(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's Special Program Series: Women of the Cloud, brought to you by AWS. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to welcome Ashley Gaare to the program, Global Extended Executive Board Member and President, North America at SoftwareONE. Ashley, welcome, it's great to have you here. >> Hi Lisa, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. >> Talk to us a little bit about you, about SoftwareONE, about your role, give us that context. >> So SoftwareONE is a global services provider for end-to-end software cloud management. We operate in over 90 countries. Our headquarters globally are in Zurich, Switzerland. Our North American headquarters are in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And I run the North American region with scales from the US, Canada, we have parts in Costa Rica, in Mexico. And our primary purpose and to serve our clients is to help them really understand the restraints in cloud management, everything from licensing used rights to financial operations to workload migrations, to help them drive better outcomes for their business. >> It's all about outcomes for the business. Every conversation we have always goes back to outcomes, but I want to learn a little bit more actually about you. Talk a little bit about your career path and then give us some recommendations that you would have for others who are looking to really kind of step the ladder in their tech careers. >> Yeah, so I've been very fortunate and blessed to be able to be at SoftwareONE for 15 years. So I came up through inside sales. I had no idea how the tech world operated, didn't even know what a server was. And I learned on the job, and this was before even cloud was really relevant. And I think for me, I get asked a lot, "How did you work your way up," so to speak, and it's really about understanding where your strengths sit and investing in those strengths, building a brand of yourself and what your identity is like within the workplace. What do you want people to know of you? Do they want to, "Oh, I got to get Ashley on this project because she accelerates and executes cleanly," right? Or, "I need Ashley to do this because she can collaborate with peers and bring people along." So really understanding where you want to sit, what your skills are, and your strengths, and then asking for mentorship, getting career advice, raising your hand, take on more, and don't ever be afraid to ask questions and admit stuff when you don't know, that humble is part of our core value within SoftwareONE, and it's really, really helped me grow in my own career. >> Ashley, I love that you talked about creating your own personal brand. Another thing that I hear often from women in this situation is creating your own personal board of directors, of mentors, and sponsors who can help guide you along that path. You also talk about investing in you, and I think that is such pertinent advice for those to be able to create success stories within their career. I would love to then know about some of the successes that you've had, where you've helped solve problems relating to cloud computing for organizations, internal, external. >> Yeah, it's a great question. That's why we're here, right? Women of the Cloud. Yeah, SoftwareONE in particular, took the approach early on that we were going to go cloud first in our services portfolio offering, right? We saw the writing on the wall. There was no reason to invest backwards and build (indistinct) and data center consulting practices. So for us, everything we built from the ground up has been cloud native. And so some of the amazing client stories that we've had are really I think, I know it's a silver lining coming out of the pandemic when you had industries hit so hard but hit so differently. And technology was at the core on how they address those problems. So you had the healthcare space that had to get protection and be able to meet with their patients face to face but virtual at the same time. So they had to be able to take the data and still governance with HIPAA laws, keep it secure but then move it to the cloud and shift it fast, right? And then you had manufacturing who had employees who had to stay on site, right? To keep the supply chain running, but at the same time you had office workers that had to move home and completely be 100% remote. And so what we've been able to do really with AWS and our certifications in that practice is AWS differentiates itself with its agility, its framework, it allows for true development in the the PaaS space. It provides a really, really secure robust end to end solution for our clients. And when you have to be able to be nimble that quickly it's created this new expectation in the industry that it could happen again. So are you set up for the next recession? Are you set up for the next pandemic? God willing, there isn't one, but you never know. And so investing in the right infrastructure there in the cloud is critical. And then having the framework, to manage it and go it is second in line and importance. >> Being able to be just aware of the situations that can happen. In hindsight, it's, that's a silver lining coming at a COVID cheer point, being able to prepare for disasters of different types or the need to establish business continuity. I mean, we saw so many organ, well every, almost that survived every surviving organization pivot to cloud during the last couple of years that had no choice to one, survive and two, to be able to be competitive in our organization. And so we've seen so many great stories of successes. And it sounds like SoftwareONE has really been at the forefront of enabling a lot of businesses, I would imagine. Can the industry be successful in that migration and that quick pivot to being competitive advantage competitively, competitive? >> Yeah. Yeah. And I think our differentiator which comes from our core strength of this licensing and asset financial management piece. So with COVID, right? When you had this great acceleration to the cloud whether it was remote workplace or it was IaaS you then had no choice but to pay what you had to pay. It was all about keeping the lights on and running the business and thriving as much as you could. And so cost wasn't a concern. And then you had the impact in certain industries where it became a concern pretty quick. And so now we're seeing this over pendulum kind of this pendulum swing back where it's like, okay we're in the cloud, now we got to go back in time and kind of fix the processes and the financial piece and the components and the compliance that we didn't really address or have time to sit and think because we were in survival mode. And that's where SoftwareONE really comes in with this end to end view on everything from what should you move to the cloud? How does it impact your budget, your bottom line should you capitalize it? Can you capitalize it? And so the CFO and the CEO and that CIO suite have to be working end to end on how to do this effectively, right? So that they can continue to thrive in the business and not just run in survival mode anymore. >> Absolutely, we're past that point of running in survival mode. We've got to be able to thrive to be able to be agile and nimble and flexible to develop new products, new services to get them to market faster than our competition. So much has changed in the last couple of years. I'm wondering what your perspective is on diversity. We've talked about it a lot in technology. We talk about DEI often. >> Yeah. >> A lot's gone on in the last couple of years thought there's so much value in thought diversity alone. But talk to me about some of the things that you're seeing through the diversity lens and what are some of the challenges that are still there that organizations need help to eradicate? >> Yeah, topic I'm very passionate about. So there's a couple of big bullets, right? That are big rocks that we have to move. There's a gender gap, we know this. There's a wage gap, we know this. Statistics state, essentially that women make 82 cents for every $1 a man makes. Men hold 75% of the US tech jobs and working mothers, for example. 34% of them do not return to the workforce. It's mind blowing, fun facts and SoftwareONE is we actually have a hundred percent return working mothers come back and stay for at least a year, yeah. And it requires really intentional investment in making sure that they have an environment that they can be successful as they transition back making diligent choices on the benefits that you provide those women so that they don't feel that they have to make some of the tough choices that they feel pressured to do. And then you have this talent shortage, right? So on top of gender, on top of pay, then you have this all up shortage of underrepresented groups, right? And you also have, in the tech space there's just a lack of talent all up. And I think looking back, hindsight's always 2020 but as a community and as a vertical in the tech space, the organizations didn't do enough good job of reaching into high schools, understanding early on in elementary and middle school to provide equal opportunity to make the computer coding classes a requirement and not an elective to give everybody exposure to how tech works in the real world, right? As opposed to offering it as an elective. It should be a requirement. I mean, it's like financial management. It's how the world runs today is on tech. So something that SoftwareONE has done to really address that is we built this academy it's only two years in its infancy, so it's young but we go intentionally to schools and we hand select and we create a program, right? To get them exposed to the industries that they're interested in. Personally though, I think we need to start way earlier on and I think that's something that we all can work better at and is exposing the next generation to setting an expectation that tech is going to be in your life. And so let's learn about it and not be afraid of it and turn it into a career, right? >> Absolutely, every company these days has to be a data company. They have to be a tug company whether it's your grocery store, a retailer, a manufacturer, a car dealer. So that kind of choice isn't really there anymore that's just the direction that these companies have to go in. You mentioned something that I love because I've been hearing it a lot from women in this series. And that is, with respect to diversity organizations need to be intentional. It has to be intentional, really from the get go. And it sounds like SoftwareONE has done a great job with intention about creating the program and looking at how can we go after and solve some of the challenges that we have today but really go after some of these younger groups who might not understand the impact and the influence that tech is having in their lives. >> Yeah, and the only way to be intentional with the right outcome is to ensure that you have diversity of thought in the leadership teams that make those decisions, right? So you can put your best foot forward in being intentional with trying to keep women in the workforce but if you don't have women on your leadership team where are you getting that feedback from? And so it starts by this getting the talent into the company at the very bottom level from an inclusion standpoint, keeping them, but also intentionally selecting the right diversity of thought at the leadership levels where they make decisions. Because that's where the magic happens Where, I have the privilege to be able to choose and work with my HR partner on what benefits we provide. And you have to have a team that's all inclusive in understanding the needs of all the groups, right? Otherwise you end up intentionally in with the best intent of heart creating benefits that don't really help women. I think it takes a lot of work and and time, but it's something that's very important. >> Very, very important. The fact that you mentioned thought diversity, the amount of value that can come from thought diversity alone is huge. I've seen so many different data points that talk about when there are females or people of color in the executive positions at organizations they are x percent say 20% more profitable. So the data is there to demonstrate the power and the business value that can come from thought diversity alone. >> Yep. Exactly. Yep. >> So moving on, we've got a couple minutes left. I want to understand what you are seeing in your crystal ball or maybe it's a magic ball about what's next in cloud. How do you see your role evolving in the industry? >> So, well, what I think what's next in cloud both from an industry and a SoftwareONE standpoint is expanding outside of this infrastructure as a service mindset where cloud was there to run your business. And the beauty of it now is that cloud is there to also drive your business and create new products and capabilities. And so one of the biggest trends we're seeing is all organizations at some form or at some point in time will become a service provider or have an application that they host that they provide to their clients, right? And so they're a tech company. And so it's not just using tech to run it's using tech to build and innovate and be able to create a profit center to be able to drive back those to meet your clients' needs. And in order for you to make the appropriate decisions on financial strategy and budget management you have to know the cost to go into, to building the product, right? And if you don't know the cost to go into the building the product then you don't know the profit margins to set and you don't have a strategy to go sell it, at market value. And so it really becomes this linchpin in all of the areas of the business where you're not only running but you're also developing and building. So you have to have a very good, strong investment in the financial operations component of cloud. And I think that's where FinOps is coming in. You'll hear that phrase a lot, right? And so the end to end ability to financially manage cloud while secure, but also with visibility is that is this next generation, and it's going to include SaaS, right? 'Cause they're going to be plugging in it's going to include governance because it's not just the CIO making decisions anymore. It's business line leaders. And so how do you have this cloud center of excellence to be able to provide the data to the decision makers so that they can drive the business? >> And that's what it's all about, is data being able to be be used, extracting insights from it in a fast real time manner to create those business decisions that help organizations to be successful to pivot when needed and to be able to meet consumer demand. Last question for you, Ashley is, if you think about in the last say five years what are some of the biggest changes in terms of the tech workforce and innovation that you've seen? And what excites you about the direction that we're going in? >> Oh, I think that, well I think the biggest change over the last five years is the criticality of the space. It used to be like, well we're not so mature in cloud. We'll eventually get there, we'll dabble in it, we'll dip our toes in it, eventually, we'll move everything. And it's like, well, we're there.(laughs) So if you're not in it, you're behind. And I think what is really important for people who want to get into this space is it doesn't mean you have to be super techy, right? The number of times people are like can you help me with my computer? And I'm like, "No, I don't even know how." Like, "No, I not can help you with your computer." I consult and I help drive, business decisions with clients. And so there's all these peripheral roles that people can get involved in, whether it's marketing or it's sales or it's product design. It's not just engineering anymore. And I think that's what's really exciting about what's to come in this space. >> The horizon is infinite. Ashley, thank you so much for joining me on the program, talking about your role, what you're doing at SoftwareONE, some of the great successes that you've had in the cloud and some of your recommendations for organizations and people to grow their careers and really increase diversity in tech. We so appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. Thanks for having me. >> My pleasure. For Ashley Gaare, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE special program series; Women of the Cloud, brought to you by AWS. Thanks so much for watching. (soft upbeat music)

>>Good morning. It's the cube live from Las Vegas. This is day four of our coverage at AWS reinvent 2021. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. We have had since Monday two live sets two remote studios over 100 guests on the program. This is a 10th annual reinvent. We're talking about the next decade of cloud innovation and we're pleased to welcome Ashley Kramer, the chief product officer and chief marketing officer of Sisense to the program. Welcome Ashley, thanks for having me today. So you own marketing and product. Tell me a little bit about your role. Obviously that's done. >>It's a big role. It has a big role, but I think as the analytics ecosystem has evolved, it makes sense to bring the product you're building the platform you're building and the messaging that you're taking to market together in one. And so I've been in size since almost two years, and I am responsible for both the messaging and the building of the product. >>Awesome. Talk to me a little bit about the next generation of business intelligence. Define Gen-Z one, two and where we are with three. >>Yeah. So when we think about the generations of analytics and we think about how the world is evolved, we're here clearly at a cloud conference, data apps, and the way people work has evolved over time. And I think analytics hasn't quite kept up and I'll explain what I mean about that. The first generation of analytics was really about, you know, that we're talking by the way, late nineties, early two thousands, big on-premise servers of data, things that would make people here sort of cringe, right? And the way to extract value was to put an analytics server right next to it, go wait in line, ask her it, Hey, I need a report. And then wait a few weeks. That report gets delivered. It's the wrong data. It's now stale. You've got to go get back in line, enter gen two, which by the way, I was a part of in my career at Tableau. >>And what we said was let's put data at everybody's fingertips. Let's allow people via desktop tool to drag and drop and build the perfect, beautiful dashboard. And then we can deploy it to everybody and we will break down that barrier to it. And that was successful. But the one thing that we didn't understand was not, everybody's an analyst, not everybody's data literate and dashboards could be very, very intimidating to the everyday worker. And so now we're on the cusp of what we call gen three and sysynced is well-positioned to really nail this market, which is make data invisible, make analytics invisible, and bring it to where people are. And that's what we consider gen three. And I of course can talk about that for hours. So I'd love to talk more about it. >>So are the lines blurred between what people think of as artificial intelligence and BI, because you're talking about, um, you know, making this invisible or transparent, you know, frictionless access, um, are you talking recommendations or just a presentation of raw information? How are those two topics, interleaved >>Talking both. And so what's, what's really beautiful about this is the dashboard doesn't have to go away, but you have to break it apart and you have to make it less intimidating, more approachable, more understandable, which is where AI comes in natural language generation, natural language querying maybe for some people, maybe for a doctor, they want to see the data presented in plain text, plain English. Great. Let them do that. And so AI is a big, big piece of this gen three. When we think about where BI and analytics is evolving to. So >>Like it, from a customization perspective, you're going to be able to allow people in healthcare, finance, marketing, sales, operations products, be able to have data at their fingertips when they need it. Because one of the things that we learned in the pandemic is that access to real-time data is no longer a nice to have it's required. But to your point, if it's intimidating or if it's inaccessible, or if it's too complicated, it's not useful. >>That's right. And what we also learned during the pandemic is people are busy and they don't have time to change what they're doing. They don't have time to leave their everyday workflow and process to go look for something. They don't have time to look for an unnatural experience and try to interpret what it says. So customization is a huge piece of this, make it look and feel the way that a healthcare worker needs it to look and feel, make it look and feel the way that, you know, a construction worker makes it as part of their everyday job. And that's a core piece of gen three as well. >>What are some of the things that you guys are doing with AWS? Obviously, AWS, very, very customer focused. They always talk about working backwards from the customer, really this customer obsession. What are some of the things that you guys are working on together that your joint customers will benefit from? >>Fun fact, I was Amazonian as part of my career. So I grew up with Amazon in the early days of AWS. And we are very close partners with them from two really big perspectives. The first is the data's moving there, all of the data, particularly things like red shift. And that is a perfect place for size sense to sit right on top of that data, query it live, bring that and extract it to people in the way that they need it to consume. It really make data-driven decisions. The second piece is, um, and we saw a great keynote yesterday by Swami, which is the AI piece of the story, the comprehend, the Lexio, you know, really bringing to people, the data and the information and the way they need, and that all plugs into the size sense experience. And we can be that visual front end layer on top of all of those services. >>So where you sit because of your purview, looking at product marketing, and then let's, let's make, let's make the third point in the triangle, the customer always what, from your perspective, because you're thinking in terms of product customer requirements, and then you're thinking about how do you get the message across to make sure people understand what you're doing? What does a delighted customer sound like to you? What makes you smile? When someone says, Hey, Ashley, we have this customer who absolutely loves us. And these are the things they love about us. What does, what does that sound like? >>Really a very, very simple thing to answer because through my career too often, and I've read products at all of the companies I've worked for, you sell these big deals and you help them be successful with one use case. And you come back a year later in three people in the organization are actually using that solution to make data-driven decisions. So my perfect customer is, you know, we take them by the hand, we help them deploy that we come back a year later and the entire organization, all of their customers are using the solution because we've made it more approachable, more personalized and less intimidating. >>So what's the opposite of shelf ware. That's what you just described >>The opposite of shelfware and that breaks down every stat you see out there, there's a really widely known one that, um, less than 30% of organizations are actually successful with their analytics solutions. And my theory, my thesis and the research that we've done is that's exactly why it's too intimidating. It's too clunky and it's too disjointed. >>So talk to me, I, one of the things I think is the best validation of brand can get is the voice of the customer. I agree with you that it's, it's exciting when you, cause there's, there's so many, there's so many tools and you just mentioned the stat, um, in terms of adoption, but share with us a customer example that you think really articulates the value of what you're talking about. That gen three BI customizable, personable, what customer comes to mind are customers. You have. >>So one of my favorites is a company called outreach and what outreach outreach caters to is sales. It's, you know, early sales, sales enablement, helping people understand which customers should I go target. And should I go sell to, these are not analysts using the platform. And when outreach came to us, they said, we want data and analytics to drive our experience for all of our customers. But these are young salespeople. They can't just be looking at dashboards. And so what we've done with them is we were actually the AI engine that drives the experience. And as that BDR, ADR SDR gets in there, they're actually using analytics to figure out who to call what account is hot, what to do next, and right. They're actioning right in the experience. And they have no clue that they're will using data. And that's okay. And they're optimized. They're more efficient at their job because science is powering that experience. >>So they could be in Salesforce and accessing this, like under the covers, not even knowing it, they have no idea >>Exactly >>What they're empowered with BI AI to be able to make decisions. >>And they're becoming better at their jobs because they're using data and they're not learning a new skill set because they don't have time. There's no time. >>That's a great point. One of the other points that we've heard a lot, the last three days is every company has to become a data company. One thing to say it whole other can of worms, right? To actually enable it. Because to your point earlier, you have access to data it's confusing or it's stale. There's a competitor right here. Ready to take over. Talk to me about how your customer conversations have changed, especially in the last 22 months about how do we become data really? Data-driven, >>That's, that's interesting because if you would've asked me two, three years ago, I would have given you this big pitch on, well, we need to go in and help them build this culture of data and analytics, right? We're going to go in and help them. That has changed. What we need to do now is accept that building. That whole culture is too hard to do. It requires people to go beyond their job and really learn a new skill set. So what we do is we make every company, a data company by not necessarily making them really realize that they're using analytics and data. We're making it personalized. We're removing the nuances that come with building the state of literacy culture. So yes, you still need to build the culture around it and have the support, but you need it to be less intimidating and you need it to just be part of the everyday workflow, the everyday process, the everyday experience, regardless of job title. There's another interesting stat that there's over 1 billion knowledge workers out there that are underserved. That's the barrier we need to break down. Next analysts are happy. Data scientists are happy. They have what they need. How do we get what they're doing to those 1 billion plus underserved knowledge workers. >>So when you're in customer conversations and they're like, Ashley, help us figure this out. >>You say, we go in and we show, you know, we, we figure out what their business case is. And they very often say, okay, let's start with a big, huge dashboard. Step them back and say, what are you really trying to solve? Okay. You want that doctor to be more efficient? You want to triage more properly, maybe right there within your system, within your medical system. We're just going to pop, you know, we're going to pull data out of red shift and we're just going to pop some insights there. Some recommendations, as you mentioned earlier, some plain text, we'll give you a search experience so you can search, you know, what beds are open and it will bring it back to you the way that you understand how to work, you don't have to change. >>And that's critical because one of the things that we talk about all the time is change management, cultural change. It's really hard to do, especially given the dynamics of the environment that we're in. People are still scattered, working from anywhere. That's going to persist for a while. We need to meet them where they are >>Absolutely a hundred percent nailed it. And I'm going to steal that in my marketing material. Thank you. I'm a marketer trademarks. Um, but absolutely meet them where they are. And you know, everybody wants to evolve. Everybody wants to upscale and you can help them, but don't expect it to happen overnight. And don't expect they're going to take it on as a second job because their core job function is the most critical. >>It's interesting from a marketer's perspective. Um, it's always great to have people running around wearing size sense, hoodies on the customer site what's even better is having them using the product. And maybe they don't even know as long as key stakeholders in the organization knows so that you can drive, you know, drive into the market. But is there anything disheartening about sort of being toiling in obscurity at times? >>It is the hardest part of the CMO hat that I wear is you both are very likely using size sense in something that you're doing and you have no idea. And that is a brand's nightmare. So yes, checking my pockets. In fact, we are giving away Fanny packs. And as soon as I'm done, I will be over here with two Fanny packs for you. Apparently that's the new thing. That's what the kids are doing. Um, but it is very hard. It's um, we have to do more because lots of people are using size sense and actually lots of people at this conference right now, a lot of these vendors have size sense embedded, and they don't necessarily know they're using it. It's a double-edged sword though, >>Because you're saying, you know, the whole point is making analytics invisible. So, but it is, but I'll take the Fanny pack. >>I'll be out. Don't worry about that. Don't you worry? >>So here we are wrapping up 10th annual at reinvent. You were an Amazonian. So you've been to many of these, obviously the first one in two years, there's nothing like the conversations that are going on behind it. There's nothing like an in-person interview to have a really a conversation about the technology. What are some of the things that have you heard at the conference that excite you going into 2022? >>My excitement going in is the focus that everybody's putting just beyond what's next beyond data like the AI, right? The AI perspective of everything, the way that AWS is evolving their data story, lots of serverless spoken by Adam in the first day. And I think there's really, really big things coming. You see the three big clouds competing and making each other better and better. You see vendors like size sense working cross-cloud because everybody has something best in class. And so I am one very excited to be in person and to be shaking hands and hugging friends that I have not seen except over zoom in two years. But I'm really excited for the direction. Particularly AWS is taking the data ecosystem inside sense plans to be a core part of that. >>Awesome. It's exciting. The amount of innovation that has gone on is we think, you know, the next 10 years is we're going to see far more in the next, probably five than we did in the previous 10. Actually. Thank you so much for joining us, talking to us about science. We'll have to, we'll have to think about that. Well, when we get our Fanny pack, so we can talk about science, how we're using it, but awesome. To be able to bring analytics to everyone so that it is invisible, usable, and we can actually extract value from data in real time. Thank you for >>Having me today. Our >>Pleasure for Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, the global leader in live tech coverage.

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering Accenture Tech Vision 2020, brought to you by Accenture. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Rick here with theCUBE. We are high atop San Francisco, at the Accenture Innovation Hub, 33rd floor of the Salesforce Tower at the Accenture Technology Vision 2020 party. The party's getting started. Paul, and Mike, and the team are going to present the findings, and we're excited to have, actually, the hostess of this great facility. She's Ashley Miller, managing director of the San Francisco Innovation Hub. Ashley, great to see you. >> Great to see you again. >> So, congratulations once again. We were here last year. It was the grand opening of this facility. >> Ashley: Yes, sure was. >> You've had it open for a year now. >> We sure have. It's been a year. We also have a soft launch in September, so a little more than a year under our belt, and as you can see, the place is busy. >> Right, so you had the hard job, right? So Mike, and Paul, and all the big brains, they put together pretty pictures, and great statements. You're the one that actually has to help customers implement this stuff, so tell us a little bit about how you use the Tech Vision because it's pretty insightful. It's a lot deeper than cloud's going to be big, or mobile's going to be big, but to take some of these things to help you with your customers drive this innovation. >> Yeah, well, I don't know about having the hard job against theirs. They certainly have the hard job understanding what these technology trends are that are going to have an impact on business three to five years out, but I certainly do have the fun job, and the exciting job. I get to work with our clients every day here in the hub, and work with our 250 dedicated innovation teammates here in the hub to think about the impact of these trends to their business, so clients come in for a day, two days, a week, and we'll sit with technologists. We'll get our hands on some of these emerging technologies, on quantum computing, on artificial intelligence, machine vision, machine learning, natural language processing. You name it, we have it here. We have a smart materials showcase going on upstairs that a lot of these clients have checked out, so they can come here, they can get their hands on these technologies that are driving these trends, and then, they can sit and work with strategists, and others who can think about, what are the application of these technologies to their business? And then, what's really exciting is we have engineers here who can then help build prototypes to actually test these technologies to see what their impacts are for the business, and then, finally, support the rollout of pilots that prove successful, so it's, again, it's a fun job. I love it. >> And how does it actually work in terms of best practices? Is it starting out as some strategy conversation with the top-level people about trying to integrate say, more AI into their products, or is it maybe more of within a product group, where they're trying to be a little bit more innovative, and it really challenges on the product development path? You talked about the material science that they want to go down, what are some of the ways that people actually work with you, and work with your teams, and leverage this asset here at the hub? >> Yeah, so ultimately, it's both, and it's at all ends of the spectrum. We are here in the Silicon Valley, where clients are coming from all over the globe to understand what the trends are that are going to shape their business operations in the future, so we have clients that are coming through. Some people call them digital safaris, or innovation safaris. Some people may say that's not valuable. I think it is valuable to come and get firsthand experience, knowledge, touch and feel these things, and really dedicate time to think about the application to your business. On the other end of the spectrum, we'll have clients who are here for days, weeks, and months, and we have ongoing partnerships with clients. We've been open for about a year and a half, for that and longer to actually embed this innovation capabilities into their business, so I think maybe an answer is, what is the most successful model I see? I really get to dig into these clients who are using our services as an innovation engine to help them drive their business, and to help augment their innovation capabilities, and it's those clients I see who are continuously testing, continuously learning, understanding the impact of these technologies, driving proofs of concepts to test them who are able to make progress. >> Can it happen without top down support? I mean, we talked, unfortunately Clayton Christensen just passed away. Innovator's Dilemma, my favorite business book of all time because he said smart people making sound business decisions based on customers, profitability, and business, logical business priorities, will always miss discontinuous change. Jeff Bezos talks about AWS had a seven-year head start on their public cloud because no one down in Redwood Shores, or Waldorf was paying attention to the bookseller in Seattle, so it's hard for big companies to innovate, so is it really necessary for that top down, that, hey, we are going to invest, and we are going to saddle up, and get our hands dirty with some of these technologies for them to be successful, and drive innovation because it's not easy for big enterprises. >> You're exactly right. Innovation is hard. Change is difficult. I was a student of Clayton Christensen, and like you and many others, are mourning his passing. He made a significant impact, this area of research. Change is hard. It's difficult, so we see a lot of clients who are coming in, and are doing interesting things to overcome that inertia to stay put, and I think tops down leadership is a significant piece of that. You need to have leaders who are supporting movement, who are enabling decision making quickly, so they are supporting small decisions they're making frequently so that there's not a massive decision that happens at the end of a pilot, but rather, micro-decisions that help ensure things are being moved along, building pilots and proof of concepts, of course, helped in that movement to get buy-in, to get leaders to see the value, and to also pivot if something isn't working, so innovation is hard. Accenture's Innovation Hub helps to fill some of those gaps because really, we are a sandbox, where you can come in, build the proof of concepts, test these ideas, and then, in an ongoing, continuous way, help understand their impacts to your business. >> Right, and I'm just curious how often, as order of magnitude, this innovation around a particular, existing business, maybe it's the new materials, the new way of thinking about it, versus maybe, is this a way for them to really explore wild ideas, or go out a little bit beyond the edge of what they're going to execute in their normal, day to day, say, product development because which of those do you find is best use of your resources? >> Yeah, so again, it runs the spectrum. I mean, I think the companies who are innovating around the edges, they're spending a lot of money to run pilots, and tests, proof of concepts that may not have significant value to the core of their business, so of course, it's the companies who are really thinking about how they're going to innovate new business models, how they're going to build on these trends to figure out where their company is going in the future, and be ready, and be ahead of the curve, but in order to get there, maybe you do need to get your hands dirty, and run some tests, run some proof of concepts to understand the technology. The key is, in order to ensure that the investment in those activities is actually helping you move the needle. >> Right, so how should people, if somebody's watching this, and they want to get involved, or I'm busting my head. We're not moving as fast as we need to. I'm nervous. I have an imperative. I need to accelerate this stuff. How do they get involved, and how do they end up here getting their hands dirty with some of your team? >> Yeah, thanks for that, appreciate that. Accenture works with the largest organizations around the globe, and there's typically a client account leader, partner, from Accenture embedded into the biggest organizations, and so, for those who are existing clients, they can reach out to their client account lead, and we would be delighted to welcome them in, and do some, either, exploratory research into these technologies, or actually, do some longer-term innovation engine work, where we're helping to augment their capabilities. For those who, maybe, aren't an Accenture client, then, we do have open houses. We do quarterly open events, not only for potential new clients, but also, for people in the community for partners, for schools. We're really committed to helping to be an asset for San Francisco, for this community, so keep your eyes peeled for opportunities to come in. >> Yeah, that's great because last time when we were here when we opened there was a lot of conversation about being a very active participant in the community. You guys are sponsors with the Warriors at the Chase Center, but no, I think we had a number of people from the city and county of San Francisco in talking about the opportunities, and being an active, engaged member of the community beyond just a for-profit company. >> Absolutely, and the undercurrent of this year's Tech Vision, which is about to launch is all about thinking beyond the edges of your organization, and understanding the choices that you make, how they impact the communities you serve, so it's really important to us to be a good steward of that here at Accenture, and we have teammates accessible within the hub. For example, data enthesis, who can help you understand the decisions you're making around artificial intelligence. Are you using data securely? Are you using it in a way that makes people feel comfortable? So we have teammates here who can help clients consider the impact of these decisions that goes beyond the four walls, to really be a good steward for the next generation. >> Okay, well, next time I come, I'm wearing a white coat, so we can go get our hands dirty. >> I like it. >> All right, Ashley, well, again, congratulations to you and the team, and have a great evening. >> Thank you so much. >> All right, she's Ashley, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're at the Accenture Innovation Hub for the Technology Vision 2020. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you next time. (funky electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's The Cube. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, here at the Sands Convention Center at Dell Technologies World 2019. I'm Stu Miniman, my cohost here is David Vellante. Two sets, five hosts, three days, wall to wall coverage. All of the action for Dell Technologies, all the component pieces. Happy to welcome back to the program Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, who's the president of the server and infrastructure services at Dell EMC. Ashley, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> Good to see you. >> Alright, so we actually had Sam Grocott on and we were talking about all the product lines. And he said he's the father of power going across the line. He did admit that the power line goes back to PowerEdge, which, of course, is your baby. >> That's right. >> Give us the update, lots of discussion at the keynote. Always change in your world, so give us the latest and greatest. >> Sure, we're about 25 years old now. So PowerEdge has lived on for quite a while. We've got to be over 30 million servers out there by now. So we had a really good Dell Technology World so far. More to come, but some of the lists, real quick, of announcements that we've had and we can talk a little bit more about them. In servers, we actually went a little bit early from Dell Technology World and lined up with Intel to launch Cascade Lake, bringing Optane into server class memory. I think the industry's been waiting for it. We're ready to deliver now. And so that was earlier this month. We've put quite a bit of advancements and enhancements in our open manage enterprise and in securing the platforms. We also this week talked about a PowerEdge that's not called a PowerEdge. So we call it the DSS 8440, and really a capstone product to our AI ML portfolio. So today we already support one, two, three, four accelerators per server. Now we can go up to 10. We can support the latest Nvidia B100 tensor core GPUs, and it's really a unique system within the industry. That's going to help customers scale their training loads further and further, faster performance, more mips, very, very intense box, but one that's going to be, I think, well received within the marketplace. >> Did you say bits? >> I said Mips. >> I like that term,. >> So actually, we've got a lot of pieces that your solutions fit, but you mentioned one item, that I wonder if you could just explain to our audience the importance of SEM, is something that how does that impact solutions, the applications. It's something that a lot of times get lost in the whole general storage discussion. So maybe explain the importance of SEM in the marketplace today. >> Sure. So it's a game changer, it really will be, but it'll have to go, in our mind, through the technology adoption curve that a game changer deserves. So it's been a long time coming. We've been working on it, the industry's been working on it. Intel has been working on it for more than a decade. And if you think through it, we see customers using it in two different ways. In memory mode, expanding the capacity within nodes to levels that you can't reach with DRAM today at almost DRAM-like levels and performance, is something that a lot of customers already have models for. They can think through TCO, they can think through their performance characteristics, and it really becomes something they can consider to enhance their portfolio today, at mode, a little bit different. As we think through software from the OS level: kernel, hypervisor, application, cache, log, database, all these levels, we're going to have software that has to catch up and allow this to be the game changer it is. But already, I'll tell you the demand for systems that we're providing customers to begin their evaluations, they proof of concepts, their software development has actually doubled what we thought it would be, and we were pretty ambitious. So I think the demand is there, and we're going to see that adoption curve when the software catches up. >> And any specific use cases you're seeing early on? >> Well like I said, memory mode, I think people can get their heads around already, is are they performance, or are they capacity bound by DRAM. Start to do the economics, does it make sense. At mode, caching for sure, putting log, changing kind of the structure of how you do logs, and database is really going to be the killer app when we get there. Across the different vendors already we've seen pretty significant increases in performance, and we're early still. But I think there's a few things that our customers want to get through, and we're trying to help them with. If you have persistence in the system, you have a new level of something you have to secure, and so we're spending a lot of time with our customers helping them develop technology methodologies to say wait a minute, information, I turned the machine off and there's still information besides the hard drive or the SSD. Also can I trust the data even though it's persistent? Or do I have to have storage services at that level that help me with things like replication or snapshot or archive. So we've got a long way to go, but we're really, we believe this is a game changer, and we're developing towards that. >> And cost-wise you're sayin' slightly more expensive than DRAM. >> Probably a little bit more than slightly. >> Yeah, okay, more expensive than DRAM, and relative to flash, obviously more expensive than flash, but much higher performance, right? >> Much higher performance, and so it's just a modeling exercise, but it'll reach levels we haven't had before. And then from a software developer point of view as you go forward, you can really think about scale out systems differently. If your application was bound by capacity of DRAM or memory, this changes it quite a bit. >> So you're talking about new programming model, essentially right, that's why it's going to take some time, but you would expect maybe uptake in financial services early on. Is that fair, Or not necessarily? Healthcare? >> All solid verticals. I think it's going to be where enhancement or performance can, you know, if you pay three, four, five x the cost, but you get three, four, or five x the capability, or even less, you have to think about it, but there's some applications where latency, where performance of the database are so sensitive, and such the bottleneck today, that it's well worth it. >> When you look at the innovation pie that's going on in servers, how much is architecture, hardware architecture, versus sort of software and management? Can you sort of, I know it's a sort of general question, but give us a sense. >> Sure, I think it's interesting, is we are investing as we go forward, I think into a brand new era. So I mentioned earlier we made it to 25 years old, what's going to happen over the next 25 years. So I think most of the architectures that we develop today are highly, highly optimized for bringing data into a processor, calculating, storing. And we have very balanced, efficient, high-performance systems for that today. What are we doing going forward? Well, we're not necessarily bringing the data, describing the rules, called software, and then getting the answers anymore, right? Now what we want to do in a lot of situations, we want to bring the data, which is the most valuable asset, we actually kind of know the answers already. We want it to calculate rules for us, and that's the output. That's a different architecture. That's a different way of computing, and that's why you're seeing these heterogeneous architectures starting to form, accelerators, a lot of technology going, and innovation, and venture capital, and talent going towards really building that new model going forward for the next two decades. >> Okay, actually we've had a lot about cloud this week. When I looked at many of the solutions underneath, I kept hearing the same answer. VxRail, VxRail, I've talked to some of the team, there is more than just VxRail and some of these solutions. Sammon looked at some of the other pieces, but VxRail has been a rocket ship for the last couple of years, and of course, you know, the servers underneath driving a lot of that. Can you talk about how that plays into your portfolio and some of the architectural discussion we were seeing. How does that bleed into the HCI and hyper cloud discussions? >> Sure, so if you think of the journey we're on, 10 years ago perhaps, maybe even more recently than that, customers really were making two different choices. As a matter of fact, you guys know as well. I was organized into two different organizations. One to deal with hyper-scale, and one to deal with enterprise capability, and customers can see that. They want to be able to operate in both domains, but even we were organized differently. And if you go maybe five years ago when people started talking about software defined and HCI we finally had a mechanism to say you can build scale out of architectures. We can automate this capability for you. You don't have to actually spend all your opexs, you administration, your talent, and your time, just keeping the infrastructure up and running. And so people broke out of IT by project by Gantt chart, and into flexible architectures, right. Next thing they said is but we still aren't really operating. We're operating in silos of very flexible architecture here in my data center, very flexible architecture in the colo, very flexible architecture in software defined or SAS or cloud. How do I bring it together? So we believe there's a consistency of platform and infrastructure that allows us to move to a consistency of operations. VxRail offers that today, because we uniquely can integrate with VMWare and V Cloud Foundation, to build where now we can take care of the automation, the lifecycle management of the hardware. VMWare together integrated now can take care of the lifecycle of the software stack, all the way up to the IAS layer or beyond, and now we have the ability to say you can look upwards, you can develop, you can build on that, and even more so, if you want to then stitch that together, and have that be the control plane, you can now build that out to other native public clouds, now you have the hybrid cloud. We can actually get there, we can actually organize around it, build it. I mean it's a breakthrough for our customers. And then add on that, some customers have come back to us and said, you have the expertise to do all this for us, can I just consume it? I don't actually need to control it. And in that case we can offer it as a service, and we previewed that as Project Dimension last year, and now the teams are really happy to bring it to fruition all the way to beta with customers today, and really give customers kind of that choice. >> So what's behind that? I mean you've got a team of people sort of monitoring everything, obviously a lot of automation. What's the customer conversation like? I mean it's the early days, but what do they want to know about, do they always just want to say hey you take care of it? Or do they want to peel the layers and say okay, I want to peek behind the curtain before I sign up for this. >> Yeah, so on the platform side, customers want to know how does the integration work. Really where do I have to spend time, energy? Can I really live at this IAS layer, can I live at the PAS layer with pivotal, can I live above that? How do my workflows get managed? And when you say, we're kind of in the environment and the methodologies you already use today with V Center and V Motion and PKS. Then I think you see a light bulb go off of okay, I can really lead the administration to the machines, and the automation. Then the customer who's interested in moving everything maybe to a consumption model, then they have the next question which is can I have consistency not only of infrastructure operation, but of consumption? And that's where as a service offering, really starts to highlight the fact that we can meet you on your journey wherever you are. Some customers aren't ready for that, some are just right there saying that's really the model I want to move to for digital transformation. >> Okay, you got roughly a 20 billion dollar business growing at almost 20 percent a year, so pretty good year last year. Give us the update on your business, why are you being so successful, and I got a follow up question on component, so the supply with. >> Okay sure. So we did have a pretty good year last year. We don't break out servers, but servers are networking as you said, but about 20 billion dollars growing at 28 percent. Why? Well I think we have one of the most capable portfolios of infrastructure. We're uniquely trying to make sure that we are operating within the Dell Technologies portfolio. And so most customers, Dave, have not come to us and said you know what I'd like to do, I'd like to have like 10 more of you guys come meet with me and talk to me about a portion of my business. They said why can't you come and provide all of my needs? But I don't want to compromise. I don't want to have one best of class, and then have to compromise across my other needs. So really building kind of number one all in one place, is that promise that you don't have to compromise. Really it's changed the dynamic with a lot of customers being able to say this is my essential IT infrastructure provider. They have what I need. So that's helped quite a bit. The nature of our business I think is that we are operating from the smallest customer, you need one, all the way up to customers who need a million servers, and we're able to operate in a consistent PowerEdge tenent across all of that space. Then the, I think, and you didn't mention it, but in hyper converged, we're seeing growth rates that kind of put the server business to shame, with we were 65 percent in Q4 in an industry that's growing 40 percent that's on fire. It's a new business model, it's still emerging, but customers, the demand for hyper converged continues to go forward, because that operating model, simplicity, elastic, scale out, automated, is extremely powerful. >> And component supply right now, component pricing, is a tail wind for you. For years it's been a head wind. Is that right, it's flipped? Or not so much >> Certainly, yeah certainly the last two years has been sort of an unprecedented rise in some of our commodities in terms of cost. We're seeing that be deflationary or stable at this point, so it's really changed a little bit of the dynamic of how customers were operating within their own budgets. So now I think we're more in what we're used to in the beginning 23 years as we go forward. >> So actually, last thing, you talked about you used to have kind of a hyper-scale business. Just give us the update. I saw a quote out there that Dell puts more gear out there in hyper-scale environments, than anyone. Can you just give us a little context as to what that means? >> Sure, you know as we go forward, I think we've seen others say that they don't operate in certain businesses, they don't want to be in tier one, and you won't hear that from us. I think where we can add value, and we have incredible assets in terms of engineering, modular data center capability, capability at the edge, real assets like software supply chain delivery, across the board. We want to be able to help customers build their infrastructures. And in the service provider community, I think we've already built up relationships, credibility, and technology, to help them compete. Our standard is if you do business with us, we want you to win in your segment. We want you to transform faster than your competition, and we think we can do that for people, and I think we continue to see quite a bit of success in the service provider's space. >> Well really appreciate the updates, and congratulations on all of the progress you've made Ashley. >> Thank you, great job thanks for having me guys. >> Alright, for Dave Vellante, I'm Stu Miniman, gettin' towards the end of day two, three days wall to wall coverage. Thank you as always for watching The Cube.

(upbeat music) >> From Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE covering the 15th annual GROW! Awards. Brought to you by ACG SV. >> Hey, Lisa Martin with theCUBE on the ground at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, for the 15th annual ACG SV GROW! Awards. Can you hear the energy and all the innovation happening behind me? Well, I'm here with one of the board members of ACG SV, Ashley Tarver, big data evangelist for Cloudera. Ashley, thank you so much for joining me on theCUBE tonight. >> My pleasure, I'm glad to be here. >> Lot of collaboration going on behind us, right? >> It's a great networking event. >> It is. >> 'Cause so many people have showed up. >> There's over 230 people. >> Oh, easily. >> Expected tonight, over 100 of those are C-levels. Before we get into your association with ACG SV, talk to us a little bit about what's going on at Cloudera, just the Hortonworks acquisition was just completed, the merger, a couple months ago, what's going on there? >> It's very exciting. As most people might know, we just did a major collaboration merger with a company called Hortonworks. And the two companies together, we're about twice the size as we were before and for the industry and for our customers, it's been really exciting because we've been able to really create what we call the enterprise data cloud that really enables our customers to bring all their data together into one single platform and we call it an edge-to-AI solution. We're really one of the only companies right now in the world who have the ability to do that in a comprehensive manner and we can do it on the premise, we can do it in the cloud, a hybrid cloud environment, so it gives you the ultimate flexibility and the merger has allowed us to really accomplish that for our customers. >> As we and every company that's succeeding today is living in this hybrid, multi-cloud environment where the edge is proliferating, the security perimeters are morphing dramatically, companies need to be able to transform digitally in a secure way, but also enable access to data from decades ago. >> Yeah, most anybody's who's listening to the media will hear IoT is really the big play and the ability to capture all that data from multiple in-points, edge devices, and bring it all into a single data repository is a major challenge. So, having the ability to do that in a. You can do it now with the way we're doing it, the way your company wants to do it. So if you're already in the cloud, you can stay there, if you wanted to keep it on the premise. So there's a lot of options that we now bring to the table. So hopefully, it becomes a little easier for our customers. >> So when you're talking with customers that maybe have a lot of workloads, enterprise workloads, maybe legacy still on prem, and you're talking to them in your role as the big data evangelist, where does the topic of AI come up? I mean, are you talking to them about here is a massive opportunity for you to actually leverage AI, you got to go to the cloud to do it? >> Absolutely. I mean, AI is kind of a marketing term that you hear a lot about. For us, it's really about machine learning and machine learning is taking large sets of data and putting logic on top of it and so you can tease out valuable insights that you might not otherwise get. So the ability to then apply that in an AI environment becomes extremely important and the ability to do that across a large data set is what's really complicated. But if you're a real data scientist, you want to have as much data as you can so your models can run more accurately. And as soon as you can do that, you'll have the ability to really improve your models, extract better insights out of the data you do own, and provide more value to your own company and your own customers. >> Absolutely, it's a fascinating topic, but since we're low on time here, we are at the 15th annual GROW! Awards. ACG SV recognizing Arista Networks for the Outstanding Growth Award and Adesto Technologies for the Emerging Growth Award. You've been involved as a board member of ACG SV for about a year now. What makes this organization worthy of your time? >> Well, it's really exciting 'cause in Silicon Valley, it's unique 'cause it's all about collaboration. The innovation that we create out of this location of the globe is through networking with our peers and ACG opens up that window, provides a door that allows you to meet with your peers, your competitors, your friends, and as a result, you can create insights and capabilities about your own company and technology directions that's really helpful. So, it's the networking, they also put on excellent C-circle events, which is really good because if your company is looking at growing as a startup, you might be able to get some valuable insights from peers who know how to do HR, merger acquisitions, finance. And so, the ability to do networking like at an event like this, the ability to come in and learn how to do business processes more effectively, it all plays a really important role at ACG. >> Well Ashley, thank you so much for carving out some time to join us on theCUBE tonight. >> My pleasure, thanks for having me. >> I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> From the Sales Force tower in downtown San Francisco. It's the cube covering a censure Tech vision twenty nineteen brought to you by Silicon Angle media. >> Hey, welcome back. You're ready, Jeff. Freak >> here with the cue. We're >> in the center. Innovation hub, downtown San Francisco Salesforce >> Tower. The party is just getting started and you can see >> behind us. Had a ribboned coat ribbon cutting ceremony this morning. We're excited here for the Century Technology Vision awards given later today. But we're excited of our next cast. First >> time on the Cube. Ashley Miller. She's the director of Innovation West Region for centuries, actually. Welcome. >> Thank you so much. Glad to be here. >> So all these toys are for you to play with. >> They they are there so many interesting things to play with your so many incredible people. It's an incredible place to be. >> So it's a great aggregation of kind of a bunch of satellite offices. You've got three stories of really kind of active, engaging labs. I wonder if you could say I guess she had a soft opening a little while ago. Tonight was the heart opening. What are some of the ways that customers actually come in and use this facility? >> Yeah, way actually have five floors. We have the thirty first through thirty fifth floor. Five entire floors with several of those floors dedicated solely Teo, innovating with our clients and collaborating and co creating with our clients. So this is the official launch The Big Party, opening us officially with the ribbon cutting. But Way did have a soft launch over the summer, and in fact, we've been hosting many clients >> each week. >> It's it's really incredible that demand is quite high. People are very eager to come in and explore and learn as well as define strategies and actually co create solutions here with the experts. So it's it's exciting, >> so help. So they come in small teams, big teams. They come for a day a week. What are some of, you know, kind of the standard offerings? If you will t come and learn about invasion >> all of the above. We host clients as well as, you know, partners in the community, uh, students and educational groups. People who want to come in and learn about emerging technologies and their potential impact to business to society. A cz well as multiday and multiweek sessions where we're actually rode mapping solutions, building new ideas together and actually co creating prototypes and solutions to solve those those challenges >> right. So Paul, talk bitterly about your innovation, architecture's so everybody wants to know how to innovate, especially in a big company. It's it's not necessarily easy, and you guys have a bunch of assets in play. And then, as I understand it, the hub is the location where you bring all those assets under one roof. >> That's exactly right. This hub is a flagship hub where we have every element of our innovation architecture represented. So it's center has this architecture to help both ourselves innovate as well as our clients and our partners. So clients and partners can come here and access the incredible breadth of our experts, designers, engineers, builders. So here in our flagship hub, we have teammates from our research organization that's offering points of view and helping others understand. What does the future look like? We have teammates from our labs are R and D organization that's actually looking at these cutting edge technologies, quantum computing, connected devices, artificial intelligence and understanding, and using these technologies, developing prototypes to test and learn and understand their potential value. Then we have teammates who can actually build prototypes and solutions. Both connected digital devices as well as physical devices way have teammates in our ventures group who are partnering with the ecosystem of universities as well start ups as well as big ecosystem platform partners and bringing those teammates in and using their solutions to help procreate and ninety eight new opportunities for our clients. And then, of course, within our innovation architecture, we also have our delivery centers. So once you identify really game changing opportunity on, you've tested it and you understand, and it's a viable solution. Well, then you can scale it more cost efficiently through our delivery centers, >> right? So I know it might be asking you like to pick your favorite kid, but but but share. I mean, what is a Woody one or two of your kind of favorite things? That that is here in this innovation hub, that you just think it's just cool beyond compare. >> It is asking me to pick my favorite kid. There's so many incredible things here, but I can tell you what we have on display tonight. We have Mary Hamilton, the head of our labs organization, along with Theresa Tongue is a managing director within our labs and room on Chowdhry, who leads a practice of ethical, eh? I talking about the future of human and robot interaction. What does that mean for teams when they're augmented by robots? How do you do that in a fair way and in an ethical way, so that you're using the humans potential as well as the robot's potential. We have Mike Reading the head of our ventures team. We have him here, along with some of our teammates, from research Justin hers egg. And they're They're talking about the power of Blockchain to create transparency and accountability within supply chains. A CZ well is talking about some of the power of of some of the startups we're working with, like one Cuban quantum computing start up, which we partnered with Bio Gen. The healthcare company. Toe Actually use quantum computing. Teo. Increase the speed of drug discovery. It's really incredible. It takes on average in the industry. It takes ten years and a billion dollars to bring an average drug to market, and they're hoping they can speed this up significantly with with quantum computing. So way have stations on display where you can actually go inside a quantum computer where we'll use immersive technologies. And walking inside, you can actually understand and see what are the powers of quantum mechanics that enable quantum computing? Let's >> see, we >> have way have incredible leaders. So those were those >> were just going long >> so I could keep down. >> I love it. And we keep hearing about the incredible technologists that you have here that something like, I don't remember fifteen hundred out of the six thousand patents you've you've had are coming out of the people that work in this facility. >> It's it's unparalleled the talent that is in this building. Um, sometimes when I walk around, I can almost see the, you know, quantum physics coming out of their brains. They're just incredible. The talent that is here and the talent that we have accessible to our partners about TTO learn from a CZ Wells to partner with and build because these teammates, they're they're working on cutting edge things. And they're looking for partners to explore the validity of these new concepts. So a lot of times we're partnering with clients were both putting some skin in the game to test these ideas on DH. It's It's a really exciting place to be at the intersection of business and technology ideation and building solutions. >> Right? And you're not just doing it just for your clients to he had city and county San Francisco represented this morning at the ribbon cutting and really she talked about and John talked about earlier, you know, being an active participant in the community, and that's a really important piece of the >> puzzle. It is an important piece of the puzzle, and we're really passionate about being a part of the San Francisco community and helping to give back in our community as well as globally. So globally, we run a tech for good program. Where were you applying these emerging technologies to help benefit societies using things like Blockchain to make logistics distribution better and more trustworthy For companies that are delivering food? Teo indeed Populations things like using artificial intelligence built on top of Microsoft cognitive services help the blind to see doing these things. They're actually giving back to the world's population as well as our local population. Just in the last week, we hosted a group of young elementary school students coming in tow learn coding basics we're hosting. Last week we hosted one hundred students from an MBA program abroad. So we're often hosting students, clients, partners, startups. A few weeks back, we hosted a large healthtech challenge, which was really exciting. We had sea levels from some of our health companies. Come in tow, actually judge start ups from the Bay Area and to explore how those startups could tweak and refine their value statement and then explore opportunities to use those startups within the judge's organizations. So So it's a really exciting way that we're finding that being professionally generous, it pays it, tees up opportunities for centuries for our partners, way learn, they learn. And this hub is a powerful place of collaboration, >> right? What a great asset that you have to bring to bear. It's a It's a terrific story. Well, actually, thank you for taking a few minutes of your time. His party is a big part for you in the team, so I will let you get back to it. And again, Thanks for sitting down. Thank you so much. Alright, she's >> asking. Jeff, if you're watching the Cube, we're downtown San Francisco. Salesforce Tower at Thehe Century Innovation Hub. Grand opening. Thanks for watching. See you next time.

>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCube covering the AWS Accenture Executive Summit, brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome back everyone to theCube's live coverage of the AWS Executive Summit here at the Venetian in Las Vegas, I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We have three guests for this segment. Doctor Justin Marley, he is a consultant psychiatrist for the NHS in the U.K., Chris Ashley, Technology Delivery Lead Associate Manager, and Gayle Sirard, Applied Intelligence Lead North America for Accenture, thank you so much the three of you for coming on the show. >> Thanks. >> Well, thanks for having us. >> Very much, yeah. >> I'm really excited about the topic that we're going to have today. which is a home healthcare system for the elderly. I'm going to start with you, Doctor Marley. In terms, can you just provide the context of what, of sort what this problem is with an elderly person living at home, experiencing loneliness, experiencing isolation, can you paint the portrait for our viewers? >> Yes certainly, so the older adult population is heterogeneous, but what happens is as people get older they retire from work, they lose part of their purpose in life, sadly they lose loved ones in their lives, and can often find themselves at home by themselves. As people get older, they start to develop cognitive impairment, it may not be at the level of dementia or it may be at the level of dementia. And so, they become increasingly isolated. And there's something called a digital divide, which is basically, we're living in a connected world which is permeated with digital technology to help connect people. The older adult population haven't grown up with this technology, so they're a little bit disconnected from all of this, which just adds to everything else. >> So what is the idea here, so he just described older people who are lonely, who are experiencing forgetfulness, they've lost a lot of their friends and social connections. So what's the answer, what's the solution here? >> Our mission is to help people feel socially connected in this, it's always changing, this digital world and stay independent in their own home for a bit longer. So, what we've done is we've made an Alexa Skill and web portal. So, an Alexa Skill is just like an app on your iPhone. And it's really about day to day help. Everyday, little things, so medicine reminders or finding things that are happening in their area. And just a bit more independence, a bit more joy day to day. >> So Gayle, so what did this look in practice? So we have this Alexa who is in a person's home and reminding the person to take his or her pills and just providing a little connection. So, just describe to me what it looks like. >> Yeah, so I mean, well if you kind of take a step back a minute and you think about this, as Doctor described right, the impact of an individual sitting at home alone and you think about their daily lives and what they're doing, this solution starts by really thinking about what are they doing on a daily basis and what's going to motivate them to get up and get engaged? So, fundamentally this solution thinks about the process that they do and it's constantly learning the behaviors that they're doing on a daily basis and as you know there's constant reminders. You start to get forgetful, so there's activities that you have to do and if you don't do, you become stagnant, lonely. And so, getting a system that allows them to learn their behaviors, understand what those behaviors are, and what's going to motivate them to wake up, get excited everyday, feel engaged. Fundamentally, this system is about learning that and nudging them to get engaged and move forward. The thing I really love about this is, if you think about sort of what we're doing here, fundamentally we're taking really sophisticated technologies, artificial intelligence, and voice recognition and applying it to an everyday process. Which is like so exciting to see the application of the elderly adopting a solution like this. And being able to reach out and engage through this new technology channel. >> And it is, as you said, learning the behaviors, it's learning their proclivities, but it's also providing a bit of social interaction for these people who are incredibly lonely. What have you seen, Doctor Marley? >> So, what we've seen is from the Hanover Project, which the Liquid Studio team in London have been working on. Which is some of the work in sheltered accommodation with older adults and Chris can talk a little bit about that, we've also been trialing it in a young onset dementia group, as well. So, we're looking at people with dementia across the lifespan, both young and old. And we've had some very promising feedback from the younger group, as well. >> So yes, how are you using this for people who are experiencing the onset of dementia? >> So, the idea is that, well first of all what we've had to do is to start a trial, a pilot study. So, we're currently going through the ethics committee process, which is very important for vulnerable adults, we can't just trial a new technology in this group, but we've had a design session with the Liquid Studio team, they've come in and they've showcased the technology within the group. And this is a group of people with young onset dementia and their carers, and we've had some very interesting feedback about how they can communicate with it and how easy it is to understand, and some of the features that we've been developing, such as the information about the condition that they can access from the home care solution. >> Chris, I wanted to ask you about the role of empathy in technology, so here's artificial intelligence which is it's not human intelligence. >> Absolutely. >> It's not our human social intelligence, but yet empathy is so important. Particularly in a technology like this. Can you, can you talk about how you approach this question? >> So, I take your point completely. It is AI, it's not a real human. And ultimately, we would love it if every single old person had human contact everyday, but it's just not the case. And I have sat with people, one of whom is my nan, and genuinely she was just like, it's really nice to have a voice in the house, my grandad's been dead for 15 years, she's been alone for 15 years in that same house and she loves it, when Alexa sang her Happy Birthday because it was configured with the birth, I put her birthday in and she was just like, I love it. She says goodnight to it's like, oh sleep well, I do call her regularly, but knowing that she has that is amazing. >> So it's giving peace of mind to the loved ones, too. >> Absolutely, yeah. >> Exactly, so talk a little bit more about what, so we've already seen great success, adoption is on the rise, what are some of things that you hope to add to this application going forward? >> So, we see it at the moment as a companion. So, it might be for people with dementia. It might just be for people who are alone and they feel a bit socially isolated. So, the Alexa platform is very powerful. It offers a very simple way to do things, like radio, if you want to mess around with an iPad, unlock it, make sure it's charged, find your contacts, call it, it's much easier to say, Alexa call my daughter. So, that's the things that we have and that's a great service, what we can add very quickly is IoT sensors, so if you put a sensor on the fridge, on the bathroom door, in the bed, you work out whether people are sleeping enough, whether they're eating enough food, whether they're drinking enough. And you're augmenting that role of the caregiver that comes along and sees, hang on, this person hasn't been sleeping very well at all for the last few days. One of the things we get people to do when they interact with home care, is just say, how are you feeling today? And they say, good or bad, and over time you build up a picture of that person's mental health. >> Because Alexa has built a rapport with her roommate. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So, what you're describing it sounds like a very user-friendly, a straightforward interface that is perfect for people on the other side of the digital divide, as you just described. So, how do you work with technologists, Doctor Marley, in terms of helping the technologists understand where these customers are, I mean so many, I had a member of my family who had Alzheimer's and the idea was meet the person where they are. So, if they come to you and tell you that it's Christmas Day and you say, it is, Merry Christmas, but how do you help the technologists sort of get that? I mean it comes back to the empathy. >> So, in terms of where the person is, there are many different barriers to the use of technology, the sensor impairment, there's for example if someone has a moderate to severe level of dementia, then it would be very difficult for them to interact with the device. So, we have to kind of work with carers to work with them. So, there's all sorts of kind of complications about taking this out into the real world. And what we're also looking to do is develop a service with the AI at the front end, backed up by healthcare professionals at the back end. So, that we can quickly escalate if there's problems because the last thing that you want is someone to run into problems, for the technology to be able to detect that there's something is amiss, and not being able to do anything about it. So, I think combining the AI with all of the warning signs flagged up by the algorithms with healthcare professionals in the background ready to escalate in-house services is the best of both worlds. And gets the right services to the person at the right time, and I think that's only possible through this combination. >> Yeah, it's an extraordinary story. >> It is. >> It's really been a great conversation. Thank you all so much for coming on theCube and sharing it with our viewers. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> It's a pleasure, thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, that wraps up our coverage of today's AWS Executive Summit. Join us tomorrow for more from AWS re:Invent. (quirky upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back. We are live here in Las Vegas. We're in the Sands right now of day two of Dell Technologies World 2018. I'm John Walls along with Stu Miniman, and it's a pleasure now to welcome Ashley Gorakhpurwalla, who is the President and GM of Server and Infrastructure Systems at Dell EMC. Ashley, good afternoon to you. >> Thank you, great pronunciation of my last name. >> Well, thank you very much, I've worked-- >> Not an easy thing to do. >> I worked on that, how about that? Stu and I were just talking briefly with you. What a cool exhibit floor, right? >> It really is. >> There's just a lot of-- What have you seen out there that's kind of caught your eye so far? >> Well, we brought in a lot of customers this time to show their outcomes. So I'm a car guy, so you know I went straight for the McLaren. >> How 'about that McLaren out there, right? Yeah. >> My son would love the F1 setup with the gaming, virtual reality. Top Golf is a great VxRail customer. We have GoalControl. Try to beat the AI and see if you can score a goal. I mean, there's some very cool demos back there. >> And then overall, just I'm curious about your thoughts about the show then because that's a part of it. >> That's a part of it. >> A lot of client relations you're doing here, business relations. >> Sure. We're only about half way through, but so far very, very positive energy I get. I don't know if you caught or already talked to Michael after the keynote, but certainly. >> Stu did today. Certainly, Michael was on fire at the keynote, and I really, really enjoyed the discussion with Dr. Chip Plater about, and Jeffrey Wright about, how technology connects to helping people. A lot of times engineers, stuck in a lab, looking at R&D, trying to figure out a problem, lose sight of what they're doing. Great opportunity for the team to see that and kind of expand and understand where their technology is going, what it's doing for the world, what the impact is that they're having. >> So, Ashley, your team's been real busy leading up to this, seeing some of the new products in the announcement. Before we get into this though, your role expanded a little bit since the last time we talked about, talked to Tom Burns yesterday as there was the group formerly known as VCE that turned into CPSG, It was split into some pieces, and HCI is now under your domain. >> That's right. So in addition to our server businesses, which are kind of the mainstream PowerEdge business, our Extreme Scale business, our OEM business. We had a reorganization to really kind of unlock the potential that we have in a great product set, a product set before my organization was already number one. It's a position of strength. What we're trying to do is accelerate from that. So if you think about the HCI marketplace, I think you have to be in the server business to win in the HCI business. I don't envy anyone trying to do this from a position of weakness or trying to adopt other people's technology. Our supply chain, our reach, our global services and support, and then the underlying ability to invest in the server technology and beyond and differentiate, innovate on top of that is what it's going to take to win, and maybe not tomorrow, but in the future as HCI takes off. We wanted to really accelerate that by shortening the decision-making loop, making it one mission for the team, and so that came in. In addition, maybe a quick call-out to the storage and data protection platform engineering team who also came into my group to, again, really put our best hardware and platform of systems engineers together from servers and data protection storage and kind of create a powerhouse of R&D. >> Yeah, Ashley, it's actually, it's not surprising to us, From our research side at Wikibon, we actually called it server SAN because it was really taking the functionality and what customers wanted as a business outcome from the SAN and was pulling it closer to the server. But at its core, it's really about software. One of the things that has struck me in the last few years, comparing this to EMC worlds in the past and now Dell, is what I used to see at Dell World, which was Dell is a platform that lots of things live on. So there's lots of storage partners that live on side of Dell. There's HCI partners. Of course, you've got a broad portfolio all from the Dell families, and then OEMs and other partners that fit there. 'Cause you're a team, it makes sense that HCI comes in there because you've got that platform at the server, >> Right. >> and it grows from there. >> If you circle back to just the Dell Legacy world perhaps, much more platform oriented, infrastructure at our heart, bringing that value with prop to our customers. And I've said it before, I think if you give any segment or capability time, I think a standard kind of open infrastructure hardware platform wins. It may not be a server, but it's going to look something like a server going forward. And the specialization and the value move into the IP stack and into the software. So you better be a company that can do the scale of a standards-based platform. You better have the IP, the specialized stacks, as we do in our VM-ware stacks, in our IP stacks or in data protection, storage, networking. You can see where Michael's kind of putting those two together. It's not a tomorrow thing but five, 10 years from now. We've seen it in the carrier space. We've seen it in storage. Everywhere you go, the commoditization curve takes us to standards, infrastructure, and IP in the software. >> You made an interesting point there, saying it might not necessarily be a server. Give us kind of, if you could step back for a second, the state of compute. >> Sure. >> There's compute in the cloud, there's compute at the edge, there's (chuckles) compute all over the place. A few years ago, it was like, ah, it's all going white box and undifferentiated. And in the public cloud, I say, there's probably more skews and compute in the public cloud than if I went to Dell and picked that up there. Whether that's a good or bad thing, you could probably have some insight on. But give us your view on kind of the state of compute in the industry today. >> Sure. So if I think back 10 years when we started our business with the hyper-scale, building those infrastructures as a service, multi-tenant public clouds, there really wasn't any other choice. You either did it in a legacy mode with your IT, maybe slightly modernizing, but you're still probably siloed. You probably had storage admins and networking admins, compute admins, or you went cloud. And it was such a different experience. Since then, what customers have said consistently is, why am I having to make that choice? I either go to this rent version, which is very expensive as I scale up, or I own it or I have to own it and it's different. So multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, private cloud, however you want to instantiate it. And something like hyper converged infrastructure just didn't exist. They didn't have a choice. Now, with a pushing of a few buttons, you can scale up your infrastructure, perhaps on prem or in a hosted environment. That is fairly seamless with that, and now you have that portability. >> Yeah, and I'm sorry, Ashley. I wasn't trying to poke at the cloud piece. Compute at edge use cases is a little bit different than traditional-- >> Yep, absolutely. >> Servers, what's happening with the Blade market. Definitely need to, I know we need to talk about the new PowerEdges. But there's the MX we're going to cover, too, but was just kind of, if there are form factors of servers. >> You bring up a good point. It's maybe emerging, so there's probably a little bit more hype than there is reality behind it. But there are going to be billions of sensors, trillions of sensors or things that create data outside of data center environments. That's where all the data's going to be produced, and that's where decisions are going to be made. Today, the theory is, it has to go back somewhere, although I don't think any of us are getting in an autonomous car if it has to talk back to a data center and decide what to do. >> Right. >> So there's already examples of what I would call edge compute. But what if your data center has to live at a base of a cell tower at the end of a 30 mile dirt road where someone only visits 45 days apart, and they're not an IT individual? How do you extend that infrastructure, that management domain, that security domain? How do you bring it all the way out there? How do you ruggedize it? Well, you're probably going to start with a company that's been doing fresh air cooling with 13, 14 billion server hours now, operating in fresh air environments. We understand how to bring that environment the way we've been working on that remote management, lights out management style, our security. I'll give you another emerging trend that's going to come out of that. Just at the time where we're going to extend our environments out of the safety of the data center, we're also going to go back to a stateful compute. With persistent memory, nonvolatile memory, storage class memories, and security paradigms are already shifting. We're getting ahead of that with our customers of what if it wasn't just the hard drive you had to protect but almost everything in that edge device. So the form factors will change, the connectivity will change, but what we know is, you'll likely gather as much data as you can. You'll throw some of it away 'cause it won't be useful. Right now, there's a sensor telling this building that these lights are on. Until they go off, it's not useful data. But in a car, it's very useful data. Some of that data will go back, it'll get trained because humans won't be able to take in all this data. You'll need a machine. You can't write the algorithm ahead of time. You have to learn something. Back goes that IP into the edge, and then decisions will be made at that stage. >> Before we head off, we've talked about some new products. You've alluded a little bit. So you've had a launch this week. Just run through that, if you would, real quick. >> Ashley: Sure, sure, we had a few things. >> It's nice to have a new baby to talk about. >> Sure, it's pretty exciting. And it really does stem from what we just talked about. So if I start on the PowerEdge side, if you have a strategy that is to help your customers with that digital transformation from cloud to data center and core all the way to edge, you can start to see why we're launching certain products and why they have certain technologies in them and innovations. So starting with the 940 XA, extreme acceleration, might have to rename it if you watched the keynote. Jeff called it extreme performance. He is the boss, so I think it's XP now. (Stu and John laughing) No, we'll keep it at extreme acceleration for now. That really is about large datasets training very quickly in database environments. So you want host to GPGPU to be a one-to-one ratio. You want large datasets to be local, so you need massive storage, 32 drives for instance. And you need the capability to, again, make sure it brings the tenets of security, manageability, the ecosystem with it. So, very excited about that one. I think there's some use cases we're just not even ready for. We've already have the technology today to put eight FPGAs in that system, direct connect. And there's very few workloads or even talent in the customer set to be able to enable that, but you got to get there first with the technology to allow that innovation to happen. And we want to stoke that. Then on the R840, this really was about, once you get the data in, you're going to have to make decisions. You need, still, that processing power. Maybe you don't need 20,000 cores in the box like a 940 XA. Maybe you need a little bit less, but you do need a massive storage localized in VME direct connect. That's more direct connect that any server, I think, period in the industry. And it's really about streaming those analytics, making those realtime choices. So it really fits into the strategy that we're undertaking. >> All right, Ashley, last thing I wanted to cover. It's a bit of preview that you showed at the show. The PowerEdge MX. >> Yep. >> Modular infrastructure, no midplane, should be able to upgrade it a lot more. So are we beyond where Blade Servers have gone? Do you consider this to fit into, some call it composable infrastructure. How would you position this kind of-- >> Well, I don't have some positioning yet. It's just a sneak peek. But let me tell you how we thing about it. Is it a Blade Server or not? I'm not sure the question is something we've considered yet. It's a form factor that we think for the future is really necessary, which is, we want to get to a stage, and we're putting our research into a stage of a journey where we want to get to the point where you can utilize the resources that you bring into your environment, whether they be your environment or someone else's. Today, so much is stranded connected to a CPU, and it's just the architecture that we have today. Whether it's memory, source class memory, persistent memory, GPGPUs, heterogeneous compute FPGAs, ASICs, memory semantics, IO semantics, have to leave the box. Then we can get you things like pooled up resources that can be utilized unbound, put together, then composed, if you want to use your word, or really just aligned around a workload then retired and put back in. APIs and software, we're starting to build that out. It's starting to emerge from certain management orchestration layers we have today. But we're going to need that fabric. And so, as you know, we're showing actually here today a Gen-Z demo where we're starting to build that fabric that has the latency, almost a memory-like latencies from load to store and usage, all the way out to it has the memory semantics that go all the way through from CPU all the way out to memory so that, all sudden, the node no longer traps and stands the resources. How do you do that? You better have an architecture that treats everything in the box, not just the compute part, as a first class citizen for power, for thermals, for management. Second thing, if you have a midplane, you have a point of failure, but you also are not upgradeable to these fabrics that are coming and these capabilities that are on the horizon, some of which are not even in Silicon or in a lab just yet. So when you build infrastructure, let me call it infrastructure for a second, people want it as an investment. That's the part we've talked about. There's a lot more to come, so the team's excited to get it out there. I tried to hold them back a little bit, but we cheated a little bit a showed it. >> A little demo goes a long way. Ashley, thanks for being with us. Thanks for telling your story, we appreciate the time. Look forward to seeing you down the road. >> Appreciate it, thanks, guys. >> You bet. Back with more. We are live here in Las Vegas at Dell Technologies World 2018. (electronic musical flourish)

>> Announcer: Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018, brought to you by Cisco, Veen and theCUBE's ecosystem partners. (upbeat electronic music) >> Hey, welcome back, everyone, to our live coverage from theCUBE here in Barcelona, Spain, for exclusive coverage of Cisco Live 2018 in Europe. I'm John Furrier, cofounder and cohost of theCUBE, with my cohost this week, Stu Miniman. Been to many events also, senior analyst at wikibon.com. Stu and I have been breaking down all the action here in the DevNet zone. And we have with us here as our guest, Ashley Roach, who is a principal engineer and evangelist with Cisco. DevNet himself, has full view of what's going on. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Hey, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >> Good to see you again. We covered DevNet Create, which was really our first foray into what DevNet was doing outside of the Cisco ecosystem, bringing that cloud-native developer into the Cisco fold. Here, it's the Cisco show where all the Cisco ecosystem and your customers are growing into the cloud and programming with DevNet. So congratulations, it's been phenomenal. It's been one of the top stories we've been covering as DevNet has just been explosive. >> Oh, thanks a lot. It's been a lot of hard work. >> People have been learning, they're coding, they're being inspired, and they're connecting, It's a very sharing culture. Props to you guys and the team. Well done. >> Ashley: Appreciate it. >> So what is DevNet? I mean, this is a cultural shift. We've been reporting on theCUBE all year and last year. But really this year, end of last year, we started really putting the stake in the ground saying we are going to see a renaissance in software development. Linux foundations, reporting that there's going to be exponential growth in code and open-source. You seeing that you can create intellectual property with only 10% of the energy codewise, 90% using open-source. They call that the code sandwich. Again, this is just data that they're sharing, but it points to the bigger trend. Developers are becoming the important part of the equation, and the integration of the stack from network to application, are working together. And again, proof point's there, things like Kubernetes, containers, have obviously been out there for a long time. You're starting to see the visibility for developers. >> Right. >> John: You're at Cisco, you're in the middle of all this. You're seeing one side of the camp and the other. >> Ashley: Yeah. >> What's your view? >> Yeah, I think that's a good, it captures a lot of the dynamics that are going on right now in the environments. And I mean, for me, I come at this from an application developer standpoint. I actually, when I joined Cisco, I was not a hardware guy at all (laughs) Frankly, I'm not even now. I'm much more oriented towards software, and so when we've seen, though, sort of the power of the underlying infrastructure that gets married up to some of these overlay systems like Kubernetes and containers, more and more of the infrastructure on one hand is getting abstracted, which you might think, oh, uh oh. Like, that's a problem. But in reality, the infrastructure still needs to be there, right? You can't run your serverless function out of thin air. >> John: Yeah. >> At least not yet. >> John: It's truly not serverless. There's servers somewhere. >> Yeah, exactly. So, you know, those are the funny jokes that we like to have in the industry, right? But at the same time, you want to think like, okay, well I'm writing my application, I'm a developer. I don't want to know about infrastructure. My whole job is I don't care about that. But there is information and utility in the data that you can get from the infrastructure because at some point, your application will fail. You may have some bugs, and yeah, Kubernetes may kill your container and bring up another one. But you still need to de-bug that issue, and so yeah, you can get tracking, you can get analytics. But also, you can get that stuff from that infrastructure that's underlying it. And so, like one of the presentations I'm doing tomorrow, I wrote just kind of a proof of concept sample app where it's a Spring Boot app that has a built-in health check capability. It ties into APIC-EM and or DNA Center and uses that information that's available about the network. So maybe it's your, from your firewall to your application, you can run a path trace and just have that happen every five minutes or something like that, or check the health of an entire environment every, you know, so often. And then your application can resolve issues or have just data about it so that we can keep moving. >> Yeah, actually, you know, I love that comment you talked, you know, you're not a hardware person, and that's okay. >> Ashley: Right. >> And there's lots of people here at the Cisco show that aren't. That's a change from just a few years ago. How is that dynamic changing? You know, I remember for a few years I was arguing like every networking person needs to become a coder and there's, you know, push back and people are scared and what's going to happen to my job and can I learn that skill set? >> Ashley: Right. >> The bar for entry seems pretty low these days but how do we translate some of those languages? >> Yeah, I think that perception of say, an ops person becoming a programmer, it's not really the right mindset. >> Right. >> There's a couple mindsets, though, that are important. So one of the things we're trying to do is foster the DevOps culture somewhat. And to do that, an ops person has to understand and have empathy for the problems that exist on the application side and vice versa. So for us, we're just trying to education people in that vein. >> John: Yeah. >> But all of the infrastructure is now also automatable and you don't have to automate at low level. You can automate it with things like Ansible, which is a bit more accessible for people that haven't been programming for a long time. So, you know, I think those are the things that we see and that we're trying to encourage within our community and just broadly speaking, I would say, in the industry. >> You brought up empathy, interesting. Because this is a cultural shift, right? So this mindset, this cultural DNA, you have to have empathy. But it's kind of like the Venn diagram. Empathy is one circle. >> Ashley: Mhm. >> Feasibility is another and viability is the other, right? >> Ashley: Mhm. >> So it's always in context to what you can get done, right? So you guys at DevNet have a good view of the development environment. What are some of the challenges and what are the opportunities for folks in the Cisco ecosystem to get their hands dirty, get down and dirty with the tech-- >> Ashley: Oh, yeah. >> Where they can do feasible, viable projects that are possible. Well, seeing Python certainly is one approach. Great for data wrangling, but you know, you got Node.js out there, has been a great language. >> Ashley: Yep. >> App guys are doing Node.js because of JavaScript in server-side. >> Ashley: Yep. >> You got a lot of IO that sounds like a network service mindset. Is there things that you see going on around that what's possible and what's kind of moonshot like projects and where should people start? >> Well, I think, again, kind of going to this historical point of view, it used to be you had one programming book and you're sitting there, you know, late at night copying code from that. And maybe it came with a CD and you could download, you know, your sample code onto your hard drive. And then, you know, you'd be sitting there flipping back and forth and then you hit an issue. You're like, I don't know what to do. Maybe you're trying to teach yourself. I don't have any friends that are programmers. I mean, today, with, I built the vast amount of resources that are available online. You know, like, we have our DevNet Learning Labs. And so that's the set of tutorials that we've provided, but that's not the only thing out there. You've got Code School, Codeacademy. You've got the loops out there. I mean, shoot, MIT, Stanford, they're all putting their courseware in open-source. So the universe of educational material for people to understand this stuff and get started is really, really awesome now. And then also, it's easier than ever, I think,. to actually code because you're, again, like code is becoming more and more abstract at higher level languages. So Python, Node.js, those are still kind of low level, but there are packages on top of those, you know, middleware and Node.js, to build a web server. You get Express or sales or whatever, and then you're kind of off to the races. Like Spring Boot is crazy. It used to be Spring was a bit of a pain in the butt with, you know-- >> Yeah. >> Ashley: All the dependency, injection and everything. But with Spring Boot, now you just add, you know, a dependency, and you've got an entire web framework or an authorization framework or whatever. And that was like, I was pretty blown away when I started seeing-- >> So it's a lot easier. >> It's, yeah, it's just a lot easier. Things are more curated. You have certain stacks. You know, it used to be LAMP stack, now you got ELK stack for data things, you got, you know, and so on. So the universe is wide open for a lot of people to program today. >> So Ashley, love the training angles that you talked about there. But what I bring to mind, a little bit orthogonal to what we've been talking about here-- >> Ashley: Ooh, good programmer buzzword there. >> But one that John and I have been asking about, you mentioned open-source. >> Yes. >> So obviously, things like Spring, lot of things you mentioned are open-source. >> Yes. >> But what about Cisco's, you know, involvement in the community, giving back to open-source. What's the philosophical, you know, viewpoint-- >> Yeah. >> From Cisco's standpoint? >> Yeah, we're active in open-source. We're big contributors to OpenStack, for example. You know, we've got some of, we've created like a CNI module for Kubernetes called Contiv. And so that's in open-source. We, you know, in DevNet, we publish tons of things in open-source, just code samples and you know, example projects and so on. Cisco's actually a big contributor to the Linux kernel, so it's a long legacy of open-source at Cisco. So it's part of our culture. >> So there's no restrictions on everybody going on GitHub, throwing their stuff in, being part of the communities-- >> There's certainly restrictions. Yeah, we have processes that we're supposed to follow. I mean, we got to protect the intellectual property when we need to. I mean, it's the way it is for working at a company. But at the same time, you know, there is viable processes if it makes business sense to open-source things. >> I mean, the line John's used, you know, for the last year or so, is GitHub, that's people's resumes these days. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> So we want to make sure, what I'm saying is it sounds like the ecosystem at Cisco, friendly for the developers to come in, participate. You got a business to run, obviously. Legal keeps their eye on stuff, but you know, Cisco's out there. We saw it in the container ecosystem, OpenStack-- >> Ashley: Yes. >> Stu: Kubernetes, Linux, absolutely-- >> Yeah. >> Stu: Not just even in networking but beyond that. See a lot of Cisco out there, so-- >> Yeah, great. >> So my question for you, personal question. If you could talk to your 22 year old self right now-- >> Ashley: Oh, wow, yeah. >> You're high school, actually, you're college or college graduate, what would you say to yourself knowing what you know now? 'Cause this is a really interesting point. I mean, at my age, we used to build stuff straight up from the bottom of the stack to the top, and it was a lot of heavy lifting. Now you're really kind of getting into some engineering here and then some composite Lego block kind of thinking where these frameworks could just snap together. Sometimes (mumbles) But it's a lot cooler now. I mean, I wish I was 22. What would you say to your 22 year old self out there? What would you advise yourself? What would you say to yourself? >> Where's my smoking jacket? (John laughs) Yeah, so, I mean, I was a liberal arts undergrad and I did take computer programming classes. So I did a couple courses in C toward the end of my time in university, and that's because I've always been interested in technical, you know, in programming and stuff. But I think probably I would have maybe stayed another year to try to maybe get an actual CS degree. So that might be one thing, I think the other-- >> John: What would you jump on today if you saw all of this awesome code, open-source? I mean, like, it's like open bar in the coding party. I mean-- >> Yeah, it's overwhelming. >> It's so many things to jump on and-- >> You know, obviously, joking, I should say blockchain and machine learning and AI, right? But actually, I would say the machine learning and AI stuff is probably a good, interesting, you know, wave of technology, yeah. >> I just want to, you know, we're talking about your 22 year old self. How about your kids? >> Ashley: Yeah. >> You're working with your kids, checking out your GitHub on there. So, you know, maybe share, you know, younger people. You know, how do they get involved? In the keynote yesterday, it was, you know, jobs of the future. >> Right, well, yeah. For my kids, I have two daughters. And so, I try to encourage them to at least be familiar with coding. I've tried to teach them Linux some, but we've done programming classes, but it's kind of hard sometimes to get them interested in something like programming, to be honest. So some of it's trying to be creative problem solvers, trying to craft that sort of attitude, you know. So that then, when they do get the opportunity to do some programming, that they'll be interested about it. >> I mean, the young kids love gaming. Gaming's a good way to get people in. >> Yep. >> VR is now an interesting-- >> I mean, Minecraft and Sims, those are the two that my oldest daughter loves. I mean, the thing I remember that's the funniest was when you know, of course, this was when we all got computers back in the day and we did keyboards, right, in order to do stuff. So I got the first iPad when it came out and I brought it home and my daughter, who was, I think, six or eight at the time, she's like, "Cool, I understand this." Like automatically understood it. But then, she went to the TV and it had icons on it. So she walked up to the TV and tried to do that, and I was like, "Oh, that's funny." Like her mental model is this. >> Yeah. >> Where our mental model was that and so on earlier on. >> My oldest son says, "Dad, search engine is so your generation," (Ashley laughs) Not even email, like search, Google search. >> Yeah, the digital, it's like the digital native thing. On the other hand, we actually are fairly restrictive about like cell phone and mobile because it's a lot. That sort of thing. They really, really are going to face some interesting, I don't know, social, you know, the social things that you have in high school and middle school now multiplied and amplified through all that. We're sort of cautious, too, as parents, you know. >> Lot of societal issues to deal with. Alright, now getting back to DevNet here, I want to get your thoughts because we had a big setup here. One of the things that the folks people can't see on camera is we're in the DevNet zone. You see behind us, but there's everywhere else around. It's really the big story at Cisco Live and has been for awhile. Every year it gets bigger. It's like, it keeps growing in interest. What do you guys show here? What's the purpose? Give a little quick, take a minute to explain the DevNet approach this year-- >> Okay. >> John: And how it's different-- >> Yeah. >> John: And how you guys take this going forward. >> So the DevNet zone, philosophically, we tried to have the experiential. We don't want people to come in here and get death by PowerPoint of hey, check out this awesome new product that we created. You know, that kind of thing. >> Yeah. >> Instead, we want people to come in and have the opportunity to sit down, either by themselves or with a friend or, you know, with one of us to be able to work through sort of tutorials so that we have this area of the Learning Labs or learn about the DevNet sandbox. That's another area that we have where that is a sort of try it out, live, always-on, cloud service that we provide for anyone. We also have, of course, examples of example use cases. So we have some IOT and collaboration use cases that we're demonstrating in the new APIs that have come out of those products that you wouldn't think may be necessarily, oh, collaboration and IOT really are connected. But in fact, you know, ultimately you need to get a human involved when you have exceptions. And in a lot of cases like for edge compute scenarios, it's exception oriented. So when we, the example that we have here is we have a truck that's sitting on a handcrafted scale that's like a raspberry pie thing that one of our evangelists, Casey Bleeker, made. And it's putting, you know, analog data into our container that's running on an edge device. And when an exception occurs when the scale has this truck on it with too many stones in the back, then it triggers an alert. It creates a team room for people to come and escalate and discuss. It'll make a phone call automatically to the truck driver and pull people together to deal with that situation. But then, additionally, we have a new room capabilities with like, our telepresence systems. And that has face identification, not like from identifying the user standpoint, but it knows it can count how many people are in the room, for example. So if you combine that sort of IOT capability with this collaboration unit that's going to already be there, you're getting kind of a win-win of that infrastructure in the rooms. >> Ashley, talked about there's so many different things going on there, what's exciting you the most? Where are you seeing the most people, you know, gravitating around? >> Yeah, in the DevNet zone in general? >> Well, it can be here or in general, yeah. >> Well, I think one thing in the DevNet zone, we also have a white hat black hat challenge. So that's been very, very popular. What we're doing is demonstrating using, you know, off the shelf hacker tools, how vulnerable some IOT devices are to give people. It's kind of a you've heard about it, now experience it and do it yourself to see how easy it really is. And then see, of course, how our solutions can help you mitigate those problems. So that's, you know, IOT security is a big concern, I think, in general, and so I think that's an exciting spot for people-- >> So hands-on learning, very people-oriented, very open-- >> Yes, yep. >> The motto I love, I'm reading on the thing there, learn code, inspire, connect. So learn, toe in the water, connect-- >> Ashley: Yes. >> Share. >> Yeah. >> Mentor, collaborate. >> The other thing that we're sort of soft launching, I guess, is we have a new application developer site on DevNet, and so-- >> John: What's the URL? >> It is developer.cisco.com/site/app-dev. >> John: Okay, that's good. Memorize that, quiz later. >> Yeah. >> That's long, just search. >> Yeah, right, right. >> Hey, Alexa. >> Right, so, but with that, we're trying to make it easier for people to understand the use cases for what kinds of applications they can build using our technology. So indoor location, using kind of doing maps and heat maps and building that kind of scenario, for example. >> Awesome. >> Ashley: Through T-Mobile and video and such. >> As you are evangelizing your engine on the engineering side, what's the plans going forward? Post-event, obviously, you've got Cisco Live in Orlando this year, it's in 2018. >> Ashley: Yeah, we have-- >> But you guys got a lot of these going on, you got a lot of digital content. What's the outreach plan? Where should people expect to see you guys? Share the going forward plan. >> Yeah, I wish I knew where everyone was going to be. So thankfully, on the website-- >> They're on the internet! >> We have an events calendar, so I would definitely encourage you to look there if you're interested in connecting with one of us. We have the Cisco Live in Melbourne then Orlando. We also have DevNet Create in April and that's in Mountain View, I think, Bay Area. So would love to have people come out to that, and kind of the theme of that last year, which was the inaugural one, continues this year, which is where apps need infrastructure. So we want to kind of continue this conversation about DevOps, how, you know, applications and infrastructure-- >> John: Yeah. >> Can benefit each other. >> And just for the folks watching, theCUBE was at the inaugural DevNet Create. We'll be there again, we'll also be in Orlando. And again, this is important, we'll end on this point. I'd like you to take a minute to explain the difference between DevNet and DevNet Create because this is really interesting. I like the way you guys are doing this. It's really open, but it's pretty transparent. So share the difference between DevNet and DevNet Create. >> Yeah, so DevNet is our developer program, and so that's a website-- >> Before Cisco and-- >> It's Cisco, it's oriented towards those things. DevNet Create is more about forming a community to solve these problems about applications and infrastructure. So that intersection, whether you call it DevOps, whether you call it I don't know what, potatoes and you know, something. Something in there, you know, there is this fluid spot where applications are looking more like infrastructure, infrastructure is starting to look more like applications. So what does that mean and how do we explore that together to, you know-- >> We call it cloud-native. >> Ashley: Yeah. >> It's a set of developers who just, like you, don't really want to get involved in network but love it to be more magical. >> Right. >> Right? And Cisco folks love Cisco because they're in that world, right? So-- >> Yes. >> To me, it's really interesting you guys do that. Congratulations. >> Yeah, thanks. And it's not just for Cisco people, right? So Cisco Live and DevNet Zone is that. For Create, it's actually the inverse. We encourage people from the community to come and check it out as opposed to the-- >> John: Props to you guys, great stuff. Cisco, DevNet Zone is where theCUBE is. Of course DevNet Create is going to be outside of the Cisco ecosystem. Connecting the two is really the key. We're living in a world, global connected devices, connected people, that's the mission of Cisco. Love that vision, but of course, we're theCUBE, bringing you the live content here in Barcelona. All, of course, is available online, youtube.com/siliconangle. Of course, thecube.net is our new site. Check it out. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. More live coverage coming from Barcelona with theCUBE after this short break. (upbeat electronic music)

>>Now welcome back to the Cube as we continue our coverage here. AWS Reinvent 2022, going out here at the Venetian in Las Vegas. Tens of thousands of attendees. That exhibit Hall is full. Let me tell you, it's been something else. Well, here in the executive summit, sponsored by Accenture. Accenture rather. We're gonna talk about Baptist Health, what's going on with that organization down in South Florida with me. To do that, I have Tony Abro, who's the SVP and Chief Digital and Information Officer. I have Ashley Lane, the managing director of the Accenture Healthcare Practice, and on the far end Poop Kumar, who is the VP and cto Baptist Health Florida won and all. Welcome. Thank you. First off, let's just talk about Baptist Health, the size of your footprint. One and a half million patient visits a year, not a small number. >>That was probably last year's number, but okay. >>Right. But not a small number about your footprint and, and what, I guess the client base basically that you guys are serving in it. >>Absolutely. So we are the largest organization in South Florida system provider and the 11 hospitals soon to be 12, as you said, it's probably about 1.8 million by now. People were, were, were supporting a lot of other units and you know, we're focusing on the four southern counties of South Florida. Okay. >>So got day Broward. Broward, yep. Down that way. Got it. So now let's get to your migration or your cloud transformation. As we're talking about a lot this week, what's been your, I guess, overarching goal, you know, as you worked with Accenture and, and developed a game plan going forward, you know, what was on the front end of that? What was the motivation to say this is the direction we're going to go and this is how we're gonna get there? >>Perfect. So Baptist started a digital transformation initiative before I came about three years ago. The board, the executive steering committee, decided that this is gonna be very important for us to support us, to help our patients and, and consumers. So I was brought in for that digital transformation. And by the way, digital transformation is kind of an umbrella. It's really business transformation with technology, digital technologies. So that's, that's basically where we started in terms of consumer focused and, and, and patient focus. And digital is a big word that really encompasses a lot of things. Cloud is one of, of course. And, you know, AI and ML and all the things that we are here for this, this event, you know, and, and we've started that journey about two years ago. And obviously cloud is very important. AWS is our main cloud provider and clearly in AWS or any club providers is not just the infrastructure they're providing, it's the whole ecosystem that provides us back value into, into our transformation. And then somebody, I think Adam this morning at the keynote said, this is a team sport. So with this big transformation, we need all the help and that we can get to mines and, and, and hands. And that's where Accenture has been invaluable over the last two years. >>Yeah, so as a team sport then depu, you, you've got external stakeholders, otherwise we talked about patience, right? Internal, right. You've, you've got a whole different set of constituents there, basically, but it takes that team, right? You all have to work together. What kind of conversations or what kind of actions, I guess have you had with different departments and what different of sectors of, of the healthcare business as Baptist Health sees it in order to bring them along too, because this is, you know, kind of a shocking turn for them too, right? And how they're gonna be doing business >>Mostly from an end user perspective. This is something that they don't care much about where the infrastructure is hosted or how the services are provided from that perspective. As long as the capabilities function in a better way, they are seemingly not worried about where the hosting is. So what we focus on is in terms of how it's going to be a better experience for, from them, from, from their perspective, right? How is it going to be better responsiveness, availability, or stability overall? So that's been the mode of communication from that perspective. Other than that, from a, from a hosting and service perspective, the clientele doesn't care as much as the infrastructure or the security or the, the technology and digital teams themselves. >>But you know, some of us are resistant to change, right? We're, we're just, we are old dogs. We don't like new tricks and, and change can be a little daunting sometimes. So even though it is about my ease of use and my efficiency and why I can then save my time on so and so forth, if I'm used to doing something a certain way, and that's worked fine for me and here comes Tony and Depo and here comes a, >>They're troublemaker >>And they're stir my pot. Yeah. So, so how do you, the work, you were giving advice maybe to somebody watching this and say, okay, you've got internal, I wouldn't say battles, but discussions to be held. How did you navigate through that? >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And Baptist has been a very well run system, very successful for 60 something odd years. Clearly that conversation did come, why should we change? But you always start with, this is what we think is gonna happen in the future. These are the changes that very likely will happen in the future. One is the consumer expectations are the consumer expectations in terms of their ability to have access to information, get access to care, being control of the process and their, their health and well-being. Everything else that happens in the market. And so you start with the, with that, and that's where clearly there are, there are a lot of signs that point to quite a lot of change in the ecosystem. And therefore, from there, the conversation is how do we now meet that challenge, so to speak, that we all face in, in, in healthcare. >>And then from there, you kind of designed the, a vision of where we want to be in terms of that digital transformation and how do we get there. And then once that is well explained and evangelized, and that's part of our jobs with the help of our colleagues who have, have been doing this with others, then is the, what I call a tell end show. We're gonna say, okay, in this, in this road, we're gonna start with this. It's a small thing and we're gonna show you how it works in terms of, in terms of the process, right? And then as, as you go along and you deliver some things, people understand more, they're on board more and they're ready for for more. So it's iterative from small to larger. >>The proof is always in the place, right? If you can show somebody, so actually I, I obviously we know about Accenture's role, but in terms of almost, almost what Tony was just saying, that you have to show people that it works. How, how do you interface with a client? And when you're talking about these new approaches and you're suggesting changes and, and making these maybe rather dramatic proposals, you know, to how they do things internally, from Accenture's perspective, how do you make it happen? How, how do you bring the client along in this case, batches >>Down? Well, in this case, with Tony and Depu, I mean, they have been on this journey already at another client, right? So they came to Baptist where they had done a similar journey previously. And so it wasn't really about convincing >>Also with Accenture's >>Health, also with Accenture's Health, correct. But it wasn't about telling Tony Dupe, how do we do this? Or anything like that. Cuz they were by far the experts and have, you know, the experience behind it. Well, it's really like, how do we make sure that we're providing the right, right team, the right skills to match, you know, what they wanted to do and their aspirations. So we had brought the, the healthcare knowledge along with the AWS knowledge and the architects and you know, we said that we gotta, you know, let's look at the roadmap and let's make sure that we have the right team and moving at the right pace and, you know, testing everything out and working with all the different vendors in the provider world specifically, there's a lot of different vendors and applications that are, you know, that are provided to them. It's not a lot of custom activity, you know, applications or anything like that. So it was a lot of, you know, working with other third party that we really had to align with them and with Baptist to make sure that, you know, we were moving together at speed. >>Yeah, we've heard about transformation quite a bit. Tony, you brought it up a little bit ago, depu, just, if you had to define transformation in this case, I mean, how big of a, of a, of a change is that? I mean, how, how would you describe it when you say we're gonna transform our, you know, our healthcare business? I mean, I think there are a lot of things that come to my mind, but, but how do you define it and, and when you're, when you're talking to the folks with whom you've got to bring along on this journey? >>So there's the transformation umbrella and compos two or three things. As Tony said, there is this big digital transformation that everybody's talking about. Then there is this technology transformation that powers the digital transformation and business transformation. That's the outcome of the digital transformation. So I think we, we started focusing on all three areas to get the right digital experience for the consumers. We have to transform the way we operate healthcare in its current state or, or in the existing state. It's a lot of manual processes, a lot of antiquated processes, so to speak. So we had to go and reassess some of that and work with the respective business stakeholders to streamline those because in, it's not about putting a digital solution out there with the anti cured processes because the outcome is not what you expect when you do that. So from that perspective, it has been a heavy lifting in terms of how we transform the operations or the processes that facilitates some of the outcomes. >>How do you know it's working >>Well? So I I, to add to what Deep was saying is I think we are fortunate and that, you know, there are a lot of folks inside Baptist who have been wanting this and they're instrumental to this. So this is not a two man plus, you know, show is really a, you know, a, a team sport. Again, that same. So in, in that, that in terms of how do we know it works well when, when we define what we want to do, there is some level of precision along the way. In those iterations, what is it that we want to do next, right? So whatever we introduce, let's say a, a proper fluid check in for a patient into a, for an appointment, we measure that and then we measure the next one, and then we kind of zoom out and we look at the, the journey and say, is this better? >>Is this better for the consumer? Do they like it better? We measure that and it's better for the operations in terms of, but this is the interesting thing is it's always a balance of how much you can change. We want to improve the consumer experience, but as deeply said, there's lot to be changed in, in the operations, how much you do at the same time. And that's where we have to do the prioritization. But you know, the, the interesting thing is that a lot of times, especially on the self servicing for consumers, there are a lot of benefits for the operations as well. And that's, that's where we're in, we're in it together and we measure. Yeah, >>Don't gimme too much control though. I don't, I'm gonna leave the hard lifting for you. >>Absolutely, absolutely right. Thank you. >>So, and, and just real quick, Ashley, maybe you can shine some light on this, about the relationship, about, about next steps, about, you know, you, you're on this, this path and things are going well and, and you've got expansion plans, you want, you know, bring in other services, other systems. Where do you want to take 'em in the big picture in terms of capabilities? >>Well, I, I mean, they've been doing a fantastic job just being one of the first to actually say, Hey, we're gonna go and make an investment in the cloud and digital transformation. And so it's really looking at like, what are the next problems that we need to solve, whether it's patient care diagnosis or how we're doing research or, you know, the next kind of realm of, of how we're gonna use data and to improve patient care. So I think it's, you know, we're getting the foundation, the basics and everything kind of laid out right now. And then it's really, it's like what's the next thing and how can we really improve the patient care and the access that they have. >>Well, it sure sounds like you have a winning accommodation, so I I keep the team together. >>Absolutely. >>Teamwork makes the dream >>Work. Absolutely. It is, as you know. So there's a certain amount of, if you look at the healthcare industry as a whole, and not, not just Baptist, Baptist is, you know, fourth for thinking, but entire industry, there's a lot of catching up to do compared to whatever else is doing, whatever else the consumers are expecting of, of an entity, right? But then once we catch up, there's a lot of other things that we were gonna have to move on, innovate for, for problems that we maybe we don't know we have will have right now. So plenty of work to do. Right. >>Which is job security for everybody, right? >>Yes. >>Listen, thanks for sharing the story. Yeah, yeah. Continued success. I wish you that and I appreciate the time and expertise here today. Thank you. Thanks for being with us. Thank you. Thank you. We'll be back with more. You're watching the Cube here. It's the Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. And the cube, as I love to remind you, is the leader in tech coverage.

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube here in Palo Alto, California In the remote interviews during this pandemic, we have our remote crews and getting all the stories and celebrating the award winners. And here to feature the most innovative connect deployment. We have a center of Canada and the Department of Employment and Social Development of Canada, known as E S D. C guys. Congratulations, Joel. More Children Censure Canada Managing director and Ben while long sdc of Canada Chief Transformation officer. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. And congratulations on the award. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>So, Ashley, during this pandemic, a lot of disruption and a lot of business still needs to go on, including government services. But the citizens and people need to still do their thing. Business got to run, and you got to get things going. But the disruptions caused a little bit of how the user experiences are. So this connect has been interesting. It's been a featured part of where you've been hearing at the Public Sector summit with Theresa Carlson. You guys, this is a key product. Tell us about the award. What is the solution? That disturbing of deserving reward? >>Maybe I'll get I'll go first and then pass it over to Benoit. But I think the solution is Amazon Connect based Virtual Contact Center that we stood up fairly quickly over the course of about four days and really in support of of benefit that the government of Canada was was releasing as part of its economic response to the pandemic. And in the end that, you know, it's a fully functioning featured contact center solution includes an I V r. And, uh, you know, we stood it up for about 1500 to 2000 agents so that that's the crux of the solution. And maybe Benoit can give a bit of insight as to to how it came about so quickly. >>Yeah, happy to actually wear obviously, like every other government, facing enormous pressures at that time to deliver benefits directly to people who were in true need, the jobs are being lost. Our current systems were in trouble because of their age and barricade cake nature. And so the challenge is was quickly how to actually support a lot of people really fast. And so it came through immediately that after our initial payments were made under what was called Canada Emergency Response Benefit, then we have to support our clients directly. And so people turn to the transformation team of all teams. If you wish during a fire firestorm to say, Well, what could you do and how could you help? And so we had an established relationship with a number of other system integrators, including Accenture, and we were able to run a competition very rapidly. Accenture one. And then we deployed. And as you all said, in a matter of four days, what for us was a new, exceptional on high quality solution to a significant client problem. And I say that because I think you can imagine how people feel in the endemic of all of all things. But with the uncertainty that comes with the loss of income, loss of jobs, the question of being able to deal with somebody really a human being, as well as to be able to be efficiently answer a very simple but straightforward questions rapidly and with high quality, with pretty fundamental for us. So the people in the groups that were talking through here are talking, speaking to millions of people who were literally being asked to to accept the pavement rapidly and to be able to connect with us quickly. And without this solution, which was exceptionally well done and deployed and of high quality personally, just a technology, uh, solution. I would not have been possible to even answer any of these queries quickly. >>And while that's a great 0.1 of the things that you see with the pandemic it's a disaster in the quote disaster kind of readiness thing. Unforeseen, right? So, like other things, you can kind of plan for things that hypothetical. You've got scenarios, but this >>is >>truly a case where every day counts. Every minute counts because humans are involved is no our ROI calculation. It's not like it's not like, Well, what's the payback of our system? The old kind of way to think this is really results fast. This is what cloud is all about. This is the promise of cloud. Can I stand up something quick and you did it with a partner. Okay, this is, like, not, like, normal again. It's like it's, you know, it's like, unheard of, right? Four days with critical infrastructure, critical services that were unforeseen. Take us through what was going on in the war room, as you guys knew this was here. Take us through the through what happened. Yeah, >>So I think I can start a Z. You can imagine the set of executives that we're seeing a payment process. Uh, was an exceptional. It was like a bunker. Frankly, for about two weeks, we had to suspend the normal operations off the vast majority of our programming. We had to launch brand new payments and benefits systems and programs that nobody had seen before. The level of simplicity was maximized to delivered the funds quickly. So you could imagine it's a warpath if you wish, because the campaign is really around. A timing. Timing is fundamental. People are are literally losing their jobs. There is no support. There's no funding money for them to be able to buy groceries. So on the trust that people have in the government, Ai's pretty much at risk right there and then in a very straightforward but extraordinarily powerful magic moment. If you wish. If you can deliver a solution, then you make a difference for a long time. And so the speed unheard off on old friends when he came to the call center capability and the ability for us to support and service context the clients that were desperate to reach us on. We're talking hundreds of thousands of calls, right? We're not talking a few 1000 year. Ultimately, at some point we were literally getting in our over over, taken by volumes, call centers. But we had a regular one still operating over a 1,000,000 calls for coming in today with the capacity to answer, um, you know, tens of thousands. And so the reality is that the counselor that we put up here very quickly became capable of answering more calls than our regular costumes. And that speaks to the speed of delivery, the quality of the solution, of course, but the scalability of it and I have to say, maybe unheard of, it may be difficult to replicate. The conditions to lead to this are rare, but I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can't do this more often, like we can't operate with that kind of speed and agility. So I think what you've got is a client in our case, under extreme circumstances. Now, realizing the new normal will never be the same, that these types of solutions and technology. And then there's scalability. There's agility there, the speed of deployment. It's frankly, something we want. We want all the time. Now we'd like to be able to do it under your whole timeline conditions. But even those will be a fraction of what it used to take. It would have taken us well, actually, I can actually tell you because I was the lead, Ah, technologists to deploy at scale for the government. Canada all the call center capabilities under a single software as a service platform. It took us two years to design it two years to procure it and five years to install it. That's the last experience. We have a call center enterprise scale capabilities, and in this case, we went from years to literally days. >>Well, you know, it takes a crisis sometimes to kind of wire up the simplicity solution that you say. Why didn't we do this before? You know, the waterfall meetings, Getting everyone arguing gets kind of gets in the way of the old the old software model. I want to come back to the transformation been wanna minute, cause I think that's gonna be a great success story and some learnings, and I want to get your thoughts on that. But I want to go to Joel because Joel, we've talked to many Accenture executives over the years and most recently this past 24 months. And the message we've been hearing is we're going to be faster. We're not going to be seen as that. You know, a consulting firm taking our times. Try and get a pound of flesh from the client. This is an example. In my opinion of a partner working with a problem statement that kind of matches the cloud speed. So you guys have been doing this. This is not new to a censure. So take us through how you guys reacted because one you got to sync up and get the cadence of what, Ben? What I was trying to do sync up and execute. Take us through what happened on your side. >>Yeah, I mean, so it's It's Ah, it's an unprecedented way of operating for us as well, frankly, and, um and, uh and, you know, we've had to look at to get this specific solution at the door and respond to an RFP and the commercial requirements that go with that way. Had Teoh get pretty agile ourselves internally on on how we go through approvals, etcetera, to make sure that that we were there to support Ben Wan is team. And I think you know that we saw this is a broader opportunity to really respond to it, to help Canada in a time of need. So So I think we, you know, we had to streamline a lot of our internal processes that make quick decisions that normally even for our organization, would have taken, um, could it could have taken weeks, right? And we were down to hours in a lot of instances. So it helps. It forces us to react and act differently as well. But I mean, to Benoit's point, I think this is really going to to hopefully change the way it illustrates the art of the possible and hopefully will change How, How quick We can look at problems and and we reduced deployment timeframes from from years to months and months to weeks, etcetera for solutions like this. Um, and I think that the AWS platform specifically in this case but what touched on a lot of things to beat the market scale ability But just as the benefit itself was, you know has to be simplified to do this quickly. I think one of the one of the benefits of the solution itself is it's simple to use technologically. I mean, we know least retrained. As I said, I think 1600 agents on how to use the platform over the course of a weekend on and and were able, and they're not normal agents. These were people who are firm from other jobs, potentially within the government. So they're not necessarily contact center agents by training. But they became contact center agents over the course of 48 hours, and I think from that perspective, you know, that was important as well have something that people could could use. The answer those calls that we know that when you were gonna come so >>Ben what this is. This is the transformation dream scenario in the sense of capabilities. I know it's under circumstances of the pandemic, and you guys didn't solve a big, big problem really fast and saved lives and help people get on with their day. But transformations about having people closest to the problem execute and the the also the people equation people process technology, as they say, is kind of playing out in real time. This >>is >>the this is kind of the playbook, you know? Amazon came in said, Hey, you want to stand something up? You wired it together. The solution quickly. You're close to it. Looking back now, it's almost like, Hey, why aren't we doing this before? As you said and then you had to bring people in who weren't trained and stood them up and they were delivering the service. This >>is >>the playbook to share your thoughts on this, because this is what you're you're thinking about all the time and it actually playing out in real time. >>Well, I would definitely endorsed the idea that it's a playbook. It's I would say it's an ideal and dream playbook timidly showing up on the basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically, it is exactly that. So a lot of things have to happen quickly, but also, um, correctly because you know, you can't pull these things properly together without that. So I would say the partnership with the private sector here was fundamental, and I have to applaud the work that Accenture did particularly, I think, as Canadians, we're very proud of the fact that we needed to respond quickly. Everyone was in this, our neighbors, we knew people who were without support and Accenture's team, I mean, all the way up and down across the organization was fundamental and delivering this, but also literally putting themselves into, uh, these roles and to make sure that we would be able to respond quickly to do so. I think the playbook around the readiness for change I was shocked into existence every night. I won't talk about quantum physics, but clearly some some high level of energy was thrown in very quickly, mobilized everybody all at once. Nobody was said. He's sitting around saying, I wonder if we have change management covered off, you know this was changed readiness at its best. And so I think for me from a learning perspective, apart from just the technology side, which is pretty fundamental if you don't have ready enough technology to deploy quickly than the best paid plans in the world won't work. The reality is that to mobilize an organization going for it into that level of of spontaneous driving, change, exception, acceptance and adoption is really what I would aim for. And so our challenge now we'll be continuing that kind of progression going forward, and we now found the way. We certainly use the way to work with private sector in an innovative capacity in the new, innovative ways with brand new solutions that are truly agile and and and scalable to be able to pull all of the organization. All that one's very rapidly, and I have to admit that it is going to shift permanently our planning. We had 10 year plans for our big transformation, so some of our programs are the most important in the country. In many ways. We support people about eight million Canadians a month and on the benefits payments that we deliver, and they're the most marginal needed meeting and and requires our support from senior study, unemployed jobseekers and whatnot. So if you think about that group itself and to be able to support them clearly with the systems that we have is just unsustainable. But the new technologies are clearly going to show us the way that we had never for forecast. And I have to say I had to throw up, like in your plan. And now I'm working my way down from 10 denying date your plants going forward. And so it's exciting and nerve wracking sometimes, but then obviously has a change leader. Our goal is to get there as quickly as possible, so the benefit of all of these solutions could make a difference in people's lives. >>What's interesting is that you can shorten that timetable but also frees you up to be focused on what's contemporary and what's needed at the time. So leverage the people on the resource is You have and take advantage of that versus having something that you're sitting on that need to be refreshed. You can always be on that bleeding edge, and this brings up the Dev ops kind of mindset agility. The lean startup glean company. You know this is a team effort between Amazon and center and SDC. It's pass, shoot, score really fast. So this isn't the new, the new reality. Any commentary from you guys on this, you know, new pass shoot score combination. Because you got speed, you got agility. You're leaner, which makes you more flexible for being contemporary and solving problems. What's your thoughts? >>So my perspective on that is most definitely right. I think what we what we were able to show and what's. You know, what's coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is, um, you know, perfection isn't the most important thing out of the gate. Getting something out there that's going to reassure citizens that's gonna allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly is what's becoming more important. Obviously, security and privacy. Those things are of the utmost importance as well. But it's ability to get stuff out there, quickly, test it, change it, tested again and and just always be iterating on the solutions. Like I can say what we put out on April 6th within four days is the backbone of what's out there still today. But we've added, you know, we added an integrated workforce management solution from Nice, and we added some other eyes views to do outbound dialing from acquisition, things like that. So the solution has grown from that M v p. And I think that's one other thing that that's going to be a big takeaways if you're not gonna do anything. So you got the final and product out there, then it's going to be here, right? So let's go quickly and let's adapt from there. >>Then we'll talk about that dynamic cause that's about building blocks, fund foundational things and then services. It's the cloud model. >>Yeah, I mean, before the pandemic, I had lunch with Mark Schwarz, which I believe you're quite familiar with, and, you know, I spent an hour and 1/2 with it. We were talking, and he was so exciting and and energized by what the technologies could do. And I was listening to him, and I used to be the chief technology officer for the government can right? And so I've seen a lot of stuff and I said, Well, that's really exciting, and I'm sure it's possible in some other places. And maybe it's some other countries where you know they didn't have infrastructure and legacy. I guess if I see him again soon, I'll have to. I apologize for not believing him enough, I think the building blocks of edge of the building, blocks of sprints and MVP's I mean they're not fundamental to the way we're gonna. So our biggest, various and scariest problems, technologically and then from a business perspective, Service candidate itself has 18,000 employees involved in multiple channels where the work has always been very lethargic, very difficult, arduous. You make change over years, not months, not days for sure. And so I think that that new method is not only a different way of working, it's a completely re HVAC way of assembly solutions, and I think the concept of engineering is probably going to be closer to what we're going to do on. And I have to borrow the Lego metaphor, but the building blocks are gonna be assembled. We now and working. I'm saying this in front of goal. He doesn't know that you should practice partners. We're gonna be assembling MPP maps of an entire long program, and it's gonna be iterative. It is gonna be designed, built. It will be agile as much as we can implement it. But more importantly, and punches weaken govern. It is, you know, the government is we may have changed. A lot of the government is not necessarily can count on to Most of these things approaches, But the reality is that that's where we're heading. And I will say, Oh, close. Perhaps on this on this answer. The biggest reason for doing that apart from we've proved it is the fact that the appetite inside the organization for that level of globalization, speed solution ing and being engaged rapidly you just can't take that away from an organization. Must be a piece of that. Uh, if you let them down, well, they'll remember. And frankly, they do remember now, cause they want more and it's gonna be hard. But it's a better heart. Ah, a better challenge that the one of having to do things over a decade, then to go fast and to kind of iterating quickly through the challenges and the issues and then move on very much to the next one as rapidly as possible. I think the other company, I would add is most of this was driven by a client need, and that's not inconsequential because it mobilized everybody to comment focused. If you have been just about, well, you know, we need to get people on side and solutions in place just to make our lives better, it providers. Yeah, it would have worked, perhaps, but it would have been different than the mobilisation It comes when the client is put in the middle, the client is the focus, and then we drive. Everyone's with that solution, >>you know, shared success and success is contagious. And when you ride the new way to oh, we need a new board, right? So once you get it, it then spreads like wildfire. This is what we've been seeing. And it also translates down to the citizens because again, being contemporary, none of us just looked could feel it's success in performance. So, as you know, people in business start to adopt cloud. It becomes a nice, nice, nice synergy. This is key. I'll take a year on a center. Um, the award winner. You guys did a great job. Final thoughts. >>Yeah. I mean, I think final thoughts would be happy to have the opportunity that help. And it was a It was a complete team effort and continues to be, um, it's not. It's not a bunch of Accenture technologists in the background in this, you know the commitment from everyone to get this in place. And can you continue to improvement from Benoit's team and from other folks across the government has been, uh, has been paramount to the success. So, um um, it's been a fantastic if world win like experience and, uh, look forward to continuing to build on it. And it has been said, I think one thing this is done is it's created demand for speed on some of these larger transformations. So I'm looking forward to continuing to innovate with with Ben wanting. >>Well, congratulations. The most innovative connect deployment. And because you guys from Canada, I have to use the hockey reference. You get multiple people working together in a cohesive manner. It's pass, shoot, score every time. And you know it's contagious. Thank you very much for your time. And congratulations for winning the >>West. Thanks. Thank you. Okay, this is the >>Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Award show. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards program. I'm John Furrow, your host of the Cube here in Palo Alto, California In the remote interviews during this pandemic, we have our remote crews and getting all the stories and celebrating the award winners. And here to feature the most innovative connect deployment. We have a center of Canada and the Department of Employment and Social Development of Canada, known as E S D. C guys. Congratulations, Joel. More Children Censure Canada Managing director and Ben while long sdc of Canada Chief Transformation officer. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on. And congratulations on the award. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. >>So, Ashley, during this pandemic, a lot of disruption and a lot of business still needs to go on, including government services. But the citizens and people need to still do their thing. Business got to run, and you got to get things going. But the disruptions caused a little bit of how the user experiences are. So this connect has been interesting. It's been a featured part of what we've been hearing at the public sector summit with Theresa Carlson. You guys, this is a key product. Tell us about the award. What is the solution? That disturbing of deserving reward? >>Maybe I'll get I'll go first and then pass it over to Benoit. But I think the solution is Amazon. Connect a spiritual contact center that we stood up fairly quickly over the course of about four days and really in support of of benefit that the government of Canada was was releasing as part of its economic response to the pandemic. And in the end that, you know, it's a fully functioning featured contact center solution includes an ai VR and, uh, you know, we stood it up for 1500 to 2000 agents so that that's the crux of the solution. And maybe Benoit can give a bit of insight as to to how it came about so quickly. >>Yeah, I'd be happy to actually wear obviously, like every other government, facing enormous pressures at that time to deliver benefits directly to people who were in true need, the jobs are being lost. Our current systems were in trouble because of their age in the arcade cake Nature. And so the challenge is was quickly how to actually support a lot of people really fast. And so it came through immediately that after our initial payments were made under what was called Canada Emergency Response Benefit, then we have to support our clients directly. And so people turn to the transformation team of all teams. If you wish during a fire firestorm to say, Well, what could you do and how could you help? And so we had an established relationship with a number of other system integrators, including Accenture, and we were able to run a competition very rapidly. Accenture one. And then we deployed in, as you all said, in a matter of four days, what for us was a new, exceptional on high quality solution to a significant client problem. And I say that because I think you can imagine how people feel in that endemic of all of all things. But with the uncertainty that comes with the loss of income, loss of jobs, the question of being able to deal with somebody really a human being, as well as to be able to be efficiently answer a very simple but straightforward questions rapidly and with high quality, with pretty fundamental for us. So the people in the groups that were talking through here are talking, speaking to millions of people who were literally being asked to to accept the pavement rapidly and to be able to connect with us quickly. And without this solution, which was exceptionally well done and deployed and of high quality personally, just a technology, uh, solution. I would not have been possible to even answer any of these queries quickly. >>And while that's a great 0.1 of the things that you see with the pandemic it's a disaster in the quote disaster kind of readiness thing. Unforeseen, right? So, like other things, you can kind of plan for things that hypothetical. You've got scenarios, but this >>is >>truly a case where every day counts. Every minute counts because humans are involved is no our ROI calculation. It's not like it's not like, Well, what's the payback of our system? The old kind of way to think this is really results fast. This is what cloud is all about. This is the promise of cloud. Can I stand up something quick and you did it with a partner. Okay, this is, like, not, like, normal again. It's like it's, you know, it's like, unheard of right? Four days with critical infrastructure, critical services that were unforeseen. Take us through what was going on in the war room, as you guys knew this was here. Take us through the through what happened. Yeah, >>So I think I can start a Z. You can imagine the set of executives that we're seeing a payment process. Uh, was an exceptional. It was like a bunker. Frankly, for about two weeks, we had to suspend the normal operations off the vast majority of our programming. We had to launch brand new payments and benefits systems and programs that nobody had seen before. The level of simplicity was maximized to delivered the funds quickly. So you could imagine it's a warpath if you wish, because the campaign is really around. A timing. Timing is fundamental. People are are literally losing their jobs. There is no support. There's no funding money for them to be able to buy groceries. So on the trust that people have in the government, Ai's pretty much at risk right there and then, in a very straightforward but extraordinarily powerful magic moment. If you wish. If you can deliver a solution, then you make a difference for a long time. And so the speed unheard off on old friends when he came to the call center capability and the ability for us to support and service context the clients that were desperate to reach us on. We're talking hundreds of thousands of calls, right? We're not talking a few 1000 year. Ultimately, at some point we were literally getting in our over over, taken by volumes, call centers, but we had a regular one still operating over a 1,000,000 calls for coming in today. Uh, with the capacity to answer, um, you know, tens of thousands. And so the reality is that the counselor that we put up here very quickly became capable of answering more calls than our regular costumes. And that speaks to the speed of delivery, the quality of the solution, of course, but the scalability of it and I have to say, maybe unheard of, it may be difficult to replicate. The conditions to lead to this are rare, but I have to say that my bosses and most of the government is probably now wondering why we can't do this more often like we can't operate with that kind of speed and agility. So I think what you've got is a client in our case, under extreme circumstances. Now, realizing the new normal will never be the same, that these types of solutions and technology. And then there's scalability. There's agility there, the speed of deployment. It's frankly, something we want. We want all the time. Now we'd like to be able to do it under your whole timeline conditions. But even those will be a fraction of what it used to take. It would have taken us well, actually, I can actually tell you because I was the lead. Ah, technologist, to deploy at scale for the government, Canada, all the call center capabilities under a single software as a service platform. It took us two years to design it. Two years to procure it and five years to install it. That's the last experience. We have a call center enterprise scale capabilities, and in this case, we went from years to literally days. >>Well, you know, it takes a crisis sometimes to kind of wire up the simplicity solution that you say. Why didn't we do this before? You know the waterfall meetings, Getting everyone arguing gets kind of gets in the way of the old, the old software model. I want to come back to the transformation been wanna minute, cause I think that's going to be a great success story and some learnings, and I want to get your thoughts on that. But I want to go to Joel because Joel we've talked to many Accenture executives over the years and most recently this past 24 months, And the message we've been hearing is we're going to be faster. We're not going to be seen as that. You know, a consulting firm taking our times. Try and get a pound of flesh from the client. This is an example, in my opinion of a partner working with the problem statement that kind of matches the cloud speed. So you guys have been doing this. This is not new to a censure. So take us through how you guys reacted because one you got to sync up and get the cadence of what? Ben? What I was trying to do, sync up and execute. Take us through what happened on your side. >>Yeah. I mean, so it's It's Ah, It's an unprecedented way of operating for us as well, frankly, and, um and, uh and, you know, we've had to look at to get this specific solution at the door and respond to an RFP and the commercial requirements that go with that way. Had Teoh get pretty agile ourselves internally on on how we go through approvals, etcetera, to make sure that that we were there to support Ben Wan is team. And I think you know that we saw this is a broader opportunity to really respond to it, to help Canada in a time of need. So So I think we, you know, we had to streamline a lot of our internal processes and make quick decisions that normally, even for our organization, would have taken, um, could it could have taken weeks, right? And we were down to hours in a lot of instances. So it helps. It forces us to react and act differently as well. But I mean, to Benoit's point, I think this is really going to to hopefully change the way it illustrates the art of the possible and hopefully will change how, How quickly we can look at problems and and we reduce deployment timeframes from from years to months and months to weeks, etcetera for solutions like this. Um, and I think that the AWS platform specifically in this case but what touched on a lot of things to beat the market scale ability But just as the benefit itself was, you know has to be simplified to do this quickly. I think one of the one of the benefits of the solution itself is it's simple to use technologically. I mean, we know least retrained. As I said, I think 1600 agents on how to use the platform over the course of a weekend on and and were able, and they're not normal agents. These were people who are firm from other jobs, potentially within the government. So they're not necessarily contact center agents by training. But they became contact center agents over the course of 48 hours that I think from that perspective, you know, that was important as well have something that people could could use. The answer those calls that you know that when you're gonna come So, >>Ben, what this is This is the transformation dream scenario in the sense of capabilities. I know it's under circumstances of the pandemic, and you guys didn't solve a big, big problem really fast and saved lives and help people get on with their day. But transformations about having people closest to the problem execute and the the also the people equation. People process technology, as they say, is kind of playing out in real time. This >>is >>the this is kind of the playbook, you know, Amazon came in said, Hey, you want to stand something up? You wired it together. The solution quickly. You're close to it. Looking back now, it's almost like, Hey, why aren't we doing this before? As you said and then you had to bring people in who weren't trained and stood them up and they were delivering the service. This >>is >>the playbook to share your thoughts on this, because this is what you're you're thinking about all the time and it actually playing out in real time. >>Well, I would definitely endorsed the idea that it's a playbook. It's I would say it's an ideal and dream playbook to build like showing up on the basketball court with all the best players in the entire league playing together magically, it is exactly that. So a lot of things have to happen quickly, but also correctly because you know you can't pull these things properly together without that. So I would say the partnership with the private sector here was fundamental. And I have to applaud the work that Accenture did particularly, I think, as Canadians, we're very proud of the fact that we needed to respond quickly. Everyone was in this, our neighbors, we knew people who were without support and Accenture's team, I mean all the way up and down across the organization was fundamental in and delivering this, but also literally putting themselves into, uh, these roles and to make sure that we would be able to respond quickly, do so. I think the playbook around the readiness for change. I was shocked into existence every night. I won't talk about quantum physics, but clearly some some high level of energy was thrown in very quickly, mobilized everybody all at once. Nobody was said. He's sitting around saying, I wonder if we have change management covered off, you know this was changed readiness at its best. And so I think for me from a learning perspective, apart from just the technology side, which is pretty fundamental if you don't have ready enough technology to deploy quickly than the best plans in the world won't work. The reality is that to mobilize an organization going forward into that level of of spontaneous driving, change, exception, acceptance and adoption is really what I would ain't for. And so our challenge Now we'll be continuing that kind of progression going forward, and we now found a way. And we certainly use the way to work with private sector in an innovative capacity and in innovative ways with brand new solutions that are truly agile and and scalable to be able to pull all of the organization. All that one's very rapidly, and I have to admit that it is going to shift permanently our planning. We had 10 year plans for our big transformation, so some of our programs are the most important in the country. In many ways. We support people about eight million Canadians a month and on the benefits payments that we deliver, and they're the most marginal needed meeting and and requires our support from senior studio, unemployed jobseekers and whatnot. So if you think about that group itself and to be able to support them clearly with their systems that we have is just unsustainable. But the new technologies are clearly going to show us the way that we had never for forecast. And I have to say I had to throw up, like in your plan. And now I'm working my way down from 10 denying date your plants going forward. And so it's exciting and nerve wracking sometimes. But then, obviously, as a change leader, our goal is to get there as quickly as possible, so the benefit of all of these solutions could make a difference in people's lives. >>What's interesting is that you can shorten that timetable but also frees you up to be focused on what's contemporary and what's needed at the time. So leverage the people on the resource is You have and take advantage of that versus having something that you're sitting on that need to be refreshed. You can always be on that bleeding edge, and this brings up the Dev ops kind of mindset agility. The lean startup glean company. You know this is a team effort between Amazon and center and SDC. It's pass, shoot, score really fast. So this isn't the new, the new reality. Any commentary from you guys on this, you know, new pass shoot score combination. Because you got speed, you got agility. You're leaner, which makes you more flexible for being contemporary and solving problems. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, So my perspective on that is most definitely right. I think what we what we were able to show and what's. You know, what's coming out of a lot of different responses to the pandemic by government is, um, you know, perfection isn't the most important thing out of the gate. Getting something out there that's going to reassure citizens that's going to allow them to answer their questions or access benefits quickly is what's becoming more important. Obviously, security and privacy. Those things are of the utmost importance as well. But it's ability to get stuff in there, quickly, test it, change it tested again and just always be iterating on the solutions. Like I can say what we put out on April 6th within four days is the backbone of what's out there still today. But we've added, you know, we added an integrated workforce management solution from Nice, and we added some other eyes views to do outbound dialing from acquisition, things like that. So the solution has grown from that M v p. And I think that's one other thing that that's going to be a big takeaways if you're not gonna do anything. So you got the final and product out there, then it's going to be here, right? So let's go quickly and let's adapt from there. >>Then we'll talk about that dynamic cause that's about building blocks, fund foundational things and then services. It's the cloud model. >>Yeah, I mean, before the pandemic, I had lunch with Mark Schwarz, which I believe you're quite familiar with, and, you know, I spent an hour and 1/2 with it. We were talking, and he was so exciting and and energized by what the technologies could do. And I was listening to him, and I used to be the chief technology officer for the government. Can't right. And so I've seen a lot of stuff and I said, Well, that's really exciting, and I'm sure it's possible in some other places. And maybe it's some other countries where you know they didn't have infrastructure and legacy. I guess if I see him again soon, I'll have to. I apologize for not believing him enough, I think the building blocks of agile, the building blocks of sprints and MVP's I mean, they're not fundamental to the way we're going to solve our biggest various and scariest problems technologically and then from a business perspective. Service candidate itself has 18,000 employees involved in multiple channels, where the work has always been very lethargic, very difficult, arduous. You make change over years, not months, not days for sure. And so I think that that new method is not only a different way of working, it's a completely revamped way of assembly solutions, and I think the concept of engineering is probably going to be closer to what we're going to do. Um, and I have to borrow the Lego metaphor, but the building blocks are gonna be assembled. We now and working. I'm saying this in front of goal. He doesn't know that you should practice partners. We're gonna be assembling MPP maps of an entire long program, and it's gonna be iterative. It is gonna be designed, built. It will be agile as much as we can implement it. But more importantly, and punches weaken govern. It is, you know, the government is we may have changed. A lot of the government is not necessarily can count on to Most of these things approaches. But the reality is that that's where we're headed. And I will say, Oh, close. Perhaps on this on this answer. The biggest reason for doing that apart from we've proved it is the fact that the appetite inside the organization for that level of globalization, speed solution ing and being engaged rapidly you just can't take that away from an organization. Must be a piece of that. Uh, if you let them down, well, they don't remember. And frankly, they do remember now, cause they want more and it's gonna be hard. But it's a better heart. Ah, a better challenge that the one of having to do things over a decade, then to go fast and to kind of iterating quickly through the challenges and the issues and then move on very much to the next one as rapidly as possible. I think The other company, I would add, is most of this was driven by a client need, and that's not inconsequential because it mobilized everybody to comment focused. It could have been just about well, you know, we need to get people on side and solutions in place just to make our lives better. It is his providers. Yeah, it would have worked, perhaps, but it would have been different than the mobilisation It comes when the client is put in the middle. The client is the focus. And then we drive. Everyone's with that, >>you know, shared success and and successes contagious. And when you ride the new way to oh, we need a new board, right? So once you get it, it then spreads like wildfire. This is what we've been seeing. And it also translates down to the citizens because again, being contemporary numbers just look and feel. It's success in performance. So, as you know, people in business start to adopt cloud. It becomes a nice, nice, nice synergy. This is key. I'll take a year on a center. Um, the award winner. You guys did a great job. Final thoughts. >>Yeah. I mean, I think final thoughts would be happy to have the opportunity that help. And it was a It was a complete team effort and continues to be, um, it's not. It's not a bunch of Accenture technologists in the background in this, you know the commitment from everyone to get this in place. And can you continue to improvement from Benoit's team and from other folks across the government has been has been paramount to the success. So, um um, it's been a fantastic world win like experience and, uh, look forward to continuing to build on it. And it has been said, I think one thing this is done is it's created demand for speed on some of these larger transformations. So I'm looking forward to continuing to innovate with with Ben wanting. >>Well, congratulations. The most innovative connect deployment. And because you guys from Canada, I have to use the hockey reference. You get multiple people working together in a cohesive manner. It's pass, shoot, score every time. And you know it's contagious. Thank you very much for your time. And congratulations for winning the West. Thanks. Okay, this is the Cube's coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Award show. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah, Yeah, >>yeah, yeah, yeah

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hey welcome back to ready Jeff Rick here with the cube we're on Apollo Alto studios today for a cute conversation with some of our friends from VMware big announcement today and we're excited to have a kick Kolbert come on he is the VP at CTO of cloud platform business unit kid great to see you again I'm gonna be here absolutely so big announcement it's the second generation of the VMware cloud on Dell EMC now you guys just brought this to market barely a year ago tell us about about the new announcement and some of the excitement around the changes that you guys put in place yeah absolutely yeah so this has been a project that's been in the making for a few years now we first announced the product version of this in April of last year and then we announced the general availability of it in August at our VMworld conference and so as we've been engaging with customers since we went GA what we've seen and heard from them was that you know they're looking for more data center style options traditionally when we first started this project you may remember it was called project dimension before in the product of VMware Colin Dell AMC beccarose project dimension we had more of an edge computing focus we were focused on how can we get compute in our VMware infrastructure out to factories and retail settings and so on and so forth and so we designed the system for those types of environments a half rack configuration smaller number of servers things like a power supply and UPS built in but as we heard back from customers what they said was hey this is great but we have a lot of needs in our data center today and so the idea there was let's rethink this offering for the data center and actually produced the types of rack architectures and server types that customers are looking for just goes to show you try to give them yin and they want yang right it's yeah so so it's a very different kind of challenge than going into the data center environment and you know one of the promises of cloud is is obviously provisioning right and spinning things up so that's a really important piece of the puzzle how are you guys addressing you know letting people add capacity and kind of changes configuration if it's actually you know in my data center yeah yeah so you seen a number of different things that we're doing here really yeah enhancing the maturity across the board of this offering so it's important to realize that this is a cloud service yes even though the physical servers in the rack reside on premises for a customer again in their data center at a retail location it is a cloud service and that we are running this and managing this like cloud service and so like any good cloud service merge have to interact with any human being right they can just call any guy and indeed that's the way it works either through an API or through our UI workflow today a customer can come on and order a new esidisi rack for their environment and that initial provisioning you know we fully automated that we had a dell service technician coming out you know actually figure the hardware on on-site but then after that and you know we didn't have many options for customers let's say that they started out with maybe four nodes on-site but then they realize Oh Ashley needs six or eight nodes right they're getting more applications on there greater usage and they just need more capacity and so what we support now is this ability to actually again use an API using the UI request additional servers or their existing racks and this is again something very simple to do in just a few weeks that those things will arrive the the service ignition will be there to install them and get that customer up right so I was gonna say you know typically it's order and then you got you got to put the stuff in and deploy it right and then support it so you just touched a little bit on the deployment did you basically take that order and then just with your existing process get into the data center and and light up that additional hardware yeah so we're doing a lot to really automate this whole process and the powerful thing here is that you know this partnership that we have between VMware and difficult runs really deep so we've actually engaged and integrated into their manufacturing process so that as we get that order through the API through the UI from a user we can ship that over to Dell tell them specifics of what that customer ordered and Dell can get started manufacturing that we actually again as for that manufacturing process integration we can get the latest version of our cloud software onto those servers we can install unique cryptographic keys on those servers so we can identify them and then we work with the Dell shipping and the Dell service technicians to actually meet those physical servers when they arrive and properly set them up and configure them taking the customer it's a completely hands-off experience I think that's a really powerful they're not you know they don't need to give the nitty-gritty of hardware configuration and installing our software and managing the lifecycle of it it's much much simpler than that and so you know I think we've really taken that and extended it here both with the additional rack type scene we have for a full rack now for the data center new host types a new host type that's much beefier better for datacenter workloads and finally for that expanded capacity that we just talked about as well right and then on the support side I assume you know even though it's it's VMware cloud on Dell EMC that probably the first line of support is still VMware it's still the software on top of the infrastructure yeah that's a good question and yeah you're right it is it's a VMware on VMware operated service and absolutely VMware provides that first line of support so it's not one of these situations where you've got two different vendors pointing the finger at each other and the customer has to figure all that out now it's on VMware and we need to figure it out we obviously work with Dell on the backend we've also integrated with their telemetry systems so we can pull all the different sort of hardware telemetry monitoring data that they that they're getting so we can understand the health of those servers that are running and when we detect a problem is that something that we can fix remotely by just accessing it with our engineers or do we need a service technician to actually go out there and it's this whole issue right right so it's just interesting you guys launched this really thinking more edge and you're getting drawn into more of a data center so why are you getting drawn in what are some of the advantages you know that the sky O's and the CTOs are seeing with this type of a deployment yeah so the data center part is really interesting and again sir processing they thought we thought there would be more need at the edge initially just because hey these edge environments are really difficult to manage and they're kind of distributed and people don't have IT staff there but we're surprised to hear about is the very urgent need customers have their data centers now again they have servers in the data centers that they're running these things today but what they find is that it just doesn't work that well and that they're spending a lot of time and resources on just keeping the lights on and it's you know these things don't differentiate them as a business you know one of things I talk to customers a lot about is that no customer has ever differentiated itself by how well they run VMware infrastructure and that might sound kind of crazy at first right but yeah it's true I can differentiate themselves negatively by how poorly and they run an infrastructure and then you know their apps don't work very well but some degrees have been working VMware infrastructure is just table sticks right and then what they do in an app level is what differentiates them and so this idea that we can come in with VMware cloud on Dell EMC just take care of all of that operational overhead is really really powerful and so as you see folks and customers and companies going through these digital transformation cycles modernizing their applications they're like oh man I need to actually modernize my infrastructure as well and so that's a compelling event that we say it's like oh there's gonna be think this right as are we thinking that they're like well why am i doing all this work in the first place let's actually rethink the whole thing and take them better fundamentally better approach ie a cloud approach and so that's where VM were caught in delians he comes in again I think that's why we're seeing so much interest from customers and again we're CIA knows and CTOs can really see a lot of benefits right I'm just curious you're taking from kind of a product development a product release point of view right is this kind of a typical VMware you know kind of speed and pacing or is this really you know getting to the second gen and this shift you know kind of in your data market has really more of a response to the market because again as as I was preparing and looking up when the initial launch was it really wasn't that long ago - so - to kind of pivot and call it second gen and include features and functions that are coming back from the market would you say that's kind of typical or you guys get it a little bit more agile in your own you know kind of product development cycle and getting away from those massive PR d's and mr d's and actually you know trying to respond more quickly to the to the pace of the marketplace yeah that's a great point and yeah you're right we are going through our own digital transformation here at VMware all right now we are shifting from a company that primarily sold shrink-wrapped software to a company that sells all services and so you know as you look at that it actually changes a lot of what we can do we can respond much much more quickly much quicker to this sort of customer feedback now we can ship new updates much more frequently and so you know if you look at our traditional vSphere release cycles those were what every 12 months 18 months may be at most but what we can do now with our con releases is actually update and do major updates every three months and so we call this kind of the second you know major advance of VMware kondalian see but in reality it's our third our fourth actual release of our underlying software and so we're actually doing these underlying releases much much quicker I think the reason that we're focusing on this launch in particular is because of the fact that again customers have been asking for this data center level support and really optimizing this solution for the data center and so now we've gone and done that and again I think we're gonna see a lot more interest from the customers on the data center side because of it great well okay thanks for giving us the quick update congratulations on the release and just keep rolling it let's listen to those customers and they'll tell you what they want definitely yeah we're excited - thank you alright kit thanks again he's kid I'm Jeff you're watching the cube thanks for watching we'll see you next time you [Music]

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation [Music] hi buddy this is Dave Volante and welcome to this cute conversation you know the we've been following a company called Activia for quite some time now they they've really popularized the concept of copy data management really innovative Boston based Waltham based company and with me Brian Regan who's the chief marketing officer and all 40 who's the newly minted chief revenue officer of actifi Oh guys great to see you I wish we were face to face that you're you're you're June event but this will have to do yeah you bet yeah so you know Brian you've been on the cube a bunch I'm gonna start with Paul if that's okay Paul you know just let's talk a little bit about your your background you've you've done a number of stance at a variety of companies you know big companies like IBM and others as well what attracted you to Activia in all honesty I've been a software guy and candidly a data specific leader for many many years and so IT infrastructure particularly associated around data has always been sort of my forte for fun on words there and and so Activia was just smack dab in the middle of that right and so when I was looking for my next adventure you know I had an opportunity to to meet with a shower CEO and Founder and describe and discuss kind of what activity was all about and candidly the the number of connections that we had that were the same a lot of our OEM relationships with people that I actually worked with and for and some that worked for me historically so it was almost this perfect world right and I'm a Boston guy so it was in my in my old backyard and it was just a perfect yeah it was a perfect match for what I was looking for which was really a small growth company that was trying to you know get to the next level that had compelling technology in a space that I was super familiar with and understanding and articulate the value proposition well as we're saying in Boston Paulie we got to get you back here I know I pack my cock let's talk about the let's talk about the climate right now I mean nobody expected this of course I mean it's funny I was I saw ash and an event in in Boston last fall we were talking like hey what do you expected for next year yeah a little bit of softening but you know nobody expected this sort of Black Swan but you guys I just got your press release you put out you had a good you had a good quarter you had a record first quarter um what's going on in the marketplace how you guys doing yeah well I think that today more than than ever businesses are realizing that data is what is actually going to carry them through this crisis and that data whether it's changing the nature of how companies interact with their customers how they manage through their supply chain and in frankly how they take care of their employees is all very data-centric and so businesses that are protecting that data that are helping businesses get faster access to that data and ultimately give them choice as to where they manage that data on-premises in the cloud and hybrid configuration those are the businesses that are really going to be top of a CIOs mind I think our q1 is a demonstration that customers voted with their wallets in their confidence in ectopy Oh has an important part of their data supplied nopal I want to come back to you first of all your your other people know you're next you're next Army Ranger so thank you for your service that's awesome you know I was talking to Frank's lute man we interviewed me other day and he was sharing with me sort of how he manages and and he says the other managed by a playbook he's a situational manager and that's something that he learned in the military well this is weird this is a situation okay and that really is kind of how you're trained and and of course we've never seen anything like this but you're trained to deal with things that you've never seen before so how are you seeing organizations generally actifi Oh specifically going to manage through this process what are some of the moves that you're advising recommending give us some insight there yeah so I'm it's really interesting it's a it's funny that you mentioned my military background I was just having this discussion with one of my leaders the other day that you know one of the things that they trained for in the military is the eventualities of chaos right and so when you when you do an exercise they we will literally tap the leader on the shoulder and say okay you're now dead and without that person being allowed to speak they take a knee and the unit has to go on and so what happens is you you learn by muscle memory like how to react in time suffice it or and you know this is a classic example of leadership and crisis and so um so it's just it's just interesting like so to me you have a playbook I think everybody needs to start with a playbook and then start with a plan I can't remember if it was Mike Tyson but one of them one of my famous quotes was you know let you know plan is good until somebody punches you in the face that's the reality of what just happened the business across the globe is it just got punched in the face and so you got a playbook that you rely on and then you have to remain nimble and creative and candidly opportunistic and from a leadership perspective I think you can't lose your confidence right so I've watched some of my friends and of what some other businesses crippled in the midst of this and I'm because they're afraid instead of instead of looking at this in my first commentary that our first staff meeting Brian if I remember it was this okay so what makes active feel great in disembark like not why is it not great right and so we didn't get scared we jumped right into it we you know we adjusted our playbook a little bit and candidly we just had a record quarter and we just down here the honestly date we took down deals in every single geography around the globe to include Italy I mean so it was insane it was really fun okay so this wasn't just one monster deal that gave you that record Porter is really a broad-based the demand yeah so if you you know if you dug underneath the covers you would see that we had the largest number of transactions ever in the first quarter we had the largest average selling price in the first quarter ever we had the largest contribution from our panel partners and our OEM partners ever and we had the highest number ever and so it was a it was really a nice truly balanced performance across the globe and across the size of deal sets and candidly across industries interesting I mean you use the term opportunistic and and I think you're right on I mean you obviously you don't want to be chasing ambulances at the same time you know we've talked to a lot of CEOs and essentially what they're doing and I'd like to get your feedback on this Brian you you you're kind of reassessing the ideal profile of a customer you're reassessing your value proposition in the context of the current pandemic and and I noticed that you guys in your press release talked about cyber resiliency you talked about digital initiatives you know data center transformations etc so maybe you could talk a little bit about that Brian did you do those things how did you do those things what kind of pace were you guys at how did you do it remotely with everybody working from home give us some color on that sure and you know Ashley if you were here you would probably remind us that Activia was born in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis so we we have essentially been bookended by two black swans over the last decade the and the lessons we learned in 2008 are every bit as as relevant today everything starts with cost containment in hospital and in protection of the business and so cio is in the midst of this shock to the system I think we're very much looking at what are the absolutely vital critical initiatives and what is a nice to have and I'm going to pause on my step and invest entirely in the critical mission and the critical initiatives tended to be around getting people safely working for remotely getting people safe access to their systems and their applications in their data and then ultimately it also became about protecting the systems from malicious individuals and state actors up unfortunately as we've seen in other times of crisis this is when crime and cyber crime particularly tends to spike particularly against industries that don't have the strong safeguards in place to to really ensure the resiliency their applications so we very much went a little bit back to the 2008 playbook around helping people get control of their costs helping people continue to do the things they need to do at a much more infrastructure light manner but also really emphasize the fact that if you are under attack or if you are concerned that you're infected but you don't know when you know instant access to data and a time machine that can take you back and forth to those points in time is something that is incredibly valuable so so let's >> cyber resiliency so specifically what is aekta video doing for its customers from a product standpoint capabilities maybe it's part of the the 10 see announcement as well but but can you can you give us some specifics on where you fit in let's take that use case cyber resiliency yeah absolutely so I think there's there's a staff of capabilities when it comes to cyber resiliency at the lowest level you need a time machine because most people don't know when they're in fact and so the ability to go back in time test the recoverability of data test the validity of the data is step one step two is once you've found the clean point being able to resume operations being able to resume the applications operation instantly or very rapidly is the next phase and that's something that Activia was founded on this notion of instant access to data and then the third phase and this is really where our partnerships really shine is you probably want to go back and mitigate that risk you want to go back and clean that system you want to go back and find the infection and eliminate it and that's where our partnership with IBM freezing resiliency services and their cyber incident recovery solution which takes the activity of platform and then rappers and a complete managed services around it so they can help the customer not only get their their systems and applications back on their feet but clean the systems and allow them to resume operations normally on a much safer and more stable okay so so that's interesting so Paul Paul was it kind of new adoptions was it was it increases from existing customers kind of a combination and you talk to that yeah totally so like ironically to really come clean we are the metrics that we had in the first quarter were very similar through the metrics that we see historically so the mix need our existing customer base and then our new customer acquisition were very similar to our historical metrics which candidly we were a little surprised by we anticipated um that the majority of our business would come from that safe harbor of your existing customer base but candidly we had a really nice split which was great which meant that you know a value proposition was resonating not only with our existing customer base where you would expect it but also in in any of our new customers as well who had been evaluating us that either accelerated or or just continue down the path of adoption during the time frame of Koba 19 across industries I would say that again um there was there were there were some industries I would say that pushed pause and so the ones that you can imagine that accelerated during during this past period were the ones you would think of right so financial institutions primarily as well as some some of the medical so some of those transactions healthcare and medical they accelerated along with financial institutions and then I would say that that we did have some industries that push pause and you can probably guess what some of those are a majority of those were the ones that we're dealing with the small and mid-sized businesses or consumer facing businesses things like retail stuff like that where we typically do have a pretty nice residence in a really nice value proposition but there were there were definitely some transactions that we saw basically just pause like we're going to come back but overall the yeah the feedback was just in general it felt like any other quarter and it felt like just pretty normal as strange as that sounds because I know speaking to a lot of my friends and gear companies your software companies they didn't have that experience but we did pretty well that's interesting I mean you're right I mean certain industries Airlines I'm interviewing a cio of major resort next week you know really interested to hear how they're you know dealing with this but those those are obviously depressed and they've dialed everything down but but we've we were one of the first to report that work from home pivot it didn't it didn't you know buffer the decline in IT spending that were expecting to be down you know maybe as much as 5% this year but it definitely offset it what about cloud we're seeing elevated levels in cloud demand guys you know have offerings there what are you seeing in cloud guys you want that yeah I'll start and then fall please please weigh in I think that'd be the move to the cloud that we've been witnessing and the acceleration of the MOOC table that we've been whipped over the past several years probably ramped up in intensity over the last two months The Improv been on the you know 18 to 24 month road map have all of a sudden been accelerated into maybe this year but in terms of the wholesale you know everything moves to cloud and I abandoned my on-premises estate I I don't think we've seen that quite yet I think the the world is still hybrid when it comes to cloud although I do think that the beneficiaries of this are probably the the non number one or number two cloud providers but the rest of the hyper scalers who are fighting for market share because now they have an opportunity to perhaps google for example a strategic partner of ours has a you know a huge offering when it comes to enabling work home and remote work so leveraging that as a platform and then extending into their enterprise offerings I think gives them a wedge that the you know Amazon might not have so this it's an acceleration of interest but I think it's just a continuation of the trend of seeing four years yeah and I would add a little bit if the you know IBM held their think conference this past week I don't know if you had an opportunity to participate there one of our OEM partners and oh yeah because you know when our the CEO presented his kind of opening his opening remarks it was really about digital transformation and he really he really kind of put it down to two things and said you know any business that's trying to transform is either talking about hybrid cloud but they're talking about AI and machine learning and that's kind of it right and so every digital business is talking in one of those categories and so when I look 2q1 it's interesting that we really didn't see anything other than as brian talked about all the cloud business which is some version of an acceleration but outside of that the customers that are in those industries that are in position to accelerate and double down during this opportunity didn't so and those that did not you know kind of just peeled back a little bit but overall I still I would agree with with ibm's assessment of the market that you know those are kind of the two hot spots and have a cloud is hot and the good news is we've got a nice guy operating Molloy yeah Arvind Krista talked about the the in and it has it maybe not I think but he talked earlier in his remarks on the earnings call just in Publix Davis that IBM must win the battle the architectural battle the hybrid cloud and also that he wants to lead with a more technical sell essentially which is submitted to me those those two things are great news for you guys obviously you know Red Hat is the linchpin of that I want to ask you guys about your your conference data-driven so we were there last year it was a great really great intimate event of course you know you hand up the physical events anymore so you've pushed to September you're going all digital would give us the update on on that program we're um we're eager to have the cube participate in our September event so I'm sure we'll be talking more about that in the coming weeks but awesome we love it we exactly so you can tell Frank to put that so we we've been participating in some of the other conferences I think most notably last week learning a lot and and really trying to cherry pick the best ideas and the best tactics for putting on a digital event I think that as we look to September and as we look to put on a really rich digital event one of the things that is I think first and foremost in our minds is we want to actually produce more on-demand digital content particularly from a technology standpoint our technology sessions last year were oversubscribed the digital format allows people to stream whenever they can and frankly as many sessions as they as they might so I think we can be far more efficient in terms of delivering technical content or the users of our technology and then we're also eager to have as we've done with data driven in the years past our customers tell the story of how they're using data and this year certainly I think we're going to hear a lot of stories about in particular how they use data during this incredible you know crisis and and hopefully renewal from crisis well one of my favorite interviews last year your show is the the guys from draft King so hopefully they'll be back on it will have some football to talk about let's hope I mean I want it I want to end with just sort of this notion of you know we've been so tactical the last eight weeks right I'm you guys too I'm sure just making sure you're there for customers making sure your employees are ok but as we start to think about coming out of this you know into a post probe Adaro it looks like it's gonna be with us for a while but we're getting back the you know quasi opening so I'm hearing you know hybrid is here to stay we agree for sure cyber resiliency is very interesting I think you know one of the things we've said is that that companies may sub optimize near-term profitability to make sure that they've got the flexibility and resilience business resiliency in place you know that's obviously something that is I think good news for you guys but but I'll start with Paul and then maybe Brian you can bring us home how do you see this sort of emergence from this lockdown and into the post ghovat era yeah so this is a really interesting topic for me in fact I've had many discussions over the last couple weeks with some of our investors as well as our executive staff and so my personal belief is that the way buying and selling has occurred for IT specifically at the enterprise level is about to go through a transformation no different than we watched the transformation of SAS businesses when you basically replace the cold-calling salesperson with an inside and you know inbound marketing kind of effort followed up with SDR and vdr because what we're finding is that our clients now are able to meet more frequently because we don't have the friction of airplane ride or or physical building to go through and so like that that whole thing has been removed from the sales process and so it's interesting to me that one of the things that I'm starting to see is that the amount of activity that our sales organization is doing and the amount of physical calls that were going on they happen to be online however you couple that with the cost savings of not traveling around the globe and not being in offices and and I really think that those companies that embrace this new model are gonna find ways to penetrate more customers in a less expensive way and I do believe that the professional sales enterprise salesperson of tomorrow is gonna look at then it looks today and so I'm super excited to be in a company that is smack dab in the middle of selling to enterprise clients and and watching us learn together how we're gonna buy sell and market to each other in this post public way because I I'm the only thing I really do know it's just not gonna be the way it used to be what is it gonna look like I think all of us are placing bets and I don't think anybody has the answer yet but it's gonna look different for sure they're very very thoughtful comments and so Brian you know our thinking is the differentiation and the war yes it gets one in digital how is that affecting you know sort of your marketing and your thing around that we we fortunately decided coming into 2020 our fiscal 21 that we were actually going to overweight digital anyway we felt that it was far more effective we were seeing far better conversion rates we saw you know way better ROI in terms of very targeted tentative digital campaigns or general-purpose ABM type of efforts so our strategy had essentially been set and and what this provided us is the opportunity to essentially redirect all of the other funds individually so you know we have essentially a two-pronged marketing you know attack Frank now which is you know digital creating inbounds and B DRS that are calling on those in bounds that are created digital and so it's a you know it's going to be a really interesting transition back when physical events if and when they do actually come back into form you know how much we decide to actually go back into that that been I think that you know to someone to some extent we've talked about this in the past II you know the physical events and the the sheer spectacle and this year you know audacity of having to spend a million dollars just to break through that was an unsustainable model and so I think this is this is hastening perhaps the decline or demise of really silly marketing expense and getting back to telling telling customers what they need to know to help their an assist their buying journey in their investigation journey into a new technology I mean the IT world is hybrid and I think the events world is also going to be hybrid to me nice intimate events you know they're gonna live on but they're also gonna have a major digital component to them I'm very excited that you know we're a lot of learnings now in digital especially around events and by September the a lot of the the bugs are gonna be worked out you know we've been going to it so it feels like 24/7 but really excited to have you guys on thanks so much really looking forward to working with you in in September it's data-driven so guys thanks a lot for coming on the cube oh my gosh thank you Dave so nice it's so nice to be here thank you alright pleasure you did thank you everybody thank you and thanks for watching this is Dave Volante for the cube and we'll see you next time [Music]

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston. It's the cube covering IBM thing brought to you by IBM. >>Hi everybody. We're back. This is Dave Volante for the cube and you watching our continuous coverage of the IBM thing, 2020 digital event experience. And ed Walsh is here as the general manager. So the IBM storage division and software defined infrastructure. Ed, last time you were about to four feet to my left. I wish you were face to face but this'll, this'll have to do. Thanks for coming on the new normal. I like to call this maybe the new abnormal as some of us are still in lockdown but is the new normal. So we'll see more of this. So welcome it. I embrace it. No. So had you, you've obviously seen a number of, of downturns. You've run a lot, a lot of businesses, you've been on rocket ship businesses, you've been at IBM for a couple of stints. Obviously we've never seen anything like this. >>When did you first start getting visibility, uh, that this was going to be an issue? Obviously you guys have presence in China, okay. In AP. Uh, but when did you start to see it and what was your first move for the team? Yeah, sure. And so, uh, yeah, I've had the opportunity to lead a couple businesses and that was it. Okay. One, 2008. Ah, and this is, it is very different. But as far as our visibility on this, um, we have a worldwide and I'll say awesome. Right. Okay. So we saw this as far as a supply chain issue, um, and we came into it hot from Q4. We had a very good Q4 so I came into it hot or something. Why? So we are tracking it early and then we started to see the issues in China in late January. Then of course they shut down, came back to open after the Chinese new year in to be honest, they weren't quite back. >>So we were watching it almost as a support. Right. Main challenge. Yes. We do a lot of business in China, so we were also watching that, but it was light chain. But every single day managing that supply chain, I get out and give a compliment to my team. Uh, I don't think anyone has a better supply chain, but then of course quickly moved and everyone says, well, you should have seen it. This happened really fast. So it's a, it's different than other crises because it actually has to do with humans in life. Okay. All the other crisis were financial crisis. These, and we largely just manage the business through it and you're worried about your employees from the stress level, but you don't worry about the employees by the health level. So, uh, so we did see it early with supply chain that quickly gotten demand. And to be honest, when Italy went down, well, when Italy had the challenges that it happened so fast, when it shut down, uh, that was kind of a big wake up call for us. >>Mmm. You saw IBM respond very quickly. Um, everyone was at home almost immediately, even in countries weren't set up for it really took care of our people. But then we immediately, you saw the IBM was going to work really helping our clients. So we saw it kind of early, but it went from a hundred percent supply chain to a demand issue. And then we did have different real uh, interesting is a bad word, but interesting supply chain challenges as well. What it went on different countries stopping shipping's coming in, had to get a government approvals to get things. Mmm. So it was a good partnership with some of our um, get things where they need be in the right time. Ah. But it was probably a, I'll remember this quarter for a lot of different reasons. Um, and it worked out good for us. But uh, to be honest, it was, it is different from the other crisis's because it wasn't just a financial issue, which I think were just getting into actually, um, it was human and you saw different, two of our best regions were Italy and Spain that you think, Whoa, why? >>You know, you think the thing about other than going on in the quarter and but it was a relationship. It was, you know, we got our, the IB members got safe real quick, but then we quickly got them to engage with the clients, but we didn't Bush and was natural. Next thing you know that trust, I think there was a flight back to quality. You saw these different companies and that was the things they had to get done. Um, but it was, it was pretty amazing quarter to me. It was more seeing the team, you see your teams reacted. Crisis is in challenges in different ways and sometimes they paralyzed and we didn't see that at all in the team, which was pretty intelligent. Um, but we it coming from the beginning, call it before this we saw supply chain did, we came into Q1 hot on supply. So we kind of saw our early and we're already doing drills. So we saw it kind of right when it was hitting. Okay. >>But it was interesting you used the term interesting the challenging because it was sort of not only day to day for you, it was probably like minute by minute, hour by hour, country by country, region by region. How did you change the way in which you communicated to your teams or did you >>well so quickly? Um, so one I think culture, so I've been in a couple different companies, big and small. Mmm. I've seen different cultures react and the IBM culture is one that I've, I kind of look back and on this last quarter just because it's very customer intimacy. You don't have to, if the customer's in trouble, you can't stop them from running to help the clients. So we saw a natural, you know, we, IBM made sure they oil is refined to have one at home. Well we saw them quickly go after it. So most of it, any indication you do see it if these crisises um, you see some groups kind of freeze and, and you have to kind of walk them through it and make sure one, they're okay. This, this one was different yet to make sure your team was okay. Um, both mentally, physically, and their families. >>And it was a different stress level, was very personal and effected all of them. Where are the financial crises? In fact, it didn't affect everyone as much. It was more sterile. Uh, this one was wow, really different from a leadership. Um, but it's all the same. You have to get the team together and make sure they're healthy, happy, a healthy and mentally healthy too. And then you have to get people to kind of how do you go drive and help clients out. In this case it was helping you make sure your clients are okay, they're healthy, and then what can we do to help them? And I think that became more natural. And then of course it's Viber, Katelyn's drive, the business supply chain, which is I would say with any of the different um, challenges. But it's all communication. Well on this one, it was really had to check with the team often. >>We also had this new normal, I call this the new abnormal, which, you know, all of a sudden you can't meet with people so you couldn't get people physically together. So I call abnormal cause we're still, we'll get to the new normal, we'll use a lot more remote type of communication. But it was, I've never been so busy and I'm on video calls with all my teams every day. You see people using different tools to communicate like Slack, but also a lot more video. Uh, so it's communication, communication, which is the same thing. It's all the same thing with teams getting together, getting your direction. Well in this one it was mixture. They're safe first and then move on. Same thing with clients. Make sure let's say. Yeah. And that was what was fundamentally different about this. Um, Hey, what's up? Yeah. You know, and we were both grinders. >>I always joke, I work a half day every day. It doesn't matter which 12 hours the same way I have it twice. I'd take 12 hour days in a heartbeat these days. I mean, it's just really been crazy and I have to agree that the teams around the world at our, at our client space, of course the cube teams have barely really stepped up. But I want to ask you about the quarter. You're right. You came in hot in December, meaning you had a really good Q4. I, you know, I reached out to Tom Rosamilia last week, members said, Hey, nice announcement. And he said, did you cover it? I said, I did. And I sent them my breaking analysis. I, I really dug into the life cycles of the Z and how it affects, you know, IBM's overall business. And I predicted this is going to go on for several quarters where IBM has done a real chill tailwind, not only in, in systems hardware, but also, you know, the storage piece of the system's hardware business. >>We saw that last 40 accrued 19% and storage 60. Yeah. In, in, in Z hardware. Pretty amazing what's going on. Unpack. Okay. The quarter for us a little bit. Yeah. So if it wasn't for the crisis, I think all that would be plate. We had some announcements okay. Across the entire source portfolio. So what we do for storage for Z big announcements in Q3, uh, directly aligned with what we do with the new store. You know, the new Z, uh, you get a lot of value. One-on-one is three. So a lot of senators, I think it's different platform. So hit the demand and what clients are trying to do. Mmm. Bring a new, you know, uh, cloud development platforms, you know, native cloud development, but also using cloud. So there's a whole bunch of different things we brought to that platform. But we also launched new AI platforms, so stores for AI and big data. >>Uh, and then it the one we launched our new distributor. So we're kind of coming in from an offering set in fact water, uh, you know, 19% growth. Um, I think it's like speaks volumes no on the offering. Yes. But more how are we reacting to their clients more than anything else? I think it was a, Ashley's I talked about earlier, it was an interesting quarter. I think it's clients were responding to the flight equality, but also who's engaging with them the right way. So we do have a company absolutely refresh offerings across. In fact, this quarter, every single one of our offerings, every single new offerings group. Yeah. It's more of a, if you have the right offerings meet in the market, helping them with it, it correct after two, right. Your own journey. The cloud, moving, modernizing your environment. We need to free up our teams. >>We did a dramatic simplification on but what we do with storage or Z, but also distributed storage and what we do for storage AI and a big focus on cyber resiliency. Those are hitting what I'll say the market was in Q4 but they happen to also be hitting the market for what's going on now the noodles. So a lot of the simplification was that, how do you remote manage, how do you do things? One of the biggest things we do to our clients is, and we have all these tools, we give you a lot of things for free baseline, but we also have these increase the pro versions. We're just said, take them, I use them because it allows you to monitor and manage your environment better remotely. It was all web based. Uh, and that was one of the biggest things to do. But that is hidden the market. >>That's, that's the new normal. And we did that across those Z distributed storage. Mmm. But also what we did in a cyber resiliency in AI. I want to hit on a couple of those points. I mean, I'm going to start with the cyber resiliency because we were one of the first to report with our, with our partner ETR, our data partner that the work from home offset it was somewhat cushioning the downturn. I mean it's ugly, but chill worked from home pivot and that included, uh, uh, solutions around ransomware, data protection, cyber resiliency. So yep. Investment, actually 20% of the CIO is that we surveyed actually by not spending more in 2020, because of there wasn't zoom and WebEx, it was, there was other infrastructure around it, VDI, et cetera. So you're seeing that, uh, it sounds like, well, maybe talk a little bit about, so the cyber resiliency, and I'm especially interested in the context of going forward, feels like this is going to be one of those permanent things. >>You know, clients might sacrifice some near term profitability to have more flexibility and resiliency in their business and not rely so much on just narrow dr but more business continuance. No, I think you agree. In fact, um, we've always been, you know, a leader in business continuance. We still are. But cyber resiliency is yes. What a million different factories hovering from a ransomware or uh, um, you know, malware incident is different fundamentally different tool sets than what you're doing. You need to have a copy of your data of course, but very different than when if you were dr single server come up and running. Okay. You see us and mostly I think we're ahead of it because as IBM, we're the largest outsource firm in the world. So we actually live with these incidents as IBM. So in normal storage you hear about them and typically it's a storage issue. >>That issue that came back running. We are living with what we do or how to, our storage or outsourcing or strategic outsourcing group. And so we're putting into all of our products a lot of unique things from cyber resiliency. So what we did for storage for Z, it literally is a safe card. Copies an offering that little gifty 500 recover points. Yeah. Separated administratively and physically. So you're really able to literally, internal and external threats, protect yourself best in class. No one else has a solution set. We did the same thing and distributed. So, but in distributed, what we're trying to do is help people, not only, I used the term, left the boom and right up, boom, left the boom is before incident. How do you prepare? How do you have the right backup recovery? How do you have the right tool sets? Recover points? >>How do you protect yourself? How do you make sure you're um, you know, monitoring for ransomware? Every single night we'll get back power tools. Okay? The right of boom is once you do get hit, you go into this incident response situation where eyes drawn, your lights are on you. How do you give the humans, uh, the right cool. So they can react the right way and be quick. So also storage plays a huge role with ransomware and malware. Also. You get into, all right, the boom hits, you get the call, it's from the CEO. You got to fix it. You need new tools. Right? What recover point do you go back to? Um, it's iterative in nature. Uh, well yeah, it hit on, I got a call on Friday, but I don't know when the malware got and it was a Wednesday or Tuesday. It might be different per system. >>It's an internet process. You need the right tools, you use all your copies, primary storage, secondary storage for sure. He copies VR copies and find out what's your best recover point. And it's imperative you have to Lily bring up environments, you have to have fence network capabilities and all your tools to allow you to literally bring them up quickly in succession or altogether find them. That's recover point you get to as soon as you can. So those are the things I think we're leading. And we launched all this before this issue. Well we also saw an increase in malware in our client set. So to be honest, you know, even with all this crisis that we're seeing an increase and in malware, ransomware is where the storage infrastructure layer really matters in the incident response capability where if you have an incident, someone stole your data sets and typically storage guys that they call now IBM has great solution sets around their AI, direct driven. >>The ability is to allow you to protect yourself there. But this is on ransomware. It's something that storage plays a huge role. We do undistributed we do on mainframe with specialized solution sets. No one else in the industry is doing that. And of course back, uh, and recovery. Yeah. Quick recovery and orchestrated fashion. That's what we do around spectrum protect all day long. Right. Okay. Yeah. Last time we met. Oh, okay. You shared with us your, your consolidation strategy, your big, you know, announcement, uh, last fall, uh, and obviously, you know, great board or 90% growth. Well, a lot of that was drafting off the Z and the, you know, the hundred, but, but I'm wondering how that, how that consolidation work. We talked about the challenges of doing that know yep. The importance of that, how others are going to have to respond. And we're seeing that in the industry for a lot of the large portfolio players. >>But how did that, you know, how's that going? Can you give us, what, can you tell us about the progress there terms of its uptake and adoption? Sure, sure. So really what we did is we kind of looked at the industry and said everyone's adding too much complexity. You know, the whole industry is based on having a high end mid range and low end storage environment and the high end did everything custom and silk concrete performance, but you had to pay a price for it. And then the whole industry is based upon just get each of the next gen. So if you're a high end about problem is every client has high end, mid range and low in storage. So you have dual vendor strategy, but what you do is you have to, the whole industry is just getting to the next high end. Uh, you see EMC, Dell hashtag next generation, midbrain storage, the whole industry, including in the past, IBM was structure and getting you there. >>So we basically announced no more of that. Doesn't make sense. It used to, it no longer makes sense. We drive a lot of innovation what we're doing with Silicon, but software and we need to one platform, one platform that allow you at different price points down the stack from low end, mid range and high end, well without compromise. What's a dramatic simplification, right? Uh, that was a well-respected, you know, I would say we got an unbelievable response from that. And you saw a dramatic growth. So you kind of hit upon, we grew across all of our segments. Yes. We had a good growth on what we do for stores for Z. Well, we had an equally good growth at, as we did on distribute storage. So if you have physical environments, virtual environments, VMware, hyper V containers, public cloud, hybrid cloud, our distributed storage portfolio. >>So one of the biggest increases. Mmm. And we, again, we grew in every one of these segments. So one the simplification. Okay. Chapter two, how do you free up your team? How do you modernize your applications so you can innovate? Mmm. critical. You're free of your team. So that one thing that we also did a lot of, you know, Billy do remote management. I made it very simple to use Mmm. And simple to support, which also helps them the new normal, but it hit the right tone with it, our partners, but also our clients. And you saw a pretty massive uptick after the February announcement. So it was only half a quarter. We saw quite a large lift. I want to ask you about the storage for big data and AI as well. There seems to be a new emerging workload. You got all this data out there collected and Hadoop and analytics over the last 10 years. >>Now you're applying, we've talked about this, the new innovation cocktail. You got data AI and okay, well it gives you the scale whether it's on grammar in the public cloud, uh, but there seems to be a new workload where you get up what kind of a data store. You've got the analytic workloads that are in there. You've got some data science tooling, uh, and other, you know, AI that, that seems to be an emerging workload beyond, um, just kind of infrastructure as a service. But okay, really new way to get insights out of data, data, wonderful insights or not yet. So talk about that workload and how that is, is powering your business. And what are you seeing there? Well, I think this is where I see IBM, uh, really I'm helping clients with this journey to building smarter businesses cause AI is going to be in every workload. >>You're bringing up very specific workloads around machine learning, learning, bring customer on Silicon, like GPS into it, on these big data Lake. Uh, how do you take a data swamp and make a data Lake? Um, okay. Uh, what I'll say is IBM's doing this and we use the term ladder, the AI, and there's no AI without IAA information architecture. You have to have the right infrastructure to do it. We also see different groups having random acts of AI, a data scientist and the visionary does something is kind of interesting. Another group does something interesting and maybe a third. It's like the early days of data warehousing, but they're not able to take it together and bring it to, they can infuse AI across all the processes in a company and have one single view of the truth. Do we see people going through this natural progression, some start independently, a fight technology then bring it together. >>So everything we're doing from, I'll talk about what we're doing is storage infrastructure servers, but also across what we're doing, you know, are um, Mmm cloud pack for data offering and make it very simple for you to pull and get the use case out of it. But for storage is about when you want to bring it together, you need the right performance. But we bar none have the best source for AI. And data. It's based upon our, you know, Lily, um, award-winning. Yeah. Scale up a file system called GPFS or spectrum scale. It runs the largest AI supercomputers in the world. The same as X software, but you can buy it to your device that we launched it in December, which is feller. ESS, um, 3000 is a single all flash array. It's a cluster, but you can no compromise. You go from that device and the largest AI supercomputer in the world configuration, exact same technology, hardware and software that we do. >>Floyd. So now you can start small and grow and then we're helping along. How do you get the value out of it? So that's typically where storage ends. I gave you the best platform you can possibly have, cost effective, small, and you can scale to the biggest thing you want to do. The next thing we're doing, which people say, well that's not storage and why are you doing that? We're doing things called spectrum discover. It's managing your metadata and making your data scientists the most productive possible. They spent any 80% of the time literally just understanding the data, tagging the data, organizing it so they know what they're doing with, cause if you don't have the right AI data sets, you really can't get the outcome. Okay. But we have what's called spectrum discover works across a whole bunch of other products, but also all of our portfolio, both object storage file system block allows you to look at an environment, organize it, and save dramatic amount of time for data scientists. >>And of course that's easy feed into all the things we do around cloud pack for data, which is where IBM has really put a lot of these open source and our own tools together so you can move forward pretty quickly. The key thing is how does IBM help you not technology. We know what you want to accomplish, let's help you but not limit you by we're letting you use all the different open source. Yes. I just want allow you to move forward and help you in that journey. And it is a journey and we're meeting clients where they are because everyone's on it different. Yeah. I guess segment of the journey and how do we help you go through it and from a storage, uh, you're seeing that environment really double every quarter. Mmm. For the people that are looking for it, no one really touches us. >>Mmm. In fact, our number two and three customers, Mmm. Competitors in the space use the same software that we OEM so we're in a very good position when it comes to stores for AI, big data. So they say it's better to be lucky than good. I say it's, it's better to be good and lucky. And so, you know, we're not going back it's not happening. we've got this new abnormal, as you call it, and you've done a lot of the hard work in terms of rationalizing the port folio. You've done the R and D and you started this years ago and it took a long time. Mmm. But I wonder if you could just talk about why you feel like you're in a good position coming out of this thing and who knows how we're going to come out of it, but what are the critical components that you feel you have in your arsenal that will make you stronger and more competitive or you know, relative to, you know, the, uh, the landscape out there, your thoughts? >>Yeah. So now this is going to sound, uh, well good. So all these different issues we've been through all these Bryce disease we've been through in our careers. Um, there's an old adage, if you can last room and you get resourced, you can come out stronger. And it's very true. So you can grow, you can do the right things, but you have to have the right offerings. Sometimes that's low, lucky you entered, right? I think we perfectly with the right innovation that did take us years ago, but we're hitting the current market. But also what I'll say is the new normal market. Mmm. And I think that's an opportunity. And I've always said, listen, the world doesn't need another storage. Right. Well, they're looking for solutions around the source challenges and I think what we've done around product portfolio with, we use the term offerings was the offerings around it with a different software allows you to actually, we're really free, you know, if it's really chapter two now we're trying to do monetize your core infrastructure, you need to free up your team so they can innovate. >>We're going to do that dramatically in what we're doing. Storage, they help you with that journey to cloud either OnPrem or into the public cloud or really what we see is a hybrid multicloud fabric happening, but also we do cyber resiliency as we built it from the or. So I think we're good hitting it, right? Mmm. Now the new normal is all the things that it has to be simple, it has to be rope managed and those are all the things we made massive investments across every one of our portfolio items. They just got launched a launch in the last two quarters. So I think we're in good stead. But to be honest, in these times, as we talked earlier, you work harder. You've got to really embrace the client feedback. Mmm. I think IBM is a good position to do that. Also with the greater IBM, we see vigor, Mmm. Opportunity set to find out how to help clients. >>Okay. We're the number one AI company in the world. So we're seeing what clients really want to do with AI and how they. There's actually holding it back. Number one outsourcer. We're seeing how people are really dealing with cyber resiliency and especially now where ransomware, where storage really impacts you. We're seeing exactly how to do it and what tools push forward and that's where you're seeing very unique opportunities in these times. If you can have the right product, the right go to market and do very well and more importantly you'd do it by helping clients. If you can help clients through this, do you come out stronger? I think some other people's storage, it becomes more challenging. I don't think people just want you know, the next flash array. I think they're looking for solution sets a companies to help them get through and get to the really the new, I think we're going to get to the new normal. I think this is a new abnormal, I can't call it normal. When we're all locked away, the new normal is going to be much faster. You're gonna have to go faster. So I think IBM and the IBM storage is aligned with let's help you with the cloud journey. Let's help you build our businesses. We'll make sure cyber resiliency built in there. Well, we're going to, you're seeing it across every division of IBM, step up and help you in that. Mmm. In that direction. That's what I think is differentiated. Why I'm excited about >>what we're doing. IBM in general, but also, yeah, again, storage is perfectly aligned with that overall mission and it's, it's kind of exciting to see it kind of play out in front of class. Well, I think you're right. I think the last decade was a lot of, it was about the all flash data center and, and the future is about powering innovation infrastructure for machine intelligence. Uh, and, and really getting insights out of data scaling. Uh, ed ed Walsh. Always great to have you on the, uh, hopefully we can do this, you know, a little closer face to face, maybe six feet apart. Um, and then eventually we could shake hands or high five or whatever it works. Thanks so much for coming to the Cuba. It's great to see you looking good and stay safe. Hey, thank you. Stay safe. All right. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante for the cube and our continuous coverage of the IBM, that 20, 20 digital events experience. I'll be right back. Sorry for the short break.