>>from >>around the globe. It's >>the cube >>with digital >>coverage of IBM >>Think 2021 >>brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm john for your host of the cube. We're here virtual again in real life soon is right around the corner but we got a great guest here, Cameron art managing director at A T and T for IBM. Cameron manages the A T and T global account for IBM camera. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on the cube. >>Thank you very much, john it's great to be >>Here. Uh, can almost imagine how complicated and big and large a TNT is with respect to IBM in the history and 18 very large company. What's the relationship with I B M and A T and T over the years? How has that evolved? And what, how do you approach that role as the managing director? >>Well, it's been fascinating. Um as you said, we've got to large complex companies but also to brand names that are synonymous for innovation, whether it be in in compute or technology or communications. But the most fascinating thing is if you look back at our relationship and this is two brands that have been around for well over 100 years. Our relationship actually has some fascinating backdrop to it. My favorite is in 1924, A T and T sent a picture of thomas Watson sr over a telephone wire to IBM and thomas Watson said they sent this over the telephone. We are united in a community of interest. They want to make it easier for businesses to transact as do I. We need to work together. And since then, there has been a number of advanced advances that both of us have driven collectively and individually. And it's been a it's been a long running and treasured relationship in the IBM company. >>It's such a storied relationship on both sides. I mean, the history is just amazing. They could do a whole History Channel segment on both 18 T N I B M. Uh but together, it's kind of the better together story, as you pointed out from that example, going back to sending a picture with the phone lines, like, oh my God, that's instagram on the internet um, happening. But how are they responding to the relationship now? I'll see with cloud, um Native exploding with the ability to get more access and you're seeing a lot more things evolved, more complexity is emerging. That needs to be abstracted away. You're seeing businesses saying, hey, I can do more with less, I can connect more more access. But then that also services more potential opportunities and challenges. How are you responding with a T and T? How are they responding to that dynamic with you guys? >>Yeah, I think it's fascinating because when I originally approached this relationship and I've been doing this for 12 months now, a little over 12 months and when I originally approach it as with anything else, many times, you're trying to enter something that is quite special and make it even better. And my approach at least initially with AT and T was very much one of, we're going to provide even better service. We're going to jointly grow together in the market and strengthen each of our businesses and we're gonna work for something broader than ourselves. And I'll get into a little more of the last point later. But those first two things from an A T T response perspective, and I think this is a common perspective among many clients is we'll see if your actions follow your words. And so it's been a process. We've gone through to understand that I'm a champion for A T and T inside of IBM and those interests that we share individually and collectively will be represented at the highest levels. And we will mature this relationship into one of not just kind of supply chain partners because we're very complementary to each other, but more ecosystem partners and my belief in my core. And you see this much with many of the business strategies that are out there. The ecosystem strategy, this sum is greater than the parts, it's not a zero sum game is something that's absolutely blooming in the market. >>Yeah, that ecosystem message is one of the things that's resonating and coming clearly out of IBM think 2021 this year and in the industry is seeing the success of network effects, ecosystem changes is the constant that's happening. Certainly the pandemic and now coming out of it, people want to have a growth strategy that's gonna be relevant, current and impactful. And you you pointed that out growth with each other is interesting. And you you shared some perspective on this just recently with an example of what is underway there where you heading with that? I mean talk more about this growth with each other because that really is an ecosystem dynamic. What is underway and where are you heading? >>It's a fascinating ecosystem dynamic and it's something that we've adopted wholeheartedly within AT and T in terms of not only how we work. So there are very basic examples examples like we, rather than answering our PS and responding to uh to requirements, we're co creating with our clients, we have multiple cloud garages going with a T and T. Where we identify outcomes that we believe could be possible and then we show and allow the client to experience the outcome of that rather than a power point slides. So there's this kind of base of how do you work with each other? But then much more broadly in the market, it didn't take long for us to realize that, you know, the addressable market, if if I were selling A T and T, everything I could ever sell them and at and T was selling IBM everything they could ever sell us. The addressable market is, let's say $10 billion. But the moment at which we pointed ourselves outside to the external market, we realize that that market opportunity expands by a factor of 20 or by a factor of 50, we have the opportunity to create unique value together. And I think that kind of comes from the core of how we work together. >>I'm also intrigued by your comments about working together for a greater purpose. You said you'd address that later. What do you mean by that? I mean that's a little bit very higher purpose. Um North Star and as you mentioned, you know, working together in the ecosystem that kind of seems tactical and strategic as well. But what's this greater purpose? What does that mean? >>Well, my belief and it's something I learned actually, as I got indoctrinated into the work that 18 T does the work that IBM does and how we do it. But we share many common purposes in terms of what we believe on the whole, in terms of progress in society. So for example, equality in the workplace. We hosted a women's day lunch and actually multiple women stays lunch days luncheons across the United States, where we had hundreds of female leaders from both IBM and AT and T. Collaborating together talking about how tips and tricks for how they continue to advance in the workplace. Another example is in equality and diversity and inclusion. Both A T and T and IBM have a strong commitment and if you'll see IBM just published, just published their diversity and inclusion study where we actually demonstrate here the numbers, here's our targets, here's where we want to get 18 T has exactly that same belief. Finally, in stem education for educating our future leaders in science and technology, engineering and math. Both 18 T and IBM for our future, need those skills showing up in the marketplace and Corey Anthony is just a quick spot for any of you would think cory cory Anthony who see it diversity and development Officer at AT and T is going to give a great presentation on A. T. N. T. S work in stem for younger generations. So there are many things that are, I would say societal on a broader purpose statement that we share a belief in together, >>that's awesome people and also people want to work on a team that's mission driven, has impact beyond just the profit and loss me, I love capitalism personally myself, I'm an entrepreneur but been there done that, but we're living in a cultural shift. Now we're starting to see a remote work. You're starting to see virtual teams, new use cases that have different expectations and experiences um, in the work place and also at home. So you know, with mobile that could be on the side of the soccer fields or you know, skiing or running or jogging and take a message to pull over to a chat, jump into an audio chat, listen to a podcast, engage. So we're all tethered now, this is exchanging the experiences and this is going to change the game for how you work together. >>100%. And by the way, we're all teller tethered hopefully through a T and T mobile connectivity devices, it was kind of amusing how much that has become a part of our lives and the core value, one of the core value propositions of AT and T is obviously connecting businesses to each other, but also consumers through their mobile brand, but also then to entertainment. I will say when I was in Augusta at the Masters, you know, people that have been there know that you're not allowed to have cell phones. It was amazing just in conversations how often whoever was I was having a conversation with and myself would say, well I'd like to look that up, hold on, can I get that statistic and and we we realized we're missing a big part of our of our lives in terms of communication. But those requirements of connecting people in new ways and in their homes were remotely actually only reinforce this shared value proposition of when you have the technology and you have it securely between our company IBM and A T and T. We play a massive part in that and it's something I'm quite proud of. >>You guys have a really interesting position there with the history of with the relationship and as you pointed out, A T and T has to be in the forefront of cutting edge user experience technology bringing. I mean, they are the edge. I mean they ultimately from base station down to the device to the person to the account you're talking about a real edge there, that's a person's consumer. Um They got to provide these new services. So I gotta ask you, you mentioned at the top of this interview that your goal is to provide even better service to a T and T. A pretty big pressure point for IBM. You know, you gotta deliver step up and their expectations must be high. Can you take us through perspectives on that kind of even better service when you've got a client that's on the cutting edge of having to deliver new kinds of things like better notifications. Smarter devices, Smarter software, more fault tolerant, highly available services. These are things that, you know, there's a lot of pressure take us through that what's it like? >>There is a lot of pressure, but there's a lot of consistency in terms of expectations and it's something that both of us understand very well and I would argue that it's probably the reason we work so well together, Both 18 T and IBM for years uh namely 50 hundreds of years have understood that if we're transacting for business, were transaction transacting on something that has to get done so on both sides of the equation. Not only do we push the edge of what can be done technically or for business, but we also understand the expectations of the business clients that are, it works every time and it works in every way I needed to. So for us, when we work together, I think that healthy balance of uh part musician, part engineer uh comes out very, very strongly in both teams, >>camera great insight and great to talk to you. I love to get the perspective on, you know, the kind of challenges and opportunities that you're um seizing at IBM with A T and T. Again, the history is amazing. Um the impact of the industry at both levels you mentioned Tom Watson senior than you got Junior. That in that generation just carries forward. You got that vibe back now with hybrid cloud. Arvin loves clouds. So, you know, you got a lot of things happening and it's really strong over at IBM and the theme this year generally is better together. So awesome, awesome work. Congratulations. >>Thank you very much. I will tell you, I don't want to I don't want to miss the opportunity to talk a bit about the future because from an A T and T and IBM perspective, we're doing a load of work around private five G or five G in general. This is something that provides an absolutely low latency, huge band with with a lot of actually characteristics from a business perspective that are manageable and it will enable. What I believe is another big wave in the technology and business industry, which is new business models very similar to that of the Internet. Originally, it allows with IBM technology and 18 T technology, they have something called multi access. Such compute these are absolutely blazing fast. Five G boxes that will be in not only businesses but universities, sports stadiums, you name that, you name it, changing the experience of how people consume technology or the benefits of technology, which I couldn't be more excited about >>awesome future ahead. Great. There's a big wave certainly away we've never seen before. Cameron, art managing Director at A T and T at IBM. Great insight. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for coming on. >>Thanks john >>Okay, Cube coverage of IBM think 2021. I'm John Ferrier. Thanks for watching. Mm. Mhm. Mhm.

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Hi everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE. We're here, virtual again, in real life soon. It's right around the corner, but we've got a great guests here. Cameron Art Managing Director at AT&T for IBM. Cameron manages the AT&T Global Account for IBM. Cameron, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the CUBE. >> Thank you very much, John. It's great to be here. >> I can almost imagine how complicated and big and large AT&T is with respect to IBM and the history and AT&T is a very large company. What's the relationship with IBM and AT&T over the years? How has that evolved and how do you approach that role as the Managing Director? >> Well, it's been fascinating. As you said, we've got two large complex companies, but also two brand names that are synonymous for innovation, whether it be in compute or technology or communications. But the most fascinating thing is, if you look back at our relationship, and this is two brands that have been around for well over a hundred years, our relationship actually has some fascinating backdrop to it. My favorite is in 1924, AT&T sent a picture of Thomas Watson Sr, over a telephone wire to IBM. And Thomas Watson said, "they sent this over the telephone?" We are United in a community of interest. They want to make it easier for businesses to transact as do I, we need to work together. And since then, there has been a number of advances, that both of us have driven collectively and individually. And it's been a long running and treasured relationship in the IBM company. >> It's such a storied relationship on both sides. I mean, the history is just amazing. They could do a whole history channel segment on both AT&T and IBM. But together it's kind of the better together story. As you pointed out from that example, going back to sending a picture with a phone line, it's like, "Oh, my God, that's Instagram on the internet happening!" But how are they responding to the relationship, now? Obviously with Cloud native exploding with the ability to get more access, and you're seeing a lot more things evolve, more complexities emerging that needs to be abstracted away. You're seeing businesses saying, "Hey, I can do more with less, I can connect more. There's more access." But then also services more potential opportunities and challenges. How are you responding with AT&T? How are they responding to that dynamic with you guys? >> Yeah, I think it's fascinating because, when I originally approached this relationship and I've been doing this for 12 months now, little over 12 months, and when I originally approached it as with anything else, many times you're trying to enter something that is quite special and make it even better. And my approach at least initially with AT&T was very much one of. We're going to provide even better service. We're going to jointly grow together in the market and strengthen each of our businesses. And we're going to work for something broader than ourselves. And I'll get into, a little more, the last point later. But those first two things, from an AT&T response perspective. And I think this is a common perspective among many clients is, "we'll see if your actions follow your words". And so it's been a process we've gone through to understand that I'm a champion for AT&T, inside of IBM. And those interests, that we share individually and collectively, will be represented at the highest levels. And we will mature this relationship into one of, not just kind of supply chain partners, because we're very complimentary to each other, but more ecosystem partners. And my belief in my core, and you see this much with many of the business strategies that are out there, the ecosystem strategy, this sum is greater than the parts. It's not a zero sum game. Is something that's absolutely blooming in the market. >> Yeah, that ecosystem message is one of the things that's resonating and coming clearly out of the IBM Think 2021 this year and in the industry your seeing the success of network effects, ecosystem changes. That is the constant that's happening. Certainly with the pandemic and now coming out of it, people want to have a growth strategy. That's going to be relevant current and impactful. And you, you pointed that out, growth with each other, it's interesting. And you shared some perspective on this just recently with an example of what is underway there. Where are you heading with that? I mean, talk more about this growth with each other, 'cause that really is an ecosystem dynamic. What is underway and where are you heading? >> It's a fascinating ecosystem dynamic and it's something that we've adopted wholeheartedly within AT&T in terms of not only how we work. So, there are very basic examples, examples like, we rather than answering RFPs and responding to requirements, we're co-creating with our clients. We have multiple Cloud Garages going with AT&T where we identify outcomes that we believe could be possible. And then we show and allow the client to experience the outcome of that rather, than a PowerPoint slide. So, there's this kind of base of how do you work with each other, but then much more broadly in the market. It didn't take long for us to realize that, you know, the addressable market, if I were selling AT&T, everything I could ever sell them. And AT&T was selling IBM everything they could ever sell us. The addressable market is, let's say, $10 billion. But the moment at which we pointed ourselves outside to the external market, we realized that that market opportunity expands by a factor of 20 or by a factor of 50. We have the opportunity to create unique value together. And I think that kind of comes from the core of how we work together. >> I'm also intrigued by your comments about working together for a greater purpose. You said you'd address that later. What do you mean by that? I mean, that's little. Is there higher purpose, North star and obviously you mentioned working together in the ecosystem. That kind of seems tactical and strategic as well, but what's this greater purpose? What does that mean? >> Well, my belief, and it's something I learned actually, is I got indoctrinated into the work that AT&T does, the work that IBM does, and how we do it, but we share many common purposes in terms of what we believe on the whole, in terms of progress in society. So for example, equality in the workplace. We hosted a women's day luncheon, actually multiple Women's days luncheons across the United States. Where we had hundreds of female leaders from both IBM and AT&T collaborating together, talking about how tips and tricks, for how they continue to advance in the workplace. Another example is inequality in diversity and inclusion. Both AT&T and IBM have a strong commitment. And if you'll see, IBM just published their diversity data inclusion study where we actually demonstrate, here are the numbers, here's our targets, here's where we want to get. AT&T has exactly that same belief. Finally, in STEM education for educating our future leaders. In science and technology, engineering and math. Both, AT&T and IBM, for our future need those skills showing up in the marketplace. And Corey Anthony, just a quick spot, for any of you at Think, Corey Anthony, who's the Diversity and Development Officer at AT&T is going to give a great presentation on AT&Ts work in STEM for younger generations. So, there are many things that are, I would say, societal on a broader purpose statement, that we share a belief in together. >> That's awesome. And also people want to work on a team that's mission driven, has impact beyond just the profit and loss. I mean, I love capitalism, personally myself. I'm an entrepreneur, but been there done that but we're living in a cultural shift now. We're starting to see remote work. We're starting to see virtual teams, new use cases that have different expectations and experiences in the work place and also at home. So, you know, with mobile, I could be on the side of the soccer fields or, you know, skiing or running or jogging and take a message, pull over, do a chat, jump into an audio chat, listen to a podcast, engage. So we're all tethered now. This is exchanging experiences, and this is going to change the game for how you work together. >> A hundred percent. And by the way, we're all tethered hopefully through AT&T mobile connectivity devices. It was kind of amusing how much that has become a part of our lives and the core value. One of the core value propositions of AT&T is obviously connecting businesses to each other but also consumers through their mobile brand. But also then to entertainment I will say when I was in Augusta at the masters, you know people that have been there know that, you're not allowed to have cell phones. It was amazing just in conversations how often whoever it was I was having a conversation with and myself would say, well, I'd like to look that up, hold on, can I get that statistic? And we realized we're missing a big part of our lives in terms of the communication but those requirements of connecting people in new ways and in their homes or remotely actually only reinforce this shared value proposition of when you have the technology and you have it securely between our company IBM and AT&T we play a massive part in that. And it's something I'm quite proud of. >> Yeah, and you guys have a really interesting position there with the history of, with the relationship. And as you pointed out AT&T has to be on the forefront of cutting edge user experience technology they're bringing, I mean, they are the edge. I mean, they ultimately from base station down to the device, to the person, to the account, you're talking about a real edge. There that's a person's consumer. They got to provide these new services. So I got to ask you, you mentioned at the top of this interview, that your goal is to provide even better service to AT&T pretty big pressure point for IBM. You know, you got to deliver step up and their expectations must be high. Can you take us through perspectives on that kind of even better service when you've got a client that's on the cutting edge of having to deliver new kinds of things like better notifications, smarter devices smarter software, more fault-tolerant highly available services. These are things that, you know there's a lot of pressure take us through that. What's, what's it like? >> There is a lot of pressure but there's a lot of consistency in terms of expectations. And it's something that both of us understand very well. And I would argue that it's probably the reason we work so well together. Both AT&T and IBM for years, namely 50, 100's of years have understood that if we're transacting for business, we're transacting on something that has to get done. So on both sides of the equation not only do we push the edge of what can be done technically or for business, but we also understand the expectations of the business clients that are, it works every time and it works in every way I need it to. So for us, when we work together, I think that healthy balance of part musician, part engineer comes out very, very strongly in both teams. >> Cameron, great insight and great to talk to you. I love to get the perspective on, you know, the kind of challenges and opportunities that you're seizing at IBM with AT&T. Again, the history is amazing. The impact to the industry at both levels. You mentioned Tom Watson Senior, then you got Junior that in that generation just carries forward. You got that vibe back now with hybrid cloud Irvin loves cloud. So, you know, you got a lot of things happening that's really strong over at IBM and the theme this year generally is better together. So, awesome, awesome work. Congratulations. >> Thank you very much. I will tell you, I don't want to miss the opportunity to talk a bit about the future, because from an AT&T and IBM perspective we're doing a load of work around private 5G or 5G in general. This is something that provides an absolutely low latency huge bandwidth with a lot of actually characteristics from a business perspective that are manageable. And it will enable what I believe is a another big wave in the technology and business industry which is new business models. Very similar to that, of the internet originally, it allows with IBM technology and AT&T technology they have something called Multi-Access Edge Computing. These are absolutely blazing, fast 5G boxes that will be in, not only businesses, but universities, sports stadiums, you name it, changing the experience of how people consume technology or the benefits of technology, which I couldn't be more excited about. >> Awesome future ahead, great. Its a big wave certainly a wave we'd never seen before. Cameron, our managing director AT&T at IBM. Great insight, thanks for sharing, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks, John. >> Okay, CUBE coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live, from Washington, DC, it's the cube. Covering dot next conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. >> Welcome back to DC everybody, this is the Nutanix dot next conference #NEXTConf, and this is the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with my co-host Stu Miniman. Dr. Arthur Langer is here, he's a professor at Columbia University, and a cube alum. Good to see you, thanks very much for coming on. >> Great to be back. >> Dave: Appreciate your time. So, interesting conversations going on at dot next. People talking about cloud and you hear a lot about virtualization and infrastructure. We're going to up level it a bit. You're giving a talk-- you're hosting a panel today, and you're also giving a talk on strategic IT. Using IT as a competitive weapon. It wasn't that long ago where people were saying does IT matter. We obviously know it matters. What's your research showing, what is your activity demonstrating about IT and how is it a strategic initiative? >> Well, if you were to first look at what goes on on board meetings today, I would say, and I think I mentioned this last time, the three prominent discussions at a board is how can I use technology for strategic advantage, how can I use predictive analytics, and how are you securing and protecting us? And when you look at that, all three of those ultimately fall in the lap of the information technology people. Now you might say digital or other parts of it, but the reality is all of this sits at the heart of information technology. And if you look at many of us in that world, we've learned very efficiently and very good how to support things. But now to move into this other area of driving business, of taking risks, of becoming better marketers. Wow, what an opportunity that is for information technology leadership. >> Dave: So, obviously you believe that IT is a strategic advantage. Is it sustainable though? You know, I was sort of tongue-in-cheek joking about the Nick Car book, but the real premise of his book was it's not a sustainable competitive advantage. Is that true in your view? >> I don't believe that at all. I live and die by that old economics curve called the S curve. In which you evaluate where your product life is going to be. I think if you go back and you look at the industrial revolution, we are very early. I think that the changes, the acceleration of changes brought on by technological innovations, will continue to haunt businesses and provide these opportunities well past our life. How's that? So, if anybody thinks that this is a passing fad, my feeling is they're delusional. We're just warming up. >> So it can be a sustainable competitive advantage, but you have to jump S curves and be willing to jump S curves at the right time. Is that a fair difference? >> Yeah, the way I would say it to you, the S curve is shrinking, so you have less time to enjoy your victories. You know, the prediction is that-- how long will people last on a dow 500 these days? Maybe two, three years, as opposed to 20, 30, 40 years. Can we change fast enough, and is there anything wrong with the S curve ending and starting a new one? Businesses reinventing themselves constantly. Change a norm. >> Professor Langer, one of the challenges we hear from customers is keeping up with that change is really tough. How do you know what technologies, do you have the right skill set? What advice are you giving? How do people try to keep up with the change, understand what they should be doing internally versus turning to partners to be able to handle. >> I think it's energy and culture and excitement. That's the first thing that I think a lot of people are missing. You need to sell this to your organizations. You need to establish why this is such a wonderful time. Alright, and then you need to get the people in, between the millenials and the baby boomers and the gen x's, and you got to get them to work together. Because we know, from research right now, that without question, the millenials will need to move into management positions faster than any of their predecessors. Because of retirements and all of the other things that are going on. But the most important thing, which is where I see IT needing to move in, is you can't just launch one thing. You have to launch lots of things. And this is the old marketing concept, right. You don't bat a thousand. And IT needs to come out of its shell in that area and say I have to launch five, six, eight, 10 initiatives. Some of them will make it. Some of them won't. Can you imagine private equity or venture people trying to launch every company and be successful? We all know that in a market of opportunity, there are risks. And to establish that as an exciting thing So, you know what, it comes back to leadership in many ways. >> Great point, because if you're not having those failures, your returns are going to be minuscule. If you're only investing in things that are sure things, then it's pretty much guaranteed to have low single-digit returns, if that. >> Look what happened at Ford. They did everything pretty well. They never took any of the money, right, but they changed CEO's because they didn't get involved in driverless cars enough. I mean these are the things that we're-- If you're trying to catch up, it's already over. So how do you predict what's coming. And who has that? It's the data. It's the way we handle the data. It's the way we secure the data. Who's going to do that? >> So, that brings me to the dark side of all this enthusiasm, which is security. You see things like IOT, you know the bad guys have AI as well. Thoughts on security, discussions that are going on in the board room. How CIOs should be thinking about communicating to the board regarding security. >> I've done a lot of work in this area. And whether that falls into the CISO, the Chief Information Security Officer, and where they report. But the bottom line is how are they briefing their boards. And once again, anybody that knows anything about security knows that you're not going to keep 'em out. It's going to be an ongoing process. It's going to be things like okay what do we do when we have these type >> response >> How do we respond to that? How do we predict things? How do we stay ahead of that? And that is the more of the norm. And what we see, and I can give you sort of an analogy, You know when the President comes to speak in a city, what do they, you know, they close down streets, don't they? They create the unpredictability. And I think one of the marvelous challenges for IT is to create architectures, and I've been writing about this, which change so that those that are trying to attack us and they're looking for the street to take inside of the network. We got to kind of have a more dynamic architecture. To create unpredictability. So these are all of the things that come into strategy, language, how to educate our boards. How to prepare the next generation of those board members. And where will the technology people sit in those processes. >> Yeah, we've had the chance to interview some older companies. Companies 75, 150 years old, that are trying to become software companies. And they're worried about the AirBnB's of the world disrupting what they're doing. How do you see the older companies keeping pace and trying to keep up with some of young software companies? >> Sure, how do you move 280 thousand people at a major bank, for example. How do you do that? And I think there's several things that people are trying. One is investing in startups with options to obtain them and purchase them. The other is to create, for lack of a better word, labs. Parts of the company that are not as controlled, or part of the predominant culture. Which as we know historically will hold back the company. Because they will just typically try to protect the domain that has worked for them so well. So those are the two main things. Creating entities within the companies that have an ability to try new things. Or investing entrepreneurially, or even intrapreneurally with new things with options to bring them in. And then the third one, and this last one is very difficult, sort of what Apple did. One of the things that has always haunted many large companies is their install base. The fact that they're trying to support the older technologies because they don't want to lose their install base. Well remember what Steve Jobs did. He came in with a new architecture and he says either you're with me or you're not. And to some extent, which is a very hard decision, you have to start looking at that. And challenge your install base to say this is the new way, we'll help you get there, but at some point we can't support those older systems. >> One of my favorite lines in the cube, Don Tapps, God created the world in six days, but he didn't have an install base. Right, because that handcuffs companies and innovation, in a lot of cases. I mean, you saw that, you've worked at big companies. So I want to ask you, Dr. Langer, we had this, for the last 10 years, this consumerization of IT. The Amazon effect. You know, the whole mobile thing. Is technology, is IT specifically, getting less complex or more complex? >> I think it's getting far more complex. I think what has happened is business people sometimes see the ease of use. The fact that we have an interface with them, which makes life a lot easier. We see more software that can be pushed together. But be careful. We have found out with cybersecurity problems how extraordinarily complicated this world is. With that power comes complexities. Block chain, other things that are coming. It's a powerful world, but it's a complicated one. And it's not one where you want amateurs running the back end of your businesses. >> Okay, so let's talk about the role of those guys running. We've talked a lot about data. You've seen the emergence of the chief data officer, particularly in regulated industries, but increasingly in non-regulated businesses. Who should be running the technology show? Is it a business person? Is it a technologist? Is it some kind of unicorn blend of those? >> I just don't think, from what we've seen by trying marketing people, by trying business people, that they can really ultimately grasp the significance of the technical aspects of this. It's almost like asking someone who's not a doctor to run a hospital. I know theoretically you could possibly do that, but think about that. So you need that technology. I'm not caught up on the titles, but I am concerned, and I've written an article in the Wall Street Journal a couple years ago, that there are just too many c-level people floating around owning this thing. And I think, whether you call it the chief technologist, or the executive technical person, or the chief automation individual, that all those people have to be talking to each other, and have to lead up to someone who's not only understanding the strategy, but really understands the back end of keeping the lights on, and the security and everything else. The way I've always said it, the IT people have the hardest job in the world. They're fighting a two-front war. Because both of those don't necessarily mesh nicely together. Tell me another area of an organization that is a driver and a supporter at the same time. You look at HR, they're a supporter. You look at marketing, they're a driver. So the complexities of this are not just who you are, but what you're doing at any moment in time. So you could have a support person that's doing something, but at one moment, in that person's function, could be doing a driving, risk-taking responsibility. >> So what are some of the projects you're working on now? What's exciting you? >> Well, the whole idea of how to drive that strategy, how to take risks, the digital disruption era, is a tremendous opportunity. This is our day for the-- because most companies are not really clear what to do. Socially, I'm looking very closely at smart cities. This is another secret wave of things that are happening. How a city's going to function. Within five, seven years, they're predicting that 75% of the world's population will live in major cities. And you won't have to work in the city and live there. You could live somewhere else. So cities will compete. And it's all about the data, and automation. And how do organizations get closer with their governments? Because our governments can't afford to implement these things. Very interesting stuff. Not to mention the issues of the socially excluded. And underserved populations in those cities. And then finally, how does this mess with cyber risk? And how does that come together to the promotion of that role in organizations. Just a few things, and then way a little bit behind, there's of course block chain. How is that going to affect the world that we live in? >> Just curious, your thoughts on the future of jobs. You know, look about what automation's happening, kind of the hollowing out of the middle class. The opportunities and risks there. >> I think it has to do with the world of what I call supply chain. And it's amazing that we still see companies coming to me saying I can't fill positions. Particularly in the five-year range. And an inability to invest in younger talent to bring them in there. Our educational institutions obviously will be challenged. We're in a skills-based market. How do they adopt? How do we change that? We see programs like IBM launching new collar. Where they're actually considering non-degree'd people. How do universities start working together to get closer, in my opinion, to corporations. Where they have to work together. And then there is, let's be careful. There are new horizons. Space, new things to challenge that technology will bring us. 20 years ago I was at a bank which I won't mention, about the closing of branch banks. Because we thought that technology would take over online banking. Well, 20 years later, online banking's done everything we predicted, and we're opening more branches than ever before. Be careful. So, I'm a believer that, with new things come new opportunities. The question is how do governments and corporations and educational institutions get closer together. This is going to be critical as we move forward. Or else the have nots are going to grow, and that's a problem. >> Alright, we have to leave it there. Dr. Arthur Langer, sir, thanks very much for coming in. To the cube >> It's always a pleasure to be here >> It's a pleasure to have you. Alright, keep it right there everybody, we'll be back with our next guest. Dave Vollante, Stu Miniman, be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Good afternoon and welcome back to KubeCon. John Furrier and I are live here from theCUBE Studios in Detroit, Michigan. And very excited for an afternoon shock full of content. John, how you holding up day too? >> I'm doing great and got a great content. This episode should be really good. We're going to be talking about modern applications, Red Hat and Konveyor, all the great stuff going on. >> Yes, and it's got a little bit of a community spin, very excited. You know I've been calling out the great Twitter handles of our guests all week and I'm not going to stop now. We have with us Coffee Art Lover, Savitha, and she's joined with Christopher here from Konveyor and Red Hat, welcome to the show. >> Thank you. >> How you doing and what's the vibe? >> The vibe is good. >> Yeah, pretty good. >> Has anything caught your attention? You guys are KubeCon veterans, we were talking about Valencia and shows prior. Anything sticking out to you this year? >> Yeah, just the amount of people here in this like post-COVID it's just so nice to see this many people get together. 'Cause the last couple of KubeCons that we've had they've been good but they've been much smaller and we haven't seen the same presence that we've had. And I feel like we're just starting to get back to normal what we had going like pre-COVID with KubeCon. >> Go ahead. >> Oh, sorry. And for me it's how everyone's like still respectful of everyone else and that's what sticking out to me. Like you go out of the conference center and you cannot see anyone like most or like respecting anyone's space. But here it's still there, it keeps you safe. So I'm super happy to be here. >> Yeah, I love that. I think that plays to the community. I mean, the CNCF community is really special. All these open source projects are layered. You run community at Red Hat so tell us a little bit more about that. >> So I have been focusing on the Konveyor community site for a while now since Konveyor got accepted into the CNCF Sandbox project. Yeah, it's so exciting and it's like I'm so thrilled and I'm so excited for the project. So it's something that I believe in and I do a lot of (indistinct) stuff and I learned a lot from the community. The community is what keeps me coming back to every KubeCon and keep me contributing. So I'm taking all the good stuff from there and then like trying to incorporate that into the conveyor community world. But not at a scale of like 20,000 or like 30,000 people but at a scale of like hundreds, we are in hundreds and hoping to like expand it to like thousands by next year. Hopefully, yeah. >> Talk about the project, give a quick overview what it is, where it's at now, obviously it's got traction, you got some momentum, I want to hear the customer. But give a quick overview of the project. Why are people excited about it? >> Sure. It is one of the open source of modernization tool sets that's available right now. So that's super exciting. So many people want to contribute to it. And what we basically do is like you see a lot of large companies and they want to like do the migration and the journey and we just want to help them, make their life easier. So we are in this environment which is like surrounded by cars, think of it like lane assist system or like think of it as an additional system, smart system but that's not taking control, like full control. But then it's there to like guide you through your journey safe and in a predictable way and you'll reach your destination point in a much happier, safer and like sooner. So that's what we are doing. I know that's a lot of talk but if you want the technical thing then I'll just say like we are here to help everyone who wants to modernize. Help them by refractoring and replatforming their applications in a safer and predictable way at scale. I think I got everything. What do you think Christopher? >> Yeah. I mean, we've seen a real need in the market to solve this problem as more and more companies are looking to go cloud native. And I feel like in the last 10 years we had this period where a lot of companies were kind of dabbling in the cloud and they're identifying the low hanging fruit for their migrations, or they were starting out with new applications in the cloud. We're just starting to move into a period where now they're trying to bring over legacy applications. Now they're trying to bring over the applications that have been running their business for 10, 20, even 30 years. And we're trying to help them solve the problem of how do we start with that? How do we take a holistic look at our applications and come up with a game plan of how we're going to bring those into being cloud native? >> Oh, yeah, go. >> One other thing I want to get to you mentioned replatforming and refactoring. A lot of discussion on what that means now. Refactoring with the cloud, we see a lot of great examples, people really getting a competitive advantage by refactoring in that case. But re-platforming also has meaning, it seems to be evolving. So guys can you share your your thoughts on what's re-platforming versus refactoring? >> I'll let you go. >> So for re-platforming, there's a few different stages that we can do this in. So we have this term in migration called lift and shift. It's basically taking something as is and just plopping it in and then having certain technologies around it that make it act in a similar way as it was before but in more of a cloud type of way. And this is a good way for people to get their feet wet, to get their applications into the cloud. But a lot of times they're not optimized around it, they're not able to scale, they're not able to have a lot of the cost effective things that go with it as well. So that's like the next step is that that's the refactoring. Where we're actually taking apart this idea, these domains is what we would call it for the business. And then breaking them down into their parts which then leads to things like microservices and things like being able to scale horizontally and proving that is. >> So the benefits of the cloud higher level services. >> Absolutely. >> So you shift to the platform which is cloud, lift and shift or get it over there, and then set it up so it can take advantage and increase the functionality. Is that kind of the difference? >> And one thing that we're seeing too is that these companies are operating this hybrid model. So they've brought some containers over and then they have legacy like virtual machines that they want to bring over into the cloud, but they're not in a position right now where they can re refactor or even- >> In position, it's not even on a table yet. >> So that's where we're also seeing opportunities where we can identify ways that we can actually lift and shift that VM closer at least to the containers. And that's where a lot of my conversations as a cloud success architect are of how do we refactor but also re-platform the most strategic candidate? >> So is Konveyor a good fit for these kinds of opportunities? >> Yes, 100%. It actually asks you like it starts certain phases like assessment phase, then it ask you a bunch of question about your infrastructure, applications and everything to gauge, and then provide you with the right strategy. It's not like one strategy. So it will provide you with the right strategy either re-platform, refracture or like what is best, retire, rehost, whatever, but replatform and refactor are the most that we are focused on right now. Hopefully that we might expand but I'm not sure. >> I think you just brought up a really good point and I was curious about this too 'cause Christopher you mentioned you're working with largely Fortune 50 companies, so some of the largest companies on earth. We're not talking about scale, we are talking about extraordinarily large scale. >> Thousands sometimes of applications. >> And I'm thinking a lot, I'm just sitting here listening to you thinking about the complexity. The complexity of each one of these situations. And I'm sure you've seen some of it before, you've been doing this for a while, and you're mentioning that Konveyor has different sorts of strategies. What's the flow like for that? I mean, just even thinking about it feels complex for me sitting here right now. >> Yeah, so typically when we're doing a large scale migration that lasts anywhere for like a year or two sometimes with these Fortune 50 companies. >> Some of this legacy stuff has got to be. >> This is usually when they're already at the point where they're ready to move and we're just there to tell them how to move it at that point. So you're right, there's years that have been going on to get to the point that even I'm involved. But from an assessment standpoint, we spend months just looking at applications and assessing them using tools like Konveyor to just figure out, okay, are you ready to go? Do you have the green light or do we have to pull the brakes? And you're right, so much goes into that and it's all strategic. >> Oh my gosh. >> So I guess, a quarter or a third of our time we're not even actually moving applications, we're assessing the applications and cutting up the strategy. >> That's right, there's many pieces to this puzzle. >> Absolutely. >> And I bet there's some even hidden in the corners under the couch that people forgot were even there. >> We learn new things every time too. Every migration we learn new patterns and new difficulties which is what's great about the community aspect. Because we take those and then we add them into the community, into Konveyor and then we can build off of that. So it's like you're sharing when we're doing those migrations or companies are using Konveyor and sharing that knowledge, we're building off what other people have done, we're expanding that. So there's a real advantage to using a tool like Konveyor when it comes to previous experiences. >> So tell me about some of the trends that you're seeing across the board with the folks that you're helping. >> Yeah, so trends wise like I said, I feel like the low hanging fruit has been already done in the last 10 years. We're seeing very critical like mission critical applications that are typically 10, 20 years old that need to get into the the cloud. Because that term data gravity is what's preventing them from moving into the cloud. And it's usually a large older what we would call monolithic application that's preventing them from moving. And trying to identify the ways that we can take that apart and strategically move it into the cloud. And we had a customer survey that went out to a few hundred different people that were using Konveyor. And the feedback we got was about 50% of them are currently migrating like have large migrations going on like this. And then another 30, 40% have that targeted next two years. >> So it's happening. >> It's happening now. This is a problem, this isn't a problem that we're trying to future proof, it is happening now for most corporations. They are focused on finding ways to be cost optimized and especially in the way our market is working in this post-COVID world, it's more critical than ever. And a lot of people are pouring even though they're cutting back expenses, they're still putting focus their IT for these type of migrations. >> What's the persona of people that you're trying to talk to about Konveyor? Who is out there? >> What's the community like? >> What's the community makeup and why should someone join the team? Why should someone come in and work on the project? >> So someone who is interested or trying to start their journey or someone who's already like going through a journey and someone who has went through the journey, right? They have the most experience of like what went wrong and where it could be improved. So we cater to like everyone out there pretty much, right? Because some point of the time right now it's cloud native right now this is a ecosystem. In five years it would be like totally different thing. So the mission of the project is going to be like similar or like probably same, help someone replatform and rehost things into the next generation of whatever that's going to come. So we need everyone. So that is the focus area or like the targeted audience. Right now we have interest from people who are actually actively ongoing the migration and the challenges that they are facing right now. >> So legacy enterprises that up and running, full workloads, multiple productions, hundreds and hundreds of apps, whose boss has said, "We're going to the cloud." And they go, oh boy. How do we do this? Lift and shift, get re-platform? There's a playbook, there's a method. You lift and shift, you get it in there, get the core competency, use some manage service restitch it together, go cloud native. So this is the cloud native roadmap. >> And the beauty of Konveyor is that it also gives you like plans. So like once it assists and analyzed it, it comes up with plans and reports so that you can actually take it to your management and say like, well, let's just target these, these and many application, X number of application in like two weeks. Now let's just do it in waves. So that is some feature that we are looking forward to in conveyor three which is going to be released in the first quarter of 2023. So it's exciting, right? >> It is exciting and it makes a lot of sense. >> It makes everyone happy, it makes the engineers happy. Don't have to be overworked. It also like makes the architects like Chris happy and it also makes- >> Pretty much so. >> As exemplified right here, love that. >> It makes the management happy because they see that there is like progress going on and they can like ramp it up or wrap it down holiday season. Do not touch prediction, right? Do not touch prediction. >> You hear that manager, do not touch production. >> It's also friendships too 'cause people want to be in a tribe that's experiencing the same things over and over again. I think that is really the comradery and the community data sharing. >> Yeah, that's the beauty of community, right? You can be on any number of teams but you are on the same team. Like any number of companies but on the same team. It also like reflected in the keynotes I think yesterday someone mentioned it. Sorry, I cannot recall the name of who mentioned it but it's like different companies, same team, similar goal. We all go through the journey together. >> Water level rises together too. We learn from each other and that's what community is really all about. You can tell folks at home might not be able to feel it but I can. You can tell how community first you both are. Last question for you before we wrap up, is there anything that you wish the world knew about Konveyor that they don't know right now, or more people knew? And if not, your marketing team is nailing it and we'll just give them a high five. >> I think it goes with just what we were talking about. It's not just a tool for individual applications and how to move it, it's how do we see things from a bigger picture? And this is what this tool ultimately is also trying to solve is how do we work together to move hundreds if not thousands of applications? Because it takes a village. >> Quite literally with that volume size. >> My biggest advice to people who are considering this who are in large enterprise or even smaller enterprise. Make sure that you understand this is a team effort. Make sure you're communicating and lessons learned on one team is going to be lessons learned for another team. So share that information. When you're doing migrations make sure that all that knowledge is spread because you're just going to end up repeating the same mistakes over and over again. >> That is a beautiful way to close the show. Savitha, Christopher, thank you so much for being with us. John, always a pleasure. And thank you for tuning into theCUBE live from Detroit. We'll be back with our next interview in just a few. (upbeat music)

>> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> Organizations have considerable room to improve their performance without making expensive changes to their talent, their structure, or their fundamental business model. You don't need a slew of consultants to tell you what to do. You already know. What you need is to immediately ratchet up expectations, energy, urgency, and intensity. You have to fight mediocrity every step of the way. Amp it up and the results will follow. This is the fundamental premise of a hard-hitting new book written by Frank Slootman, CEO of Snowflake, and published earlier this year. It's called "Amp It Up, Leading for Hypergrowth "by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, "and Elevating Intensity." Hello and welcome to this week's Wikibon CUBE Insights, powered by ETR. At Snowflake Summit last month, I was asked to interview Frank on stage about his new book. I've read it several times. And if you haven't read it, you should. Even if you have read it, in this Breaking Analysis, we'll dig deeper into the book and share some clarifying insights and nuances directly from Slootman himself from my one-on-one conversation with him. My first question to Slootman was why do you write this book? Okay, it's kind of a common throwaway question. And how the heck did you find time to do it? It's fairly well-known that a few years ago, Slootman put up a post on LinkedIn with the title Amp It Up. It generated so much buzz and so many requests for Frank's time that he decided that the best way to efficiently scale and share his thoughts on how to create high-performing companies and organizations was to publish a book. Now, he wrote the book during the pandemic. And I joked that they must not have Netflix in Montana where he resides. In a pretty funny moment, he said that writing the book was easier than promoting it. Take a listen. >> Denise, our CMO, you know, she just made sure that this process wasn't going to. It was more work for me to promote this book with all these damn podcasts and other crap, than actually writing the book, you know. And after a while, I was like I'm not doing another podcast. >> Now, the book gives a lot of interesting background information on Slootman's career and what he learned at various companies that he led and participated in. Now, I'm not going to go into most of that today, which is why you should read the book yourself. But Slootman, he's become somewhat of a business hero to many people, myself included. Leaders like Frank, Scott McNealy, Jayshree Ullal, and my old boss, Pat McGovern at IDG, have inspired me over the years. And each has applied his or her own approach to building cultures and companies. Now, when Slootman first took over the reins at Snowflake, I published a Breaking Analysis talking about Snowflake and what we could expect from the company now that Slootman and CFO Mike Scarpelli were back together. In that post, buried toward the end, I referenced the playbook that Frank used at Data Domain and ServiceNow, two companies that I followed quite closely as an analyst, and how it would be applied at Snowflake, that playbook if you will. Frank reached out to me afterwards and said something to the effect of, "I don't use playbooks. "I am a situational leader. "Playbooks, you know, they work in football games. "But in the military, they teach you "situational leadership." Pretty interesting learning moment for me. So I asked Frank on the stage about this. Here's what he said. >> The older you get, the more experience that you have, the more you become a prisoner of your own background because you sort of think in terms of what you know as opposed to, you know, getting outside of what you know and trying to sort of look at things like a five-year-old that has never seen this before. And then how would you, you know, deal with it? And I really try to force myself into I've never seen this before and how do I think about it? Because at least they're very different, you know, interpretations. And be open-minded, just really avoid that rinse and repeat mentality. And you know, I've brought people in from who have worked with me before. Some of them come with me from company to company. And they were falling prey to, you know, rinse and repeat. I would just literally go like that's not what we want. >> So think about that for a moment. I mean, imagine coming in to lead a new company and forcing yourself and your people to forget what they know that works and has worked in the past, put that aside and assess the current situation with an open mind, essentially start over. Now, that doesn't mean you don't apply what has worked in the past. Slootman talked to me about bringing back Scarpelli and the synergistic relationship that they have and how they build cultures and the no BS and hard truth mentality they bring to companies. But he bristles when people ask him, "What type of CEO are you?" He says, "Do we have to put a label on it? "It really depends on the situation." Now, one of the other really hard-hitting parts of the book was the way Frank deals with who to keep and who to let go. He uses the Volkswagen tagline of drivers wanted. He says in his book, in companies there are passengers and there are drivers, and we want drivers. He said, "You have to figure out really quickly "who the drivers are and basically throw the wrong people "off the bus, keep the right people, bring in new people "that fit the culture and put them "in the right seats on the bus." Now, these are not easy decisions to make. But as it pertains to getting rid of people, I'm reminded of the movie "Moneyball." Art Howe, the manager of the Oakland As, he refused to play Scott Hatteberg at first base. So the GM, Billy Bean played by Brad Pitt says to Peter Brand who was played by Jonah Hill, "You have to fire Carlos Pena." Don't learn how to fire people. Billy Bean says, "Just keep it quick. "Tell him he's been traded and that's it." So I asked Frank, "Okay, I get it. "Like the movie, when you have the wrong person "on the bus, you just have to make the decision, "be straightforward, and do it." But I asked him, "What if you're on the fence? "What if you're not completely sure if this person "is a driver or a passenger, if he or she "should be on the bus or not on the bus? "How do you handle that?" Listen to what he said. >> I have a very simple way to break ties. And when there's doubt, there's no doubt, okay? >> When there's doubt, there's no doubt. Slootman's philosophy is you have to be emphatic and have high conviction. You know, back to the baseball analogy, if you're thinking about taking the pitcher out of the game, take 'em out. Confrontation is the single hardest thing in business according to Slootman but you have to be intellectually honest and do what's best for the organization, period. Okay, so wow, that may sound harsh but that's how Slootman approaches it, very Belichickian if you will. But how can you amp it up on a daily basis? What's the approach that Slootman takes? We got into this conversation with a discussion about MBOs, management by objective. Slootman in his book says he's killed MBOs at every company he's led. And I asked him to explain why. His rationale was that individual MBOs invariably end up in a discussion about relief of the MBO if the person is not hitting his or her targets. And that detracts from the organizational alignment. He said at Snowflake everyone gets paid the same way, from the execs on down. It's a key way he creates focus and energy in an organization, by creating alignment, urgency, and putting more resources into the most important things. This is especially hard, Slootman says, as the organization gets bigger. But if you do approach it this way, everything gets easier. The cadence changes, the tempo accelerates, and it works. Now, and to emphasize that point, he said the following. Play the clip. >> Every meeting that you have, every email, every encounter in the hallway, whatever it is, is an opportunity to amp things up. That's why I use that title. But do you take that opportunity? >> And according to Slootman, if you don't take that opportunity, if you're not in the moment, amping it up, then you're thinking about your golf game or the tennis match that's going on this weekend or being out on your boat. And to the point, this approach is not for everyone. You're either built for it or you're not. But if you can bring people into the organization that can handle this type of dynamic, it creates energy. It becomes fun. Everything moves faster. The conversations are exciting. They're inspiring. And it becomes addictive. Now let's talk about priorities. I said to Frank that for me anyway, his book was an uncomfortable read. And he was somewhat surprised by that. "Really," he said. I said, "Yeah. "I mean, it was an easy read but uncomfortable "because over my career, I've managed thousands of people, "not tens of thousands but thousands, "enough to have to take this stuff very seriously." And I found myself throughout the book, oh, you know, on the one hand saying to myself, "Oh, I got that right, good job, Dave." And then other times, I was thinking to myself, "Oh wow, I probably need to rethink that. "I need to amp it up on that front." And the point is to Frank's leadership philosophy, there's no one correct way to approach all situations. You have to figure it out for yourself. But the one thing in the book that I found the hardest was Slootman challenged the reader. If you had to drop everything and focus on one thing, just one thing, for the rest of the year, what would that one thing be? Think about that for a moment. Were you able to come up with that one thing? What would happen to all the other things on your priority list? Are they all necessary? If so, how would you delegate those? Do you have someone in your organization who can take those off your plate? What would happen if you only focused on that one thing? These are hard questions. But Slootman really forces you to think about them and do that mental exercise. Look at Frank's body language in this screenshot. Imagine going into a management meeting with Frank and being prepared to share all the things you're working on that you're so proud of and all the priorities you have for the coming year. Listen to Frank in this clip and tell me it doesn't really make you think. >> I've been in, you know, on other boards and stuff. And I got a PowerPoint back from the CEO and there's like 15 things. They're our priorities for the year. I'm like you got 15, you got none, right? It's like you just can't decide, you know, what's important. So I'll tell you everything because I just can't figure out. And the thing is it's very hard to just say one thing. But it's really the mental exercise that matters. >> Going through that mental exercise is really important according to Slootman. Let's have a conversation about what really matters at this point in time. Why does it need to happen? And does it take priority over other things? Slootman says you have to pull apart the hairball and drive extraordinary clarity. You could be wrong, he says. And he admits he's been wrong on many things before. He, like everyone, is fearful of being wrong. But if you don't have the conversation according to Slootman, you're already defeated. And one of the most important things Slootman emphasizes in the book is execution. He said that's one of the reasons he wrote "Amp It Up." In our discussion, he referenced Pat Gelsinger, his former boss, who bought Data Domain when he was working for Joe Tucci at EMC. Listen to Frank describe the interaction with Gelsinger. >> Well, one of my prior bosses, you know, Pat Gelsinger, when they acquired Data Domain through EMC, Pat was CEO of Intel. And he quoted Andy Grove as saying, 'cause he was Intel for a long time when he was younger man. And he said no strategy is better than its execution, which if I find one of the most brilliant things. >> Now, before you go changing your strategy, says Slootman, you have to eliminate execution as a potential point of failure. All too often, he says, Silicon Valley wants to change strategy without really understanding whether the execution is right. All too often companies don't consider that maybe the product isn't that great. They will frequently, for example, make a change to sales leadership without questioning whether or not there's a product fit. According to Slootman, you have to drive hardcore intellectual honesty. And as uncomfortable as that may be, it's incredibly important and powerful. Okay, one of the other contrarian points in the book was whether or not to have a customer success department. Slootman says this became really fashionable in Silicon Valley with the SaaS craze. Everyone was following and pattern matching the lead of salesforce.com. He says he's eliminated the customer service department at every company he's led which had a customer success department. Listen to Frank Slootman in his own words talk about the customer success department. >> I view the whole company as a customer success function. Okay, I'm customer success, you know. I said it in my presentation yesterday. We're a customer-first organization. I don't need a department. >> Now, he went on to say that sales owns the commercial relationship with the customer. Engineering owns the technical relationship. And oh, by the way, he always puts support inside of the engineering department because engineering has to back up support. And rather than having a separate department for customer success, he focuses on making sure that the existing departments are functioning properly. Slootman also has always been big on net promoter score, NPS. And Snowflake's is very high at 72. And according to Slootman, it's not just the product. It's the people that drive that type of loyalty. Now, Slootman stresses amping up the big things and even the little things too. He told a story about someone who came into his office to ask his opinion about a tee shirt. And he turned it around on her and said, "Well, what do you think?" And she said, "Well, it's okay." So Frank made the point by flipping the situation. Why are you coming to me with something that's just okay? If we're going to do something, let's do it. Let's do it all out. Let's do it right and get excited about it, not just check the box and get something off your desk. Amp it up, all aspects of our business. Listen to Slootman talk about Steve Jobs and the relevance of demanding excellence and shunning mediocrity. >> He was incredibly intolerant of anything that he didn't think of as great. You know, he was immediately done with it and with the person. You know, I'm not that aggressive, you know, in that way. I'm a little bit nicer, you know, about it. But I still, you know, I don't want to give into expediency and mediocrity. I just don't, I'm just going to fight it, you know, every step of the way. >> Now, that story was about a little thing like some swag. But Slootman talked about some big things too. And one of the major ways Snowflake was making big, sweeping changes to amp up its business was reorganizing its go-to-market around industries like financial services, media, and healthcare. Here's some ETR data that shows Snowflake's net score or spending momentum for key industry segments over time. The red dotted line at 40% is an indicator of highly elevated spending momentum. And you can see for the key areas shown, Snowflake is well above that level. And we cut this data where responses were greater, the response numbers were greater than 15. So not huge ends but large enough to have meaning. Most were in the 20s. Now, it's relatively uncommon to see a company that's having the success of Snowflake make this kind of non-trivial change in the middle of steep S-curve growth. Why did they make this move? Well, I think it's because Snowflake realizes that its data cloud is going to increasingly have industry diversity and unique value by industry, that ecosystems and data marketplaces are forming around industries. So the more industry affinity Snowflake can create, the stronger its moat will be. It also aligns with how the largest and most prominent global system integrators, global SIs, go to market. This is important because as companies are transforming, they are radically changing their data architecture, how they think about data, how they approach data as a competitive advantage, and they're looking at data as specifically a monetization opportunity. So having industry expertise and knowledge and aligning with those customer objectives is going to serve Snowflake and its ecosystems well in my view. Slootman even said he joined the board of Instacart not because he needed another board seat but because he wanted to get out of his comfort zone and expose himself to other industries as a way to learn. So look, we're just barely scratching the surface of Slootman's book and I've pulled some highlights from our conversation. There's so much more that I can share just even from our conversation. And I will as the opportunity arises. But for now, I'll just give you the kind of bumper sticker of "Amp It Up." Raise your standards by taking every opportunity, every interaction, to increase your intensity. Get your people aligned and moving in the same direction. If it's the wrong direction, figure it out and course correct quickly. Prioritize and sharpen your focus on things that will really make a difference. If you do these things and increase the urgency in your organization, you'll naturally pick up the pace and accelerate your company. Do these things and you'll be able to transform, better identify adjacent opportunities and go attack them, and create a lasting and meaningful experience for your employees, customers, and partners. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks for watching. And thank you to Alex Myerson who's on production and he manages the podcast for Breaking Analysis. Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight help get the word out on social and in our newsletters. And Rob Hove is our EIC over at Silicon Angle who does some wonderful and tremendous editing. Thank you all. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts. Wherever you listen, just search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. And you can email me at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me @dvellante or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in enterprise tech. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR. Thanks for watching. Be well. And we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to The Cube. We're here for the AWS Executive Summit part of Reinvent 2021. I'm John Farrow, your host of the Cube. We've got a great segment focus here, Art of the Possible is the segment. Jas Bains, Chief Executive at Hafod and Jamie Smith, director of research and innovation and Laetitia Cailleteau who's the global lead of conversational AI at Accenture. Thanks for joining me today for this Art of the Possible segment. >> Thank you. >> So tell us a little bit about Hafod and what you guys are doing to the community 'cause this is a really compelling story of how technology in home care is kind of changing the game and putting a stake in the ground. >> Yeah, so Hafod is one of the largest not for profits in Wales. We employ about 1400 colleagues. We have three strands a service, which practices on key demographics. So people who are vulnerable and socioeconomically disadvantaged. Our three core strands of service are affordable housing, we provide several thousand homes to people in housing need across Wales. We also are an extensive provider of social provision, both residential and in the community. And then we have a third tier, which is a hybrid in between. So that supports people who are not quite ready for independent living but neither are they ready for residential care. So that's a supportive provision. I suppose what one of the things that marks Hafod out and why we're here in this conversation is that we're uniquely placed as one of the organizations that actually has a research and innovation capacity. And it's the work of the research and innovation capacity led by Jamie that brought about this collaboration with Accenture which is great in great meaning and benefits. So thousands of our customers and hopefully universal application as it develops. >> You know this is a really an interesting discussion because multiple levels, one, the pandemic accelerated this needs so, I want to get comments on that. But two, if you look at the future of work and work and home life, you seeing the convergence of where people live. And I think this idea of having this independent home and the ecosystem around it, there's a societal impact as well. So what brought this opportunity together? How did this come together with Accenture and AWS? >> We're going for Jamie and Laetitia. >> Yeah, I can start. Well, we were trying to apply for the LC Aging Grand Challenge in the U.K., so the United Kingdom recognized the need for change around independent living and run a grand challenge. And then we got together as part of this grand challenge. You know, we had some technology, we had trialed with AGK before and Hanover Housing Association. Hafod was really keen to actually start trying some of that technology with some of the resident. And we also worked with Swansea University, was doing a lot of work around social isolation and loneliness. And we came together to kind of pitch for the grand challenge. And we went quite far actually, unfortunately we didn't win but we have built such a great collaboration that we couldn't really let it be, you know, not going any further. And we decided to continue to invest in this idea. And now we here, probably 18 months on with a number of people, Hafod using the technology and a number of feedbacks and returns coming back and us having a grand ambitions to actually go much broader and scale this solution. >> Jas and Jamie, I'd love to get your reaction and commentary on this trend of tech for good because I mean, I'm sure you didn't wake up, oh, just want to do some tech for good. You guys have an environment, you have an opportunity, you have challenges you're going to turn into opportunities. But if you look at the global landscape right now, things that are jumping out at us are looking at the impact of social media on people. You got the pandemic with isolation, this is a first order problem in this new world of how do we get technology to change how people feel and make them better in their lives. >> Yeah, I think for us, the first has to be a problem to solve. There's got to be a question to be answered. And for us, that was in this instance, how do we mitigate loneliness and how do we take services that rely on person to person contact and not particularly scalable and replicate those through technology somehow. And even if we can do 10% of the job of that in-person service then for us, it's worth it because that is scalable. And there are lots of small interventions we can make using technology which is really efficient way for us to support people in the community when we just can't be everywhere at once. >> So, John, just to add, I think that we have about 1500 people living in households that are living alone and isolated. And I think the issue for us was more than just about technology because a lot of these people don't have access to basic technology features that most of us would take for granted. So far this is a two-prong journey. One is about increasing the accessibility to tech and familiarizing people so that they're comfortable with these devices technology and two importantly, make sure that we have the right means to help people reduce their loneliness and isolation. So the opportunity to try out something over the last 12 months, something that's bespoke, that's customized that will undoubtedly be tweaked as we go forward has been an absolutely marvelous opportunity. And for us, the collaboration with Accenture has been absolutely key. I think what we've seen during COVID is cross-fertilization. We've seen multi-disciplinary teams, we've got engineers, architects, manufacturers, and clinicians, and scientists, all trying to develop new solutions around COVID. And I think this probably just exemplary bias, especially as a post COVID where industry and in our case for example public sector and academia working together. >> Yeah, that's a great example and props to everyone there. And congratulations on this really, really important initiative. Let's talk about the home care solution. What does it do? How does it work? Take us through what's happening? >> Okay, so Home Care is actually a platform which is obviously running on AWS technology and this particular platform is the service offered accessible via voice through the Alexa device. We use the Echo Show to be able to use voice but also visuals to kind of make the technology more accessible for end user. On the platform itself, we have a series of services available out there. We connecting in the background a number of services from the community. So in the particular case of Hafod, we had something around shopping during the pandemic where we had people wanting to have access to their food bank. Or we also had during the pandemic, there was some need for having access to financial coaching and things like that. So we actually brought all of the service on the platform and the skills and this skill was really learning how to interact with the end user. And it was all customized for them to be able to access those things in a very easy way. It did work almost too well because some of our end users have been a kind of you know, have not been digital literate before and it was working so well, they were like, "But why can't it do pretty much anything on the planet? "Why can't it do this or that?" So the expectations were really, really high but we did manage to bring comfort to Hafod residents in a number of their daily kind of a need, some of the things during COVID 'cause people couldn't meet face to face. There was some challenge around understanding what events are running. So the coaches would publish events, you know, through the skills and people would be able to subscribe and go to the event and meet together virtually instead of physically. The number of things that really kind of brought a voice enabled experience for those end users. >> You know, you mentioned the people like the solution just before we, I'm going to get the Jamie in a second, but I want to just bring up something that you brought up. This is a digital divide evolution because digital divide, as Josh was saying, is that none about technology,, first, you have to access, you need access, right? First, then you have to bring broadband and internet access. And then you have to get the technology in the home. But then here it seems to be a whole nother level of digital divide bridging to the new heights. >> Yeah, completely, completely. And I think that's where COVID has really accelerated the digital divide before the solution was put in place for Hafod in the sense that people couldn't move and if they were not digitally literate, it was very hard to have access to services. And now we brought this solution in the comfort of their own home and they have the access to the services that they wouldn't have had otherwise on their own. So it's definitely helping, yeah. >> It's just another example of people refactoring their lives or businesses with technology. Jamie, what's your take on the innovation here and the technical aspects of the home care solutions? >> I think the fact that it's so easy to use, it's personalized, it's a digital companion for the home. It overcomes that digital divide that we talked about, which is really important. If you've got a voice you can use home care and you can interact with it in this really simple way. And what I love about it is the fact that it was based on what our customers told us they were finding difficult during this time, during the early lockdowns of the pandemic. There was 1500 so people Jas talked about who were living alone and at risk of loneliness. Now we spoke to a good number of those through a series of welfare calls and we found out exactly what it is they found challenging. >> What were some of the things that they were finding challenging? >> So tracking how they feel on a day-to-day basis. What's my mood like, what's my wellbeing like, and knowing how that changes over time. Just keeping the fridge in the pantry stocked up. What can I cook with these basic ingredients that I've got in my home? You could be signposted to basic resources to help you with that. Staying connected to the people who are really important to you but the bit that shines out for me is the interface with our services, with our neighborhood coaching service, where we can just give these little nudges, these little interventions just to mitigate and take the edge of that loneliness for people. We can see the potential of that coming up to the pandemic, where you can really encourage people to interact with one another, to be physically active and do all of those things that sort of mitigate against loneliness. >> Let me ask you a question 'cause I think a very important point. The timing of the signaling of data is super important. Could you comment on the relevance of having access to data? If you're getting something connected, when you're connected like this, I can only imagine the benefits. It's all about timing, right? Knowing that someone might be thinking some way or whether it's a tactical, in any scenario, timing of data, the right place at the right time, as they say. What's your take on that 'cause it sounds like what you're saying is that you can see things early when people are in the moment. >> Yeah, exactly. So if there's a trend beginning to emerge, for example, around some of these wellbeing, which has been on a low trajectory for a number of days, that can raise a red flag in our system and it alerts one of our neighborhood coaches just to reach out to that person and say, "Well, John, what's going on? "You haven't been out for a walk for a few days. "We know you like to walk, what's happening?" And these early warning signs are really important when we think of the long-term effects of loneliness and how getting upstream of those, preventing it reaching a point where it moves from being a problem into being a crisis. And the earlier we can detect that the more chance we've got of these negative long-term outcomes being mitigated. >> You know, one of the things we see in the cloud business is kind of separate track but it kind of relates to the real world here that you're doing, is automation and AI and machine learning bringing in a lot of value if applied properly. So how are you guys seeing, I can almost imagine that patterns are coming in, right? Do you see patterns in the data? How does AI and analytics technology improve this process especially with the wellbeing and emotional wellbeing of the elderly? >> I think one of the things we've learned through the pilot study we've done is there's not one size fits all. You know, all those people are very different individuals. They have very different habits. You know, there's some people not sleeping over the night. There's some people wanting to be out early, wanting to be social. Some people you have to put in much more. So it's definitely not one size fits all. And automation and digitalization of those kinds of services is really challenging because if they're not personalized, it doesn't really catch the interest or the need of the individuals. So for me as an IT professional being in the industry for like a 20 plus years, I think this is the time where personalization has really a true meaning. Personalization at scale for those people that are not digitally literate. But also in more vulnerable settings 'cause there's just so many different angles that can make them vulnerable. Maybe it's the body, maybe it's the economy position, their social condition, there's so many variation of all of that. So I think this is one of the use case that has to be powered by technology to complement the human side of it. If we really want to start scaling the services we provide to people in general, meaning obviously, in all the Western country now we all growing old, it's no secret. So in 20 years time the majority of everybody will be old and we obviously need people to take care of us. And at the moment we don't have that population to take care of us coming up. So really to crack on those kinds of challenges, we really need to have technology powering and just helping the human side to make it more efficient, connected than human. >> It's interesting. I just did a story where you have these bots that look at the facial recognition via cameras and can detect either in hospitals and or in care patients, how they feel. So you see where this is going. Jas I got to ask you how all this changes, the home care model and how Hafod works. Your workforce, the career's culture, the consortium you guys are bringing to the table, partners, you know this is an ecosystem now, it's a system. >> Yes John, I think that probably, it's also worth talking a little bit about the pressures on state governments around public health issues which are coming to the fore. And clearly we need to develop alternative ways that we engage with mass audiences and technology is going to be absolutely key. One of the challenges I still think that we've not resolved in the U.K. level, this is probably a global issue, is about data protection. When we're talking to cross governmental agencies, it's about sharing data and establishing protocols and we've enjoyed a few challenging conversations with colleagues around data protection. So I think those need to be set out in the context of the journey of this particular project. I think that what's interesting around COVID is that, hasn't materially changed the nature in which we do things, probably not in our focus and our work remains the same. But what we're seeing is very clear evidence of the ways, I mean, who would have thought that 12 months ago, the majority of our workforce would be working from home? So rapid mobilization to ensure that people can use, set IT home effectively. And then how does that relationship impact with people in the communities we're serving? Some of whom have got access to technology, others who haven't. So that's been, I think the biggest change, and that is a fundamental change in the design and delivery of future services that organizations like us will be providing. So I would say that overall, some things remain the same by and large but technology is having an absolutely profound change in the way that our engagement with customers will go forward. >> Well, you guys are in the front end of some massive innovation here with this, are they possible and that, you're really delivering impact. And I think this is an example of that. And you brought up the data challenges, this is something that you guys call privacy by design. This is a cutting edge issue here because there are benefits around managing privacy properly. And I think here, your solution clearly has value, right? And no one can debate that, but as these little blockers get in the way, what's your reaction to that? 'Cause this certainly is something that has to be solved. I mean, it's a problem. >> Yeah, so we designed a solution, I think we had, when we design, I co-designed with your end-users actually. We had up to 14 lawyers working with us at one point in time looking at different kinds of angles. So definitely really tackle the solution with privacy by design in mind and with end users but obviously you can't co-design with thousands of people, you have to co-design with a representative subset of a cohort. And some of the challenge we find is obviously, the media have done a lot of scaremongering around technology, AI and all of that kind of things, especially for people that are not necessarily digitally literate, people that are just not in it. And when we go and deploy the solution, people are a little bit worried. When we make them, we obviously explain to them what's going to happen if they're happy, if they want to consent and all that kind of things. But the people are scared, they're just jumping on a technology on top of it we're asking them some questions around consent. So I think it's just that the solution is super secured and we've gone over millions of hoops within Accenture but also with Hafod itself. You know, it's more that like the type of user we deploying the solution to are just not in that world and then they are little bit worried about sharing. Not only they're worried about sharing with us but you know, in home care, there there's an option as well to share some of that data with your family. And there we also see people are kind of okay to share with us but they don't want to share with their family 'cause they don't want to have too much information kind of going potentially worrying or bothering some of their family member. So there is definitely a huge education kind of angle to embracing the technology. Not only when you create the solution but when you actually deploy it with users. >> It's a fabulous project, I am so excited by this story. It's a great story, has all the elements; technology, innovation, cidal impact, data privacy, social interactions, whether it's with family members and others, internal, external. In teams themselves. You guys doing some amazing work, thank you for sharing. It's a great project, we'll keep track of it. My final question for you guys is what comes next for the home care after the trial? What are Hafod's plans and hopes for the future? >> Maybe if I just give an overview and then invite Jamie and Laetitia. So for us, without conversations, you don't create possibilities and this really is a reflection of the culture that we try to engender. So my ask of my team is to remain curious, is to continue to explore opportunities because it's home care up to today, it could be something else tomorrow. We also recognize that we live in a world of collaboration. We need more cross industrial partnerships. We love to explore more things that Accenture, Amazon, others as well. So that's principally what I will be doing is ensuring that the culture invites us and then I hand over to the clever people like Jamie and Laetitia to get on with the technology. I think for me we've already learned an awful lot about home care and there's clearly a lot more we can learn. We'd love to build on this initial small-scale trial and see how home care could work at a bigger scale. So how would it work with thousands of users? How do we scale it up from a cohort of 50 to a cohort of 5,000? How does it work when we bring different kinds of organizations into that mix? So what if, for example, we could integrate it into health care? So a variety of services can have a holistic view of an individual and interact with one another, to put that person on the right pathway and maybe keep them out of the health and care system for longer, actually reducing the costs to the system in the long run and improving that person's outcomes. That kind of evidence speaks to decision-makers and political partners and I think that's the kind of evidence we need to build. >> Yeah, financial impact is there, it's brutal. It's a great financial impact for the system. Efficiency, better care, everything. >> Yeah and we are 100% on board for whatever comes next. >> Laetitia-- >> What about you Laetitia? >> Great program you got there. A amazing story, thank you for sharing. Congratulations on this awesome project. So much to unpack here. I think this is the future. I mean, I think this is a case study of represents all the moving parts that need to be worked on, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We are the Art of the Possible here inside the Cube, part of AWS Reinvent Executive Summit, I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Welcome to The Cube. We're here for the AWS Executive Summit part of Reinvent 2021. I'm John Farrow, your host of the Cube. We've got a great segment focus here, Art of the Possible is the segment. Jas Bains, Chief Executive at Hafod and Jamie Smith, director of research and innovation and Laetitia Cailleteau who's the global lead of conversational AI at Accenture. Thanks for joining me today for this Art of the Possible segment. >> Thank you. >> So tell us a little bit about Hafod and what you guys are doing to the community 'cause this is a really compelling story of how technology in home care is kind of changing the game and putting a stake in the ground. >> Yeah, so Hafod is one of the largest not for profits in Wales. We employ about 1400 colleagues. We have three strands a service, which practices on key demographics. So people who are vulnerable and socioeconomically disadvantaged. Our three core strands of service are affordable housing, we provide several thousand homes to people in housing need across Wales. We also are an extensive provider of social provision, both residential and in the community. And then we have a third tier, which is a hybrid in between. So that supports people who are not quite ready for independent living but neither are they ready for residential care. So that's a supportive provision. I suppose what one of the things that marks Hafod out and why we're here in this conversation is that we're uniquely placed as one of the organizations that actually has a research and innovation capacity. And it's the work of the research and innovation capacity led by Jamie that brought about this collaboration with Accenture which is great in great meaning and benefits. So thousands of our customers and hopefully universal application as it develops. >> You know this is a really an interesting discussion because multiple levels, one, the pandemic accelerated this needs so, I want to get comments on that. But two, if you look at the future of work and work and home life, you seeing the convergence of where people live. And I think this idea of having this independent home and the ecosystem around it, there's a societal impact as well. So what brought this opportunity together? How did this come together with Accenture and AWS? >> We're going for Jamie and Laetitia. >> Yeah, I can start. Well, we were trying to apply for the LC Aging Grand Challenge in the U.K., so the United Kingdom recognized the need for change around independent living and run a grand challenge. And then we got together as part of this grand challenge. You know, we had some technology, we had trialed with AGK before and Hanover Housing Association. Hafod was really keen to actually start trying some of that technology with some of the resident. And we also worked with Swansea University, was doing a lot of work around social isolation and loneliness. And we came together to kind of pitch for the grand challenge. And we went quite far actually, unfortunately we didn't win but we have built such a great collaboration that we couldn't really let it be, you know, not going any further. And we decided to continue to invest in this idea. And now we here, probably 18 months on with a number of people, Hafod using the technology and a number of feedbacks and returns coming back and us having a grand ambitions to actually go much broader and scale this solution. >> Jas and Jamie, I'd love to get your reaction and commentary on this trend of tech for good because I mean, I'm sure you didn't wake up, oh, just want to do some tech for good. You guys have an environment, you have an opportunity, you have challenges you're going to turn into opportunities. But if you look at the global landscape right now, things that are jumping out at us are looking at the impact of social media on people. You got the pandemic with isolation, this is a first order problem in this new world of how do we get technology to change how people feel and make them better in their lives. >> Yeah, I think for us, the first has to be a problem to solve. There's got to be a question to be answered. And for us, that was in this instance, how do we mitigate loneliness and how do we take services that rely on person to person contact and not particularly scalable and replicate those through technology somehow. And even if we can do 10% of the job of that in-person service then for us, it's worth it because that is scalable. And there are lots of small interventions we can make using technology which is really efficient way for us to support people in the community when we just can't be everywhere at once. >> So, John, just to add, I think that we have about 1500 people living in households that are living alone and isolated. And I think the issue for us was more than just about technology because a lot of these people don't have access to basic technology features that most of us would take for granted. So far this is a two-prong journey. One is about increasing the accessibility to tech and familiarizing people so that they're comfortable with these devices technology and two importantly, make sure that we have the right means to help people reduce their loneliness and isolation. So the opportunity to try out something over the last 12 months, something that's bespoke, that's customized that will undoubtedly be tweaked as we go forward has been an absolutely marvelous opportunity. And for us, the collaboration with Accenture has been absolutely key. I think what we've seen during COVID is cross-fertilization. We've seen multi-disciplinary teams, we've got engineers, architects, manufacturers, and clinicians, and scientists, all trying to develop new solutions around COVID. And I think this probably just exemplary bias, especially as a post COVID where industry and in our case for example public sector and academia working together. >> Yeah, that's a great example and props to everyone there. And congratulations on this really, really important initiative. Let's talk about the home care solution. What does it do? How does it work? Take us through what's happening? >> Okay, so Home Care is actually a platform which is obviously running on AWS technology and this particular platform is the service offered accessible via voice through the Alexa device. We use the Echo Show to be able to use voice but also visuals to kind of make the technology more accessible for end user. On the platform itself, we have a series of services available out there. We connecting in the background a number of services from the community. So in the particular case of Hafod, we had something around shopping during the pandemic where we had people wanting to have access to their food bank. Or we also had during the pandemic, there was some need for having access to financial coaching and things like that. So we actually brought all of the service on the platform and the skills and this skill was really learning how to interact with the end user. And it was all customized for them to be able to access those things in a very easy way. It did work almost too well because some of our end users have been a kind of you know, have not been digital literate before and it was working so well, they were like, "But why can't it do pretty much anything on the planet? "Why can't it do this or that?" So the expectations were really, really high but we did manage to bring comfort to Hafod residents in a number of their daily kind of a need, some of the things during COVID 'cause people couldn't meet face to face. There was some challenge around understanding what events are running. So the coaches would publish events, you know, through the skills and people would be able to subscribe and go to the event and meet together virtually instead of physically. The number of things that really kind of brought a voice enabled experience for those end users. >> You know, you mentioned the people like the solution just before we, I'm going to get the Jamie in a second, but I want to just bring up something that you brought up. This is a digital divide evolution because digital divide, as Josh was saying, is that none about technology,, first, you have to access, you need access, right? First, then you have to bring broadband and internet access. And then you have to get the technology in the home. But then here it seems to be a whole nother level of digital divide bridging to the new heights. >> Yeah, completely, completely. And I think that's where COVID has really accelerated the digital divide before the solution was put in place for Hafod in the sense that people couldn't move and if they were not digitally literate, it was very hard to have access to services. And now we brought this solution in the comfort of their own home and they have the access to the services that they wouldn't have had otherwise on their own. So it's definitely helping, yeah. >> It's just another example of people refactoring their lives or businesses with technology. Jamie, what's your take on the innovation here and the technical aspects of the home care solutions? >> I think the fact that it's so easy to use, it's personalized, it's a digital companion for the home. It overcomes that digital divide that we talked about, which is really important. If you've got a voice you can use home care and you can interact with it in this really simple way. And what I love about it is the fact that it was based on what our customers told us they were finding difficult during this time, during the early lockdowns of the pandemic. There was 1500 so people Jas talked about who were living alone and at risk of loneliness. Now we spoke to a good number of those through a series of welfare calls and we found out exactly what it is they found challenging. >> What were some of the things that they were finding challenging? >> So tracking how they feel on a day-to-day basis. What's my mood like, what's my wellbeing like, and knowing how that changes over time. Just keeping the fridge in the pantry stocked up. What can I cook with these basic ingredients that I've got in my home? You could be signposted to basic resources to help you with that. Staying connected to the people who are really important to you but the bit that shines out for me is the interface with our services, with our neighborhood coaching service, where we can just give these little nudges, these little interventions just to mitigate and take the edge of that loneliness for people. We can see the potential of that coming up to the pandemic, where you can really encourage people to interact with one another, to be physically active and do all of those things that sort of mitigate against loneliness. >> Let me ask you a question 'cause I think a very important point. The timing of the signaling of data is super important. Could you comment on the relevance of having access to data? If you're getting something connected, when you're connected like this, I can only imagine the benefits. It's all about timing, right? Knowing that someone might be thinking some way or whether it's a tactical, in any scenario, timing of data, the right place at the right time, as they say. What's your take on that 'cause it sounds like what you're saying is that you can see things early when people are in the moment. >> Yeah, exactly. So if there's a trend beginning to emerge, for example, around some of these wellbeing, which has been on a low trajectory for a number of days, that can raise a red flag in our system and it alerts one of our neighborhood coaches just to reach out to that person and say, "Well, John, what's going on? "You haven't been out for a walk for a few days. "We know you like to walk, what's happening?" And these early warning signs are really important when we think of the long-term effects of loneliness and how getting upstream of those, preventing it reaching a point where it moves from being a problem into being a crisis. And the earlier we can detect that the more chance we've got of these negative long-term outcomes being mitigated. >> You know, one of the things we see in the cloud business is kind of separate track but it kind of relates to the real world here that you're doing, is automation and AI and machine learning bringing in a lot of value if applied properly. So how are you guys seeing, I can almost imagine that patterns are coming in, right? Do you see patterns in the data? How does AI and analytics technology improve this process especially with the wellbeing and emotional wellbeing of the elderly? >> I think one of the things we've learned through the pilot study we've done is there's not one size fits all. You know, all those people are very different individuals. They have very different habits. You know, there's some people not sleeping over the night. There's some people wanting to be out early, wanting to be social. Some people you have to put in much more. So it's definitely not one size fits all. And automation and digitalization of those kinds of services is really challenging because if they're not personalized, it doesn't really catch the interest or the need of the individuals. So for me as an IT professional being in the industry for like a 20 plus years, I think this is the time where personalization has really a true meaning. Personalization at scale for those people that are not digitally literate. But also in more vulnerable settings 'cause there's just so many different angles that can make them vulnerable. Maybe it's the body, maybe it's the economy position, their social condition, there's so many variation of all of that. So I think this is one of the use case that has to be powered by technology to complement the human side of it. If we really want to start scaling the services we provide to people in general, meaning obviously, in all the Western country now we all growing old, it's no secret. So in 20 years time the majority of everybody will be old and we obviously need people to take care of us. And at the moment we don't have that population to take care of us coming up. So really to crack on those kinds of challenges, we really need to have technology powering and just helping the human side to make it more efficient, connected than human. >> It's interesting. I just did a story where you have these bots that look at the facial recognition via cameras and can detect either in hospitals and or in care patients, how they feel. So you see where this is going. Jas I got to ask you how all this changes, the home care model and how Hafod works. Your workforce, the career's culture, the consortium you guys are bringing to the table, partners, you know this is an ecosystem now, it's a system. >> Yes John, I think that probably, it's also worth talking a little bit about the pressures on state governments around public health issues which are coming to the fore. And clearly we need to develop alternative ways that we engage with mass audiences and technology is going to be absolutely key. One of the challenges I still think that we've not resolved in the U.K. level, this is probably a global issue, is about data protection. When we're talking to cross governmental agencies, it's about sharing data and establishing protocols and we've enjoyed a few challenging conversations with colleagues around data protection. So I think those need to be set out in the context of the journey of this particular project. I think that what's interesting around COVID is that, hasn't materially changed the nature in which we do things, probably not in our focus and our work remains the same. But what we're seeing is very clear evidence of the ways, I mean, who would have thought that 12 months ago, the majority of our workforce would be working from home? So rapid mobilization to ensure that people can use, set IT home effectively. And then how does that relationship impact with people in the communities we're serving? Some of whom have got access to technology, others who haven't. So that's been, I think the biggest change, and that is a fundamental change in the design and delivery of future services that organizations like us will be providing. So I would say that overall, some things remain the same by and large but technology is having an absolutely profound change in the way that our engagement with customers will go forward. >> Well, you guys are in the front end of some massive innovation here with this, are they possible and that, you're really delivering impact. And I think this is an example of that. And you brought up the data challenges, this is something that you guys call privacy by design. This is a cutting edge issue here because there are benefits around managing privacy properly. And I think here, your solution clearly has value, right? And no one can debate that, but as these little blockers get in the way, what's your reaction to that? 'Cause this certainly is something that has to be solved. I mean, it's a problem. >> Yeah, so we designed a solution, I think we had, when we design, I co-designed with your end-users actually. We had up to 14 lawyers working with us at one point in time looking at different kinds of angles. So definitely really tackle the solution with privacy by design in mind and with end users but obviously you can't co-design with thousands of people, you have to co-design with a representative subset of a cohort. And some of the challenge we find is obviously, the media have done a lot of scaremongering around technology, AI and all of that kind of things, especially for people that are not necessarily digitally literate, people that are just not in it. And when we go and deploy the solution, people are a little bit worried. When we make them, we obviously explain to them what's going to happen if they're happy, if they want to consent and all that kind of things. But the people are scared, they're just jumping on a technology on top of it we're asking them some questions around consent. So I think it's just that the solution is super secured and we've gone over millions of hoops within Accenture but also with Hafod itself. You know, it's more that like the type of user we deploying the solution to are just not in that world and then they are little bit worried about sharing. Not only they're worried about sharing with us but you know, in home care, there there's an option as well to share some of that data with your family. And there we also see people are kind of okay to share with us but they don't want to share with their family 'cause they don't want to have too much information kind of going potentially worrying or bothering some of their family member. So there is definitely a huge education kind of angle to embracing the technology. Not only when you create the solution but when you actually deploy it with users. >> It's a fabulous project, I am so excited by this story. It's a great story, has all the elements; technology, innovation, cidal impact, data privacy, social interactions, whether it's with family members and others, internal, external. In teams themselves. You guys doing some amazing work, thank you for sharing. It's a great project, we'll keep track of it. My final question for you guys is what comes next for the home care after the trial? What are Hafod's plans and hopes for the future? >> Maybe if I just give an overview and then invite Jamie and Laetitia. So for us, without conversations, you don't create possibilities and this really is a reflection of the culture that we try to engender. So my ask of my team is to remain curious, is to continue to explore opportunities because it's home care up to today, it could be something else tomorrow. We also recognize that we live in a world of collaboration. We need more cross industrial partnerships. We love to explore more things that Accenture, Amazon, others as well. So that's principally what I will be doing is ensuring that the culture invites us and then I hand over to the clever people like Jamie and Laetitia to get on with the technology. I think for me we've already learned an awful lot about home care and there's clearly a lot more we can learn. We'd love to build on this initial small-scale trial and see how home care could work at a bigger scale. So how would it work with thousands of users? How do we scale it up from a cohort of 50 to a cohort of 5,000? How does it work when we bring different kinds of organizations into that mix? So what if, for example, we could integrate it into health care? So a variety of services can have a holistic view of an individual and interact with one another, to put that person on the right pathway and maybe keep them out of the health and care system for longer, actually reducing the costs to the system in the long run and improving that person's outcomes. That kind of evidence speaks to decision-makers and political partners and I think that's the kind of evidence we need to build. >> Yeah, financial impact is there, it's brutal. It's a great financial impact for the system. Efficiency, better care, everything. >> Yeah and we are 100% on board for whatever comes next. >> Laetitia-- >> What about you Laetitia? >> Great program you got there. A amazing story, thank you for sharing. Congratulations on this awesome project. So much to unpack here. I think this is the future. I mean, I think this is a case study of represents all the moving parts that need to be worked on, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> We are the Art of the Possible here inside the Cube, part of AWS Reinvent Executive Summit, I'm John Furrier, your host, thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

(melodious music) >> Voiceover: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Hi and welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're a virtual this year. But we'll be in real life soon, right around the corner, as we come out of COVID. We got a great guest, a CUBE alumni, Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow VP, CTO for IBM automation. Jerry, great to see you. Been on since almost since the early days of theCUBE. Good to see you >> Yeah, John. Thrilled to be back again. Thank you. >> What I love about our conversations, one is you're super technical. You've got patents under your belt. You're on the cutting edge. You've been involved in web services and web technologies for a long, long time. You're constantly riding the wave. And also you're a creator of a great podcast called "The Art of Automation", which is the subject of this discussion. As automation becomes central in cloud operations and Hybrid Cloud, which is the main theme of this event this year and the industry. So great to see you. First give us a little background for the folks that may not know you, about your history with IBM and who you are. >> Yeah. So thanks John. So I'm Jerry Cuomo. I've been with IBM for about three decades and I started my career at IBM research in Yorktown at the dawn of the internet. And I've been incredibly fortunate as you mentioned, to be on the forefront of many technology trends over the last three decades, internet software, middleware, including being one of the founding fathers of WebSphere software. I recently helped launch the IBM blockchain initiative and now all about AI powered automation. Which actually brings me back to my roots of studying AI in graduate school. So it's kind of come full circle for me, really enjoying the topic. >> It's funny you mentioned AI in graduate school. I was really kind of into AI when I was an undergraduate and get a master's degree in Computer Science. I kind of went the MBA route. But if you think about what was going on in the eighties during those systems times, a lot of the concepts of systems programming and cloud operations kind of gel well together. So you got this confluence of computer science and engineering AKA now DevOps, DevSecOps, coming together. This is actually a really unique time to bring back the best of the best concepts. Whether it's AI and systems and computer science and engineering into automation. Could you share your view on this? Because you're in a unique position, you've been there done that, now you're on the cutting edge. What's your thoughts? >> Yeah, absolutely John. And just when you think of automation and time, automation is not new. That literally, if you go into Wikipedia and you look up automation, you see patents and references to like steam engine regulators at the dawn of the industrial era, right? So automation has been around and in its simplest form, automation whether it was back then, whether it was in the eighties or today it's about applying technology that uses technology software to perform tasks that were once exclusively done by us, humans. But now what we're seeing is AI coming into the picture and changing the landscape in an interesting way. But I think at its essence, automation is this two-step dance of both eliminating repetitive mundane tasks that help reduce errors and free up our time. So we get back the gift of time, but also helps. It's not about taking jobs away at that point, it's a sentence of two-step dance. That's step one. But if you stop there, you're not getting the full value. Step two is to augment our skills. And to use automation, to help augment our skills. And we get speed, we get quality, we get lower costs, we get improved user experience. So whether it was back in the steam engine times or today with AI, automation is evolving with technology. >> And it's interesting too, as a student of the history of the computer industry, as you are and now a creator with your podcast, which we'll get to in a second. You're starting to see the intersection of these concerts and not bespoke as much as they used to be. You got transformation, digital transformation and innovation are connected and scale. If you think about those three concepts, they don't stand alone anymore. They can stand alone, but they work better together. Transformation. And it is the innovation, innovation provides cloud scale. So if you think about automation, automation is powering this dynamic of taking all that undifferentiated heavy lifting and moving the creativity and the skillset into higher integrated areas. Can you share your thoughts? >> Yeah, no, right on there. When you talk about transformation, jeez, look around us. The pandemic has made, transformation and specifically digital transformation, the default. So everything is digital. Whether it's ordering a pizza, visiting a doctor through telemedicine, or this zoom WebEx based workplace that we live in. But picture a telemedicine environment, talking about transformation and going digital. With 10 X more users, they can't hire 10 X more support staff. And think about it. I forgot my password, does this work on my version of the Apple iPhone or all of that kind of stuff? So their support desks are lit up, right? So as they scale digitally, automation is the relief that that comes into play, which is just in time. So the digital transformation needs automation. And John, I think about it like this, businesses like cars have become computers. So they're programmable. So automation software just like in the cars, it makes the car self-driving. I think about the Tesla model three, which I recently test drove. So with this digital acceleration, digital opens the door for automation. And now we can muse about self-driving business. We can muse about maybe that's step one, right? That's the remove repetitive work, but maybe we can actually augment business to have an autopilot. So it doesn't need us there all the time to drive. And that's the scale that you talked about. That's the scale we need. So automation is really like the peanut butter and chocolate. Digital is the peanut butter automation is the chocolate. They go well together and they produce amazing tastes. >> Yeah. That's a really interesting insight. And I was just put an exclamation point on that because you mentioned self-driving business you're implying, you said the business is a computer. So if you just think about that mind blowing concept for a second. If it's a computer, what's the operating system and what's the suite of applications that are on top of it? So, okay. Let's go in the old days you had a windows machine and you had office, which was a system software, applications software construct. If you map that to the entire company, you're talking about Red Hat and IBM will kind of come working together. Kind of connects the dots a little bit on what Red Hat could, because they're not breaking system company. So if Hybrid Cloud is the system, edge, hybrid, then you got the application suite is all software for the business. >> That's right. That's right. And if you listen to anything these days about what IBM stands for, it's Hybrid Cloud and think Red Hat as kind of the core element of that with OpenShift and AI. And both of those really matter in terms of automation and maybe I'll come back to the Hybrid Cloud or Red Hat thing in a second, but let's just talk about Watson and AI, which is the application. You mentioned scale, which I'm so glad you did. AI could help scale automation. And the trick is, is that automation sometimes gets stuck. It gets stuck when it's working with data that is noisy or unstructured. So there's a lot of structured data in your organization. With that, we can breeze through automation. But if there is more ambiguous data, unstructured, noisy, you need a human in the loop. And when you get a human in the loop, it slows things down. So what AI can start to do, AI and its subordinates, machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision. We can start to make sense of both unstructured and structured data together and we can make a big deal going forward. So that's the AI part. You mentioned Red Hat and, and Hybrid Cloud Park. Well, think about it this way, when you shop, how many stores do you... You don't just shop in one store, right? You go to specialty stores to pick up that special catsup, I don't know or mustard. (audio cuts) In one store and maybe do shopping in another store. Customers using clouds John, aren't very different. They have their specialty places to go. Maybe they're going to be running workloads in Google, involving search and AI related to search. And they're going to be using other clouds for more specialty things. From that perspective, that's a view of hybrid. Customers today, take that shopping analogy. They're going to be using Salesforce or Servicenow, IBM cloud, they have a private cloud. So when you think about automating that world, it's the real world. It's how we shop, whether it's for groceries or for cloud. The Hybrid Cloud is a reality. And how do you make sense of that? Because when an average customer has five clouds, how do you deal with five things? How do you make it easy, normalize? And that's what Red hat really does. >> It's interesting. I'll just share with you though. When I interviewed Arvin, who is now the CEO of IBM when he was at Red Hat summit 2019 in San Francisco. Before he made the acquisition, I was peppering him with questions. Like, you need to get this cloud and he loves cloud, you know, he loves cloud. So he was smiling. He just wanted to say it, he wanted to just say it. And I think Red hat brings that operating kind of mindset where the clouds are just subsystems in the OS of the middleware, which is now software which is software defined business. And this kind of is the talk of your views. Now you have a podcast called "Art of Automation". We want to get that in there, for the folks watching. Search for the podcast, "Art of Automation". This is the stories that you tell. Tell us some stories, from this phenomena. What's the impact of automation for the holistic picture? >> Well, it starts with a lot of, I guess it starts with customers. The stories start with the customer. So we're hearing from customers that AI and automation is where they're investing in 2021. For all the reasons we briefly mentioned, and IBM has a lot to offer there. So we've made AI powered automation a priority. But John, in the pursuit of making it a priority, I've started talking with many of our subject matter experts and was floored by their knowledge, their energy, their passion, and their stories. And I said, we can't keep this to ourselves. We can't keep this locked away. We have to share it. We have to let it out. So basically this is what started the podcast around that. And since then, we've had many industry luminaries from IBM and outside. Starting with customers. We had Klaus Jensen who is the CIO of Memorial Clones Kettering Hospital to talk about automation in healthcare. And he shared great stories. You need to listen to them, about automation is not going to take the place of doctors. But automation will help better read x-rays and look at those shades of gray on the x-ray and interpret it much better than we can. And be able to ingest all of the up-to-date medical research to provide pointers and make connections that the human may not be able to do in that moment. So the two working together are better than any individual. Carol Polson recently joined me to talk, and she's the CIO for Cooperators, to talk about automation and insurance. And she had some great stories too. So John, with that, a bunch of IBM, great IBM fellows like Rama Akkiraju, who is one of Forbes top 20 women in AI research. Talking about AI ops. And also Ruchir Puri talking, and Ruchir has been working on Watson since jeopardy to tell stories about ultimately now how we're teaching AI to code and all the modern programming languages. And really automating application modernization and the like. Four keyed episodes in, we have those under our belt. About 6,000 downloads so far. So it's coming along pretty well. Thanks for asking, John. >> The key is you're a content creator now, as well as a fellow. And this is the democratization, as we say direct to audience, share those stories. Also here, I think you released an ebook. Tell us a little quickly about that. We've got one minute left, give a quick plug for the ebook. >> The book echoes the podcast. Chapters relate to the episodes of the book. We're dropping the first five chapters plus forward for free on the IBM website. Other chapters will become available and drop as they become available. The book makes the content searchable on the internet. We go into more detail with advice on how to get started. You get to hear the topics and the voice of those subject matter experts. And I really suggest you go out and check it out. >> All right, Jerry Cuomo. IBM fellow VP, CTO, IBM automation. Also a content creator, podcast "Art of Automation." Jerry, we're going to list it out on our Silicon angle and our cube sites, gets you some extra love on that. Love the podcast, love the focus on sharing from experts in the field. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah. Thank you so much for having me again, John. >> Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Here for IBM Think 2021. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the >>cube >>With digital coverage of IBM think 2021 brought to you by IBM. Hello and welcome back to the cubes coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm john for a year host of the cube. We're virtual this year in real life. Soon, right around the corner as we come out of code, we've got a great guest cube alumni jerry, cuomo IBM fellow V P C T O for IBM automation jerry, Great to see you uh nonsense got almost since the early days of the cube. Good to see you, >>john thrilled to be back again. Thank you >>what I love about our conversations. One is your super technical, you've got patents under your belt during the cutting edge. You've been involved in web services and web technologies for a long, long time. You constantly riding the wave and also your creator of a great podcast called the art of automation, which is the subject of this discussion as automation becomes central in cloud operations and hybrid cloud, which is the main theme of this event this year and the industry so great to see you. Uh First team is a little background for the folks that may not know you about your history with IBM and who you are. >>Yeah, so thanks john, So I'm I'm jerry Carrillo, I've been with IBM for about three decades and I started my career at IBM research in Yorktown at the dawn of the internet and I've been incredibly fortunate, as you mentioned to be on the forefront of many technology trends over the last three decades. Internet software middleware, including being one of the founding fathers of web sphere software, uh I recently helped launch the IBM Blockchain initiative and now all about aI powered automation, which actually brings me back to my roots of studying AI and graduate school. So it's kind of come full circle for me, you know, really you know, enjoying the topic. >>You know, these funny, you mentioned aI in graduate school, I was really kind of into a I when I was an undergraduate and get a masters degree in computer science, I kind of went the NBA route. But if you think about what was going on in the eighties during those systems times, a lot of the concepts of systems programming and cloud operations kind of gel well together. So you've got this confluence of computer science and engineering A. K A. Now devops sec cops coming together. This is actually a really unique time to bring back the best of the best concepts, whether it's A I and systems and computer science and engineering into the automation. Could you share your view on this because you're in a unique position, you've been there, done that now. You're on the cutting edge with your thoughts. >>Yeah, absolutely, john And just when you think of automation and time, automation is not new, literally, if you go into Wikipedia and you look up automation, you see patents and references to like steam engine regulators at the dawn of the industrial era. Right? So automation has been around and and in the simplest form automation, whether it was back then, um whether it was in the 80s or today, it's about applying technology and that that performs, that uses like technology software to perform tasks that were once exclusively done by us humans. Right? So, but now what we're seeing is a I coming into the picture and and changing the landscape in an interesting way. But I think at its essence, you know, automation is this two step dance of both eliminating repetitive, mundane tasks. That helped reduce errors and free up our time. So we get back the gift of time but also helps. It's not about taking jobs away at that point, as I said, it's a two step dance, that's step one. But if you stop there, you're not getting the full value. Step two is to augment our skills right? And and to use automation to help augment our skills and we get speed, we get quality, we get lower costs, we get improved user experience. So whether it was back in the steam engine times or today with a I automation is evolving with technology >>and it's interesting to its you know, as a student of the history of the computer industry as you are and now a creator with your podcast which we'll get to in a second, you're starting to see the intersection of these concepts are not bespoke as much as they used to be. You got transformation. Digital, transformation and innovation are connected and scale. If you think about those three concepts they don't stand alone anymore. They can stand alone but they work better together transformation. And is the innovation innovation provides cloud scale. So if you think about automation, automation is powering this dynamic of taking all that undifferentiated heavy lifting and moving the creativity and the skill set into higher integrated areas. Can you share >>your john Yeah no right on there when you talk about transformation, jeez look around us, the pandemic has made transformation and specifically digital transformation the default so everything is digital. You know whether it's ordering a pizza, you know visiting a doctor through telemedicine or or this zoom webex based workplace that we live in. But picture of telemedicine environment right? Talking about transformation and going digital With 10 x more users. They can't hire 10 x more support staff and think about it I forgot my password. Um Does does this work on my version of the Apple iphone or all of that kind of stuff? So their support desks or lit up? Right. So uh as they scale digitally automation is the relief that that comes into play which is which is just in time. Right? So the digital transformation needs automation and john I think about it like this um businesses like cars are have become computers right? So they are programmable. So automation software just like in the cars it makes you know the car self driving? I think about the Tesla model three which I recently test drove. Um so with this digital acceleration digital opens the door for automation And now we can use about a self driving business. We can use about uh maybe that's step one, right? That's the um remove repetitive work, but maybe we can actually augment business to have an autopilot so it doesn't eat us there all the time to drive. And that's the scale that you talked about. That's the scale we need. So automation is really like the peanut butter and chocolate Digital is the peanut butter, automation is the chocolate. They go well together and they produce amazing tastes. >>You know, that's a really, that's a really interesting insight and I will just put an exclamation point on that because you mentioned self driving business, you're implying, you said the computer, the business is a computer. So if you just just think about that mind blowing concept for a second, if it's a computer, what's the operating system and what's the suite of applications that are on top of it? So, Okay, let's go in the old days at a Windows machine and you had office, which is a system software, applications, software construct. Okay, If you map that to the entire company, you're talking about Red hat and IBM kind of come working together. Kind of connects the dots a little bit on what Red Hackett because they're not bring system company. So if hybrid cloud is the system mm hybrid, then you got the applications suite is all software for the That's >>right. That's right. And if you, you know, if you listen to anything these days about what IBM stands words, hybrid cloud and and think red hat as as, you know, kind of the core element of that with open shift in a I right. And both of those really matter in terms of automation and maybe I'll come back to the hybrid cloud and red hat thing in a second. Let's just talk about you know Watson and Ai, you know, which is the application and you mentioned scale, which I'm so glad you did. You know a I could help scale automation. And the trick is is that ai automation sometimes gets stuck right? It gets stuck when it's working with data that is noisy or unstructured. Right? So there's a lot of structured data in your organization and it it with that we can breeze through automation. But if there is more ambiguous data unstructured noisy, you need a human in the loop. And when you get a human in the loop, it slows things down. So what a I can start to do a I. And its subordinates, machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision. We can start to make sense of both unstructured and structured data together and we can make a big deal going forward. Right? So that's that's the way I part you mentioned Red hat and and hybrid cloud part. We'll think about it this way. When you shop, how many stores do you don't just shop in one store? Right. You you go to specialty stores to pick up that special uh ketchup, I don't know or must store and maybe do shopping another store, customers using clouds john aren't very different. You know, they have their specialty places to go. Maybe they're going to be running workloads and google involving search and a I related to search, right? And they're going to be using other clouds for more specialty things. Right? So from that perspective, that's a view of hybrid, you know, customers today, you know, take that shopping analogy, they're going to be using sales force or service Now, IBM cloud, they have a private cloud, right? So, when you think about automating that world, All right. It's the real world. It's how we shop, whether it's for groceries or for cloud, right? So the hybrid cloud is a reality. Um and how do you make sense of a high of that? Right, Because when when an average customer has five clouds, How do you deal with five things? Right. How do you make it easy normalize? And that's what red hat really >>does. It's interesting. I just just share with you the and I interviewed Arvin um who is now the ceo of IBM when he was at Red Hat some in 2019 in SAn Francisco before he made the acquisition here that I was, I was peppered with questions like you know, you need to get this cloud and he loves cloud, you know, he loves clouds. So so he was smiling, he just wanted to say it, I wanted to just say it and I think Red Hat brings that operating kind of mindset where the clouds are just subsystems in the Os >>yes of the middle >>where which is now software which is software to find business. And this kind of is the talk of your, your your views. Now you have a podcast called Art of automation. Want to get that in there for the folks watching uh search for the podcast, Art of automation. This is the stories that you tell. Tell us some stories from this phenomenon. What's the impact of automation for the holistic picture? >>Well, it starts with a lot of, I guess it starts with customers. The stories start with the customers. So we're hearing from customers that Ai and automation is where they're investing in 2021. Um for all the reasons we briefly mentioned and and IBM has a lot to offer there. So we've made a I powered automation of priority but john in the pursuit of making it a priority. I've started talking with many of our subject matter experts and was floored by their knowledge, their energy, their passion and their stories. And I said we can't keep this to ourselves, we can't keep this locked away, we have to share it, we have to let it out. So, so basically this is what started the podcast around that. And since then we've had many industry luminaries from IBM and outside, starting with customers, we had claus Jensen who is the ceo of memorial clones Kettering hospital to talk about automation and health care. And he shared great stories. You need to listen to them about. Automation is not going to take the place of doctors, but automation will help better read um x rays and look at those shades of gray on the X ray and interpret it much better than we can and be able to ingest all of the up to date medical research to provide pointers and make connections that the human may not be able to do in that moment. Right. So the two working together or better than any individual carol Poulsen recently joined me to talk and she's the C. I. O. For cooperators to talk about automation and insurance. And she had some great stories to uh so john with that a bunch of IBM great IBM fellows like Rama Agra jew, who is one of Forbes top 20 women in AI research, talking about Ai ops and also Russia near pori talking and Russia has been working on Watson since jeopardy to tell stories about ultimately now how we're teaching ai to code and all the modern programming languages and really automating application modernization and the like uh, 14 episodes in we have those under our belt, About 6000 downloads so far. So it's it's coming along pretty well. Thanks. >>Thanks for being done. Yeah. The key is your your content creator now as well as a fellow and this is the democratization, as we say, direct to audience, share those stories also here. And thank you released an e book. Tell us a little quickly about that. We've got one minute left, give a quick plug. >>The book echoes the podcast chapters relate to the, to the episodes of the book. We're dropping the first five chapters plus forward for free on the IBM website. Other chapters will become available um, and drop as they become available. The book makes the content searchable on the internet. We go into more detail with advice on how to get started. You get to hear the topics and the voice of those subject matter experts and uh I really, you know, suggest you go out and check it out. >>Alright, jerry, cuomo IBM fellow VPC T IBM automation um also a content creator podcast, art of automation, jerry. We're gonna lift it listed on our silicon angle and our cube sites. Get you some extra love on that. Love the podcast. Love the focus on sharing from experts in the field. Thanks for coming on. >>Thank you so much for having me again, john >>Okay. I'm John Fryer with the Cube here for IBM think 2021. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube presenting accelerating automation with definite brought to you by >>Cisco We're back. This is Dave Volonte and TK Kia Ninis here he's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK My friend. Good to see you again. >>How are you? >>Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, way saw this thing coming, But we didn't see it coming this way, did we? >>No, I have. No one did, but yeah, it, uh that was right before everything happened. >>Well, it's weird, right? I mean, we were you know, we it was in the back of our minds in January. We said Barcelona hasn't really been hit yet. Looked like it was really isolated in China. But But wow, what a change. And I guess I guess I'd I'd start with that. We're seeing really a secular change in your space and security identity access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden, these things have exploded as the work from home pivot has occurred on it. It feels like these changes are permanent or semi permanent. What are you seeing out there? >>Yeah, I don't I don't think anybody thinks the world's gonna go back the way it waas. Um, to some degree, it's it's changed forever. Um, you know, I I do a lot of my work remotely on bond. And so, you know, being a remote worker isn't such a big deal for me. But for some, it was, ah, huge impact. And like I said, you know, remote work, remote education, you know, everybody's on Thea opposite side of a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect. And the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >>Yeah, And when you see that you know that work from home pivot I mean, you know, our estimates are along with a partner GTR. About 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to co vid, and now it's, you know, north to 70% plus and and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge. But people essentially, except expect that to the you know, at least double that 16% you know, going forward and definitely So what is that? What kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and and how? How organizations are approaching security. >>Yeah, I just think from a mindset standpoint, you know what Waas optional? Uh, maybe, uh, last year, eyes no longer optional. And I don't think it's going to go back. I think I think a lot of people have changed the way you know they live and the way they work. Um and they're doing it in ways. Hopefully that, you know, in some cases, yield more productivity again. Um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works Justus Well, for the bad guys. And so that's That's the balance we need to keep. Which is we need Thio be extra diligent on how we go about securing infrastructure, how we go about securing even our our social channels. Because remember all our social channels now our digital so that's has become the new norm. >>You know, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember the line you shared with me in the Cube one time. Is it the adversary is highly capable of sort of the phrase that you used And essentially the way you describe it is you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guys, return on investment, you know, increase their cost, increase the numerator. But as as works just from home, Yeah, I'm in my house, you know, by my wife, I and my you know, router with my you know, dog's name is the password. You know, it's much, much harder for me. Thio, increase that denominator at home. So how can you help? >>Yeah, I mean, it is It is truly when you think when you get into the mind of the adversary and, uh, you know, cybercrime out there, there, honestly, there, like any other business they're trying toe, you know, operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, they'll they'll frankly go find something else to do. Um, and and again, you know, you know, the shift we experience day to day is you know, it's not just our kids are online in school, and our work is online, but all the groceries we order, You know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season Ah, lot more online shopping is going to take place. Eso you know, everything's gone digital. And so the question is you know how How do we up our game there so that, um we can go about our business effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary toe operate on take care of their business because it's nasty stuff. I want to >>ask you about automation, you know, generally and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyper scale er's. And of course, they really attacked the I t labor problem. We learned a lot from that, and an I T organizations have applied much of that thinking and the it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace that technology scales today. How does that apply to security? And specifically, how is automation affecting security? >>Yeah, it z the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like ai and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand on operate at machine scale. Now. I mean that for for businesses. I mean that for, you know, education and everything else. Now, so are the adversaries, right. So it's expensive for them to operate at human scale, and they are going to machine scale, go into machine scale. A necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines work on your behalf, Have the machines carry your intent. Andi, when you do that, you can do it, uh, safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should. You wanna make sure that, frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's a tricky thing because, you know, when you take the phrase you know, how do we How do we automate security? Well, you actually have to take care of of securing the automation first. >>Yeah, we talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that you know, the bad guys, the adversaries essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because they're hiding in plain sight. Right there >>is a, um Well, there's they're clever, Given that, you know, there's this phrase that they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and and being detected. You know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then they have, ah, higher degree of evading your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob who's already been credential and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not, you know, marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavioral anomalies and things like that become, ah, Paramount. But also, you know, having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to minimize their effectiveness. Um, without e mean ideally without human interaction, because you just can you move faster, you move quicker. Andi, I say that with an asterisk because, um, if done wrong, frankly you're just making their job or effect. >>I wonder if I could talk about the market a little bit. Uh, it's, I mean, security space cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which, by the way, it's just a little infant testable component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that It that massive, uh, GDP. But guys, I wonder if you could bring up the the chart. Because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them what you're what, your biggest challenge to say, lack of talent and and so what? This chart shows this is from e T. R R R survey partner, and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum. On the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence. Pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here I wanted toe put forth to our audience and then get your reaction. So you see Cisco I highlighted in red. Cisco's business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the on the conference call, and so you can see on the horizontal axis you've got, you know, big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere. But you're right there, Um, in that in that data set and then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. The other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here, and that just adds to the complexity. This is, of course, only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is, how can Cisco help you simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it? You know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions, and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left There it z, I had a customer, you know, Tell me once that you know, I I came to this trade show looking for transportation, and these people are trying toe Selmi car parts. That's the frustration customers have, you know? And I think What Cisco has done really well is to really focus on outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Because, ultimately that's that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest you closer you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think I think security in general has just year over year been just written with. You need to be an expert. You need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And I think I think those days are behind us. But particularly as as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business. We're not selling to the, you know, T shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah, well, how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about Cloud. People think I put my data in the cloud. I'm safe. But you know, of course, we know it's a shared responsibility model, so I'm interested in your your thoughts on that. Is it really? Is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say no state of security is great in the cloud where, as you know, many of us out there saying, Wow, it z not so great. Eso What are your thoughts on that? That whole narrative and what Cisco's play in cloud? >>I think. Cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible? Um, you know, no, no data center required. No, this Dr required, you just get storage. You know, it Z all of those things that are again closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud to is it's really been It's really punctuated the way we go about building systems, um, again, at machine scale. So, you know, before when I write code and I think about what computer is it going to run on? Are you know what servers are gonna Is it gonna run on those? Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire Internet shows up the system, you know, works without fail. And on Wednesday Onley North America shows up, you know, so what? But there's no way you could staff that right. There is just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff. Is, um, it really is the next level of how we do computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure is code, and that applies to you know, security is code. That's what you know definite is really all about. I've said many times. I think Cisco of the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only that really has figured out. You know that developer angle because it's practical. You're not trying to force your way into developers. But, you know, I wonder if you could you could talk a little bit about that trend. Andi, where you see it going? >>Yeah. No, that is That is truly the trend. Every time I walk into Devon yet, um, the big halls at at Cisco Live it is Cisco as code. Everything about Cisco is being presented through an A P I. It is automation ready, and and frankly, that is that is the love language of the cloud. Um, it's machines. It's the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, you know, it is the I think I think necessary maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What? What's also necessary Eyes thio to secure if infrastructure is code. Therefore, um what what secure what security methodologies do we have today that we used to secure code? While we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So when I when I talk about how do you do automation securely, You do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you threat model, you say, You know, Ken, my adversary exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intended to go. Eso all of those practices apply. It's just everything as code these days. >>Today I've often said that security and privacy or sort of two sides of the same coin and I wanna ask you a question and it's really you know, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco, and companies like companies like Cisco is responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you could help. And of course, this this, you know, Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatizes the way in which companies air appropriating our data, tell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, etcetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy. And I mean, it's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're, you know, social media user. I love tic tac. I don't care, but but But they sort of laid out This is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that? And, you know, can Cisco play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy? I mean, beyond GDP R and California Consumer Privacy Act. Um, what do you think? >>Yeah, um, I'll give you my You know, my humble opinion is you you fix social problems with social tools, you fix technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem. Um, that needs to be rectified. You know, um, we we weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. Just It's just pretty wrong. So, yeah, that that that that serious did really kind of wake up a lot of people. It is. It is. You know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I saw um but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we we overcome it or we we compensate by what number one? Just being aware that is happening. Um, number two. You know how you go about solving it. I think maybe come down Thio an individual or even a community's solution And what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's it's It's almost I think if I could, you know, play back. What I heard is is yeah, technology, Maybe got us into this problem. But technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic A I bought is going to solve this. It's gonna be, you know, society has to really, really take this on. Is your premise good one? >>When I when I first started playing online games, I'm going back to, you know, the text based adventure stuff like muds and moos. I did a talk it at m i t one time and this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social process that we had modeled in our game and this and that, and this guy just gave us the Smackdown. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, You know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy that completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you should be scared. If somebody can decide in a minute what is good for the community, it two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community, so it almost has the opposite dynamic. And that was super interesting to me. >>That's really interesting. You know, you read the Lincoln historians, and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions. But, you know, ultimately, when he acted, he acted with with confidence. So to that point, but So what else you working on these days? That is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience anything. It's really super exciting for you or you. >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, um, trying, trying to make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's Ah general theme making it simpler for the common person to use tools again. You know, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity. It's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can drive at human scale and we can do things. That machine scale and kind of working those two together is it's sort of the magic recipe. Um, it's not easy, but but it is. It is fun So that's that's what keeps me engaged. >>I'm definitely seeing I wonder if you see it. Just sort of Ah, obviously a heightened organization awareness. But I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, You know, it used to be the SEC ops team in an island. Okay, it's your problem. You know, the CSO cannot report into the to the CEO, because that's like the fox in the hen house. A lot of those structures are are changing, it seems, and becoming this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there and what do >>you know? It's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums. Everybody knows their role, and you create something that's larger than you know, some of all parts. And so that that analogy, I think is coming to, you know, way saw it. Sort of with Dev ops where, you know, the developer doesn't just throw their quote over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They moved together as a band. And and that's what I think organizations air seeing is that you know why? Why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just. Here's the product. And here's the rest of the business s. Oh, that's that's That's pretty awesome. I think we see a lot of those patterns, particularly for the highly high performance businesses, >>you know, In fact, it's interesting you for great analogy, by the way. And you actually seeing that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of, uh and I know sometimes you guys, you know, I don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you gotta leadership structure. Now, I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how their connect connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of you know, of silo busters, isn't it? >>Yeah. No. And you, you Almost as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring a band and say, Okay, all you guitar players go over here. All you bass players go over there like what happened to the band s. So that's that's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines moving together, um, and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. >>Well, I was I always, uh, feel better after talking to you. You know? I remember. I remember Art. Coviello used to put out his, uh, his letter every year. And I was reading I get depressed. Yeah, we spend all this money now, we're less secure. But when I talked to you, t k I I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cubits. It's awesome to have you as a guest. >>Right on. I love these. I love these sessions, So thanks. Thanks for inviting me. >>And I miss you. You know, hopefully you know, next year's we could get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird like the sign says >>doing my part. >>All right, T k. Kennedy. Thanks so much for coming in the queue. We we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte. We've right back with our next guest right after this short break.

(Techno music) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! Presenting, Accelerating Automation, with DevNet. Brought to you by Cisco (Techno music ends) >> We're back, this is Dave Vellante, and TK Keanini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco. TK, my friend good to see you again. >> How are you? >> Good, I mean you and I were in Barcelona in January, and yeah, we saw this thing coming but we didn't see it coming this way, did we? >> No, no one did. But yeah, that was right before everything happened. >> Well, it's weird. I mean, it was in the back of our minds in January, we started, "Well, Barcelona hasn't really been hit yet." It looked like it was really isolated in China, but wow, what a change. And I guess I'd start with, we're seeing really a secular change in your space, in security; identity, access, management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things explode as the work from home pivot has occurred, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent. What are you seeing out there? >> Yeah, I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. To some degree, it's changed forever. I do a lot of my work remotely, and so being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, remote work, remote education, everybody's on the opposite side of a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect, and the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >> Yeah, and when you see that work from home pivot, I mean, our estimates along with our partner, DTR, about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID, and now it's north of 70% plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next six months, we'll see what happens with the fall surge. But people essentially expect that to at least double, that 16% going forward indefinitely. So what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how organizations are approaching security? >> Yeah, I just think from a mindset standpoint, what was optional maybe last year is no longer optional. And I don't think it's going to go back. I think a lot of people have changed the way they live and the way they work, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that in some cases yield more productivity. Again, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is, it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's the balance we need to keep, which is, we need to be extra diligent on how we go about securing infrastructure how we go about securing even our social channels. Because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's become the new norm. >> You've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in theCUBE one time is that the adversary is highly capable, I'll sort of the phrase that you used. And essentially the way you described it is, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease the bad guys' return on investment, increase their costs, increase the numerator. But as work shifts from home, I'm in my house. My Wi-Fi and my router, with my dog's name is the password. It's much much harder for me to increase that denominator at home. So (chuckles) how can you help? >> Yeah, I mean, it is truly, when you get into the mind of the adversary and the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business. They're trying to operate with high margins. And so if you can get in there and erode their margin, they'll frankly go find something else to do. And again, the shift we experience day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school, and our work is online, but all the groceries we order, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, a lot more online shopping is going to take place. So everything's gone digital. And so the question is, how do we up our game there so that we can go about our business effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary to operate and take care of their business? 'Cause it's nasty stuff. >> I want to ask you about automation generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the IT labor problem. We learned a lot from that, and IT organizations have applied much of that thinking. And it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace that technology scales today. How does that apply to security, and specifically, how is automation affecting security? >> Yeah, it's the topic these days. Businesses, I think realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for businesses, I mean that for education, and everything else now, so are the adversaries. So it's expensive for them to operate at human scale, and they are going to machine scale. Going to machine scale, a necessity is that, you're going to have to harness some level of automation; have the machines work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. And when you do that you can do it safely, or you could do it dangerously. (chuckles) And that's really kind of your choice. Just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should. You want to make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's a tricky thing because, when you take the phrase, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have to take care of securing the automation first. >> Yeah, we talked about this in Barcelona where you were explaining that, the the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially weaponizing, using your own tooling which makes them appear safe. Because they're hiding in plain sight. >> Right? >> That's scary. >> Well, they're clever, (chuckles) I'll giving them that. There's this phrase that they they always talk about, called, living off the land. There's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools, and being detected. If they can use the tools that's already there, then they have a higher degree of evading your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed, and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, having the detecting methods available to find their behavioral anomalies, and things like that, become a paramount, but in also having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to minimize their effectiveness, I mean, ideally without human interaction. 'Cause you move faster, you move quicker. And I say that with an asterisk, because if done wrong, frankly, you're just making their job more effective. >> I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit. I'm mean, the security space, cybersecurity, 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infinitesimal component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that massive GDP. But guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart, because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, "What's your biggest challenge?" They'll say, "Lack of talent." And so what this chart shows, this is from ETR, our survey partner. And on the vertical axis is net score, and that's an indication of spending momentum, on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here, I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. So you can see Cisco highlighted in red. Cisco's business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter, it's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the conference calls. And so you can see on the horizontal axis you've got a big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere. But you're right there in that data set. And then you've got, for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here, and that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is, how can Cisco help simplify this picture? Is it automation? You guys have done some really interesting token acquisitions, and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >> Yeah, I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there, it's... I had a customer tell me once that, "I came to this trade show looking for transportation and these people are trying to sell me car parts." That's the frustration customers have. And I think what Cisco has done really well is, to really focus on outcomes. What is the customer outcome? 'Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. There might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closer you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think security in general has just year over year have been just ridden with, "You need to be an expert." "You need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself." And I think those days are behind us, but particularly as security becomes more pervasive. and we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the T-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >> Well, how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud. People think, "I'll put my data in the cloud I'm safe," but of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your thoughts on that. Really is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way say, "Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud." Whereas many of us out there saying, "Wow, it's not so great." So what are your thoughts on that whole narrative, and what's Cisco's play in cloud? >> I think cloud, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. No data center required, no distract required, you just get storage. It's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud too is, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems, again, at machine scale. Before, when I write code and I think about "Oh, what computers are going to run on, what servers is it going to run on?" Those thoughts never cross my mind anymore. I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do, and the machines then figure it out. So for instance on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, the system works without fail. And on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you have so much. But there's no way you could staff that. There's just no human-scale approach that gets you there. And that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, it really is the next level of how we do computer science. >> So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to security as code, that's what DevNet is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco, of the the large established enterprise companies, is one of the few if not the only, that really has figured out that developer angle. Because it's practical, you're not trying to force your way into developers, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >> Yeah, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into DevNet, the big halls at Cisco Live, it is Cisco as code. Everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation-ready, and frankly, that is the love language of the cloud. It's machines, it's the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So it is the, I think necessary maybe not sufficient, but necessary for doing all the machine scale stuff. What's also necessary is to secure, if infrastructure is code, therefore, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code? Well we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So then when I talk about how do you do automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code. You test it, you threaten-model you say, "Can my adversary exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go?" So all of those practices apply. It's just, everything is code these days. >> TK, I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question, and it's really to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma, I don't know if you've had a chance to see it, but that basically dramatizes the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads, and creating own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy, and that means good from the standpoint of awareness, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love TikTok, I don't care. But they sort of laid out, this is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that, and can Cisco play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy? I mean, beyond GDPR and California Consumer Privacy Act, what do you think? >> Yeah, my humble opinion is, you fix social problems with social tools. You fix technology problems with technology tools. I think there is a social problem that needs to be rectified. We weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. (chuckles) It's just pretty wrong. So yeah that series did really kind of wake up a lot of people, it's probably every day I hear, somebody ask me if I saw it. But I do think it also, with that level of awareness, I think we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Number two, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a community's solution. And what might be right for one community might be not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >> Yeah, so it's almost, I think if I could play back, what I heard is, is yeah, technology maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's going to be, society has to really take this on, is your premise. It's a good one. >> When I first started playing online games, I mean going back to the text-based adventure stuff like MUDs and MOOs, I did a talk at MIT one time and this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, we were talking about democracy, and we were talking about the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. Then this guy just gave us the smack-down. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, "You know all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes." He says, "Democracy is completely the opposite which is, you need to sleep on it. In fact, you should be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? If two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite dynamic." And that was super interesting to me. >> That's really interesting, you read the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long to make certain decisions, but ultimately when he acted, he acted with confidence. So to that point. But so what else are you working on these days that is interesting, that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you, are you... >> Yeah, generally speaking, I'm trying to make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme, making it simpler for the common person to our use tools. Again, all of these security tools no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user, so that they can thrive at human scale, and we can do things at machine scale. And kind of looping those two together is sort of the magic recipe. It's not easy, but it is fun. So that's what keeps me engaged. >> I'm definitely seeing, I wonder if you see it, this sort of obviously a heightened organizational awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. It used to be a SecOps team in an Island, "Okay, it's your problem." The CSO can not report into the to the CIO because that's like the fox in the henhouse, a lot of those structures are changing it seems, this responsibilities is becoming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there- >> Yeah, I know, and it's so familiar to me, because I started out as a musician. So, bands are a great analogy, you play bass, I play guitar, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role, and you create something that's larger than the sum of all parts. And so that analogy I think is coming to, we saw it sort of with DevOps where the developer doesn't just throw their code over the wall and it's somebody else's problem, they move together as a band. And that's what I think organizations are seeing is that, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business, not just, "Here's the product, and here's the rest of the business." (chuckles) That's pretty awesome. I think we see a lot of those patterns, particularly for the high-performance businesses. >> In fact, it's interesting, you have great analogy by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco. You're seeing sort of, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you've got a leadership structure now, I've talked to many of them, they seem to really be more focused on how they're connecting across organizations, and it's increasingly critical in this world of silo busters, isn't it? >> Yeah, no, I mean, as you move further and further away, you can see how ridiculous it was before, it would be like acquiring a band and say, "Okay, all you guitar players, go over here. All you bass players over there. Then I'm like, "What happened to the band?" (both laughing) So that's what I'm talking about. All of those disciplines moving together, and servicing the same backlog and achieving the same successes together, is just so awesome. >> Well, I always feel better after talking to you. I remember Art Coviello used to put out this letter every year, I would read it and I'd get depressed. (chuckles) We spent all this money, now we're less secure. But when I talk to you TK, I feel much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on theCUBE. It's awesome to have you as a guest. >> I love this session, so thanks for inviting me. >> And I miss you, hopefully next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird, like the sign says. >> (talks faintly) Bring my product. >> TK Keanini, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. We really appreciate it, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante. We'll be right back with our next guest, after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hey, welcome back, you're ready. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are still getting through the year of 2020. It's still the year of COVID and there's no end in sight I think until we get to a vaccine. That said, we're really excited to have one of our favorite guests. We haven't had him on for a while. I haven't talked to him for a long time. He used to I think have the record for the most CUBE appearances of probably any CUBE alumni. We're excited to have him joining us from his house in Palo Alto. Bill Schmarzo, you know him as the Dean of Big Data, he's got more titles. He's the chief innovation officer at Hitachi Vantara. He's also, we used to call him the Dean of Big Data, kind of for fun. Well, Bill goes out and writes a bunch of books. And now he teaches at the University of San Francisco, School of Management as an executive fellow. He's an honorary professor at NUI Galway. I think he's just, he likes to go that side of the pond and a many time author now, go check him out. His author profile on Amazon, the "Big Data MBA," "The Art of Thinking Like A Data Scientist" and another Big Data, kind of a workbook. Bill, great to see you. >> Thanks, Jeff, you know, I miss my time on theCUBE. These conversations have always been great. We've always kind of poked around the edges of things. A lot of our conversations have always been I thought, very leading edge and the title Dean of Big Data is courtesy of theCUBE. You guys were the first ones to give me that name out of one of the very first Strata Conferences where you dubbed me the Dean of Big Data, because I taught a class there called the Big Data MBA and look what's happened since then. >> I love it. >> It's all on you guys. >> I love it, and we've outlasted Strata, Strata doesn't exist as a conference anymore. So, you know, part of that I think is because Big Data is now everywhere, right? It's not the standalone thing. But there's a topic, and I'm holding in my hands a paper that you worked on with a colleague, Dr. Sidaoui, talking about what is the value of data? What is the economic value of data? And this is a topic that's been thrown around quite a bit. I think you list a total of 28 reference sources in this document. So it's a well researched piece of material, but it's a really challenging problem. So before we kind of get into the details, you know, from your position, having done this for a long time, and I don't know what you're doing today, you used to travel every single week to go out and visit customers and actually do implementations and really help people think these through. When you think about the value, the economic value, how did you start to kind of frame that to make sense and make it kind of a manageable problem to attack? >> So, Jeff, the research project was eyeopening for me. And one of the advantages of being a professor is, you have access to all these very smart, very motivated, very free research sources. And one of the problems that I've wrestled with as long as I've been in this industry is, how do you figure out what is data worth? And so what I did is I took these research students and I stick them on this problem. I said, "I want you to do some research. Let me understand what is the value of data?" I've seen all these different papers and analysts and consulting firms talk about it, but nobody's really got this thing clicked. And so we launched this research project at USF, professor Mouwafac Sidaoui and I together, and we were bumping along the same old path that everyone else got, which was inched on, how do we get data on our balance sheet? That was always the motivation, because as a company we're worth so much more because our data is so valuable, and how do I get it on the balance sheet? So we're headed down that path and trying to figure out how do you get it on the balance sheet? And then one of my research students, she comes up to me and she says, "Professor Schmarzo," she goes, "Data is kind of an unusual asset." I said, "Well, what do you mean?" She goes, "Well, you think about data as an asset. It never depletes, it never wears out. And the same dataset can be used across an unlimited number of use cases at a marginal cost equal to zero." And when she said that, it's like, "Holy crap." The light bulb went off. It's like, "Wait a second. I've been thinking about this entirely wrong for the last 30 some years of my life in this space. I've had the wrong frame. I keep thinking about this as an act, as an accounting conversation. An accounting determines valuation based on what somebody is willing to pay for." So if you go back to Adam Smith, 1776, "Wealth of Nations," he talks about valuation techniques. And one of the valuation techniques he talks about is valuation and exchange. That is the value of an asset is what someone's willing to pay you for it. So the value of this bottle of water is what someone's willing to pay you for it. So everybody fixates on this asset, valuation in exchange methodology. That's how you put it on balance sheet. That's how you run depreciation schedules, that dictates everything. But Adam Smith also talked about in that book, another valuation methodology, which is valuation in use, which is an economics conversation, not an accounting conversation. And when I realized that my frame was wrong, yeah, I had the right book. I had Adam Smith, I had "Wealth of Nations." I had all that good stuff, but I hadn't read the whole book. I had missed this whole concept about the economic value, where value is determined by not how much someone's willing to pay you for it, but the value you can drive by using it. So, Jeff, when that person made that comment, the entire research project, and I got to tell you, my entire life did a total 180, right? Just total of 180 degree change of how I was thinking about data as an asset. >> Right, well, Bill, it's funny though, that's kind of captured, I always think of kind of finance versus accounting, right? And then you're right on accounting. And we learn a lot of things in accounting. Basically we learn more that we don't know, but it's really hard to put it in an accounting framework, because as you said, it's not like a regular asset. You can use it a lot of times, you can use it across lots of use cases, it doesn't degradate over time. In fact, it used to be a liability. 'cause you had to buy all this hardware and software to maintain it. But if you look at the finance side, if you look at the pure play internet companies like Google, like Facebook, like Amazon, and you look at their valuation, right? We used to have this thing, we still have this thing called Goodwill, which was kind of this capture between what the market established the value of the company to be. But wasn't reflected when you summed up all the assets on the balance sheet and you had this leftover thing, you could just plug in goodwill. And I would hypothesize that for these big giant tech companies, the market has baked in the value of the data, has kind of put in that present value on that for a long period of time over multiple projects. And we see it captured probably in goodwill, versus being kind of called out as an individual balance sheet item. >> So I don't think it's, I don't know accounting. I'm not an accountant, thank God, right? And I know that goodwill is one of those things if I remember from my MBA program is something that when you buy a company and you look at the value you paid versus what it was worth, it stuck into this category called goodwill, because no one knew how to figure it out. So the company at book value was a billion dollars, but you paid five billion for it. Well, you're not an idiot, so that four billion extra you paid must be in goodwill and they'd stick it in goodwill. And I think there's actually a way that goodwill gets depreciated as well. So it could be that, but I'm totally away from the accounting framework. I think that's distracting, trying to work within the gap rules is more of an inhibitor. And we talk about the Googles of the world and the Facebooks of the world and the Netflix of the world and the Amazons and companies that are great at monetizing data. Well, they're great at monetizing it because they're not selling it, they're using it. Google is using their data to dominate search, right? Netflix is using it to be the leader in on-demand videos. And it's how they use all the data, how they use the insights about their customers, their products, and their operations to really drive new sources of value. So to me, it's this, when you start thinking about from an economics perspective, for example, why is the same car that I buy and an Uber driver buys, why is that car more valuable to an Uber driver than it is to me? Well, the bottom line is, Uber drivers are going to use that car to generate value, right? That $40,000, that car they bought is worth a lot more, because they're going to use that to generate value. For me it sits in the driveway and the birds poop on it. So, right, so it's this value in use concept. And when organizations can make that, by the way, most organizations really struggle with this. They struggle with this value in use concept. They want to, when you talk to them about data monetization and say, "Well, I'm thinking about the chief data officer, try not to trying to sell data, knocking on doors, shaking their tin cup, saying, 'Buy my data.'" No, no one wants your data. Your data is more valuable for how you use it to drive your operations then it's a sell to somebody else. >> Right, right. Well, on of the other things that's really important from an economics concept is scarcity, right? And a whole lot of economics is driven around scarcity. And how do you price for scarcity so that the market evens out and the price matches up to the supply? What's interesting about the data concept is, there is no scarcity anymore. And you know, you've outlined and everyone has giant numbers going up into the right, in terms of the quantity of the data and how much data there is and is going to be. But what you point out very eloquently in this paper is the scarcity is around the resources to actually do the work on the data to get the value out of the data. And I think there's just this interesting step function between just raw data, which has really no value in and of itself, right? Until you start to apply some concepts to it, you start to analyze it. And most importantly, that you have some context by which you're doing all this analysis to then drive that value. And I thought it was really an interesting part of this paper, which is get beyond the arguing that we're kind of discussing here and get into some specifics where you can measure value around a specific business objective. And not only that, but then now the investment of the resources on top of the data to be able to extract the value to then drive your business process for it. So it's a really different way to think about scarcity, not on the data per se, but on the ability to do something with it. >> You're spot on, Jeff, because organizations don't fail because of a lack of use cases. They fail because they have too many. So how do you prioritize? Now that scarcity is not an issue on the data side, but it is this issue on the people resources side, you don't have unlimited data scientists, right? So how do you prioritize and focus on those opportunities that are most important? I'll tell you, that's not a data science conversation, that's a business conversation, right? And figuring out how you align organizations to identify and focus on those use cases that are most important. Like in the paper we go through several different use cases using Chipotle as an example. The reason why I picked Chipotle is because, well, I like Chipotle. So I could go there and I could write it off as research. But there's a, think about the number of use cases where a company like Chipotle or any other company can leverage your data to drive their key business initiatives and their key operational use cases. It's almost unbounded, which by the way, is a huge challenge. In fact, I think part of the problem we see with a lot of organizations is because they do such a poor job of prioritizing and focusing, they try to solve the entire problem with one big fell swoop, right? It's slightly the old ERP big bang projects. Well, I'm just going to spend $20 million to buy this analytic capability from company X and I'm going to install it and then magic is going to happen. And then magic is going to happen, right? And then magic is going to happen, right? And magic never happens. We get crickets instead, because the biggest challenge isn't around how do I leverage the data, it's about where do I start? What problems do I go after? And how do I make sure the organization is bought in to basically use case by use case, build out your data and analytics architecture and capabilities. >> Yeah, and you start backwards from really specific business objectives in the use cases that you outline here, right? I want to increase my average ticket by X. I want to increase my frequency of visits by X. I want to increase the amount of items per order from X to 1.2 X, or 1.3 X. So from there you get a nice kind of big revenue hit that you can plan around and then work backwards into the amount of effort that it takes and then you can come up, "Is this a good investment or not?" So it's a really different way to get back to the value of the data. And more importantly, the analytics and the work to actually call out the information. >> The technologies, the data and analytic technologies available to us. The very composable nature of these allow us to take this use case by use case approach. I can build out my data lake one use case at a time. I don't need to stuff 25 data sources into my data lake and hope there's someone more valuable. I can use the first use case to say, "Oh, I need these three data sources to solve that use case. I'm going to put those three data sources in the data lake. I'm going to go through the entire curation process of making sure the data has been transformed and cleansed and aligned and enriched and met of, all the other governance, all that kind of stuff this goes on. But I'm going to do that use case by use case, 'cause a use case can tell me which data sources are most important for that given situation. And I can build up my data lake and I can build up my analytics then one use case at a time. And there is a huge impact then, huge impact when I build out use case by use case. That does not happen. Let me throw something that's not really covered in the paper, but it is very much covered in my new book that I'm working on, which is, in knowledge-based industries, the economies of learning are more powerful than the economies of scale. Now think about that for a second. >> Say that again, say that again. >> Yeah, the economies of learning are more powerful than the economies of scale. And what that means is what I learned on the first use case that I build out, I can apply that learning to the second use case, to the third use case, to the fourth use case. So when I put my data into my data lake for my first use case, and the paper covers this, well, once it's in my data lake, the cost of reusing that data in a second, third and fourth use cases is basically, you know marginal cost is zero. So I get this ability to learn about what data sets are most important and to reapply that across the organization. So this learning concept, I learn use case by use case, I don't have to do a big economies of scale approach and start with 25 datasets of which only three or four might be useful. But I'm incurring the overhead for all those other non-important data sets because I didn't take the time to go through and figure out what are my most important use cases and what data do I need to support those use cases. >> I mean, should people even think of the data per se or should they really readjust their thinking around the application of the data? Because the data in and of itself means nothing, right? 55, is that fast or slow? Is that old or young? Well, it depends on a whole lot of things. Am I walking or am I in a brand new Corvette? So it just, it's funny to me that the data in and of itself really doesn't have any value and doesn't really provide any direction into a decision or a higher order, predictive analytics until you start to manipulate the data. So is it even the wrong discussion? Is data the right discussion? Or should we really be talking about the capabilities to do stuff within and really get people focused on that? >> So Jeff, there's so many points to hit on there. So the application of data is what's the value, and the queue of you guys used to be famous for saying, "Separating noise from the signal." >> Signal from the noise. Signal from a noise, right. Well, how do you know in your dataset what's signal and what's noise? Well, the use case will tell you. If you don't know the use case and you have no way of figuring out what's important. One of the things I use, I still rail against, and it happens still. Somebody will walk up my data science team and say, "Here's some data, tell me what's interesting in it." Well, how do you separate signal from noise if I don't know the use case? So I think you're spot on, Jeff. The way to think about this is, don't become data-driven, become value-driven and value is driven from the use case or the application or the use of the data to solve that particular use case. So organizations that get fixated on being data-driven, I hate the term data-driven. It's like as if there's some sort of frigging magic from having data. No, data has no value. It's how you use it to derive customer product and operational insights that drive value,. >> Right, so there's an interesting step function, and we talk about it all the time. You're out in the weeds, working with Chipotle lately, and increase their average ticket by 1.2 X. We talk more here, kind of conceptually. And one of the great kind of conceptual holy grails within a data-driven economy is kind of working up this step function. And you've talked about it here. It's from descriptive, to diagnostic, to predictive. And then the Holy grail prescriptive, we're way ahead of the curve. This comes into tons of stuff around unscheduled maintenance. And you know, there's a lot of specific applications, but do you think we spend too much time kind of shooting for the fourth order of greatness impact, instead of kind of focusing on the small wins? >> Well, you certainly have to build your way there. I don't think you can get to prescriptive without doing predictive, and you can't do predictive without doing descriptive and such. But let me throw a really one at you, Jeff, I think there's even one beyond prescriptive. One we're talking more and more about, autonomous, a ton of analytics, right? And one of the things that paper talked about that didn't click with me at the time was this idea of orphaned analytics. You and I kind of talked about this before the call here. And one thing we noticed in the research was that a lot of these very mature organizations who had advanced from the retrospective analytics of BI to the descriptive, to the predicted, to the prescriptive, they were building one off analytics to solve a problem and getting value from it, but never reusing this analytics over and over again. They were done one off and then they were thrown away and these organizations were so good at data science and analytics, that it was easier for them to just build from scratch than to try to dig around and try to find something that was never actually ever built to be reused. And so I have this whole idea of orphaned analytics, right? It didn't really occur to me. It didn't make any sense into me until I read this quote from Elon Musk, and Elon Musk made this statement. He says, " I believe that when you buy a Tesla, you're buying an asset that appreciates in value, not depreciates through usage." I was thinking, "Wait a second, what does that mean?" He didn't actually say it, "Through usage." He said, "He believes you're buying an asset that appreciates not depreciates in value." And of course the first response I had was, "Oh, it's like a 1964 and a half Mustang. It's rare, so everybody is going to want these things. So buy one, stick it in your garage. And 20 years later, you're bringing it out and it's worth more money." No, no, there's 600,000 of these things roaming around the streets, they're not rare. What he meant is that he is building an autonomous asset. That the more that it's used, the more valuable it's getting, the more reliable, the more efficient, the more predictive, the more safe this asset's getting. So there is this level beyond prescriptive where we can think about, "How do we leverage artificial intelligence, reinforcement, learning, deep learning, to build these assets that the more that they are used, the smarter they get." That's beyond prescriptive. That's an environment where these things are learning. In many cases, they're learning with minimal or no human intervention. That's the real aha moment. That's what I miss with orphaned analytics and why it's important to build analytics that can be reused over and over again. Because every time you use these analytics in a different use case, they get smarter, they get more valuable, they get more predictive. To me that's the aha moment that blew my mind. I realized I had missed that in the paper entirely. And it took me basically two years later to realize, dough, I missed the most important part of the paper. >> Right, well, it's an interesting take really on why the valuation I would argue is reflected in Tesla, which is a function of the data. And there's a phenomenal video if you've never seen it, where they have autonomous vehicle day, it might be a year or so old. And he's got his number one engineer from, I think the Microprocessor Group, The Computer Vision Group, as well as the autonomous driving group. And there's a couple of really great concepts I want to follow up on what you said. One is that they have this thing called The Fleet. To your point, there's hundreds of thousands of these things, if they haven't hit a million, that are calling home reporting home every day as to exactly how everyone took the Northbound 101 on-ramp off of University Avenue. How fast did they go? What line did they take? What G-forces did they take? And every one of those cars feeds into the system, so that when they do the autonomous update, not only are they using all their regular things that they would use to map out that 101 Northbound entry, but they've got all the data from all the cars that have been doing it. And you know, when that other car, the autonomous car couple years ago hit the pedestrian, I think in Phoenix, which is not good, sad, killed a person, dark tough situation. But you know, we are doing an autonomous vehicle show and the guy who made a really interesting point, right? That when something like that happens, typically if I was in a car wreck or you're in a car wreck, hopefully not, I learned the person that we hit learns and maybe a couple of witnesses learn, maybe the inspector. >> But nobody else learns. >> But nobody else learns. But now with the autonomy, every single person can learn from every single experience with every vehicle contributing data within that fleet. To your point, it's just an order of magnitude, different way to think about things. >> Think about a 1% improvement compounded 365 times, equals I think 38 X improvement. The power of 1% improvements over these 600,000 plus cars that are learning. By the way, even when the autonomous FSD, the full self-driving mode module isn't turned on, even when it's not turned on, it runs in shadow mode. So it's learning from the human drivers, the human overlords, it's constantly learning. And by the way, not only they're collecting all this data, I did a little research, I pulled out some of their job search ads and they've built a giant simulator, right? And they're there basically every night, simulating billions and billions of more driven miles because of the simulator. They are building, he's going to have a simulator, not only for driving, but think about all the data he's capturing as these cars are riding down the road. By the way, they don't use Lidar, they use video, right? So he's driving by malls. He knows how many cars are in the mall. He's driving down roads, he knows how old the cars are and which ones should be replaced. I mean, he has this, he's sitting on this incredible wealth of data. If anybody could simulate what's going on in the world and figure out how to get out of this COVID problem, it's probably Elon Musk and the data he's captured, be courtesy of all those cars. >> Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting, and we're seeing it now. There's a new autonomous drone out, the Skydio, and they just announced their commercial product. And again, it completely changes the way you think about how you use that tool, because you've just eliminated the complexity of driving. I don't want to drive that, I want to tell it what to do. And so you're saying, this whole application of air force and companies around things like measuring piles of coal and measuring these huge assets that are volume metric measured, that these things can go and map out and farming, et cetera, et cetera. So the autonomy piece, that's really insightful. I want to shift gears a little bit, Bill, and talk about, you had some theories in here about thinking of data as an asset, data as a currency, data as monetization. I mean, how should people think of it? 'Cause I don't think currency is very good. It's really not kind of an exchange of value that we're doing this kind of classic asset. I think the data as oil is horrible, right? To your point, it doesn't get burned up once and can't be used again. It can be used over and over and over. It's basically like feedstock for all kinds of stuff, but the feedstock never goes away. So again, or is it that even the right way to think about, do we really need to shift our conversation and get past the idea of data and get much more into the idea of information and actionable information and useful information that, oh, by the way, happens to be powered by data under the covers? >> Yeah, good question, Jeff. Data is an asset in the same way that a human is an asset. But just having humans in your company doesn't drive value, it's how you use those humans. And so it's really again the application of the data around the use cases. So I still think data is an asset, but I don't want to, I'm not fixated on, put it on my balance sheet. That nice talk about put it on a balance sheet, I immediately put the blinders on. It inhibits what I can do. I want to think about this as an asset that I can use to drive value, value to my customers. So I'm trying to learn more about my customer's tendencies and propensities and interests and passions, and try to learn the same thing about my car's behaviors and tendencies and my operations have tendencies. And so I do think data is an asset, but it's a latent asset in the sense that it has potential value, but it actually has no value per se, inputting it into a balance sheet. So I think it's an asset. I worry about the accounting concept medially hijacking what we can do with it. To me the value of data becomes and how it interacts with, maybe with other assets. So maybe data itself is not so much an asset as it's fuel for driving the value of assets. So, you know, it fuels my use cases. It fuels my ability to retain and get more out of my customers. It fuels ability to predict what my products are going to break down and even have products who self-monitor, self-diagnosis and self-heal. So, data is an asset, but it's only a latent asset in the sense that it sits there and it doesn't have any value until you actually put something to it and shock it into action. >> So let's shift gears a little bit and start talking about the data and talk about the human factors. 'Cause you said, one of the challenges is people trying to bite off more than they can chew. And we have the role of chief data officer now. And to your point, maybe that mucks things up more than it helps. But in all the customer cases that you've worked on, is there a consistent kind of pattern of behavior, personality, types of projects that enables some people to grab those resources to apply to their data to have successful projects, because to your point there's too much data and there's too many projects and you talk a lot about prioritization. But there's a lot of assumptions in the prioritization model that you can, that you know a whole lot of things, especially if you're comparing project A over in group A with project B, with group B and the two may not really know the economics across that. But from an individual person who sees the potential, what advice do you give them? What kind of characteristics do you see, either in the type of the project, the type of the boss, the type of the individual that really lends itself to a higher probability of a successful outcome? >> So first off you need to find somebody who has a vision for how they want to use the data, and not just collect it. But how they're going to try to change the fortunes of the organization. So it always takes a visionary, may not be the CEO, might be somebody who's a head of marketing or the head of logistics, or it could be a CIO, it could be a chief data officer as well. But you've got to find somebody who says, "We have this latent asset we could be doing more with, and we have a series of organizational problem challenges against which I could apply this asset. And I need to be the matchmaker that brings these together." Now the tool that I think is the most powerful tool in marrying the latent capabilities of data with all the revenue generating opportunities in the application side, because there's a countless number, the most important tool that I found doing that is design thinking. Now, the reason why I think design thinking is so important, because one of the things that design thinking does a great job is it gives everybody a voice in the process of identifying, validating, valuing, and prioritizing use cases you're going to go after. Let me say that again. The challenge organizations have is identifying, validating, valuing, and prioritizing the use cases they want to go after. Design thinking is a marvelous tool for driving organizational alignment around where we're going to start and what's going to be next and why we're going to start there and how we're going to bring everybody together. Big data and data science projects don't die because of technology failure. Most of them die because of passive aggressive behaviors in the organization that you didn't bring everybody into the process. Everybody's voice didn't get a chance to be heard. And that one person who's voice didn't get a chance to get heard, they're going to get you. They may own a certain piece of data. They may own something, but they're just waiting and lay, they're just laying there waiting for their chance to come up and snag it. So what you got to do is you got to proactively bring these people together. We call this, this is part of our value engineering process. We have a value engineering process around envisioning where we bring all these people together. We help them to understand how data in itself is a latent asset, but how it can be used from an economics perspective, drive all those value. We get them all fired up on how these can solve any one of these use cases. But you got to start with one, and you've got to embrace this idea that I can build out my data and analytic capabilities, one use case at a time. And the first use case I go after and solve, makes my second one easier, makes my third one easier, right? It has this ability that when you start going use case by use case two really magical things happen. Number one, your marginal cost flatten. That is because you're building out your data lake one use case at a time, and you're bringing all the important data lake, that data lake one use case at a time. At some point in time, you've got most of the important data you need, and the ability that you don't need to add another data source. You got what you need, so your marginal costs start to flatten. And by the way, if you build your analytics as composable, reusable, continuous learning analytic assets, not as orphaned analytics, pretty soon you have all the analytics you need as well. So your marginal cost flatten, but effect number two is that you've, because you've have the data and the analytics, I can accelerate time to value, and I can de-risked projects as I go use case by use case. And so then the biggest challenge becomes not in the data and the analytics, it's getting the all the business stakeholders to agree on, here's a roadmap we're going to go after. This one's first, and this one is going first because it helps to drive the value of the second and third one. And then this one drives this, and you create a whole roadmap of rippling through of how the data and analytics are driving this value to across all these use cases at a marginal cost approaching zero. >> So should we have chief design thinking officers instead of chief data officers that really actually move the data process along? I mean, I first heard about design thinking years ago, actually interviewing Dan Gordon from Gordon Biersch, and they were, he had just hired a couple of Stanford grads, I think is where they pioneered it, and they were doing some work about introducing, I think it was a a new apple-based alcoholic beverage, apple cider, and they talked a lot about it. And it's pretty interesting, but I mean, are you seeing design thinking proliferate into the organizations that you work with? Either formally as design thinking or as some derivation of it that pulls some of those attributes that you highlighted that are so key to success? >> So I think we're seeing the birth of this new role that's marrying capabilities of design thinking with the capabilities of data and analytics. And they're calling this dude or dudette the chief innovation officer. Surprise. >> Title for someone we know. >> And I got to tell a little story. So I have a very experienced design thinker on my team. All of our data science projects have a design thinker on them. Every one of our data science projects has a design thinker, because the nature of how you build and successfully execute a data science project, models almost exactly how design thinking works. I've written several papers on it, and it's a marvelous way. Design thinking and data science are different sides of the same coin. But my respect for data science or for design thinking took a major shot in the arm, major boost when my design thinking person on my team, whose name is John Morley introduced me to a senior data scientist at Google. And I was bottom coffee. I said, "No," this is back in, before I even joined Hitachi Vantara, and I said, "So tell me the secret to Google's data science success? You guys are marvelous, you're doing things that no one else was even contemplating, and what's your key to success?" And he giggles and laughs and he goes, "Design thinking." I go, "What the hell is that? Design thinking, I've never even heard of the stupid thing before." He goes, "I'd make a deal with you, Friday afternoon let's pop over to Stanford's B school and I'll teach you about design thinking." So I went with him on a Friday to the d.school, Design School over at Stanford and I was blown away, not just in how design thinking was used to ideate and bring and to explore. But I was blown away about how powerful that concept is when you marry it with data science. What is data science in its simplest sense? Data science is about identifying the variables and metrics that might be better predictors of performance. It's that might phrase that's the real key. And who are the people who have the best insights into what values or metrics or KPIs you might want to test? It ain't the data scientists, it's the subject matter experts on the business side. And when you use design thinking to bring this subject matter experts with the data scientists together, all kinds of magic stuff happens. It's unbelievable how well it works. And all of our projects leverage design thinking. Our whole value engineering process is built around marrying design thinking with data science, around this prioritization, around these concepts of, all ideas are worthy of consideration and all voices need to be heard. And the idea how you embrace ambiguity and diversity of perspectives to drive innovation, it's marvelous. But I feel like I'm a lone voice out in the wilderness, crying out, "Yeah, Tesla gets it, Google gets it, Apple gets it, Facebook gets it." But you know, most other organizations in the world, they don't think like that. They think design thinking is this Wufoo thing. Oh yeah, you're going to bring people together and sing Kumbaya. It's like, "No, I'm not singing Kumbaya. I'm picking their brains because they're going to help make their data science team much more effective and knowing what problems we're going to go after and how I'm going to measure success and progress. >> Maybe that's the next Dean for the next 10 years, the Dean of design thinking instead of data science, and who knew they're one and the same? Well, Bill, that's a super insightful, I mean, it's so, is validated and supported by the trends that we see all over the place, just in terms of democratization, right? Democratization of the tools, more people having access to data, more opinions, more perspective, more people that have the ability to manipulate the data and basically experiment, does drive better business outcomes. And it's so consistent. >> If I could add one thing, Jeff, I think that what's really powerful about design thinking is when I think about what's happening with artificial intelligence or AI, there's all these conversations about, "Oh, AI is going to wipe out all these jobs. Is going to take all these jobs away." And what we're actually finding is that if we think about machine learning, driven by AI and human empowerment, driven by design thinking, we're seeing the opportunity to exploit these economies of learning at the front lines where every customer engagement, every operational execution is an opportunity to gather not only more data, but to gather more learnings, to empower the humans at the front lines of the organization to constantly be seeking, to try different things, to explore and to learn from each of these engagements. I think it's, AI to me is incredibly powerful. And I think about it as a source of driving more learning, a continuous learning and continuously adapting an organization where it's not just the machines that are doing this, but it's the humans who've been empowered to do that. And my chapter nine in my new book, Jeff, is all about team empowerment, because nothing you do with AI is going to matter of squat if you don't have empowered teams who know how to take and leverage that continuous learning opportunity at the front lines of customer and operational engagement. >> Bill, I couldn't set a better, I think we'll leave it there. That's a great close, when is the next book coming out? >> So today I do my second to last final review. Then it goes back to the editor and he does a review and we start looking at formatting. So I think we're probably four to six weeks out. >> Okay, well, thank you so much, congratulations on all the success. I just love how the Dean is really the Dean now, teaching all over the world, sharing the knowledge and attacking some of these big problems. And like all great economics problems, often the answer is not economics at all. It's completely really twist the lens and don't think of it in that, all that construct. >> Exactly. >> All right, Bill. Thanks again and have a great week. >> Thanks, Jeff. >> All right. He's Bill Schmarzo, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> From the SiliconANGLE media office, in Boston Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. (upbeat music) Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Hi everybody, welcome to this cube conversation. This is part of our CIO series and Jason Thomas is here, he's the CIO of Cole, Scott, and Kissane. CSK is Florida's largest civil defense law firm. Cube along Jason Thomas, great to see you again, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me. >> So, let's talk a little bit about, the firm. largest firm in Florida, the focus is on Civil Defense, so you got lawyers, you got paralegals running around, you got demanding clients. What's the business like that's driving your technology strategy? >> so when I I'm new to legal, so this, I've been here about almost four years now, so I started January. a whole different world. I came from, from Startup Biotech, that line of business and a completely different animal. it's some of what you imagine, very always on the go, very busy, lot of business, we open dozens of cases a day, new cases, so a lot of things going on. >> Really event driven? >> Yeah very, very busy, so and you know technology's, you know the firm has taken stance that, technology is very important, to the firm and, we want to use the best technology possible, to make us as efficient as possible, so that's the chief driver, for tech at the law firm. >> So tech, you know, 15 years ago, whatever it was like, take an email to SaaS, right? So, but I would imagine you're focusing a lot on just attorney and employee productivity, maybe collaboration, document management, compliance. Are those some of the hot topics? And how are you applying technology to deal with those? >> Yep, so that is a big drive, efficiency, using technology to be efficient, and to make our folks productive. What we don't want to see, and that you see sometimes, you throw a whole bunch of technology at folks thinking that it's going to make them efficient and productive, and actually, it could be the greatest technology in the world for one place, and apply it, and you put it in another firm, and it makes us unproductive, so that's kind of the magic there. Kind of a trick to figuring out, what is it that actually is going to make us productive? >> Are there pretty clear swim lanes in your firm? Or is there a lot of shadow IT going on? Because I would imagine a lot of the frustration of, you know, IT folks is, you get the shadow IT, they bring in a point product, and that IT goes, "CIO's calling clean up this crime scene," and is that a problem in your firm specifically? Or even your industry? Or is it pretty much hey, let the tech folks figure out what the right tool for the job is? >> so in my mind the trick here is, it's not going to be any one person, or any practice group that's going to define what's the best option, what's the best tech. I mean thankfully for me, I do try and drive most of the tech out the firm, but the key is, you have to understand how the business runs. Just because it's cool tech, or it's working at one firm, doesn't mean it's going to apply or work in others. So, I spent a lot of time, in conversations with, a lot of the partners and associates. I try to make myself available as much, just to chat, see what they're doing. see what could make them more efficient. Sometimes if you don't ask, they don't even tell you, but if you ask the question, you can learn a lot in 20 minutes from somebody. And that kind of helps me decide, okay, what is going to make sense, or what's the next thing I should be looking at, to help folks out. >> So basically, Columbo questions, for those of you who remember Columbo, kind of ask your basic questions? What about work flow, how do you spend your time? What kinds of questions would you ask attorneys? >> honestly they could be calling about something completely unrelated to what, you know, what I'm thinking. It just could be as simple as, "Hey I'm this thing with this program where I'm trying to do X and this is the way we're doing now. Is there a better way to do it?" Or, it could be as simple as, we just kind of fall into the conversation based on other things. You know. They just want to talk to somebody sometimes. But they're not necessarily going to bring it up, or just don't have the time, they don't have the time. >> So a lot of times in theCUBE we get caught up, We love the tech, we talk about data science, and machine learning, and block chains and everything else, but then there's this basic blocking and tackling, that the CIO has to worry about. I wondered if you could share your perspectives based on your experience, just in terms of, some of the advice you might give to, organizations that are maybe growing, maybe haven't had the experience of a CIO that's been around the block, maybe in different industries? But some of the basic blocking and tackling that you see, that maybe doesn't happen in organizations, that really needs to happen. >> the expectation, or when you're thinking about, thinking about what the next thing is for the firm, or for your company, you also want to kind of think, you want to think long term as well. You want to think three to five years out. So, if we do this now and based on our current, growth projections, will this work for us in three years? Will this work for us in five years? Or what's our game plan? Maybe we start small, and, expand from there, but you don't want to just plan for the immediate you want to plan for the future. That's kind of, I think that's what CIO should be doing. It's not just about the tech, or is it going to work in our environment, but is it going to work for us down the road. Because we don't want, nobody, CFOs don't want to hear, and CEOs don't want to hear that, hey, yeah we just bought this thing last year, but, yeah we're going to have to buy something new now because it doesn't work anymore. >> But it does happen sometimes? >> It happens all the time, you know. >> Right, I remember, it goes a ways back now, but the federal rules of civil procedure, I think it was 2006, and everybody was rushing to plug holes because the courts ruled that electronic material was evidentiary, for whatever, seven years or something. So everybody was like okay, we need to have a system that allows us to comply. So, they went out and bought email archiving systems, which they knew they were going to have to throw away in three or four year. So how do you deal with it? Do you face that? Especially in a compliance oriented world, and you just try to sort of balance the cost and the throw away nature of that initiative with something more strategic? How do you deal with that? And how do you communicate that to the powers that be? >> Number one, no one likes to be held at gunpoint, number one, and especially my boss, so. I mean he gets it right, I mean there's regulations. But I will say, nothing happens as fast as everyone says it's going to happen. so there's always that idea. There's always this panic, oh we've got to put this in, and honestly I feel like tech folks use an excuse, and of course I do too. Say like, oh you all this is awesome. You know, we get to put something new in and, you know no one's going to say no and, it's not always the best approach, and again you kind of have to look at it long term, holistically for the business. You know, what is really going to happen in a few years? Is this technology going to even be a thing in a few years? Or is it just like, just to satisfy an immediate solution? Because again, I don't want, the last thing I hate doing is putting something in and telling my boss that it has to be replaced. He hates hearing that, and I don't want to tell him that either, quite frankly it's embarrassing. >> I don't blame your boss. >> Yeah it's embarrassing, it's just, let's do it right the first time. >> How do you do planning? I mean obviously there's a technology component, of planning, but I'm inferring from what you say that the end of technology is kind of the, the last thing you should be worrying about. You should be worried about the direction of the firm, the business, the growth plan, how do you do, as CIO, planning and how do you align that with the business? >> conversations, so lots of conversations. Lots of conversations with the attorneys. continued conversations with my boss, the CEO, and sometimes I'm not really great about it sometimes. And, you know, weeks will go by, you know, and I won't even have a conversation with him, about what's going on, and he wants to know what's going on. He doesn't understand all of it, but in those, you know, 15, 20 minute conversations, you'll be surprised what you'll learn. What's going on in the business that you didn't, or I didn't know about, and from there I can make decisions about, you know, six months from now, or next year, or during budgeting season, what it is that we need because, budgeting season is not really the time that you need to try and figure out what you want to do for next year. You want to have a plan months before that. You know, You already want to have kind of an idea of what you want to do, I mean, I've been talking to my CFO since, the beginning of summer about things we want to do for 2020. you know, six months, nine months, ahead of time, so. >> So, do you do basically annual planning? Do you try to look out further? Do you formally document that stuff? >> Every quarter, so we have, we kind of have most of the conversations with our, with my CFO and COO. every quarter we have kind of a list of projects/ what is it we want to do for the next couple quarters. We just kind of, track that and based on what we're seeing and how we do, then we, basically we plan each quarter, is how it comes down to. And we have a, we'll call it a white board, a virtual white board of what we're doing and what we want to do. >> But relatively near the midterm planning, you know doing like five year plannings though right? >> No. >> Waste of time to try to do that, or? At least in your business, maybe in pharmaceuticals? >> At least for us it was really, it's hard for us, to do that because of how quickly we grew over the last, again I've only been here almost four years, but even when I started, in 2015, I think we had somewhere around 300 plus attorneys. Now we're somewhere in the 475 range, I'm not saying no one saw that happening, but I don't think we expected that. I mean business has been great and we're happy, and we're fortunate to have it, but you can only plan so much. but do the best you can with the data you have. >> And for organization structure, you report to the CFO, is that correct? >> CEO. >> CEO? Okay so the, so you're a peer essentially of the CFO, is that right? >> Yeah. >> So you talk to the CFO about budgeting? >> Yeah. >> So you've got the CEO's >> More of the nitty gritty you know the details and numbers. >> What's that conversation like? Is it obviously you've got to justify, show a business case, or is it more sort of hate space? >> So here's the good news. I got lucky again. the CFO is very technology forward and so he understands that it drives a lot of efficiencies within the firm. So he gets it but he's been in the history long enough to get it and knows that we can, again he's efficiency a lot, but there's just a lot of efficiencies, and a lot of inefficiencies seen in a lot of what folks do in law firms that no one takes the time to sit down and say okay why do you do it like this? there's got to be a better way. Well this is the way I just do it, and so, we've been able to kind of adjust a lot of those work flows, or change those work flows to make it more cost effective for the business. Like even things simple as, just manage print service, you know, do we store 100 toners in the back somewhere and then wait for someone to, say that they're out of toners? That's not very efficient. and it's very expensive actually, so you put in a much more efficient process in place for toners. Because we're a paperless firm, but you know, I mean we still have to print, so. >> So, the joke about the paperless office was something like paperless bathroom. So, the other way around, I want to ask you about security. Are you the defacto Chief Information Security Officer, or do you have a CISO, or? >> I do not have a CISO that is me, so that'll be me. >> So, that is you. Alright so let's talk security. So, what is the state of security and as you see it? it's constantly evolving. Security practitioners tell us that they got so many tools, they got, they might have a SEC ops team, you may or may not, it may be something embedded in your team, but they've got to respond, they've got to respond, sometimes it's hard to figure out what they should respond to, prioritization, the data, keeping up with the bad guys, all that stuff. What's your state of security? >> so I think these days, it's not really, it's not really about having the best firewall, or the best, outside protection, so I think a lot of the attacks that are happening now, not that they don't happen form the outside, but a lot of it is a lot of social engineering, and a lot of everything. They're taking advantage of the the ignorance of the users, for lack of a better way to say it, so a lot of it's coming in through email, malicious links, and they're taking advantage of the inside, and bad practices, and bad policies, and/or lack of So, I think based on what we see in the news now, and what you read about, it seems like there's a breech every week somewhere. And when it comes down to it you find out that X company didn't, didn't use a strong hashing. For assaulting, on the hashes for their passwords. Like simple simple, just basic basic stuff. It's not like some massive operation like you see in a movie where you know, they're making this big plan to break in a building and it pans out and they're sneaking in you know, from the ceiling and all that kind of stuff. They're just basic stuff, they're just passwords. How can passwords, reused passwords, just databases of passwords everywhere, out in the dark where you can just buy, and they're just utilizing simple stuff like that. It's not even complicated anymore, it's just, it's a lot of social engineering. >> Often times I say that bad user behavior trumps good security every time, I wanted to ask you about the state of the self security in the industry. So you are reinforced, we were there, and Steven Schmidt stood up and he said, "Look at this narrative from the vendor community that says security is broken, isn't productive. It hurts the industry at the same time." I was at VM world recently a couple months ago, last month actually, Pat Kelsinger basically stood up and said security is broken and we're here to fix it, they bought, you know made a big acquisition of carbon black a local company, so you have these two different, you know, polarizing opinions, I don't necessarily feel like the state of security is great. I look back every year I say do I feel more secure or not, you know remember art cove yellow, every year RSA would write his letter. but what are your thoughts on that? Are you basically saying hey, it's, a lot of times it's user behavior, it's things that maybe, you know it's education, is security a do over? I guess is my question. >> A do over in the sense that I think it just comes out to basic education. I have, you'd be, we're in tech and we understand security and we have all these grand ideas and technologies and vendors and software that we use to do different things on all these fancy dashboards. But, if you ask the basic person off the street about, I think I saw a skit on Twitter the other day and you know there was this guy going around asking them, asking people, you know, what's your Facebook password, or you know how complex is it and they'll just give them their passwords and stuff you know, and I mean there's just a lack of basic education, so all us security buffs walk around, and they don't understand what we're talking about, but they don't need to understand what we're talking about. We just need to be able to look, to just have a basic security awareness and training with folks. I have a friend who works in industry, or in a nonprofit that does, that helps folks who've been you know kind of, harassed or abused online. And she's saying, she's telling me, she's like, "Look you guys are great you're really smart, but these folks, they don't know the basic stuff like hey you know someone keeps logging into my internet, and I keep seeing someone, you know, these weird things in my yard, like cameras in my yard and, can I do this with my phone, and oh well I can't use, like, my dogs name for my Facebook password? Like this is just basic stuff that nobody knows. It's not because they're stupid it's just, they just don't know." And so, like we're up here, and your average everyday person is just on this level. >> How about ransom ware? Obviously a hot topic in the business. what should people be, what should they know and what should they be doing? >> at a basic level security ware is training, it's very simple to do, there's a lot of, no that I'm, pushing products there's plenty of products out there. Secure great ones that kind of help your user, or teach them what not to do, or what to look for. we run a fishing campaign in our firm every once in a while and at this point no one clicks on anything without asking. I mean I get direct emails and I say hey, how's this look? Does it look like I should click it or, you know, does it look legit, I mean it's great. They ask now, they know not to do it. Whereas, I mean that's how they get you. That's how they get most of these places. Especially from we get a lot of, we constantly hear about small firms or smaller clients/companies getting hacked, we constantly get emails from them all the time. They'll get hacked and then we'll get the the emails with the links or whatever. that's one on the user side. On the IT side, we just really need to take it back to the basics, let's make sure we have, backups, and a backup policy, and a data protection policy, and an instant response plan. Let's have a plan here, let's not react when something happens, let's just have a plan. Honestly at our firm, we do have backups, we have layered strategy, but there's just some basic things that we don't do, like you know, IT folks, we don't, we don't keep things on our desktop. Let's start with us, you know we're supposed to be the leadership, in this regard, so let's not keep stuff on our desk let's keep stuff on the network. Let's keep it protected. Make sure it's part of the backup schedule. things like that, I think you just start there, because I was you know, I was just reading about, there's an article that came out yesterday, I think it was Washington Post, and it was talking about the ransomer incident in Baltimore a few months ago. They're just now finding out that the, even the IT folks had stuff on their local computers that couldn't be recovered, important documentation. So, this is just data protection 101. You know, we've got to take it back to the basics, take it back. >> Last question, is just kind of your career, so you mentioned before, you were in, I think you said health care, or? >> Yeah so I worked with MSP, so I worked with a lot of start ups. >> So, how'd you get here how'd you become a CIO? People out there may be, you know people in tech, they aspire perhaps to stay in tech, but they want maybe more of a management role. What was your path, and what kind of advice would you give them? >> what I would say is, so it worked out where, I was I was a lead at the company I was at here in Mass at the time, and so long story short my wife had an opportunity in Orlando, we moved, and I said I would never work for a law firm, ever. because I was, when my current boss found out I was coming we have a, a long relationship. When I was in, grew up in Florida and so part of that yeah, okay so I was in the right place at the right time and I knew somebody, that's why it's important to stay on top of networking. Always be networking, not for any other reason, just get to know people, you know. the tough thing that I had growing in the industry, I didn't get involved early on, which I should've. I should've gone to events, things like that. Get to know folks because if the people don't know you, why are they going to hire you? It's easier to get in somewhere, or get an opportunity, if they at least know you, or know your name, or know somebody that knows you. That's number one, so I'm big on that. as soon as I moved back here I've already started, I have quarterly lunches with some of the CIOs at different firms, I just put myself put there. Just hey I'm here, want to get together for lunch? It's that simple. number two make sure this is what you want to do, it's a lot of it, and you hear this all the time, a lot of it has to do with personalities and people. You're managing personalities and people half the time. You are not just doing the tech. If you think you're just going to be doing tech, or you're just going to be doing cool stuff, not the case. So, make sure you can, you know, make sure you know what you're getting into because it's, it's very challenging. >> Now that's great, great advice, so network, it's not, I like to say it's not who you know it's who knows you, so get out there. And then, Love it because, a lot of times I would imagine it's thankless. Right, you hear, >> Yep. >> You hear a lot of the chatter when something goes wrong, >> It's like a defense of a football team, you know, it's fine until, >> Until somebody scores. >> And someone gets sacked you know what I mean, otherwise no one cares. >> Alright Jason well thanks for the update, really appreciate you coming on theCUBE again. >> Thank you. >> Alright you're welcome, alright keep it right there buddy. We will be back with our next segment, right after this short break. (mood music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host stool minimun hi I'm Stu minimun and this is a special cube conversation from our Boston area studio I'm happy to welcome back to the program Bobbie Patrick who's the chief marketing officer of uipath Bobby great thank you sue thank you she's great to be here all right so Bobby you know we've known you for many years there were a couple of jobs you know you and I've talked at many the cloud shows over the year and especially companies that were at the lead of that wave they talked about cloud first right and so now you know not surprising at uipath who is one of the leaders in robotic process automation the tagline I'm hearing is automation first a uipath so a bunch of news a lot of updates we had the cube at uipath forward in Miami last year we're gonna have it back in Las Vegas so a lot of ground to cover but I guess set the stage for us you know our PA is might not be an acronym that comes off of everybody's tongue just yet but boy there's a lot of buzz in the marketplace companies growing like wildfire so you know give us kind of the dynamics to set things yeah absolutely I think you know people spent the last 5-10 years trying to go digital write digital transformation has been really hard it's largely been IT led and IT swamped and has a million things to do and along comes a technology that actually you know business users and business analysts and subject matter experts can use and and go digital quite quickly get real outcomes fast and and a complete payback on all the entire projects in less than six months or nine months it's kind of unheard of an IT and so you know our PA is now established itself now as as really the best path to digital going digital it's actually the best path to using AI as well that's coming together about quickly but I think what's what's if you step back in the zoom out a bit you know the cloud first era brought brought incredible agility to organizations right and the very beginning a cloud for your calls to do right you know IT was kind of against cloud right we're never gonna go out of our data center right we're never going to go off Siebel and sales to Salesforce all those kind of things right and but cloud the business talk cloud as a mechanism to drive fast agility and to you know drive new economics for the business and and so on well you know the cloud air is kind of behind us now and it's obvious right today the automation first era has a very similar view to it right it is about rapid agility mass productivity competitive complete company transformation and in that era we know we call it the automation first error so it's less a tagline for us we want our competitors to use it we want the market to use that we want our partners to use it we want to talk about this automation first error and we think it's a sea level conversation it's a board level conversation and it's it's gonna completely change the landscape of how companies work over the next 20 years yeah it definitely reminds me much about you know that stealth IT and then IT as we said IT needs to respond to this because if they don't the business will just go elsewhere so right ah absolutely this wave of automation it's something that we see in the you know so many aspects of the market intelligence and automation is something that we talked about for decades but is real today and in our industry there's no better proof point that something has reached a certain stage of the market then you know the venerable Gartner has come out with a Magic Quadrant first of all congratulations we're gonna thanks let the graphic and talk a little bit about it up here the Gartner Magic Quadrant uipath you know it is up in front yeah that's terrific it's uh I I think you know Gartner Magic Quadrant much like the Forester ways the Forester in the last two years has had several waves on the on our PA prior to that uh horses for sources and and in Everest and others had kind of uncovered and discovered our PA I think what the Gartner Magic Quadrant does is it is it is a one I think it's a great articulation of the state of the market today I think it's helpful to IT and to businesses to see and understand the market is legitimate its long-term several years ago many people said our PA was sort of a short-term it was a band-aid that's not the case at all RP is becoming a platform and and so we're excited because the quadrant really I think accurately shows the state you know we're obviously happy to be number one you know blue prism in at number two and obligation anywhere number three in the leaders quadrant I think the three of us you know really are the vast majority of the market there's a few other players in there that are traditional you know pegye sort of tries to have an RPA product but they're still focused on cloud I think and and the you know there's a number of other players that have kind focuses around certain parts of our PA like nice systems around attended but really the leader quadrant I think does does accurately show the the market yeah it reminds me of some of the software define products in traditional IT is that today relatively speaking the dollars are small compared to the overall IT but Gartner said this is the fastest software group of anything that it tracks and you know billions of dollars in it forecasted in kind of the next five years this is really important right because gardner size to the 890 million i think next year or this year foresters at one point one point nine billion you know will have twenty percent market share this year thirty thirty-five percent market share next year either way the numbers are accelerating and every time a forecast comes out they raise guidance and that's going to happen again this year because our PA is becoming more critical and core to enabling technologies like blockchain even and like Internet of Things and and nai obviously and so I think you're gonna see the Tam grow considerably but I think look it's the fastest growing market we're the fastest growing enterprise software company in history when we went from one to one hundred million arr in about twenty months you know no other company has done that we're considerably larger right now and but we say that you know kind of in a humble way as an example of it's a fact we actually put our numbers out even though we're a private company because we do want to show the market hey this is really excited exciting what's going on here we add eight new enterprise customers a day we have a to the fortune 10 as as customers today right we have companies grow and robots robots out to a hundred thousand employees right so it's it's it's very exciting what's going on here and the enthusiasm mean there's not many technologies to where employees show extreme excitement when they realize this robots will take this kind of mundane task from you and that I think that is just fantastic yeah it's definitely something I saw when I attended your conference I know some of the employees from previous jobs some that I've worked with at other vendors as well as the customers are all super excited in sharing their story let's get in you talked about you know that that customer growth obviously is one of the execution arms of Gartner if you've got revenue you've got customers you're executing there that completes this vision you know look like there there's still room for everybody in that space Gartner had some some ways that they think the market needs to mature in there but you know what are some of the key factors that led to UI performance you know so I think I think you know what did this come our companies done right and I you know our founder Daniel Dinah's is absolutely amazing is we built a company people love to work at our culture is is one where we've won a a dozens of awards from inc magazine compared ibly recently daniel Dinah's was voted by employees as a best work place for women right next to Satya Nadella right none of our competitors are anywhere on these cultural landscapes culture is extremely important we want to build a company that is is the epitome of the next generation of businesses right I think I think the next would be the product then we built a product that's open we built a product that is extensible with open api's we embed and best-of-breed components we don't build our stuff a lot of our competitors have proprietary components like proprietary AI or others no we're very open in architecture and we've made that product easily available through our community and that's that's been a big difference between us and our competitors communities not just a free download though communities how you embrace your your your your users how you how you give them you know whole experience training and they're willing to share their skills and best practices as well as as obviously access to software and then finally I think our customer success so one of the best things last years we've watched hundreds of customers begin to really scale we're talking hundreds thousands and even hundreds of thousands of robots right and as they go from in to HR and they work on robots to help with HR admin and HR recruiting right or they go into legal or over contact centers call centers are really popular right now a lot of our airline customers you know they really want to help improve the experience not only for their customers but their employees their employees don't want to be on a phone 25 minutes either to a disgruntled person but they have to check your employee goes and looks like 10 different systems sometimes to go solve a problem robots can do all that work and cut the entire call center experience down by 60% everybody benefits so we're seeing you know we're seeing you know again you know great company great product and an amazing customer scaling all right we always know Gartner does a very kind of point in time look at what they're doing you know you mentioned the kind of the open an environment there one of the things they were tracking is the ecosystem because obviously there's a lot of software's that you need to integrate with our software is always changing so how does the the technology deal with those changes you know we all would complain is like oh geez I went in Gmail and my interface looks totally different today than it did before how does that impact stuff so well you know what's changing is are there things in the last kind of six to twelve months that maybe the report doesn't catch or you know what should be one of the challenges with the report is that it took a long time to complete we started they started this I think it was last October so for us it's multiple versions ago right but we still had a great spot one of our competitors I think decided that you know they didn't like their at their result and hence MQ took a little longer than then it showed up so yes it's from a product perspective we've gone to look in a long way since since in October I think a number of things are important one is you know we embed AI into the product and use different components around helping with document understanding visual understanding conversational understanding and so there's a lot of advancements on the ability for a robot whose robots learn new skills is a phrase we often use for robot to do more and more you know it with every release that a lot of those can be you know our components or or our partners we have 700 companies today they're in our ecosystem right so maybe a natural image processing company like core AI right or or an AI ml company like element AI or sky mind right Dayna robot these are all amazing companies that have great algorithms but they don't have access to the data right well the customers data is flowing through our platform and in these automation so we've made it very easy to drag and drop AI you know it's a drag and drop in Watson for example to apply to an automation flowing through our platform right so you know with every release you know robots getting new skills we make the products easier easier to use we're making it easier from four more people who have even less technical skills to be able to automate almost Excel users will be able to automate with them within Excel with a new version that's coming up right so you know all axes you know we're a three thousand person company now right so we've got a lot of developers so you know all axes ease-of-use scalability they're all they're all growing fast ya want to unpack that what you just brought up there a little bit this is not necessarily IT rolling out these environments we know if it's gonna be fast and you know tied to the business oftentimes it will start on the business how is that dynamic working you know your customers that you've been with for a while you know how do they work through that dynamic there are four phases in the maturity of kind of an RPA program right the first phase is citizen development led it's often led within a business like within finance or with an HR with a call center the second phase IT gets involved in the CIO gets involved this is where they say okay I've got to govern this you know robots are like or like human workers they have to have credentials and and login and passwords and things so to manage them and and robots actually bring a lot of compliance and auditability right everything a robot does is tracked and stored and and so CIOs get involved in Phase two that's when they build out we call the ROC a robotic operations center right and this is where they scale you see hundreds of robots lots of automations and they're really building a pipeline to serve their company phase three is when the CEO gets involved this is where around our vision of a robot for every person this is when CEO the board begin to think about automation and its impact across the entire enterprise and then they kind of I would say the aspirational phase and which we see some today is what we call phase 4 which is the gigabyte economy these are where robots are working up and down a value chain and a supply chain supply chain shared amongst companies in a way that the entire chain benefits right and this is actually where we see some blockchain use cases coming in where blockchain becomes the immutable source of truth for the actions the robot does between a customer and say and say a manufacturer so those four phases that maturity model is absolutely critical but I think it's important to note in phase two you know serving IT providing a platform that they can that they know is secure that they can that has good auditing that that they can scale efficiently and effectively it's really important so we often say you know we're built for both business and for IT all right October you've got uipath or come to the Bellagio in Las Vegas give us a little bit of a you know sneak peek as to you know what people can be expecting when they come to your big of yeah for it's gonna be amazing this year and you know as you know we host events all around the world this year will host 23,000 people in our own uipath events which is absolutely incredible this will be our kind of flagship signature event where we will unveil a stream of new products we have made some acquisitions that we have not announced that are part of that we will be taking the platform in making it much more kind of easy to implement on one side the higher scalability on the other side and will show a lot of innovations around that we're gonna also show some disruption in some other markets our PA can really extend itself into other technologies and do other markets that exist today as a new way of doing things and so we're excited to unveil what I think will be some pretty strategic directions for for our PA and finally the real focus of this event will be about customer stories particularly customers that have scale we'll have about two dozen customers who will talk about how they've scaled their operations how they're adding you know they're doubling their automations every month hundreds or thousands of robots how they manage that how they deploy that how they market internally even how do they you know what are the challenges they have is how do i educate within my own company right one of my favorite stories last week on art weeks ago on linkedin was a CEO of SingTel out of singapore you know he put out a post showing a hackathon that they ran where and he said we're now a believer in a robot for every sink tell employee and the employee that won the hackathon had been there 46 years the robot saw the problem that drove her nuts every week of her career and she was thrilled so you know this is gonna be an event to celebrate also celebrate the community celebrate success celebrate automation yeah final question I have for you Bobby I love talking to CMOS about how technology is impacting your job so you know what's new about you know the digital transformation our PA automation first cloud first era for you know for CMO like yourself both so we have you know dozen robots in marketing I have my favorite one I think I did a post on this one my favorite one was I would wah I wake up every morning and I would go to my my device mobile I'd go look up Google Trends how are we doing you like go to alexa.com or similar web duck how would you answer competitors and I'd you know it's great take this take the screen look in there okay great we're doing great well that was ten minutes of my day every day well now we have a robot that does that every morning for me and it takes the data puts it into a Google sheet and I can track it over time right you know that's an easy example but we actually use robots in a much more serious way where we move data between different systems between eventbrite systems or between our CRM systems and our leads when we get leads that come in our robots actually take the lead based on the location and and and notify the right people in each each each region right so robots are you know kind of kind of running you know throughout how we operate it's a company we have our own rock our own robotic operations that are in our business we think about automations you know throughout our entire organization and and it's exciting we have interns this summer and there's a intern contest and they're building the robots and we have fun robots - robots that help a fantasy football right and if you forget to make your selections it will go fix it for you so you don't miss out you know perhaps on on moving a player it's not playing out so all kinds of you know fun with with robots whether it's marketing HR a little legal it's it's exciting all right well Bobby Patrick thanks so much for all the updates congratulations on the momentum the updates in the Gartner MQ and I know we look forward to you iPad forward in Las Vegas later thanks - all right as always check out the cube dotnet to see all of the content we've done if you go in the search in search uipath you can see Daniel there CEO of the previous conversation with Bobby as well as who will have on at the show there on Stu minimun and thanks as always for watching the cube

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen, brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello. Welcome back to the Cube. At least a market with Dave Alonso. We are at Del Technologies World. This is our third day of coverage. As John has been saying, This is a cannon double cannon of Q content. We are pleased to welcome back a couple of alumni to keep. We've got Beth failing Presidents data Protection division from Italians. It's great to have you back. And Sherrod Rastogi also welcome back S VP of data protection product management Guys, Lots of news. The last three days, fifteen thousand or so people. Lot of partners. We've been hearing nothing but tremendous amount of positivity and also appreciation from your customers and partners for all of this collaboration within the Della Technologies company with partners. Some of the news, though, that you were on the keynote stage give us some anecdotes that you've heard from customers and partners the last few days about where Del Technologies is going. >> Yeah, I'm happy too. And you know, a big announcements this week. We're a power protect software and the power protect extra hundred appliance. And what we're hearing from customers is this is exactly what we needed to do because the demands on data protection are changing with more more. Brooke look being distributed with data being more more important and with the risks being more more prevalent that they were looking for us to take a bold step and introduce this next generation software to find platform. And so the feedback you're getting is you've done what you needed to do, and they're looking forward to learning more. >> So I wonder if we could sort of explore a little bit this concept of data management. So data management lead needs different things to different people. Sure, if your database person maybe maybe different from a person who's doing data protection, what does it mean in a data protection context? I think >> first of all, you know, having visibility off your data all across your infrastructure that resides in the edge. The court a cloud across multiple applications in physical virtual environments, right? So having full facility that I think is one component second is not the ability to move the data across seamlessly across any socially target but it is on track in the cloud. Robert Cloud. I think that sort of a second element, the third and probably the most important is how do you actually get value from the data, right? Already, Actually, not only unable to protect it, but make it available at the right time, right place for the right application and be able to use it because, as you know, data is the fuel of the modern visual economy. On making it available is really, really critical. And that to me. So you're combining all of that is what I would consider it at management to be. >> So double click on that. I mean, could you be more specific about the attributes of, you know, a modern data management system? So I >> would say, you know, any modern technology may be modular FBI driven, you know, it really sort of the automate scale performance coverage. All those attributes, I think are very important for any more than data protection product and be able to meet the needs of our customers. You know, high scale hi coverage and rapidly, >> and that gives you a cloud like experience presumably allows you to scale out many a performance. I've seen some of the conversations that start associating with that or scale in place Bath. You talked about that? Yeah, Well, yeah. I want to explore a little bit about your business because you know who knew? Who would have predicted a few years ago? The data protection would always because all of a sudden become this hot space veces diving in hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars being spent. And of course, you're the biggest player. So everybody wants a piece of your hide. And so and you got a portfolio. It goes back up llegado days. They have amar stuff data, domaine et cetera, et cetera. She had a sort of make sure that that was logical for your customers. Protect those customers that have made investment of you, but also shoma roadmap. Jeff Clark comes in, says, Okay, we're going to simplify, you know, marching orders. Your business in a very rapid time has transformed. Can you talk about that? What's what's taking place in your business? >> Absolutely, David, it's so interesting even comparing last year to this year, right? We're at this pivot point where we're building on the legacy of Trust and I T and knowledge and experience that we have. But we're now setting the foundation to be number one and data protection and data management for the next ten years. Introducing this new set of products were able to bring a customer's forward. We call it the path to power. So in addition to that, bring new customers into the family. We're looking for all those aspects of modern day to management, with simplicity, with multi cloud, with automation and with the new use cases where it's more than just back up. It's CCD are its analytics. It's testing toe. It's validation. So this is whole spectrum of things that we can expand into now that we have this new platform. It's really exciting. >> It is exciting. And yesterday the under Armour video was very cool, and one of the things that they set in there is that there they're leveraging data for brand reputation. I mean, they've got under Armour has incredible brand ambassadors Tom Brady, Steph Curry. But looking at it as not just a business ever. But this is actually tied to our brand reputation, did. It is so incredibly pivotal to the lifeblood of a business. It has to be protected. >> Yeah, and that's a big theme. And you probably something too. But, you know, in this day and time data is no longer something that maybe people in I'd worry about write It is now the lifeblood of most of our customers, corporations and at the same time list, like the threat of malware are very prevalent. And so things like what we've done with cyber recovery always were working with our customers to protect their data. In a survey we just did. With twenty two hundred I t professionals, twenty eight percent of them had had some data loss in the last twelve months. So the risk of data loss is real. And we take our responsibility very seriously to help our customers protect from that risk. >> So I like this message to any source. Any target, any s l a. I would I would had any workload and because on so talk about you're differentiation in the marketplace, that would be great, because it's hard sometimes, you know, squint through all the marketing. And so what makes you guys different specifically thinking >> about Delhi emcee Indiana production historically has its strength in dealing with complex work clothes at high scale, with high performance on having a wide coverage of work has been a strength and actually had very low cost, very efficient, right? So that string we sort of carry on into the future. And what we're adding on is I would say that the next degree off simplification and ease off ease off, install, upgrade use. Making those work was very, very simple, right? So I think that's another dimension. We are God. We're adding our dimension, what we call multi dimensional scale, which is both scale up and scale out the same time when you actually add more notes and more cubes, you are not only capacity, but he also improved performance, right? That's it, architecturally, a fundamentally different way in Harvey approach it. So I think that's an element of innovation, and I think on performance we're introducing our first all flash off Lions industry first, So we're super excited about that. And so I think it just helped our customers in terms of restore interactions store Do those work was a lot faster. Those are some other elements in which we continue innovating. >> That's great. Yeah, so you talk about the power protect X four hundred, which is your flesh. John Rose said something on stage. Beth, I want to ask you, Teo, sort of add some color. Hey, said this is not just secondary storage. It's protected. Managed infrastructure, >> huh? That's great face. >> What? What did he mean by that? And what should we take away? >> I mean, it shows how we're broadening the use cases that these products can help satisfy. And so much of what we're talking about Del Technologies is a simplified infrastructure across the board, not thinking about just point products, but giving the customer that experience of a seamless extendable infrastructure. So protected managed infrastructure means that your infrastructure, something you have, can confidence it's protected and that you also are not just dealing with all of these pieces and parts. But I can think of it has a managed whole. I think that that helps out and talk to John about that. But that's what I take away from what he's saying. >> If I can just add to that, I would say Like, you know, data management is sort of the perfect glue across the whole del technology infrastructure, but a server storage bm We're, you know, eighty, you know, infrastructure pivotal, right? Data management data productions are off, cuts across everything, and we can bring everything together. So >> I would like to add something to that if I make it. You know Beth on sure Art as well. Data protection Backup was always OK. We gotta back it up. Who's gonna? Okay, Bump bolted on. And what's happening is the lines are blurring. Primary storage, secondary storage. You're seeing back up in the e r. Use cases. You talked about analytics and, you know, so many new emerging. That's why it is so exciting. And so because those lines are blurring, you get more value out of the system. It goes beyond just insurance. And that means this could be a lot of money being made here >> if there is. And it is also a really important need, write one thing that we haven't touched on. But I also think it's really important is with our protect we're helping combine self service with centralized governance. So what I mean by that is, if you're a V a madman or Oracle Adnan or a sequel admin, you know, you could have control over protecting your data, but we pair that with a single, you know, governance model. So if I'm the person is responsible for my company's entire, you know, data set, I can still make sure that everything's happening is it should be. And there are no anomalies, so we're really making it as easy as possible, for the business is within our customers to protect and manage their data but not making it the Wild West. Because somebody in the end is accountable for saying I know where all the data is, and I know it's protected, so it's having both of those users. >> So as data protection has really elevated, the stay was saying to become its way beyond an insurance policy. This is absolutely table stakes because data has so much value and so much value that organisations haven't even been able to extract it right, how the conversation within the customer base changed. It's not just to the admin girl or guy anymore. Rightness is Are you saying this really leveled up Tio? Maybe a senior level C level challenge as our business imperative that the state of must be protected and readily accessible at any time. Who are you talking to? >> So answer quickly that I lied to you when we're talking to the eye to decision makers. So seo no, that level data protection strategy has become something that they have in their priority list, right? It's not really in any way what it was maybe five or ten years ago. Now it's something that there's cord of what they hold as their responsibilities, executives and and that's great. It's great to have those kind of conversations because it's strategic. >> Another conversation. Just an example from yesterday, while speaking with one of the chief architects at a major company, they're really talking about cyber security on How do you use Extend? You know what we offer into a full solution across their technology. Do address, you know, doesn't use case right. So I think it's expanding beyond just back up and protection to true protection off the data. Very most mission critical data is available and not just protected. They also want to talk about how can you recover that real quickly in very quick time, so that your operation, when you do have that cyber, if and when you have that attack So I think it's just expanding toe touch. A lot more customers, I would say Our people buying, buying decision makers across >> so that when I talk to people in division I sense a renewed energy. A renewed focus. I mean, GMC before Del. Tell'Em Steve always been really good. Taking engineering resource is to getting products out to the market. But But I I see again more focused effort here and one of the exam to keep pushing on. Is this notion of cloud model so beyond? Just okay, there's a target. How do we now get to that? You know, data protection is a service small. I know that you're working toward that. I know it's, you know, a lot of it's It's early days there, but you've got to be a leader in that, I presume. So. I want to keep watching that pushing that I won if you guys could comment on what coming >> on, both things that you said. First of all, there's absolutely a level of excitement and focus and confidence in what we're doing in the product groups. I'm really changing the way we're developing software so that we have a new customer value coming out every quarter. And they were having clarity between the top level strategies. White downs, what individual engineers are working on. So that's fun and excited because we're truly transforming the way we're developing Product says point one. And the second one, absolutely here, that theme throughout all of what we're talking about. You heard a nun day one, No, giving people that cloud that experience infrastructure has a service which certainly includes data management and data protection so they can consume it in a way that fit step business that scales with business That's automated, that doesn't require, you know, massive manual steps and is more what people expect today was a cloud like experience, even for them on from data centers. Clearly, that's where we're moving. And this one more point is you know, people really want automation they don't wanna have to think about. Did I remember to protect everything? They want the system to do that for them. So you'LL see more of that from us as well. You know how we helping them with machine learning? An A I an automation so they can have confidence that all of the assets are protected even if they haven't remember to do it all. >> I mean, I just add to it. I've bean at Delhi emcee for about a year. >> It >> has been a fantastic journey waiting. It's exciting. It's been awesome. Awesome experience. I totally see the >> focus. And I think that renewed focus the cloud like a model and the innovation. They all go hand in hand because the old waterfall model of okay, we're gonna develop properties shipment every year, eighteen months. Whatever it is that doesn't fly anymore. People want innovations, and now they want to push code every day. Right? So our baby, every quarter at least. >> Yeah. Yeah. Facing new energy to the engineers as well. >> So I mean, I understand that many of your team, if not your entire engineering team, has been trained in agile. Is that my getting it right? Is that right? >> Yeah, yeah, >> not just not just like internal train. You guys brought in outside people and really took him through some formal training. Right >> way have in multiple different kinds of training. And we have lots of communications inside to get people coaching. And it's not just a process book that we're following its really a different way of thinking about how you bring customer value in small increments, staying in a good known stay and making sure that we're maximizing our engineering capacity. >> That's big. And I wish we had more time cause that's cultural train. Yeah, yeah, that you guys are really driving. And we also didn't have time to touch on partners, but it can imagine there's a lot of excitement and your huge partner community about what you guys are doing This. Congratulations on all the announcement is gonna have to have you back because there's just so much more to dig into. But back Sherrod, Thank you for joining David me this afternoon on the you go. >> Thank you so much >> for our pleasure. For Dave Volonte and Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Day three of Del Technologies, World twenty nineteen on the Cube. Thanks for watching