common way to share data. And so you basically, it's so, I got it now you take it and do whatever you want with it. Now we're talking, Jesse, about sharing the same copy of live data. How common is that use case in your industry? >> It's become very common over the last couple of years. And I think a big part of it is having the right technology to do it effectively. You know, as Nick mentioned, historically, this was done by people sending files around. And the challenge with that approach, of course, while there are multiple challenges, one, every time you send a file around your, by definition creating a copy of the data because you have to pull it out of your system of record, put it into a file, put it on some server where somebody else picks it up. And by definition at that point you've lost governance. So this creates challenges in general hesitation to doing so. It's not that it hasn't happened, but the other challenge with it is that the data's no longer real time. You know, you're working with a copy of data that was as fresh as at the time at that when that was actually extracted. And that creates limitations in terms of how effective this can be. What we're starting to see now with some of our customers is live sharing of information. And there's two aspects of that that are important. One is that you're not actually physically creating the copy and sending it to someone else, you're actually exposing it from where it exists and allowing another consumer to interact with it from their own account that could be in another region, some are running in another cloud. So this concept of super-cloud or cross-cloud could becoming realized here. But the other important aspect of it is that when that other- when that other entity is querying your data, they're seeing it in a real time state. And this is particularly important when you think about use cases like supply chain planning, where you're leveraging data across various different enterprises. If I'm a manufacturer or if I'm a contract manufacturer and I can see the actual inventory positions of my clients, of my distributors, of the levels of consumption at the pharmacy or the hospital that gives me a lot of indication as to how my demand profile is changing over time versus working with a static picture that may have been from three weeks ago. And this has become incredibly important as supply chains are becoming more constrained and the ability to plan accurately has never been more important. >> Yeah. So the race is on to solve these problems. So it start, we started with, hey, okay, cloud, Dave, we're going to simplify database, we're going to put it in the cloud, give virtually infinite resources, separate compute from storage. Okay, check, we got that. Now we've moved into sort of data clean rooms and governance and you've got an ecosystem that's forming around this to make it safer to share data. And then, you know, nirvana, at least near term nirvana is we're going to build data applications and we're going to be able to share live data and then you start to get into monetization. Do you see, Nick, in the near future where I know you've got relationships with, for instance, big pharma like AstraZeneca, do you see a situation where you start sharing data with them? Is that in the near term? Is that more long term? What are the considerations in that regard? >> I mean, it's something we've been thinking about. We haven't actually addressed that yet. Yeah, I could see situations where, you know, some of these big relationships where we do need to share a lot of data, it would be very nice to be able to just flick a switch and share our data assets across to those organizations. But, you know, that's a ways off for us now. We're mainly looking at bringing data in at the moment. >> One of the things that we've seen in financial services in particular, and Jesse, I'd love to get your thoughts on this, is companies like Goldman or Capital One or Nasdaq taking their stack, their software, their tooling actually putting it on the cloud and facing it to their customers and selling that as a new monetization vector as part of their digital or business transformation. Are you seeing that Jesse at all in healthcare or is it happening today or do you see a day when that happens or is healthier or just too scary to do that? >> No, we're seeing the early stages of this as well. And I think it's for some of the reasons we talked about earlier. You know, it's a much more secure way to work with a colleague if you don't have to copy your data and potentially expose it. And some of the reasons that people have historically copied that data is that they needed to leverage some sort of algorithm or application that a third party was providing. So maybe someone was predicting the ideal location and run a clinical trial for this particular rare disease category where there are only so many patients around the world that may actually be candidates for this disease. So you have to pick the ideal location. Well, sending the dataset to do so, you know, would involve a fairly complicated process similar to what Nick was mentioning earlier. If the company who was providing the logic or the algorithm to determine that location could bring that algorithm to you and you run it against your own data, that's a much more ideal and a much safer and more secure way for this industry to actually start to work with some of these partners and vendors. And that's one of the things that we're looking to enable going into this year is that, you know, the whole concept should be bring the logic to your data versus your data to the logic and the underlying sharing mechanisms that we've spoken about are actually what are powering that today. >> And so thank you for that, Jesse. >> Yes, Dave. >> And so Nick- Go ahead please. >> Yeah, if I could add, yeah, if I could add to that, that's something certainly we've been thinking about. In fact, we'd started talking to Snowflake about that a couple of years ago. We saw the power there again of the platform to be able to say, well, could we, we were thinking in more of a data share, but could we share our data out to say an AI/ML vendor, have them do the analytics and then share the data, the results back to us. Now, you know, there's more powerful mechanisms to do that within the Snowflake ecosystem now, but you know, we probably wouldn't need to have onsite AI/ML people, right? Some of that stuff's very sophisticated, expensive resources, hard to find, you know, it's much better for us to find a company that would be able to build those analytics, maintain those analytics for us. And you know, we saw an opportunity to do that a couple years ago and we're kind of excited about the opportunity there that we can just basically do it with a no op, right? We share the data route, we have the analytics done, we get the result back and it's just fairly seamless. >> I mean, I could have a whole another Cube session on this, guys, but I mean, I just did a a session with Andy Thurai, a Constellation research about how difficult it's been for organization to get ROI because they don't have the expertise in house so they want to either outsource it or rely on vendor R&D companies to inject that AI and machine intelligence directly into applications. My follow-up question to you Nick is, when you think about, 'cause Jesse was talking about, you know, let the data basically stay where it is and you know bring the compute to that data. If that data lives on different clouds, and maybe it's not your group, but maybe it's other parts of Ionis or maybe it's your partners like AstraZeneca, or you know, the AI/ML partners and they're potentially on other clouds or that data is on other clouds. Do you see that, again, coming back to super-cloud, do you see it as an advantage to be able to have a consistent experience across those clouds? Or is that just kind of get in the way and make things more complex? What's your take on that, Nick? >> Well, from the vendors, so from the client side, it's kind of seamless with Snowflake for us. So we know for a fact that one of the datasets we have at the moment, Compile, which is a, the large multi terabyte dataset I was talking about. They're on AWS on the East Coast and we are on Azure on the West Coast. And they had to do a few tweaks in the background to make sure the data was pushed over from, but from my point of view, the data just exists, right? So for me, I think it's hugely beneficial that Snowflake supports this kind of infrastructure, right? We don't have to jump through hoops to like, okay, well, we'll download it here and then re-upload it here. They already have the mechanism in the background to do these multi-cloud shares. So it's not important for us internally at the moment. I could see potentially at some point where we start linking across different groups in the organization that do have maybe Amazon or Google Cloud, but certainly within our providers. We know for a fact that they're on different services at the moment and it just works. >> Yeah, and we learned from Benoit Dageville, who came into the studio on August 9th with first Supercloud in 2022 that Snowflake uses a single global instance across regions and across clouds, yeah, whether or not you can query across you know, big regions, it just depends, right? It depends on latency. You might have to make a copy or maybe do some tweaks in the background. But guys, we got to jump, I really appreciate your time. Really thoughtful discussion on the future of data and cloud, specifically within healthcare and pharma. Thank you for your time. >> Thanks- >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, this is Dave Vellante for theCUBE team and my co-host, John Furrier. Keep it right there for more action at Supercloud 2. (upbeat music)

foreign welcome back to re invent 2022 we're wrapping up four days well one evening and three solid days wall-to-wall of cube coverage I'm Dave vellante John furrier's birthday is today he's on a plane to London to go see his nephew get married his his great Sister Janet awesome family the furriers uh spanning the globe and uh and John I know you wanted to be here you're watching in Newark or you were waiting to uh to get in the plane so all the best to you happy birthday one year the Amazon PR people brought a cake out to celebrate John's birthday because he's always here at AWS re invented his birthday so I'm really pleased to have two really special guests uh former Cube host Cube Alum great wikibon contributor Stu miniman now with red hat still good to see you again great to be here Dave yeah I was here for that cake uh the twitterverse uh was uh really helping to celebrate John's birthday today and uh you know always great to be here with you and then with this you know Awesome event this week and friend of the cube of many time Cube often Cube contributor as here's a cube analyst this week as his own consultancy sarbj johal great to see you thanks for coming on good to see you Dave uh great to see you stu I'm always happy to participate in these discussions and um I enjoy the discussion every time so this is kind of cool because you know usually the last day is a getaway day and this is a getaway day but this place is still packed I mean it's I mean yeah it's definitely lighter you can at least walk and not get slammed but I subjit I'm going to start with you I I wanted to have you as the the tail end here because cause you participated in the analyst sessions you've been watching this event from from the first moment and now you've got four days of the Kool-Aid injection but you're also talking to customers developers Partners the ecosystem where do you want to go what's your big takeaways I think big takeaways that Amazon sort of innovation machine is chugging along they are I was listening to some of the accessions and when I was back to my room at nine so they're filling the holes in some areas but in some areas they're moving forward there's a lot to fix still it doesn't seem like that it seems like we are done with the cloud or The Innovation is done now we are building at the millisecond level so where do you go next there's a lot of room to grow on the storage side on the network side uh the improvements we need and and also making sure that the software which is you know which fits the hardware like there's a specialized software um sorry specialized hardware for certain software you know so there was a lot of talk around that and I attended some of those sessions where I asked the questions around like we have a specialized database for each kind of workload specialized processes processors for each kind of workload yeah the graviton section and actually the the one interesting before I forget that the arbitration was I asked that like why there are so many so many databases and IRS for the egress costs and all that stuff can you are you guys thinking about reducing that you know um the answer was no egress cost is not a big big sort of uh um show stopper for many of the customers but but the from all that sort of little discussion with with the folks sitting who build these products over there was that the plethora of choice is given to the customers to to make them feel that there's no vendor lock-in so if you are using some open source you know um soft software it can be on the you know platform side or can be database side you have database site you have that option at AWS so this is a lot there because I always thought that that AWS is the mother of all lock-ins but it's got an ecosystem and we're going to talk about exactly we'll talk about Stu what's working within AWS when you talk to customers and where are the challenges yeah I I got a comment on open source Dave of course there because I mean look we criticized to Amazon for years about their lack of contribution they've gotten better they're doing more in open source but is Amazon the mother of all lock-ins many times absolutely there's certain people inside Amazon I'm saying you know many of us talk Cloud native they're like well let's do Amazon native which means you're like full stack is things from Amazon and do things the way that we want to do things and you know I talk to a lot of customers they use more than one Cloud Dave and therefore certain things absolutely I want to Leverage The Innovation that Amazon has brought I do think we're past building all the main building blocks in many ways we are like in day two yes Amazon is fanatically customer focused and will always stay that way but you know there wasn't anything that jumped out at me last year or this year that was like Wow new category whole new way of thinking about something we're in a vocals last year Dave said you know we have over 200 services and if we listen to you the customer we'd have over two thousand his session this week actually got some great buzz from my friends in the serverless ecosystem they love some of the things tying together we're using data the next flywheel that we're going to see for the next 10 years Amazon's at the center of the cloud ecosystem in the IT world so you know there's a lot of good things here and to your point Dave the ecosystem one of the things I always look at is you know was there a booth that they're all going to be crying in their beer after Amazon made an announcement there was not a tech vendor that I saw this week that was like oh gosh there was an announcement and all of a sudden our business is gone where I did hear some rumbling is Amazon might be the next GSI to really move forward and we've seen all the gsis pushing really deep into supporting Cloud bringing workloads to the cloud and there's a little bit of rumbling as to that balance between what Amazon will do and their uh their go to market so a couple things so I think I think we all agree that a lot of the the announcements here today were taping seams right I call it and as it relates to the mother of all lock-in the reason why I say that it's it's obviously very much a pejorative compare Oracle company you know really well with Amazon's lock-in for Amazon's lock-in is about bringing this ecosystem together so that you actually have Choice Within the the house so you don't have to leave you know there's a there's a lot to eat at the table yeah you look at oracle's ecosystem it's like yeah you know oracle is oracle's ecosystem so so that is how I think they do lock in customers by incenting them not to leave because there's so much Choice Dave I agree with you a thousand I mean I'm here I'm a I'm a good partner of AWS and all of the partners here want to be successful with Amazon and Amazon is open to that it's not our way or get out which Oracle tries how much do you extract from the overall I.T budget you know are you a YouTube where you give the people that help you create a large sum of the money YouTube hasn't been all that profitable Amazon I think is doing a good balance of the ecosystem makes money you know we used to talk Dave about you know how much dollars does VMware make versus there um I think you know Amazon is a much bigger you know VMware 2.0 we used to think talk about all the time that VMware for every dollar spent on VMware licenses 15 or or 12 or 20 were spent in the ecosystem I would think the ratio is even higher here sarbji and an Oracle I would say it's I don't know yeah actually 1 to 0.5 maybe I don't know but I want to pick on your discussion about the the ecosystem the the partner ecosystem is so it's it's robust strong because it's wider I was I was not saying that there's no lock-in with with Amazon right AWS there's lock-in there's lock-in with everything there's lock-in with open source as well but but the point is that they're they're the the circle is so big you don't feel like locked in but they're playing smart as well they're bringing in the software the the platforms from the open source they're picking up those packages and saying we'll bring it in and cater that to you through AWS make it better perform better and also throw in their custom chips on top of that hey this MySQL runs better here so like what do you do I said oh Oracle because it's oracle's product if you will right so they are I think think they're filing or not slenders from their go to market strategy from their engineering and they listen to they're listening to customers like very closely and that has sort of side effects as well listening to customers creates a sprawl of services they have so many services and I criticized them last year for calling everything a new service I said don't call it a new service it's a feature of a existing service sure a lot of features a lot of features this is egress our egress costs a real problem or is it just the the on-prem guys picking at the the scab I mean what do you hear from customers so I mean Dave you know I I look at what Corey Quinn talks about all the time and Amazon charges on that are more expensive than any other Cloud the cloud providers and partly because Amazon is you know probably not a word they'd use they are dominant when it comes to the infrastructure space and therefore they do want to make it a little bit harder to do that they can get away with it um because um yeah you know we've seen some of the cloud providers have special Partnerships where you can actually you know leave and you're not going to be charged and Amazon they've been a little bit more flexible but absolutely I've heard customers say that they wish some good tunning and tongue-in-cheek stuff what else you got we lay it on us so do our players okay this year I think the focus was on the upside it's shifting gradually this was more focused on offside there were less talk of of developers from the main stage from from all sort of quadrants if you will from all Keynotes right so even Werner this morning he had a little bit for he was talking about he he was talking he he's job is to Rally up the builders right yeah so he talks about the go build right AWS pipes I thought was kind of cool then I said like I'm making glue easier I thought that was good you know I know some folks don't use that I I couldn't attend the whole session but but I heard in between right so it is really adopt or die you know I am Cloud Pro for last you know 10 years and I think it's the best model for a technology consumption right um because of economies of scale but more importantly because of division of labor because of specialization because you can't afford to hire the best security people the best you know the arm chip designers uh you can't you know there's one actually I came up with a bumper sticker you guys talked about bumper sticker I came up with that like last couple of weeks The Innovation favorite scale they have scale they have Innovation so that's where the Innovation is and it's it's not there again they actually say the market sets the price Market you as a customer don't set the price the vendor doesn't set the price Market sets the price so if somebody's complaining about their margins or egress and all that I think that's BS um yeah I I have a few more notes on the the partner if you you concur yeah Dave you know with just coming back to some of this commentary about like can Amazon actually enable something we used to call like Community clouds uh your companies like you know Goldman and NASDAQ and the like where Industries will actually be able to share data uh and you know expand the usage and you know Amazon's going to help drive that API economy forward some so it's good to see those things because you know we all know you know all of us are smarter than just any uh single company together so again some of that's open source but some of that is you know I think Amazon is is you know allowing Innovation to thrive I think the word you're looking for is super cloud there well yeah I mean it it's uh Dave if you want to go there with the super cloud because you know there's a metaphor for exactly what you described NASDAQ Goldman Sachs we you know and and you know a number of other companies that are few weeks at the Berkeley Sky Computing paper yeah you know that's a former supercloud Dave Linthicum calls it metacloud I'm not really careful I mean you know I go back to the the challenge we've been you know working at for a decade is the distributed architecture you know if you talk about AI architectures you know what lives in the cloud what lives at the edge where do we train things where do we do inferences um locations should matter a lot less Amazon you know I I didn't hear a lot about it this show but when they came out with like local zones and oh my gosh out you know all the things that Amazon is building to push out to the edge and also enabling that technology and software and the partner ecosystem helps expand that and Pull It in it's no longer you know Dave it was Hotel California all of the data eventually is going to end up in the public cloud and lock it in it's like I don't think that's going to be the case we know that there will be so much data out at the edge Amazon absolutely is super important um there some of those examples we're giving it's not necessarily multi-cloud but there's collaboration happening like in the healthcare world you know universities and hospitals can all share what they're doing uh regardless of you know where they live well Stephen Armstrong in the analyst session did say that you know we're going to talk about multi-cloud we're not going to lead with it necessarily but we are going to actually talk about it and that's different to your points too than in the fullness of time all the data will be in the cloud that's a new narrative but go ahead yeah actually Amazon is a leader in the cloud so if they push the cloud even if they don't say AWS or Amazon with it they benefit from it right and and the narrative is that way there's the proof is there right so again Innovation favorite scale there are chips which are being made for high scale their software being tweaked for high scale you as a Bank of America or for the Chrysler as a typical Enterprise you cannot afford to do those things in-house what cloud providers can I'm not saying just AWS Google cloud is there Azure guys are there and few others who are behind them and and you guys are there as well so IBM has IBM by the way congratulations to your red hat I know but IBM won the award um right you know very good partner and yeah but yeah people are dragging their feet people usually do on the change and they are in denial denial they they drag their feet and they came in IBM director feed the cave Den Dell drag their feed the cave in yeah you mean by Dragon vs cloud deniers cloud deniers right so server Huggers I call them but they they actually are sitting in Amazon Cloud Marketplace everybody is buying stuff from there the marketplace is the new model OKAY Amazon created the marketplace for b2c they are leading the marketplace of B2B as well on the technology side and other people are copying it so there are multiple marketplaces now so now actually it's like if you're in in a mobile app development there are two main platforms Android and Apple you first write the application for Apple right then for Android hex same here as a technology provider as and I I and and I actually you put your stuff to AWS first then you go anywhere else yeah they are later yeah the Enterprise app store is what we've wanted for a long time the question is is Amazon alone the Enterprise app store or are they partner of a of a larger portfolio because there's a lot of SAS companies out there uh that that play into yeah what we need well and this is what you're talking about the future but I just want to make a point about the past you talking about dragging their feet because the Cube's been following this and Stu you remember this in 2013 IBM actually you know got in a big fight with with Amazon over the CIA deal you know and it all became public judge wheeler eviscerated you know IBM and it ended up IBM ended up buying you know soft layer and then we know what happened there and it Joe Tucci thought the cloud was Mosey right so it's just amazing to see we have booksellers you know VMware called them books I wasn't not all of them are like talking about how great Partnerships they are it's amazing like you said sub GC and IBM uh with the the GSI you know Partnership of the year but what you guys were just talking about was the future and that's what I wanted to get to is because you know Amazon's been leading the way I I was listening to Werner this morning and that just reminded me of back in the days when we used to listen to IBM educate us give us a master class on system design and decoupled systems and and IO and everything else now Amazon is you know the master educator and it got me thinking how long will that last you know will they go the way of you know the other you know incumbents will they be disrupted or will they you know keep innovating maybe it's going to take 10 or 20 years I don't know yeah I mean Dave you actually you did some research I believe it was a year or so ago yeah but what will stop Amazon and the one thing that worries me a little bit um is the two Pizza teams when you have over 202 Pizza teams the amount of things that each one of those groups needs to take care of was more than any human could take care of people burn out they run out of people how many amazonians only last two or three years and then leave because it is tough I bumped into plenty of friends of mine that have been you know six ten years at Amazon and love it but it is a tough culture and they are driving werner's keynote I thought did look to from a product standpoint you could say tape over some of the seams some of those solutions to bring Beyond just a single product and bring them together and leverage data so there are some signs that they might be able to get past some of those limitations but I still worry structurally culturally there could be some challenges for Amazon to keep the momentum going especially with the global economic impact that we are likely to see in the next year bring us home I think the future side like we could talk about the vendors all day right to serve the community out there I think we should talk about how what's the future of technology consumption from the consumer side so from the supplier side just a quick note I think the only danger AWS has has that that you know Fred's going after them you know too big you know like we will break you up and that can cause some disruption there other than that I think they they have some more steam to go for a few more years at least before we start thinking about like oh this thing is falling apart or anything like that so they have a lot more they have momentum and it's continuing so okay from the I think game is on retail by the way is going to get disrupted before AWS yeah go ahead from the buyer's side I think um the the future of the sort of Technology consumption is based on the paper uh use and they actually are turning all their services to uh they are sort of becoming serverless behind the scenes right all analytics service they had one service left they they did that this year so every service is serverless so that means you pay exactly for the amount you use the compute the iops the the storage so all these three layers of course Network we talked about the egress stuff and that's a problem there because of the network design mainly because Google has a flatter design and they have lower cost so so they are actually squeezing the their their designing this their services in a way that you don't waste any resources as a buyer so for example very simple example when early earlier In This Cloud you will get a VM right in Cloud that's how we started so and you can get 20 use 20 percent of the VM 80 is getting wasted that's not happening now that that has been reduced to the most extent so now your VM grows as you grow the usage and if you go higher than the tier you picked they will charge you otherwise they will not charge you extra so that's why there's still a lot of instances like many different types you have to pick one I think the future is that those instances will go away the the instance will be formed for you on the fly so that is the future serverless all right give us bumper sticker Stu and then Serb G I'll give you my quick one and then we'll wrap yeah so just Dave to play off of sharp G and to wrap it up you actually wrote about it on your preview post for here uh serverless we're talking about how developers think about things um and you know Amazon in many ways you know is the new default server uh you know for the cloud um and containerization fits into the whole serverless Paradigm uh it's the space that I live in uh you know every day here and you know I was happy to see the last few years serverless and containers there's a blurring a line and you know subject we're still going to see VMS for a long time yeah yeah we will see that so give us give us your book Instagram my number six is innovation favorite scale that's my bumper sticker and and Amazon has that but also I I want everybody else to like the viewers to take a look at the the Google Cloud as well as well as IBM with others like maybe you have a better price to Performance there for certain workloads and by the way one vendor cannot do it alone we know that for sure the market is so big there's a lot of room for uh Red Hats of the world and and and Microsoft's the world to innovate so keep an eye on them they we need the competition actually and that's why competition Will Keep Us to a place where Market sets the price one vendor doesn't so the only only danger is if if AWS is a monopoly then I will be worried I think ecosystems are the Hallmark of a great Cloud company and Amazon's got the the biggest and baddest ecosystem and I think the other thing to watch for is Industries building on top of the cloud you mentioned the Goldman Sachs NASDAQ Capital One and Warner media these all these industries are building their own clouds and that's where the real money is going to be made in the latter half of the 2020s all right we're a wrap this is Dave Valente I want to first of all thank thanks to our great sponsors AWS for for having us here this is our 10th year at the cube AMD you know sponsoring as well the the the cube here Accenture sponsor to third set upstairs upstairs on the fifth floor all the ecosystem partners that came on the cube this week and supported our mission for free content our content is always free we try to give more to the community and we we take back so go to thecube.net and you'll see all these videos go to siliconangle com for all the news wikibon.com I publish weekly a breaking analysis series I want to thank our amazing crew here you guys we have probably 30 35 people unbelievable our awesome last session John Walls uh Paul Gillen Lisa Martin Savannah Peterson John Furrier who's on a plane we appreciate Andrew and Leonard in our ear and all of our our crew Palo Alto Boston and across the country thank you so much really appreciate it all right we are a wrap AWS re invent 2022 we'll see you in two weeks we'll see you two weeks at Palo Alto ignite back here in Vegas thanks for watching thecube the leader in Enterprise and emerging Tech coverage [Music]

hello I'm John Furrier with thecube and welcome to this special presentation of the cube and Horizon 3.ai they're announcing a global partner first approach expanding their successful pen testing product Net Zero you're going to hear from leading experts in their staff their CEO positioning themselves for a successful Channel distribution expansion internationally in Europe Middle East Africa and Asia Pacific in this Cube special presentation you'll hear about the expansion the expanse partner program giving Partners a unique opportunity to offer Net Zero to their customers Innovation and Pen testing is going International with Horizon 3.ai enjoy the program [Music] welcome back everyone to the cube and Horizon 3.ai special presentation I'm John Furrier host of thecube we're here with Jennifer Lee head of Channel sales at Horizon 3.ai Jennifer welcome to the cube thanks for coming on great well thank you for having me so big news around Horizon 3.aa driving Channel first commitment you guys are expanding the channel partner program to include all kinds of new rewards incentives training programs help educate you know Partners really drive more recurring Revenue certainly cloud and Cloud scale has done that you got a great product that fits into that kind of Channel model great Services you can wrap around it good stuff so let's get into it what are you guys doing what are what are you guys doing with this news why is this so important yeah for sure so um yeah we like you said we recently expanded our Channel partner program um the driving force behind it was really just um to align our like you said our Channel first commitment um and creating awareness around the importance of our partner ecosystems um so that's it's really how we go to market is is through the channel and a great International Focus I've talked with the CEO so you know about the solution and he broke down all the action on why it's important on the product side but why now on the go to market change what's the what's the why behind this big this news on the channel yeah for sure so um we are doing this now really to align our business strategy which is built on the concept of enabling our partners to create a high value high margin business on top of our platform and so um we offer a solution called node zero it provides autonomous pen testing as a service and it allows organizations to continuously verify their security posture um so we our company vision we have this tagline that states that our pen testing enables organizations to see themselves Through The Eyes of an attacker and um we use the like the attacker's perspective to identify exploitable weaknesses and vulnerabilities so we created this partner program from a perspective of the partner so the partner's perspective and we've built It Through The Eyes of our partner right so we're prioritizing really what the partner is looking for and uh will ensure like Mutual success for us yeah the partners always want to get in front of the customers and bring new stuff to them pen tests have traditionally been really expensive uh and so bringing it down in one to a service level that's one affordable and has flexibility to it allows a lot of capability so I imagine people getting excited by it so I have to ask you about the program What specifically are you guys doing can you share any details around what it means for the partners what they get what's in it for them can you just break down some of the mechanics and mechanisms or or details yeah yep um you know we're really looking to create business alignment um and like I said establish Mutual success with our partners so we've got two um two key elements that we were really focused on um that we bring to the partners so the opportunity the profit margin expansion is one of them and um a way for our partners to really differentiate themselves and stay relevant in the market so um we've restructured our discount model really um you know highlighting profitability and maximizing profitability and uh this includes our deal registration we've we've created deal registration program we've increased discount for partners who take part in our partner certification uh trainings and we've we have some other partner incentives uh that we we've created that that's going to help out there we've we put this all so we've recently Gone live with our partner portal um it's a Consolidated experience for our partners where they can access our our sales tools and we really view our partners as an extension of our sales and Technical teams and so we've extended all of our our training material that we use internally we've made it available to our partners through our partner portal um we've um I'm trying I'm thinking now back what else is in that partner portal here we've got our partner certification information so all the content that's delivered during that training can be found in the portal we've got deal registration uh um co-branded marketing materials pipeline management and so um this this portal gives our partners a One-Stop place to to go to find all that information um and then just really quickly on the second part of that that I mentioned is our technology really is um really disruptive to the market so you know like you said autonomous pen testing it's um it's still it's well it's still still relatively new topic uh for security practitioners and um it's proven to be really disruptive so um that on top of um just well recently we found an article that um that mentioned by markets and markets that reports that the global pen testing markets really expanding and so it's expected to grow to like 2.7 billion um by 2027. so the Market's there right the Market's expanding it's growing and so for our partners it's just really allows them to grow their revenue um across their customer base expand their customer base and offering this High profit margin while you know getting in early to Market on this just disruptive technology big Market a lot of opportunities to make some money people love to put more margin on on those deals especially when you can bring a great solution that everyone knows is hard to do so I think that's going to provide a lot of value is there is there a type of partner that you guys see emerging or you aligning with you mentioned the alignment with the partners I can see how that the training and the incentives are all there sounds like it's all going well is there a type of partner that's resonating the most or is there categories of partners that can take advantage of this yeah absolutely so we work with all different kinds of Partners we work with our traditional resale Partners um we've worked we're working with systems integrators we have a really strong MSP mssp program um we've got Consulting partners and the Consulting Partners especially with the ones that offer pen test services so we they use us as a as we act as a force multiplier just really offering them profit margin expansion um opportunity there we've got some technology partner partners that we really work with for co-cell opportunities and then we've got our Cloud Partners um you'd mentioned that earlier and so we are in AWS Marketplace so our ccpo partners we're part of the ISP accelerate program um so we we're doing a lot there with our Cloud partners and um of course we uh we go to market with uh distribution Partners as well gotta love the opportunity for more margin expansion every kind of partner wants to put more gross profit on their deals is there a certification involved I have to ask is there like do you get do people get certified or is it just you get trained is it self-paced training is it in person how are you guys doing the whole training certification thing because is that is that a requirement yeah absolutely so we do offer a certification program and um it's been very popular this includes a a seller's portion and an operator portion and and so um this is at no cost to our partners and um we operate both virtually it's it's law it's virtually but live it's not self-paced and we also have in person um you know sessions as well and we also can customize these to any partners that have a large group of people and we can just we can do one in person or virtual just specifically for that partner well any kind of incentive opportunities and marketing opportunities everyone loves to get the uh get the deals just kind of rolling in leads from what we can see if our early reporting this looks like a hot product price wise service level wise what incentive do you guys thinking about and and Joint marketing you mentioned co-sell earlier in pipeline so I was kind of kind of honing in on that piece sure and yes and then to follow along with our partner certification program we do incentivize our partners there if they have a certain number certified their discount increases so that's part of it we have our deal registration program that increases discount as well um and then we do have some um some partner incentives that are wrapped around meeting setting and um moving moving opportunities along to uh proof of value gotta love the education driving value I have to ask you so you've been around the industry you've seen the channel relationships out there you're seeing companies old school new school you know uh Horizon 3.ai is kind of like that new school very cloud specific a lot of Leverage with we mentioned AWS and all the clouds um why is the company so hot right now why did you join them and what's why are people attracted to this company what's the what's the attraction what's the vibe what do you what do you see and what what do you use what did you see in in this company well this is just you know like I said it's very disruptive um it's really in high demand right now and um and and just because because it's new to Market and uh a newer technology so we are we can collaborate with a manual pen tester um we can you know we can allow our customers to run their pen test um with with no specialty teams and um and and then so we and like you know like I said we can allow our partners can actually build businesses profitable businesses so we can they can use our product to increase their services revenue and um and build their business model you know around around our services what's interesting about the pen test thing is that it's very expensive and time consuming the people who do them are very talented people that could be working on really bigger things in the in absolutely customers so bringing this into the channel allows them if you look at the price Delta between a pen test and then what you guys are offering I mean that's a huge margin Gap between street price of say today's pen test and what you guys offer when you show people that they follow do they say too good to be true I mean what are some of the things that people say when you kind of show them that are they like scratch their head like come on what's the what's the catch here right so the cost savings is a huge is huge for us um and then also you know like I said working as a force multiplier with a pen testing company that offers the services and so they can they can do their their annual manual pen tests that may be required around compliance regulations and then we can we can act as the continuous verification of their security um um you know that that they can run um weekly and so it's just um you know it's just an addition to to what they're offering already and an expansion so Jennifer thanks for coming on thecube really appreciate you uh coming on sharing the insights on the channel uh what's next what can we expect from the channel group what are you thinking what's going on right so we're really looking to expand our our Channel um footprint and um very strategically uh we've got um we've got some big plans um for for Horizon 3.ai awesome well thanks for coming on really appreciate it you're watching thecube the leader in high tech Enterprise coverage [Music] [Music] hello and welcome to the Cube's special presentation with Horizon 3.ai with Raina Richter vice president of emea Europe Middle East and Africa and Asia Pacific APAC for Horizon 3 today welcome to this special Cube presentation thanks for joining us thank you for the invitation so Horizon 3 a guy driving Global expansion big international news with a partner first approach you guys are expanding internationally let's get into it you guys are driving this new expanse partner program to new heights tell us about it what are you seeing in the momentum why the expansion what's all the news about well I would say uh yeah in in international we have I would say a similar similar situation like in the US um there is a global shortage of well-educated penetration testers on the one hand side on the other side um we have a raising demand of uh network and infrastructure security and with our approach of an uh autonomous penetration testing I I believe we are totally on top of the game um especially as we have also now uh starting with an international instance that means for example if a customer in Europe is using uh our service node zero he will be connected to a node zero instance which is located inside the European Union and therefore he has doesn't have to worry about the conflict between the European the gdpr regulations versus the US Cloud act and I would say there we have a total good package for our partners that they can provide differentiators to their customers you know we've had great conversations here on thecube with the CEO and the founder of the company around the leverage of the cloud and how successful that's been for the company and honestly I can just Connect the Dots here but I'd like you to weigh in more on how that translates into the go to market here because you got great Cloud scale with with the security product you guys are having success with great leverage there I've seen a lot of success there what's the momentum on the channel partner program internationally why is it so important to you is it just the regional segmentation is it the economics why the momentum well there are it's there are multiple issues first of all there is a raising demand in penetration testing um and don't forget that uh in international we have a much higher level in number a number or percentage in SMB and mid-market customers so these customers typically most of them even didn't have a pen test done once a year so for them pen testing was just too expensive now with our offering together with our partners we can provide different uh ways how customers could get an autonomous pen testing done more than once a year with even lower costs than they had with with a traditional manual paint test so and that is because we have our uh Consulting plus package which is for typically pain testers they can go out and can do a much faster much quicker and their pain test at many customers once in after each other so they can do more pain tests on a lower more attractive price on the other side there are others what even the same ones who are providing um node zero as an mssp service so they can go after s p customers saying okay well you only have a couple of hundred uh IP addresses no worries we have the perfect package for you and then you have let's say the mid Market let's say the thousands and more employees then they might even have an annual subscription very traditional but for all of them it's all the same the customer or the service provider doesn't need a piece of Hardware they only need to install a small piece of a Docker container and that's it and that makes it so so smooth to go in and say okay Mr customer we just put in this this virtual attacker into your network and that's it and and all the rest is done and within within three clicks they are they can act like a pen tester with 20 years of experience and that's going to be very Channel friendly and partner friendly I can almost imagine so I have to ask you and thank you for calling the break calling out that breakdown and and segmentation that was good that was very helpful for me to understand but I want to follow up if you don't mind um what type of partners are you seeing the most traction with and why well I would say at the beginning typically you have the the innovators the early adapters typically Boutique size of Partners they start because they they are always looking for Innovation and those are the ones you they start in the beginning so we have a wide range of Partners having mostly even um managed by the owner of the company so uh they immediately understand okay there is the value and they can change their offering they're changing their offering in terms of penetration testing because they can do more pen tests and they can then add other ones or we have those ones who offer 10 tests services but they did not have their own pen testers so they had to go out on the open market and Source paint testing experts um to get the pen test at a particular customer done and now with node zero they're totally independent they can't go out and say okay Mr customer here's the here's the service that's it we turn it on and within an hour you're up and running totally yeah and those pen tests are usually expensive and hard to do now it's right in line with the sales delivery pretty interesting for a partner absolutely but on the other hand side we are not killing the pain testers business we do something we're providing with no tiers I would call something like the foundation work the foundational work of having an an ongoing penetration testing of the infrastructure the operating system and the pen testers by themselves they can concentrate in the future on things like application pen testing for example so those Services which we we're not touching so we're not killing the paint tester Market we're just taking away the ongoing um let's say foundation work call it that way yeah yeah that was one of my questions I was going to ask is there's a lot of interest in this autonomous pen testing one because it's expensive to do because those skills are required are in need and they're expensive so you kind of cover the entry level and the blockers that are in there I've seen people say to me this pen test becomes a blocker for getting things done so there's been a lot of interest in the autonomous pen testing and for organizations to have that posture and it's an overseas issue too because now you have that that ongoing thing so can you explain that particular benefit for an organization to have that continuously verifying an organization's posture yep certainly so I would say um typically you are you you have to do your patches you have to bring in new versions of operating systems of different Services of uh um operating systems of some components and and they are always bringing new vulnerabilities the difference here is that with node zero we are telling the customer or the partner package we're telling them which are the executable vulnerabilities because previously they might have had um a vulnerability scanner so this vulnerability scanner brought up hundreds or even thousands of cves but didn't say anything about which of them are vulnerable really executable and then you need an expert digging in one cve after the other finding out is it is it really executable yes or no and that is where you need highly paid experts which we have a shortage so with notes here now we can say okay we tell you exactly which ones are the ones you should work on because those are the ones which are executable we rank them accordingly to the risk level how easily they can be used and by a sudden and then the good thing is convert it or indifference to the traditional penetration test they don't have to wait for a year for the next pain test to find out if the fixing was effective they weren't just the next scan and say Yes closed vulnerability is gone the time is really valuable and if you're doing any devops Cloud native you're always pushing new things so pen test ongoing pen testing is actually a benefit just in general as a kind of hygiene so really really interesting solution really bring that global scale is going to be a new new coverage area for us for sure I have to ask you if you don't mind answering what particular region are you focused on or plan to Target for this next phase of growth well at this moment we are concentrating on the countries inside the European Union Plus the United Kingdom um but we are and they are of course logically I'm based into Frankfurt area that means we cover more or less the countries just around so it's like the total dark region Germany Switzerland Austria plus the Netherlands but we also already have Partners in the nordics like in Finland or in Sweden um so it's it's it it's rapidly we have Partners already in the UK and it's rapidly growing so I'm for example we are now starting with some activities in Singapore um um and also in the in the Middle East area um very important we uh depending on let's say the the way how to do business currently we try to concentrate on those countries where we can have um let's say um at least English as an accepted business language great is there any particular region you're having the most success with right now is it sounds like European Union's um kind of first wave what's them yes that's the first definitely that's the first wave and now we're also getting the uh the European instance up and running it's clearly our commitment also to the market saying okay we know there are certain dedicated uh requirements and we take care of this and and we're just launching it we're building up this one uh the instance um in the AWS uh service center here in Frankfurt also with some dedicated Hardware internet in a data center in Frankfurt where we have with the date six by the way uh the highest internet interconnection bandwidth on the planet so we have very short latency to wherever you are on on the globe that's a great that's a great call outfit benefit too I was going to ask that what are some of the benefits your partners are seeing in emea and Asia Pacific well I would say um the the benefits is for them it's clearly they can they can uh talk with customers and can offer customers penetration testing which they before and even didn't think about because it penetrates penetration testing in a traditional way was simply too expensive for them too complex the preparation time was too long um they didn't have even have the capacity uh to um to support a pain an external pain tester now with this service you can go in and say even if they Mr customer we can do a test with you in a couple of minutes within we have installed the docker container within 10 minutes we have the pen test started that's it and then we just wait and and I would say that is we'll we are we are seeing so many aha moments then now because on the partner side when they see node zero the first time working it's like this wow that is great and then they work out to customers and and show it to their typically at the beginning mostly the friendly customers like wow that's great I need that and and I would say um the feedback from the partners is that is a service where I do not have to evangelize the customer everybody understands penetration testing I don't have to say describe what it is they understand the customer understanding immediately yes penetration testing good about that I know I should do it but uh too complex too expensive now with the name is for example as an mssp service provided from one of our partners but it's getting easy yeah it's great and it's great great benefit there I mean I gotta say I'm a huge fan of what you guys are doing I like this continuous automation that's a major benefit to anyone doing devops or any kind of modern application development this is just a godsend for them this is really good and like you said the pen testers that are doing it they were kind of coming down from their expertise to kind of do things that should have been automated they get to focus on the bigger ticket items that's a really big point so we free them we free the pain testers for the higher level elements of the penetration testing segment and that is typically the application testing which is currently far away from being automated yeah and that's where the most critical workloads are and I think this is the nice balance congratulations on the international expansion of the program and thanks for coming on this special presentation really I really appreciate it thank you you're welcome okay this is thecube special presentation you know check out pen test automation International expansion Horizon 3 dot AI uh really Innovative solution in our next segment Chris Hill sector head for strategic accounts will discuss the power of Horizon 3.ai and Splunk in action you're watching the cube the leader in high tech Enterprise coverage foreign [Music] [Music] welcome back everyone to the cube and Horizon 3.ai special presentation I'm John Furrier host of thecube we're with Chris Hill sector head for strategic accounts and federal at Horizon 3.ai a great Innovative company Chris great to see you thanks for coming on thecube yeah like I said uh you know great to meet you John long time listener first time caller so excited to be here with you guys yeah we were talking before camera you had Splunk back in 2013 and I think 2012 was our first splunk.com and boy man you know talk about being in the right place at the right time now we're at another inflection point and Splunk continues to be relevant um and continuing to have that data driving Security in that interplay and your CEO former CTO of his plug as well at Horizon who's been on before really Innovative product you guys have but you know yeah don't wait for a breach to find out if you're logging the right data this is the topic of this thread Splunk is very much part of this new international expansion announcement uh with you guys tell us what are some of the challenges that you see where this is relevant for the Splunk and Horizon AI as you guys expand uh node zero out internationally yeah well so across so you know my role uh within Splunk it was uh working with our most strategic accounts and so I looked back to 2013 and I think about the sales process like working with with our small customers you know it was um it was still very siled back then like I was selling to an I.T team that was either using this for it operations um we generally would always even say yeah although we do security we weren't really designed for it we're a log management tool and we I'm sure you remember back then John we were like sort of stepping into the security space and and the public sector domain that I was in you know security was 70 of what we did when I look back to sort of uh the transformation that I was witnessing in that digital transformation um you know when I look at like 2019 to today you look at how uh the IT team and the security teams are being have been forced to break down those barriers that they used to sort of be silent away would not commute communicate one you know the security guys would be like oh this is my box I.T you're not allowed in today you can't get away with that and I think that the value that we bring to you know and of course Splunk has been a huge leader in that space and continues to do Innovation across the board but I think what we've we're seeing in the space and I was talking with Patrick Coughlin the SVP of uh security markets about this is that you know what we've been able to do with Splunk is build a purpose-built solution that allows Splunk to eat more data so Splunk itself is ulk know it's an ingest engine right the great reason people bought it was you could build these really fast dashboards and grab intelligence out of it but without data it doesn't do anything right so how do you drive and how do you bring more data in and most importantly from a customer perspective how do you bring the right data in and so if you think about what node zero and what we're doing in a horizon 3 is that sure we do pen testing but because we're an autonomous pen testing tool we do it continuously so this whole thought I'd be like oh crud like my customers oh yeah we got a pen test coming up it's gonna be six weeks the week oh yeah you know and everyone's gonna sit on their hands call me back in two months Chris we'll talk to you then right not not a real efficient way to test your environment and shoot we saw that with Uber this week right um you know and that's a case where we could have helped oh just right we could explain the Uber thing because it was a contractor just give a quick highlight of what happened so you can connect the doctor yeah no problem so um it was uh I got I think it was yeah one of those uh you know games where they would try and test an environment um and with the uh pen tester did was he kept on calling them MFA guys being like I need to reset my password we need to set my right password and eventually the um the customer service guy said okay I'm resetting it once he had reset and bypassed the multi-factor authentication he then was able to get in and get access to the building area that he was in or I think not the domain but he was able to gain access to a partial part of that Network he then paralleled over to what I would assume is like a VA VMware or some virtual machine that had notes that had all of the credentials for logging into various domains and So within minutes they had access and that's the sort of stuff that we do you know a lot of these tools like um you know you think about the cacophony of tools that are out there in a GTA architect architecture right I'm gonna get like a z-scale or I'm going to have uh octum and I have a Splunk I've been into the solar system I mean I don't mean to name names we have crowdstriker or Sentinel one in there it's just it's a cacophony of things that don't work together they weren't designed work together and so we have seen so many times in our business through our customer support and just working with customers when we do their pen tests that there will be 5 000 servers out there three are misconfigured those three misconfigurations will create the open door because remember the hacker only needs to be right once the defender needs to be right all the time and that's the challenge and so that's what I'm really passionate about what we're doing uh here at Horizon three I see this my digital transformation migration and security going on which uh we're at the tip of the spear it's why I joined sey Hall coming on this journey uh and just super excited about where the path's going and super excited about the relationship with Splunk I get into more details on some of the specifics of that but um you know well you're nailing I mean we've been doing a lot of things on super cloud and this next gen environment we're calling it next gen you're really seeing devops obviously devsecops has already won the it role has moved to the developer shift left is an indicator of that it's one of the many examples higher velocity code software supply chain you hear these things that means that it is now in the developer hands it is replaced by the new Ops data Ops teams and security where there's a lot of horizontal thinking to your point about access there's no more perimeter huge 100 right is really right on things one time you know to get in there once you're in then you can hang out move around move laterally big problem okay so we get that now the challenges for these teams as they are transitioning organizationally how do they figure out what to do okay this is the next step they already have Splunk so now they're kind of in transition while protecting for a hundred percent ratio of success so how would you look at that and describe the challenge is what do they do what is it what are the teams facing with their data and what's next what are they what are they what action do they take so let's use some vernacular that folks will know so if I think about devsecops right we both know what that means that I'm going to build security into the app it normally talks about sec devops right how am I building security around the perimeter of what's going inside my ecosystem and what are they doing and so if you think about what we're able to do with somebody like Splunk is we can pen test the entire environment from Soup To Nuts right so I'm going to test the end points through to its I'm going to look for misconfigurations I'm going to I'm going to look for um uh credential exposed credentials you know I'm going to look for anything I can in the environment again I'm going to do it at light speed and and what what we're doing for that SEC devops space is to you know did you detect that we were in your environment so did we alert Splunk or the Sim that there's someone in the environment laterally moving around did they more importantly did they log us into their environment and when do they detect that log to trigger that log did they alert on us and then finally most importantly for every CSO out there is going to be did they stop us and so that's how we we do this and I think you when speaking with um stay Hall before you know we've come up with this um boils but we call it fine fix verifying so what we do is we go in is we act as the attacker right we act in a production environment so we're not going to be we're a passive attacker but we will go in on credentialed on agents but we have to assume to have an assumed breach model which means we're going to put a Docker container in your environment and then we're going to fingerprint the environment so we're going to go out and do an asset survey now that's something that's not something that Splunk does super well you know so can Splunk see all the assets do the same assets marry up we're going to log all that data and think and then put load that into this long Sim or the smoke logging tools just to have it in Enterprise right that's an immediate future ad that they've got um and then we've got the fix so once we've completed our pen test um we are then going to generate a report and we can talk about these in a little bit later but the reports will show an executive summary the assets that we found which would be your asset Discovery aspect of that a fix report and the fixed report I think is probably the most important one it will go down and identify what we did how we did it and then how to fix that and then from that the pen tester or the organization should fix those then they go back and run another test and then they validate like a change detection environment to see hey did those fixes taste play take place and you know snehaw when he was the CTO of jsoc he shared with me a number of times about it's like man there would be 15 more items on next week's punch sheet that we didn't know about and it's and it has to do with how we you know how they were uh prioritizing the cves and whatnot because they would take all CBDs it was critical or non-critical and it's like we are able to create context in that environment that feeds better information into Splunk and whatnot that brings that brings up the efficiency for Splunk specifically the teams out there by the way the burnout thing is real I mean this whole I just finished my list and I got 15 more or whatever the list just can keeps growing how did node zero specifically help Splunk teams be more efficient like that's the question I want to get at because this seems like a very scale way for Splunk customers and teams service teams to be more so the question is how does node zero help make Splunk specifically their service teams be more efficient so so today in our early interactions we're building customers we've seen are five things um and I'll start with sort of identifying the blind spots right so kind of what I just talked about with you did we detect did we log did we alert did they stop node zero right and so I would I put that you know a more Layman's third grade term and if I was going to beat a fifth grader at this game would be we can be the sparring partner for a Splunk Enterprise customer a Splunk Essentials customer someone using Splunk soar or even just an Enterprise Splunk customer that may be a small shop with three people and just wants to know where am I exposed so by creating and generating these reports and then having um the API that actually generates the dashboard they can take all of these events that we've logged and log them in and then where that then comes in is number two is how do we prioritize those logs right so how do we create visibility to logs that that um are have critical impacts and again as I mentioned earlier not all cves are high impact regard and also not all or low right so if you daisy chain a bunch of low cves together boom I've got a mission critical AP uh CPE that needs to be fixed now such as a credential moving to an NT box that's got a text file with a bunch of passwords on it that would be very bad um and then third would be uh verifying that you have all of the hosts so one of the things that splunk's not particularly great at and they'll literate themselves they don't do asset Discovery so dude what assets do we see and what are they logging from that um and then for from um for every event that they are able to identify one of the cool things that we can do is actually create this low code no code environment so they could let you know Splunk customers can use Splunk sword to actually triage events and prioritize that event so where they're being routed within it to optimize the Sox team time to Market or time to triage any given event obviously reducing MTR and then finally I think one of the neatest things that we'll be seeing us develop is um our ability to build glass cables so behind me you'll see one of our triage events and how we build uh a Lockheed Martin kill chain on that with a glass table which is very familiar to the community we're going to have the ability and not too distant future to allow people to search observe on those iocs and if people aren't familiar with it ioc it's an instant of a compromise so that's a vector that we want to drill into and of course who's better at Drilling in the data and smoke yeah this is a critter this is an awesome Synergy there I mean I can see a Splunk customer going man this just gives me so much more capability action actionability and also real understanding and I think this is what I want to dig into if you don't mind understanding that critical impact okay is kind of where I see this coming got the data data ingest now data's data but the question is what not to log you know where are things misconfigured these are critical questions so can you talk about what it means to understand critical impact yeah so I think you know going back to the things that I just spoke about a lot of those cves where you'll see um uh low low low and then you daisy chain together and they're suddenly like oh this is high now but then your other impact of like if you're if you're a Splunk customer you know and I had it I had several of them I had one customer that you know terabytes of McAfee data being brought in and it was like all right there's a lot of other data that you probably also want to bring but they could only afford wanted to do certain data sets because that's and they didn't know how to prioritize or filter those data sets and so we provide that opportunity to say hey these are the critical ones to bring in but there's also the ones that you don't necessarily need to bring in because low cve in this case really does mean low cve like an ILO server would be one that um that's the print server uh where the uh your admin credentials are on on like a printer and so there will be credentials on that that's something that a hacker might go in to look at so although the cve on it is low is if you daisy chain with somebody that's able to get into that you might say Ah that's high and we would then potentially rank it giving our AI logic to say that's a moderate so put it on the scale and we prioritize those versus uh of all of these scanners just going to give you a bunch of CDs and good luck and translating that if I if I can and tell me if I'm wrong that kind of speaks to that whole lateral movement that's it challenge right print serve a great example looks stupid low end who's going to want to deal with the print server oh but it's connected into a critical system there's a path is that kind of what you're getting at yeah I use Daisy Chain I think that's from the community they came from uh but it's just a lateral movement it's exactly what they're doing in those low level low critical lateral movements is where the hackers are getting in right so that's the beauty thing about the uh the Uber example is that who would have thought you know I've got my monthly Factor authentication going in a human made a mistake we can't we can't not expect humans to make mistakes we're fallible right the reality is is once they were in the environment they could have protected themselves by running enough pen tests to know that they had certain uh exposed credentials that would have stopped the breach and they did not had not done that in their environment and I'm not poking yeah but it's an interesting Trend though I mean it's obvious if sometimes those low end items are also not protected well so it's easy to get at from a hacker standpoint but also the people in charge of them can be fished easily or spearfished because they're not paying attention because they don't have to no one ever told them hey be careful yeah for the community that I came from John that's exactly how they they would uh meet you at a uh an International Event um introduce themselves as a graduate student these are National actor States uh would you mind reviewing my thesis on such and such and I was at Adobe at the time that I was working on this instead of having to get the PDF they opened the PDF and whoever that customer was launches and I don't know if you remember back in like 2008 time frame there was a lot of issues around IP being by a nation state being stolen from the United States and that's exactly how they did it and John that's or LinkedIn hey I want to get a joke we want to hire you double the salary oh I'm gonna click on that for sure you know yeah right exactly yeah the one thing I would say to you is like uh when we look at like sort of you know because I think we did 10 000 pen tests last year is it's probably over that now you know we have these sort of top 10 ways that we think and find people coming into the environment the funniest thing is that only one of them is a cve related vulnerability like uh you know you guys know what they are right so it's it but it's it's like two percent of the attacks are occurring through the cves but yeah there's all that attention spent to that and very little attention spent to this pen testing side which is sort of this continuous threat you know monitoring space and and this vulnerability space where I think we play a such an important role and I'm so excited to be a part of the tip of the spear on this one yeah I'm old enough to know the movie sneakers which I loved as a you know watching that movie you know professional hackers are testing testing always testing the environment I love this I got to ask you as we kind of wrap up here Chris if you don't mind the the benefits to Professional Services from this Alliance big news Splunk and you guys work well together we see that clearly what are what other benefits do Professional Services teams see from the Splunk and Horizon 3.ai Alliance so if you're I think for from our our from both of our uh Partners uh as we bring these guys together and many of them already are the same partner right uh is that uh first off the licensing model is probably one of the key areas that we really excel at so if you're an end user you can buy uh for the Enterprise by the number of IP addresses you're using um but uh if you're a partner working with this there's solution ways that you can go in and we'll license as to msps and what that business model on msps looks like but the unique thing that we do here is this C plus license and so the Consulting plus license allows like a uh somebody a small to mid-sized to some very large uh you know Fortune 100 uh consulting firms use this uh by buying into a license called um Consulting plus where they can have unlimited uh access to as many IPS as they want but you can only run one test at a time and as you can imagine when we're going and hacking passwords and um checking hashes and decrypting hashes that can take a while so but for the right customer it's it's a perfect tool and so I I'm so excited about our ability to go to market with uh our partners so that we understand ourselves understand how not to just sell to or not tell just to sell through but we know how to sell with them as a good vendor partner I think that that's one thing that we've done a really good job building bring it into the market yeah I think also the Splunk has had great success how they've enabled uh partners and Professional Services absolutely you know the services that layer on top of Splunk are multi-fold tons of great benefits so you guys Vector right into that ride that way with friction and and the cool thing is that in you know in one of our reports which could be totally customized uh with someone else's logo we're going to generate you know so I I used to work in another organization it wasn't Splunk but we we did uh you know pen testing as for for customers and my pen testers would come on site they'd do the engagement and they would leave and then another release someone would be oh shoot we got another sector that was breached and they'd call you back you know four weeks later and so by August our entire pen testings teams would be sold out and it would be like well even in March maybe and they're like no no I gotta breach now and and and then when they do go in they go through do the pen test and they hand over a PDF and they pack on the back and say there's where your problems are you need to fix it and the reality is that what we're going to generate completely autonomously with no human interaction is we're going to go and find all the permutations of anything we found and the fix for those permutations and then once you've fixed everything you just go back and run another pen test it's you know for what people pay for one pen test they can have a tool that does that every every Pat patch on Tuesday and that's on Wednesday you know triage throughout the week green yellow red I wanted to see the colors show me green green is good right not red and one CIO doesn't want who doesn't want that dashboard right it's it's exactly it and we can help bring I think that you know I'm really excited about helping drive this with the Splunk team because they get that they understand that it's the green yellow red dashboard and and how do we help them find more green uh so that the other guys are in red yeah and get in the data and do the right thing and be efficient with how you use the data know what to look at so many things to pay attention to you know the combination of both and then go to market strategy real brilliant congratulations Chris thanks for coming on and sharing um this news with the detail around the Splunk in action around the alliance thanks for sharing John my pleasure thanks look forward to seeing you soon all right great we'll follow up and do another segment on devops and I.T and security teams as the new new Ops but and super cloud a bunch of other stuff so thanks for coming on and our next segment the CEO of horizon 3.aa will break down all the new news for us here on thecube you're watching thecube the leader in high tech Enterprise coverage [Music] yeah the partner program for us has been fantastic you know I think prior to that you know as most organizations most uh uh most Farmers most mssps might not necessarily have a a bench at all for penetration testing uh maybe they subcontract this work out or maybe they do it themselves but trying to staff that kind of position can be incredibly difficult for us this was a differentiator a a new a new partner a new partnership that allowed us to uh not only perform services for our customers but be able to provide a product by which that they can do it themselves so we work with our customers in a variety of ways some of them want more routine testing and perform this themselves but we're also a certified service provider of horizon 3 being able to perform uh penetration tests uh help review the the data provide color provide analysis for our customers in a broader sense right not necessarily the the black and white elements of you know what was uh what's critical what's high what's medium what's low what you need to fix but are there systemic issues this has allowed us to onboard new customers this has allowed us to migrate some penetration testing services to us from from competitors in the marketplace But ultimately this is occurring because the the product and the outcome are special they're unique and they're effective our customers like what they're seeing they like the routineness of it many of them you know again like doing this themselves you know being able to kind of pen test themselves parts of their networks um and the the new use cases right I'm a large organization I have eight to ten Acquisitions per year wouldn't it be great to have a tool to be able to perform a penetration test both internal and external of that acquisition before we integrate the two companies and maybe bringing on some risk it's a very effective partnership uh one that really is uh kind of taken our our Engineers our account Executives by storm um you know this this is a a partnership that's been very valuable to us [Music] a key part of the value and business model at Horizon 3 is enabling Partners to leverage node zero to make more revenue for themselves our goal is that for sixty percent of our Revenue this year will be originated by partners and that 95 of our Revenue next year will be originated by partners and so a key to that strategy is making us an integral part of your business models as a partner a key quote from one of our partners is that we enable every one of their business units to generate Revenue so let's talk about that in a little bit more detail first is that if you have a pen test Consulting business take Deloitte as an example what was six weeks of human labor at Deloitte per pen test has been cut down to four days of Labor using node zero to conduct reconnaissance find all the juicy interesting areas of the of the Enterprise that are exploitable and being able to go assess the entire organization and then all of those details get served up to the human to be able to look at understand and determine where to probe deeper so what you see in that pen test Consulting business is that node zero becomes a force multiplier where those Consulting teams were able to cover way more accounts and way more IPS within those accounts with the same or fewer consultants and so that directly leads to profit margin expansion for the Penn testing business itself because node 0 is a force multiplier the second business model here is if you're an mssp as an mssp you're already making money providing defensive cyber security operations for a large volume of customers and so what they do is they'll license node zero and use us as an upsell to their mssb business to start to deliver either continuous red teaming continuous verification or purple teaming as a service and so in that particular business model they've got an additional line of Revenue where they can increase the spend of their existing customers by bolting on node 0 as a purple team as a service offering the third business model or customer type is if you're an I.T services provider so as an I.T services provider you make money installing and configuring security products like Splunk or crowdstrike or hemio you also make money reselling those products and you also make money generating follow-on services to continue to harden your customer environments and so for them what what those it service providers will do is use us to verify that they've installed Splunk correctly improved to their customer that Splunk was installed correctly or crowdstrike was installed correctly using our results and then use our results to drive follow-on services and revenue and then finally we've got the value-added reseller which is just a straight up reseller because of how fast our sales Cycles are these vars are able to typically go from cold email to deal close in six to eight weeks at Horizon 3 at least a single sales engineer is able to run 30 to 50 pocs concurrently because our pocs are very lightweight and don't require any on-prem customization or heavy pre-sales post sales activity so as a result we're able to have a few amount of sellers driving a lot of Revenue and volume for us well the same thing applies to bars there isn't a lot of effort to sell the product or prove its value so vars are able to sell a lot more Horizon 3 node zero product without having to build up a huge specialist sales organization so what I'm going to do is talk through uh scenario three here as an I.T service provider and just how powerful node zero can be in driving additional Revenue so in here think of for every one dollar of node zero license purchased by the IT service provider to do their business it'll generate ten dollars of additional revenue for that partner so in this example kidney group uses node 0 to verify that they have installed and deployed Splunk correctly so Kitty group is a Splunk partner they they sell it services to install configure deploy and maintain Splunk and as they deploy Splunk they're going to use node 0 to attack the environment and make sure that the right logs and alerts and monitoring are being handled within the Splunk deployment so it's a way of doing QA or verifying that Splunk has been configured correctly and that's going to be internally used by kidney group to prove the quality of their services that they've just delivered then what they're going to do is they're going to show and leave behind that node zero Report with their client and that creates a resell opportunity for for kidney group to resell node 0 to their client because their client is seeing the reports and the results and saying wow this is pretty amazing and those reports can be co-branded where it's a pen testing report branded with kidney group but it says powered by Horizon three under it from there kidney group is able to take the fixed actions report that's automatically generated with every pen test through node zero and they're able to use that as the starting point for a statement of work to sell follow-on services to fix all of the problems that node zero identified fixing l11r misconfigurations fixing or patching VMware or updating credentials policies and so on so what happens is node 0 has found a bunch of problems the client often lacks the capacity to fix and so kidney group can use that lack of capacity by the client as a follow-on sales opportunity for follow-on services and finally based on the findings from node zero kidney group can look at that report and say to the customer you know customer if you bought crowdstrike you'd be able to uh prevent node Zero from attacking and succeeding in the way that it did for if you bought humano or if you bought Palo Alto networks or if you bought uh some privileged access management solution because of what node 0 was able to do with credential harvesting and attacks and so as a result kidney group is able to resell other security products within their portfolio crowdstrike Falcon humano Polito networks demisto Phantom and so on based on the gaps that were identified by node zero and that pen test and what that creates is another feedback loop where kidney group will then go use node 0 to verify that crowdstrike product has actually been installed and configured correctly and then this becomes the cycle of using node 0 to verify a deployment using that verification to drive a bunch of follow-on services and resell opportunities which then further drives more usage of the product now the way that we licensed is that it's a usage-based license licensing model so that the partner will grow their node zero Consulting plus license as they grow their business so for example if you're a kidney group then week one you've got you're going to use node zero to verify your Splunk install in week two if you have a pen testing business you're going to go off and use node zero to be a force multiplier for your pen testing uh client opportunity and then if you have an mssp business then in week three you're going to use node zero to go execute a purple team mssp offering for your clients so not necessarily a kidney group but if you're a Deloitte or ATT these larger companies and you've got multiple lines of business if you're Optive for instance you all you have to do is buy one Consulting plus license and you're going to be able to run as many pen tests as you want sequentially so now you can buy a single license and use that one license to meet your week one client commitments and then meet your week two and then meet your week three and as you grow your business you start to run multiple pen tests concurrently so in week one you've got to do a Splunk verify uh verify Splunk install and you've got to run a pen test and you've got to do a purple team opportunity you just simply expand the number of Consulting plus licenses from one license to three licenses and so now as you systematically grow your business you're able to grow your node zero capacity with you giving you predictable cogs predictable margins and once again 10x additional Revenue opportunity for that investment in the node zero Consulting plus license my name is Saint I'm the co-founder and CEO here at Horizon 3. I'm going to talk to you today about why it's important to look at your Enterprise Through The Eyes of an attacker the challenge I had when I was a CIO in banking the CTO at Splunk and serving within the Department of Defense is that I had no idea I was Secure until the bad guys had showed up am I logging the right data am I fixing the right vulnerabilities are my security tools that I've paid millions of dollars for actually working together to defend me and the answer is I don't know does my team actually know how to respond to a breach in the middle of an incident I don't know I've got to wait for the bad guys to show up and so the challenge I had was how do we proactively verify our security posture I tried a variety of techniques the first was the use of vulnerability scanners and the challenge with vulnerability scanners is being vulnerable doesn't mean you're exploitable I might have a hundred thousand findings from my scanner of which maybe five or ten can actually be exploited in my environment the other big problem with scanners is that they can't chain weaknesses together from machine to machine so if you've got a thousand machines in your environment or more what a vulnerability scanner will do is tell you you have a problem on machine one and separately a problem on machine two but what they can tell you is that an attacker could use a load from machine one plus a low from machine two to equal to critical in your environment and what attackers do in their tactics is they chain together misconfigurations dangerous product defaults harvested credentials and exploitable vulnerabilities into attack paths across different machines so to address the attack pads across different machines I tried layering in consulting-based pen testing and the issue is when you've got thousands of hosts or hundreds of thousands of hosts in your environment human-based pen testing simply doesn't scale to test an infrastructure of that size moreover when they actually do execute a pen test and you get the report oftentimes you lack the expertise within your team to quickly retest to verify that you've actually fixed the problem and so what happens is you end up with these pen test reports that are incomplete snapshots and quickly going stale and then to mitigate that problem I tried using breach and attack simulation tools and the struggle with these tools is one I had to install credentialed agents everywhere two I had to write my own custom attack scripts that I didn't have much talent for but also I had to maintain as my environment changed and then three these types of tools were not safe to run against production systems which was the the majority of my attack surface so that's why we went off to start Horizon 3. so Tony and I met when we were in Special Operations together and the challenge we wanted to solve was how do we do infrastructure security testing at scale by giving the the power of a 20-year pen testing veteran into the hands of an I.T admin a network engineer in just three clicks and the whole idea is we enable these fixers The Blue Team to be able to run node Zero Hour pen testing product to quickly find problems in their environment that blue team will then then go off and fix the issues that were found and then they can quickly rerun the attack to verify that they fixed the problem and the whole idea is delivering this without requiring custom scripts be developed without requiring credential agents be installed and without requiring the use of external third-party consulting services or Professional Services self-service pen testing to quickly Drive find fix verify there are three primary use cases that our customers use us for the first is the sock manager that uses us to verify that their security tools are actually effective to verify that they're logging the right data in Splunk or in their Sim to verify that their managed security services provider is able to quickly detect and respond to an attack and hold them accountable for their slas or that the sock understands how to quickly detect and respond and measuring and verifying that or that the variety of tools that you have in your stack most organizations have 130 plus cyber security tools none of which are designed to work together are actually working together the second primary use case is proactively hardening and verifying your systems this is when the I that it admin that network engineer they're able to run self-service pen tests to verify that their Cisco environment is installed in hardened and configured correctly or that their credential policies are set up right or that their vcenter or web sphere or kubernetes environments are actually designed to be secure and what this allows the it admins and network Engineers to do is shift from running one or two pen tests a year to 30 40 or more pen tests a month and you can actually wire those pen tests into your devops process or into your detection engineering and the change management processes to automatically trigger pen tests every time there's a change in your environment the third primary use case is for those organizations lucky enough to have their own internal red team they'll use node zero to do reconnaissance and exploitation at scale and then use the output as a starting point for the humans to step in and focus on the really hard juicy stuff that gets them on stage at Defcon and so these are the three primary use cases and what we'll do is zoom into the find fix verify Loop because what I've found in my experience is find fix verify is the future operating model for cyber security organizations and what I mean here is in the find using continuous pen testing what you want to enable is on-demand self-service pen tests you want those pen tests to find attack pads at scale spanning your on-prem infrastructure your Cloud infrastructure and your perimeter because attackers don't only state in one place they will find ways to chain together a perimeter breach a credential from your on-prem to gain access to your cloud or some other permutation and then the third part in continuous pen testing is attackers don't focus on critical vulnerabilities anymore they know we've built vulnerability Management Programs to reduce those vulnerabilities so attackers have adapted and what they do is chain together misconfigurations in your infrastructure and software and applications with dangerous product defaults with exploitable vulnerabilities and through the collection of credentials through a mix of techniques at scale once you've found those problems the next question is what do you do about it well you want to be able to prioritize fixing problems that are actually exploitable in your environment that truly matter meaning they're going to lead to domain compromise or domain user compromise or access your sensitive data the second thing you want to fix is making sure you understand what risk your crown jewels data is exposed to where is your crown jewels data is in the cloud is it on-prem has it been copied to a share drive that you weren't aware of if a domain user was compromised could they access that crown jewels data you want to be able to use the attacker's perspective to secure the critical data you have in your infrastructure and then finally as you fix these problems you want to quickly remediate and retest that you've actually fixed the issue and this fine fix verify cycle becomes that accelerator that drives purple team culture the third part here is verify and what you want to be able to do in the verify step is verify that your security tools and processes in people can effectively detect and respond to a breach you want to be able to integrate that into your detection engineering processes so that you know you're catching the right security rules or that you've deployed the right configurations you also want to make sure that your environment is adhering to the best practices around systems hardening in cyber resilience and finally you want to be able to prove your security posture over a time to your board to your leadership into your regulators so what I'll do now is zoom into each of these three steps so when we zoom in to find here's the first example using node 0 and autonomous pen testing and what an attacker will do is find a way to break through the perimeter in this example it's very easy to misconfigure kubernetes to allow an attacker to gain remote code execution into your on-prem kubernetes environment and break through the perimeter and from there what the attacker is going to do is conduct Network reconnaissance and then find ways to gain code execution on other machines in the environment and as they get code execution they start to dump credentials collect a bunch of ntlm hashes crack those hashes using open source and dark web available data as part of those attacks and then reuse those credentials to log in and laterally maneuver throughout the environment and then as they loudly maneuver they can reuse those credentials and use credential spraying techniques and so on to compromise your business email to log in as admin into your cloud and this is a very common attack and rarely is a CV actually needed to execute this attack often it's just a misconfiguration in kubernetes with a bad credential policy or password policy combined with bad practices of credential reuse across the organization here's another example of an internal pen test and this is from an actual customer they had 5 000 hosts within their environment they had EDR and uba tools installed and they initiated in an internal pen test on a single machine from that single initial access point node zero enumerated the network conducted reconnaissance and found five thousand hosts were accessible what node 0 will do under the covers is organize all of that reconnaissance data into a knowledge graph that we call the Cyber terrain map and that cyber Terrain map becomes the key data structure that we use to efficiently maneuver and attack and compromise your environment so what node zero will do is they'll try to find ways to get code execution reuse credentials and so on in this customer example they had Fortinet installed as their EDR but node 0 was still able to get code execution on a Windows machine from there it was able to successfully dump credentials including sensitive credentials from the lsas process on the Windows box and then reuse those credentials to log in as domain admin in the network and once an attacker becomes domain admin they have the keys to the kingdom they can do anything they want so what happened here well it turns out Fortinet was misconfigured on three out of 5000 machines bad automation the customer had no idea this had happened they would have had to wait for an attacker to show up to realize that it was misconfigured the second thing is well why didn't Fortinet stop the credential pivot in the lateral movement and it turned out the customer didn't buy the right modules or turn on the right services within that particular product and we see this not only with Ford in it but we see this with Trend Micro and all the other defensive tools where it's very easy to miss a checkbox in the configuration that will do things like prevent credential dumping the next story I'll tell you is attackers don't have to hack in they log in so another infrastructure pen test a typical technique attackers will take is man in the middle uh attacks that will collect hashes so in this case what an attacker will do is leverage a tool or technique called responder to collect ntlm hashes that are being passed around the network and there's a variety of reasons why these hashes are passed around and it's a pretty common misconfiguration but as an attacker collects those hashes then they start to apply techniques to crack those hashes so they'll pass the hash and from there they will use open source intelligence common password structures and patterns and other types of techniques to try to crack those hashes into clear text passwords so here node 0 automatically collected hashes it automatically passed the hashes to crack those credentials and then from there it starts to take the domain user user ID passwords that it's collected and tries to access different services and systems in your Enterprise in this case node 0 is able to successfully gain access to the Office 365 email environment because three employees didn't have MFA configured so now what happens is node 0 has a placement and access in the business email system which sets up the conditions for fraud lateral phishing and other techniques but what's especially insightful here is that 80 of the hashes that were collected in this pen test were cracked in 15 minutes or less 80 percent 26 of the user accounts had a password that followed a pretty obvious pattern first initial last initial and four random digits the other thing that was interesting is 10 percent of service accounts had their user ID the same as their password so VMware admin VMware admin web sphere admin web Square admin so on and so forth and so attackers don't have to hack in they just log in with credentials that they've collected the next story here is becoming WS AWS admin so in this example once again internal pen test node zero gets initial access it discovers 2 000 hosts are network reachable from that environment if fingerprints and organizes all of that data into a cyber Terrain map from there it it fingerprints that hpilo the integrated lights out service was running on a subset of hosts hpilo is a service that is often not instrumented or observed by security teams nor is it easy to patch as a result attackers know this and immediately go after those types of services so in this case that ILO service was exploitable and were able to get code execution on it ILO stores all the user IDs and passwords in clear text in a particular set of processes so once we gain code execution we were able to dump all of the credentials and then from there laterally maneuver to log in to the windows box next door as admin and then on that admin box we're able to gain access to the share drives and we found a credentials file saved on a share Drive from there it turned out that credentials file was the AWS admin credentials file giving us full admin authority to their AWS accounts not a single security alert was triggered in this attack because the customer wasn't observing the ILO service and every step thereafter was a valid login in the environment and so what do you do step one patch the server step two delete the credentials file from the share drive and then step three is get better instrumentation on privileged access users and login the final story I'll tell is a typical pattern that we see across the board with that combines the various techniques I've described together where an attacker is going to go off and use open source intelligence to find all of the employees that work at your company from there they're going to look up those employees on dark web breach databases and other forms of information and then use that as a starting point to password spray to compromise a domain user all it takes is one employee to reuse a breached password for their Corporate email or all it takes is a single employee to have a weak password that's easily guessable all it takes is one and once the attacker is able to gain domain user access in most shops domain user is also the local admin on their laptop and once your local admin you can dump Sam and get local admin until M hashes you can use that to reuse credentials again local admin on neighboring machines and attackers will start to rinse and repeat then eventually they're able to get to a point where they can dump lsas or by unhooking the anti-virus defeating the EDR or finding a misconfigured EDR as we've talked about earlier to compromise the domain and what's consistent is that the fundamentals are broken at these shops they have poor password policies they don't have least access privilege implemented active directory groups are too permissive where domain admin or domain user is also the local admin uh AV or EDR Solutions are misconfigured or easily unhooked and so on and what we found in 10 000 pen tests is that user Behavior analytics tools never caught us in that lateral movement in part because those tools require pristine logging data in order to work and also it becomes very difficult to find that Baseline of normal usage versus abnormal usage of credential login another interesting Insight is there were several Marquee brand name mssps that were defending our customers environment and for them it took seven hours to detect and respond to the pen test seven hours the pen test was over in less than two hours and so what you had was an egregious violation of the service level agreements that that mssp had in place and the customer was able to use us to get service credit and drive accountability of their sock and of their provider the third interesting thing is in one case it took us seven minutes to become domain admin in a bank that bank had every Gucci security tool you could buy yet in 7 minutes and 19 seconds node zero started as an unauthenticated member of the network and was able to escalate privileges through chaining and misconfigurations in lateral movement and so on to become domain admin if it's seven minutes today we should assume it'll be less than a minute a year or two from now making it very difficult for humans to be able to detect and respond to that type of Blitzkrieg attack so that's in the find it's not just about finding problems though the bulk of the effort should be what to do about it the fix and the verify so as you find those problems back to kubernetes as an example we will show you the path here is the kill chain we took to compromise that environment we'll show you the impact here is the impact or here's the the proof of exploitation that we were able to use to be able to compromise it and there's the actual command that we executed so you could copy and paste that command and compromise that cubelet yourself if you want and then the impact is we got code execution and we'll actually show you here is the impact this is a critical here's why it enabled perimeter breach affected applications will tell you the specific IPS where you've got the problem how it maps to the miter attack framework and then we'll tell you exactly how to fix it we'll also show you what this problem enabled so you can accurately prioritize why this is important or why it's not important the next part is accurate prioritization the hardest part of my job as a CIO was deciding what not to fix so if you take SMB signing not required as an example by default that CVSs score is a one out of 10. but this misconfiguration is not a cve it's a misconfig enable an attacker to gain access to 19 credentials including one domain admin two local admins and access to a ton of data because of that context this is really a 10 out of 10. you better fix this as soon as possible however of the seven occurrences that we found it's only a critical in three out of the seven and these are the three specific machines and we'll tell you the exact way to fix it and you better fix these as soon as possible for these four machines over here these didn't allow us to do anything of consequence so that because the hardest part is deciding what not to fix you can justifiably choose not to fix these four issues right now and just add them to your backlog and surge your team to fix these three as quickly as possible and then once you fix these three you don't have to re-run the entire pen test you can select these three and then one click verify and run a very narrowly scoped pen test that is only testing this specific issue and what that creates is a much faster cycle of finding and fixing problems the other part of fixing is verifying that you don't have sensitive data at risk so once we become a domain user we're able to use those domain user credentials and try to gain access to databases file shares S3 buckets git repos and so on and help you understand what sensitive data you have at risk so in this example a green checkbox means we logged in as a valid domain user we're able to get read write access on the database this is how many records we could have accessed and we don't actually look at the values in the database but we'll show you the schema so you can quickly characterize that pii data was at risk here and we'll do that for your file shares and other sources of data so now you can accurately articulate the data you have at risk and prioritize cleaning that data up especially data that will lead to a fine or a big news issue so that's the find that's the fix now we're going to talk about the verify the key part in verify is embracing and integrating with detection engineering practices so when you think about your layers of security tools you've got lots of tools in place on average 130 tools at any given customer but these tools were not designed to work together so when you run a pen test what you want to do is say did you detect us did you log us did you alert on us did you stop us and from there what you want to see is okay what are the techniques that are commonly used to defeat an environment to actually compromise if you look at the top 10 techniques we use and there's far more than just these 10 but these are the most often executed nine out of ten have nothing to do with cves it has to do with misconfigurations dangerous product defaults bad credential policies and it's how we chain those together to become a domain admin or compromise a host so what what customers will do is every single attacker command we executed is provided to you as an attackivity log so you can actually see every single attacker command we ran the time stamp it was executed the hosts it executed on and how it Maps the minor attack tactics so our customers will have are these attacker logs on one screen and then they'll go look into Splunk or exabeam or Sentinel one or crowdstrike and say did you detect us did you log us did you alert on us or not and to make that even easier if you take this example hey Splunk what logs did you see at this time on the VMware host because that's when node 0 is able to dump credentials and that allows you to identify and fix your logging blind spots to make that easier we've got app integration so this is an actual Splunk app in the Splunk App Store and what you can come is inside the Splunk console itself you can fire up the Horizon 3 node 0 app all of the pen test results are here so that you can see all of the results in one place and you don't have to jump out of the tool and what you'll show you as I skip forward is hey there's a pen test here are the critical issues that we've identified for that weaker default issue here are the exact commands we executed and then we will automatically query into Splunk all all terms on between these times on that endpoint that relate to this attack so you can now quickly within the Splunk environment itself figure out that you're missing logs or that you're appropriately catching this issue and that becomes incredibly important in that detection engineering cycle that I mentioned earlier so how do our customers end up using us they shift from running one pen test a year to 30 40 pen tests a month oftentimes wiring us into their deployment automation to automatically run pen tests the other part that they'll do is as they run more pen tests they find more issues but eventually they hit this inflection point where they're able to rapidly clean up their environment and that inflection point is because the red and the blue teams start working together in a purple team culture and now they're working together to proactively harden their environment the other thing our customers will do is run us from different perspectives they'll first start running an RFC 1918 scope to see once the attacker gained initial access in a part of the network that had wide access what could they do and then from there they'll run us within a specific Network segment okay from within that segment could the attacker break out and gain access to another segment then they'll run us from their work from home environment could they Traverse the VPN and do something damaging and once they're in could they Traverse the VPN and get into my cloud then they'll break in from the outside all of these perspectives are available to you in Horizon 3 and node zero as a single SKU and you can run as many pen tests as you want if you run a phishing campaign and find that an intern in the finance department had the worst phishing behavior you can then inject their credentials and actually show the end-to-end story of how an attacker fished gained credentials of an intern and use that to gain access to sensitive financial data so what our customers end up doing is running multiple attacks from multiple perspectives and looking at those results over time I'll leave you two things one is what is the AI in Horizon 3 AI those knowledge graphs are the heart and soul of everything that we do and we use machine learning reinforcement techniques reinforcement learning techniques Markov decision models and so on to be able to efficiently maneuver and analyze the paths in those really large graphs we also use context-based scoring to prioritize weaknesses and we're also able to drive collective intelligence across all of the operations so the more pen tests we run the smarter we get and all of that is based on our knowledge graph analytics infrastructure that we have finally I'll leave you with this was my decision criteria when I was a buyer for my security testing strategy what I cared about was coverage I wanted to be able to assess my on-prem cloud perimeter and work from home and be safe to run in production I want to be able to do that as often as I wanted I want to be able to run pen tests in hours or days not weeks or months so I could accelerate that fine fix verify loop I wanted my it admins and network Engineers with limited offensive experience to be able to run a pen test in a few clicks through a self-service experience and not have to install agent and not have to write custom scripts and finally I didn't want to get nickeled and dimed on having to buy different types of attack modules or different types of attacks I wanted a single annual subscription that allowed me to run any type of attack as often as I wanted so I could look at my Trends in directions over time so I hope you found this talk valuable uh we're easy to find and I look forward to seeing seeing you use a product and letting our results do the talking when you look at uh you know kind of the way no our pen testing algorithms work is we dynamically select uh how to compromise an environment based on what we've discovered and the goal is to become a domain admin compromise a host compromise domain users find ways to encrypt data steal sensitive data and so on but when you look at the the top 10 techniques that we ended up uh using to compromise environments the first nine have nothing to do with cves and that's the reality cves are yes a vector but less than two percent of cves are actually used in a compromise oftentimes it's some sort of credential collection credential cracking uh credential pivoting and using that to become an admin and then uh compromising environments from that point on so I'll leave this up for you to kind of read through and you'll have the slides available for you but I found it very insightful that organizations and ourselves when I was a GE included invested heavily in just standard vulnerability Management Programs when I was at DOD that's all disa cared about asking us about was our our kind of our cve posture but the attackers have adapted to not rely on cves to get in because they know that organizations are actively looking at and patching those cves and instead they're chaining together credentials from one place with misconfigurations and dangerous product defaults in another to take over an environment a concrete example is by default vcenter backups are not encrypted and so as if an attacker finds vcenter what they'll do is find the backup location and there are specific V sender MTD files where the admin credentials are parsippled in the binaries so you can actually as an attacker find the right MTD file parse out the binary and now you've got the admin credentials for the vcenter environment and now start to log in as admin there's a bad habit by signal officers and Signal practitioners in the in the Army and elsewhere where the the VM notes section of a virtual image has the password for the VM well those VM notes are not stored encrypted and attackers know this and they're able to go off and find the VMS that are unencrypted find the note section and pull out the passwords for those images and then reuse those credentials across the board so I'll pause here and uh you know Patrick love you get some some commentary on on these techniques and other things that you've seen and what we'll do in the last say 10 to 15 minutes is uh is rolled through a little bit more on what do you do about it yeah yeah no I love it I think um I think this is pretty exhaustive what I like about what you've done here is uh you know we've seen we've seen double-digit increases in the number of organizations that are reporting actual breaches year over year for the last um for the last three years and it's often we kind of in the Zeitgeist we pegged that on ransomware which of course is like incredibly important and very top of mind um but what I like about what you have here is you know we're reminding the audience that the the attack surface area the vectors the matter um you know has to be more comprehensive than just thinking about ransomware scenarios yeah right on um so let's build on this when you think about your defense in depth you've got multiple security controls that you've purchased and integrated and you've got that redundancy if a control fails but the reality is that these security tools aren't designed to work together so when you run a pen test what you want to ask yourself is did you detect node zero did you log node zero did you alert on node zero and did you stop node zero and when you think about how to do that every single attacker command executed by node zero is available in an attacker log so you can now see you know at the bottom here vcenter um exploit at that time on that IP how it aligns to minor attack what you want to be able to do is go figure out did your security tools catch this or not and that becomes very important in using the attacker's perspective to improve your defensive security controls and so the way we've tried to make this easier back to like my my my the you know I bleed Green in many ways still from my smoke background is you want to be able to and what our customers do is hey we'll look at the attacker logs on one screen and they'll look at what did Splunk see or Miss in another screen and then they'll use that to figure out what their logging blind spots are and what that where that becomes really interesting is we've actually built out an integration into Splunk where there's a Splunk app you can download off of Splunk base and you'll get all of the pen test results right there in the Splunk console and from that Splunk console you're gonna be able to see these are all the pen tests that were run these are the issues that were found um so you can look at that particular pen test here are all of the weaknesses that were identified for that particular pen test and how they categorize out for each of those weaknesses you can click on any one of them that are critical in this case and then we'll tell you for that weakness and this is where where the the punch line comes in so I'll pause the video here for that weakness these are the commands that were executed on these endpoints at this time and then we'll actually query Splunk for that um for that IP address or containing that IP and these are the source types that surface any sort of activity so what we try to do is help you as quickly and efficiently as possible identify the logging blind spots in your Splunk environment based on the attacker's perspective so as this video kind of plays through you can see it Patrick I'd love to get your thoughts um just seeing so many Splunk deployments and the effectiveness of those deployments and and how this is going to help really Elevate the effectiveness of all of your Splunk customers yeah I'm super excited about this I mean I think this these kinds of purpose-built integration snail really move the needle for our customers I mean at the end of the day when I think about the power of Splunk I think about a product I was first introduced to 12 years ago that was an on-prem piece of software you know and at the time it sold on sort of Perpetual and term licenses but one made it special was that it could it could it could eat data at a speed that nothing else that I'd have ever seen you can ingest massively scalable amounts of data uh did cool things like schema on read which facilitated that there was this language called SPL that you could nerd out about uh and you went to a conference once a year and you talked about all the cool things you were splunking right but now as we think about the next phase of our growth um we live in a heterogeneous environment where our customers have so many different tools and data sources that are ever expanding and as you look at the as you look at the role of the ciso it's mind-blowing to me the amount of sources Services apps that are coming into the ciso span of let's just call it a span of influence in the last three years uh you know we're seeing things like infrastructure service level visibility application performance monitoring stuff that just never made sense for the security team to have visibility into you um at least not at the size and scale which we're demanding today um and and that's different and this isn't this is why it's so important that we have these joint purpose-built Integrations that um really provide more prescription to our customers about how do they walk on that Journey towards maturity what does zero to one look like what does one to two look like whereas you know 10 years ago customers were happy with platforms today they want integration they want Solutions and they want to drive outcomes and I think this is a great example of how together we are stepping to the evolving nature of the market and also the ever-evolving nature of the threat landscape and what I would say is the maturing needs of the customer in that environment yeah for sure I think especially if if we all anticipate budget pressure over the next 18 months due to the economy and elsewhere while the security budgets are not going to ever I don't think they're going to get cut they're not going to grow as fast and there's a lot more pressure on organizations to extract more value from their existing Investments as well as extracting more value and more impact from their existing teams and so security Effectiveness Fierce prioritization and automation I think become the three key themes of security uh over the next 18 months so I'll do very quickly is run through a few other use cases um every host that we identified in the pen test were able to score and say this host allowed us to do something significant therefore it's it's really critical you should be increasing your logging here hey these hosts down here we couldn't really do anything as an attacker so if you do have to make trade-offs you can make some trade-offs of your logging resolution at the lower end in order to increase logging resolution on the upper end so you've got that level of of um justification for where to increase or or adjust your logging resolution another example is every host we've discovered as an attacker we Expose and you can export and we want to make sure is every host we found as an attacker is being ingested from a Splunk standpoint a big issue I had as a CIO and user of Splunk and other tools is I had no idea if there were Rogue Raspberry Pi's on the network or if a new box was installed and whether Splunk was installed on it or not so now you can quickly start to correlate what hosts did we see and how does that reconcile with what you're logging from uh finally or second to last use case here on the Splunk integration side is for every single problem we've found we give multiple options for how to fix it this becomes a great way to prioritize what fixed actions to automate in your soar platform and what we want to get to eventually is being able to automatically trigger soar actions to fix well-known problems like automatically invalidating passwords for for poor poor passwords in our credentials amongst a whole bunch of other things we could go off and do and then finally if there is a well-known kill chain or attack path one of the things I really wish I could have done when I was a Splunk customer was take this type of kill chain that actually shows a path to domain admin that I'm sincerely worried about and use it as a glass table over which I could start to layer possible indicators of compromise and now you've got a great starting point for glass tables and iocs for actual kill chains that we know are exploitable in your environment and that becomes some super cool Integrations that we've got on the roadmap between us and the Splunk security side of the house so what I'll leave with actually Patrick before I do that you know um love to get your comments and then I'll I'll kind of leave with one last slide on this wartime security mindset uh pending you know assuming there's no other questions no I love it I mean I think this kind of um it's kind of glass table's approach to how do you how do you sort of visualize these workflows and then use things like sore and orchestration and automation to operationalize them is exactly where we see all of our customers going and getting away from I think an over engineered approach to soar with where it has to be super technical heavy with you know python programmers and getting more to this visual view of workflow creation um that really demystifies the power of Automation and also democratizes it so you don't have to have these programming languages in your resume in order to start really moving the needle on workflow creation policy enforcement and ultimately driving automation coverage across more and more of the workflows that your team is seeing yeah I think that between us being able to visualize the actual kill chain or attack path with you know think of a of uh the soar Market I think going towards this no code low code um you know configurable sore versus coded sore that's going to really be a game changer in improve or giving security teams a force multiplier so what I'll leave you with is this peacetime mindset of security no longer is sustainable we really have to get out of checking the box and then waiting for the bad guys to show up to verify that security tools are are working or not and the reason why we've got to really do that quickly is there are over a thousand companies that withdrew from the Russian economy over the past uh nine months due to the Ukrainian War there you should expect every one of them to be punished by the Russians for leaving and punished from a cyber standpoint and this is no longer about financial extortion that is ransomware this is about punishing and destroying companies and you can punish any one of these companies by going after them directly or by going after their suppliers and their Distributors so suddenly your attack surface is no more no longer just your own Enterprise it's how you bring your goods to Market and it's how you get your goods created because while I may not be able to disrupt your ability to harvest fruit if I can get those trucks stuck at the border I can increase spoilage and have the same effect and what we should expect to see is this idea of cyber-enabled economic Warfare where if we issue a sanction like Banning the Russians from traveling there is a cyber-enabled counter punch which is corrupt and destroy the American Airlines database that is below the threshold of War that's not going to trigger the 82nd Airborne to be mobilized but it's going to achieve the right effect ban the sale of luxury goods disrupt the supply chain and create shortages banned Russian oil and gas attack refineries to call a 10x spike in gas prices three days before the election this is the future and therefore I think what we have to do is shift towards a wartime mindset which is don't trust your security posture verify it see yourself Through The Eyes of the attacker build that incident response muscle memory and drive better collaboration between the red and the blue teams your suppliers and Distributors and your information uh sharing organization they have in place and what's really valuable for me as a Splunk customer was when a router crashes at that moment you don't know if it's due to an I.T Administration problem or an attacker and what you want to have are different people asking different questions of the same data and you want to have that integrated triage process of an I.T lens to that problem a security lens to that problem and then from there figuring out is is this an IT workflow to execute or a security incident to execute and you want to have all of that as an integrated team integrated process integrated technology stack and this is something that I very care I cared very deeply about as both a Splunk customer and a Splunk CTO that I see time and time again across the board so Patrick I'll leave you with the last word the final three minutes here and I don't see any open questions so please take us home oh man see how you think we spent hours and hours prepping for this together that that last uh uh 40 seconds of your talk track is probably one of the things I'm most passionate about in this industry right now uh and I think nist has done some really interesting work here around building cyber resilient organizations that have that has really I think helped help the industry see that um incidents can come from adverse conditions you know stress is uh uh performance taxations in the infrastructure service or app layer and they can come from malicious compromises uh Insider threats external threat actors and the more that we look at this from the perspective of of a broader cyber resilience Mission uh in a wartime mindset uh I I think we're going to be much better off and and will you talk about with operationally minded ice hacks information sharing intelligence sharing becomes so important in these wartime uh um situations and you know we know not all ice acts are created equal but we're also seeing a lot of um more ad hoc information sharing groups popping up so look I think I think you framed it really really well I love the concept of wartime mindset and um I I like the idea of applying a cyber resilience lens like if you have one more layer on top of that bottom right cake you know I think the it lens and the security lens they roll up to this concept of cyber resilience and I think this has done some great work there for us yeah you're you're spot on and that that is app and that's gonna I think be the the next um terrain that that uh that you're gonna see vendors try to get after but that I think Splunk is best position to win okay that's a wrap for this special Cube presentation you heard all about the global expansion of horizon 3.ai's partner program for their Partners have a unique opportunity to take advantage of their node zero product uh International go to Market expansion North America channel Partnerships and just overall relationships with companies like Splunk to make things more comprehensive in this disruptive cyber security world we live in and hope you enjoyed this program all the videos are available on thecube.net as well as check out Horizon 3 dot AI for their pen test Automation and ultimately their defense system that they use for testing always the environment that you're in great Innovative product and I hope you enjoyed the program again I'm John Furrier host of the cube thanks for watching

(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. The theme, this showcase is MarTech, the emerging cloud scale customer experiences. Season two of episode three, the ongoing series covering the startups, the hot startups, talking about analytics, data, all things MarTech. I'm your host, John Furrier, here joined by Christian Wiklund, founder and CEO of unitQ here, talk about harnessing the power of user feedback to empower marketing. Thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you so much, John. Happy to be here. >> In these new shifts in the market, when you got cloud scale, open source software is completely changing the software business. We know that. There's no longer a software category. It's cloud, integration, data. That's the new normal. That's the new category, right? So as companies are building their products, and want to do a good job, it used to be, you send out surveys, you try to get the product market fit. And if you were smart, you got it right the third, fourth, 10th time. If you were lucky, like some companies, you get it right the first time. But the holy grail is to get it right the first time. And now, this new data acquisition opportunities that you guys in the middle of that can tap customers or prospects or end users to get data before things are shipped, or built, or to iterate on products. This is the customer feedback loop or data, voice of the customer journey. It's a gold mine. And it's you guys, it's your secret weapon. Take us through what this is about now. I mean, it's not just surveys. What's different? >> So yeah, if we go back to why are we building unitQ? Which is we want to build a quality company. Which is basically, how do we enable other companies to build higher quality experiences by tapping into all of the existing data assets? And the one we are in particularly excited about is user feedback. So me and my co-founder, Nik, and we're doing now the second company together. We spent 14 years. So we're like an old married couple. We accept each other, and we don't fight anymore, which is great. We did a consumer company called Skout, which was sold five years ago. And Skout was kind of early in the whole mobile first. I guess, we were actually mobile first company. And when we launched this one, we immediately had the entire world as our marketplace, right? Like any modern company. We launch a product, we have support for many languages. It's multiple platforms. We have Android, iOS, web, big screens, small screens, and that brings some complexities as it relates to staying on top of the quality of the experience because how do I test everything? >> John: Yeah. >> Pre-production. How do I make sure that our Polish Android users are having a good day? And we found at Skout, personally, like I could discover million dollar bugs by just drinking coffee and reading feedback. And we're like, "Well, there's got to be a better way to actually harness the end user feedback. That they are leaving in so many different places." So, you know what, what unitQ does is that we basically aggregate all different sources of user feedback, which can be app store reviews, Reddit posts, Tweets, comments on your Facebook ads. It can be better Business Bureau Reports. We don't like to get to many of those, of course. But really, anything on the public domain that mentions or refers to your product, we want to ingest that data in this machine, and then all the private sources. So you probably have a support system deployed, a Zendesk, or an Intercom. You might have a chatbot like an Ada, or and so forth. And your end user is going to leave a lot of feedback there as well. So we take all of these channels, plug it into the machine, and then we're able to take this qualitative data. Which and I actually think like, when an end user leaves a piece of feedback, it's an act of love. They took time out of the day, and they're going to tell you, "Hey, this is not working for me," or, "Hey, this is working for me," and they're giving you feedback. But how do we package these very messy, multi-channel, multiple languages, all over the place data? How can we distill it into something that's quantifiable? Because I want to be able to monitor these different signals. So I want to turn user feedback into time series. 'Cause with time series, I can now treat this the same way as Datadog treats machine logs. I want to be able to see anomalies, and I want to know when something breaks. So what we do here is that we break down your data in something called quality monitors, which is basically machine learning models that can aggregate the same type of feedback data in this very fine grained and discrete buckets. And we deploy up to a thousand of these quality monitors per product. And so we can get down to the root cause. Let's say, passive reset link is not working. And it's in that root cause, the granularity that we see that companies take action on the data. And I think historically, there has been like the workflow between marketing and support, and engineering and product has been a bit broken. They've been siloed from a data perspective. They've been siloed from a workflow perspective, where support will get a bunch of tickets around some issue in production. And they're trained to copy and paste some examples, and throw it over the wall, file a Jira ticket, and then they don't know what happens. So what we see with the platform we built is that these teams are able to rally around the single source of troop or like, yes, passive recent link seems to have broken. This is not a user error. It's not a fix later, or I can't reproduce. We're looking at the data, and yes, something broke. We need to fix it. >> I mean, the data silos a huge issue. Different channels, omnichannel. Now, there's more and more channels that people are talking in. So that's huge. I want to get to that. But also, you said that it's a labor of love to leave a comment or a feedback. But also, I remember from my early days, breaking into the business at IBM and Hewlett-Packard, where I worked. People who complain are the most loyal customers, if you service them. So it's complaints. >> Christian: Yeah. >> It's leaving feedback. And then, there's also reading between the lines with app errors or potentially what's going on under the covers that people may not be complaining about, but they're leaving maybe gesture data or some sort of digital trail. >> Yeah. >> So this is the confluence of the multitude of data sources. And then you got the siloed locations. >> Siloed locations. >> It's complicated problem. >> It's very complicated. And when you think about, so I started, I came to Bay Area in 2005. My dream was to be a quant analyst on Wall Street, and I ended up in QA at VMware. So I started at VMware in Palo Alto, and didn't have a driver's license. I had to bike around, which was super exciting. And we were shipping box software, right? This was literally a box with a DVD that's been burned, and if that DVD had bugs in it, guess what it'll be very costly to then have to ship out, and everything. So I love the VMware example because the test cycles were long and brutal. It was like a six month deal to get through all these different cases, and they couldn't be any bugs. But then as the industry moved into the cloud, CI/CD, ship at will. And if you look at the modern company, you'll have at least 20 plus integrations into your product. Analytics, add that's the case, authentication, that's the case, and so forth. And these integrations, they morph, and they break. And you have connectivity issues. Is your product working as well on Caltrain, when you're driving up and down, versus wifi? You have language specific bugs that happen. Android is also quite a fragmented market. The binary may not perform as well on that device, or is that device. So how do we make sure that we test everything before we ship? The answer is, we can't. There's no company today that can test everything before the ship. In particular, in consumer. And the epiphany we had at our last company, Skout, was that, "Hey, wait a minute. The end user, they're testing every configuration." They're sitting on the latest device, the oldest device. They're sitting on Japanese language, on Swedish language. >> John: Yeah. >> They are in different code paths because our product executed differently, depending on if you were a paid user, or a freemium user, or if you were certain demographical data. There's so many ways that you would have to test. And PagerDuty actually had a study they came out with recently, where they said 51% of all end user impacting issues are discovered first by the end user, when they serve with a bunch of customers. And again, like the cool part is, they will tell you what's not working. So now, how do we tap into that? >> Yeah. >> So what I'd like to say is, "Hey, your end user is like your ultimate test group, and unitQ is the layer that converts them into your extended test team." Now, the signals they're producing, it's making it through to the different teams in the organization. >> I think that's the script that you guys are flipping. If I could just interject. Because to me, when I hear you talking, I hear, "Okay, you're letting the customers be an input into the product development process." And there's many different pipelines of that development. And that could be whether you're iterating, or geography, releases, all kinds of different pipelines to get to the market. But in the old days, it was like just customer satisfaction. Complain in a call center. >> Christian: Yeah. >> Or I'm complaining, how do I get support? Nothing made itself into the product improvement, except for slow moving, waterfall-based processes. And then, maybe six months later, a small tweak could be improved. >> Yes. >> Here, you're taking direct input from collective intelligence. Okay. >> Is that have input and on timing is very important here, right? So how do you know if the product is working as it should in all these different flavors and configurations right now? How do you know if it's working well? And how do you know if you're improving or not improving over time? And I think the industry, what can we look at, as far as when it relates to quality? So I can look at star ratings, right? So what's the star rating in the app store? Well, star ratings, that's an average over time. So that's something that you may have a lot of issues in production today, and you're going to get dinged on star ratings over the next few months. And then, it brings down the score. NPS is another one, where we're not going to run NPS surveys every day. We're going to run it once a quarter, maybe once a month, if we're really, really aggressive. That's also a snapshot in time. And we need to have the finger on the pulse of product quality today. I need to know if this release is good or not good. I need to know if anything broke. And I think that real time aspect, what we see as stuff sort of bubbles up the stack, and not into production, we see up to a 50% reduction in time to fix these end user impacting issues. And I think, we also need to appreciate when someone takes time out of the day to write an app review, or email support, or write that Reddit post, it's pretty serious. It's not going to be like, "Oh, I don't like the shade of blue on this button." It's going to be something like, "I got double billed," or "Hey, someone took over my account," or, "I can't reset my password anymore. The CAPTCHA, I'm solving it, but I can't get through to the next phase." And we see a lot of these trajectory impacting bugs and quality issues in these work, these flows in the product that you're not testing every day. So if you work at Snapchat, your employees probably going to use Snapchat every day. Are they going to sign up every day? No. Are they going to do passive reset every day? No. And these things are very hard to instrument, lower in the stack. >> Yeah, I think this is, and again, back to these big problems. It's smoke before fire, and you're essentially seeing it early with your process. Can you give an example of how this new focus or new mindset of user feedback data can help customers increase their experience? Can you give some examples, 'cause folks watching and be like, "Okay, I love this value. Sell me on this idea, I'm sold. Okay, I want to tap into my prospects, and my customers, my end users to help me improve my product." 'Cause again, we can measure everything now with data. >> Yeah. We can measure everything. we can even measure quality these days. So when we started this company, I went out to talk to a bunch of friends, who are entrepreneurs, and VCs, and board members, and I asked them this very simple question. So in your board meetings, or on all hands, how do you talk about quality of the product? Do you have a metric? And everyone said, no. Okay. So are you data driven company? Yes, we're very data driven. >> John: Yeah. Go data driven. >> But you're not really sure if quality, how do you compare against competition? Are you doing as good as them, worse, better? Are you improving over time, and how do you measure it? And they're like, "Well, it's kind of like a blind spot of the company." And then you ask, "Well, do you think quality of experience is important?" And they say, "Yeah." "Well, why?" "Well, top of fund and growth. Higher quality products going to spread faster organically, we're going to make better store ratings. We're going to have the storefronts going to look better." And of course, more importantly, they said the different conversion cycles in the product box itself. That if you have bugs and friction, or an interface that's hard to use, then the inputs, the signups, it's not going to convert as well. So you're going to get dinged on retention, engagement, conversion to paid, and so forth. And that's what we've seen with the companies we work with. It is that poor quality acts as a filter function for the entire business, if you're a product led company. So if you think about product led company, where the product is really the centerpiece. And if it performs really, really well, then it allows you to hire more engineers, you can spend more on marketing. Everything is fed by this product at them in the middle, and then quality can make that thing perform worse or better. And we developed a metric actually called the unitQ Score. So if you go to our website, unitq.com, we have indexed the 5,000 largest apps in the world. And we're able to then, on a daily basis, update the score. Because the score is not something you do once a month or once a quarter. It's something that changes continuously. So now, you can get a score between zero and 100. If you get the score 100, that means that our AI doesn't find any quality issues reported in that data set. And if your score is 90, that means that 10% will be a quality issue. So now you can do a lot of fun stuff. You can start benchmarking against competition. So you can see, "Well, I'm Spotify. How do I rank against Deezer, or SoundCloud, or others in my space?" And what we've seen is that as the score goes up, we see this real big impact on KPI, such as conversion, organic growth, retention, ultimately, revenue, right? And so that was very satisfying for us, when we launched it. quality actually still really, really matters. >> Yeah. >> And I think we all agree at test, but how do we make a science out of it? And that's so what we've done. And when we were very lucky early on to get some incredible brands that we work with. So Pinterest is a big customer of ours. We have Spotify. We just signed new bank, Chime. So like we even signed BetterHelp recently, and the world's largest Bible app. So when you look at the types of businesses that we work with, it's truly a universal, very broad field, where if you have a digital exhaust or feedback, I can guarantee you, there are insights in there that are being neglected. >> John: So Chris, I got to. >> So these manual workflows. Yeah, please go ahead. >> I got to ask you, because this is a really great example of this new shift, right? The new shift of leveraging data, flipping the script. Everything's flipping the script here, right? >> Yeah. >> So you're talking about, what the value proposition is? "Hey, board example's a good one. How do you measure quality? There's no KPI for that." So it's almost category creating in its own way. In that, this net new things, it's okay to be new, it's just new. So the question is, if I'm a customer, I buy it. I can see my product teams engaging with this. I can see how it can changes my marketing, and customer experience teams. How do I operationalize this? Okay. So what do I do? So do I reorganize my marketing team? So take me through the impact to the customer that you're seeing. What are they resonating towards? Obviously, getting that data is key, and that's holy gray, we all know that. But what do I got to do to change my environment? What's my operationalization piece of it? >> Yeah, and that's one of the coolest parts I think, and that is, let's start with your user base. We're not going to ask your users to ask your users to do something differently. They're already producing this data every day. They are tweeting about it. They're putting in app produce. They're emailing support. They're engaging with your support chatbot. They're already doing it. And every day that you're not leveraging that data, the data that was produced today is less valuable tomorrow. And in 30 days, I would argue, it's probably useless. >> John: Unless it's same guy commenting. >> Yeah. (Christian and John laughing) The first, we need to make everyone understand. Well, yeah, the data is there, and we don't need to do anything differently with the end user. And then, what we do is we ask the customer to tell us, "Where should we listen in the public domain? So do you want the Reddit post, the Trustpilot? What channels should we listen to?" And then, our machine basically starts ingesting that data. So we have integration with all these different sites. And then, to get access to private data, it'll be, if you're on Zendesk, you have to issue a Zendesk token, right? So you don't need any engineering hours, except your IT person will have to grant us access to the data source. And then, when we go live. We basically build up this taxonomy with the customers. So we don't we don't want to try and impose our view of the world, of how do you describe the product with these buckets, these quality monitors? So we work with the company to then build out this taxonomy. So it's almost like a bespoke solution that we can bootstrap with previous work we've done, where you don't have these very, very fine buckets of where stuff could go wrong. And then what we do is there are different ways to hook this into the workflow. So one is just to use our products. It's a SaaS product as anything else. So you log in, and you can then get this overview of how is quality trending in different markets, on different platforms, different languages, and what is impacting them? What is driving this unitQ Score that's not good enough? And all of these different signals, we can then hook into Jira for instance. We have a Jira integration. We have a PagerDuty integration. We can wake up engineers if certain things break. We also tag tickets in your support system, which is actually quite cool. Where, let's say, you have 200 people, who wrote into support, saying, "I got double billed on Android." It turns out, there are some bugs that double billed them. Well, now we can tag all of these users in Zendesk, and then the support team can then reach out to that segment of users and say, "Hey, we heard that you had this bug with double billing. We're so sorry. We're working on it." And then when we push fix, we can then email the same group again, and maybe give them a little gift card or something, for the thank you. So you can have, even big companies can have that small company experience. So, so it's groups that use us, like at Pinterest, we have 800 accounts. So it's really through marketing has vested interest because they want to know what is impacting the end user. Because brand and product, the lines are basically gone, right? >> John: Yeah. >> So if the product is not working, then my spend into this machine is going to be less efficient. The reputation of our company is going to be worse. And the challenge for marketers before unitQ was, how do I engage with engineering and product? I'm dealing with anecdotal data, and my own experience of like, "Hey, I've never seen these type of complaints before. I think something is going on." >> John: Yeah. >> And then engineering will be like, "Ah, you know, well, I have 5,000 bugs in Jira. Why does this one matter? When did it start? Is this a growing issue?" >> John: You have to replicate the problem, right? >> Replicate it then. >> And then it goes on and on and on. >> And a lot of times, reproducing bugs, it's really hard because it works on my device. Because you don't sit on that device that it happened on. >> Yup. >> So now, when marketing can come with indisputable data, and say, "Hey, something broke here." And we see the same with support. Product engineering, of course, for them, we talk about, "Hey, listen, you you've invested a lot in observability of your stack, haven't you?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah." "So you have a Datadog in the bottom?" "Absolutely." "And you have an APP D on the client?" "Absolutely." "Well, what about the last mile? How the product manifests itself? Shouldn't you monitor that as well using machines?" They're like, "Yeah, that'd be really cool." (John laughs) And we see this. There's no way to instrument everything, lowering the stack to capture these bugs that leak out. So it resonates really well there. And even for the engineers who's going to fix it. >> Yeah. >> I call it like empathy data. >> Yup. >> Where I get assigned a bug to fix. Well, now, I can read all the feedback. I can actually see, and I can see the feedback coming in. >> Yeah. >> Oh, there's users out there, suffering from this bug. And then when I fix it and I deploy the fix, and I see the trend go down to zero, and then I can celebrate it. So that whole feedback loop is (indistinct). >> And that's real time. It's usually missed too. This is the power of user feedback. You guys got a great product, unitQ. Great to have you on. Founder and CEO, Christian Wiklund. Thanks for coming on and sharing, and showcase. >> Thank you, John. For the last 30 seconds, the minute we have left, put a plug in for the company. What are you guys looking for? Give a quick pitch for the company, real quick, for the folks out there. Looking for more people, funding status, number of employees. Give a quick plug. >> Yes. So we raised our A Round from Google, and then we raised our B from Excel that we closed late last year. So we're not raising money. We are hiring across go-to-markets, engineering. And we love to work with people, who are passionate about quality and data. We're always, of course, looking for customers, who are interested in upping their game. And hey, listen, competing with features is really hard because you can copy features very quickly. Competing with content. Content is commodity. You're going to get the same movies more or less on all these different providers. And competing on price, we're not willing to do. You're going to pay 10 bucks a month for music. So how do you compete today? And if your competitor has a better fine tuned piano than your competitor will have better efficiencies, and they're going to retain customers and users better. And you don't want to lose on quality because it is actually a deterministic and fixable problem. So yeah, come talk to us if you want to up the game there. >> Great stuff. The iteration lean startup model, some say took craft out of building the product. But this is now bringing the craftsmanship into the product cycle, when you can get that data from customers and users. >> Yeah. >> Who are going to be happy that you fixed it, that you're listening. >> Yeah. >> And that the product got better. So it's a flywheel of loyalty, quality, brand, all off you can figure it out. It's the holy grail. >> I think it is. It's a gold mine. And every day you're not leveraging this assets, your use of feedback that's there, is a missed opportunity. >> Christian, thanks so much for coming on. Congratulations to you and your startup. You guys back together. The band is back together, up into the right, doing well. >> Yeah. We we'll check in with you later. Thanks for coming on this showcase. Appreciate it. >> Thank you, John. Appreciate it very much. >> Okay. AWS Startup Showcase. This is season two, episode three, the ongoing series. This one's about MarTech, cloud experiences are scaling. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> Snowflake Summit 2022 underscored that the ecosystem excitement which was once forming around Hadoop is being reborn, escalated and coalescing around Snowflake's data cloud. What was once seen as a simpler cloud data warehouse and good marketing with the data cloud is evolving rapidly with new workloads of vertical industry focus, data applications, monetization, and more. The question is, will the promise of data be fulfilled this time around, or is it same wine, new bottle? Hello, and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis," we'll talk about the event, the announcements that Snowflake made that are of greatest interest, the major themes of the show, what was hype and what was real, the competition, and some concerns that remain in many parts of the ecosystem and pockets of customers. First let's look at the overall event. It was held at Caesars Forum. Not my favorite venue, but I'll tell you it was packed. Fire Marshall Full, as we sometimes say. Nearly 10,000 people attended the event. Here's Snowflake's CMO Denise Persson on theCUBE describing how this event has evolved. >> Yeah, two, three years ago, we were about 1800 people at a Hilton in San Francisco. We had about 40 partners attending. This week we're close to 10,000 attendees here. Almost 10,000 people online as well, and over over 200 partners here on the show floor. >> Now, those numbers from 2019 remind me of the early days of Hadoop World, which was put on by Cloudera but then Cloudera handed off the event to O'Reilly as this article that we've inserted, if you bring back that slide would say. The headline it almost got it right. Hadoop World was a failure, but it didn't have to be. Snowflake has filled the void created by O'Reilly when it first killed Hadoop World, and killed the name and then killed Strata. Now, ironically, the momentum and excitement from Hadoop's early days, it probably could have stayed with Cloudera but the beginning of the end was when they gave the conference over to O'Reilly. We can't imagine Frank Slootman handing the keys to the kingdom to a third party. Serious business was done at this event. I'm talking substantive deals. Salespeople from a host sponsor and the ecosystems that support these events, they love physical. They really don't like virtual because physical belly to belly means relationship building, pipeline, and deals. And that was blatantly obvious at this show. And in fairness, all theCUBE events that we've done year but this one was more vibrant because of its attendance and the action in the ecosystem. Ecosystem is a hallmark of a cloud company, and that's what Snowflake is. We asked Frank Slootman on theCUBE, was this ecosystem evolution by design or did Snowflake just kind of stumble into it? Here's what he said. >> Well, when you are a data clouding, you have data, people want to do things with that data. They don't want just run data operations, populate dashboards, run reports. Pretty soon they want to build applications and after they build applications, they want build businesses on it. So it goes on and on and on. So it drives your development to enable more and more functionality on that data cloud. Didn't start out that way, you know, we were very, very much focused on data operations. Then it becomes application development and then it becomes, hey, we're developing whole businesses on this platform. So similar to what happened to Facebook in many ways. >> So it sounds like it was maybe a little bit of both. The Facebook analogy is interesting because Facebook is a walled garden, as is Snowflake, but when you come into that garden, you have assurances that things are going to work in a very specific way because a set of standards and protocols is being enforced by a steward, i.e. Snowflake. This means things run better inside of Snowflake than if you try to do all the integration yourself. Now, maybe over time, an open source version of that will come out but if you wait for that, you're going to be left behind. That said, Snowflake has made moves to make its platform more accommodating to open source tooling in many of its announcements this week. Now, I'm not going to do a deep dive on the announcements. Matt Sulkins from Monte Carlo wrote a decent summary of the keynotes and a number of analysts like Sanjeev Mohan, Tony Bear and others are posting some deeper analysis on these innovations, and so we'll point to those. I'll say a few things though. Unistore extends the type of data that can live in the Snowflake data cloud. It's enabled by a new feature called hybrid tables, a new table type in Snowflake. One of the big knocks against Snowflake was it couldn't handle and transaction data. Several database companies are creating this notion of a hybrid where both analytic and transactional workloads can live in the same data store. Oracle's doing this for example, with MySQL HeatWave and there are many others. We saw Mongo earlier this month add an analytics capability to its transaction system. Mongo also added sequel, which was kind of interesting. Here's what Constellation Research analyst Doug Henschen said about Snowflake's moves into transaction data. Play the clip. >> Well with Unistore, they're reaching out and trying to bring transactional data in. Hey, don't limit this to analytical information and there's other ways to do that like CDC and streaming but they're very closely tying that again to that marketplace, with the idea of bring your data over here and you can monetize it. Don't just leave it in that transactional database. So another reach to a broader play across a big community that they're building. >> And you're also seeing Snowflake expand its workload types in its unique way and through Snowpark and its stream lit acquisition, enabling Python so that native apps can be built in the data cloud and benefit from all that structure and the features that Snowflake is built in. Hence that Facebook analogy, or maybe the App Store, the Apple App Store as I propose as well. Python support also widens the aperture for machine intelligence workloads. We asked Snowflake senior VP of product, Christian Kleinerman which announcements he thought were the most impactful. And despite the who's your favorite child nature of the question, he did answer. Here's what he said. >> I think the native applications is the one that looks like, eh, I don't know about it on the surface but he has the biggest potential to change everything. That's create an entire ecosystem of solutions for within a company or across companies that I don't know that we know what's possible. >> Snowflake also announced support for Apache Iceberg, which is a new open table format standard that's emerging. So you're seeing Snowflake respond to these concerns about its lack of openness, and they're building optionality into their cloud. They also showed some cost op optimization tools both from Snowflake itself and from the ecosystem, notably Capital One which launched a software business on top of Snowflake focused on optimizing cost and eventually the rollout data management capabilities, and all kinds of features that Snowflake announced that the show around governance, cross cloud, what we call super cloud, a new security workload, and they reemphasize their ability to read non-native on-prem data into Snowflake through partnerships with Dell and Pure and a lot more. Let's hear from some of the analysts that came on theCUBE this week at Snowflake Summit to see what they said about the announcements and their takeaways from the event. This is Dave Menninger, Sanjeev Mohan, and Tony Bear, roll the clip. >> Our research shows that the majority of organizations, the majority of people do not have access to analytics. And so a couple of the things they've announced I think address those or help to address those issues very directly. So Snowpark and support for Python and other languages is a way for organizations to embed analytics into different business processes. And so I think that'll be really beneficial to try and get analytics into more people's hands. And I also think that the native applications as part of the marketplace is another way to get applications into people's hands rather than just analytical tools. Because most people in the organization are not analysts. They're doing some line of business function. They're HR managers, they're marketing people, they're sales people, they're finance people, right? They're not sitting there mucking around in the data, they're doing a job and they need analytics in that job. >> Primarily, I think it is to contract this whole notion that once you move data into Snowflake, it's a proprietary format. So I think that's how it started but it's usually beneficial to the customers, to the users because now if you have large amount of data in paket files you can leave it on S3, but then you using the Apache Iceberg table format in Snowflake, you get all the benefits of Snowflake's optimizer. So for example, you get the micro partitioning, you get the metadata. And in a single query, you can join, you can do select from a Snowflake table union and select from an iceberg table and you can do store procedure, user defined function. So I think what they've done is extremely interesting. Iceberg by itself still does not have multi-table transactional capabilities. So if I'm running a workload, I might be touching 10 different tables. So if I use Apache Iceberg in a raw format, they don't have it, but Snowflake does. So the way I see it is Snowflake is adding more and more capabilities right into the database. So for example, they've gone ahead and added security and privacy. So you can now create policies and do even cell level masking, dynamic masking, but most organizations have more than Snowflake. So what we are starting to see all around here is that there's a whole series of data catalog companies, a bunch of companies that are doing dynamic data masking, security and governance, data observability which is not a space Snowflake has gone into. So there's a whole ecosystem of companies that is mushrooming. Although, you know, so they're using the native capabilities of Snowflake but they are at a level higher. So if you have a data lake and a cloud data warehouse and you have other like relational databases, you can run these cross platform capabilities in that layer. So that way, you know, Snowflake's done a great job of enabling that ecosystem. >> I think it's like the last mile, essentially. In other words, it's like, okay, you have folks that are basically that are very comfortable with Tableau but you do have developers who don't want to have to shell out to a separate tool. And so this is where Snowflake is essentially working to address that constituency. To Sanjeev's point, and I think part of it, this kind of plays into it is what makes this different from the Hadoop era is the fact that all these capabilities, you know, a lot of vendors are taking it very seriously to put this native. Now, obviously Snowflake acquired Streamlit. So we can expect that the Streamlit capabilities are going to be native. >> I want to share a little bit about the higher level thinking at Snowflake, here's a chart from Frank Slootman's keynote. It's his version of the modern data stack, if you will. Now, Snowflake of course, was built on the public cloud. If there were no AWS, there would be no Snowflake. Now, they're all about bringing data and live data and expanding the types of data, including structured, we just heard about that, unstructured, geospatial, and the list is going to continue on and on. Eventually I think it's going to bleed into the edge if we can figure out what to do with that edge data. Executing on new workloads is a big deal. They started with data sharing and they recently added security and they've essentially created a PaaS layer. We call it a SuperPaaS layer, if you will, to attract application developers. Snowflake has a developer-focused event coming up in November and they've extended the marketplace with 1300 native apps listings. And at the top, that's the holy grail, monetization. We always talk about building data products and we saw a lot of that at this event, very, very impressive and unique. Now here's the thing. There's a lot of talk in the press, in the Wall Street and the broader community about consumption-based pricing and concerns over Snowflake's visibility and its forecast and how analytics may be discretionary. But if you're a company building apps in Snowflake and monetizing like Capital One intends to do, and you're now selling in the marketplace, that is not discretionary, unless of course your costs are greater than your revenue for that service, in which case is going to fail anyway. But the point is we're entering a new error where data apps and data products are beginning to be built and Snowflake is attempting to make the data cloud the defacto place as to where you're going to build them. In our view they're well ahead in that journey. Okay, let's talk about some of the bigger themes that we heard at the event. Bringing apps to the data instead of moving the data to the apps, this was a constant refrain and one that certainly makes sense from a physics point of view. But having a single source of data that is discoverable, sharable and governed with increasingly robust ecosystem options, it doesn't have to be moved. Sometimes it may have to be moved if you're going across regions, but that's unique and a differentiator for Snowflake in our view. I mean, I'm yet to see a data ecosystem that is as rich and growing as fast as the Snowflake ecosystem. Monetization, we talked about that, industry clouds, financial services, healthcare, retail, and media, all front and center at the event. My understanding is that Frank Slootman was a major force behind this shift, this development and go to market focus on verticals. It's really an attempt, and he talked about this in his keynote to align with the customer mission ultimately align with their objectives which not surprisingly, are increasingly monetizing with data as a differentiating ingredient. We heard a ton about data mesh, there were numerous presentations about the topic. And I'll say this, if you map the seven pillars Snowflake talks about, Benoit Dageville talked about this in his keynote, but if you map those into Zhamak Dehghani's data mesh framework and the four principles, they align better than most of the data mesh washing that I've seen. The seven pillars, all data, all workloads, global architecture, self-managed, programmable, marketplace and governance. Those are the seven pillars that he talked about in his keynote. All data, well, maybe with hybrid tables that becomes more of a reality. Global architecture means the data is globally distributed. It's not necessarily physically in one place. Self-managed is key. Self-service infrastructure is one of Zhamak's four principles. And then inherent governance. Zhamak talks about computational, what I'll call automated governance, built in. And with all the talk about monetization, that aligns with the second principle which is data as product. So while it's not a pure hit and to its credit, by the way, Snowflake doesn't use data mesh in its messaging anymore. But by the way, its customers do, several customers talked about it. Geico, JPMC, and a number of other customers and partners are using the term and using it pretty closely to the concepts put forth by Zhamak Dehghani. But back to the point, they essentially, Snowflake that is, is building a proprietary system that substantially addresses some, if not many of the goals of data mesh. Okay, back to the list, supercloud, that's our term. We saw lots of examples of clouds on top of clouds that are architected to spin multiple clouds, not just run on individual clouds as separate services. And this includes Snowflake's data cloud itself but a number of ecosystem partners that are headed in a very similar direction. Snowflake still talks about data sharing but now it uses the term collaboration in its high level messaging, which is I think smart. Data sharing is kind of a geeky term. And also this is an attempt by Snowflake to differentiate from everyone else that's saying, hey, we do data sharing too. And finally Snowflake doesn't say data marketplace anymore. It's now marketplace, accounting for its application market. Okay, let's take a quick look at the competitive landscape via this ETR X-Y graph. Vertical access remembers net score or spending momentum and the x-axis is penetration, pervasiveness in the data center. That's what ETR calls overlap. Snowflake continues to lead on the vertical axis. They guide it conservatively last quarter, remember, so I wouldn't be surprised if that lofty height, even though it's well down from its earlier levels but I wouldn't be surprised if it ticks down again a bit in the July survey, which will be in the field shortly. Databricks is a key competitor obviously at a strong spending momentum, as you can see. We didn't draw it here but we usually draw that 40% line or red line at 40%, anything above that is considered elevated. So you can see Databricks is quite elevated. But it doesn't have the market presence of Snowflake. It didn't get to IPO during the bubble and it doesn't have nearly as deep and capable go-to market machinery. Now, they're getting better and they're getting some attention in the market, nonetheless. But as a private company, you just naturally, more people are aware of Snowflake. Some analysts, Tony Bear in particular, believe Mongo and Snowflake are on a bit of a collision course long term. I actually can see his point. You know, I mean, they're both platforms, they're both about data. It's long ways off, but you can see them sort of in a similar path. They talk about kind of similar aspirations and visions even though they're quite in different markets today but they're definitely participating in similar tam. The cloud players are probably the biggest or definitely the biggest partners and probably the biggest competitors to Snowflake. And then there's always Oracle. Doesn't have the spending velocity of the others but it's got strong market presence. It owns a cloud and it knows a thing about data and it definitely is a go-to market machine. Okay, we're going to end on some of the things that we heard in the ecosystem. 'Cause look, we've heard before how particular technology, enterprise data warehouse, data hubs, MDM, data lakes, Hadoop, et cetera. We're going to solve all of our data problems and of course they didn't. And in fact, sometimes they create more problems that allow vendors to push more incremental technology to solve the problems that they created. Like tools and platforms to clean up the no schema on right nature of data lakes or data swamps. But here are some of the things that I heard firsthand from some customers and partners. First thing is, they said to me that they're having a hard time keeping up sometimes with the pace of Snowflake. It reminds me of AWS in 2014, 2015 timeframe. You remember that fire hose of announcements which causes increased complexity for customers and partners. I talked to several customers that said, well, yeah this is all well and good but I still need skilled people to understand all these tools that I'm integrated in the ecosystem, the catalogs, the machine learning observability. A number of customers said, I just can't use one governance tool, I need multiple governance tools and a lot of other technologies as well, and they're concerned that that's going to drive up their cost and their complexity. I heard other concerns from the ecosystem that it used to be sort of clear as to where they could add value you know, when Snowflake was just a better data warehouse. But to point number one, they're either concerned that they'll be left behind or they're concerned that they'll be subsumed. Look, I mean, just like we tell AWS customers and partners, you got to move fast, you got to keep innovating. If you don't, you're going to be left. Either if your customer you're going to be left behind your competitor, or if you're a partner, somebody else is going to get there or AWS is going to solve the problem for you. Okay, and there were a number of skeptical practitioners, really thoughtful and experienced data pros that suggested that they've seen this movie before. That's hence the same wine, new bottle. Well, this time around I certainly hope not given all the energy and investment that is going into this ecosystem. And the fact is Snowflake is unquestionably making it easier to put data to work. They built on AWS so you didn't have to worry about provisioning, compute and storage and networking and scaling. Snowflake is optimizing its platform to take advantage of things like Graviton so you don't have to, and they're doing some of their own optimization tools. The ecosystem is building optimization tools so that's all good. And firm belief is the less expensive it is, the more data will get brought into the data cloud. And they're building a data platform on which their ecosystem can build and run data applications, aka data products without having to worry about all the hard work that needs to get done to make data discoverable, shareable, and governed. And unlike the last 10 years, you don't have to be a keeper and integrate all the animals in the Hadoop zoo. Okay, that's it for today, thanks for watching. Thanks to my colleague, Stephanie Chan who helps research "Breaking Analysis" topics. Sometimes Alex Myerson is on production and manages the podcasts. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social and in our newsletters, and Rob Hof is our editor in chief over at Silicon, and Hailey does some wonderful editing, thanks to all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis Podcasts. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com and you can email me at David.Vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @DVellante. If you got something interesting, I'll respond. If you don't, I'm sorry I won't. Or comment on my LinkedIn post. Please check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting innovation for good, brought to you by on shape. >>Hello, everyone, and welcome to Innovation for Good Program, hosted by the Cuban. Brought to You by on Shape, which is a PTC company. My name is Dave Valentin. I'm coming to you from our studios outside of Boston. I'll be directing the conversations today. It's a very exciting, all live program. We're gonna look at how product innovation has evolved and where it's going and how engineers, entrepreneurs and educators are applying cutting edge, cutting edge product development techniques and technology to change our world. You know, the pandemic is, of course, profoundly impacted society and altered how individuals and organizations they're gonna be thinking about an approaching the coming decade. Leading technologists, engineers, product developers and educators have responded to the new challenges that we're facing from creating lifesaving products to helping students learn from home toe how to apply the latest product development techniques and solve the world's hardest problems. And in this program, you'll hear from some of the world's leading experts and practitioners on how product development and continuous innovation has evolved, how it's being applied toe positive positively affect society and importantly where it's going in the coming decades. So let's get started with our first session fueling Tech for good. And with me is John Hirschbeck, who is the president of the Suffers, a service division of PTC, which acquired on shape just over a year ago, where John was the CEO and co founder, and Dana Grayson is here. She is the co founder and general partner at Construct Capital, a new venture capital firm. Folks, welcome to the program. Thanks so much for coming on. >>Great to be here, Dave. >>All right, John. >>You're very welcome. Dana. Look, John, let's get into it for first Belated congratulations on the acquisition of Von Shape. That was an awesome seven year journey for your company. Tell our audience a little bit about the story of on shape, but take us back to Day zero. Why did you and your co founders start on shape? Well, >>actually, start before on shaping the You know, David, I've been in this business for almost 40 years. The business of building software tools for product developers and I had been part of some previous products in the industry and companies that had been in their era. Big changes in this market and about, you know, a little Before founding on shape, we started to see the problems product development teams were having with the traditional tools of that era years ago, and we saw the opportunity presented by Cloud Web and Mobile Technology. And we said, Hey, we could use Cloud Web and Mobile to solve the problems of product developers make their Their business is run better. But we have to build an entirely new system, an entirely new company, to do it. And that's what on shapes about. >>Well, so notwithstanding the challenges of co vid and difficulties this year, how is the first year been as, Ah, division of PTC for you guys? How's business? Anything you can share with us? >>Yeah, our first year of PTC has been awesome. It's been, you know, when you get acquired, Dave, you never You know, you have great optimism, but you never know what life will really be like. It's sort of like getting married or something, you know, until you're really doing it, you don't know. And so I'm happy to say that one year into our acquisition, um, PTC on shape is thriving. It's worked out better than I could have imagined a year ago. Along always, I mean sales are up. In Q four, our new sales rate grew 80% vs Excuse me, our fiscal Q four Q three. In the calendar year, it grew 80% compared to the year before. Our educational uses skyrocketing with around 400% growth, most recently year to year of students and teachers and co vid. And we've launched a major cloud platform using the core of on shape technology called Atlas. So, um, just tons of exciting things going on a TTC. >>That's awesome. But thank you for sharing some of those metrics. And of course, you're very humble individual. You know, people should know a little bit more about you mentioned, you know, we founded Solid Works, co founded Solid where I actually found it solid works. You had a great exit in the in the late nineties. But what I really appreciate is, you know, you're an entrepreneur. You've got a passion for the babies that you you helped birth. You stayed with the salt systems for a number of years. The company that quiet, solid works well over a decade. And and, of course, you and I have talked about how you participated in the the M I T. Blackjack team. You know, back in the day, a zai say you're very understated, for somebody was so accomplished. Well, >>that's kind of you, but I tend to I tend Thio always keep my eye more on what's ahead. You know what's next, then? And you know, I look back Sure to enjoy it and learn from it about what I can put to work making new memories, making new successes. >>Love it. Okay, let's bring Dana into the conversation. Hello, Dana. You look you're a fairly early investor in in on shape when you were with any A And and I think it was like it was a serious B, but it was very right close after the A raise. And and you were and still are a big believer in industrial transformation. So take us back. What did you see about on shape back then? That excited you. >>Thanks. Thanks for that. Yeah. I was lucky to be a early investment in shape. You know, the things that actually attracted me. Don shape were largely around John and, uh, the team. They're really setting out to do something, as John says humbly, something totally new, but really building off of their background was a large part of it. Um, but, you know, I was really intrigued by the design collaboration side of the product. Um, I would say that's frankly what originally attracted me to it. What kept me in the room, you know, in terms of the industrial world was seeing just if you start with collaboration around design what that does to the overall industrial product lifecycle accelerating manufacturing just, you know, modernizing all the manufacturing, just starting with design. So I'm really thankful to the on shape guys, because it was one of the first investments I've made that turned me on to the whole sector. And while just such a great pleasure to work with with John and the whole team there. Now see what they're doing inside PTC. >>And you just launched construct capital this year, right in the middle of a pandemic and which is awesome. I love it. And you're focused on early stage investing. Maybe tell us a little bit about construct capital. What your investment thesis is and you know, one of the big waves that you're hoping to ride. >>Sure, it construct it is literally lifting out of any what I was doing there. Um uh, for on shape, I went on to invest in companies such as desktop metal and Tulip, to name a couple of them form labs, another one in and around the manufacturing space. But our thesis that construct is broader than just, you know, manufacturing and industrial. It really incorporates all of what we'd call foundational industries that have let yet to be fully tech enabled or digitized. Manufacturing is a big piece of it. Supply chain, logistics, transportation of mobility or not, or other big pieces of it. And together they really drive, you know, half of the GDP in the US and have been very under invested. And frankly, they haven't attracted really great founders like they're on in droves. And I think that's going to change. We're seeing, um, entrepreneurs coming out of the tech world orthe Agnelli into these industries and then bringing them back into the tech world, which is which is something that needs to happen. So John and team were certainly early pioneers, and I think, you know, frankly, obviously, that voting with my feet that the next set, a really strong companies are going to come out of the space over the next decade. >>I think it's a huge opportunity to digitize the sort of traditionally non digital organizations. But Dana, you focused. I think it's it's accurate to say you're focused on even Mawr early stage investing now. And I want to understand why you feel it's important to be early. I mean, it's obviously riskier and reward e er, but what do you look for in companies and and founders like John >>Mhm, Um, you know, I think they're different styles of investing all the way up to public market investing. I've always been early stage investors, so I like to work with founders and teams when they're, you know, just starting out. Um, I happened to also think that we were just really early in the whole digital transformation of this world. You know, John and team have been, you know, back from solid works, etcetera around the space for a long time. But again, the downstream impact of what they're doing really changes the whole industry. And and so we're pretty early and in digitally transforming that market. Um, so that's another reason why I wanna invest early now, because I do really firmly believe that the next set of strong companies and strong returns for my own investors will be in the spaces. Um, you know, what I look for in Founders are people that really see the world in a different way. And, you know, sometimes some people think of founders or entrepreneurs is being very risk seeking. You know, if you asked John probably and another successful entrepreneurs, they would call themselves sort of risk averse, because by the time they start the company, they really have isolated all the risk out of it and think that they have given their expertise or what they're seeing their just so compelled to go change something, eh? So I look for that type of attitude experience a Z. You can also tell from John. He's fairly humble. So humility and just focus is also really important. Um, that there's a That's a lot of it. Frankly, >>Excellent. Thank you, John. You got such a rich history in the space. Uh, and one of you could sort of connect the dots over time. I mean, when you look back, what were the major forces that you saw in the market in in the early days? Particularly days of on shape on? And how is that evolved? And what are you seeing today? Well, >>I think I touched on it earlier. Actually, could I just reflect on what Dana said about risk taking for just a quick one and say, throughout my life, from blackjack to starting solid works on shape, it's about taking calculated risks. Yes, you try to eliminate the risk Sa's much as you can, but I always say, I don't mind taking a risk that I'm aware of, and I've calculated through as best I can. I don't like taking risks that I don't know I'm taking. That's right. You >>like to bet on >>sure things as much as you sure things, or at least where you feel you. You've done the research and you see them and you know they're there and you know, you, you you keep that in mind in the room, and I think that's great. And Dana did so much for us. Dana, I want to thank you again. For all that, you did it every step of the way, from where we started to to, you know, your journey with us ended formally but continues informally. Now back to you, Dave, I think, question about the opportunity and how it's shaped up. Well, I think I touched on it earlier when I said It's about helping product developers. You know, our customers of the people build the future off manufactured goods. Anything you think of that would be manufacturing factory. You know, the chair you're sitting in machine that made your coffee. You know, the computer you're using, the trucks that drive by on the street, all the covert product research, the equipment being used to make vaccines. All that stuff is designed by someone, and our job is given the tools to do it better. And I could see the problems that those product developers had that we're slowing them down with using the computing systems of the time. When we built solid works, that was almost 30 years ago. If people don't realize that it was in the early >>nineties and you know, we did the >>best we could for the early nineties, but what we did. We didn't anticipate the world of today. And so people were having problems with just installing the systems. Dave, you wouldn't believe how hard it is to install these systems. You need toe speck up a special windows computer, you know, and make sure you've got all the memory and graphics you need and getting to get that set up. You need to make sure the device drivers air, right, install a big piece of software. Ah, license key. I'm not making this up. They're still around. You may not even know what those are. You know, Dennis laughing because, you know, zero cool people do things like this anymore. Um, and it only runs some windows. You want a second user to use it? They need a copy. They need a code. Are they on the same version? It's a nightmare. The teams change, you know? You just say, Well, get everyone on the software. Well, who's everyone? You know, you got a new vendor today? A new customer tomorrow, a new employee. People come on and off the team. The other problem is the data stored in files, thousands of files. This isn't like a spreadsheet or word processor, where there's one file to pass around these air thousands of files to make one, even a simple product. People were tearing their hair out. John, what do we do? I've got copies everywhere. I don't know where the latest version is. We tried like, you know, locking people out so that only one person can change it At the time that works against speed, it works against innovation. We saw what was happening with Cloud Web and mobile. So what's happened in the years since is every one of the forces that product developers experience the need for speed, the need for innovation, the need to be more efficient with their people in their capital. Resource is every one of those trends have been amplified since we started on shape by a lot of forces in the world. And covert is amplified all those the need for agility and remote work cove it is amplified all that the same time, The acceptance of cloud. You know, a few years ago, people were like cloud, you know, how is that gonna work now They're saying to me, You know, increasingly, how would you ever even have done this without the cloud. How do you make solid works work without the cloud? How would that even happen? You know, once people understand what on shapes about >>and we're the >>Onley full SAS solution software >>as a service, >>full SAS solution in our industry. So what's happened in those years? Same problems we saw earlier, but turn up the gain, their bigger problems. And with cloud, we've seen skepticism of years ago turn into acceptance. And now even embracement in the cova driven new normal. >>Yeah. So a lot of friction in the previous environments cloud obviously a huge factor on, I guess. I guess Dana John could see it coming, you know, in the early days of solid works with, you know, had Salesforce, which is kind of the first major independent SAS player. Well, I guess that was late nineties. So his post solid works, but pre in shape and their work day was, you know, pre on shape in the mid two thousands. And and but But, you know, the bet was on the SAS model was right for Crick had and and product development, you know, which maybe the time wasn't a no brainer. Or maybe it was, I don't know, but Dana is there. Is there anything that you would invest in today? That's not Cloud based? >>Um, that's a great question. I mean, I think we still see things all the time in the manufacturing world that are not cloud based. I think you know, the closer you get to the shop floor in the production environment. Um e think John and the PTC folks would agree with this, too, but that it's, you know, there's reliability requirements, performance requirements. There's still this attitude of, you know, don't touch the printing press. So the cloud is still a little bit scary sometimes. And I think hybrid cloud is a real thing for those or on premise. Solutions, in some cases is still a real thing. What what we're more focused on. And, um, despite whether it's on premise or hybrid or or SAS and Cloud is a frictionless go to market model, um, in the companies we invest in so sass and cloud, or really make that easy to adopt for new users, you know, you sign up, started using a product, um, but whether it's hosted in the cloud, whether it's as you can still distribute buying power. And, um, I would I'm just encouraging customers in the customer world and the more industrial environment to entrust some of their lower level engineers with more budget discretionary spending so they can try more products and unlock innovation. >>Right? The unit economics are so compelling. So let's bring it, you know, toe today's you know, situation. John, you decided to exit about a year ago. You know? What did you see in PTC? Other than the obvious money? What was the strategic fit? >>Yeah, Well, David, I wanna be clear. I didn't exit anything. Really? You >>know, I love you and I don't like that term exit. I >>mean, Dana had exit is a shareholder on and so it's not It's not exit for me. It's just a step in the journey. What we saw in PTC was a partner. First of all, that shared our vision from the top down at PTC. Jim Hempleman, the CEO. He had a great vision for for the impact that SAS can make based on cloud technology and really is Dana of highlighted so much. It's not just the technology is how you go to market and the whole business being run and how you support and make the customers successful. So Jim shared a vision for the potential. And really, really, um said Hey, come join us and we can do this bigger, Better, faster. We expanded the vision really to include this Atlas platform for hosting other SAS applications. That P D. C. I mean, David Day arrived at PTC. I met the head of the academic program. He came over to me and I said, You know, and and how many people on your team? I thought he'd say 5 40 people on the PTC academic team. It was amazing to me because, you know, we were we were just near about 100 people were required are total company. We didn't even have a dedicated academic team and we had ah, lot of students signing up, you know, thousands and thousands. Well, now we have hundreds of thousands of students were approaching a million users and that shows you the power of this team that PTC had combined with our product and technology whom you get a big success for us and for the teachers and students to the world. We're giving them great tools. So so many good things were also putting some PTC technology from other parts of PTC back into on shape. One area, a little spoiler, little sneak peek. Working on taking generative design. Dana knows all about generative design. We couldn't acquire that technology were start up, you know, just to too much to do. But PTC owns one of the best in the business. This frustrated technology we're working on putting that into on shaping our customers. Um, will be happy to see it, hopefully in the coming year sometime. >>It's great to see that two way exchange. Now, you both know very well when you start a company, of course, a very exciting time. You know, a lot of baggage, you know, our customers pulling you in a lot of different directions and asking you for specials. You have this kind of clean slate, so to speak in it. I would think in many ways, John, despite you know, your install base, you have a bit of that dynamic occurring today especially, you know, driven by the forced march to digital transformation that cove it caused. So when you sit down with the team PTC and talk strategy. You now have more global resource is you got cohorts selling opportunities. What's the conversation like in terms of where you want to take the division? >>Well, Dave, you actually you sounds like we should have you coming in and talking about strategy because you've got the strategy down. I mean, we're doing everything said global expansion were able to reach across selling. We got some excellent PTC customers that we can reach reach now and they're finding uses for on shape. I think the plan is to, you know, just go, go, go and grow, grow, grow where we're looking for this year, priorities are expand the product. I mentioned the breath of the product with new things PTC did recently. Another technology that they acquired for on shape. We did an acquisition. It was it was small, wasn't widely announced. It, um, in an area related to interfacing with electrical cad systems. So So we're doing We're expanding the breath of on shape. We're going Maura, depth in the areas were already in. We have enormous opportunity to add more features and functions that's in the product. Go to market. You mentioned it global global presence. That's something we were a little light on a year ago. Now we have a team. Dana may not even know what we have. A non shape, dedicated team in Barcelona, based in Barcelona but throughout Europe were doing multiple languages. Um, the academic program just introduced a new product into that space that z even fueling more success and growth there. Um, and of course, continuing to to invest in customer success and this Atlas platform story I keep mentioning, we're going to soon have We're gonna soon have four other major PTC brands shipping products on our Atlas Saas platform. And so we're really excited about that. That's good for the other PTC products. It's also good for on shape because now there's there's. There's other interesting products that are on shape customers can use take advantage of very easily using, say, a common log in conventions about user experience there, used to invest of all they're SAS based, so they that makes it easier to begin with. So that's some of the exciting things going on. I think you'll see PTC, um, expanding our lead in SAS based applications for this sector for our our target, uh, sectors not just in, um, in cat and data management, but another area. PTC's Big and his augmented reality with of euphoria, product line leader and industrial uses of a R. That's a whole other story we should do. A whole nother show augmented reality. But these products are amazing. You can you can help factory workers people on, uh, people who are left out of the digital transformation. Sometimes we're standing from machine >>all day. >>They can't be sitting like we are doing Zoom. They can wear a R headset in our tools, let them create great content. This is an area Dana is invested in other companies. But what I wanted to note is the new releases of our authoring software. For this, our content getting released this month, used through the Atlas platform, the SAS components of on shape for things like revision management and collaboration on duh workflow activity. All that those are tools that we're able to share leverage. We get a lot of synergy. It's just really good. It's really fun to have a good time. That's >>awesome. And then we're gonna be talking to John MacLean later about that. Let's do a little deeper Dive on that. And, Dana, what is your involvement today with with on shape? But you're looking for you know, which of their customers air actually adopting. And they're gonna disrupt their industries. And you get good pipeline from that. How do you collaborate today? >>That sounds like a great idea. Um, Aziz, John will tell you I'm constantly just asking him for advice and impressions of other entrepreneurs and picking his brain on ideas. No formal relationship clearly, but continue to count John and and John and other people in on shaping in the circle of experts that I rely on for their opinions. >>All right, so we have some questions from the crowd here. Uh, one of the questions is for the dream team. You know, John and Dana. What's your next next collective venture? I don't think we're there yet, are we? No. >>I just say, as Dana said, we love talking to her about. You know, Dana, you just returned the compliment. We would try and give you advice and the deals you're looking at, and I'm sort of casually mentoring at least one of your portfolio entrepreneurs, and that's been a lot of fun for May on, hopefully a value to them. But also Dana. We uran important pipeline to us in the world of some new things that are happening that we wouldn't see if you know you've shown us some things that you've said. What do you think of this business? And for us, it's like, Wow, it's cool to see that's going on And that's what's supposed to work in an ecosystem like this. So we we deeply value the ongoing relationship. And no, we're not starting something new. I got a lot of work left to do with what I'm doing and really happy. But we can We can collaborate in this way on other ventures. >>I like this question to somebody asking With the cloud options like on shape, Wilmore students have stem opportunities s Oh, that's a great question. Are you because of sass and cloud? Are you able to reach? You know, more students? Much more cost effectively. >>Yeah, Dave, I'm so glad that that that I was asked about this because Yes, and it's extremely gratified us. Yes, we are because of cloud, because on shape is the only full cloud full SAS system or industry were able to reach. Stem education brings able to be part of bringing step education to students who couldn't get it otherwise. And one of most gratifying gratifying things to me is the emails were getting from teachers, um, that that really, um, on the phone calls that were they really pour their heart out and say We're able to get to students in areas that have very limited compute resource is that don't have an I T staff where they don't know what computer that the students can have at home, and they probably don't even have a computer. We're talking about being able to teach them on a phone to have an android phone a low end android phone. You can do three D modeling on there with on shape. Now you can't do it any other system, but with on shape, you could do it. And so the teacher can say to the students, They have to have Internet access, and I know there's a huge community that doesn't even have Internet access, and we're not able, unfortunately to help that. But if you have Internet and you have even an android phone, we can enable the educator to teach them. And so we have case after case of saving a stem program or expanding it into the students that need it most is the ones we're helping here. So really excited about that. And we're also able to let in addition to the run on run on whatever computing devices they have, we also offer them the tools they need for remote teaching with a much richer experience. Could you teach solid works remotely? Well, maybe if the student ran it had a windows workstation. You know, big, big, high end workstation. Maybe it could, but it would be like the difference between collaborating with on shape and collaborate with solid works. Like the difference between a zoom video call and talking on the landline phone. You know, it's a much richer experience, and that's what you need. And stem teaching stem is hard, So yeah, we're super super. Um, I'm excited about bringing stem to more students because of cloud yond >>we're talking about innovation for good, and then the discussion, John, you just had it. Really? There could be a whole another vector here. We could discuss on diversity, and I wanna end with just pointing out. So, Dana, your new firm, it's a woman led firm, too. Two women leaders, you know, going forward. So that's awesome to see, so really? Yeah, thumbs up on that. Congratulations on getting that off the ground. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Okay, so thank you guys. Really appreciate It was a great discussion. I learned a lot and I'm sure the audience did a swell in a moment. We're gonna talk with on shaped customers to see how they're applying tech for good and some of the products that they're building. So keep it right there. I'm Dave Volonte. You're watching innovation for good on the Cube, the global leader in digital tech event coverage. Stay right there. >>Oh, yeah, it's >>yeah, yeah, around >>the globe. It's the Cube presenting innovation for good. Brought to you by on shape. >>Okay, we're back. This is Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good. A program on Cuba 3 65 made possible by on shape of PTC company. We're live today really live tv, which is the heritage of the Cube. And now we're gonna go to the sources and talkto on shape customers to find out how they're applying technology to create real world innovations that are changing the world. So let me introduce our panel members. Rafael Gomez Furberg is with the Chan Zuckerberg bio hub. A very big idea. And collaborative nonprofit was initiative that was funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, and really around diagnosing and curing and better managing infectious diseases. So really timely topic. Philip Tabor is also joining us. He's with silver side detectors, which develops neutron detective detection systems. Yet you want to know if early, if neutrons and radiation or in places where you don't want them, So this should be really interesting. And last but not least, Matthew Shields is with the Charlottesville schools and is gonna educate us on how he and his team are educating students in the use of modern engineering tools and techniques. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cuban to the program. This should be really interesting. Thanks for coming on. >>Hi. Or pleasure >>for having us. >>You're very welcome. Okay, let me ask each of you because you're all doing such interesting and compelling work. Let's start with Rafael. Tell us more about the bio hub and your role there, please. >>Okay. Yeah. So you said that I hope is a nonprofit research institution, um, funded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan. Um, and our main mission is to develop new technologies to help advance medicine and help, hopefully cure and manage diseases. Um, we also have very close collaborations with Universe California, San Francisco, Stanford University and the University California Berkeley on. We tried to bring those universities together, so they collaborate more of biomedical topics. And I manage a team of engineers. They by joining platform. Um, and we're tasked with creating instruments for the laboratory to help the scientist boats inside the organization and also in the partner universities Do their experiments in better ways in ways that they couldn't do before >>in this edition was launched Well, five years ago, >>it was announced at the end of 2016, and we actually started operation with at the beginning of 2017, which is when I joined, um, So this is our third year. >>And how's how's it going? How does it work? I mean, these things take time. >>It's been a fantastic experience. Uh, the organization works beautifully. Um, it was amazing to see it grow From the beginning, I was employee number 12, I think eso When I came in, it was just a nem P office building and empty labs. And very quickly we had something running about. It's amazing eso I'm very proud of the work that we have done to make that possible. Um And then, of course, that's you mentioned now with co vid, um, we've been able to do a lot of very cool work attire being of the pandemic in March, when there was a deficit of testing, uh, capacity in California, we spun up a testing laboratory in record time in about a week. It was crazy. It was a crazy project, Um, but but incredibly satisfying. And we ended up running all the way until the beginning of November, when the lab was finally shut down. We could process about 3000 samples a day. I think at the end of it all, we were able to test about 100 on the order of 100 and 50,000 samples from all over the state. We were providing free testing toe all of the Department of Public Health Department of Public Health in California, which at the media pandemic, had no way to do testing affordably and fast. So I think that was a great service to the state. Now the state has created that testing system that would serve those departments. So then we decided that it was unnecessary to keep going with testing in the other biopsy that would shut down. >>All right. Thank you for that. Now, Now, Philip, you What you do is mind melting. You basically helped keep the world safe. Maybe describe a little bit more about silver sod detectors and what your role is there and how it all works. >>Tour. So we make a nuclear bomb detectors and we also make water detectors. So we try and do our part thio keep the world from blowing up and make it a better place at the same time. Both of these applications use neutron radiation detectors. That's what we make. Put them out by import border crossing places like that. They can help make sure that people aren't smuggling. Shall we say very bad things. Um, there's also a burgeoning field of research and application where you can use neutrons with some pretty cool physics to find water so you could do things. Like what? A detector up in the mountains and measure snowpack. Put it out in the middle of the field and measure soil moisture content. And as you might imagine, there's some really cool applications in, uh, research and agronomy and public policy for this. >>All right, so it's OK, so it's a It's much more than, you know, whatever fighting terrorism, it's there's a riel edge or I kind of i o t application for what you guys >>do. We do both its's to plowshares. You might >>say a mat. I I look at your role is kind of scaling the brain power for for the future. Maybe tell us more about Charlottesville schools and in the mission that you're pursuing and what you do. >>Thank you. Um, I've been in Charlottesville City schools for about 11 or 12 years. I started their teaching, um, a handful of classes, math and science and things like that. But Thescore board and my administration had the crazy idea of starting an engineering program about seven years ago. My background is an engineering is an engineering. My masters is in mechanical and aerospace engineering and um, I basically spent a summer kind of coming up with what might be a fun engineering curriculum for our students. And it started with just me and 30 students about seven years ago, Um, kind of a home spun from scratch curriculum. One of my goals from the outset was to be a completely project based curriculum, and it's now grown. We probably have about six or 700 students, five or six full time teachers. We now have pre engineering going on at the 5th and 6th grade level. I now have students graduating. Uh, you know, graduating after senior year with, like, seven years of engineering under their belt and heading off to doing some pretty cool stuff. So it's It's been a lot of fun building a program and, um, and learning a lot in the process. >>That's awesome. I mean, you know, Cuba's. We've been passionate about things like women in tech, uh, diversity stem. You know, not only do we need more, more students and stem, we need mawr underrepresented women, minorities, etcetera. We were just talking to John Herstek and integrate gration about this is Do you do you feel is though you're I mean, first of all, the work that you do is awesome, but but I'll go one step further. Do you feel as though it's reaching, um, or diverse base? And how is that going? >>That's a great question. I think research shows that a lot of people get funneled into one kind of track or career path or set of interests really early on in their educational career, and sometimes that that funnel is kind of artificial. And so that's one of the reasons we keep pushing back. Um, so our school systems introducing kindergartners to programming on DSO We're trying to push back how we expose students to engineering and to stem fields as early as possible. And we've definitely seen the first of that in my program. In fact, my engineering program, uh, sprung out of an after school in Extracurricular Science Club that actually three girls started at our school. So I think that actually has helped that three girls started the club that eventually is what led to our engineering programs that sort of baked into the DNA and also our eyes a big public school. And we have about 50% of the students are under the poverty line and we e in Charlottesville, which is a big refugee town. And so I've been adamant from Day one that there are no barriers to entry into the program. There's no test you have to take. You don't have to have be taking a certain level of math or anything like that. That's been a lot of fun. To have a really diverse set of kids enter the program and be successful, >>that's final. That's great to hear. So, Philip, I wanna come back to you. You know, I think about maybe some day we'll be able to go back to a sporting events, and I know when I when I'm in there, there's somebody up on the roof looking out for me, you know, watching the crowd, and they have my back. And I think in many ways, the products that you build, you know, our similar. I may not know they're there, but they're keeping us safe or they're measuring things that that that I don't necessarily see. But I wonder if you could talk about a little bit more detail about the products you build and how they're impacting society. >>Sure, so There are certainly a lot of people who are who are watching, trying to make sure things were going well in keeping you safe that you may or may not be aware of. And we try and support ah lot of them. So we have detectors that are that are deployed in a variety of variety of uses, with a number of agencies and governments that dio like I was saying, ports and border crossing some other interesting applications that are looking for looking for signals that should not be there and working closely to fit into the operations these folks do. Onda. We also have a lot of outreach to researchers and scientists trying to help them support the work they're doing. Um, using neutron detection for soil moisture monitoring is a some really cool opportunities for doing it at large scale and with much less, um, expense or complication than would have been done. Previous technologies. Um, you know, they were talking about collaboration in the previous segment. We've been able to join a number of conferences for that, virtually including one that was supposed to be held in Boston, but another one that was held out of the University of Heidelberg in Germany. And, uh, this is sort of things that in some ways, the pandemic is pushing people towards greater collaboration than they would have been able to do. Had it all but in person. >>Yeah, we did. Uh, the cube did live works a couple years ago in Boston. It was awesome show. And I think, you know, with this whole trend toward digit, I call it the Force march to digital. Thanks to cove it I think that's just gonna continue. Thio grow. Rafael. What if you could describe the process that you use to better understand diseases? And what's your organization's involvement? Been in more detail, addressing the cove in pandemic. >>Um, so so we have the bio be structured in, Um um in a way that foster so the combination of technology and science. So we have to scientific tracks, one about infectious diseases and the other one about understanding just basic human biology, how the human body functions, and especially how the cells in the human body function on how they're organized to create tissues in the body. On Ben, it has this set of platforms. Um, mind is one of them by engineering that are all technology rated. So we have data science platform, all about data analysis, machine learning, things like that. Um, we have a mass spectrometry platform is all about mass spectrometry technologies to, um, exploit those ones in service for the scientist on. We have a genomics platform that it's all about sequencing DNA and are gonna, um and then an advanced microscopy. It's all about developing technologies, uh, to look at things with advanced microscopes and developed technologies to marry computation on microscopy. So, um, the scientists set the agenda and the platforms, we just serve their needs, support their needs, and hopefully develop technologies that help them do their experiments better, faster, or allow them to the experiment that they couldn't do in any other way before. Um And so with cove, it because we have that very strong group of scientists that work on have been working on infectious disease before, and especially in viruses, we've been able to very quickly pivot to working on that s O. For example, my team was able to build pretty quickly a machine to automatically purified proteins on is being used to purify all these different important proteins in the cove. It virus the SARS cov to virus Onda. We're sending some of those purified proteins all over the world. Two scientists that are researching the virus and trying to figure out how to develop vaccines, understand how the virus affects the body and all that. Um, so some of the machines we built are having a very direct impact on this. Um, Also for the copy testing lab, we were able to very quickly develop some very simple machines that allowed the lab to function sort of faster and more efficiently. Sort of had a little bit of automation in places where we couldn't find commercial machines that would do it. >>Um, eso Matt. I mean, you gotta be listening to this and thinking about Okay, So someday your students are gonna be working at organizations like like, like Bio Hub and Silver Side. And you know, a lot of young people they're just don't know about you guys, but like my kids, they're really passionate about changing the world. You know, there's way more important than you know, the financial angles and it z e. I gotta believe you're seeing that you're right in the front lines there. >>Really? Um, in fact, when I started the curriculum six or seven years ago, one of the first bits of feedback I got from my students is they said Okay, this is a lot of fun. So I had my students designing projects and programming microcontrollers raspberry, PiS and order we nose and things like that. The first bit of feedback I got from students was they said Okay, when do we get to impact the world? I've heard engineering >>is about >>making the world a better place, and robots are fun and all, but, you know, where is the real impact? And so um, dude, yeah, thanks to the guidance of my students, I'm baking that Maurin. Now I'm like day one of engineering one. We talk about how the things that the tools they're learning and the skills they're gaining, uh, eventually, you know, very soon could be could be used to make the world a better place. >>You know, we all probably heard that famous line by Jeff Hammer Barker. The greatest minds of my generation are trying to figure out how to get people to click on ads. I think we're really generally generationally, finally, at the point where young students and engineering a really, you know, a passionate about affecting society. I wanna get into the product, you know, side and understand how each of you are using on shape and and the value that that it brings. Maybe Raphael, you could start how long you've been using it. You know, what's your experience with it? Let's let's start there. >>I begin for about two years, and I switched to it with some trepidation. You know, I was used to always using the traditional product that you have to install on your computer, that everybody uses that. So I was kind of locked into that. But I started being very frustrated with the way it worked, um, and decided to give on ship chance. Which reputation? Because any change always, you know, causes anxiety. Um, but very quickly my engineers started loving it, Uh, just because it's it's first of all, the learning curve wasn't very difficult at all. You can transfer from one from the traditional product to entree very quickly and easily. You can learn all the concepts very, very fast. It has all the functionality that we needed and and what's best is that it allows to do things that we couldn't do before or we couldn't do easily. Now we can access the our cat documents from anywhere in the world. Um, so when we're in the lab fabricating something or testing a machine, any computer we have next to us or a tablet or on iPhone, we can pull it up and look at the cad and check things or make changes. That's something that couldn't do before because before you had to pay for every installation off the software for the computer, and I couldn't afford to have 20 installations to have some computers with the cat ready to use them like once every six months would have been very inefficient. So we love that part. And the collaboration features are fantastic, especially now with Kobe, that we have to have all the remote meetings eyes fantastic, that you can have another person drive the cad while the whole team is watching that person change the model and do things and point to things that is absolutely revolutionary. We love it. The fact that you have very, very sophisticated version control before it was always a challenge asking people, please, if you create anniversary and apart, how do we name it so that people find it? And then you end up with all these collection of files with names that nobody ever remembers, what they are, the person left. And now nobody knows which version is the right one. A mess with on shape on the version ING system it has, and the fact that you can go back in history off the document and go back to previous version so easily and then go back to the press and version and explore the history of the part that is truly, um, just world changing for us, that we can do that so easily on for me as a manager to manage this collection of information that is critical for our operations. It makes it so much easier because everything is in one place. I don't have to worry about file servers that go down that I have to administer that have to have I t taken care off that have to figure how to keep access to people to those servers when they're at home, and they need a virtual private network and all of that mess disappears. I just simply give give a person in accounting on shape and then magically, they have access to everything in the way I want. And we can manage the lower documents and everything in a way that is absolutely fantastic. >>Feel what was your what? What were some of the concerns you had mentioned? You had some trepidation. Was it a performance? Was it security? You know some of the traditional cloud stuff, and I'm curious as to how, How, whether any of those act manifested really that you had to manage. What were your concerns? >>Look, the main concern is how long is it going to take for everybody in the team to learn to use the system like it and buy into it? Because I don't want to have my engineers using tools against their will write. I want everybody to be happy because that's how they're productive. They're happy, and they enjoyed the tools they have. That was my main concern. I was a little bit worried about the whole concept of not having the files in a place where I couldn't quote unquote seat in some server and on site, but that That's kind of an outdated concept, right? So that took a little bit of a mind shift, but very quickly. Then I started thinking, Look, I have a lot of documents on Google Drive. Like, I don't worry about that. Why would I worry about my cat on on shape, right? Is the same thing. So I just needed to sort of put things in perspective that way. Um, the other, um, you know, the concern was the learning curve, right? Is like, how is he Will be for everybody to and for me to learn it on whether it had all of the features that we needed. And there were a few features that I actually discussed with, um uh, Cody at on shape on, they were actually awesome about using their scripting language in on shape to sort of mimic some of the features of the old cat, uh, in on, shaped in a way that actually works even better than the old system. So it was It was amazing. Yeah, >>Great. Thank you for that, Philip. What's your experience been? Maybe you could take us through your journey within shape. >>Sure. So we've been we've been using on shaped silver side for coming up on about four years now, and we love it. We're very happy with it. We have a very modular product line, so we make anything from detectors that would go into backpacks. Two vehicles, two very large things that a shipping container would go through and saw. Excuse me. Shape helps us to track and collaborate faster on the design. Have multiple people working a same time on a project. And it also helps us to figure out if somebody else comes to us and say, Hey, I want something new how we congrats modules from things that we already have put them together and then keep track of the design development and the different branches and ideas that we have, how they all fit together. A za design comes together, and it's just been fantastic from a mechanical engineering background. I will also say that having used a number of different systems and solid works was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Before I got using on shape, I went, Wow, this is amazing and I really don't want to design in any other platform. After after getting on Lee, a little bit familiar with it. >>You know, it's funny, right? I'll have the speed of technology progression. I was explaining to some young guns the other day how I used to have a daytime er and that was my life. And if I lost that daytime, er I was dead. And I don't know how we weigh existed without, you know, Google maps eso we get anywhere, I don't know, but, uh but so So, Matt, you know, it's interesting to think about, you know, some of the concerns that Raphael brought up, you hear? For instance, you know, all the time. Wow. You know, I get my Amazon bill at the end of the month that zip through the roof in, But the reality is that Yeah, well, maybe you are doing more, but you're doing things that you couldn't have done before. And I think about your experience in teaching and educating. I mean, you so much more limited in terms of the resource is that you would have had to be able to educate people. So what's your experience been with With on shape and what is it enabled? >>Um, yeah, it was actually talking before we went with on shape. We had a previous CAD program, and I was talking to my vendor about it, and he let me know that we were actually one of the biggest CAD shops in the state. Because if you think about it a really big program, you know, really big company might employ. 5, 10, 15, 20 cad guys, right? I mean, when I worked for a large defense contractor, I think there were probably 20 of us as the cad guys. I now have about 300 students doing cat. So there's probably more students with more hours of cat under their belt in my building than there were when I worked for the big defense contractor. Um, but like you mentioned, uh, probably our biggest hurdle is just re sources. And so we want We want one of things I've always prided myself and trying to do in this. Programs provide students with access two tools and skills that they're going to see either in college or in the real world. So it's one of the reason we went with a big professional cad program. There are, you know, sort of K 12 oriented software and programs and things. But, you know, I want my kids coding and python and using slack and using professional type of tools on DSO when it comes to cat. That's just that That was a really hurt. I mean, you know, you could spend $30,000 on one seat of, you know, professional level cad program, and then you need a $30,000 computer to run it on if you're doing a heavy assemblies, Um and so one of my dreams And it was always just a crazy dream. And I was the way I would always pitcher in my school system and say, someday I'm gonna have a kid on a school issued chromebook in subsidized housing, on public WiFi doing professional level bad and that that was a crazy statement until a couple of years ago. So we're really excited that I literally and you know, March and you said the forced march, the forced march into, you know, modernity, March 13th kids sitting in my engineering lab that we spent a lot of money on doing cad March 14th. Those kids were at home on their school issued chromebooks on public WiFi, uh, keeping their designs going and collaborating. And then, yeah, I could go on and on about some of the things you know, the features that we've learned since then they're even better. So it's not like this is some inferior, diminished version of Academy. There's so much about it. Well, I >>wanna I wanna ask you that I may be over my skis on this, but we're seeing we're starting to see the early days of the democratization of CAD and product design. It is the the citizen engineer, I mean, maybe insulting to the engineers in the room, But but is that we're beginning to see that >>I have to believe that everything moves into the cloud. Part of that is democratization that I don't need. I can whether you know, I think artists, you know, I could have a music studio in my basement with a nice enough software package. And Aiken, I could be a professional for now. My wife's a photographer. I'm not allowed to say that I could be a professional photographer with, you know, some cloud based software, and so, yeah, I do think that's part of what we're seeing is more and more technology is moving to the cloud. >>Philip. Rafael Anything you Dad, >>I think I mean, yeah, that that that combination of cloud based cat and then three d printing that is becoming more and more affordable on ubiquitous It's truly transformative, and I think for education is fantastic. I wish when I was a kid I had the opportunity to play with those kinds of things because I was always the late things. But, you know, the in a very primitive way. So, um, I think this is a dream for kids. Teoh be able to do this. And, um, yeah, there's so many other technologies coming on, like Arduino on all of these electronic things that live kids play at home very cheaply with things that back in my day would have been unthinkable. >>So we know there's a go ahead. Philip, please. >>We had a pandemic and silver site moved to a new manufacturing facility this year. I was just on the shop floor, talking with contractors, standing 6 ft apart, pointing at things. But through it all, our CAD system was completely unruffled. Nothing stopped in our development work. Nothing stopped in our support for existing systems in the field. We didn't have to think about it. We had other server issues, but none with our, you know, engineering cad, platform and product development in support world right ahead, which was cool, but also a in that's point. I think it's just really cool what you're doing with the kids. The most interesting secondary and college level engineering work that I did was project based, taken important problem to the world. Go solve it and that is what we do here. That is what my entire career has been. And I'm super excited to see. See what your students are going to be doing, uh, in there home classrooms on their chromebooks now and what they do building on that. >>Yeah, I'm super excited to see your kids coming out of college with engineering degrees because, yeah, I think that Project based experience is so much better than just sitting in a classroom, taking notes and doing math problems on day. I think it will give the kids a much better flavor. What engineering is really about Think a lot of kids get turned off by engineering because they think it's kind of dry because it's just about the math for some very abstract abstract concept on they are there. But I think the most important thing is just that hands on a building and the creativity off, making things that you can touch that you can see that you can see functioning. >>Great. So, you know, we all know the relentless pace of technology progression. So when you think about when you're sitting down with the folks that on shape and there the customer advisor for one of the things that that you want on shape to do that it doesn't do today >>I could start by saying, I just love some of the things that does do because it's such a modern platform. And I think some of these, uh, some some platforms that have a lot of legacy and a lot of history behind them. I think we're dragging some of that behind them. So it's cool to see a platform that seemed to be developed in the modern era, and so that Z it is the Google docks. And so the fact that collaboration and version ing and link sharing is and like platform agnostic abilities, the fact that that seems to be just built into the nature of the thing so far, That's super exciting. As far as things that, uh, to go from there, Um, I don't know, >>Other than price. >>You can't say >>I >>can't say lower price. >>Yeah, so far on P. D. C. S that work with us. Really? Well, so I'm not complaining. There you there, >>right? Yeah. Yeah. No gaps, guys. Whitespace, Come on. >>We've been really enjoying the three week update. Cadence. You know, there's a new version every three weeks and we don't have to install it. We just get all the latest and greatest goodies. One of the trends that we've been following and enjoying is the the help with a revision management and release work flows. Um, and I know that there's more than on shape is working on that we're very excited for, because that's a big important part about making real hardware and supporting it in the field. Something that was cool. They just integrated Cem markup capability. In the last release that took, we were doing that anyway, but we were doing it outside of on shapes. And now we get to streamline our workflow and put it in the CAD system where We're making those changes anyway when we're reviewing drawings and doing this kind of collaboration. And so I think from our perspective, we continue to look forward. Toa further progress on that. There's a lot of capability in the cloud that I think they're just kind of scratching the surface on you, >>right? I would. I mean, you're you're asking to knit. Pick. I would say one of the things that I would like to see is is faster regeneration speed. There are a few times with convicts, necessities that regenerating the document takes a little longer than I would like. It's not a serious issue, but anyway, I I'm being spoiled, >>you know? That's good. I've been doing this a long time, and I like toe ask that question of practitioners and to me, it It's a signal like when you're nit picking and that's what you're struggling to knit. Pick that to me is a sign of a successful product, and and I wonder, I don't know, uh, have the deep dive into the architecture. But are things like alternative processors. You're seeing them hit the market in a big way. Uh, you know, maybe helping address the challenge, But I'm gonna ask you the big, chewy question now. Then we maybe go to some audience questions when you think about the world's biggest problems. I mean, we're global pandemics, obviously top of mind. You think about nutrition, you know, feeding the global community. We've actually done a pretty good job of that. But it's not necessarily with the greatest nutrition, climate change, alternative energy, the economic divides. You've got geopolitical threats and social unrest. Health care is a continuing problem. What's your vision for changing the world and how product innovation for good and be applied to some of the the problems that that you all are passionate about? Big question. Who wants toe start? >>Not biased. But for years I've been saying that if you want to solve the economy, the environment, uh, global unrest, pandemics, education is the case. If you wanna. If you want to, um, make progress in those in those realms, I think funding funding education is probably gonna pay off pretty well. >>Absolutely. And I think Stam is key to that. I mean, all of the ah lot of the well being that we have today and then industrialized countries. Thanks to science and technology, right improvements in health care, improvements in communication, transportation, air conditioning. Um, every aspect of life is touched by science and technology. So I think having more kids studying and understanding that is absolutely key. Yeah, I agree, >>Philip, you got anything to add? >>I think there's some big technical problems in the world today, Raphael and ourselves there certainly working on a couple of them. Think they're also collaboration problems and getting everybody to be able to pull together instead of pulling separately and to be able to spur the ideas on words. So that's where I think the education side is really exciting. What Matt is doing and it just kind of collaboration in general when we could do provide tools to help people do good work. Uh, that is, I think, valuable. >>Yeah, I think that's a very good point. And along those lines, we have some projects that are about creating very low cost instruments for low research settings, places in Africa, Southeast Asia, South America, so that they can do, um, um, biomedical research that it's difficult to do in those place because they don't have the money to buy the fancy lab machines that cost $30,000 an hour. Um, so we're trying to sort of democratize some of those instruments. And I think thanks to tools like Kahn shape then is easier, for example, to have a conversation with somebody in Africa and show them the design that we have and discuss the details of it with them on. But it's amazing, right to have somebody, you know, 10 time zones away, Um, looking really life in real time with you about your design and discussing the details or teaching them how to build a machine, right? Because, um, you know, they have a three D printer. You can you can just give them the design and say like, you build it yourself, uh, even cheaper than and, you know, also billing and shipping it there. Um, so all that that that aspect of it is also super important. I think for any of these efforts to improve some of the hardest part was in the world for climate change. Do you say, as you say, poverty, nutrition issues? Um, you know, availability of water. You have that project at about finding water. Um, if we can also help deploy technologies that teach people remotely how to create their own technologies or how to build their own systems that will help them solve those forms locally. I think that's very powerful. >>Yeah, the point about education is right on. I think some people in the audience may be familiar with the work of Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, the second machine age where they sort of put forth the premise that, uh, is it laid it out. Look, for the first time in history, machines air replacing humans from a cognitive perspective. Machines have always replaced humans, but that's gonna have an impact on jobs. But the answer is not toe protect the past from the future. The answer is education and public policy that really supports that. So I couldn't agree more. I think it's a really great point. Um, we have We do have some questions from the audience. If if we could If I can ask you guys, um, you know, this one kind of stands out. How do you see artificial intelligence? I was just talking about machine intelligence. Um, how do you see that? Impacting the design space guys trying to infuse a I into your product development. Can you tell me? >>Um, absolutely, like, we're using AI for some things, including some of these very low cost instruments that will hopefully help us diagnose certain diseases, especially this is that are very prevalent in the Third World. Um, and some of those diagnostics are these days done by thes armies of technicians that are trained to look under the microscope. But, um, that's a very slow process. Is very error prone and having machine learning systems that can to the same diagnosis faster, cheaper and also little machines that can be taken to very remote places to these villages that have no access to a fancy microscope. To look at a sample from a patient that's very powerful. And I we don't do this, but I have read quite a bit about how certain places air using a Tribune attorneys to actually help them optimize designs for parts. So you get these very interesting looking parts that you would have never thought off a person would have never thought off, but that are incredibly light ink. Earlier, strong and I have all sort of properties that are interesting thanks to artificial intelligence machine learning in particular >>yet another. The advantage you get when when your work is in the cloud I've seen. I mean, there's just so many applications that so if the radiology scan is in the cloud and the radiologist is goes to bed at night, Radiologist could come in in the morning and and say, Oh, the machine while you were sleeping was using artificial intelligence to scan these 40,000 images. And here's the five that we picked out that we think you should take a closer look at. Or like Raphael said, I can design my part. My, my, my, my, my you know, mount or bracket or whatever and go to sleep. And then I wake up in the morning. The machine has improved. It for me has made it strider strider stronger and lighter. Um And so just when your when your work is in the cloud, that's just that's a really cool advantage that you get that you can have machines doing some of your design work for you. >>Yeah, we've been watching, uh, you know, this week is this month, I guess is AWS re invent and it's just amazing to see how much effort is coming around machine learning machine intelligence. You know Amazon has sage maker Google's got, you know, embedded you no ML and big query. Uh, certainly Microsoft with Azure is doing tons of stuff and machine learning. I think the point there is that that these things will be infused in tow R and D and in tow software product by the vendor community. And you all will apply that to your business and and build value through the unique data that your collecting, you know, in your ecosystems. And and that's how you add value. You don't have to be necessarily, you know, developers of artificial intelligence, but you have to be practitioners to apply that. Does that make sense to you, Philip? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think your point about value is really well chosen. We see AI involved from the physics simulations all the way up to interpreting radiation data, and that's where the value question, I think, is really important because it's is the output of the AI giving helpful information that the people that need to be looking at it. So if it's curating a serious of radiation alert, saying, Hey, like these air the anomalies. You need to look at eyes it, doing that in a way that's going to help a good response on. In some cases, the II is only as good as the people. That sort of gave it a direction and turn it loose. And you want to make sure that you don't have biases or things like that underlying your AI that they're going to result in less than helpful outcomes coming from it. So we spend quite a lot of time thinking about how do we provide the right outcomes to people who are who are relying on our systems? >>That's a great point, right? Humans air biased and humans build models, so models are inherently biased. But then the software is hitting the market. That's gonna help us identify those biases and help us, you know? Of course. Correct. So we're entering Cem some very exciting times, guys. Great conversation. I can't thank you enough for spending the time with us and sharing with our audience the innovations that you're bringing to help the world. So thanks again. >>Thank you so much. >>Thank you. >>Okay. Welcome. Okay. When we come back, John McElheny is gonna join me. He's on shape. Co founder. And he's currently the VP of strategy at PTC. He's gonna join the program. We're gonna take a look at what's next and product innovation. I'm Dave Volonte and you're watching innovation for good on the Cube, the global leader. Digital technology event coverage. We'll be right back. >>Okay? Okay. Yeah. Okay. >>From around >>the globe, it's the Cube. Presenting innovation for good. Brought to you by on shape. >>Okay, welcome back to innovation. For good. With me is John McElheny, who is one of the co founders of On Shape and is now the VP of strategy at PTC. John, it's good to see you. Thanks for making the time to come on the program. Thanks, Dave. So we heard earlier some of the accomplishments that you've made since the acquisition. How has the acquisition affected your strategy? Maybe you could talk about what resource is PTC brought to the table that allowed you toe sort of rethink or evolve your strategy? What can you share with us? >>Sure. You know, a year ago, when when John and myself met with Jim Pepperman early on is we're we're pondering. Started joining PTC one of things became very clear is that we had a very clear shared vision about how we could take the on shape platform and really extended for, for all of the PTC products, particular sort of their augmented reality as well as their their thing works or the i o. T business and their product. And so from the very beginning there was a clear strategy about taking on shape, extending the platform and really investing, um, pretty significantly in the product development as well as go to market side of things, uh, toe to bring on shape out to not only the PTC based but sort of the broader community at large. So So So PTC has been a terrific, terrific, um, sort of partner as we've we've gonna go on after this market together. Eso We've added a lot of resource and product development side of things. Ah, lot of resource and they go to market and customer success and support. So, really, on many fronts, that's been both. Resource is as well a sort of support at the corporate level from from a strategic standpoint and then in the field, we've had wonderful interactions with many large enterprise customers as well as the PTC channels. So it's been really a great a great year. >>Well, and you think about the challenges of in your business going to SAS, which you guys, you know, took on that journey. You know, 78 years ago. Uh, it's not trivial for a lot of companies to make that transition, especially a company that's been around as long as PTC. So So I'm wondering how much you know, I was just asking you How about what PCP TC brought to the table? E gotta believe you're bringing a lot to the table to in terms of the mindset, uh, even things is, is mundane is not the right word, but things like how you compensate salespeople, how you interact with customers, the notion of a service versus a product. I wonder if you could address >>that. Yeah, it's a it's a really great point. In fact, after we had met Jim last year, John and I one of the things we walked out in the seaport area in Boston, one of things we sort of said is, you know, Jim really gets what we're trying to do here and and part of let me bring you into the thinking early on. Part of what Jim talked about is there's lots of, you know, installed base sort of software that's inside of PTC base. That's helped literally thousands of customers around the world. But the idea of moving to sass and all that it entails both from a technology standpoint but also a cultural standpoint. Like How do you not not just compensate the sales people as an example? But how do you think about customer success? In the past, it might have been that you had professional services that you bring out to a customer, help them deploy your solutions. Well, when you're thinking about a SAS based offering, it's really critical that you get customers successful with it. Otherwise, you may have turned, and you know it will be very expensive in terms of your business long term. So you've got to get customers success with software in the very beginning. So you know, Jim really looked at on shape and he said that John and I, from a cultural standpoint, you know, a lot of times companies get acquired and they've acquired technology in the past that they integrate directly into into PTC and then sort of roll it out through their products, are there just reached channel, he said. In some respects, John John, think about it as we're gonna take PTC and we want to integrate it into on shape because we want you to share with us both on the sales side and customer success on marketing on operations. You know all the things because long term, we believe the world is a SAS world, that the whole industry is gonna move too. So really, it was sort of an inverse in terms of the thought process related to normal transactions >>on That makes a lot of sense to me. You mentioned Sharon turns the silent killer of a SAS company, and you know, there's a lot of discussion, you know, in the entrepreneurial community because you live this, you know what's the best path? I mean today, You see, you know, if you watch Silicon Valley double, double, triple triple, but but there's a lot of people who believe, and I wonder, if you come in there is the best path to, you know, in the X Y axis. If if it's if it's uh, growth on one and retention on the other axis. What's the best way to get to the upper right on? Really? The the best path is probably make sure you've nailed obviously the product market fit, But make sure that you can retain customers and then throw gas on the fire. You see a lot of companies they burn out trying to grow too fast, but they haven't figured out, you know that. But there's too much churn. They haven't figured out those metrics. I mean, obviously on shape. You know, you were sort of a pioneer in here. I gotta believe you've figured out that customer retention before you really, You know, put the pedal to the >>metal. Yeah, and you know, growth growth can mask a lot of things, but getting getting customers, especially the engineering space. Nobody goes and sits there and says, Tomorrow we're gonna go and and, you know, put 100 users on this and and immediately swap out all of our existing tools. These tools are very rich and deep in terms of capability, and they become part of the operational process of how a company designs and builds products. So any time anybody is actually going through the purchasing process. Typically, they will run a try along or they'll run a project where they look at. Kind of What? What is this new solution gonna help them dio. How are we gonna orient ourselves for success? Longer term. So for us, you know, getting new customers and customer acquisition is really critical. But getting those customers to actually deploy the solution to be successful with it. You know, we like to sort of, say, the marketing or the lead generation and even some of the initial sales. That's sort of like the Kindle ing. But the fire really starts when customers deploy it and get successful. The solution because they bring other customers into the fold. And then, of course, if they're successful with it, you know, then in fact, you have negative turn which, ironically, means growth in terms of your inside of your install. Bates. >>Right? And you've seen that with some of the emerging, you know, SAS companies, where you're you're actually you know, when you calculate whatever its net retention or renew ALS, it's actually from a dollar standpoint. It's up in the high nineties or even over 100%. >>So >>and that's a trend we're gonna continue. See, I >>wonder >>if we could sort of go back. Uh, and when you guys were starting on shape, some of the things that you saw that you were trying to strategically leverage and what's changed, you know, today we were talking. I was talking to John earlier about in a way, you kinda you kinda got a blank slate is like doing another startup. >>You're >>not. Obviously you've got installed base and customers to service, but But it's a new beginning for you guys. So one of the things that you saw then you know, cloud and and sas and okay, but that's we've been there, done that. What are you seeing? You know today? >>Well, you know, So So this is a journey, of course, that that on shape on its own has gone through it had I'll sort of say, you know, several iterations, both in terms of of of, you know, how do you How do you get customers? How do you How do you get them successful? How do you grow those customers? And now that we've been part of PTC, the question becomes okay. One, There is certainly a higher level of credibility that helps us in terms of our our megaphone is much bigger than it was when we're standalone company. But on top of that now, figuring out how to work with their channel with their direct sales force, you know, they have, um, for example, you know, very large enterprises. Well, many of those customers are not gonna go in forklift out their existing solution to replace it with with on shape. However, many of them do have challenges in their supply chain and communications with contractors and vendors across the globe. And so, you know, finding our fit inside of those large enterprises as they extend out with their their customers is a very interesting area that we've really been sort of incremental to to PTC. And then, you know, they they have access to lots of other technology, like the i o. T business. And now, of course, the augmented reality business that that we can bring things to bear. For example, in the augmented reality world, they've they've got something called expert capture. And this is essentially imagine, you know, in a are ah, headset that allows you to be ableto to speak to it, but also capture images still images in video. And you could take somebody who's doing their task and capture literally the steps that they're taking its geo location and from their builds steps for new employees to be, we'll learn and understand how todo use that technology to help them do their job better. Well, when they do that, if there is replacement products or variation of of some of the tools that that they built the original design instruction set for they now have another version. Well, they have to manage multiple versions. Well, that's what on shape is really great at doing and so taking our technology and helping their solutions as well. So it's not only expanding our customer footprint, it's expanding the application footprint in terms of how we can help them and help customers. >>So that leads me to the tam discussion and again, as part of your strategist role. How do you think about that? Was just talking to some of your customers earlier about the democratization of cat and engineering? You know, I kind of joked, sort of like citizen engineering, but but so that you know, the demographics are changing the number of users potentially that can access the products because the it's so much more of a facile experience. How are you thinking about the total available market? >>It really is a great question, You know, it used to be when you when you sold boxes of software, it was how many engineers were out there. And that's the size of the market. The fact that matter is now when, When you think about access to that information, that data is simply a pane of glass. Whether it's a computer, whether it's a laptop, UH, a a cell phone or whether it's a tablet, the ability to to use different vehicles, access information and data expands the capabilities and power of a system to allow feedback and iteration. I mean, one of the one of the very interesting things is in technology is when you can take something and really unleash it to a larger audience and builds, you know, purpose built applications. You can start to iterate, get better feedback. You know there's a classic case in the clothing industry where Zara, you know, is a fast sort of turnaround. Agile manufacturer. And there was a great New York Times article written a couple years ago. My wife's a fan of Zara, and I think she justifies any purchases by saying, You know, Zara, you gotta purchase it now. Otherwise it may not be there the next time. Yet you go back to the store. They had some people in a store in New York that had this woman's throw kind of covering Shaw. And they said, Well, it would be great if we could have this little clip here so we can hook it through or something. And they sent a note back toe to the factory in Spain, and literally two weeks later they had, you know, 4000 of these things in store, and they sold out because they had a closed loop and iterative process. And so if we could take information and allow people access in multiple ways through different devices and different screens, that could be very specific information that, you know, we remove a lot of the engineering data book, bring the end user products conceptually to somebody that would have had to wait months to get the actual physical prototype, and we could get feedback well, Weaken have a better chance of making sure whatever product we're building is the right product when it ultimately gets delivered to a customer. So it's really it's a much larger market that has to be thought of rather than just the kind of selling A boxes software to an engineer. >>That's a great story. And again, it's gonna be exciting for you guys to see that with. The added resource is that you have a PTC, Um, so let's talk. I promise people we wanna talk about Atlas. Let's talk about the platform. A little bit of Atlas was announced last year. Atlas. For those who don't know it's a SAS space platform, it purports to go beyond product lifecycle management and you You're talking cloud like agility and scale to CAD and product design. But John, you could do a better job than I. What do >>we need to know about Atlas? Well, I think Atlas is a great description because it really is metaphorically sort of holding up all of the PTC applications themselves. But from the very beginning, when John and I met with Jim, part of what we were intrigued about was that he shared a vision that on shape was more than just going to be a cad authoring tool that, in fact, you know, in the past these engineering tools were very powerful, but they were very narrow in their purpose and focus. And we had specialty applications to manage the versions, etcetera. What we did in on shape is we kind of inverted that thinking. We built this collaboration and sharing engine at the core and then kind of wrap the CAD system around it. But that collaboration sharing and version ING engine is really powerful. And it was that vision that Jim had that he shared that we had from the beginning, which was, how do we take this thing to make a platform that could be used for many other applications inside of inside of any company? And so not only do we have a partner application area that is is much like the APP store or Google play store. Uh, that was sort of our first Stan Shih ation of this. This this platform. But now we're extending out to broader applications and much meatier applications. And internally, that's the thing works in the in the augmented reality. But there'll be other applications that ultimately find its way on top of this platform. And so they'll get all the benefits of of the collaboration, sharing the version ing the multi platform, multi device. And that's an extremely extremely, um, strategic leverage point for the company. >>You know, it's interesting, John, you mentioned the seaport before. So PTC, for those who don't know, built a beautiful facility down at the Seaport in Boston. And, of course, when PTC started, you know, back in the mid 19 eighties, there was nothing at the seaport s. >>So it's >>kind of kind of ironic, you know, we were way seeing the transformation of the seaport. We're seeing the transformation of industry and of course, PTC. And I'm sure someday you'll get back into that beautiful office, you know? Wait. Yeah, I'll bet. And, uh and but I wanna bring this up because I want I want you to talk about the future. How you how you see that our industry and you've observed this has moved from very product centric, uh, plat platform centric with sass and cloud. And now we're seeing ecosystems form around those products and platforms and data flowing through the ecosystem powering, you know, new innovation. I wonder if you could paint a picture for us of what the future looks like to you from your vantage point. >>Yeah, I think one of the key words you said there is data because up until now, data for companies really was sort of trapped in different applications. And it wasn't because people were nefarious and they want to keep it limited. It was just the way in which things were built. And, you know, when people use an application like on shape, what ends up happening is there their day to day interaction and everything that they do is actually captured by the platform. And, you know, we don't have access to that data. Of course it's it's the customer's data. But as as an artifact of them using the system than doing their day to day job, what's happening is they're creating huge amounts of information that can then be accessed and analyzed to help them both improve their design process, improve their efficiencies, improve their actual schedules in terms of making sure they can hit delivery times and be able to understand where there might be roadblocks in the future. So the way I see it is companies now are deploying SAS based tools like on shape and an artifact of them. Using that platform is that they have now analytics and tools to better understand and an instrument and manage their business. And then from there, I think you're going to see, because these systems are all you know extremely well. Architected allow through, you know, very structured AP. I calls to connect other SAS based applications. You're gonna start seeing closed loop sort of system. So, for example, people design using on shape, they end up going and deploying their system or installing it, or people use the end using products. People then may call back into the customers support line and report issues, problems, challenges. They'll be able to do traceability back to the underlying design. They'll be able to do trend analysis and defect analysis from the support lines and tie it back and closed loop the product design, manufacture, deployment in the field sort of cycles. In addition, you can imagine there's many things that air sort of as designed. But then when people go on site and they have to install it. There's some alterations modifications. Think about think about like a large air conditioning units for buildings. You go and you go to train and you get a large air conditioning unit that put up on top of building with a crane. They have to build all kinds of adaptors to make sure that that will fit inside of the particulars of that building. You know, with on shape and tools like this, you'll be able to not only take the design of what the air conditioning system might be, but also the all the adapter plates, but also how they installed it. So it sort of as designed as manufactured as stalled. And all these things can be traced, just like if you think about the transformation of customer service or customer contacts. In the early days, you used to have tools that were PC based tools called contact management solution, you know, kind of act or gold mine. And these were basically glorified Elektronik role in Texas. It had a customer names and they had phone numbers and whatever else. And Salesforce and Siebel, you know, these types of systems really broadened out the perspective of what a customer relationship? Waas. So it wasn't just the contact information it was, you know, How did they come to find out about you as a company? So all of the pre sort of marketing and then kind of what happens after they become a customer and it really was a 3 60 view. I think that 3 60 view gets extended to not just to the customers, but also tools and the products they use. And then, of course, the performance information that could come back to the manufacturer. So, you know, as an engineer, one of the things you learn about with systems is the following. And if you remember, when the CD first came out CDs that used to talk about four times over sampling or eight times over sampling and it was really kind of, you know, the fidelity the system. And we know from systems theory that the best way to improve the performance of a system is to actually have more feedback. The more feedback you have, the better system could be. And so that's why you get 16 60 for example, etcetera. Same thing here. The more feedback we have of different parts of a company that a better performance, The company will be better customer relationships. Better, uh, overall financial performance as well. So that's that's the view I have of how these systems all tied together. >>It's a great vision in your point about the data is I think right on. It used to be so fragmented in silos, and in order to take a system view, you've gotta have a system view of the data. Now, for years, we've optimized maybe on one little component of the system and that sometimes we lose sight of the overall outcome. And so what you just described, I think is, I think sets up. You know very well as we exit. Hopefully soon we exit this this covert era on John. I hope that you and I can sit down face to face at a PTC on shape event in the near term >>in the seaport in the >>seaport would tell you that great facility toe have have an event for sure. It >>z wonderful >>there. So So John McElhinney. Thanks so much for for participating in the program. It was really great to have you on, >>right? Thanks, Dave. >>Okay. And I want to thank everyone for participating. Today we have some great guest speakers. And remember, this is a live program. So give us a little bit of time. We're gonna flip this site over toe on demand mode so you can share it with your colleagues and you, or you can come back and and watch the sessions that you heard today. Uh, this is Dave Volonte for the Cube and on shape PTC. Thank you so much for watching innovation for good. Be well, Have a great holiday. And we'll see you next time. Yeah.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting innovation for good. Brought to >>you by on shape. Okay, welcome back to innovation. For good. With me is John McElheny, who is one of the co founders of on Shape and is now the VP of strategy at PTC. John, good to see you. Thanks for making the time to come on the program. Thanks, Dave. So we heard earlier some of the accomplishments that you've made since the acquisition. How has the acquisition affected your strategy? Maybe you could talk about what resource is PTC brought to the table that allowed you toe sort of rethink or evolve your strategy? What can you share with us? >>Sure. You know, a year ago when John and myself met with Jim Hempleman early on is we're we're pondering started joining PTC. One of things became very clear is that we had a very clear shared vision about how we could take the on shape platform and really extended for for all of the PTC products, particular sort of their augmented reality as well as their their thing works or the i o. T business and their product. And so from the very beginning, there was a clear strategy about taking on shape, extending the platform and really investing, um, pretty significantly in the product development as well as go to market side of things, uh, toe to bring on shape out to not only the PTC based but sort of the broader community at large. So So So PTC has been terrific. Terrific, um, sort of partner as we've we've gonna go on after this market together. Eso we've added a lot of resource and product development side of things. Ah, lot of resource and to go to market and customer success and support. So really, on many fronts, that's with both resource is, as well a sort of support at the corporate level from from a strategic standpoint and then in the field, we've had wonderful interactions with many large enterprise customers as well as the PTC channels. So it's been really a great a great year. >>Well, and you think about the challenges of your business going to sas what you guys, you know, took on that journey, you know, 78 years ago. Uh, it's not trivial for a lot of companies to make that transition, especially company. That's been around as long as PTC. So So I'm wondering how much you know, I was just asking you what PC PTC brought the table. E gotta believe you're bringing a lot to the table to in terms of the mindset, uh, even things is, is mundane is not the right word. But things like how you compensate sales people, how you interact with customers, the notion of a service versus a product. I wonder if you could address >>that. Yeah, it's a It's a really great point. In fact, after we had met Jim last year, John and I one of the things we walked out in the seaport area in Boston one of things we sort of said is you know, Jim really gets what we're trying to do here and and part of let me bring you into the thinking early on. Part of what Jim talked about is there's lots of, you know, installed base sort of software that's inside of PTC base. That helped literally thousands of customers around the world. But the idea of moving to sass and all that it entails both from a technology standpoint, but also a cultural standpoint, like how do you not not just compensate the sales people as an example? But how do you think about customers? Success? In the past, it might have been that you had professional services that you bring out to a customer, help them deploy your solutions. Well, when you're thinking about a SAS based offering, it's really critical that you get customers successful with it. Otherwise, you may have turned, and you know it will be very expensive in terms of your business long term. So you've got to get customers success with software in the very beginning. So you know, Jim really looked at on shape and he said that John and I from a cultural standpoint, you know, a lot of times companies get acquired and they've acquired technology in the past that they integrate directly into into PTC and then sort of roll it out through their products or their distribution channels, he said. In some respects, John John, think about it as we're gonna take PTC and we want to integrate it into on shape because we want you to share with us both on the sales side and customer success on marketing on operations, you know, all the things because long term, we believe the world is a SAS world, that the whole industry is gonna move too. So, really, it was sort of an inverse in terms of the thought process related to normal transactions >>on that makes a lot of sense to me. You mentioned Sharon turns the silent killer of a SAS company. And you know, there's a lot of discussion, you know, in the entrepreneurial community because you live this, you know, what's the best path? I mean, today, you see, you know, you you watch Silicon Valley double, double, triple triple. But but there's a lot of people who believe, and I wonder, if you come in there is the best path to, you know, in the X Y axis. If if it's if it's, uh, growth on one and retention on the other axis, what's the best way to get to the upper right on? Really, the the best path is probably make sure you've nailed obviously the product market fit, but make sure that you can retain customers and then throw gas on the fire. You see a lot of companies they burn out trying to grow too fast, but they haven't figured out, you know that. But there's too much churn. They haven't figured out those metrics. I mean, obviously on shape. You know, you were sort of a pioneer in here. I gotta believe you've figured out that customer retention before you really? You know, put the pedal to the >>metal. Yeah. And you know, growth growth can mask a lot of things, but getting getting customers, especially the engineering space. Nobody goes and sits there and says, Tomorrow we're gonna go and and, you know, put 100 users on this and and immediately swap out all of our existing tools. These tools are very rich and deep in terms of capability, and they become part of the operational process of how a company designs and builds products. So any time anybody is actually going through the purchasing process, typically they will run a try along or they'll run a project where they look at Kind of What? What is this new solution gonna help them dio. How are we gonna orient ourselves for success? Longer term. So for us, you know, getting new customers and customer acquisition is really critical. But getting those customers to actually deploy the solution to be successful with it. You know, we like to sort of, say, the marketing or the lead generation and even some of the initial sales. That's sort of like the Kindle ing. But the fire really starts when customers deploy it and get successful with the solution because they bring other customers into the fold. And then, of course, if they're successful with it, you know, then in fact, you have negative turn which, ironically, means growth in terms of your inside of your install Bates. >>Right? And you've seen that with some of the emerging, you know, SAS companies, where you're you're actually you know, when you calculate whatever its net retention or renew ALS, it's actually from a dollar standpoint that's up in the high nineties or even over 100% >>so and >>that's a trend we're gonna continue. See, I wonder if we could sort of go back. Uh, and when you guys were starting on shape, some of the things that you saw that you were trying to strategically leverage and what's changed, you know, today we were talking. I was talking to John earlier about in a way, you kinda you kinda got a blank slate is like doing another startup. You're not. Obviously you've got installed base and customers to service, but but it's a new beginning for you guys. So one of the things that you saw then you know, cloud and and sas and okay, but that's we've been there, done that. What are you seeing? You know, today? >>Well, you know, So So this is a journey, of course, that that on shape on its own has gone through. And had, I'll sort of say, you know, several iterations, both in terms of of of, you know, how do you How do you get customers? How do you How do you get them successful? How do you grow those customers? And now that we've been part of PTC, the question becomes okay, One, there is certainly a higher level of credibility that helps us in terms of our our megaphone is much bigger than it was when we're standalone company. But on top of that now, figuring out how to work with their channel with their direct sales force, you know, they have, um, for example, you know, very large enterprises. Well, many of those customers are not gonna go in forklift out their existing solution to replace it with with on shape. However, many of them do have challenges in their supply chain and communications with contractors and vendors across the globe. And so, you know, finding our fit inside of those large enterprises as they extend out with their their customers is a very interesting area that we've really been sort of incremental to to PTC. And then, you know, they they have access to lots of other technology, like the i O. T business. And now, of course, the augmented reality business that that we can bring things to bear. For example, in the augmented reality world they've they've got something called expert capture. And this is essentially imagined, you know, in a are, ah, headset that allows you to be ableto to speak to it but also capture images, still images in video, and you could take somebody who's doing their task and capture literally the steps that they're taking its geo location and from their builds steps for new employees. We'll learn and understand how todo use that technology to help them do their job better. Well, when they do that if there is replacement products or variation of of some of the tools that that they built the original design instruction set for they now have another version. Well, they have to manage multiple versions. Well, that's what on shape is really great at doing and so taking our technology and helping their solutions as well. So it's not only expanding our customer footprint, it's expanding the application footprint in terms of how we can help them and help customers. >>So that leads me to the tam discussion. And again, it was part of your strategist role. How do you think about that? Was just talking to some of your customers earlier about the democratization of cat and engineering. You know, I kind of joked, sort of like citizen engineering, but but so that, you know, the demographics are changing the number of users potentially that can access the products because the it's so much more of a facile experience. How are you thinking about the total available market? >>It really is a great question, you know, It used to be when you when you sold boxes of software, it was how many engineers were out there, and that's the size of the market. The fact that matter is now when, When you think about access to that information, that data is simply a pane of glass. Whether it's a computer, whether it's a laptop, uh, a cell phone or whether it's a tablet, the ability to to use different vehicles, access information and data expands the capabilities and power of a system to allow feedback and iteration. I mean, one of the one of the very interesting things is in technology is when you can take something and really unleash it to a larger audience and builds, you know, purpose built applications. You can start to iterate, get better feedback. You know, there's a classic case in the clothing industry where Zara, you know, is a fast, sort of turnaround agile manufacturer. And there was a great New York Times article written a couple years ago. My wife's a fan of Zara, and I think she justifies any purchases by saying, you know, was Are you gotta purchase it now. Otherwise it may not be there the next time. Yet you go back to the store. They had some people in the store in New York that had this woman's throw kind of covering Shaw, and they said, Well, it would be great if we could have this little clip here so we could hook it through or something. And they sent a note back toe to the factory in Spain and literally two weeks later they had, you know, 4000 of these things in store, and they sold out because they had a closed loop and iterative process. And so if we could take information and allow people access in multiple ways through different devices and different screens, that could be very specific information that, you know, we remove a lot of the engineering data book, bring the end user products conceptually to somebody that would have had to wait months to get the actual physical prototype, and we could get feedback. Well, Weaken have a better chance of making sure whatever product we're building is the right product when it ultimately gets delivered to a customer. So it's really it's a much larger market that has to be thought of rather than just the kind of selling a boxes off where to an engineer, >>that's a great story, and and again, it's gotta be exciting for you guys to see that on day with the added resource is that you have a PTC eso. Let's talk. I promise people we want to talk about Atlas. Let's talk about the platform. A little bit of Atlas was announced last year. Atlas. For those who don't know it's a SAS space platform, it purports to go beyond product lifecycle management and you you're talking cloudlike agility and scale to CAD and product design. But, John, you could do a better job than I. What do >>we need to know about Atlas? Well, I think Atlas is a great description because it really is metaphorically, sort of holding up all of the PTC applications themselves. But from the very beginning, when John and I met with Jim, part of what we were intrigued about was that he shared a vision that on shape was more than just going to be a cad authoring tool that, in fact, you know, in the past, these engineering tools were very powerful, but they were very narrow in their purpose and focus, and we had specialty applications to manage diversions, etcetera. What we did in on shape is we kind of inverted that thinking we built this collaboration and sharing engine at the core and then kind of wrap the CAD system around it. But that collaboration sharing and version ING engine is really powerful. And it was that vision that Jim had that he shared that we had from the beginning, which was, how do we take this thing to make a platform that could be used for many other applications inside of inside of any company? And so not only do we have a partner application area that is is much like the APP store or Google play store. Uh, that was sort of our first misty initiation of this this this platform. But now we're extending out to broader applications and much meatier applications. And internally, that's the thing works in the in the augmented reality. But there'll be other applications that ultimately find its way on top of this platform, and so they'll get all the benefits of of the collaboration, sharing the version ing the multi platform multi device. And that's an extremely extremely, um, strategic leverage point for the company. >>You know, it's interesting, John, you mentioned the seaport before, So PTC For those who don't know built a beautiful facility down at the seaport in Boston. And of course, when PTC started back in the mid 19 eighties, this there was nothing at the seaport s. >>So it's >>kind of kind of ironic, you know, we were way seeing the transformation of the seaport. We're seeing the transformation of industry and of course, PTC. And I'm sure someday you'll get back into that beautiful office, you know? Wait. Yeah, I'll Bet. And, uh and but I wanna bring this up because I want I want you to talk about the future. How you how you see that our industry and you've observed this has moved from very product centric, uh, plat platform centric with sass and cloud. And now we're seeing ecosystems form around those products and platforms and in data flowing through the ecosystem, powering you new innovation. I wonder if you could paint a picture for us of what the future looks like to you from your vantage point. >>Yeah, I think one of the key words you said there is data because up until now, data for companies really was sort of trapped in different applications. And it wasn't because people with nefarious and they want to keep it limited. It was just the way in which things were built, and you know, when people use an application like on shape, what ends up happening is there their day to day interactions and everything that they dio is actually captured by the platform. And you know, we don't have access to that data. Of course it's it's the customer's data. But as as an artifact of them using the system than doing their day to day job, what's happening is they're creating huge amounts of information that can then be accessed and analyzed to help them both improve their design process, improve their efficiencies, improve their actual schedules in terms of making sure they can hit delivery times and be able to understand where there might be roadblocks in the future. So the way I see it is, companies now are deploying SAS based tools like an shape and an artifact of them. Using that platform is that they have now analytics and tools to better understand and an instrument and manage their business. And then from there, I think you're going to see, because these systems are all you know extremely well. architected allow through, you know, very structured AP. I calls to connect other SAS based applications. You're gonna start seeing closed loop sort of system. So, for example, people design using on shape. They end up going and deploying their system or installing it, or people use the end using products. People then may call back into the customers support line and report issues problems, challenges. They'll be able to do traceability back to the underlying design. They'll be able to do trend analysis and defect analysis from the support lines and tie it back and closed loop the product design, manufacture, deployment in the field sort of cycles. In addition, you can imagine there's many things that air sort of as designed. But then when people go on site and they have to install it, there's some alterations modifications. Think about think about like a large air conditioning units for buildings. You go and you go to train and you get a large air conditioning unit that put up on the top of building with a crane. They have to build all kinds of adaptors to make sure that that will fit inside of of of the particulars of that building. You know, with on shape and tools like this, you'll be able to not only take the design of what the air conditioning system might be, but also the all the adapter plates, but also how they installed it. So it sort of as designed as manufactured as stalled. And all these things can be traced just like if you think about the transformation of customer service or customer contacts. In the early days, you used to have tools that were PC based tools called contact management solution, you know, kind of act or gold mine. And these were basically glorified Elektronik role in Texas. It had a customer names, and they had phone numbers and whatever else. And Salesforce and Siebel, these types of systems really broadened out the perspective of what a customer relationship waas. So it wasn't just the contact information it was, you know, How did they come to find out about you as a company? So all the pre sort of marketing and then kind of what happens after they become a customer and it really was a 3 60 view. I think that 3 60 view gets extended to not just to the customers, but also tools and the products they use. And then, of course, the performance information that could come back to the manufacturer. So, you know, as an engineer, one of the things you learn about with systems is the following. And if you remember, when the 501st came out CDs that used to talk about four times over sampling or eight times over sampling and it was really kind of, you know, the fidelity the system. And we know from systems theory that the best way to improve the performance of a system is to actually have more feedback. The more feedback you have, the better system could be. And so that's why you got 16 60 for example, etcetera. Same thing here. The more feedback we have of different parts of a company that a better performance. The company will be better customer relationships, better overall financial performance as well. So that's that's the view I have of how these systems all tied together. >>The great vision in your point about the data is, I think, right on. It used to be so fragmented in silos, and in order to take a system view, you've gotta have a system view of the data. Uh, for years we've optimized maybe on one little component of the system and that sometimes we lose sight of the overall outcome. And so what you just described, I think is, I think sets up. You know very well as we exit. Hopefully soon we exit this this covert era on John. I hope that you and I can sit down face to face at a PTC on shape event in the near term. Who's >>in the seaport in the >>seaport Would tell you that great facility toe have have an event for sure. It >>z wonderful >>there. So So, John McElhinney. Thanks so much for for participating in the program. It was really great to have you on. >>Right. Thanks, Dave. >>Okay. And I want to thank everyone for participating. Today. We have some great guest speakers. And remember, this is a live program, so give us a little bit of time. We're gonna flip this site over to on demand mode so you can share it with your colleagues and you, or you can come back and and watch the sessions that you heard today. Uh, this is Dave Volonte for the Cube and on shape PTC. Thank you so much for watching innovation for good. Be well, have a great holiday and we'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Welcome to theCUBE Virtual and our coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, the specialized programming for Worldwide Public Sector. I'm Lisa Martin. I'm joined by Nick Speece the chief federal technologist for Snowflake. Nick, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here. >> Likewise, chief federal technologist, that's the first time I've ever heard of that title. Tell me a little bit about that. >> It's probably the last time you'll hear it. So chief federal technologist is really somebody in the company who is focused on bringing the needs of the federal government back to our corporate headquarters, making sure that the product as it's developed and evolves has the federal requirements in mind. >> Excellent. So the last couple of months for Snowflake big, biggest software IPO and software history your market cap right now is at 66 billion 515 data workloads running on Snowflake's platform every day 250 petabytes of data under management, a lot is going on. Let's talk about Snowflake. You guys operate only in the cloud, why was that decision made and how does that impact businesses analysis of data? >> Yeah, so great question and the answer is actually in the opening that you gave for us and thank you for that reinforcement. Snowflake can't exist anywhere, but the cloud. Technology over the last five to 10 years has really seen a move from what the cloud originally was, which was I have a virtual machine in my data center, I'm going to run it on your stuff not mine, into more comprehensive service offerings like Snowflake. We can't reach the kind of scale that Snowflake operates at every day and that our customers demand without the technology of clouds like AWS. The technology has to be there, the underlying and underpinning architecture has to be there, otherwise our customers get left in the dark and we can't can't have that. >> And especially today as data volumes are massively increasing and we know that that's only going to go up. We know that IT is only going to be more complex but when we talk to businesses in any industry the value of the data is in the insights the ability to extract that data in real time glean insights from it so that businesses can make data-based decisions that pivot their business, especially critical during the year that we have now known as 2020. Talk to me a little bit about though digging into your marketing material, everyone, there's all these terms, right, that everyone uses and you guys use single source of truth. What does it actually mean for single source, for stuff like? >> Yeah, so we talk about cloud, we talk about single source of truth and when you're looking at data problems, the problem and the solution are the same thing. A massive amount of data is a raw resource, that's all it is. And trying to refine that raw resource into something that is insightful or something that is useful to a business process is a challenge that every customer in every market, in every region undergoes. And how you overcome that is critical. And one of the primary focuses of Snowflake is to evolve the data cloud. Snowflake platform is the underlying technology for the data cloud but the data cloud is where we're going. And what I mean by data cloud. If you have a data set, your internal data, that is your truth, but it might not be the truth. So in Snowflake we encourage our customers to collaborate on data sets. For example, if you want to know how many people are living in a certain borough in New York City you could go around with a clicker and count everyone, or you could just ask the Census Bureau. That's the nature of the data cloud and what we're talking about here. Going to the subject matter experts who have the data that you need, using our marketplace, using our private exchanges, using our data sharing to build your own data cloud and become part of the next gen architecture for data sharing and collaboration, to get to the source of the truth, to make better decisions, to gain better insights. It's great to combine your data with enrich data from other sources, especially when it comes to making federal decisions and governance decisions. >> Absolutely that's critical. That the biggest challenge customers have is being able to sort through all that and find. I like how you put this as their single source of truth. Can you give us some examples of some federal agencies maybe even just anonymously that are using the power of Snowflake to do just that? >> Absolutely. We've got customers in the healthcare space and in some of the law enforcement spaces and especially in public education that are trying to increase the awareness of the folks that are subscribing to their services, for example, folks that are looking for healthcare help. If you're filing claims for a certain healthcare providers or certain care facilities, we want to make sure that those claims that are forwarded to those entities are legitimate, first of all, for example, if you're filing a claim for knee surgery in Florida, you probably didn't have one in California, three hours later. So those kinds of enforcement activities, and not just trying to do audits but also to benefit everybody who's receiving care. There's a lot of push now about genetic sequencing, DNA and RNA vaccination is huge with COVID-19, getting access to massive amounts of data to do analysis against and figure out the best approach, that's critical for where we go in the next 10 to 15 years in healthcare. Snowflake is very, very honored and happy to be propelling that move in the healthcare space. >> It is that's going to be absolutely critical but we're also seeing it, you know, everywhere else, such as for universities and education, suddenly this need, the last few months for real-time learning. Talk to me about data analysis. Can Snowflake help companies, you talked about enriching data sets so not just companies sources of data but additional data sets that they can add in and evaluate and analyze to make great decisions, but from a historical real-time perspective, talk to me how Snowflake helps with that data analysis. >> Yeah, sure. Right. So Snowflake in and of itself can do some analysis work. We've got some great visualization tools in our new UI that was released recently on public preview. So there's some analysis tools built into Snowflake but really where the value comes from is in taking your tools that you already use today and connecting it to a data source or platform that can wrangle that data, that can move that data through automated pipelines to give you a model view of that data that's beneficial. For example, data scientists and data engineers spend 80% of their time, and I know a lot of statistics are made up on the spot, that was not a promise, but trying to move this data through and refine it and build features to get to the point where you can ask a question is 80% of these very valuable professionals time. Shortening those timelines is what Snowflake really aims to do in the analysis space. We're not trying to replace the analysis tools that you use today, we work fine with all of them. The big difference is presenting them with enough data volume to give you real insights and eliminate bias as much as we can in data sets. >> What are some of the things that differentiates Snowflake from data warehouses and other folks in the market? >> Yeah. Great question. The big difference is Snowflake was built natively for the cloud. We weren't adapted to the cloud, we didn't adopt the cloud at some point in the future, Snowflake was built from scratch to be in the cloud. And since this is the appropriate show to mention it the primary difference between us is we were built to use object storage foundationally underneath our technology. And I know that sounds really nerdy and it is, but it adds a tremendous amount of value. If you think about how we used to collaborate 10 years ago we'd have a spreadsheet that if I open that spreadsheet for my share drive and you tried to open it at the same time, you'd get locked out. You're told you couldn't have it. And if tradition stays true I would probably be on vacation for two weeks. Contrast that now with the massive Google Doc platform and Office 365, object storage has changed the way that we collaborate on the same kinds of documents. Multiple people interacting with one thing at one time without contention, that's the reason why Snowflake has to operate in the cloud. We bring that same paradigm, multiple actors on a single object and give you that source of truth the truth that you absolutely need to make decisions. >> And that's critical these days as we know. We're in living in uncertain times and one of the things I think we can expect is the uncertainty to continue, but also for many industries people to stay remote or some big percentage for quite a while. So the ability to have those collaboration tools and be able to collaborate in real time is table stakes for so many companies. But when we're talking about some of the things going on this year, security, we can't not talk about security. You know, all these folks from home accessing corporate networks, you know, maybe not through VPNs or behind firewalls, the cloud is paramount to that. How does Snowflake address the security issue? >> Absolutely. So I'll start by saying our security is inherited from the wonderful security platform that AWS has underneath it. So we inherit all the security around data storage the EC Compute, all of the different entities and end points that AWS already secures Snowflake takes the same precautions. More than that, we've also built and rolled this access control to ensure that people are getting access only to the data that they should be getting access to, we recently implemented data masking as well, so certain roles are not able to see unmasked data, but they can still do queries that use the underlying data to filter. So there's a lot of different capabilities built in, encryption at rest, encryption in flight, AES-256 encryption keys used in a hierarchial model. These are phenomenal security architectures that are paramount to the security of the folks that are using our platform. Because we know at the end of the day the first day we have a leak in Snowflake is probably our last day in business. We got to be good at that which is why it's our top priority. >> I didn't, to ever talk about security as an inherited, I must be a dominant trait if we're going to be talking about, you know, genetics and chromosomes and mRNA and things like that. So walk me through last question, a government organization, or say they're an AWS customer or they want to start using Snowflake, what's that process? How do they go about doing that to leverage those inherited security capabilities that you talked about? >> Well, thankfully AWS has helped us put a FedRAMP moderate certified Snowflake region together in AWS, East commercial, so we're very happy to have a FedRAMP moderate region. They can access Snowflake through the AWS Marketplace or from Snowflake.com, you can start a trial in just a couple of minutes. Our security is built into all of our regions although the FedRAMP regions are specialized in some of the encryption technology we use, but we always, always always protect our users' data, regardless of where it is. >> You make it sound easy, I got to say. (laughing) >> That's because it is. (laughing) Thank you cloud. >> That's good. And well, that's good and it should be, especially because there's so much complexity and uncertainty everywhere else in the world right now. Last question for you. As I mentioned in the beginning, the biggest IPO in software history, just a couple of months ago during probably one of the most strangest time of any of us have ever, and our relatives ever witnessed, what can we expect from Snowflake in 2021? Are you going to bring all the good vibes that we all need? (laughing) >> Well, good vibes is our business model. You know, Snowflake is a phenomenal platform. We've had a ton of success driven by the success of our cloud provider partners, driven by the success of our wonderful customers. We have over 4,000 people using Snowflake now to great effect. You can look for more features, you can look for more functions, but really the evolution of the data cloud, our big push is to help our customers get into the data cloud, get the truth out of their data and make better decisions every day. And you'll see more of that from us as time continues. >> One more question I wanted to sneak in, how did you work with those customers to evolve the data cloud? What's that feedback loop like? >> It's, a lot of it comes down to silos that the customers have built up over years and years and years of operation. That's the first step. In Snowflake there isn't such thing really as a data silo there's data put into Snowflake, everything is unified, you can do queries across databases, that's the first thing. The second thing is browsing our data marketplace. It's just like an App Store for your phone but instead it's data sets and the data sets are published by the experts who know that material better than anyone. I mentioned earlier bringing in everything from housing evaluation data to COVID-19 data from California and Boston, bringing World Health Organization data, John Hopkins University data, joining that with the data that you already use today along with weather and population counts, the main thing here, the strategy is almost endless. More and more data sets are being published over every day. We have over a hundred contributors in the marketplace now. >> That's exciting that we have the technology and the power like this to help the world re, you know, recover from such a crazy time. It's nice to know that, that there was the power of that behind that, and the smart folks like you chief federal technologists, helping to fine tune that and really ensure that organizations across the government can maximize the value of data and find their single source of truth. Nick, it's been a blast having you on theCUBE. Thank you for joining me. >> Thank you for having me. >> For next piece, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE Virtual. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, it's theCUBE! Covering IBM Think, brought to you by IBM. >> Hi everybody, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM 2020, it's the digital IBM 2020, the Think Event Experience. My name is Dave Vellante, and you are watching theCUBE. Steve Canepa is here, he's the global GM of Communications, of the Communications sector for IBM. Steve, how ya doing, good to have you on. >> Doing great Dave, thanks for having me. >> Yeah, you're very welcome. I mean, communications is sort of a broad term for the stuff you covered. Telco, Cable, Entertainment, Broadcast, Publishing, Satellite, Sports, Music, Games, I mean, Social, wow. You run the gamut. >> It's exciting times. >> Pretty big role, yeah, I'll say you've got exciting times. With so much going on in your space, and of course this pandemic is really, you know, hit the communications industry in so many different ways. Some tailwinds, some headwinds, and it's just crazy out there. What are you seeing and what are you guys doing to support clients? >> Well, first and importantly, our thoughts go out to everyone. As we're all dealing with this around the world. I have the opportunity to work with clients, in every geography, around the globe and each and everyone of them is busily dealing with how they make sure their employees are safe, how they're providing services to their customers. And, we're right there alongside them, helping them do that as well. For us in the telecommunication space, as you know, it's actually essential, it's an essential industry that's helping the world deal with this as we are all going virtual like this session we're having today. So we're working with clients to help them get their resources in place so that they can support their businesses, their network platforms, their media services in a way that they can keep the business running. Our telecommunications customers all around the globe had to get their resources and work at home environments, we work with many of them, in deploying real-time services. We also work with them in deploying call center chatbot capabilities so that they could answer questions from their customers, from other members of the community as they were coming in. So tremendous opportunity for us to help them respond to what's happening. >> It's actually quite amazing the response, when you think about telco, you think about telco infrastructure, what comes to mind is, it's hard and it's reliable, it works and all of a sudden you've got all these remote workers. The pace of the pivot has been actually quite astounding. I mean your thoughts on that. >> Yeah and it actually goes hand in glove in what way we've been preparing the industry for generally. I mean there's been this evolution that digital service providers that's been happening in the industry now for a number of years and in fact the center point of what we're doing now to help telcos virtualize and abstract those networks so that they're software based services platforms that can respond to these kinds of peak load demand issues. Not that anyone anticipated COVID, but the ability to have a platform, that can scale your business. And allow you to respond, move services where they need to be moved, be much more agile in the way you work. These are all playing in the ability to respond to it. >> Steve I want to ask you about something you said in a recent article in Forbes, you said, winners in the 5G and edge era will be those who embrace a hybrid multicloud approach." Well, first of all, I want to ask you, I mean five G can't get here fast enough, but still you're kind of predicting, my inference a five g and edge era coming this decade, like I said it can't happen soon enough. What are your thoughts on this coming era? >> In my view there's three fundamental things that are happening simultaneously. So first obviously, five g is emerging. It's showing up now. Most service providers around the world are starting to already deploy their private five g capabilities. We're seeing it show up in evolution form, in consumer marketplace. So five g is here and will continue to scale. The second key transformation that's happening is the telco network itself is becoming a hybrid cloud platform. What I mean by that is that just as when video abstracted as a service and it could be deployed over the top service platforms, enabling things like our interview that we're doing today to happen, that got loaded on top of now open IP platform. The same exact thing is happening in the network domain where the network services, data services, voice service, multimedia services are being put on an open platform architecture that allows you to respond. And then the third key thing that's happening in the market is this edge phenomenon. And this is all about the ability to move workloads, to move services out closer to where things happen and take advantage of those key five g features like ultra low latency, increased bandwidth, and of course the ability to slice the network down to dedicated to a specific application. This opens up a whole new set of services. >> Yeah I mean as I was sort of eluding to before, the reliability of telco networks has been the hallmark of that infrastructure. As we move to this more open sort of standardized environments Steve, I would imagine that one of the technical challenges is maintaining that level of reliability and predictability while at the same time being able to support remote workers, etc low latency workloads. Can you comment on that? >> Yeah so a couple of key points there. One is as you may know, IBM acquired Red Hat a little over a year ago. Red Hat has created an open platform for the telco's to modernize their core infrastructure. And the power of that is we can see is this enormous upstream community now and that community can help accelerate the rate pace of transformation is happening, bring innovation in. That's really powerful. The second is, once we go through an open platform, software based platform, we can infuse automation. Extreme levels of automation, and AI for intelligent predictive capability. And now think about the network becoming a living, breathing, responding platform where it's based on software. So we can deploy services and functions and we can automate those services and functions. That level of intelligence serves as the ability to then get out these services. >> So Steve, definitely we had I think a decent understanding of the Red Hat and the strategy around Open Shift and the container approach, hybrid multicloud. What I didn't realize is that there was specificity around the telco industry. Can you talk more specifically about what IBM is doing in that regard? >> Yeah, it's a great question. Red Hat has a very significant presence in 120 telcos around the globe. And so not only they're Red Hat Linux which is kind of a defacto standard in the marketplace, but their open stack architecture now we're moving after the Open Shift architecture. And as part of that the relationship with an enormous upstream community of talent, it's building on those platforms. And so we're able to really infuse into Red Hat the kind of requirements that are necessary for their software platform to serve as the platform, the open platform for the telcos as we go forward. It has been an incredible synergy. I think of it as kind of two puzzle pieces that fit together incredibly well. At IBM we've had the long standing relationship with all the service providers around the world and helping them transform their business and now with Red Hat we have the opportunity to really integrate what we're doing with automation and AI standpoint with all the power of that Red Hat Platform. >> So where do you see the edge fitting into this hybrid multicloud approach? Is it sort of an extension of cloud? Is it a new cloud? We know we are envisioning this seamless experience between on-prem, cloud, multicloud, and edge. >> Yeah I think of it in a kind of simple venn diagram where you have kind of this virtualized open software based telco network on one side and you have the edge on the other and in the middle you have this kind of combination where you do edge in partnership with the telco. And the idea here is that all industries are going to want to provide a next generation of insights to their customers and to their partners. The ability to move those workloads, so think about a manufacturing shop for an example. You know we've already had IoT centers, hundreds if not thousands of them. Now we can infuse video cameras and take a huge amount of data through the enhanced bandwidth of five g and bring that down to an edge platform and analyze that video data in real time, whether employees are in safe zones, maybe with COVID now even, whether or not they're taking the proper social distancing, and looking at actually everything that's coming off of that platform or manufacturing line, looking at the equipment itself and adding AI to that so that we can analyze it in real time. Edge allows us to take advantage of those five g attributes and to put it wherever that workload should run. Whether it's on the plant floor itself, in proximity to where that equipment is, or back at a central office location within the network of a telco. >> Well this is huge for the telcos because for years, I keep talking about their hardened network, but their cost per bit has been coming down. They're responsible for putting in that infrastructure, maintaining that infrastructure and then you got the over the top providers laying out content growing like crazy, has really disrupted that industry. This is going to change the way in which telcos are able to compete, is it not? >> It's a great point. Yes. If you think about the last generation of evolution you know when we went to four g and smartphones came out, think about the Apple App Store as an example. Folks started not going to the telcos anymore for those services, they went to that OTP capability to get those applications. Now think about about in this edge world as we essentially are creating platforms for innovation for businesses and all industries. And they can now innovate on those platforms and create incredible value in their business and the telcos now can add beyond just the transport capability, but artificial intelligence, automation, they can expose certain data capabilities, they can make those applications smarter, understanding proximity data, that could be applied to things like logistics or pricing or as I said operations like in manufacturing. So a tremendous new set of value in fact most analysts say a trillion dollars in value is going to be created here. And the opportunity I see is that the open network platform becomes a way for the service providers to not only capture value for themselves, but to accelerate the value for businesses in all industries. >> Well I think we're going to see some huge moves in the chess board. More M and A. I mean it's going to be a very exciting time and of course five g's at the heart of it, but Steve I wonder if you could give us IBM's point of view in terms of where we are with five g, I mean sometimes I see it pop up on my phone and I'm like come on, that's not real five g quite yet. We heard recently that Apple might somewhat delay it's new phones that maybe five g's involved in that, but it's going to take some time for that infrastructure to roll out but what's your point of view on sort of that time frame and the business impact that we can all expect? >> Yeah I know, it's a good question. And we will see it roll out over time. Some things are starting to roll out now. Think about stadiums or other venues where you have a manufacturing shop floor as an example, oil rig off the coast. I mean you have environments where you could create five g infrastructure in a private model today and then of course consumer models are going to roll out as cities continue to get deployed by the various service providers. But I think the important point which is what we've spoken about so far, is that as we start to create this platform capability around the edge and we start to transform those network themself to coincide telcos platform, we can start to capture those values today in a four g world and as five g comes along you just essentially evolve into the capabilities that that brings especially with regards to latency and bandwidth. Now some applications where slicing will be really important. Think about a medical operation where a doctor is consulting on a surgery in a remote location. Now if I know for sure that bandwidths going to be there, that doctor no longer has to be in the same location as that robotic equipment as an example. So the ability to have dedicated bandwidth which will come with five g, will be an important attribute that gets added. >> I mean the possibilities are really mind boggling. You mentioned stadiums. Now of course hopefully at some point we'll be able to go to football games again. But I mean the last decade was all about how big can you make the screen in the stadium versus this screen. This is where a lot of the action is going to be now. Replays and just the whole experience, ordering goods and services. And then of course hardened environments like oil rigs etc so really we're not just going to return to the last decade we've been talking about that a lot here. Go ahead please. >> An example that I like to mention just 'cause it kind of brings us all together, think about first responders. Now we're in the midst of the COVID thing but soon in California again unfortunately we'll probably get close to fire season. Think in a five g edge world what that might look like. So the minute that fire starts in some location in California, drones are in the air sending video down to an edge platform that's being analyzed to understand where that fire's going and importantly everything that's in it's path and how to best battle it. Sensors coming in from IoT centers in the area feeding in data. Our weather company app feeding in real time weather statistics, wind path, temperature changes, that are going to influence the way that that that fire performs. And now with the announcement we made Samsung just recently with our edge platform, the ability to have those first responders have sensors on them, Samsung devices that are measuring their vital signs and with the predictive models that are being built, we'll know whether that first responders' in distress or about to be in distress. The ability to scale our inbound communications capability digitally so that chat bots can handle this enormous increase in the amount of folks calling in to get information on what's happening in real time. And of course with the AI in that edge platform. Moving all of that physical equipment, the asset, humans, the first responders, in the optimal position at all times in order to get that fire out as soon as possible. I think it's a good example of how we can see these capabilities come together in a five g and edge world and allow us to get enormous value, saving lives, saving property, responding to an incident like that. >> I mean that's a great example of how you're going to put innovation into action 'cause you touched all points. Imagine the amount of data now that's being created and that example that you just gave, I mean it's just going exponential. Applying artificial intelligence, machine intelligence, and then the other phrase you used is real time. And we're talking about real time or near real time decisions actually being made potentially often times by the machines or in combination with humans so that these actions can be taken of course it's all occurring on an infrastructure that's sort of an expanding definition of cloud, not just on prem, not just hybrid, not just multicloud but now the edge. It's really going to be an exciting 10 years. >> You got it exactly right. And importantly, using that example, once that fire's put out, that edge platform can wind back down to where it was before the incident occurred. But all the intelligence that was gained during that, can be taken to the next incident has it happens. So this agility becomes really powerful 'cause we get the cumulative learning that happens in these models going forward. >> Amazing. So where can people go to get some more information on sort of IBM's edge approach? >> If you go to IBM.com, you'll see information on both on IBM edge solutions that we're putting forward into marketplace and what we're doing specifically with the telecommunication service providers to help them transform their networks to take advantage of this incredible opportunity. >> Well Steve, thanks so much for your time. Really great discussion. I appreciate you comin on and sharing with our community. >> My pleasure. Thank you. >> And thank you everybody. This is theCUBE's continuous coverage of IBM Think 2020, the Digital Event Experience. My name's Dave Vellante. Keep it right there, I'll be right back right after this short break. (relaxing music)

>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering Kubecon and CloudNativeCon, brought to you by RedHat, a CloudNative computing foundation and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi and welcome back to Kubecon, CloudNativeCon 2019 here in San Diego. I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost for three days of coverage is John Troyer, and happy to welcome back to the program, was on the keynote stage earlier at the conference, Derek Collison is the founder and CEO of Synadia. >> Yes, welcome. >> Stu: Showing the logo, thanks so much for joining us, Derek. >> Oh, thank you, I really appreciate it, it's been a while. >> Yeah, it has, so you know, we've known you for many years, had you on the program, you look at us, you've got one of those VIP logos 'cause you've been on the show a few times, and you've seen a couple of these waves. Latest thing, of course, you're talking a lot about NATS, but of course Cloud Foundry you built that, so you've seen a lot of these waves, but I want to start with something you said that I thought was really thought-provoking and interesting. A lot of people, we talk about the Cloud economy, talk about the data economy... You talk about the connective economy, so, explain to our audience a little bit what that means. >> So, the general gist of it is, hey, where's the innovation and where's the value coming out of information technology, IT, infrastructure and things like that, and for a long time, we were swept up in the Cloud economy, which was how you move from CapEx into OpEx, and things like that, and then of course it was all about data. And it still is about data, but if you notice, it's not the data moving to where you're trying to process things, now it's all of a sudden being distributed, and so you take that, and you take MicroServices, and you take all these things, and at least from my perspective, I see the value driving out of these systems now is in, how are they connected? How are you observing them, how are you securing them and trusting them? And I believe that's where the value in the next wave of innovation's going to come from. >> Yeah, it's funny, I hear sometimes we talk about the pendulum of technology, and I look in the ten years we've been doing this, really we're talking about the journey along the distributed architecture we've been trying to build, and it's not moving back and forth, but it's kind of... >> Derek: Circling. >> It's kind of circling, and some of the themes are repeating, but it's growing that along the way, so, give us NATS and messaging, how this plays into helping to solve that communication issue, it's the kind of thing, we read about in the Google papers as to, global distributed architectures. >> Yeah, so, the general gist is that NATS was built to power Cloud Foundry, right, and that was the deployment mechanism for applications and such like that. And NATS, just like a lot of the other technologies, was built for an itch I needed to scratch. And it was a silo technology. So about two years ago, we had the opportunity to actually think about if we wanted to make a business out of NATS, right? And any time you say open source and commercial entity, there's challenges, and I don't think anyone has all of the answers. But the answer we came up with internally as a team was, we need to build something that's value is greater than the sum of its parts. I personally, again, and a lot of people won't agree with me and that's okay, I don't believe in the open core model. I don't believe in the fact that you make certain enterprise features and certain open source features. However, what I do believe is that if we could take a communication technology and make it a true utility, like the global cellular now, or the Internet, and connect everything, we'd have these opportunities that no one could foresee, for example, with the web, or even with the global cellular network and what people think is about to happen with the 5G. So we took NATS, which is a very mature technology, made it multi-tinted, made it very, very forward-looking secure, made it run in any Cloud, Edge, IoT, with the hope that we could encourage people to connect everything, start isolated, but have the ability to say, hey, we want to start sharing data securely in an audited way, that it's drop-dead simple to do. It's not a, let's plan a six-month project to integrate your systems with these systems and things like that, and so that's the gist of what we're trying to do, and we believe that running this thing as a server as such that it's a utility, it's not just something for you or for you or for me, it's that we're all using the same thing and we're all connected if we want to be, we think there's value there. >> Derek, maybe let's go in a little bit on NATS, and the service you're running too, but maybe educate us a little bit on the landscape here. We've already talked about IoT, Cloud data, VAP messaging, and I think people understand, to a certain extent, what a messaging system is, sometimes it gets conflated with a streaming system, maybe you could talk about what NATS does really well, we've talked about security, we've talked about a few other things, you've teased already here, but how should we be thinking about NATS? >> Well, I think, outside of NATS, just in general, any type of way of communications, we need to think secure by default, right? We can't do what happened with the Internet, where we go, ooh, it'd be really nice to do these kind of things, but we need security. And we have to wait, as a group of excited individuals, probably 15 years to get that, we can't do that in this generation with IoT and things. But when you look at NATS, or any technology, there's essentially two types of patterns that anybody wants to support. A service-based pattern, where I ask you a question, you give me an answer, ninety-plus percent of distributed systems today, that's their main architectural pattern. So I'm coordinating and asking a lot of questions of these services, micro-services, you know, has become popular. Streaming is now becoming popular with things like Kafka and stuff like that, it's been around for a while, but that's the second, other pattern. So it's like, I'm emitting events or data streams or things like that, and they could be persisted or not, but essentially if you want to make it simple, it's services and streams, and for us, we wanted technology that did equally well in both of them, right, you didn't have to pick one technology for one pattern and another one for a different one. >> All right, let's talk a little bit about your business. So you talked a little bit about kind of the business model, so explain the business model, what you're doing, how that actually goes together? >> Yeah, and for the viewers, this is our take on it, which means it's advice, you get what you pay for, it's free, type of stuff, but, you know... Been around the block a little bit. So, when we started out, what we didn't want to do is ignore the old models. I don't think a long-term business model is the old models, meaning recurring support, consulting, NRE work type of stuff, but I've also seen startups that ignore that and say, "no, we're not going to do that at all." And I did a little bit of that with my prior company, so we embrace that, but we know long-term that's not going to be it. So we deploy a global network, we have a global network, it's available with a single URL, secure by default, runs in every Cloud, every major GO, and more importantly, you can extend it on your own, on your own servers, with the RN off to do that. And we believe that Saas model, that utility model where, again, its value is greater than the sum of its parts, allows us to keep everything open-source, but there's a value in being connected to this network. Multi-Cloud, Cloud to Edge, all that kind of stuff. And what we want is we want customers to slowly transition to that. I've been telling people there's basic cable, which is like, just the dial tone, then there's going to be premium channels on that, that you can pay for, like storage, DR, secrets, zero-trust mechanisms, anomaly detection around communication patterns. People might opt in and say, "ooh, we want to pay for those things 'cause they're interesting to us." And then the last piece of that pie is, there may be people who are running against the global utility, running their own servers, and they go, "that service right there inside of that system, we love it, we want it on premise, can we actually license it from you?" So it's a combination of softwares and service, license revenue, and recurring support. >> Okay, and so, are you enabling partners to deliver those services, is that Synadia does that themselves, where do those premium services come from? >> So, we're going to seed the market, but yeah, we want it to be an open marketplace, and what we will provide is things like billing and such like that, almost, not exactly, but almost like the app store, the Apple app store, where someone who just wants to write a simple service, and if people like it, they don't have to do much, they just have it run and it's receiving stuff and they just get paid. So we do think that's a federated model. Believe it or not, we also feel running the network on a global scale is also federated. So we've designed it such that we don't have to be the only operators. Matter of fact, if we're successful, we're the smallest operator going forward. But, the system is always interconnected, right, so if John's trying to connect in and he's connecting to a Google server, I can connect to that server also, even though Synadia might have actually granted me the rights to access the system. And so we're working on that, we're thinking about that, but Cloud providers are really good at running infrastructure and running services on that infrastructure. We want to embrace that, we just want to make sure that any user of the system, it's like a SIM card that's unlocked, essentially, right? You could go to any provider that you want and it works, that's what we want to make sure we set up for. >> Right, it seems like a great example of this next wave of companies that's being built on top of the existing Cloud infrastructure. You don't have to be a hoster yourself, you could take advantage of and partner with all the other infrastructure providers and interconnect them in several different ways. Maybe, Derek, could you give us an example of an app, what an app might look like that's globally distributed and what kind of messages would be being passed back and forth? >> Sure, so, we're about to release something on Synadia where we truly believe, at the base of everything, it's just sending messages. And so, most people think of NATS as a communication mechanism, and it is, but when we say storage or state storage, they kind of say, "oh, NATS doesn't do that." But we can send a message to a KV service that says KV.set, and I could send a message that says KV get and get it back. Now, what's interesting is, we can make that zero trust, meaning, it leaves your app totally encrypted, so none of our servers, none of Google, Amazon, or Azure's servers, actually even understand what the heck it is, but what's interesting is, you could connect to any of our servers worldwide, or even run your own servers, and connect to those, and it works, all the time. We have another one that's just a usage server, meaning it tells you how much usage you've been racking up, let's say, over the month, kind of like a cell bill. And the way we built it was, there's multiple servers that are running, collecting this data, totally independent, there's no consensus. Everyone has the same subject, NGS.usage, you send a request saying, "what's my usage for the last hour?" Yet the backend service, guaranteed secure, trusted, it receives a request that it knows it's John, knows it's Stu, knows it's Derek, and so it can say, "oh, I'm trying to get John's usage, I'm trying to get Stu's usage." Yet the user experience is, everyone does the same thing, which we think is extremely powerful. And you don't have to do anything unnatural to get that with a system like NATS, right, where we tried to put security first and really think hard about what it meant, and that wasn't fun, it wasn't easy, but we think it's important. >> Yeah. So, Derek, I want to kind of step up-level a second here, 'cause you've got some great viewpoints on things, so, there's some people that look at a show like this or look at the industry and say, "Ah, there's all this hype around multi-Cloud, but there's a lot of challenges." Does it become least common denominator? How do these things work together? My definition that I've been saying for a while, I'll use a phrase you've used a couple of times. If, for multi-Cloud to be real, the value that I get out of it has to be greater than the sum of its parts. You live through the PaaS and the post-PaaS era, you've done a number of environments here, so where are we today, where do we need to go as an industry, as a whole, to reach that value statement that we talk about? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Even from day one in Cloud Foundry, I've believed in multi-Cloud, but I've watched how the markets have actually reacted and what they are doing, and the first wave in my perspective was, posturing for better pricing. To be honest with you, it was Netflix go, "hey we're going to move to Google unless you give us a better price." And I've seen that time and time again. Where it becomes real, though, is, when there's a class of service in a given Cloud provider, that is extremely attractive. Amazon, just in terms of the breadth, Azure a lot for some of the big data stuff, Google a lot for some of the AI stuff they have. Where an organization has a legitimate use to say "we really need best of breed in AI," best of breed in, let's say, big data, and they want to run an app in Azure and an app in Google, and that's kind of the realest situation I've seen. The notion of running something that's truly oblivious and can run anywhere, it's possible, but your lowest common denominators compute and simple storage, and a lot of times, that's not actually distinguishing. So I still see a lot of pricing pressure, you know, posturing, around multi-Cloud, just as a negotiation tactic. Where I see it being real is, this class of app, we want to run it in this Cloud provider to access these services that are differentiating. >> Derek, you have been around for a few generations of Stack wars, PaaS wars, I don't know that they need a name. Any advice to application architects and technologists who are choosing technologies here? I mean, here at this conference, Kubernetes is kind of a common assumption for a lot of what people are doing, not everybody, but there's a lot of other parts that plug into it, and a lot of other decisions to be made about architectures, and about, everything from messaging, to security, to networking, to storage, and I can go on and on and on and on. So, I mean how... Again, you've seen this happen a couple times, people having to pick and make choices, worried about lock-in, whatever they're worried about, I don't know. What are your thoughts on what's the, what are the right ways to do this so you actually succeed? >> Yeah, you know, it's a great question. And yeah, I have seen the pendulum swing back and forth quite a bit, but I think for the viewers, I can simplify it, at least from my perspective. It goes between choice and simplicity. So if you look in even the PaaS wars versus IaS versus all that stuff, PaaS was a swing towards simplicity, get stuff done, you know what I mean? And then there was like, "oh, I can get stuff done, but I don't have enough choice." So we saw this swing back, and I think Kubernetes hit at the absolute perfect time to take advantage of, "hey, we need choice at these base layers," right? And the way Kubernetes was architected was to give you that full choice. So if a startup's coming along and saying, okay, given the fact that the pendulum's over here, knowing it's going to be swinging back, and at least in my opinion, we're swinging back for simplicity, concentrate on, how do you simplify what people are struggling with today? So at this conference, there's a tremendous amount of people, you can get a lot of insight into what's going on, ask 'em where it hurts, you know what I mean? What are you struggling with? How long have you been struggling with it? And then solve those problems, especially when the pendulum you know is starting to swing back around. Hey, can we do this in a more simplified way, why does it have to be so hard? Those are the big opportunities right now. But again, it'll swing this way, and it'll swing back, eventually it'll get to the middle, and then we'll pick a whole other class of problems to, you know, swing back and forth from. >> Well, you know, it actually, it's not surprising to me that you're actually echoing a comment that Steve Harrod made on the program yesterday, saying when he goes and talks to all the companies here, it's, tell me how you make my life better as a company, and that's what we need to focus on. That wave toward simplicity absolutely is something we see, it's something we've been driving toward from Kubernetes, but an area that you're spending some time in talking about at the keynote, Edge computing. And absolutely, we need simplicity for that to be able to come there. What are you seeing in the Edge space, what's real, customers you're talking to, give us a little bit of forward-looking as where you see that whole space going. >> Yeah, so, I mean, for me, Edge and IoT, you can define it a lot of different ways, but even for enterprise companies that are here, it's, hey, do you deploy a piece of software out into the field, or a hardware/software combination? So, Bose headsets, Peloton bikes, whatever, that's kind of an industrial IoT type of thing. I see a lot of people wanting to drag what they think works in Cloud out to the Edge. Kubernetes works here, we're going to drag it out here. We're just going to slim it up a little bit and package it. I don't know if that's the right answer. What I think we need to think about is how do we get data and compute, compute meaning processing of that data, securely in a trusted fashion out to the Edge, however that works? It doesn't necessarily mean we have to have all the same pieces, but you have to say, I want to push an update and I want it to go over the air so to speak to the Edge, I want to be able to trust that it's doing the right thing. And so I think there's a massive amount of opportunity around that, and in how do you move all those pieces around. And what we're trying to do at Synadia is encompassing both, right? So we started with the secure by default, trusting in the beginning, and then if we say, hey, it's just messages, and in the keynote, I talked a little bit about our excitement around web assembly. But where we get excited about it is, we give you a drop-dead easy system and say, I want to digitally sign that web assembly for use in this certain situation at the Edge. And then that shovels it out there, and the system looks at it, verifies that it was signed by John, and says, yep, I can run this now. And so we're looking very heavily at those types of opportunities. We don't care how the things are deployed per se, but I would say that I think as you get further out, I think you're going to see more common denominators around web assembly, secure and signed web assemblies, than on how we actually deploy them. So you're going to see lighter weight things, not to say that Kubernetes might not have relevance out there, but I don't think it's needed to get to where we want. We need that trust factor, ubiquitous, communications to really kind of light that field up. The other one at least that we feel we need to meet the customer where they're at, is most of the IoT type devices are MQTT. And so we talked also that in Q1, we're going to allow native MQTT apps to connect directly into a NATS server and the NGS ecosystem, meaning you get the best of both worlds as well. Then an Edge router's running a NATS server, could be a raspberry pie, thousands of devices all connecting in, we think that connectivity and trust will light up a lot of opportunities. >> All right, well, Derek, always a pleasure to catch up with you, thanks so much for the updates. >> Thank you guys, I really appreciate it. >> All right. John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more coverage here at Kubecon CloudNativeCon, thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> Is and who we are today as as a country, as a universe. >> Narrator: Congratulations Reggie Jackson, (inspirational music) you are a CUBE alumni. (upbeat music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering Splunk.Conf19. Brought to you by Splunk. >> Okay, welcome back everyone it's theCUBE's live coverage here in Las Vegas for Splunk.Conf19. I am John Furrier host of theCUBE. It's the 10th Anniversary of Splunk's .Conf user conference. Our 7th year covering it. It's been quite a ride, what a wave. Splunk keeps getting stronger and better, adding more features, and has really become a powerhouse from a third party security standpoint. We got a C-SO in theCUBE on theCUBE today. Chief Information Security, John Frushour Deputy Chief (mumbles) New York-Presbyterian The Award Winner from the Data to Everywhere Award winner, welcome by theCube. >> Thank you, thank you. >> So first of all, what is the award that you won? I missed the keynotes, I was working on a story this morning. >> Frushour: Sure, sure. >> What's the award? >> Yeah, the Data Everything award is really celebrating using Splunk kind of outside its traditional use case, you know I'm a security professional. We use Splunk. We're a Splunk Enterprise Security customer. That's kind of our daily duty. That's our primary use case for Splunk, but you know, New York Presbyterian developed the system to track narcotic diversion. We call it our medication analytics platform and we're using Splunk to track opioid diversion, slash narcotic diversions, same term, across our enterprise. So, looking for improper prescription usage, over prescription, under prescription, prescribing for deceased patients, prescribing for patients that you've never seen before, superman problems like taking one pill out of the drawer every time for the last thirty times to build up a stash. You know, not resupplying a cabinet when you should have thirty pills and you only see fifteen. What happened there? Everything's data. It's data everything. And so we use this data to try to solve this problem. >> So that's (mumbles) that's great usage we'll find the drugs, I'm going to work hard for it. But that's just an insider threat kind of concept. >> Frushour: Absolutely. >> As a C-SO, you know, security's obviously paramount. What's changed the most? 'Cause look at, I mean, just looking at Splunk over the past seven years, log files, now you got cloud native tracing, all the KPI's, >> Frushour: Sure. >> You now have massive volumes of data coming in. You got core business operations with IOT things all instrumental. >> Sure, sure. >> As a security offer, that's a pretty big surface area. >> Yeah. >> How do you look at that? What's your philosophy on that? >> You know, a lot of what we do, and my boss, the C-SO (mumbles) we look at is endpoint protection and really driving down to that smaller element of what we complete and control. I mean, ten, fifteen years ago information security was all about perimeter control, so you've got firewalls, defense and depth models. I have a firewall, I have a proxy, I have an endpoint solution, I have an AV, I have some type of data redaction capability, data masking, data labeling capability, and I think we've seen.. I don't think security's changed. I hear a lot of people say, "Oh, well, information security's so much different nowadays." No, you know, I'm a military guy. I don't think anything's changed, I think the target changed. And I think the target moved from the perimeter to the endpoint. And so we're very focused on user behavior. We're very focused on endpoint agents and what people are doing on their individual machines that could cause a risk. We're entitling and providing privilege to end users today that twenty years ago we would've never granted. You know, there was a few people with the keys to the kingdom, and inside the castle keep. Nowadays everybody's got an admin account and everybody's got some level of privilege. And it's the endpoint, it's the individual that we're most focused on, making sure that they're safe and they can operate effectively in hospitals. >> Interviewer: What are some of the tactical things that have changed? Obviously, the endpoint obviously shifted, so some tactics have to change probably again. Operationally, you still got to solve the same problem: attacks, insider threats, etc. >> Frushour: Yeah. >> What are the tactics? What new tactics have emerged that are critical to you guys? >> Yeah, that's a tough question, I mean has really anything changed? Is the game really the game? Is the con really the same con? You look at, you know, titans of security and think about guys like Kevin Mitnick that pioneered, you know, social engineering and this sort of stuff, and really... It's really just convincing a human to do something that they shouldn't do, right? >> Interviewer: Yeah. >> I mean you can read all these books about phone freaking and going in and convincing the administrative assistant that you're just late for meeting and you need to get in through that special door to get in that special room, and bingo. Then you're in a Telco closet, and you know, you've got access. Nowadays, you don't have to walk into that same administrative assistant's desk and convince 'em that you're just late for the meeting. You can send a phishing email. So the tactics, I think, have changed to be more personal and more direct. The phishing emails, the spear phishing emails, I mean, we're a large healthcare institution. We get hit with those types of target attacks every day. They come via mobile device, They come via the phishing emails. Look at the Google Play store. Just, I think, in the last month has had two apps that have had some type of backdoor or malicious content in them that got through the app store and got onto people's phones. We had to pull that off people's phones, which wasn't pretty. >> Interviewer: Yeah. >> But I think it's the same game. It's the same kind to convince humans to do stuff that they're not supposed to do. But the delivery mechanism, the tactical delivery's changed. >> Interviewer: How is Splunk involved? Cause I've always been a big fan of Splunk. People who know me know that I've pretty much been a fan boy. The way they handle large amounts of data, log files, (mumbles) >> Frushour: Sure. >> and then expand out into other areas. People love to use Splunk to bring in their data, and to bring it into, I hate to use the word data leg but I mean, Just getting... >> Yeah >> the control of the data. How is data used now in your world? Because you got a lot of things going on. You got healthcare, IOT, people. >> Frushour: Sure, sure. >> I mean lives are on the line. >> Frushour: Lives are on the line, yeah. >> And there's things you got to be aware of and data's key. What is your approach? >> Well first I'm going to shamelessly plug a quote I heard from (mumbles) this week, who leads the security practice. She said that data is the oxygen of AI, and I just, I love that quote. I think that's just a fantastic line. Data's the oxygen of AI. I wish I'd come up with it myself, but now I owe her a royalty fee. I think you could probably extend that and say data is the lifeline of Splunk. So, if you think about a use case like our medication analytics platform, we're bringing in data sources from our time clock system, our multi-factor authentication system, our remote access desktop system. Logs from our electronic medical records system, Logs from the cabinets that hold the narcotics that every time you open the door, you know, a log then is created. So, we're bringing in kind of everything that you would need to see. Aside from doing something with actual video cameras and tracking people in some augmented reality matrix whatever, we've got all the data sources to really pin down all the data that we need to pin down, "Okay, Nurse Sally, you know, you opened that cabinet on that day on your shift after you authenticated and pulled out this much Oxy and distributed it to this patient." I mean, we have a full picture and chain of everything. >> Full supply chain of everything. >> We can see everything that happens and with every new data source that's out there, the beauty of Splunk is you just add it to Splunk. I mean, the Splunk handles structured and unstructured data. Splunk handles cis log fees and JSON fees, and there's, I mean there's just, it doesn't matter You can just add that stream to Splunk, enrich those events that were reported today. We have another solution which we call the privacy platform. Really built for our privacy team. And in that scenario, kind of the same data sets. We're looking at time cards, we're looking at authentication, we're looking at access and you visited this website via this proxy on this day, but the information from the EMR is very critical because we're watching for people that open patient records when they're not supposed to. We're the number five hospital in the country. We're the number one hospital in the state of New York. We have a large (mumbles) of very important people that are our patients and people want to see those records. And so the privacy platform is designed to get audit trails for looking at all that stuff and saying, "Hey, Nurse Sally, we just saw that you looked at patient Billy's record. That's not good. Let's investigate." We have about thirty use cases for privacy. >> Interviewer: So it's not in context of what she's doing, that's where the data come in? >> That's where the data come in, I mean, it's advanced. Nurse Sally opens up the EMR and looks at patient Billy's record, maybe patient Billy wasn't on the chart, or patient Billy is a VIP, or patient Billy is, for whatever reason, not supposed to be on that docket for that nurse, on that schedule for that nurse, we're going to get an alarm. The privacy team's going to go, "Oh, well, were they supposed to look at that record?" I'm just giving you, kind of, like two or three uses cases, but there's about thirty of them. >> Yeah, sure, I mean, celebrities whether it's Donald Trump who probably went there at some point. Everyone wants to get his taxes and records to just general patient care. >> Just general patient care. Yeah, exactly, and the privacy of our patients is paramount. I mean, especially in this digital age where, like we talked about earlier, everyone's going after making a human do something silly, right? We want to ensure that our humans, our nurses, our best in class patient care professionals are not doing something with your record that they're not supposed to. >> Interviewer: Well John, I want to hear your thoughts on this story I did a couple weeks ago called the Industrial IOT Apocalypse: Now or Later? And the provocative story was simply trying to raise awareness that malware and spear phishing is just tactics for that. Endpoint is critical, obviously. >> Sure. >> You pointed that out, everyone kind of knows that . >> Sure. >> But until someone dies, until there's a catastrophe where you can take over physical equipment, whether it's a self-driving bus, >> Frushour: Yeah. >> Or go into a hospital and not just do ransom ware, >> Frushour: Absolutely. >> Actually using industrial equipment to kill people. >> Sure. >> Interviewer: To cause a lot of harm. >> Right. >> This is an industrial, kind of the hacking kind of mindset. There's a lot of conversations going on, not enough mainstream conversations, but some of the top people are talking about this. This is kind of a concern. What's your view on this? Is it something that needs to be talked about more of? Is it just BS? Should it be... Is there any signal there that's worth talking about around protecting the physical things that are attached to them? >> Oh, absolutely, I mean this is a huge, huge area of interest for us. Medical device security at New York Presbyterian, we have anywhere from about eighty to ninety thousand endpoints across the enterprise. Every ICU room in our organization has about seven to ten connected devices in the ICU room. From infusion pumps to intubation machines to heart rate monitors and SPO2 monitors, all this stuff. >> Interviewer: All IP and connected. >> All connected, right. The policy or the medium in which they're connected changes. Some are ZP and Bluetooth and hard line and WiFi, and we've got all these different protocols that they use to connect. We buy biomedical devices at volume, right? And biomedical devices have a long path towards FDA certification, so a lot of the time they're designed years before they're fielded. And when they're fielded, they come out and the device manufacturer says, "Alright, we've got this new widget. It's going to, you know, save lives, it's a great widget. It uses this protocol called TLS 1.0." And as a security professional I'm sitting there going, "Really?" Like, I'm not buying that but that's kind of the only game, that's the only widget that I can buy because that's the only widget that does that particular function and, you know, it was made. So, this is a huge problem for us is endpoint device security, ensuring there's no vulnerabilities, ensuring we're not increasing our risk profile by adding these devices to our network and endangering our patients. So it's a huge area. >> And also compatible to what you guys are thinking. Like I could imagine, like, why would you want a multi-threaded processor on a light bulb? >> Frushour: Yeah. >> I mean, scope it down, turn it on, turn it off. >> Frushour: Scope it down for its intended purpose, yeah, I mean, FDA certification is all about if the device performs its intended function. But, so we've, you know, we really leaned forward, our CSO has really leaned forward with initiatives like the S bomb. He's working closely with the FDA to develop kind of a set of baseline standards. Ports and protocols, software and services. It uses these libraries, It talks to these servers in this country. And then we have this portfolio that a security professional would say, "Okay, I accept that risk. That's okay, I'll put that on my network moving on." But this is absolutely a huge area of concern for us, and as we get more connected we are very, very leaning forward on telehealth and delivering a great patient experience from a mobile device, a phone, a tablet. That type of delivery mechanism spawns all kinds of privacy concerns, and inter-operability concerns with protocol. >> What's protected. >> Exactly. >> That's good, I love to follow up with you on that. Something we can double down on. But while we're here this morning I want to get back to data. >> Frushour: Sure. >> Thank you, by the way, for sharing that insight. Something I think's really important, industrial IOT protection. Diverse data is really feeds a lot of great machine learning. You're only as good as your next blind spot, right? And when you're doing pattern recognition by using data. >> Frushour: Absolutely. >> So data is data, right? You know, telecraft, other data. Mixing data could actually be a good thing. >> Frushour: Sure, sure. >> Most professionals would agree to that. How do you look at diverse data? Because in healthcare there's two schools of thought. There's the old, HIPAA. "We don't share anything." That client privacy, you mentioned that, to full sharing to get the maximum out of the AI or machine learning. >> Sure. >> How are you guys looking at that data, diverse data, the sharing? Cause in security sharing's good too, right? >> Sure, sure, sure. >> What's your thoughts on sharing data? >> I mean sharing data across our institutions, which we have great relationships with, in New York is very fluid at New York Presbyterian. We're a large healthcare conglomerate with a lot of disparate hospitals that came as a result of partnership and acquisition. They don't all use the same electronic health record system. I think right now we have seven in play and we're converging down to one. But that's a lot of data sharing that we have to focus on between seven different HR's. A patient could move from one institution to the next for a specialty procedure, and you got to make sure that their data goes with them. >> Yeah. >> So I think we're pretty, we're pretty decent at sharing the data when it needs to be shared. It's the other part of your question about artificial intelligence, really I go back to like dedication analytics. A large part of the medication analytics platform that we designed does a lot of anomaly detections, anomaly detection on diversion. So if we see that, let's say you're, you know, a physician and you do knee surgeries. I'm just making this up. I am not a clinician, so we're going to hear a lot of stupidity here, but bare with me. So you do knee surgeries, and you do knee surgeries once a day, every day, Monday through Friday, right? And after that knee surgery, which you do every day in cyclical form, you prescribe two thousand milligrams of Vicodin. That's your standard. And doctors, you know, they're humans. Humans are built on patterns. That's your pattern. Two thousand milligrams. That's worked for you; that's what you prescribe. But all of the sudden on Saturday, a day that you've never done a knee surgery in your life for the last twenty years, you all of a sudden perform a very invasive knee surgery procedure that apparently had a lot of complications because the duration of the procedure was way outside the bounds of all the other procedures. And if you're kind of a math geek right now you're probably thinking, "I see where he's going with this." >> Interviewer: Yeah. >> Because you just become an anomaly. And then maybe you prescribe ten thousand milligrams of Vicodin on that day. A procedure outside of your schedule with a prescription history that we've never seen before, that's the beauty of funneling this data into Splunk's ML Toolkit. And then visualizing that. I love the 3D visualization, right? Because anybody can see like, "Okay, all this stuff, the school of phish here is safe, but these I've got to focus on." >> Interviewer: Yeah. >> Right? And so we put that into the ML Toolkit and then we can see, "Okay, Dr. X.." We have ten thousand, a little over ten thousand physicians across New York Presbyterian. Doctor X right over here, that does not look like a normal prescriptive scenario as the rest of their baseline. And we can tweak this and we can change precision and we can change accuracy. We can move all this stuff around and say, "Well, let's just look on medical record number, Let's just focus on procedure type, Let's focus on campus location. What did they prescribe from a different campus?" That's anomalous. So that is huge for us, using the ML Toolkit to look at those anomalies and then drive the privacy team, the risk teams, the pharmacy analytics teams to say, "Oh, I need to go investigate." >> So, that's a lot of heavy lifting for ya? Let you guys look at data that you need to look at. >> Absolutely. >> Give ya a (mumbles). Final question, Splunk, in general, you're happy with these guys? Obviously, they do a big part of your data. What should people know about Splunk 2019, this year? And are you happy with them? >> Oh, I mean Splunk has been a great partner to New York Presbyterian. We've done so much incredible development work with them, and really, what I like to talk about is Splunk for healthcare. You know, we've created, we saw some really important problems in our space, in this article. But, we're looking, we're leaning really far forward into things like risk based analysis, peri-op services. We've got a microbial stewardship program, that we're looking at developing into Splunk, so we can watch that. That's a huge, I wouldn't say as big of a crisis as the opioid epidemic, but an equally important crisis to medical professionals across this country. And, these are all solvable problems, this is just data. Right? These are just events that happen in different systems. If we can get that into Splunk, we can cease the archaic practice of looking at spreadsheets, and look up tables and people spending days to find one thing to investigate. Splunk's been a great partner to us. The tool it has been fantastic in helping us in our journey to provide best in-class patient care. >> Well, congratulations, John Frushour, Deputy Chief Information Security Officer, New York Presbyterian. Thanks for that insight. >> You're welcome. >> Great (mumbles) healthcare and your challenge and your opportunity. >> Congratulations for the award winner Data to Everything award winner, got to get that slogan. Get used to that, it's two everything. Getting things done, he's a doer. I'm John Furrier, here on theCube doing the Cube action all day for three days. We're on day two, we'll be back with more coverage, after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> from the Silicon Angle Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue. Here's your host. Still Minutemen. >> Hi, I'm Stew Minutemen. And welcome to a special cute conversation here in our Boston Areas studio where in spring 2019 whole lot of shows where the cubes gonna be on going to lots of events so many different technologies were covering on one of the areas we always love to be able to dig into is what's happening with the users. Many of these shows, we go to our user conferences as well as the community. Really happy to Boca Burger. Believe first time on the program. Steve Methodists famous. Who is the newly elected president of the mug s. So I think most of Ronan should know the V mug organization to the VM where User group. We've done cube events at, you know, the most related events. Absolute talked about the mug we've had, you know, the CEO of the mug on the program. And of course, the VM were Community 2019 will be the 10th year of the Cube at VM World. Still figuring out if we should do a party and stuff like that. We know all the ins and outs of what happened at that show. But you know the V mugs itself? I've attended many. Your Boston V mug is one that I've been, too. But before we get into the mug stuff, Steve could just give us a little bit of your back, because you are. You're practicing your user yourself. >> Yeah, well, first thanks for having me. You know what? I've been watching the cube for years, and it's ah, it's great to be on this side of the of the screen, right? So, yes. So I'm Steve. I think I, you know, show up every day as the associate chief information officer of the University of Massachusetts. Little just for 95 here, and that's my day job. That's my career, right? But what? You know what? I'm excited to be here to talk about what I'm excited in general with the mug is it's a community organization. And so it's a volunteer gig, and that's true of all of our leadership, right? So the from the president of the board of directors to our local leaders around the world, they're all volunteers, and that's I think, what makes it special is We're doing this because we're excited about it. We're passionate about it. >> Yeah, you know the mugs, It's, you know, created by users for user's. You go to them, talk a little bit. It's evolved a lot, you know, It started as just a bunch of independent little events. Is now you know, my Twitter feed. I feel like constantly every day. It's like, Oh, wait, who is at the St Louis? The Wisconsin one? I'll get like ads for like, it's like a weight is the Northeast one. I'm like, Oh, is that here in New England that I don't know about? No, no, no. It's in the UK on things like that. So I get ads and friends around the world and I love seeing the community. So, boy, how do you guys keep it all straight? Man, is that allow both the organic nature as well as some of the coordination and understanding of what's going on. How do you balance that? >> Yeah, that's a great question. And you know, So I was a V mug member for many, many years before I ever got interested in becoming a leader, and you're right it when it started, it was 10 of us would get around with a six pack of beer and a box of pizza, right? And we'd be talking shop and that, you know, that was awesome. And that's what would that was, how it started. But you get to a certain scale when you start talking about having 50,000 now, over 125,000 members around the world. You gotta coordinate that somehow you're right on the money with that. And so that's why you know, we have, you know, a strong, um, coordination effort that is our offices down in Nashville, Tennessee, and their their role is to enable our leaders to give back to their community and take the burden out of running these things. You know, sourcing venues and, you know, working with hotels and stuff. That is effort that not everybody wants to do all the time. And so to do that for them lets them focus on the really cool stuff which is the tech and connecting users. >> Yeah. Can you speak a little bit too? You know what were some of the speeds and feed to the event? How many do you have How much growing, you know, Like I'm signed up. I get the newsletter for activities as well as you know, lots of weapons. I've spoken on some of the webinars too. >> Yeah, well, first thanks for that s o. We have over 30 user cons around the world on three continents. >> In fact, what's the user cough? >> Great questions. So user kind is user conference, you know, consolidated into user Connery. And those are hundreds of end users getting together around the world were on three continents. In fact, I was fortunate enough in March, I went to Australia and I spoke at Sydney and Melbourne on That was awesome, getting to meet users literally, almost a sw far away from Boston. As you can get having the same challenges in the office day today, solving the same business problems with technology. So that was exciting. And so we've got those all over. We also have local meetings which are, you know, smaller in scope and often more focused on content. We've got 235 or Maur local chapters around the world. They're talking about this, and so we're really engaged at multiple levels with this and like you talk about. We have the online events which are global in scope. And we do those, you know, we time so that people in our time zone here in the States could get to them as well as folks in, you know, e m b A and a factory. >> Yeah, and I have to imagine the attendees have to vary. I mean, is it primarily for, you know, Sylvie, um, where admin is the primary title there up to, you know, people that are CEOs or one of the CEOs? >> Yes. So that actually we've seen that change over the past couple years, which is exciting for me being in the role that I'm in is you're right historically was vey Sphere admits, right? And we're all getting together. We're talking about how do we partition our lungs appropriately, right? And now it has switched. We see a lot more architect titles. We Seymour director titles coming in because, you know, I said the other day I was in Charlotte talking and I said, You know, business is being written in code, right? And so there's a lot more emphasis on what it's happening with V m wearing his VM worth portfolio expands. We've got a lot of new type of members coming into the group, which is exciting. >> Yeah, And what about the contents out? How much of it is user generated content versus VM were content and then, you know, I understand sponsorships or part of it vendors. The vendor ecosystem, which vm where has a robust ecosystem? Yes, you know, help make sure that it's financially viable for things to happen and as well as participate in the contest. >> Yes, I feel like I almost planted that question because it's such a good one. So, you know, in 2018 we started putting a strong emphasis on community content because we were, you know, we heard from remembers that awesome VM were content, awesome partner content. But we're starting to miss some of the user to user from the trenches, battle war stories, right? And so we put an emphasis on getting that back in and 2018 we've doubled down in 2019 in a big way, so if you've been to a user kind yet in 2019 but we've limited the number of sponsors sessions that we have, right so that we have more room for community content. We're actually able to get people from around the world to these events. So again, me and a couple folks from the States went toe Australia to share our story and then user story, right? And at the end of the day, we used to have sponsored sessions to sort of close it out. Now we have a community, our right, and Sophie Mug provides food and beverages and a chance to get together a network. And so that is a great community. Our and you know, I was at one recently and I was able to watch Ah, couple folks get to them. We're talking about different problems. They're having this and let me get your card so we can touch base on this later, which at the end of the day, that's what gets me motivated. That's what >> it's about. It's Steve. I won't touch on that for a second. You know what? Get you motivated. You've been doing this for years. You're, you know, putting your time in your president. I know. When I attended your Boston V mark the end of the day, it was a good community member talking about career and got some real good, you know, somebody we both know and it really gets you pumped up in something very, a little bit different from there. So talk a little bit without kind of your goals. For a CZ president of Emma, >> Sure eso I get excited about Vima because it's a community organization, right? And because, you know, I've said this a bunch of times. But for me, what excites me is it's a community of people with similar interests growing together right and reinforcing each other. I know for a fact that I can call ah whole bunch of people around the world and say, Hey, I'm having a problem technically or hey, I'm looking for some career advice or hey, one of my buddies is looking for work. Do you know of any opening somewhere? And that's really powerful, right? Because of the end of the day, I think the mug is about names and people and not logos, right? And so that's what it motivates me is seeing the change and the transformation of people and their career growth that V mug can provide. In fact, I know ah ton of people from Boston. In fact, several of them have. You know, they were administrators at a local organization. Maybe they moved into partners. Maybe they moved into vendors. Maybe they stay where they are, and they kept accelerating their growth. But I've seen tons of career growth and that that gets me excited watching people take the next step to be ableto to build a >> career, I tell you, most conferences, I go to the kind of jobs take boards, especially if you're kind of in the hot, cool new space they're all trying to hire. But especially when you go to a local on the smaller events, it's so much about the networking and the people. When I go to a local user, event it. Hey, what kind of jobs you hiring for who you're looking for and who do I know that's looking for those kind of things and trying to help connect? You know, people in cos cause I mean, you know, we all sometime in our career, you know we'll need help alone those lines that I have, something that's personally that you know, I always love to help >> you. I have a friend who said it. I think best, and I can't take credit for this, right? But it's It can be easy to get dismissed from your day job, right? One errant click could be the career limiting click. It is nigh impossible to be fired from the community, right? And that that, to me, is a powerful differentiator for folks that are plugged into a community versus those that are trying to go it >> alone. Yeah, there are some community guidelines that if you don't follow, you might be checking for sure, but no, if if we're there in good faith and we're doing everything like out, tell me it's speaking. You know, this is such, you know, change. Is this the constant in our world? You know, I've been around in the interview long enough. That's like, you know, I remember what the, um where was this tiny little company that had, you know, once a week, they had a barbecue for everybody in the company because they were, like, 100 of them. And, you know, you know, desktop was what they started working on first. And, you know, we also hear stories about when we first heard about the emotion and the like. But, you know, today you know Veum world is so many different aspects. The community is, you know, in many ways fragmented through so many different pieces. What are some of the hot, interesting things? How does seem a deal with the Oh, hey, I want the Aye Aye or the Dev Ops or the you know where where's the vmc cloud versus all these various flavors? How do you balance all that out? All these different pieces of the community? >> Yeah, it's an interesting question. And to be fair with you, I think that's an area that were still getting better at. And we're still adapting to write. You know, if you look at V mug Five years ago, we were the V's fear, sort of first, last and always right. And now you know, especially is VM. Where's portfolio keeps increasing and they keep moving into new areas. That's new areas for us, too. And so, you know, we've got a big, uh, initiative over the next year to really reach out and and see where we can connect with, you know, the kubernetes environment, right? Cause that the hefty oh acquisition is a really big deal. and I think fundamentally changes or potential community, right? And so you know, we've launched a bunch of special interest groups over the span of the past couple years, and I think that's a big piece of it, which is, if you're really interested in networking and security, here's an area that you can connect in and folks that are like minded. If you're really interested in and user computing, here's what you can connect into. And so I think, you know, as we continue to grow and you know, we're, you know, hundreds of thousands of people now around the world so that you can be a challenge. But I think it's It's also a huge opportunity for us to be ableto keep building that connection with folks and saying, Hey, you know, as you continue to move through your career, it's not always gonna be this. You're right. Change is constant. So hey, what's on the horizon for >> you? When I look at like the field organization for being where boy, I wonder when we're gonna have the sand and NSX user groups just because there's such a strong emphasis on the pieces, the business right now? Yeah, All right, Steve, let's change that for a second. Sure said, You know, you're you got CEO is part of your title, their eyes, what you're doing. Tell me about your life these days and you know the stresses and strains And what what's changing these days and what's exciting? You >> sure? So you know, it's exciting to have moved for my career because I'm an old school admin, right? I mean, that's my background. Uh, so, you know, as I've progressed, you know, I keep getting different things in my portfolio, right? So it started out as I was, you know, I was the admin, and then I was managing the systems engineering team. And then they added desktop support that was out of necessity was like, I'm not really a dustup person, right? So something new you need to learn. But then you start seeing where these synergies are, right? Not to hate, like the words energies. But the reality is that's where we launched our VD. I project at U Mass. Lowell, and that has been transformative for how we deliver education. And it has been a lot of ways. Reduced barriers to students to get access to things they couldn't before. So we had engineering students that would have to go out and finance a 3 $4000 laptop to get the horsepower to do their work. Now, that can use a chromebook, right? They don't have to have that because we do that for them and just they have to have any device t get access via via where horizon. Right, So that happened, and then, you know, then they moved in. Our service is operation, right? So what I'm interested now is how do we deliver applications seamlessly to users to give them the best possible experience without needing to think about it? Because if you and I have been around long enough that it used to be a hassle to figure out okay, I need to get this done. That means they need to get this new applications I have to go to I t there and I have my laptop. Now it's the expectation is just like you and I really want to pull out my phone now and go to the APP store and get it right. So how do we enable that to make it very seamless and remove any friction to people getting their work >> done? Yeah, absolutely. That the enterprise app store is something we've talked about is not just the Amazon marketplace these days. >> In some ways, it is so not all applications rate. Some applications are more specific to platforms. And so that's a challenge, which is, you know, I'm a professor. I really like my iPad. Well, how do I get S P ss on that? Okay, well, let me come up with some solutions. >> Yeah, it's interesting. I'm curious if you have any thoughts just from the education standpoint, how that ties into i t. Personally myself, I think I was in my second job out of school before I realized I was in the i t industry because I studied engineering they didn't teach us about. Oh, well, here's the industry's You're working. I knew tech, and I knew various pieces of it and, you know, was learning networking and all these various pieces there. But, you know, the industry viewpoint as a technology person wasn't something. I spend a lot of time. I was just in a conference this week and they were talking about, you know, some of the machine learning pieces. There was an analyst got up on stage is like here I have a life hack for you, he said. What you need to do is get a summer intern that's been at least a junior in college that studied this stuff, and they can educate you on all these cool new things because those of us have been here a while that there's only tools and they're teaching them at the universities. And therefore that's one of those areas that even if you have years, well, if you need to get that retraining and they can help with that >> no, that's that to me is one of most exciting parts about working in education is that our faculty are constantly pushing us in new directions that we haven't even contemplated yet. So we were buying GPU raise in order to start doing a I. Before I even knew why we were doing and there was like, Hey, I need this and I was like, Are you doing like a quake server? Like they were mining Bitcoins? I don't think so, but it was, you know, that was that was that was an area for us and now we're old. Had it this stuff, right? And so that is a exciting thing to be able to partner with people that are on the bleeding edge of innovation and hear about the work that they're doing and not just in in the tech field, but how technology is enabling Other drew some groundbreaking research in, you know, the life sciences space that the technology is enabling in a way that it wasn't possible before. In fact, I had one faculty member tell me, Geez, maybe six months ago. That said, the laboratory of the past is beakers and Silla scopes, right? The laboratory of the future is how many cores can you get? >> Yeah, all right, So next week is Del Technologies world. So you know the show. The combination of what used to be A M, C World and Del World put together a big show expecting around 15,000 people in Las Vegas to be the 10th year actually of what used to be M. C world. We actually did a bunch of dead worlds together. For me personally, it's like 17 or 18 of the M C world that I've been, too, just because disclaimer former emcee employees. So V mugs there on dhe, Maybe explain. You know, the mugs roll there. What you're looking to accomplish what you get out of a show like that. >> Sure. So V mug is a part of the affiliation of del Technologies user communities. Right? And what I love about user communities is they're not mutually exclusive, right? You absolutely can. Being a converged and Avi mug and a data protection user group. It's all about what fits your needs and what you're doing back in the office. And, you know, we're excited to be there because there's a ton of the move members that are coming to Deltek World, right? And so we're there to support our community and be a resource for them. And that's exciting for us because, you know, Del Del Technologies World is a whole bunch of really cool attack that were that were seeing people run vm were on Ray. We're seeing via more partner with, and so that's exciting for us. >> Yeah, and it's a try. Hadn't realized because, like, I've been to one of the converted user group events before, didn't realize that there was kind of an affiliation between those but makes all the sense in the world. >> Yeah, right. And it's, you know, again, it's an open hand thing, right? Beaten and one being the other. You realize them both. For what? They're what They're great at connecting with people that are doing the same thing. There's a ton of people running VM wear on. Ah, myriad. Like you talked about earlier VM Where's partner? Ecosystem is massive, right? But many, many, many in fact, I would say a huge majority of converged folks are running VM we're >> on it. All right. So, Steve want to give you the final word? What's the call to action? Understand? A lot of people in the community, but always looking from or always, ways for people to get involved. So where do they go? What? What would you recommend? >> Yeah, thanks. So if if you are not plugged into user community now, when you're in the tech field, I would strongly encourage you to do so. Right? V mug, obviously, is the one that's closest to my heart, right? If you're in that space, we'd love to have you as part of our community. And it's really easy. Go to V mug. dot com and sign up and see where the next meet up is and go there, right? If you're not into the VM where space and I know you have lots of folks that air, they're doing different things. Go check out your community, right? But I tell you, the career advantages to being in a user community are immense, and I frankly was able to track my career growth from admin to manager to director to associate CEO, right alongside my community involvement. And so it's something I'm passionate about, and I would encourage everybody to check out. >> Yeah, it's Steve. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, I give a personal plug on this. There are a lot of communities out there, the virtual ization community, especially the VM. One specifically is, you know, a little bit special from the rest. You know, I've seen it's not the only one, but is definitely Maur of. It's definitely welcoming. They're always looking for feedback, and it's a good collaborative environment. I've done surveys in the group that you get way better feedback than I do in certain other sectors in just so many people that are looking to get involved. So it's one that you know, I'm not only interviewing, but, you know, I can personally vouch for its steeple. Thank you. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Alright. And be sure to check out the cube dot net. Of course, we've got dealt technologies world in the immediate future. Not that long until we get to the end of summer. And vm World 2019 back in San Francisco, the Q will be there. Double set. So for both del world del Technologies world and VM World. So come find us in Las Vegas. If you're Adele or Mosconi West in the lobby is where will be for the emerald 2019 and lots and lots of other shows. So thank you so much for watching. Thank you.

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California It is a cute conversation >> run. Welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I have remote. Sarah Varney is the chief marketing officer Tulio Company. We've covered for many, many years one of the most successful A p I now public company. Um, Sarah, welcome to the Cube competition. Good to see you remotely. You're in San Francisco? Were in Palo Alto. Um, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks so much for having me. >> So you guys have been really a powerhouse company? Twilio. We've been following the rise and success. It just seems just success that the success of success go public stock keeps growing. Big acquisition would send grid for $2,000,000,000 in October. We covered that, but really kind of reading the tea leaves and connecting the dots. It's really the continued evolution of Cloud sas, where AP eyes are becoming Maur and Maur the lingua franca for the next generation way. That's coming, but is going into a whole nother direction. You guys are a big part of that. You're the chief marketing officer. It's >> a hard >> story to tell because it's it's kind of under the hood nerdy, but it's also really big business benefits. So as the c m o. How do you get your arms around that you've been in the business for a while? Take him in to explain the strategy around how you're handling. That's Willie. Oh, Marketing. >> Sure, Yeah. I mean, I do. I agree that, uh, you know, Tulio is >> very much an ingredient brand, but at the same time, everyone is interacting with with in some cheaper form, probably every day, whether or not they realize it or not. If you're getting an appointment reminder from your >> dentist's confirming an appointment, that's probably Tulio behind the scenes, >> if you are communicating with your uber driver to say that you are headed outside that is normally powered by Coolio technology. So even though it might be, ah, technology that exists lower in the stack and something you might not physically see, it is very much something that people everywhere getting every day and you know our goal really is to Leo is to make sure that we're helping companies across the globe from all different types of industries, of all shapes and sizes. to bridge the communication gap with their customers. You know, every day there's a new channel to keep up to speed with. There's a new way that people are customers that are demanding Thio be communicated with. And we want companies to be out in front of that s O that you know, they can connect with their customers on any channel, if that's what's up. If that's SMS. If that's voice, if that's even fax, we want to make that ah possibility. >> I love the Positioning Cloud Communications Company. That's kind of what you guys Air Corps, because you're bringing it all together. And I think you know, the mobile Revolution, starting with the iPhone and 2007. You look at that as a seminal moment and you say OK, mobile device. It's a phone, It's a computer. It's got applications on it. This is a device that's unique to the rest of the infrastructure, but developers and your programming on it, and those things all integrate together. That's where a lot of people kind of saw that for the first time. Then you add cloud to it. Amazon, Microsoft and Google, the top three Amazon dominating really kind of brings a P. I focus even more to make these service's. These Web service is go to a whole nother level on dhe. That's the big wave that we're seeing. I'd >> love to get >> your thoughts and you worked at salesforce dot com, which really pioneered sass. And they were the first real cloud company before you started to see Amazon really cloud infrastructure to service. So Platforms asserts and suffers of service evolve. You were there early. You had a lot of experience working with AP Exchange APP stores early on its sales force. How does that compare to now? What is the trajectory and how does it all connect? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that when I, you know my joke is always that when I started on the APP exchange, its sales force, the Apple App store didn't even exist. So the explosion of mobile devices was just we weren't even. We weren't even there quite yet, and I was working with Iess V's Thio to help them. I think about how they could launch big businesses in the cloud on, I think at that point people were were rotating hard away from the world of on premise, which required a ton of investment of a hardware perspective and service's perspective, and in the process of that, rotated very almost overcorrected towards package solutions. And I think over the last few years what we've seen and something that Tulio is definitely behind and you could see in the vision of our product roadmap he's coming back to the middle, where you have the benefits of the cloud, the speed, the ability to stand something out very quickly. But you also have unlimited customization ability, and you can really put that Theobald ity to build palette for applications that bring the best of different solutions in different applications through a p. I's in the hands of of your developers. Sorry. Go ahead. >> I think that's a great point. I want to just double down on that for a second and ask you how you guys are seeing the developer traction on this because one of the core things that were been reporting over the past couple years this year in particular is the rise of things like Kubernetes Cloud native, where developers now have a seamless way to program the infrastructure, the hard stuff. So you're seeing a faster development cycle for those application developers. Is that where the customization piece comes in? Is that where you guys see that connection point? And what does that mean for customers? >> Yeah, I mean, I think that's part of it. But at a higher level, we really want to empower developers. You create a custom connected journey across >> all different parts of how our customers interacting with the brand. You know, >> if you think about I. I had a recent incident with an airline that will remain nameless, but I I left my laptop on a plane in to get that laptop back. Took multiple calls. Thio the customer service desk. I was bounced around to a bunch of different people. The tracking of that computer was a near impossible. At one point, it traveled from New Jersey, Thio Ireland. You know, there was just so many different points of that journey where there was disconnection and I began to lose trust in this the ability of this customer service department, uh, you know, this This company had an A P I based approach. They could bring all of the data from these different systems from there. >> Your pee from their serum, you know, from their shipping vendor all in one place. And I wouldn't have had that that experience with that particular airline. >> So if you see a P Eyes is a data connector model, really, connecting data sets together fast and easy. >> Ideo. I think it's a way I think developers love working in AP eyes because they can bring all the they can pick the best of breed solutions and bring over that data into one customer united customer experience so that your customer doesn't have >> to do that heavy lifting. It's all there for them. >> You know, one of the things you see from companies like Salesforce pioneering the early days of Assassin Cloud. I mean, even Andy jassy it Amazon many times, and he always uses the expression that they use the Amazon cold you got. You have to be misunderstood for a long time. If you want to be a leader in an emerging Newmarket. You guys that twilio kind of have done that and continue to surpass expectations because you've been kind of skating to where the puck is now, which is the cloud Native Wave. Third party applications, Coyote security all kind of come together for developers. So as a company that's been different and been disruptive as the c m o. >> How do you >> take that? Uh, that that vision in Montreat the next level as you market the solution because you are kind of different. You are not new per se, but you're a new way to create value for customers. How do you go out and tell that story with some of the marketing things that you do? Um, take that twilio to the next level. >> I mean, I personally, in >> my experience, I think, uh, the easiest marking jobs are the ones where you have amazing customer stories and there is no shortage of amazing innovation and our customer base on. And, you know, I think if you think about the companies that are making the news, if that's lift, if that's, you know, cos like Airbnb, they're not. If you think about their business, they're not inventing something. Brando. The Hoover didn't invent the taxi, uh, air being beaten and then a hotel room. But they invented a new way to consume their product to communicate around their product. And, you know, I think it's very easy to show the power of Tulio and how we've evolved through some of these these customer stories. And it's not just the kind of Silicon Valley fast growing, you know, start ups that we're all familiar with here, just just living and being located in the region. But, you know, we're starting to see this more and more in the enterprise as well. Ah, and people really hardest in communication to make sure that that they themselves are not disrupted. >> Yeah, of course. We love that. The enterprise high we've been doing for 10 years now. Everyone talks enterprise because the confidence of consumer ization of I t. Is happening. It's the lines are blurring. Share some customers successors because I think this is a great, great example of just great marketing that the customers do the talking for you. You always got to do this thing. You know the standard operational things and have some a text back and all that good stuff. But at the end of the day, when you have your customer sharing their success, that's really the ultimate testimonial. So share some cool examples of notable customers, if you can. >> Yeah, well, look I mean, we have a wide range, I'll tell you. Three Medtronic, one of the largest medical device companies in the world. They provide a solution for Type one diabetes. They provide a pump that is constantly monitoring the glucose levels in someone's blood. What they've done with Julio's. Now they're layering on messaging capability. So if someone's glucose levels all to a level that's unsafe, they could be messaged. And you know, this is not just for the patient. But if you think of a young child who suffers from Type one diabetes, this could be a very stressful situation for their parents and their caregiving team. And now that team can constantly be in the loop, and they don't have to worry if they are at work and wondering, you know how they're chai that was doing at school. Or, you know, if they're on the soccer field and concerned about you know how, uh, their condition could be affected by them. Participating in that sport s so completely different from your more, um uh, straight down the middle startup that we see here in the Valley. >> So basically, messaging is to keep value. It's not so much a tech thing. It's more of a the outcome. It's a critical service piece toe. Have those kind of real time communications? >> Yes, absolutely. Because, I mean, if you think about >> it monitoring your your, uh, glucose levels, that's not a new phenomenon. People have been doing that for years, but layering on communications on top of this has brought a real time element Thio monitoring this, uh, this condition and has liberated people with this condition so that, you know, they can get back to the things that they've always going to do without having to worry about. You know, the state of their health. It's gone. >> It's like infrastructure is code for devil up you guys air for communications. You make it easy to do that for things like that. Talk about the impact of scale over the years because now you know, we're seeing the data tsunami happen Every day I ot devices air coming on. Everything's got. Ah, a sensor on it. You got doorbells. You got everything out there now has got an I P address and connected in that could potentially be a messaging unit of of data. This is just getting massive. How you guys see scale? And how do you guys getting around the next wave on that piece? >> Yeah. I mean, I think one of the >> huge benefits in working with polio is our super network. So we're constantly maintaining relationships with all the key carriers across the globe to make sure that we can get deliver our to our customers the best routes. And so that means also that they can stand up business virtually anywhere across the globe, a cz, their entry in new markets and coyote. This is especially true for anyone who is in the eye ot space. If you think about the dock Ellis category, companies like lime, uh, who are, you know, delivering rental bike service is where and you know, a market where market share just grabbing as much market share is possible. It seems to be the name of the game. They're able to partner with Julio in bed sim cards and all of their bicycles, and now be able to you track all of those all of those bicycles across the globe as well as scooters. Ah, and then take that information, uh, figure out how customers are engaging with their product and ultimately build a better solution. Long term, >> real time messaging will never go away as values. I see just like data. So it's gonna get faster and larger amounts of messaging making sense of it. Do. The heavy lifting is great story. You guys done a great job. Thanks for coming on and sharing your perspective. Get the plug in for twilio real quick. What's new with the company employees out? See the public companies? You really can't talk about futures, but what's on your plate? What's on the horizon for Tulio? What's the update? >> Yeah, I mean, the company is >> growing extremely quickly. We're really excited about the context, but center market especially. We launched our flex contact center Solution, uh, was made generally available just this past October. On a CZ you've mentioned we're super excited to welcome sing grid into the family of products you know, really, round out our full set communication in the eyes of people communicate with their customers in any way possible. And I would be, uh, it would be a crime for me, not to mention our user conference coming up this August August 6th and seventh at Mosconi West and that's called Signal s O. I highly encourage you to attend. It's a great opportunity to hear from experts in the communications space and also our customers. >> Well, we love the name signal. Extracting the signal from the noise was our original kind of tag line. Really appreciate it. And with all those customers, must be a hard challenge to have a cup conference, doing the keynote selections and figuring out what to do. What you're gonna have breakout sessions. Just get a little more detail on the event. You're gonna see the stage and customer story's going to break out sections. What's the format for the event? >> Yeah, so it's It's a two day, um, session. At most witty West. We have a number of breakouts. We have hands on training, which we call super class. We have, uh, keynotes. Last year we had an interactive performance with the band. OK, go. Uh, we had the creators of Westworld onstage. Geoff Lawson, our CEO, always kicked the Hoff ER, and it's just a great, exciting two days on, and we also this year, given that were hosting it during the summer time frame, we have ah camp experience for your children. And if you're looking to combine it with a summer vacation so we're super excited about signal, it's, uh, it's, Ah, two of my favorite days of the year from, Ah, Giulio perspective. And I'd love for everyone to come join us. >> We got a great customer success over the years, and great names congratulate Sarah. Thanks for been the time here in the Cube. I'm John Furry here in Palo Alto. Ceremony the chief marketing officer with Julio in San Francisco via remote. Thanks for watching this cute conversation.