>>Okay, welcome back everyone. This is the Cube's coverage here. Monaco took a trip all the way out here to cover the Monaco crypto summit. I'm John feer, host of the cube, a lot of action happening presented by digital bits and this ecosystem that's coming together, building on top of digital bits and other blockchains to bring value at the application. These new app, super apps are emerging. Almost every category's gonna be decentralized. This is our opinion and the world believes it. And they're here as well. We've got Oscar ballet CEO co-founder of Agora verse ago is a shopping metaverse coming out soon. We'll get the dates, Oscar. Welcome to the cube. >>Thank you very much for having me. >>We were just talking before you came on camera. You're a young gun, young entrepreneur. You're a gamer. Yeah, a little bit too old to miss the eSports windows. You said, you know, like 25. It's great until that's you missed the window. I wish I was 25 gaming the pandemic with remote work, big tailwind acceleration around the idea of this new digital VI virtual hybrid world. We're living in where people want to have experiences that are similar to physical and virtual. You're doing something really cool around shopping. Yeah. Take a explain. What's going on when the, I know it's not out yet. It's in preview. Yeah. Take a minute to explain. >>Absolutely. So a goers really is a way to create those online storefront environments, virtual environments that are really much inspired by video games in their usage and kind of how the experience goes forward. We want to recreate the brand's theme, aesthetic storytelling or the NFT project as well. All of that created in a virtual setting, which is way more interesting than looking at a traditional webpage. And also you can do some crazy stuff that you can't do in real life, in a real life store, you know, with some crazy effects and lighting and stuff. So it's, it's a whole new frontier that we are trying to cover. And we believe that there is a real use case for shopping centric S experiences and to actually make the S a bit more than a buzzword than that. It is at the moment. >>Okay. So a Agora is the shopping. Metaverse a Agora verse is the company name and product name. You're on the Solona blockchain. Got my notes here, but I gotta ask you, I mean, people are trying to do this right now. We see a lot of high end clients like Microsoft showroom, showroom vibes. Yeah. Not so much. E-commerce per se, but more like the big, I mean it's low hanging fruit. Yeah. How do you guys compare to some other apps out there? Other metaverses? >>I think compared to the bigger companies, we are way more flexible and we can act way more quickly than they can. They still have a lot of ground to cover. And a lot of convincing to do with their communities of users metaverse is not really the most popular topic at the moment. It's still very much kind of looked at as a trend, as something that is just passing and they have to deal with this community interaction that is not really favorable for them. There are other questions about the metaverse that are not being talked about as often, but the ecological costs, for example, of running a metaverse like Facebook envisions it, of running those virtual headsets, running those environments. It's very costy on, on, on the ecological side of things and it's not as often mentioned. And I think that's actually their biggest challenge. >>Can you get an example for folks that don't are in the weeds on that? What's the what's what do you mean by that? The cost of build the headsets? Is it the >>Servers? It's more of the servers, really? You need to run a lot of servers, which is really costly on the environment and environmental questions are at the center of public debates. Anyways, and companies have to play that game as well. So they will have to find kind of this balance between, well, building this cool metaverse, but doing it in an ecological friendly manner as well. I think that's their toughest challenge. >>And what's your solution just using the blockchain? Well, an answer to that, cause some people say, Hey, that's not that's, that's not. So eco-friendly either, >>That's part of it. And it's also part of why we're choosing an ecosystem such as Lana as a starter. It's not limited to only Salana, but Salala is, is known as a blockchain. That is very much ecological. Inclined transactions are less polluting. And definitely this problem is, is tackled in the fact that we are offering this product on a case by case scenario brands come to us, we build this environment and we run something that is proper to them. So the scale of it is also way less important that what Facebook is trying to build. >>Yeah. They're trying to build the all encompassing. Yeah. All singing old dancing, as we say system, and then they're not getting a lot of luck. They just got slammed dunked this week on the news, I saw the, you know, FTC moved against them on the acquisition of the exercise app. >>It's it's a tough, it's a tough battle for them. Let's say they >>Still have, they got a headwind. I wouldn't say tailwind. They broke democracy. So they gotta pay for it. Right. Exactly. I always say definitely revenge going on there. I'm not a big fan of what they did. The FTC. I think that's bad move. They shouldn't block acquisitions, but they do buy, they don't really build much. That's well documented. Facebook really hasn't built anything except for Facebook. That's right. Mean what's the one thing Facebook has done besides Facebook. >>I mean, >>It's everything they've tried is failed except for Facebook. Yeah. >>So we'll see what's going on with the Methodist side. >>Well, so successful, not really one trick bony. Yeah. They bought Instagram. They bought WhatsApp, you know, and not really successful. >>That's true. They do have the, the means though, to maybe become successful with something. So >>You're walking out there, John just said, Facebook's not successful. I meant they don't. They have a one product company. They use their money to buy everything. Yeah. And that's some people don't like that, but anyway, the startups like to get bought out. Yeah. Okay. So let's get back to the metaverse it's coming out is the business model to build for others. Are you gonna have a system for users? What's what's the approach? How do you, how are we view viewing this? What's the, the business you're going after? >>So we are very much a B2B type of service where we can create custom kind of tailor made virtual environments for brands, where we dedicate our team to building those environments, which has been what we have been at the start to really kickstart the initiative. But we're also developing the tool that will allow antibody to develop their own shop themselves, using what we give them to do something kind of like the Sims for those that know, building their environment and building their shop, which will they, they, they will then be to put online and for anybody of their user base customers to have a look at. So it's, it's kind of, yeah, the tailor made experience, but also the more broader experience where we want to create this tool, develop this tool, make it accessible to the public with a subscription based model where any individual that has an idea and maybe a product that is interesting for the metaverse be able to create this virtual storefront and upload it directly. >>How long does it take to build an environment? Let's say I was, I wanna do a cube. Yeah. I go to a lot of venues all around the world. Yeah. MOSCON and San Francisco, the San convention center in Las Vegas, we're here in Monaco. How do I replicate these environments? Do I call you up and say, Hey, I need some artists. Do you guys render it? What's the take us through the process. >>Yeah. It's, it's basically a case by case scenario at the moment, very much. We're working with our partners that find brands that are interested in getting into the metaverse and we then design the shops. Well, it depends on the brands. Some have a really clear idea of what they want. Some are a bit more open to it and they're like, well, we have this and this, can you build something? >>I mean, I mean, I can see the apple store saying, Hey, you know, they're pretty standard apple stores. You got cases of iWatches. Yeah. I mean that's easily to, replicateable probably good ROI for them. >>Exactly. It's it's is that what you're thinking? Their team. Exactly. Yeah. It depends. And we, we want to add a layer of something cuz just replicating the store simply. Yeah. It's it's maybe not as interesting, you know, it just, oh, okay. I'm in the store. It's white, everywhere. It's apple. Right. It's like, oh I'm in at the dentist, but we want to add some video game elements to the, to those experiences. But very subtle ones, ones that won't make you feel, oh, I'm playing one of these games, you know? It's yeah. Very supple. >>You can, you can jump into immersive experience as defined by the brand. Yeah. I mean the brand will control the values. So you're say apple and you're at the iWatch table. Yeah. You could have a digital assistant pop in there with an avatar. Exactly. You can jump down a rabbit hole and say, Hey, I want this iWatch. I'm a bike mountain biker. For example, I could get experience of mountain biking with my watch on I fall off, ambulance sticks me up. I mean, all these things that they advertise is what goes >>On. Yeah. And we can recreate these experiences and what they're advertising and into a more immersive experience is what we're trying to our, our goal is to create experiences. We know that, you know, why does someone is someone spend so much at Disneyland? It's like triple the price of whatever, because you know, it's Mickey mouse around you. It's, that's the experience that comes around. And often the experience is more important than the product. Sometimes >>It's hard. It's really hard to get that first class citizen experience with the event or venue physical. Yeah. Which is a big challenge. I know the metaverse are gonna try to solve this. So I gotta ask you what's your vision on solving that? Okay. Cause that's the holy grail. That's what we're talking about here. Yeah. I got a physical event or place. I wanna replicate it in the metaverse but create that just as good first party citizen like experience. >>Yeah. I mean that's the whole event event type of business side of the metaverse is also a huge one. It's one that we are choosing to tackle after the e-commerce one. But it's definitely something that has been asked a lot by the brands where like we want to create, like, we want to release this store for an event that is in real life, but we want to make it accessible to the largest number. That's why we saw with Fortnite as well. All those events, the fashion week in the central land. And >>Sand's a Cub in the Fortnite too. >>There you go. And so the, the event aspect is super important and we want those meta shops to be places where a brand can organize an event. Let's say they want to make the entrance paid. They can do an NFD for that if they want. And then they have to, the user has to connect the NFD to access the event with an idea. Right. But that's definitely possible. And that's how we leverage blockchain as well with those companies and say, you know, you're not familiar with >>This method. You're badging, you know, you're the gaming where we were talking earlier. Yeah. Badging and credentials and access methods. A tech concept can be easily forwarded to NFTs. Yeah, >>Exactly. Exactly. And brands are interested in that. >>Sure. Of course. Yeah. By being the NFT. That's cool. Yeah. Yeah. So I gotta ask you the origination story. Take me through the, the, how this all started. Yeah. Was it a seat of an idea you and your friends get together? Yeah. It was an it scratch. And when you're really into this, what's the origination story and where you're at now. >>So we started off in January really with a, quite a, a different idea. It was called the loft business club. It's an NFT collection on the Salina blockchain. And the whole idea beyond it is that NFT holders would have access to their virtual apartments that we called the lofts. It got very popular. We got a really big following at the start. It was really the trend back in January, February. And we managed to, to sell out successfully the whole collection of 5,000 NFTs. And yeah, we started as a group of friends, really like-minded friends from my hometown in, in, met in France who are today, the co-founders and the associates with different backgrounds. Leo has the marketing side of things. A club has the 3d designing. We had all our different skills coming into it. Obviously my English was quite helpful as well cause French people in English it's, it's not often the best French English. Yeah. And I was, the COO has been doing amazing on the kind of the serious stuff. You know, the taxis lawyers >>Operational to all of trains running on time. >>Exactly >>Sure. People get their jobs done. >>Yeah, exactly. So >>It's well too long of a lunch cuz you know, French would take what, two hour lunches. Yeah. You >>Have to enjoy it. Yeah. >>Coffee and stuff. That's wine, you know about creative, >>But yeah, it's, it's a friend stuff that started as a, as a passion project and got so quick. And today I'm here talking to you in this setting. It's like, >>You're pretty excited. >>I mean it's super excited. It's such a we're you know, we feel like we're building something that's new and our developer team, we're now a team of 15 in total with developers based in Paris, mostly. And everybody is, is feeling like, you know, they're contributing to something new and that's, what's exciting about it. You know, it's something that's not really done or it's trying to be done, but nobody really knows the way >>It's pioneering days. But the, but the pandemic has shifted the culture faster because people like certainly the gen Zs are like, I don't wanna reuse that old stuff. Yeah. And, but they still want to go to like games or events or go to stores. Yeah. But once to go to a store, I mean, I go to apple store all the time where I live in Palo Alto, California. And it's like, yeah, I love that store. And I know it by heart. I don't, I don't have to go there. Yeah. Walking into the genius bar virtually I get the same job done. Yeah, >>Exactly. That's that's what we want to do. And the other pandemic is just it's it's been all about improving, you know, people's condition, life conditions at home, I think. And that's what kind of boosted the whole metaverse conversation and Facebook really grabbing onto it as well. It's just that people were stuck at home and for gamers, that's fine. We used to be stuck at home playing video games all day. Yeah. We survived the pandemic fine. But for other people it was a bit more of a new >>Experience. Well, Oscar, one of the cool things is that you said like mind you and your founding team, always the secret to success. But now you see a lot of old guys like me and gals coming in too, your smart people are like-minded they get it. Especially ones that have seen the ways before, when you have this kind of change, it's a cultural shift and technology shift and business model shift at the same time. Yeah. And to me there's gonna be chaos, but at the end of the day, >>I mean there's fun and >>Chaos. That's opportunity. There's a fun and fun and opportunity. >>It's fun and chaos, you know, and yeah. Likeminded people and the team has really been the driving factor with our company. We are all very much excited about what we're doing and it's been driving us forward. >>Well, keep in touch. Thanks for coming on the cube and sharing, sharing a story with us in the world. We really appreciate we'll keep in touch with you guys. Do love what you do. Oscar ballet here inside the cube Argo verse eCommerce shop. The beginning of this wave is happening. The convergence of physical virtual is a hybrid mode. It's a steady state. It is not gonna go away. It's only gonna get bigger, more cooler, more relevant than ever before. Cube covering it like a blanket here in Monaco, crypto summit. I'm John furrier. We'll be right back after this short break.

[Music] okay welcome back everyone it's thecube's coverage here in monaco i'm john furrier host of thecube monaco crypto summit presented by digital bits uh media partners coin telegraph in the cube a lot of great stuff going on here digital bits and the ecosystem around the world come together to talk about the next generation uh nft environments metaverse uh blockchain all the innovations going up and down the stack of the decentralized world that will be soon a reality for everybody we have a great guest david lutzkach here who's the co-founder of aftermath islands metaverse which i got a little sneak preview of but david thanks for joining me thanks john great to be here uh we had dinner the other night at nobu it's great to know you get to know your background you've got a stellar uh pedigree um you've run public companies you've been involved in tech media across the board again this is a ship we're seeing like we've never before perfect storm technology change cultural change business model transformation all around deep decentralization crypto token economics decentralized applications metaverse i mean come on we haven't digital identity there was identity which you're involved in take us through what are you working on take a minute to explain what you're working on and then we'll get into it so aftermath islands is is really a culmination of three things uh digital identity the ability to prove who you are because we think the internet and i think everyone would agree the internet's broken you know um nefarious actors bad actors can be anywhere um hacks fake spots so by being able to prove that you're a real person not necessarily verifying your identity but prove that you're a real person um can add a lot of benefits to everyone in the ecosync system second thing is we combine that with avatars nfts and credentials because i'd like to represent myself as a little more buff than i am and maybe a little taller and then the third thing is we put it in a unreal engine so real realistic photo realistic game engine metaverse that requires no downloading it's all pixel streaming just like you'd stream netflix you can stream the game i want to ask because this is i know it's a hard problem because i've asked a lot of people the same question the unreal engine is really powerful and the imagery is amazing like gaming we all know what it looks like it's hard it's not everyone's getting it right what makes it so special how are you guys cracking the code well i think it's our experience i mean we've worked for major entertainment companies major technology companies major sports companies so um as i just use your word because it being i want to be humbled by this but we do have a great pedigree we've also brought great people to the table so having a platform isn't enough we've got great creators and uh we've got great storytellers so we've got the anisiasa brothers one mariano is is a illustrator and former special editor uh project center at marvel and his brother fabian is our storyteller who's the co-creator of deadpool so we've got great people and with unreal engine 5 we've really taken it from the ground up we've looked at it and and we've really combined it with new gpu cloud serving and pixel streaming so that you're so the individual that's that's involved engaged immersed is now really playing it without having to download a graphics package yeah and also you drop some names there and some and some brands i know there's a lot more at dinner we've talked a lot about them you you know all the top creators and again i love the creator culture i mean that's the new buzzwords around but ultimately it's artists people building stuff application developers in the software world movies and film art art and code is kind of coming together it's the same kind of thing media and coding it's like the same mindset you know creative exactly crazy good smart in a good way in the blockchain it's harder because you've got all this underlying infrastructure and stuff to provision and build often created say oh man it's like doing chores it's like i just want to build cool stuff i don't want to get in the weeds of all the tech right this is like whoever cracks the code can unleash that heavy lifting so the artist can like feel good about kicking ass well i'm i'm being a slot a little sly here because we've sort of broken it into three areas and we've used blockchain to book and the platform so we still think that that gaming in the interactive platform has to have centralization it has to have decision making we have a great community um between twitter and discord we have over 30 000 people and we have organizations that have already um spawned um themselves up or spun up to manage our landowner ownership and some of our guilds for some of our professions but at the same time they're allowing us to make decisions based on what the community wants i mean i've heard recently um i don't want to say it's a horror story but it's been difficult that consensus-based models for development have to get consensus and not everybody agrees you still need the leadership i mean you still need sort of a captain on a ship to make sure that the dictatorships are work and well and linux um tried that and they've worked for a while but when they moved over to we're going to make some decisions have an opinion right whether it's centralization it's faster yeah consensus systems can be diverse and time-consuming well they can be political as well i mean you can you can it can become problems so at the front end we've got digital identity and that's all blockchain based and at the back end we have over 20 services including dids and did com which is decentralized identifier communication and all our services are blockchain based but in the middle um connected to nft's blockchain and everything else and to our teacher identity we have a game or a game platform or a open world platform that is centralized built in unreal engine so that we can make those decisions that spur on individual development it's an architecture it is i mean this is essentially an operating environment exactly you can have the benefits of the decentralized all your data on your identity okay and then have the middle be the playground and built right now that has to get done faster and you're constantly iterating exactly so you need to have that exactly so what are people saying about this to me i think that makes a lot of sense people are very intrigued um we're getting a lot of traction first of all unreal engine in the middle um brands love it because it provides a realistic view of a brand brands have spent you know hundreds of millions of dollars building brand equity and they don't necessarily want a cartoon representation of their brand so brands love it um uh we showed a video here at the monaco crypto summit of some and our videos available online on youtube but we're showing realistic we can create realistic avatars so people are really excited about what we're doing you know david i think one of the things i've had controversy statements in the past that got all the purists going back to 2018 you know throwing tomatoes at me but other halfs like loving it because at that time there was dogma around block change got to be done you know it was slow and gas so why i can use a database now we use the blockchain for smart contracts right which you that's what you want to do you want to have that locked in you want immutability so again this opportunity is to advance faster and not have to get stuck in the dogma but maybe get it back to it later database is a great example i agreed i think i think over time the community will take over the entire platform but i think at the beginning you have to have again you have to have a rudder on a ship to make it go somewhere it's called product market fit exactly you got to get to the market exactly with a product you've got that i want that exactly i mean unreal engine is hard i know what are some of the people you worked with because i think i think what i like about what you're working on is that you are and i think a great poster child of in terms of the organization of a group of people that are pros that want to do great work in a new world with the kind of experience and tools that they had in their old world right faster cheaper better more control when we were there at web one we're there at web two and now with web three we have the ability to fix some of the things that we thought were wrong with web one and two so and move into the ownership economy and and really um for us we've got a great team of people you know around the world that we work with and we're starting to bring in larger organizations to support us i mean our digital identity we're really working with the backbone at ibm and digital identity is very different in blockchain than is crypto and we're working with great people in crypto now we announced today that we're minting our native token dubs with digital bits so we're really excited about that yeah yeah let me ask you a question because i love the fact that you brought multiple ways of innovation again i've mentioned on that with shared experience there different different ride for different waves what have you learned and shared to folks who are going to dip their toe and get on their surfboard so to speak use the california metaphor for both californians what is web3 wave like how's it different from two what's the learnings can you share scar tissue experience observation anything around what you're doing now so they can get insight into this wave well you know web 1 and web 2 were broken i mean you could never go in i think we had this discussion you could never go into an electronic store in the real world write your information down on a piece of paper and expect that you'd walk out of the store with the purchase but we can type in information that is non-verified until i could take my friend's credit card know where they live and use it by using digital identity at a front end we create one user one account that user can have thousands of verifiable credentials around them and hundreds of avatars so i think what we've really learned is the ability to progress in a way that that really puts data back in the hands of consumers and makes them the owner of their identity by starting there we have a world in front of us that is valuable to marketers valuable to brands and valuables to individuals and whether it's education whether it's government services whether it's retail everything can be built on that simple premise that i am myself it's interesting there's a constant technology we're called presence you know you're present at an event you're present at a store you're present and some reality physically and you have credentials around that presence contextually exactly you're saying you can have one nft one digital identity or identity and have multiple identities that have contacts all stored i'll store it in an avatar it's like changing your suit hey i'm going into the apple store i'm now my apple john and and think of it this way um brands can now connect with you and give you promos give you product based on the information that you're willing to share with them about your real person and your avatar becomes your intermediary so your payment information stored within your digital identity and your avatar not at the retail level so this is a concept we've been working on for a long time i think we're talking about dinner but i want to bring this up for you for you to come and get a reaction to is that if what you just said is true that means if i'm the user and i have power to control my data the script flips now i'm brokering my data to the brand exactly not the other way around exactly or some intermediary i'm in control exactly and i could demand based on what my contextual relevance is to the brand and the brand is willing to pay for that because if you think about it today um social media unfortunately is plagued by fake accounts you know and issues and and so brands are spending all this money and they're getting slippage and breakage and that's spent if they know your real person they're more likely to want to give you an incentive to engage with them because it's a one-to-one transaction that creates value that's a great point you mentioned twitter earlier look at elon musk uncovered all the bots on twitter um and if they ever did the facebook i'm sure there's a ton of different accounts on facebook but you know it's out there these walled gardens have nefarious bad actors man it's not truth isn't what's the truth i mean gaming has this right now it's like you're anonymous you can go down or you got to go real name so we've got a hybrid you can do anonymously verified so because we use biometrics to verify that you're a real person so you can stay anonymous but we know you're a real person because your biometrics belong to you well david great to have you on thecube you got a great insight and experience thanks for sharing thank you john uh what's next for you guys you want to put a plug in for what you're working on you're looking for people funding more action what are you guys doing right well we've we've self-funded to date and we're we're finally going to be releasing um opportunities for people to engage with us in tokenomics and that's why we've we're working with digital bits but we're also looking for great people and great partners we're creating an interoperable open um uh world where we want to bring partners to the table so anyone who's interested reach out to us all right david guys thanks for going on thecube all right more coverage here on thecube we're all over this area going back to 2018 we brought thecube to all the events been covered on siliconangle.com since 2010 and watching this wave just get better the reality is here it's a metaverse world it is a decentralized world happening to everyone monaco crypto summit here in monaco thanks for watching we'll be right back with more after this short break you

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering your red hat. Some twenty nineteen. You buy bread. >> Oh, good afternoon. And welcome back as the Cube continues our live coverage. Exclusive coverage of Redhead Summit twenty nineteen here in Boston. Some nine thousand strong attendees here. Key notes have been jam packed, but we just finished our afternoon session not too long ago again. Very well attended. Dynamic speakers stew Minimum. John Walls. We're joined now by Lee Dae. Who's the Vice president of Marketing Communications? That Red Hatley. Good to see you. I see you and Michael brats, who was a teacher of English as a second language of Franklin Middle School in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Mr B. Good to see you, sir. And that's what your your students call you, Mr B. Is that right? What they do, we saw that way. Might just follow through on that tradition right now. All right, let's talk about why the two of you are here together. And I know you're Michael School has an interesting history that they've been kind of following somewhat independently, you know, in terms of open source and work. And only you found them through your marketing work some really very interesting. Two avenues that you have on your platform. So tell me a little bit about how how you got here. And then we'LL get into it after that. >> Okay, Great. So Red Hat has a program called co lab and this sir program where we go into schools and we teach kids how to code. So we do things like circuit boards and programming on raspberry pies. Kids have program raspberry pies into cameras to go around cities and take pictures. And we have had collapse in many cities, and we hadn't hit the Midwest. And we chose Minneapolis. And we found, fortunately, Franklin Middle School in that great group of girls and two awesome teachers that are very inspirational on, So the relationship didn't stop it. That week of coal lab, we have stayed in touch, and here at the summit, we've showcased the work in the police ship that we have together. Yeah, >> and I know a lot of the focus that the program is toward, uh, appealing to younger ladies. You know, young girls trying to get them or involved in stem education. We just had the two award winners for the women and open source with us just a few moments ago. So this is Ahh, a company wide. Durant wants a directive initiative that you said, Okay, we we have a responsibility, and we think we have a role here to play >> absolutely well. It's important to us to see the next generation of technologists. And when you feel like women, especially young women sometimes feel like technology is inaccessible to them, and they're not often in technology programs and university. So it's our initiative. Teo help young people feel comfortable and good about technology and that they can actually code. And they can actually do things that they didn't think were possible to them previously. >> So, Mr B. Help us understand how this fixing curriculum and give us a little bit of the story of how it went down. >> Well, it's funny asset. I mean, this opportunity for us is a home run out the part because we're a steam school science, technology, engineering, arts in math. So today, not only did our students perform on the main stage a song that we were able to collaborate right and go through a >> whole production process >> with music were also able to on there right now as we speak down running a booth, building circuits, presenting those circuits, presenting those circuit boards, and collaborating altogether down there with attendees of this conference right now. So, I mean, we're covering every one of those steam components, basically, in one project, one large scale technology project. So this opportunity homeland out the >> part. >> I love that because that was the first thing I went to mind. I heard photography involved. You say steam and so much, you know, we can't just have tech for Tex take. You know, I worried I studied engineering and, like, things like design and those kind of things right weren't in the curriculum. But you know what? I went to school. Creative side. Yeah. How important is that? You kind of get especially think young people get the enthusiasm going. That creative side would, you know, get them deeper into it. >> Well, you know, I always look att, individual students. Everybody has their individual gifts and talents, and it's about, you know, finding those leadership skills within each one of those gifts. And so within this, you're able to find someone that might be more creative in one area, maybe more technical and more, you know, logic orientated in other areas. So with that, you're able to just have Mohr a broader spectrum to be ableto find people's individual gives in towns and for them to in the collaboration also contribute their gifts and talents in different avenues instead of it just being one lane like just this part of technology or just this part of production and just this part of design were able to kind of integrate all of that into one thing and to take it one step further. After we did the, um So Cola came out with their mobile container to US Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and it was right downtown, right outside of where our football team players brand new stadium Super Bowl is is there two years ago now And, um, so with our students being there after we got done with that, that cold lamb, when they were asking us, you know, to take it a step further in the classroom are students actually designed with our future boys Lo Bill Future Girls logo a card and then presented it to Red hat and they ended up printing off the cars and they were able to use it to build the circuit. So we weren't just using the coal lab cars. But we also got to design our own, too. >> So, you know, you said future boy's feet. So that's that's a new organization, the club that you formed the school Future Boys and Girls Club for the express purpose of what? >> Well, so we actually tie in all different content areas into assault. Obviously, this is just the future girls that are here in Boston and did the technology side with us and that parts of Spain the cold because it's an initiative for girls in technology but of the future boys and girls, uh, overall program. We encompass a lot of different continent as we integrate performing arts with academics and all the components of esteem school, um, into learning. And we do interest based learning. We do project based learning, and basically, you know, kids are learning a lot without realizing how much they're really learning, you know, and we make it fun and relevant. But we also teach the leadership skills in the hard work that goes in with it. And I mean, even just coming out here to Boston for this, uh, for this opportunity here in this summit, I mean, the amount of work that it took for the students to get here and the process, the ups and downs, especially with middle school students. You know, the marathon, not a sprint mentality, you know, has been absolutely amazing. >> Good luck with that eye. Well, >> I always say I >> haven't had a bad day yet. Just an overstimulating one. >> So lately, you know, we love having stories on the Cube and especially tech for good is something that we always get a good dose here at Red had some it. You know what else can share some of the open tour stories that were going on around the event? >> We're really thrilled. Today. We're launching our newest open source story, which is about agriculture and which we choose topics with open source stories that are important every everyone so medicine, helping to find cures for cancer, even our government and artificial intelligence. And today it's about open hardware and open agriculture. And we're launching a new film this afternoon. >> It's all future farming, right? Right. That that's the viewing today. >> Yes, and we had someone showing their their farming computer on our stage, and it's actually done in Summit >> Show for today. So you've got the open studio, you know, working and you have a number of projects. I assume this fell into one of those slots right where you were Using one of those platforms to feature great work of future farming is another example of this, But But you have some, I think, pretty neat things that you've created some slots that give you a chance to promote open source in a very practical and very relatable way. >> Yes, exactly. So our Opens our open studio is our internal creative community agency. But we do get ideas from everyone around, you know, around the world. So wait, get ideas about open agriculture, eh? I, uh, what we can do with kids and programming with kids. And then we take those ideas into the open studio and it is a meritocracy. So the best ideas when and that's what we choose to bring to life. And we have designers and writers and filmmakers and strategist and a whole group of people that make up the open studio inside a red hat >> And you've done a new feature, Frank. >> Yes. So, yeah. We work together to create the container that doctor be mentioned and to create the container. And then we work. When >> you have you >> have. You know, one of the girls Taylor actually taught me just now I am not technical. I will just give that caveat. But they they make, they made circuit boards, and they're making circuit boards here. Some issue and mine doesn't work. So don't That's okay. Just, basically were you can see here we have different designs that are attendees can choose from, and then we have electrical tape that you are sorry, competent and an led light. And so the idea is to toe form a circuit and to have led light item the card. That's great. So one of the one of the girls actually taught me how to make it, but I think I didn't follow >> her. Instructed you to go back to school. Wouldn't be the first time that I would have fallen apart either on that. So where Michael, Where would you be now without red hat? Or, you know, you were doing your own thing right independently. But now you've received some unexpected support. Where would you be? You think was out that help. And how much of a difference have they made >> you? Well, let me tell you. I mean, you know, when we look at it being an after school program, the amount of enrichment and opportunities that redhead has created for us has been, honestly, just unbelievable. It's been first class, and we're so appreciative. I mean, even even in our meeting with the future girls last night, we just talked about gratitude and how grateful we are for it. I mean, when you look at this circuit, this is an abbreviated version of what the students actually participate in. This is, you know, just a one one, uh, one led light and a small formation our students were doing. I think there were seven or eight on ours. And so the amount of learning in the modern opportunity that this presented to him not only have they learned how to do the technical piece of it, they've learned howto present. They've learned howto speak and present. They've learned howto call lab, collaborate, work together on huge levels, and I mean, they learned what they can take on an airplane, you know, coming out here. So I mean, the amount of things that through the learning process of, like, eye color, large scale technology project that we've been participating since October since they brought the mobile lab out to Minneapolis. I called a large scale tech, you know, technology project, and going through that whole process has been huge. And let me tell you this as a teacher and those that are parents you're competing was so much in this day and age to keep kids attention, right? I mean, everything is swiped the phone every which way and everything. So instant gratification. So for students to actually engage in this cola program for to be set up so well from Red Hat and to actually stick with it and stay engaged with it really speaks volumes denying the program. But also, you know, our students staying engaged with it, but they've they've stuck with it, they've been engaged, and it's very interest based, the project I've seen it through. But then also the renewed opportunities and being ableto one of the things on our rubric as the teacher is toe expand and extend the learning I don't mean to be long winded, but we wanted, you know, expand on the learning that's already taken place and being out here, it's just it's just a continuous continuation of the learning, you know, not just one level going to next level going on next long light, next level. And that's that, honestly, is where the real learning really takes place. >> So, Michael, you know, from its very nature being an open source company, you know, Red Hat talks a lot about it. Ecosystem in community. If I five red right in the notes, they're you know, your student really getting the value and understanding of community. There's something about they wrote a song. Talk >> about that. We become stronger. Yeah, that's the name of the song is we become stronger And you know what the idea was. We were looking at the power point for this summer and for this summit, and in that there was, uh there was a phrase that said ideas become stronger and that's the collaboration. And so we started tossed around ideas and things like that were like, Well, we liked the idea of stronger, and then we're like, Well, this is more of the coal lab experience, not just the ideas of the technical side. And that's why we become stronger. And yet we developed a song specifically for this summit. I think you go top for, you know. >> Yeah, the performance was amazing. >> Yeah, you don't want >> one top forty, to be honest with you, but no. I mean, uh, you know, and that was another whole another phase, you know, like, I talked about the steam side of the school. Um uh, integrating the arts in and the whole production side of that, you know, it was a lot of work and another project, but it was another area of content that we're able to integrate into this project, and, uh, and we're able to perform it on stage. So, like I said, they literally just got off stage performing. We become stronger singing the whole production of song a dance routine choreography and then went straight to the boot to now present circuits and teach attendees here at the summit howto build a circuit. I don't know how much better can get in that. >> That is so cool. That's great. Now is this the song that you recorded in the same studio. Lenny Kravitz. Atlantis More. Tell me you didn't like that, huh? >> I mean, you know, it's all right. >> That's good. That's great. Congratulations, Roy. On this collaboration, it's really it is exciting to see what they're doing to inspire young people on Michael. I can tell you like your job. Don't you love it? I love it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, keep up the great work. And we appreciate the time here. And I look forward to hearing that song. Maybe if it hits, you know, the ice store. You know, Apple Store, maybe, You know, maybe good things will happen, right? Hey, you never know. She's Vice president marketing. We're gonna figure this. I'm checking out. I tio go by weight, become stronger. Thanks, Michael. We appreciate Lee. Thank you for having me back with more. Here on the Cube. You're watching our coverage, right? Had some twenty nineteen, but

>> Live from Washington DC, it's theCUBE! Covering Inforum DC 2018 brought to you by Infor. >> And good afternoon, or I guess at least Eastern Time, good afternoon. We're in Washington DC, theCUBE live here at Inforum '18. We're at the Washington D.C. Convention Center along with Dave Vellante, I'm John Walls. It's a pleasure to welcome Nanzio Esposito who's a VP and Head of Experience at Infor and you can tell he's the coolest guy in the room right now. (all laughing) Yeah, Nanzio, good to see ya. Thanks for joining us, we appreciate that. >> Thank you, thank you for asking. >> So you had a, as part of your primary responsibility, the in-house creative agency. >> Yep. >> Hook and Loop. First off, let's just deal with design, from an approach standpoint. Why is that so important for Infor to have its own in-house agency? >> Well I mean, we have amazing capabilities, and a lot of, and those capabilities really differentiate us against our competitives that. But what ends up happening is that our end users essentially want to have a more enjoyable and more satisfying experience, through their work. So, the reason why design is extremely important to Infor is because, through design, we get to do things like provide efficiency through workflows. We get to do things like create a design system that helps to escale and empower and enable our development teams to pick up UX best practices and UI assets so that they can build quicker. Or open-sourcing those kind of capabilities to be able to empower our partners and our customers to build apps with kind of a standard code base. So, I would tell you that the reason why design is so important is because we look at things from a very macro view, strategically. Design is very holistic, it's problem-solving. And it's taking the best of some of design's key attributes of modernizing the UI, being able to apply design thinking to understand kind of what the business value needs to come out of the system or the solution that's put in play. And how that mutually creates a beneficial kind of delivery mechanism to each user as they're doing their work. And also looking at kind of just the raw, sheer amount of assets that we have from data and being able to find ways to essentially come up with solutions that businesses today really need. And it's a very competitive landscape. And what best to have a designer be able to try to solve some of your business application needs. >> And does it change depending upon the vertical in which you're working? So, I mean, those have to be considerations too, and the environment, right, from the mobile if you're going to be at the desktop, you're going to be on a laptop or? >> Yep, yep. >> On iPad or whatever. All that factors into that. >> Yeah, definitely. You know, it is interesting. I mean, part of Infor strategy has always been to, you know, have industry-focused cloud suites. And from a design perspective, for us, we do tend to see patterns. So, it depends on user roles, kind of access points, you talked about devices. So we see the use of device in, say, healthcare industry, very different, say, than to the use of a device in manufacturing. But mobile, is really starting to kind of blur those lines. And you brought up something that was part of our mobile strategy, internal that was kind of finished out in October of 2017. Which is essentially what we call mobility in context. So context is very important. Knowing situationally where a user is in a moment so that they can, from one moment, work with, say, some portal. And that portal may be a laptop to a, say, an iPhone or even just an Alexa device, and be able to understand where they are, allow them to continue on in that workflow and make sure that it's integrated, it's smooth and it's direct and to the point. So, that's what has kind of transpired through the evolution of Hook and Loop because design has evolved and it's bigger than just modernizing our user interfaces here at Infor. >> So when we first heard about Hook and Loop, it was through Infor. It was the early part of this decade. The mobile was only five or six years old. I mean, smart phones. >> Yeah. >> At the time. So in was early days, you guys were first, certainly, of all the major software company enterprises to focus on that. Now, subsequently, we hear you've always heard a lot about UI. >> M-hmm. >> And UX. Subsequently, much more recently we're hearing much more around design. You're seeing, you know, you go to conferences like Service Now and they're focusing on this stuff and you guys have always been there. What's the difference between UX, UI, and sort of design at the core? >> Yeah, sure. I mean, I think it, sometimes the lines are blurred, right, and it depends on the industry and it depends on where you're speaking as far as when you say user experience design or if you say just design in general. So, I'm going to just take two steps back. The reason why I didn't go for head of design at Hook and Loop was just because design means, has a certain definition here at Infor. We are obviously an enterprise, it's very vast, it's extremely broad and at that point, each, say, of our major constituents, product management, it could be a product development, it could be a customer, they have different mental models on what design means. So, we wanted to go with something that's a little more elusive. Alright, so Head of Experience. But, essentially, now, through our evolution in our sixth year, we're really focused on product experience. So what that means is taking kind of all the learnings that we've had in the industry around modernizing UI, so that's essentially the way in which the solution manifests itself, how it looks, and the best of user experience. Essentially, what is the flow? What are the click states? How can we provide efficiency in form fields? But now you bring in A.I. and that obviously puts a different dimension on that process. But when it kind of all comes together, it's really just about making a strategic call on what the solution needs to be able to satisfy, all the different configurations in which it needs to account for, and then how to package that in a very lightweight manner. So, it's almost to the point that a company or a user doesn't need any instructional information on how to use it. And that's always been a goal at Hook and Loop. Through the six-year journey, strategically, even with some prior leadership, there was a very amazing strategic call to focus on a more mobile first initiative and mobile first, that brought forward kind of all the responsive web behaviors to our applications. So, that's great. Because that just essentially means that on any device, the application will conform, will render, to kind of provide the best usability that it can. As we're evolving, though, we're realizing that the future of work, and I mentioned this to the analysts yesterday, the future of work, which is now post-Millennial, and I know that sounds crazy 'cause I think we're all still seeing millennials in our workforce and trying to reconfigure, figure out what the company culture is, the purpose is, and how business solutions help to support that. But the article in the New York Times talked about iGen, and you know, the theme that Inforum here is all about human potential. Well, in the iGen generation, it's all about the personal aspects of the way in which they communicate, the way they do work, the way they have social gatherings. And I found it very profound because that essentially really supports what the vision of Hook and Loop is now in this era, which is the personal enterprise. And there's nothing more personal than the device that we choose on a daily level, which is the mobile device. So, at that point, it's extremely innate. And it definitely kind of personifies who we are in our digital world, our digital selves, and because it actually has all this tons of capability that's packed into it, what ends up happening is not about kind of the nine to five anymore, and I think you guys, and myself, we all know that. We're getting notifications and communication to, say, a loved one or some kind of social event that's going on and then getting pinged through some kind of communication or notification of work that we have jobs to do, there's things that have to get done. So, it moves from work-life balance to a work-life blend. And for our enterprise, and through kind of I think the investment that we've done with design, that allows us at Hook and Loop to really push the boundaries of user experience and think about the balance of all those to kind of give our customers always only exactly what the user needs right now. And that's been our new mantra, where we've kind of strategically pivoted, evolved, and been essentially looking at our principles and re-looking at our work, given all this investment in our capabilities. >> We heard this morning in the keynotes that you're basically infusing A.I. into your applications, in an effort to create better outcomes. Giving users advice as to how they maybe could have done things differently, maybe tracking some KPI's and giving feedback to the user, so that they can have better outcomes. How does A.I. from a design standpoint change the way in which you have to think about presenting data and information to the user? And not being intrusive, but being helpful? >> Yeah. I could probably talk about that for like the next two to five hours, but the reality is there's different versions or flavors of A.I. So, some of it could be more backend processes, like you alluded to and presenting, say, best potential outcomes that a user, or paths that a user can navigate or select or go down. One thing that we saw from a design perspective is the fact that you don't want to just present the recommendation. You don't want to lose the human factor. You have to establish trust with A.I. over time. So, in just saying, hey I got that or I got that done or here's the best KPI to use, you want to still have a system that can offer up why. And be able to kind of promote choice. A user doesn't want to feel, essentially, controlled. They want the system to be able to make them feel like they're in control. So, those are some nuances there. When it gets into kind of the more conversational aspects of A.I., you know, and I'm going well beyond kind of chat bots, having conversations and having it kind of leverage some of our CIR capabilities, find business objects and promote it, say through our GUI, conversations get intense. And why I say intense, it's some of the terminology we use at Hook and Loop. But that's just because utterances and variancing in the way in which we communicate, are complex. You might say, OK and I might say yeah. You might say I am on it and I might say, yo, I'm doin' that. And just through-- >> That's exactly right, as a matter of fact, that's exactly what David would say. (all laughing) >> I wasn't trying to say this or that. But they all mean the same thing, or in different contexts or whatever the inquiry was, we have to understand that kind of user intent and be able to map all those correlations. So, it's not so easy as just saying hey, we have A.I. and we'll put it into play. And from a design perspective, the last thing we want to do is ever alienate a user. So. >> A frustrated user. >> And frustrated user, exactly. So, just because you can doesn't mean you should and we really need to think strategically in a way in which we ultimately empower a user. So when I say user we're saying a name for customer's employee, or a new force customer customer. So it's a very interesting strategic place that we sit within Infora in our product development teams. >> Yeah, within user experience and best practices, so obviously there are some general trends or general concepts, what do you find out though amongst your clients and your user base maybe that offers additional insight or is giving you maybe a little sneak peak about something that you are uniquely discovering, if you can talk about that? >> Oh yeah, sure. I mean, I think as we evolved kind of our business model this year and our services, I think one of the things that we've learned over the years is that, like, we're no subject matter experts. Like at all. So it's kind of like, well, how do we get this information? How can we learn more? How can we provide or satisfy or create solutions that satisfy these certain pain points? So what we ended up doing is, ya know, I hear this from my team constantly, it's like who's the customer? Or who's the user? And we need personas. And we need to understand the journey maps. And we lose sight of some of the more internal mechanisms that we have that really kind of give us that information. So, we've, over the last few months, have gotten access to Infor Concierge, which is a tool that Infor created for our customers to be able to kind of understand what's new in the product. If they have any product enhancement requests, issues, that they would love to see, bugs, defects. They're finding that their Infor is working really well in creating kind of a two-way conversation. Well, what best to have design team, which, you know, product experience team, to be able to have access to all of that information. Be able to comb and sift through it. So, we're learning kind of what the customer and the user wants, but they're participating in that. So it's a really interesting orchestration or concert. And then on the flip side, we have a ton of subject matter experts. So, and that goes well beyond just our solution, industry solution, architects. This goes into like, our sales teams, or our solution consultants, or our channel partners. So, strategically over these last six to eight months, I think what we have uncovered is that we have a lot of support. And there's like ways for us to make decisions quicker and be able to test or have successes or failures in a very like small, confined box, so to speak. So that we make decisions that don't necessarily create massive ramifications in the enterprise but get us to kind of create value quicker in a more kind of sizeable chunk in deployment mechanism. So, I think the biggest thing that we've uncovered is the fact that, not only do we have a lot of talent but we have a lot of amazing, bright ideas. And that is why we moved from an in-house design agency to product experience because essentially Infor has grown and our team is everyone's becoming a designer. And that's you want. You want to go from a design organization which was the goal in 2012 to now in 2017, 2018 and where we're headed, to move from a design org to a design culture. And I think that's what is going to definitely going to get Infor to differentiate against its competitive landscape. >> 'Cause one of the problems with design is oftentimes the design, the ideal design, there's a gap between that and the actual functionality of the product. And then you end up with this kind of hybrid. Some of the design intent matches the outcome but then the functionality is sort of becomes roadmap. >> Yeah, and a lot of that was happening, I think 'cause we were going through an evolution. What we noticed is we need to move design closer to our product development teams in Hyderabad, Manila. You know, development is getting done all over the globe. So what we did was, we wanted to ensure that UX practitioners were, ya know, sitting side by side of our development teams so that in a moment's time they can have a conversation, quickly make a decision, and obviously just continue on their way. Another piece, though, is what is the right balance between having massive amounts of engineering capacity to, say, a designer that's in partnership with them? So we started practicing and growing our team to be less focused on some of the more baseline design capabilities and we brought in some really smart and talented engineers that understand design, find ways to translate it. And we're doing that kind of translation right now in building native mobile applications inside of Hook and Loop. And that gives us a mechanism to prove out our work, understand some of our decisions, get kind of the feasibility more done upfront so that when we make strategic calls or we want to scale from there, we start to minimize the gap between wouldn't this be amazing if it could render or do this, to, oh, God, we just did like, patchwork, or it was a quill that we created to get it done. We want to bridge that gap and get closer and closer to what the original concept or the idea was. >> So you announced one of those apps this week. >> Yeah, that was super exciting! >> If you want to talk about that. Congratulations. >> Thank you, thank you. Yeah, I mean leveraging the best of human-centered design, I can't mention the customer's name given the NDA, but we did work with a very large consulting firm that had 18,000 users. And they're kind of road warriors. So, strategically working with our C suite, we were focusing on more agnostic solutions and then scale to more industry-focused solutions, so this is in expense management. But we needed something that was insanely high consumer grade. So really driven by usability. But offered more of the baseline utility. So leveraging the capabilities of XM, this was all kind of like the road warrior, I just need to capture my receipt, potentially build a queue, wait 'til my credit card feeds in these data points, my expenses, match these expenses, submit a report, and like can I just get back on my day 'cause we all hate doing that. So the app that we just released, it's available on Apple iTunes, the Apple Store, today. It's called Infor Expense. It acts as a companion to Infor Expense Management. We say companion because if you're an Infor Expense Management customer today, you have access to it. And it really is a mechanism to kind of promote the best of what Hook and Loop is trying to scale, continues to scale, inside of Infor. At the same time, it's a playground for us. It's a playground for us to test new capabilities, leverage capabilities that are on the device. You know, evolve our design patterns and our UI assets. So that we kind of always stay at the tip of the spear. And that's essentially where Hook and Loop sits for Infor from a product strategy perspective. >> Well if you make expense reports easy, I'm all for it. >> Me too, right? >> I got my parking ticket right here, we can start as soon as we're done. >> Alright, you want me to take a picture of that? (all laughing) >> Nunzio, thanks for the time. >> Awesome. >> Congratulations. I know you're moving into your second year, it'll be an exciting time for you I'm sure. >> Yeah, I'm excited. >> Keynote tomorrow, right? >> Yeah, I'm opening up day two. >> Just give us real quick, sneak peak, what are you going to talk about? >> Yeah, it's, I think it's really just all about design's evolution inside of Infor, really setting the stage that Hook and Loop went from an internal kind of creative agency and is really moving towards product experience. So that's product strategy, product thinking, how do we aggregate all of that capability, from a data and A.I. perspective, and then find deployment mechanisms that not only inspire our internal teams, but more importantly, inspire our customers in the market. >> Good deal. >> Thank you again for the time. Pleasure. >> Alright, thank you. >> See you tomorrow morning. Nunzio Esposito joining us from Infor. Back with more, we're at Inforum '18. We're live in Washington D.C. and you are watching theCUBE. (light upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE. Covering Oracle modern customer experience 2017. Brought to you by Oracle. (electronic music fades away) Welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay for Oracle's Modern Customer Experience Conference. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Peter Burris with theCUBE and our next guest is Brian Curran, Vice President of Strategy and Design with Oracle Cloud. Great to have you on theCUBE. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So you're a design and strategy person you've been the art and science of designing experiences. Not so much in the technology, Vasas Port, Vasas Server and yet innovation is the number one thing people talk about in the digital transformation certainly that's happening. But it's hard when you have all those Legacy stuff process, people, well that guy does that, that's his job over there and this guy runs it over there, so that's all coming together as we were talking about on our intro, Peter and I were talking about that. How do you get at the innovation when you engage with customers? When you walk in the door? >> It's funny. It's still a dirty word in companies innovation, right? I mean people are scared of it because the fancy word is innovation. The real word is change. And now you want to make changes in an organization and it's scary for people. And what I really do is I try to spend time with them trying to get them to understand that this is an art and a science. The science part is usually where you start first because I'm trying to get them to kind of go through the discipline of what it takes to do that. And it's really about getting the right people involved in that. And so I really try to spend my time saying look, let's find something really small to go work on, let's find a little problem that maybe you have and let me show you the art and science of getting from that understanding of the customer need all the way to hey I've got to wait to actually solve that will drive results for your business. >> It's interesting, the psychology of the customer is under a lot of stress, because as you said, it's a dirty word, innovation, because it means change but now it's interesting with Cloud you're seeing some of these technologies out there there's more pressure on top of that, it'speed they have to do it faster, so now you have a speed game going on and then agility and all these things people are seeing as use cases that okay, people are getting things right, but what do I do? And this is a lot of pressure for them. How does that add to the complication when you get to come in and say okay, we've got to change we've got to do it fast. You're roles might change. How do you take that? How do you walk through that? >> Well, first of all when you talk about the trends and the changes, what it's driving is these increased expectations so customers are dealing with an Amazon then they're coming back to another brand saying hey, how come you're experience is not like Amazon? So companies feel that pressure right now and they realize they can't wait six months, 12 months to go make the change, they've got to make it in six weeks or 12 weeks and so one of the things I'm a big believer is in rapid prototyping, get your point to a test where you can actually get it out in the market. So how do you frame something to really understand it in a couple days? How do you ideate in a couple days? How do you get everyone to understand what you're trying to do in a couple days and eventually get to a point where maybe five or six weeks, boy you're driving at that point. But the old days of going, hey, let's have a big strategy session and then we'll come through stuff in three to six months and nine months from now by then you're out of business. So we're really focused on trying to get people to understand it is about speed, it is about understanding and get to that point. >> But it comes back to the customer. Ultimately the design point is what experience do you want the customer to have with you. >> Correct. So in many respects the challenge is the customer does things and in a B2B setting they do things with a lot of other folks in their organization and they do things with the seller. In a B2C sense it's by themselves but they do things and they move through different context, what they do together. How do you help companies get focused on that singular element, it's what the customer is trying to do and how you want them to invite you to do it with them? >> To me, there's adjurity, right? There's a step-by-step process that the customer goes through in order to fulfill their need. And so it is about understanding that interaction that engagement and determining whether you're actually meeting the customer's need at that moment. Do you understand the context, do you understand the expectations, do you have all of the things that you need in order to understand that moment? But once you've chosen that moment, now what you're really focused on is the value equation. How do I fulfill that need in a way, drive that experience, that perception, that changes the customer's attitude so they think differently. That ultimately drives a different behavior from the customer that leads to a result that's different for the business. So businesses need to understand that value equation. Your job, number one job, is to fulfill customers needs. And I'm not talking about just the end need, but the need at every single moment along that life-cycle. And if you can understand and fulfill that need you can understand how to deliver results. Then it's just about plugging that formula in to get that done. >> So the question that I have for a lot of design folks, and it's kind of a big question but it ties back into some of the trends we're talking about. The Cloud, which is this thing that presumably allows companies to be in a lot of different places with at least a digital presence has been instrumental in presenting services to the communities to a lot of communities in new ways. >> Brian: Yes. >> To what degree do you think The Cloud and design thinking are reinforcing each other. By that I mean design thinking gets the business to focus on what's the value in use and The Cloud is presented as a service, not as a product. So is the design thinking The Cloud helping to move us from thinking about products to the services that they provide overall? >> Yeah, I would say design thinking first came out to actually drive product design but now it's starting to drive experiential design. The thing about The Cloud is that I can quickly go from rapid prototyping to putting it right in front of customers where before, using Legacy, armed premise capability, it would take me months to stand up something that I wanted to go do. So I think we're at the beautiful time for design, right? Is that all the disciplines around design the ability to really understand the customer to have that empathetic understanding to actually design experiences that are very relevant to that customer. But now to be able to actually take that experience and go multi-variant, AB tested immediately, not months from now but days from now and to get that learning, because part of great design thinking is not just the first generation, when I think design thinking I'm also thinking service design, lean, agile so I get the ability to take my minimal viable experience, not minimal viable product, get it in the market very quickly, get the learning from that, come back and make that iteration, put it back out on the market again So The Cloud allows you to do that on the fly where before you couldn't drive at that kind of speed. >> Talk about the commitment level, because that's a commit they have to make organizationally to iterate >> To fail? Well, to be ready for the iteration because you're throwing something out there that's also, I mean some people just got to get over, hey, the parachute will open. >> Brian: Yes. Kind of get over that fear and then once they're there they have to commit, they can't just leave it there. How do you walk through that with the customer because that to me, I think, is the trend that I see. Maybe it's different across different customers but the same organizational commitment. >> You've got to stop thinking about projects and you've got to start thinking about learning and engaging and so for me the process is really about going, hey, can I design something, can I actually test it very quickly, can I learn, and learn to me is fail. I mean I was involved in building the first Apple store. I will tell you the first Apple store was a complete failure (laughing) and it was the best learning that Apple could ever get in order to be able to use to build the next store, which was a much more successful piece. You have to build that in your DNA that says, if I'm fast then I can actually reduce my risk I can get to a point where I actually, be able to >> Yeah. learn very quickly and that I can go make that change come into place. >> That's great. I've got to ask you a question in terms of the customers because this is awesome you have a lot of experience with the customers. What's the pattern that emerges as you go out and look at the transformational heroes out there that are taking the transformation from the evolution of that? Is there a pattern that emerges, they kind of get nervous at first, then they snap in line here, and then things kind of happen. Can you share what you've seen as a pattern? >> So the pattern for innovators is usually they're just a little off-center and they have a little less fear than the rest of us about losing their job the next day and they're so passionate about what they want to do, they're willing to actually kind of push the envelope. What I find is that's the innovator. That's the guy. And by the way, usually not up high, usually down around the middle of the company. Now when they run into someone who will, on high also, is passionate about the change but not sure how to do it when the two of them come into combination, that innovator whose passionate, and that leader who understands they need to build that DNA, what I find is when those two come together, that is the pattern for success. So bottom's up, top's down innovation is really what works the best. I also find that the people who actually embrace discipline, embrace design thinking, embrace all of those aspects, but also have the arty kind of, hey, let's try some new things, let's be willing to kind of put our nose out there >> Yeah. I find the stodgy people who are not willing to make the change are the ones who actually just get stuck and we've seen those companies all go out of business, right? So the people who are willing to be leading-edge what's great is, though, if you see really great leaders, >> John: Yeah. they're also willing to be credible and authentic and get in front of audiences to say, "I designed this, it was a failure. >> Yeah. "I'm willing to actually now go do the next thing." And we see this from great leaders >> Yeah. from Starbucks on, that way I tried to do a bar in Starbucks and actually it didn't work, so we're going to go on to something else. >> Doesn't it also, I mean I agree with you totally, Brian having studied this a lot myself over the years. But it also means data. That you have to build measurement into everything >> Yes. Because the innovator doesn't get acknowledged or recognized by the leader if there isn't some data that >> Correct transmits message. You don't realize you're failing if you don't have data that alerts you early, before you double-down and triple-down, and quadruple-down on a bad idea. So how does the science of design thinking come into play here, because it's the designing-in, the measurements, the changes that become so crucial to actually moving us from just a good idea into something that actually manifests change. >> To me, the value equation is the first thing you work on, right? Which is the math. I need to understand the customer's needs and I need to understand the results that you're getting to. So I need to understand the attitudinal, the behavioral, the operational, the executional, all of those measurements so financial measurements, customer measurements, all those pieces. That data's crucial. I don't start, by the way, on any innovation projects until we have current-state understanding of that. The design is actually about how do I get that moving? How do I get that attitudinal, behavioral, operational, executional, financial movement by the design of what I'm doing. So data actually becomes more crucial. What's great too, about The Cloud, is that I actually have more access to data that I didn't have access to before and the data's in the hands of the innovator, not some other group I don't have to wait >> Right. a long time for analysis so I can literally go, here's our current state, let me go do A, B, multi-variant testing, wow, I got this change right here. Look at the pattern of behavior that I'm getting from customers. Now I say, okay, that's working, we will eventually get the results. And the fear for businesses in some cases, they need the financial result immediately, but now what we can say is actually, if you watch this track of behavior, you'll eventually get to the results. So if you're getting the behavioral change, you're actually >> With risk management to headed in the right direction. >> To your other point so there's also a piece of don't just jump to where's the ROI? >> Correct. (laughs) >> To, no, you're going to get there. >> Well we're talking about things like advocacy and retention and loyalty, well these are long-term behavioral things so you actually have to even go even further up and start measuring attitudinal, am I getting the movement for customers of how they talk about our brand and how they talk about engagement. That will eventually lead to the behaviors that I want, will eventually lead to results. So there is a leap of faith here >> Yes. that says if you understand the formula you should be able to actually drive the outcome by understanding the pieces across the formula. >> Well the good news is that by doing a better job of measurement, by having a discipline approach and think about design, how it leads innovation and getting leadership in place, you actually look at risk management as a way of thinking about what options am I going to buy in the future by failing now. >> Brian: Right. So I've learned something that says, well so now that group of options we're pairing-off. We still have this group of options. Let's pursue this group of options and when something didn't work, let's pair these options off >> Brian: Correct. And each time the risk of movement, of action goes down. >> Well the speed of it does too. >> Peter: Exactly. So time actually costs money, right? >> Right. And so if I can make quick bets, I can test them very quickly and I can determine what I should scale and what I should not scale. It's actually cheaper to de-risk that piece that way. >> Yeah, this is an interesting point you guys bring up the psychology and the DNA of the innovator. Whether it's the person in the trenches, who gets the data and makes the discovery and the innovation to the executive. But one area that we've seen is, and certainly this is always talked about at the conferences and stages, the No Manager. They're looking for ways to say no. >> Brian: Right. Then there's the guy who's looking to get to the yes. >> Brian: Yes. Take me through your experience on that, because you have to get to yes. >> Correct You have to find that person that's looking for yes. >> Correct. (laughs) In our process, by the way, we go from framing to ideating to share. And in share we believe that showcasing is really important. The ability to actually put your idea in front of someone the right way. But when people say, "No." They spell it N-O and I always spell it K-N-O-W, right? Most cases a leader is saying no because they don't actually have enough information. >> Yes. So if you framed, you really understand the customer and you've done a really good job of ideating, and you're really putting some proof of concepts together and getting them validated internally and externally and you've done the disciplined work >> John: Yeah. by the time you get to a decision, you should be able to give enough of that K-N-O-W >> Yeah to get that leader to move in the direction. >> John: Yeah, because they're looking for information, they're looking to learn. >> Peter: Which means you want an informed yes. >> Brian: Correct. Because if you don't get the informed yes, you're not getting the leader. You're really not getting the leader >> Brian: Correct. You're getting rubber-stamping >> But leaders ask great questions, right? >> and that's not what you want. >> Peter: That's right. >> And they're looking for other people to have the answers and they want to make sure that they went through the process, so when you bring me and ROI model, I want to say, well how did you put this together? How do you know that actually is going to get increased? And I back them up to well, wait a minute, here's the customer's attitude and here's the behavior and here's how I measured them. Okay, how do you know it's going to cost this much? I went through every activity, resource, partner, I've determined what I believe it's going to take. If you're doing the disciplined work, along with the artwork, you have a much better chance of actually getting things done. The other piece too, is that by the time you go to execute, even if you were wrong, you had so many measurements in place, that you're able to make those tweaks and iterations or decide to kill the innovation quick enough. So for leaders I'm saying don't make scale-decisions. Make test-decisions. Make very small, little bets, very quick, rapid prototyping and then make scale-decisions based-off of those tests. Now you've de-risked the whole process. >> Well you get clear visibility on what will the fly-wheel be for the scale, get the visibility on the metrics and unit economics or whatever >> Exactly. Alright, so final question since we have to wrap-up is what's the coolest thing that you've seen or been involved with of a customer? It could be an ah-ha moment, it could be you walked into a train wreck and you cleaned it up, or a big discovery or a big innovation. >> So I try not to share too many of the individual customers that I'm working with but I'll give you a story, it was in the Middle East, a customer that I'm working with, they were looking at, it's a communications company, they were looking at their bundling process of how do I sell wireless and broadband at the same time. So after going through the whole customer ethnography work and framing it, they realized that what they were doing is actually selling two silos that didn't make any sense. The customer just wanted connectivity. They didn't care whether it was broadband or wireless or anything, so they started thinking differently, which was maybe we should step back from this and actually stop trying to bundle or special-pricing based-off of the bundle, let's just sell connectivity. Let's just do away with the whole thought process, that it's actually two different things. >> John: And it worked? >> They're in the process of actually >> so they simplify it. going through that design. >> I thought you might say, "Well, here's how the American companies do it. Do it the exact opposite." (laughter) >> Yeah, because let's face it the process is not right but they actually got to the point, and by the way, we didn't come in with, okay, here's the idea that you should go do >> yeah they came to a conclusion that said, it's not unified billing, it's unified delivery of fulfilling the need. The customer's need is not broadband and wireless. The customer's need is connectivity. >> John: Yeah. If that's the need, we should be fulfilling that and not thinking about the duck below the water, whether that's broadband or this and that. >> That's a great point. A lot of companies just stay in their product lanes and say, "Buy the products." not what they want. >> Brian: Correct. >> Peter: Focus on the service. Alright. >> Brian: Correct. Alright, Brian Curran here inside theCUBE really laying-out some great insight into the design thinking, the role of the innovator, the role of organization. Congratulations on all your work, great insight here on theCUBE, appreciate it. Thanks for sharing the data, we learned a lot >> thanks for having me. We're going to iterate more with great interviews coming up from Oracle Modern Customer Experience after this short break. (electronic music)

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

David it's just gonna call in like basically live feel more nos Vegas Nevada execute again it's the 10 covering knowledge 15 brought to you by service now hello everyone welcome to the cube this is our flagship program we go out to the events in the correct the city okla noise I'm John furry the founder silicon they enjoy my coach Dave vellante co-founder Wikibon org and networks I to be in Las Vegas live for three days of wall-to-wall coverage of service now's no 15 knowledge 15 hashtag no 15 go to the crowd chat / no 15 join the conversation our first guest is Frank's lubin president/ceo source now great to see you again thanks for having us thanks much absolutely the keynote was great i mean in the world's changing IT cloud vmware's had an announcement about native apps on the cloud customers are changing business models are changing talk about what you get to do house that you had a big stock drop in the past week and value is that a sentiment of the of the of the Wall Street dynamic products what is it about the business right now with clouds specifically the business model for your customers it's flywheel the SAS models what's what's going on what's your take on all that flying cloud companies and obviously well I ought to got a lot of the high we're one of them you know we're priced to perfection right and that's that's not an easy place to be for for for anybody and you know we're not really focused on that it's this is a marathon every quarter is one mile marker he can't get too excited about you know one versus the other we're really pacing ourselves your building you know an enterprise that's going to be here for for a long time and our focus is not just on modernizing what what people are doing it's focusing on transforming what people are doing and the emphasis that we place on everything as a service structure workflow approaches getting away from message oriented ways of doing things like email is enormous sea change right there is there's over 100 million PDFs out their forms that people have to download and fill out what somebody else then has to scan and reenter right the world is ripe for this type of innovation the technology is here all we need to do is apply it the start okay so I said when I talked yesterday and I said any successful 12 billion dollar valuation company's going to have a day like friday but I've noticed post the financial analyst discussion yesterday things have calmed down a little bit so who knows maybe it's a buying opportunity I wanted to tie it into the TAM expansion that we've seen when you first took this company public everybody looked at it as a very small niche and it took you and Mike scarpelli and others a while to sort of educate Wall Street on the size of the potential and we're now starting to see that come to fruition you guys talk about expanding into the business side and now you're doing it you talk about going into mobile you talk about you know new innovations at the SMB why is it that you're so successful at executing at what you're doing is that the platform is that the people is that the customers I wonder if you could describe that a little bit what's the magic formula are fundamentally a platform company we that was not always well understood even before I joined the company and I talked to Fred Lunney the founder we were very well aware of the opportunity to expand just dramatically beyond the boundaries of the initial application set which was the IGM set of applications it's just how to do that right when you peel away the veneer the rhetoric the nomenclature you know what you see is a workflow an orchestration platform this is so broadly applicable right what these knowledge conferences are all about is to show people what is possible on this platform and you know all we have to do is take the horse to water soda drink and then you know they go on their own right this is a place where people come to get inspired platform and if you seen from some of the examples that we had on stage this morning and people are not tackling crm applications what service now you know why there's really nothing there's really no boundaries in terms of service management for us to tackle workflows and orchestrations like that right so the world is your oyster II and there's really no place that we we can go with this platform all we got to do is empower and energize the audience that you have here and the fact that they show up in such huge numbers as evidence that were we're succeeding at that right good all the events it's the same kind of theme Internet of Things Big Data have paced are changing clouds and innovator what is it about the cloud and your platform and your customers in terms of the business models what is it about the innovation that's going on right without business must change what specifically can you highlight and get some example because you have a lot of customers we were just talking that the cubbies are sending dozens of people here this event it's not just a boondoggle there's some real work getting done so there's a huge transformation see what is it about the business model now that's changing what are you guys doing turn on your platform this conference is called knowledge for a reason people come here to get knowledge right that's right the labs and training and all this kind of stuff but the most important thing to understand about service now what we did with the individuals really lowered the skills profile and the skill demands to be able to access this level of functional and we really did that by an order of magnitude this wasn't just a platform for programmers people that really have procedural programming skills we really took that out of the equation and people have Excel style skills people will understand the rows and columns and data types that's enough to know to be able to go up okay now what happens in that process we empower very large groups of people in our case IT people to basically take control back over this platform you know in Prior generations of this class of software they were always dependent very small we were people that weren't very accessible and very expensive to do thanks for them how they're doing that is what has unleashed explosion creativity let's talk a little bit about your keynote everything as a service was your big theme EAS sort of acronym what is everything is the service number one second question is is there an analogue to vm sprawl is there a potential for server sprawl what do you what are you telling customers about that are they asking you questions but start with what does everything is a service what does that mean everything is what service means taking work work in the sense the repeatable activities things we do over and over again digging it out of the realm of messaging email text phone and putting it into structure workflow we essentially invent that dress as once without best practices really tune and optimize that process and every single time we do that activity we do it exactly the same way and we enforce the business rules the logic upfront stupid enough to thinking like I always is the silly example an organization I lose my security badge or I mangled in the door I need a new on what do I do well you know I Massey Hill I just asked my admin you figure it out okay but everybody else starts roaming the halls like where do i go to go to the front desk maybe you know that thing employees have to have a place to go for their service needs whatever it is HR related facilities related maybe have a parking issue and you should be able to search navigate themselves to a place where they can make a request and then that request is no different than sending a package through fedex or ordering something on amazon information it's now following you you don't have to go and chase it anymore right oh there's a big inversion of how we work i mean we often target service now but we're changing how we work because we're going we're getting away from the structure messaging woman be structure workflow that's what everything is a service is about regard to aquino but so second part of I want to talk about that is my question is there a dark side to that is there a risk of just too many services service sprawl or do you have service for that is there an app for that yeah talk about that logo the obviously during our keynote we actually spoke explicitly to that point because you're concerning your race is legitimate people are saying hey you know DevOps is great you know empowering all these groups to publish their own services that's great but now I'm going to lose control I'm going to lose visibility and we'll lose accountability i'm going to have compliance security problems and so on what we do is you know we actually maintain the transparency the visibility and the control while people are doing things so it doesn't become the Wild West that we've had in Prior generations of software >> Frank talk about what you're seeing in big data honestly you know we didn't cover that space this doesn't seem to be its own little market but certainly medupe to some stuff going on but companies are looking at Big Data certainly in data as it advantaged in some of the things whether it's IT and or an apple agents what's your vision and what is what our customers doing with the day how's the NIT date is great and everyone's the service date is enabler you look at that and how do you find your customs look at it are very transactionally intense but so our systems they're not data rich in the sense that we deal with enormous volumes of data so it's a little bit of a different model and during the keynote what I talked about it's not like they what's hiding your data we can't figure out what's going on the data by structuring the data right what big data tries to do they're trying to figure out what's going on in unstructured data really really hard to do we structure the data so hence it's very very easy for us to analyze the dashboard exactly what's going on but our focus is not so much on big data it's on real time data the real time dimension is something that is going to become huge because people are demanding real-time information is just not interesting to look at data it's 12 24 hours old and because we are sitting on life data the ability to represent it so you can see your business in action right that is insanely exciting for for executives and managers network magic was hot in the old days with the network little but now the way date is got that same kind of paradigm where you have active data passive data and by melding together they can create values that mean we the CIO that we talked to they what you mean by real time today yeah I said look where I want to get you there's one my office just wall-to-wall LED panels and I want to see every every pocket of activity I want to see it executing in real time whether it's good better and different setting threshold seeing exceptions and says I want to be it's like watching the stock market I want to watch my my business that way and that is what we're going to focus on very different from data oceans and data legs and all this kind of stuff we've already structured the data we're not going to have the problem of big data the three of us started our careers without email and it was amazing productivity bump into our lives when we got email but now email is this productivity killer you talked about it in your keynote you guys did a survey is that basically forty percent of a time is spent on admin tasks and employees time I know judge doesn't manage I'll give your calculation i saw was manager with just even you know higher salaries but so how much of that can you actually reduce and what a customer is actually doing around that well it can be reduced by orders of magnitude you can't make it go away I mean people have needs but being able to make those needs fully automated very intuitive very productive it's absolutely possible right I mean 42 days a week almost half time on tasks that have nothing to do or your job is absurd I think this is almost a dirty little secret of business death we have invested in everything except our own internal workplace productivity right we're stuck in the 1980s if not the 1970s and who's going to put on that mantle write it and we're always trying to drive IT to take on that mantle because who else CEOs typically are focused about revenue right image presentation right coo CFO's those are the people that should be driving the internal productivity challenge sorry just that we just haven't made any progress there in decades and the acceleration now is a significant I start guy an email Facebook say I just finally gave my blackberry you mentioned iPhone and your kita he's still using the blackberry I was like that's actually a great scandalous blog post opportunity but are you mentioned iphone in your keynote moment of this is changing the world certainly edge of the network smartphones and we also hear from customers want to be more Apple night so what's your what were you hearing from customers and they say I don't want to be like the 80s and 90s I want to be more like Apple meaning kind of like the iPhone and the innovation that they bring what they brought to that or you guys been using uber as an example or open table as an example that's that modern vibe for the customer what are they trying to get to in an environment what's their outcome what are you hearing customers the first aspect is the series experience itself in other words what does would like to do what you want to get done essentially we're transactional platform we're not a hanging around platform like a social system we twitter has no no point no purpose it's just nice to shoot things out into the ether and help somebody sees it our systems are not like that it's about performing a unit of work something very specific about the beginning it doesn't end and there's things that happen in between the result it's very different that way uber is also a transactional app I want to hail a cab I need a ride opentable is transactional act I want a reservation there's a very specific end point to that unit of work and this is where technology can be incredibly helpful to get you there faster i use the Gulf example you know fewer strokes is better right and as people want they want have grubert a lot and I find that user experience my blowing compared to trying to call or or hail account it's cheaper and it scales incredibly well right but if wherever you are or whenever you are it seems to be there's cars around this quite impressive App Store like model the enterprise has been kicked around for a while is that service cataloging uber shows the real-time aspect of services needs you know demand in real time but in the back-end service catalog that more apples to the apple store at the back end its lights out light speed right in other words it's just like Amazon right everything is the speed of light until I got to pick something off the shelf the real world kicks in and i have to ship something the same thing same thing with fedex I mean the information processing aspect of FedEx is what makes fedex special in fact that they have planes and trucks you know it is not what your user experience focuses on yeah you got minimal exposure to that you are you're on your way to a billion dollars here shortly you've laid out a plan for four billion by the league 2020 correct with the the financial analyst a lot of people say well one of these guys going to make money you have indicated before you you're right now after scale after growth and what if you could address that um we actually were profitable are you sure I mean we were you could make a lot more money if you want to do but you're going for growth I should have clarified that question better you guys can be wildly profitable if you skip down and just reach over office we've always said and by the way you know one of the things that that our business model really focuses on is making sure that the cash equation really work so on a cash flow basis we're doing extraordinarily well because it's a subscription model you know the profitability equation is a little squishy it's more accounting them than economic which is why the focus on cash our investors focus on growth in the next thing to focus is on this cash right and after they get generally accounting representation of our at some point the law of large numbers kicks in and that's really maybe out in the business out a target model yesterday I was we put updated for the financial analyst shows you exactly where the leverage is coming from transparent supplies for peace I want to let's do a great job of that very drill into on the he said amazon amazon does a great job executing and near a great executors and certainly proven that we do successful with the company but they're constantly innovating the new product announcements debía new announcements is that the new competitive advantage scale and stickiness through rapidly iteration of new features is that this is just a one-off outlier with amazon you see no price it be more like that's one of them  you see that with Tesla they've changed the car industry there's constant updates to the cars right a changes of driving experience and that that model of rapid iteration is really the new normal you know back to the real time thing it gets really boring when you get an update every 18 months you think we don't tolerate those kind of time friends anymore and lag is not a good ending our but I you know software gotta ask you a final question I know you getting we're getting a puppy you get very busy schedule thanks to spend the time with us as well I'll see you had a your competitive sailor and following your career right outside sirs now you got a boat for the nuchal hand you mentioned data ocean data legs big big fan of data ocean I want you to share perspective from what you've learned sailing and being successful winning and sailing with how to navigate an idea this as a c-level executive or a CEO CIO or some of the trenches what lessons can sail in your experience is sailing and running service now what would you share with the folks out there as they try to look at their transitional transformation I teach transformation the others there's a lot of analogs if you will between sailing and business because it's this multi-dimensional game that we play you know in sailing it's about technology it's about how great your crew is it's I'll get your boat is it's the weather is what the competition is doing all those things you have in business so people always want to write it yourselves he's like another you know another another brutal contest township and that's that's all true it's very multi-dimensional and finding your high leverage entry point because you know it's very easy to do super business super busy and business and really not move the dial right so understanding where leverage exists what opportunities are that's really the art form I Frank great to have I know you're busy to getting them getting of the big nokia pricing the president/ceo of service now here live in Las Vegas is to Cuba railroad next guest live in three days wall-to-wall coverage here at no.15 join the conversation crowd chef net / no 15 right now