(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to "theCUBE's" coverage of the International Women's Showcase, 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm pleased to be joined by my next guest, Madhura DasGupta Sinha, the founder and CEO of Aspire For Her. Madhura, it's great to have you on the program. >> It's lovely to be here on this program. Thank you for having me, Lisa >> Tell me a little bit about your background. >> Lisa, I have been a banker for the last 25 years but the last two years of my journey have been professionally and personally the most satisfying and fulfilling. On 8th of March, 2020, I started Aspire For Her. So today is our second birthday. >> Lisa: Happy birthday. >> Thank you, Lisa >> Tell us a little bit about Aspire For Her >> It's been a wonderful journey. >> Yeah, what was the genesis of it? You're obviously very passionate about it but talk to us about the Genesis of Aspire For Her. >> Thank you for the question. I was looking at gender data emanating from India and that left me fairly disturbed and distressed, why? Well, I was looking at the economic participation of women and I realized that we are absolutely at the bottom of a list of 156 countries. I felt someone needs to do something about this problem and I thought that someone could be me. >> And so two years ago you launched Aspire For Her. Talk to me about what that has achieved in its first two years and now embarking on year three. >> Well, I think our journey has been absolutely fascinating Today we have more than 120,000 members, mentors, supporters across the globe, across 60 different countries. We have more than 150 women leaders who are mentors at Aspire For Her, we have about 50 organizations that are working with us jointly and partnering with us in our journey to motivate more women to enter and stay in the workforce. Our vision is to add more than 1 million women to the workforce by 2025 and 10 million women to the workforce by 2030 and we want to do that by using the power of networks and communities. >> Those are really lofty goals, but fantastic. You mentioned and across 60 countries so far and we're talking about just on your second birthday, all of that you've accomplished. Talk to me a little bit about some of the mentors and how did you find some of these people? >> Well, Lisa, we use a unique five point model to change mindsets, and the first pillar in that model is mentors and role models. Because we notice that four out of five women have no successful, professional women role models in their immediate network. We give them access. So these mentors are CEOs, CXOs, women leaders who have built businesses who want to give back and they come to us and want to be part of Aspire For Her. They are a big part of our equation for success. The second pillar that we work on is learning opportunities and we work with organizations like Amazon and many others to ensure that our members stand head over shoulders over others when they are being looked at for jobs and recruitment opportunities. The third pillar that we work on is what we call career previews. Now, if you are wanting to get women excited about careers we have to understand one thing, if she can see it, she can be it. That's the mantra that we follow as we open up doors and windows of women's minds to new age career options. The fourth pillar that we work on is what we call a peer community. And what we notice is that the community connects with each other, motivates each other and elevates each other and collectively finds solutions to problems. The fifth pillar that we work with is what we call 3E, employment, entrepreneurship, or education. We want every woman in our country and across the globe to be in 3E. We want every woman to be financially independent because financial independence is the cornerstone of all other forms of independence and that is how we can break all biases. >> That is fantastic. The five point model, how it leads of the 3E's. Something you said really resonated with me and that is: if she can see it, she can be it. And we often say, we can't be what we can't see but I love this spin that you've taken on that, you've put that positive mindset, if she can see it, we want to enable her to see it across the globe. As you talked about your goals of a million women in the workforce by 2025 which is just a few years down the road, you're well on your way to accomplishing that. Talk to me about some of the data. I know you have some interesting data from McKinsey that really supported the genesis of Aspire For Her. >> Yes, Lisa, in fact, there's a report for the "Power Of Parity" report which McKinsey publishes from time to time and I notice some very interesting data in that. McKinsey says, "If we have a little more "than 10% women more in the workforce "this will be a trillion dollar opportunity for India. "A 27% increase in our GDP." So if we get more women to work, it essentially means that they will add to their families, to their country, to their society, to the world. >> So the data is there showing just a 10% increase in women in the workforce leads to a 27% increase in India's GDP. We're talking about India alone here. Talk to me about how are you working with companies like AWS to help Aspire For Her achieve it's lofty goals. >> AWS has been an absolutely wonderful partner for us. And let me start by talking about the She Dares community, their focus on diversity and their thought leadership has been absolutely wonderful for us. Well, the She Dares community is meant for all women who want to be in tech careers whether today they're in school or in college or they're working in non-tech fields, but are interested in technology as a career option or they're taking a break and they wish to come back into the workforce. The AWS She Dares community welcomes all women like this. It's very inclusive, all embracive and that's what we love about building the community with AWS. We just started two months ago and today we have more than 10,000 members in India and we've had some fantastic stories also emanating from the She Dares community in AWS. >> I love that. You've 10,000 members in two months, the Aspire For Her program, not only does it have lofty goals but you've got a really fast growth trajectory. Share a story with me, if you will of a woman that that is in the She Dares program and where she came from and where she is now. >> Yes, let me share the story of Usha and we just shared this at the launch of AWS, just a couple of days back, Lisa. So Usha worked for just two years and the next 16 years of her life, she devoted to bringing up her family. A few years back, her husband suffered Parkinson's disease and she realized that the entire weight of the family was on her so she decided to join She Dares. She decided to sign up for the AWS cloud certification program. How did she do it? Well, she had the entire family's burden on her. She worked night and day, but somehow she squeezed out hours during the night where she would sit and study and ensured that she got certified. Remember, this was a woman who just spent two years in the workforce and the next 16 years, she had absolutely no connection with anything that was even remotely career oriented. But after getting certified and getting motivated by the community of She Dares, she decided to give it a shot and apply for a job with AWS. Two days ago, she got her offer letter. So today, she's proud-- >> What a fantastic story going from two years in the workforce, 16 years taking care of her family then the burden is on her with her husband falling ill and she finds this opportunity. I love the message there. How do you talk to women who might be in similar situations to Usha going, "I haven't been in the workforce "for a really long time, Tech seems intimidating." How do you help them achieve the courage to go forward >> Lisa, it's the same five point model that we use. If she can see it, she can be it. If she can see a role model like Usha, a woman who has been out of the workforce for a long time finds the confidence, finds her voice and finds the ability to just rise up above that adversity and ensure that she jumps right back into the workforce. >> And is Aspire For Her focused on STEM only, or are you focused on all industries for women? >> We are focused on all industries for women and we like to look at fairly new age careers as well. So whether it's an Instagram influencer, whether it's somebody who's opened patisserie for the best brownies in town, we like to celebrate all women and all their career paths, but STEM is a very important part of what we do because we know that the STEM skills gap in India and globally is a very serious problem and if we train women and reskill women in STEM, they will automatically gravitate towards those roles which will open up in the India of tomorrow. >> Are you able to reach young girls like say in primary school and high school as well, is this open to women of all ages? >> It's open to women of all ages. We like to start at the age 16 because that's when women start taking career decisions whether it's about writing competitive exams or whether it's about looking at which colleges they will get into so we like to start at 16 and there's really no age limit. >> That's fantastic that there's no age limit but also starting young. One of the things that we know about the tech industry is the percentage of women in technical roles is quite low, I believe it's below 25% and has been for quite some time. We see that in a lot of countries that drop off around the high school, 16 year age, how do you help attract these young girls to be interested in not just STEM but in creating a career for herself? >> So we like telling a lot of stories, Lisa, and there are constant nudges and triggers on our platform. So today I'm speaking with you and I'm sure that this will be beamed across our platforms as well, And people will look at Lisa and say, "Hey Lisa is doing this fantastic thing as a host. "And she's working with this great organization. "Why can we not be like Lisa?" And that's the way in which we motivate folks. And we try to ensure that every woman with a career story comes in and is able to share her journey, her path with our larger community whether that's through mentorship sessions, whether that's through role modeling, whether it's through coaching, whether it's through many fireside chats that we have, we have a lot of workshops and webinars. We are a COVID baby so we are very digital and we love technology. So that's how we try to create the community, ensure that there is enough excitement going every minute of the day. It's a very buzzing, humming, active community and we ensure that finally, everyone has that one thing in mind: I have to be financially independent and I cannot ever give up on my career. >> I love that: Be financially independent and not give up on my career. You must be obviously, very intentionally, you launched Aspire For Her, you mentioned two years ago today, on the 8th of March, 2020 right in the very onset of COVID but also on International Women's Day. Talk to me a little bit about why that was so important to launch on that day in International Women's history month. >> Well, when I was looking at the problem that was staring at women in India there's another interesting piece of statistic that's struck, which was that the percentage of women in the workforce has been declining steadily in India. And I thought that someone needed to do something about that problem, and I thought that someone could be me. I'm not a great one for symbols but I thought that if we launch it on Women's day, this will be a constant reminder for us to strive harder to get to those numbers quicker than we have set ourselves up for. That's the reason why I decided when the world was talking about women, it's a great idea for this to be like a conscience keeper for us. >> Perfect timing. Well, congratulations on all of the success that you have achieved in just a short two year time period. I can't wait to see what year three brings and sign me up to be a mentor. I'm a woman in STEM, I'm a woman that hosts this program. I would love to get involved and help encourage girls and other women to follow their passion. >> That is so amazing, Lisa, you are on and we'd love to welcome you aboard as a mentor >> Oh, excellent! Lucky me, my lucky day. Madhura, thank you so much for talking with us about Aspire For Her, and again, congratulations on all of your success. >> Thank you. >> And Madhura, you've got one final message for AWS employees that you want to leave, what is that? >> Thank you, Lisa, for the question, there is a message that I'd like to leave for all AWS employees across the globe, join us, be a part of our movement, it takes about three minutes to sign up for Aspire For Her. Please be a part of the change that you wish to see. Thank you. >> Well, Madhura again, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Congratulations on the success, the momentum that you have achieved in such a short time period. We appreciate your insights and your time. >> Thank you so much, Lisa, thank you, thank you, and I am going to send you the form to become a mentor as well (chuckling). >> I'm in, sign me up. >> Thank you >> For Madhura DasGupta Sinha, I'm, Lisa Martin, you're watching "theCUBE's" coverage of International Women's Showcase, 2022. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios today, having a Cube Conversation, you know, with the COVID situation going on we've had to change our business and go pretty much 100% digital. And as part of that process, we wanted to reach out to our community, and talk to some of the leaders out there, because I think leadership in troubling times is even more amplified in it's importance. So we're excited to be joined today by two leaders in our community. First one being John Chambers, a very familiar face from many, many years at Cisco, who's now the founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures. John, great to see you. >> Jeff, it's a pleasure to be with you again. >> Absolutely. And joining him is Umesh Sachdev, he's the co-founder and CEO of Uniphore. First time on theCUBE, Umesh, great to meet you. >> Jeff, thank you for having me, it's great to be with you. >> You as well, and I had one of your great people on the other day, talking about CX, and I think CX is the whole solution. Why did Uber beat cabs, do you want to stand on a corner and raise your hand in the rain? Or do you want to know when the guy's going to come pick you up, in just a couple minutes? So anyway, welcome. So let's jump into it. John, one of your things, that you talked about last time we talked, I think it was in October, wow how the world has changed. >> Yes. >> Is about having a playbook, and really, you know, kind of thinking about what you want to do before it's time to actually do it, and having some type of a script, and some type of direction, and some type of structure, as to how you respond to situations. Well there's nothing like a disaster to really fire off, you know, the need to shift gears, and go to kind of into a playbook mode. So I wonder if you could share with the viewers, kind of what is your playbook, you've been through a couple of these bumps. Not necessarily like COVID-19, but you've seen a couple bumps over your career. >> So it's my pleasure Jeff. What I'll do is kind of outline how I believe you use an innovation playbook on everything from acquisitions, to digitizing a company, to dealing with crisis. Let's focus on the playbook for crisis. You are right, and I'm not talking about my age, (John laughing) but this is my sixth financial crisis, and been through the late 1990s with the Asian financial crisis, came out of it even stronger at Cisco. Like everybody else we got knocked down in the 2001 tech bubble, came back from it even stronger. Then in 2008, 2009, Great Recession. We came through that one very, very strong, and we saw that one coming. It's my fourth major health crisis. Some of them turned out to be pretty small. I was in Mexico when the bird pandemic hit, with the President of Mexico, when we thought it was going to be terrible. We literally had to cancel the meetings that evening. That's why Cisco built the PLAR Presence. I was in Brazil for the issue with the Zika virus, that never really developed much, and the Olympics went on there, and I only saw one mosquito during the event. It bit me. But what I'm sharing with you is I've seen this movie again and again. And then, with supply chain, which not many people were talking about yet, supply chain crisis, like we saw in Japan with the Tsunami. What's happening this time is you're seeing all three at one time, and they're occurring even faster. So the playbook is pretty simple in crisis management, and then it would be fun to put Umesh on the spot and say how closely did you follow it? Did you agree with issues, or did you disagree, et cetera, on it. Now I won't mention, Umesh, that you've got a review coming up shortly from your board, so that should not affect your answer at all. But the first playbook is being realistic, how much was self-inflicted, how much was market. This one's largely market, but if you had problems before, you got to address them at the same time. The second thing is what are the five to seven things that are material, what you're going to do to lead through this crisis. That's everything from expense management, to cash preservation. It's about how do you interface to your employees, and how do you build on culture. It's about how do you interface to your customers as they change from their top priority being growth and innovation, to a top priority being cost savings, and the ability to really keep their current revenue streams from churning and moving. And it's about literally, how do make your big bets for what you want to look like as you move out of this market. Then it's how do you communicate that to your employees, to your shareholders, to your customers, to your partners. Painting the picture of what you look like as you come out. As basic as that sounds, that's what crisis management is all about. Don't hide, be visible, CEOs should take the role on implementing that playbook. Umesh to you, do you agree? And have fun with it a little bit, I like the give and take. >> I want to see the playbook, do you have it there, just below the camera? (Jeff laughing) >> I have it right here by my side. I will tell you, Jeff, in crisis times and difficult times like these, you count all the things that go right for you, you count your blessings. And one of the blessings that I have, as a CEO, is to have John Chambers as my mentor, by my side, sharing not just the learning that he had through the crisis, but talking through this, with me on a regular basis. I've read John's book more than a few times, I bet more than anybody in the world, I've read it over and over. And that, to me, is preparation going into this mode. One of the things that John has always taught me is when times get difficult, you get calmer than usual. It's one thing that when you're cruising on the freeway and you're asked to put the brakes, but it's quite another when you're in rocket ship, and accelerating, which is what my company situation was in the month of January. We were coming out of a year of 300% growth, we were driving towards another 300% growth, hiring tremendously, at a high pace. Winning customers at a high pace, and then this hit us. And so what I had to do, from a playbook perspective, is, you know, take a deep breath, and just for a couple of days, just slow down, and calmly look at the situation. My first few steps were, I reached out to 15 of our top customers, the CEOs, and give them calls, and said let's just talk about what you're seeing, and what we are observing in our business. We get a sense of where they are in their businesses. We had the benefit, my co-founder works out of Singapore, and runs our Asia business. We had the benefit of picking up the sign probably a month before everyone else did it in the U.S. I was with John in Australia, and I was telling John that "John, something unusual is happening, "a couple of our customers in these countries in Asia "are starting to tell us they would do the deal "a quarter later." And it's one thing when one of them says it, it's another when six of them say it together. And John obviously has seen this movie, he could connect the dots early. He told me to prepare, he told the rest of the portfolio companies that are in his investment group to start preparing. We then went to the playbook that John spoke of, being visible. For me, culture and communication take front seat. We have employees in ten different countries, we have offices, and very quickly, even before the governments mandated, we had all of them work, you know, go work from home, and be remote, because employee safety and health was the number one priority. We did our first virtual all-hands meeting on Zoom. We had about 240 people join in from around the world. And my job as CEO, usually our all-hands meeting were different functional leaders, different people in the group talk to the team about their initiatives. This all-hands was almost entirely run by me, addressing the whole company about what's going to be the situation from my lens, what have we learned. Be very factual. At the same time, communicating to the team that because of the fact that we raised our funding the last year, it was a good amount of money, we still have a lot of that in the bank, so we going to be very secure. At the same time, our customers are probably going to need us more than ever. Call centers are in more demand than ever, people can't walk up to a bank branch, they can't go up to a hospital without taking an appointment. So the first thing everyone is doing is trying to reach call centers. There aren't enough people, and anyways the work force that call centers have around the world, are 50% working from home, so the capacity has dropped. So our responsibility almost, is to step up, and have our AI and automation products available to as many call centers as we can. So as we are planning our own business continuity, and making sure every single employee is safe, the message to my team was we also have to be aggressive and making sure we are more out there, and more available, to our customers, that would also mean business growth for us. But first, and foremost is for us to be responsible citizens, and just make it available where it's needed. As we did that, I quickly went back to my leadership team, and again, the learning from John is usually it's more of a consensus driven approach, we go around the table, talk about a topic for a couple of hours, get the consensus, and move out of the room. My leadership meetings, they have become more frequent, we get together once a week, on video call with my executive leaders, and it's largely these days run by me. I broke down the team into five different war rooms, with different objectives. One of them we called it the preservation, we said one leader, supported by others will take the responsibility of making sure every single employee, their families, and our current customers, are addressed, taken care of. So we made somebody lead that group. Another group was made responsible for growth. Business needs to, you know, in a company that's growing at 300%, and we still have the opportunity, because call centers need us more than ever, we wanted to make sure we are responding to growth, and not just hunkering down, and, you know, ignoring the opportunity. So we had a second war room take care of the growth. And a third war room, lead by the head of finance, to look at all the financial scenarios, do the stress tests, and see if we are going to be ready for any eventuality that's going to come. Because, you know, we have a huge amount of people, who work at Uniphore around the world, and we wanted to make sure their well being is taken care of. So from being over communicative, to the team and customers, and being out there personally, to making sure we break down the teams. We have tremendous talent, and we let different people, set of people, run different set of priorities, and report back to me more frequently. And now, as we have settled into this rhythm, Jeff, you know, as we've been in, at least in the Bay area here, we've been shelter in place for about a month now. As we are in the rhythm, we are beginning to do virtual happy hours, every Thursday evening. Right after this call, I get together with my team with a glass of wine, and we get together, we talk every but work, and every employee, it's not divided by functions, or leadership, and we are getting the rhythm back into the organization. So we've gone and adjusted in the crisis, I would say very well. And the business is just humming along, as we had anticipated, going into this crisis. But I would say, if I didn't have John by my side, if I hadn't read his book, the number of times that I have, every plane ride we've done together, every place we've gone together, John has spoken about war stories. About the 2001, about 2008, and until you face the first one of your own, just like I did right now, you don't appreciate when John says leadership is lonely. But having him by our side makes it easier. >> Well I'm sure he's told you the Jack Welch story, right? That you've quoted before, John, where Jack told you that you're not really a good leader, yet, until you've been tested, right. So you go through some tough stuff, it's not that hard to lead on an upward to the right curve, it's when things get a little challenging that the real leadership shines through. >> Completely agree, and Jack said it the best, we were on our way to becoming the most valuable company in the world, he looked me in the eye and said "John, you have a very good company." And I knew he was about to give me a teaching moment, and I said "What does it take to have a great one?" He said a near death experience. And I thought I did that in '97, and some of the other management, and he said, "No, it's when you went through something "like we went through in 2001, "which many of our peers did die in." And we were knocked down really hard. When we came back from it, you get better. But what you see in Umesh is a very humble, young CEO. I have to remember he's only 34 years old, because his maturity is like he's 50, and he's seen it before. As you tell, he's like a sponge on learning, and he doesn't mind challenging. And what what he didn't say, in his humbleness, is they had the best month in March ever. And again, well over 300% versus the same quarter a year ago. So it shows you, if you're in the right spot, i.e. artificial intelligence, i.e. cost savings, i.e. customer relationship with their customers, how you can grow even during the tough times, and perhaps set a bold vision, based upon facts and a execution plan that very few companies will be able to deliver on today. So off to a great start, and you can see why I'm so honored and proud to be his strategic partner, and his coach. >> Well it's interesting, right, the human toll of this crisis is horrible, and there's a lot of people getting sick, and a lot of people are dying, and all the estimations are a lot more are going to die this month, as hopefully we get over the hump of some of these curves. So that aside, you know, we're here talking kind of more about the, kind of, the business of this thing. And it's really interesting kind of what a catalyst COVID has become, in terms of digital transformation. You know, we've been talking about new ways to work for years, and years, and years, and digital transformation, and all these kind of things. You mentioned the Cisco telepresence was out years, and decades ago. I mean I worked in Mitsubishi, we had a phone camera in 1986, I looked it up today, it was ridiculous, didn't work. But now, it's here, right. Now working from home is here. Umesh mentioned, you know, these huge call centers, now everybody's got to go home. Do they have infrastructure to go home? Do they have a place to work at home? Do they have support to go home? Teachers are now being forced, from K-12, and I know it's a hot topic for you, John, to teach from home. Teach on Zoom, with no time to prep, no time to really think it through. It's just like the kids aren't coming back, we got to learn it. You know I think this is such a transformational moment, and to your point, if this goes on for weeks, and weeks, and months, and months, which I think we all are in agreement that it will. I think you said, John, you know, many, many quarters. As people get new habits, and get into this new flow, I don't think they're going to go back back to the old ways. So I think it's a real, you know, kind of forcing function for digital transformation. And it's, you can't, you can't sit on the sidelines, cause your people can't come to the office anymore. >> So you've raised a number of questions, and I'll let Umesh handle the tough part of it. I will answer the easy part, which is I think this is the new normal. And I think it's here now, and the question is are you ready for it. And as you think about what we're really saying is the video sessions will become such an integral part of our daily lives, that we will not go back to having to do 90% of our work physically. Today alone I've done seven major group meetings, on Zoom, and Google Hangouts, and Cisco Webex. I've done six meetings with individuals, or the key CEOs of my portfolio. So that part is here to stay. Now what's going to be fascinating is does that also lead into digitization of our company, or do the companies make the mistake of saying I'm going to use this piece, because it's so obvious, and I get it, in terms of effectiveness, but I'm not going to change the other things in my normal work, in my normal business. This is why, unfortunately, I think you will see, we originally said, Jeff, you remember, 40% maybe as high as 45% of the Fortune 500 wouldn't exist in a decade. And perhaps 70% of the start-ups wouldn't exist in a decade, that are venture capital backed. I now think, unfortunately, you're going to see 20-35% of the start-ups not exist in 2 years, and I think it's going to shock you with the number of Fortune 500 companies that do not make this transition. So where you're leading this, that I completely agree with, is the ability to take this terrible event, with all of the issues, and again thank our healthcare workers for what they've been able to do to help so many people, and deal with the world the way it is. As my parents who are doctors taught me to do, not the way we wish it was. And then get your facts, prepare for the changes, and get ready for the future. The key would be how many companies do this. On the area Umesh has responsibility for, customer experience, I think you're going to see almost all companies focus on that. So it can be an example of perhaps how large companies learn to use the new technology, not just video capability, but AI, assistance for the agents, and then once they get the feel for it, just like we got the feel for these meetings, change their rhythm entirely. It was a dinner in New York, virtually, when we stopped, six weeks ago, traveling, that was supposed to be a bunch of board meetings, customer meetings, that was easy. But we were supposed to have a dinner with Shake Shack's CEO, and we were supposed to have him come out and show how he does cool innovation. We had a bunch of enterprise companies, and a bunch of media, and subject matter expertise, we ended up canceling it, and then we said why not do it virtually? And to your point, we did it in 24 different locations. Half the people, remember six weeks ago, had never even used Zoom. We had milk shakes, and hamburgers, and french fries delivered to their home. And it was one of the best two hour meetings I've seen. The future is this now. It's going to change dramatically, and Umesh, I think, is going to be at the front edge of how enterprise companies understand how their relationship with their customers is going to completely transform, using AI, conversational AI capability, speech recognition, et cetera. >> Yeah, I mean, Umesh, we haven't even really got into Uniphore, or what you guys are all about. But, you know, you're supporting call centers, you're using natural language technology, both on the inbound and all that, give us the overview, but you're playing on so many kind of innovation spaces, you know, the main interaction now with customers, and a brand, is either through the mobile phone, or through a call center, right. And that's becoming more, and increasingly, digitized. The ability to have a voice interaction, with a machine. Fascinating, and really, I think, revolutionary, and kind of taking, you know, getting us away from these stupid qwerty keyboards, which are supposed to slow us down on purpose. It's still the funniest thing ever, that we're still using these qwerty keyboards. So I wonder if you can share with us a little bit about, you know, kind of your vision of natural language, and how that changes the interaction with people, and machines. I think your TED Talk was really powerful, and I couldn't help but think of, you know, kind of mobile versus land lines, in terms of transformation. Transforming telecommunications in rural, and hard to serve areas, and then actually then adding the AI piece, to not only make it better for the front end person, but actually make it for the person servicing the account. >> Absolutely Jeff, so Uniphore, the company that I founded in 2008. We were talking about it's such a coincidence that I founded the company in 2008, the year of the Great Recession, and here we are again, talking in midst of the impact that we all have because of COVID. Uniphore does artificial intelligence and automation products, for the customer service industry. Call centers, as we know it, have fundamentally, for the last 20, 30 years, not have had a major technology disruption. We've seen a couple of ways of business model disruption, where call centers, you know, started to become offshore, in locations in Asia, India, and Mexico. Where our calls started to get routed around the world internationally, but fundamentally, the core technology in call centers, up until very recently, hadn't seen a major shift. With artificial intelligence, with natural language processings, speech recognition, available in over 100 languages. And, you know, in the last year or so, automation, and RPA, sort of adding to that mix, there's a whole new opportunity to re-think what customer service will mean to us, more in the future. As I think about the next five to seven years, with 5G happening, with 15 billion connected devices, you know, my five year old daughter, she the first thing she does when she enters the house from a playground, she goes to talk to her friend called Alexa. She speaks to Alexa. So, you know, these next generation of users, and technology users will grow up with AI, and voice, and NLP, all around us. And so their expectation of customer service and customer experience is going to be quantum times higher than some of us have, from our brands. I mean, today when a microwave or a TV doesn't work in our homes, our instinct could be to either go to the website of the brand, and try to do a chat with the agent, or do an 800 number phone call, and get them to visit the house to fix the TV. With, like I said with 5G, with TV, and microwave, and refrigerator becoming intelligent devices, you know, I could totally see my daughter telling the microwave "Why aren't you working?" And, you know, that question might still get routed to a remote contact center. Now the whole concept of contact center, the word has center in it, which means, in the past, we used to have these physical, massive locations, where people used to come in and put on their headsets to receive calls. Like John said, more than ever, we will see these centers become dispersed, and virtual. The channels with which these queries will come in would no more be just a phone, it would be the microwave, the car, the fridge. And the receivers of these calls would be anywhere in the world, sitting in their home, or sitting on a holiday in the Himalayas, and answering these situations to us. You know, I was reading, just for everyone to realize how drastic this shift has been, for the customer service industry. There are over 14 million workers, who work in contact centers around the world. Like I said, the word center means something here. All of them, right now, are working remote. This industry was never designed to work remote. Enterprises who fundamentally didn't plan for this. To your point Jeff, who thought digitization or automation, was a project they could have picked next year, or they were sitting on the fence, will now know more have a choice to make this adjustment. There's a report by a top analyst firm that said by 2023, up to 30% of customer service representatives would be remote. Well guess what, we just way blew past that number right away. And most of the CEOs that I talked to recently tell me that now that this shift has happened, about 40% of their workers will probably never return back to the office. They will always remain a permanent virtual workforce. Now when the workforce is remote, you need all the tools and technology, and AI, that A, if on any given day, 7-10% of your workforce calls in sick, you need bots, like the Amazon's Alexa, taking over a full conversation. Uniphore has a product called Akira, which does that in call centers. Most often, when these call center workers are talking, we have the experience of being put on hold, because call center workers have to type in something on their keyboard, and take notes. Well guess what, today AI and automation can assist them in doing that, making the call shorter, allowing the call center workers to take a lot more calls in the same time frame. And I don't know your experience, but, you know, a couple of weekends ago, the modem in my house wasn't working. I had a seven hour wait time to my service provider. Seven hour. I started calling at 8:30, it was somewhere around 3-4:00, finally, after call backs, wait, call back, wait, that it finally got resolved. It was just a small thing, I just couldn't get to the representative. So the enterprises are truly struggling, technology can help. They weren't designed to go remote, think about it, some of the unique challenges that I've heard now, from my customers, is that how do I know that my call center representative, who I've trained over years to be so nice, and empathetic, when they take a pee break, or a bio break, they don't get their 10 year old son to attend a call. How do I know that? Because now I can no more physically check in on them. How do I know that if I'm a bank, there's compliance? There's nothing being said that isn't being, is, you know, supposed to be said, because in a center, in an office, a supervisor can listen in. When everyone's remote, you can't do that. So AI, automation, monitoring, supporting, aiding human beings to take calls much better, and drive automation, as well as AI take over parts of a complete call, by the way of being a bot like Alexa, are sort of the things that Uniphore does, and I just feel that this is a permanent shift that we are seeing. While it's happening because of a terrible reason, the virus, that's affecting human beings, but the shift in business and behavior, is going to be permanent in this industry. >> Yeah, I think so, you know it's funny, I had Marten Mickos on, or excuse me, yeah, Marten Mickos, as part of this series. And I asked him, he's been doing distributed companies since he was doing MySQL, before Sun bought them. And he's, he was funny, it's like actually easier to fake it in an office, than when you're at home, because at home all you have to show is your deliverables. You can't look busy, you can't be going to meetings, you can't be doing things at your computer. All you have to show is your output. He said it's actually much more efficient, and it drives people, you know, to manage to the output, manage to what you want. But I want to shift gears a little bit, before we let you go, and really talk a little bit about the role of government. And John, I know you've been very involved with the Indian government, and the French government, trying to help them, in their kind of entrepreneurial pursuits, and Uniphore, I think, was founded in India, right, before you moved over here. You know we've got this huge stimulus package coming from the U.S. government, to try to help, as people, you know, can't pay their mortgage, a lot of people aren't so fortunate to be in digital businesses. It's two trillion dollars, so as kind of a thought experiment, I'm like well how much is two trillion dollars? And I did the cash balance of the FAANG companies. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet, just looking at Yahoo Finance, the latest one that was there. It's 333 billion, compared to two trillion. Even when you add Microsoft's 133 billion on top, it's still shy, it's still shy of 500 billion. You know, and really, the federal government is really the only people in a position to make kind of sweeping, these types of investments. But should we be scared? Should we be worried about, you know, kind of this big shift in control? And should, do you think these companies with these big balance sheets, as you said John, priorities change a little bit. Should it be, keep that money to pay the people, so that they can stay employed and pay their mortgage, and go buy groceries, and maybe get take out from their favorite restaurant, versus, you know, kind of what we've seen in the past, where there's a lot more, you know, stock buy backs, and kind of other uses of these cash. As you said, if it's a crisis, and you got to cut to survive, you got to do that. But clearly some of these other companies are not in that position. >> So you, let me break it into two pieces, Jeff, if I may. The first is for the first time in my lifetime I have seen the federal government and federal agencies move very rapidly. And if you would have told me government could move with the speed we've seen over the last three months, I would have said probably not. The fed was ahead of both the initial interest rate cuts, and the fed was ahead in terms of the slowing down, i.e. your 2 trillion discussion, by central banks here, and around the world. But right behind it was the Treasury, which put on 4 trillion on top of that. And only governments can move in this way, but the coordination with government and businesses, and the citizens, has been remarkable. And the citizens being willing to shelter in place. To your question about India, Prime Minister Modi spent the last five years digitizing his country. And he put in place the most bandwidth of any country in the world, and literally did transformation of the currency to a virtual currency, so that people could get paid online, et cetera, within it. He then looked at start-ups and job creation, and he positioned this when an opportunity or problem came along, to be able to perhaps navigate through it in a way that other countries might struggle. I would argue President Macron in France is doing a remarkable job with his innovation economy, but also saying how do you preserve jobs. So you suddenly see government doing something that no business can do, with the scale, and the speed, and a equal approach. But at the same time, may of these companies, and being very candid, that some people might have associated with tech for good, or with tech for challenges, have been unbelievably generous in giving both from the CEOs pockets perspective, and number two and three founders perspective, as well as a company giving to the CDC, and giving to people to help create jobs. So I actually like this opportunity for tech to regain its image of being good for everybody in the world, and leadership within the world. And I think it's a unique opportunity. For my start-ups, I've been so proud, Jeff. I didn't have to tell them to go do the right thing with their employees, I didn't have to tell them that you got to treat people, human lives first, the economy second, but we can do both in parallel. And you saw companies like Sprinklr suddenly say how can I help the World Health Organization anticipate through social media, where the next spread of the virus is going to be? A company, like Bloom Energy, with what KR did there, rebuilding all of the ventilators that were broken here in California, of which about 40% were, out of the stock that they got, because it had been in storage for so long, and doing it for all of California in their manufacturing plant, at cost. A company like Aspire Foods, a cricket company down in Texas, who does 3D capabilities, taking part of their production in 3D, and saying how many thousand masks can I generate, per week, using 3D printers. You watch what Umesh has done, and how he literally is changing peoples lives, and making that experience, instead of being a negative from working at home, perhaps to a positive, and increasing the customer loyalty in the process, as opposed to when you got a seven hour wait time on a line. Not only are you probably not going to order anything else from that company, you're probably going to change it. So what is fascinating to me is I believe companies owe an obligation to be successful, to their employees, and to their shareholders, but also to give back to society. And it's one of the things I'm most proud about the portfolio companies that I'm a part of, and why I'm so proud of what Umesh is doing, in both a economically successful environment, but really giving back and making a difference. >> Yeah, I mean, there's again, there's all the doctor stuff, and the medical stuff, which I'm not qualified to really talk about. Thankfully we have good professionals that have the data, and the knowledge, and know what to do, and got out ahead of the social distancing, et cetera, but on the backside, it really looks like a big data problem in so many ways, right. And now we have massive amounts of compute at places like Amazon, and Google, and we have all types of machine learning and AI to figure out, you know, there's kind of resource allocation, whether that be hospital beds, or ventilators, or doctors, or nurses, and trying to figure out how to sort that all out. But then all of the, you know, genome work, and you know, kind of all that big heavy lifting data crunching, you know, CPU consuming work, that hopefully is accelerating the vaccine. Because I don't know how we get all the way out of this until, it just seems like kind of race to the vaccine, or massive testing, so we know that it's not going to spike up. So it seems like there is a real opportunity, it's not necessarily Kaiser building ships, or Ford building planes, but there is a role for tech to play in trying to combat this thing, and bring it under control. Umesh, I wonder if you could just kind of contrast being from India, and now being in the States for a couple years. Anything kind of jump out to you, in terms of the differences in what you're hearing back home, in the way this has been handled? >> You know, it's been very interesting, Jeff, I'm sure everyone is concerned that India, for many reasons, so far hasn't become a big hot spot yet. And, you know, we can hope and pray that that remains to be the case. There are many things that the government back home has done, I think India took lessons from what they saw in Europe, and the U.S, and China. They went into a countrywide lockdown pretty early, you know, pretty much when they were lower than a two hundred positive tested cases, the country went into lockdown. And remember this is a 1.5 billion people all together going into lockdown. What I've seen in the U.S. is that, you know, California thankfully reacted fast. We've all been sheltered in place, there's cabin fever for all of us, but you know, I'm sure at the end of the day, we're going to be thankful for the steps that are taken. Both by the administration at the state level, at the federal level, and the medical doctors, who are doing everything they can. But India, on the other hand, has taken the more aggressive stance, in terms of doing a country lockdown. We just last evening went live at a University in the city of Chennai, where Uniphore was born. The government came out with the request, much like the U.S., where they're government departments were getting a surge of traffic about information about COVID, the hospitals that are serving, what beds are available, where is the testing? We stood up a voice bot with AI, in less than a week, in three languages. Which even before the government started to advertise, we started to get thousands of calls. And this is AI answering these questions for the citizens, in doing so. So it goes back to your point of there's a real opportunity of using all the technology that the world has today, to be put to good use. And at the same time, it's really partnering meaningfully with government, in India, in Singapore, in Vietnam, and here in the U.S., to make sure that happens on, you know, John's coaching and nudging, I became a part of the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum, which is truly a premier trade and commerce body between U.S. and India. And I, today, co-chaired the start-up program with, you know, the top start-ups between U.S. and India, being part of that program. And I think we got, again, tremendously fortunate, and lucky with the timeline. We started working on this start-up program between U.S. and India, and getting the start-ups together, two quarters ago, and as this new regulation with the government support, and the news about the two trillion dollar packages coming out, and the support for small businesses, we could quickly get some of the questions answered for the start-ups. Had we not created this body, which had the ability to poll the Treasury Department, and say here are questions, can start-ups do A, B, and C? What do you have by way of regulation? And I think as a response to one of our letters, on Monday the Treasury put out an FAQ on their website, which makes it super clear for start-ups and small businesses, to figure out whether they qualify or they don't qualify. So I think there's ton that both from a individual company, and the technology that each one of us have, but also as a community, how do we, all of us, meaningfully get together, as a community, and just drive benefit, both for our people, for the economy, and for our countries. Wherever we have the businesses, like I said in the U.S., or in India, or parts of Asia. >> Yeah, it's interesting. So, this is a great conversation, I could talk to you guys all night long, but I probably would hear about it later, so we'll wrap it, but I just want to kind of close on the following thought, which is really, as you've talked about before John, and as Umesh as you're now living, you know, when we go through these disruptions, things do get changed, and as you said a lot of people, and companies don't get through it. On the other hand many companies are birthed from it, right, people that are kind of on the new trend, and are in a good position to take advantage, and it's not that you're laughing over the people that didn't make it, but it does stir up the pot, and it sounds like, Umesh, you're in a really good position to take advantage of this new kind of virtual world, this new digital transformation, that's just now waiting anymore. I love your stat, they were going to move X% out of the call center over some period of time, and then it's basically snap your fingers, everybody out, without much planning. So just give you the final word, you know, kind of advice for people, as they're looking forward, and Umesh, we'll get you on another time, because I want to go deep diving in natural language, I think that's just a fascinating topic in the way that people are going to interact with machines and get rid of the stupid qwerty keyboard. But let me get kind of your last thoughts as we wrap this segment. Umesh we'll let you go first. >> Umesh, you want to go first? >> I'll go first. My last thoughts are first for the entrepreneurs, everyone who's sort of going through this together. I think in difficult times is when real heroes are born. I read a quote that when it's a sunny day, you can't overtake too many cars, but when it's raining you have a real opportunity. And the other one that I read was when fishermen can't go out fishing, because of the high tide, they come back, and mend their nets, and be ready for the time that they can go out. So I think there's no easy way to say, this is a difficult time for the economy, health wise, I hope that, you know, we can contain the damage that's being done through the virus, but some of us have the opportunity to really take our products and technology out there, more than usual. Uniphore, particularly, has a unique opportunity, the contact center industry just cannot keep up with the traffic that it's seeing. Around the world, across US, across Asia, across India, and the need for AI and automation would never be pronounced more than it is today. As much as it's a great business opportunity, it's more of a responsibility, as I see it. There can be scale up as fast as the demand is coming, and really come out of this with a much stronger business model. John has always told me in final words you always paint the picture of what you want to be, a year or two out. And I see Uniphore being a much stronger AI plus automation company, in the customer service space, really transforming the face of call centers, and customer service. Which have been forced to rethink their core business value in the last few weeks. And, you know, every fence sitter who would think that digitalization and automation was an option that they could think of in the future years, would be forced to make those decisions now. And I'm just making sure that my team, and my company, and I, am ready to gear to that great responsibility and opportunity that's ahead of us. >> John, give you the final word. >> Say Jeff, I don't know if you can still hear me, we went blank there, maybe for me to follow up. >> We gotcha. >> Shimon Peres taught me a lot about life, and dealing with life the way it is, not the way you wish it was. So did my parents, but he also taught me it always looks darkest just before the tide switches, and you move on to victory. I think the challenges in front of us are huge, I think our nation knows how to deal with that, I do believe the government has moved largely pretty effectively, to give us the impetus to move, and then if we continue to flatten the curve on the issues with the pandemic, if we get some therapeutic drugs that dramatically reduce the risk of death, for people that get the challenges the worst, and over time a vaccine, I think you look to the future, America will rebound, it will be rebounding around start-ups, new job creation, using technology in every business. So not only is there a light at the tunnel, at the end of the tunnel, I think we will emerge from this a stronger nation, a stronger start-up community. But it depends on how well we work together as a group, and I just want to say to Umesh, it's an honor to be your coach, and I learn from you as much as I give back. Jeff, as always, you do a great job. Thank you for your time today. >> Thank you both, and I look forward to our next catch up. Stay safe, wash your hands, and thanks for spending some time with us. >> And I just want to say I hope and pray that all of us can get together in Palo Alto real quick, and in person, and doing fist bumps, not shake hands or probably a namaste. Thank you, it's an honor. >> Thank you very much. All right, that was John and Umesh, you're watching theCUBE from our Palo Alto Studios, thanks for tuning in, stay safe, wash your hands, keep away from people that you're not that familiar with, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (calm music)

>>live from Atlanta, Georgia. It's the Q covering Answerable Fest 2019. Brought to you by >>Red Hat. >>Okay, welcome back. It runs two cubes. Live coverage of Ansel Fest here in Atlanta, Georgia. I'm John for a host of the Cube with stewed Minutemen. Analysts were looking angle. The Cube are next to guest Tom Anderson and most product owner. Red Hat is part of the sensible platform automation properly announced. And Richard Henshaw, product manager. Guys, welcome to the Cube Way had all the execs on yesterday and some customers all pretty jazzed up about this year, mainly around just the timing of how automation is really hitting the scene and some of the scale that's going on. You guys had big news with the answerable automation platform. New addition to the portfolio. What's the feedback? >>So far, I think the feedback has been super positive. We have customers have come to us. A lot of the last little one said, Hey, we're maturing. We're moving along the automation maturity curve, right, and we have multiple teams coming to us and saying, Hey, can you help us connect this other team? We've had a lot of success doing cloud provisioning or doing network automation were doing security automation. What have you and they're coming to us and saying, Help us give us kind of the story if you will, to be able to connect these other teams in our organization. And so that way I kind of feel the pole for this thing to move from a tool that automates this or that. This task for that task. Too much more of a platform center. >>It seems to be scaling out in terms of what automation is touching these days. And look at the numbers six million plus activations on get Hub versus other projects. So activities high in the community. But this seems to be much more broader. Scope now. Bring more things together. What's the rationale behind? What's the reasoning? What's the strategy? But the main thing is, >>automation is got to that point where it's becoming the skill set that we do. So it was always the focus. You know, I'm a database administrator. I'm assists out, man. I'm a middle where I'm a nap deaf on those people, then would do task inside their job. But now we're going to the point off, actually, anybody that can see apiece. Technology can automate piece technology in the clouds have shown This is the way to go forward with the things what we had. We bring that not just in places where it's being created from scratch, a new How do you bring that into what's existing? Because a lot of our customers have 20 or 30 years like a heritage in the I T estate. How do you do with all of that? You can't just rebuild everything into new as well. So you gotta be ableto automate across both of those areas and try and keep. You know, we say it's administrative efficiency versus organization effectiveness. Now how do I get to the point of the organization? Could be effective, supposed just doing things that make my job easier. And that's what we're gonna bring with applying automation capability that anybody can take advantage of. >>Richard. I actually felt the keynote demo this morning did a nice job of that line that they set it up with is this is this is tools that that all the various roles and teams just get it, and it's not the old traditional okay, I do my piece and set it up and then throw it over the wall. There was that, you know? Oh, I've got the notification and then some feedback loops and, you know, we huddled for something and it gets done rather fast, not magic. It's still when I get a certain piece done. Okay, I need to wait for it's actually be up and running, but you know, you're getting everybody into really a enterprise collaboration, almost with the tool driving those activities together >>on that. And that's why yesterday said that focus on collaboration is the great thing. All teams need to do that to be more successful because you get Maur inclusivity, Maurin puts. But organizations also need to coordinate what activities they're doing because they have rules, regulations, structures and standards they have to apply. Make sure that those people can do things in a way that's guided for them so that they're they're effective at what they're trying to do. >>Okay, I think I'm going to explain what's in the platform first because an engine and tower and there, what else is in there, what's new? What's what our customers is going to see. That's new. That's different >>it's the new components are automation Hope Collections, which is a technology inside answer ball itself. On also Automation Analytics and the casing is that engine and terrorist of the beating heart of the platform. But it's about building the body around the outside. So automation is about discover abilities like, What can we find out? What automation can I do that I'm allowed to do? Um, and let six is about the post activity. So I've automated all these things. I've done all this work well, How did it go? Who did what, who did? How much of what? How well did it work? How much did it failed? Succeeds and then, once you build on that, you don't start to expand out into other areas. So what? KP eyes, How much of what I do is automated versus no automated? You can start to instigate other aspects of business change, then Gamification amongst teams. Who's the Who's the boat? The closest motive here into the strategy input source toe How? >>Find out what's working right, essentially and sharing mechanism to for other groups in terms of knowing what's happening >>and how is my platform performing which areas are performing well, which airs might not be performing well. And then, as we move down the road, kind of how my performing against my peers are other organizations that are automating using the ants will automation platform doing? And am I keeping up on my doing better? That kind of stuff. >>So, Tom, there's a robust community as we was talking about. Their platform feels like it builds on yet to change the dynamic a little bit. When you talk about the automation hub and collections, you've already got a long list of the ecosystem vendors that are participating here. Bring us two through a little bit. What led Thio. You know all these announcements and where you expect, you know, how would this change the dynamics of >>the body? And maybe we'll split up that question. I'll talk a little bit about partners because it's both partners and customers in community here that's been driving us this way. I'll talk a little bit about partners and Rich talk about the customer piece here, which is partners have been traditionally distributing their content there. Ansel automation content through our engine capability. So our engine release cycle, or cadence, has been sort of the limiting factor to how fast they can get content out to their users and what what the collections does is part of the platforms allows us to separate those things. Rich talked about it yesterday in his keynote, having that stable platform. But you having yet having content be able to read fast. And our partners love that idea because they can content. They can develop content, create content, get into their users hands faster. So partners like at five and Microsoft you've seen on stage here are both huge contributors. And they've been part of the pole for us to get to the platform >>from a customer perspective. And the thing I love most about doing this job with the gas of customers is because I was a customer on Guy was danceable customer, and then I came over to this side on Dhe. I now go and see customers. I see what they've done, and I know what that's what I want to do. Or that's what I was trying to do. And she started to see those what people wanted to achieve, and I was said yesterday it is moving away from should I automate. How would we automate Maura? What should I automate? And so we'll start to see how customers are building their capabilities. And there's no there's many different ways people do. This is about different customers, >>you know. What's interesting is you guys have such a great success formula first. Well, congratulations. It's great to see how this is turning into such a wider market, because is not just the niche configuration management. More automation become with cloud to point a whole new wider category. So congratulations. The formula we see with success is good product, community customers adopting and then ecosystem that seems to be the successful former in these kinds of growth growth waves you guys experiencing? What is the partnering with you mentioned? S five Microsoft? Because that, to me, is gonna be a tipping point in a tel sign for you guys because you got the community. You got the customers that check check ecosystem. What's the partner angle? How do they involve? Take us through that. What's going on? They're >>so you're absolutely so you know, kind of platform velocity will be driven by partner adoption and how many things customers can automate on that platform or through that platform and for us I mean, the example was in the demo this morning where they went to the automation hub and they pulled down the F five collection, plugged it into a workflow, and they were automating. What are partners? Experience through their customers is Look, if I'm a customer, I have a multi cloud environment or hybrid cloud environment. I've got automation from AWS. I've got azure automation via more automation. Five. Got Sisko. I've got Palo Alto. I've got all these different automation tools to try and string them together, and the customers are coming and telling those vendors Look, we don't want to use your automation to end this automation tooling that one we want to use Ansel is the common substrate if you will automation substrate across this platform. So that's motivating the partners to come to us and say, Hey, I had I was out five Aspire last week, and they're all in a natural. I mean, it's really impressive to see just how much there in unanswerable and how much they're being driven by their customers when they do Ansell workshops without five, they say the attendance is amazing so they're being pulled by their customers and therefore the partners are coming to us. And that's driving our platform kind of usability across the across the scale. >>Another angle we'll see when we talk to the engineers of the partners that are actually doing the work to work with danceable is that they're seeing is ah, change also in how they it's no longer like an individual customer side individual day center because everything is so much more open and so much more visible. You know there's value in there, making it appealing and easy for their customers to gain advantage of what they're doing. And also the fact that the scales across those customers as well because they have their internal team's doing it, saying the same things and so bringing them to an automation capable, like Ansel have to push. That means that they also gained some of the customers appreciation for them, making it easier to do their tasking collaboration with us and you know, the best collaborations. We've got some more partners, all initiated by customers, saying Hey, I want you to go and get danceable content, >>the customer driving a lot of behavior, the guest system. Correct. On the just another point, we've been hearing a lot of security side separate sector, but cyber security. A lot of customers are building teams internally, Dev teams building their own stacks and then telling the suppliers a support my AP eyes. So now you start to see more of a P I integration point. Is that something that is gonna be something that you guys gonna be doubling down on? What's that? What's the approach there? How does that partner connected scale with the customers? So we've >>been eso Ansel security automation, which is the automation connecting I. P. S. C. P. S that kind of stuff. It is almost a replay of what we did the network automation space. So we saw a need in the network automation space. We feel that we became a catalyst in the community with our partners and our customers and our and our contributors. And after about three years now, Ansel Network automation is a huge piece of our business and adoption curve. We're doing the exactly see the exact same thing in the security automation space compliance. The side over here, we're talking about kind of automating the connections between your firewalls, your threat detection systems and all that kind of stuff. So we're working with a set of partners, whether it's Cisco, whether it's Palo Alto, whether it's whether it's resilient by the EMS, resilient and being able to connect and automate the connections between the threat and the response and and all of that kind of >>the same trajectory as the network automation >>Zach. Same trajectory, just runnin the same play and it's working out right now. We're on that kind of early part of that curve, that adoption curve, and we have partners jumping in with us. >>You're talking to customers. We've heard certain stories. You know how I got, you know, 1000 hours of work down to a dozen hours of work there. Is there anything built into the tool today that allows them to kind of generate those those hero stats O. R. Any anything along those lines? >>Talk about analytic committee from yes, >>well, again without any analytic side. I mean, those things starts become possible that one of the things we've been doing is turning on Maur more metrics. And it's actually about mining the data for the customer because Tower gives this great focal point for all the automation that's going on. It's somewhere that everything comes through. So when we export that and then we can we can do that work for all the customers rather than have to duel themselves. Then you start to build those pictures and we start with a few different areas. But as we advance with those and start, see how people use them and start having that conversation customers about what data they want to use and how they want to use it, I think that's gonna be very possible. You know, it's so >>important. E think was laid out here nicely. That automation goes from a tactical solution to more strategic, but more and more how customers can leverage that data and be data driven. That's that's gonna drive them for it. And any good customer examples you have of the outcomes. No, you're talking to a lot of >>PS one from this morning. Yeah, >>so I mean, I'll be Esther up this morning, and I think that the numbers they used in the demo that she's like, you know, last year they did 100,000 from launch to the end of the year. 100,000 changes through their platform on this year so far that in a 1,000,000. So now you know, from my recollection, that's about the same time frame on either side of the year. So that's a pretty impressive acceleration. Side of things. We've had other ones where people have said, You know how many times you were telling some customers yesterday? What used to take eight hours to a D R test with 20 or 30 people in for the weekend now takes 12 minutes for two People on the base is just pushing a few buttons just as they go through and confirm everything worked that that type of you can't get away from that type of change. >>J. P. Morgan example yesterday was pretty compelling. I mean, time savings and people are, I mean, this legit times. I mean, we're talking serious order of magnitude, time savings. So that's awesome. Then I want to ask you guys, Next is we're seeing another pattern in the market where amongst your customer base, where it's the same problem being automated, allover the place so playbooks become kind of key as that starts to happen is that where the insights kind of comes in? Can you help us kind of tie that together? Because if I'm a large enterprise with its I'm decentralized or centralized, are organized problem getting more gear? I'm getting more clouds, game or operations. There's more surface area of stuff and certainly five g I ot is coming around the corner. Mention security. All this is expanding to be much more touchpoints. Automation seems to be the killer app for this automation, those mundane task, but also identifying new things, right? Can you guys comment on that? >>Yeah, so maybe I'll start rich. You could jump in, which is a little bit around, uh, particularly those large accounts where you have these different disparate teams taking a approach to automate something, using Ansel and then be able to repeat or reuse that somewhere else. The organization. So that idea of being for them to be able to curate they're automation content that they've created. Maybe they pulled something down from galaxy. Maybe they've got something from our automation husband. They've made it their own, and now they want to curate that and spread it across the organization to either obviously become more efficient, but also in four standards. That's where automation hub is going to come into play here. Not only will it be a repo for certify content from us and our partners, but it will also be an opportunity for them to curate their own content and share it across the organization. >>Yeah, I think when you tie those two things together and you've got that call discover abilities, I had away go and find what I want. And then the next day, the next day, after you've run the automation, you then got the nerve to say, Well, who's who's using the right corporate approved rolls? Who's using the same set of rolls from the team that builds the standards to make sure you're gonna compliant build again, showing the demo That's just admin has his way of doing it, puts the security baseline application on top and you go, Oh, okay, who's running that security baseline continuously every time. So you can both imposed the the security standards in the way the build works. But you can also validate that everybody is actually doing the security standards. >>You what I find fascinating about what you guys are doing, and I think this is came out clearly yesterday and you guys are talking about it. And some of the community conversations is a social construct here. Going on is that there's a cultural shift where the benefits that you guys are throwing off with the automation is creating a network effect within the companies. So it's not just having a slack channel on texting. The servers are up or down. It's much more of a tighter bond between the stakeholders inside the company's. Because you have people from different geography is you have champions driving change. And there's some solidarity happening between the groups of people, whether they're silo door decentralized. So there's a whole new social network, almost a cultural shift that's happening with the standardization of the substrate. Can you guys comment on this dynamic? Did you see this coming? You planning forward? Are you doubling down on it? >>I think so. And we talk about community right on how important that is. But how did you create that community internally and so ask balls like the catalyst so most teams don't actually need to understand in their current day jobs. Get on all the Dev ops, focus tools or the next generation. Then you bring answer because they want to automate, and suddenly they go. Okay, Now I need to understand source control, and it's honest and version. I need to understand how to get pulls a full request on this and so on and so forth on it changes that provides this off. The catalyst for them to focus on what changed they have to make about how they work, because what they wanted to do was something that requires them to do you no good disciplines and good behaviors that previously there was no motivation or need to do. I think >>Bart for Microsoft hit on that yesterday. You know, if you saw Bart Session but their network engineers having to get familiar with concepts of using automation almost like software development, life cycles right and starting to manage those things in repose. And think of it that way, which is intimidating at first for people who are not used to. But once they're over that kind of humping understand that the answer language itself is simple, and our operations person admin can use it. No problem, >>he said himself. Didn't my network engineers have become network developers. >>It's funny watching and talking to a bunch of customers. They all have their automation journey that they're going through. And I hear the Gamification I'm like, Okay, what if I have certain levels I have to reach in it unlocked capabilities, you know, in the community along the way. Maybe that could build a built in the future. >>Maybe it's swag based, you know, you >>get level C shows that nice work environment when you're not talking about the server's down on some slack channel when you're actually focusing on work. Yeah, so that mean that's the shift. That's what I'm saying, going >>firefighting to being able to >>do for throwing bombs. Yeah, wars. And the guy was going through this >>myself. Now you start a lot of the different team to the deaf teams and the ops teams. And I say it would be nice if these teams don't have to talk to complain about something that hadn't worked. It was Mexican figured it was just like I just like to talk to you because you're my friend. My colleague and I'd like to have a chat because everything's working because it's all automated, so it's consistent. It's repeatable. That's a nice, nice way. It can change the way that people get to interact because it's no longer only phoned me up when something's wrong. I think that absent an interesting dynamic >>on our survey, our customer base in our community before things one of the four things that came up was happier employees. Because if they're getting stuff done and more efficient, they have more time to actually self actualizing their job. That becomes an interesting It's not just a checkbox in some HR manual actually really impact. >>And I kind of think the customers we've heard talk rvs, gentlemen, this morning gave me a lot of the fear initially is, well, I automate myself out of a job, and what we've heard from everybody is that's not absolutely That's not actually true at all. It just allows them to do higher value things that, um or pro >>after that big data, that automation thing. That's ridiculous. >>I didn't use it yesterday. My little Joe Comet with that is when I tried to explain to my father what I do. Andi just said Well, in the 19 seventies, they said that computers you mean we'll do a two day week on? That hasn't come >>true. Trade your beeper and for a phone full of pots. But Richard, Thanks for coming on. Thanks for unpacking the ants. Full automation platforms with features. Congratulations. Great to see the progress. Thank you, Jonah. Everybody will be following you guys to Cuba. Coverage here in Atlanta, First Amendment Stevens for day two of cube coverage after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering Informatica World 2018. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live here in Las Vegas at the Venetian, this is Informatica World 2018, CUBE's exclusive coverage. It's our fourth year covering Informatica World, and boy, what a transition; it's been fun to watch. I'm John Furrier, the co-host of theCUBE, with Peter Burris, Head of Research for Wikibon, SiliconANGLE, and theCUBE. Our next guest is Sally Jenkins, Executive Vice President, Chief Marketing Officer at Informatica. Welcome back, good to see you. >> Thank you, John, it's nice to see you too. >> Very comfortable here, you guys having a great event, congratulations. It's crowded, but it doesn't feel crowded. A lot of sessions are going on. What's going on with the event? Give us some stats, you've got a lot of partners here. >> Yeah, so we are very happy to be back in Las Vegas, and we are taking this up a whole notch a bit, if you can notice. We've got close to 4,000 folks who saw the Opening General Session this morning. For the first time ever, we're live streaming, and sent out a note that we were live streaming to over 250,000 customers, so I'm real happy about that. Because, as you know, with the rebrand last year, it was all about getting our message out and upleveling our message, so we're really happy that our message is getting out there, with everything that came from General Session this morning, and then, tomorrow with Closing General Session. >> Just gets bigger every year, so congratulations. >> Thank you. >> Great to see that everything comes in. Of course, the products are just right in line. The timing couldn't have been better. Multi-cloud, everything's kind of clicking. GDPR over the top, little push there for all the international customers. But the big story that we see is the journeys that are happening. You guys have been on a journey as your own company, digital disruption, digital transformation. But there's multiple journeys. Can you just take us through the vision of how you guys see the journeys, and how does Informatica fit into the customers, 'cause your customers are also changing? >> Sally: Yes, that's right. >> Do you change your business model? Anil laid it out, customers have this journey. What's the four journies? >> Yes, that's a great question, John. So we have, of course, been customer-centric ourselves. We've adapted our journeys to accommodate the journeys that we know our customers are on. And this whole conference is centered around those four journeys, so hybrid cloud, next-gen analytics, 360 engagement, and data governance and compliance. So that's what we've heard our customers deal with day in and day out, in their data-centric initiatives, and so we wanted to encapsulate that into the entire conference. So that's what it's all about, and that's an extension of our messaging that we laid out last year. So you'll see that again and again and again in a consistent fashion. >> "Disrupt Intelligently", I saw the messaging. First of all, great artwork, great branding, a lot of the images; what does that mean? 'Cause you've got all kinds of great imagery, people on the move, mobile, data's involved, obviously, the center of it. >> Well, that and data is the critical foundation for what we call "Intelligent Disruptive". So disruption with a purpose is intelligent. And we believe, with our technology, that our customers can then unleash the power of their data to create what we call their next intelligent disruption. So we were very thoughtful about the choice of words there, 'cause disruption can be considered a negative, but we see it as very much a positive, and a way for customers to leapfrog the competition, and set the tone for their markets. >> This is an interesting concept. We were talking with a lot of the customers you've had on; we've had Toyota on, and they said, quote, these testimonials just kind of pop out, "We knew we had the data; we had all these problems "we hadn't connected, but we actually had the data "when they actually connected us, and said, "we could have foreseen this." >> Sally: That's right. >> So they were disrupted in a negative way, the fact that they were trying to connect, now they're set up. And then he used an example, once they got set up, that they didn't predict that all this inbound data from the cars were coming in. So again, that's a disruption, but now they've handled it. Is that kind of where you guys were kind of connecting the dots on the intelligent piece? >> Yeah, that's right, we're helping our customers understand what to do with the data, right? So they know the data exists, but we need to help them turn it into actionable insights that leads to their next disruption, and again and again and again with their different projects. And so those are the conversations that we've been having with our customers. Just helping them, we say, unleash the power of their data. The data's there, we need to make it useful and valuable to them. >> And competitive advantage, obviously, seeing data, ease of use as a competitive strategy. Now the Microsoft announcement was interesting, because you can see that you can take an on-prem dataset, go through the Azure portal in their console, which is very cloud-native, you know, press a few buttons, connect to Informatica's intelligent cloud service, and move data. >> Sally: That's right. >> I mean, it's not like there's someone behind the curtain; it's actually a working product. >> No, it's real, it's real and it's available for preview, and if you saw the keynote this morning, you heard from Scott Guthrie. He said this whole partnership between Informatica and Microsoft, and I quote, "A match made in heaven". So there's something real there. Microsoft and their customers see the value in partnering with us, so we were really pleased to announce that today. >> I'm going to check the Internet, but I think this might be the first iPaaS integration into Azure at this level. 'Cause it's pretty deep with these guys. So that's going to certainly set up hybrid cloud instantly. >> That's right, that's right. And scale, right, we're enterprise-scale to begin with, obviously, so is Microsoft. So it's a good partnership. >> Okay, from the branding piece, I got to ask you, you guys did the rebranding, what's your one-year review, if you have to give yourself a report card, check, check, check, straight As, perfect score? If you could go back and do- >> Well, I'd like to say that we were in the honor roll. And we measure ourselves based on what our customers tell us, so we were very deliberate in choosing a few areas of which we wanted to see progress, and that is, the first one is, were people aware that we're a cloud company? And I'm delighted to say that, yes, we've absolutely moved the needle on that, so they associate Informatica with cloud, as you know, we're the number one in enterprise cloud data management. That's what we kicked off last year. And so you'll see a continued investment around the globe in the brand. We believe that good brand health is what leaders do, in terms of setting the pace for their industry. And that's exactly what we're doing. So, one year into it, we feel really good. We did what we set out, and we delivered on what we said we were going to do. And if you all remember last year's part of the rebrand, as soon as we went external, then we needed to shift our focus back internally, and think about what does this mean to our employees, and how do we leverage the culture that we already had inside Informatica and build upon that? And that's exactly what we've been working on. So we rolled out a new set of values in January. To no surprise, they're called We-DATA. And DATA stands for Do Good, Act as One Team, Think Customer First, and Aspire for the Future. And so that's what we're doing right now, is rolling that out around the world to our employees. And that was based on employee feedback, as well. >> That's bottoms up, that's good organic listening. I got to talk about branding, 'cause this is something that we're seeing a lot of. We're seeing a lot of shifts going on. When you have these shifts you mentioned earlier, about getting a competitive advantage, a leg up on the competition, you guys had that same opportunity. Because the brand, pecking order of companies is going to change with these new waves coming. With data, certainly, so it's a huge opportunity. Do you guys talk about that when you're in the brand meetings, and you're talking about with the execs, the power of the brand, and building the brand? >> Sally: Absolutely. >> And what are some of the things you're focused on to help continue to build that brand? >> Well, I think where you're going with this is what's the financial impact or value that the brand has? And everybody, from our industry analysts, to the financial analysts, to our customers, partners, they put a value on the brand. So if you don't define who you are in the market, then you let everybody else define you, and then there's no value in that. So that's really what we set out to do last year, is we wanted to define who we were, and be proud of it, and take ownership of it. >> Put a stake in the ground. >> Yeah, and then continue to invest in that. So when I say we'll continue to invest in the brand, that is about our messaging, and making sure that we are very clear as to who we are, as I said, 'cause we're setting the pace for this industry. >> And the brand promise real quick, just to summarize, if you had to kind of sum up the bumper sticker for Informatica, Disrupt Intelligently, kind of add to that, what would be the brand promise to your customers? >> Yeah, so it's the Disruptive Power of Data. And then what falls out of that is Unleashing the Power of Data, right? So that's our brand promise to our customers, is that's what we were talking about earlier, that's exactly what we do for them with our technology, and how can we help them stay ahead of their competition? >> That's great, look at the trends too. Look at what GDPR's doing, and some of the block chain stuff that's kind of emerging, it's power to the people. People want to have control of the data. >> Sally: That's right, putting the control back in their hands. >> Great stuff, so thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it, great to see you, congratulations. >> Thanks, John. >> And great to have our fourth year, our fifth year with Anil, we saw him at Amazon re:Invent in 2014, so great to continue to watch you guys grow. It's been fun to watch. >> Great, good, well stay tuned, there's more to come for sure. >> Right, can't wait to hear. It's theCUBE live here at Informatica World, two days of coverage here. We're getting down to the second day. We've got more action coming; stay here with us. I'm John Furrier, Peter Buriss, we'll be back after this short break.

>> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We are here in Denver, Colorado at the DJI AirWorks show, it's their second show; about 600 people talking about commercial applications for the DJI drone platform. Really exciting agriculture, construction, public safety, no fun stuff, well, it's all kind of fun, really about the commercial applications, and we're excited to have Chris Boots with us, he is the chief engineer of Quadrocopter. Chris, good to see you. >> Good to see you. >> So we talked a little bit about what Quadrocopter does, and you're really into the enterprise space, these are not platforms that are generally available, you've got to get them through a dealer, they're expensive, they're complicated pieces of equipment, and that's a place you guys have been playing for a long time. >> Absolutely. For example, the Wind Series was unveiled today, the 4 and the 8; AirWorks 2016 introduced the Wind 1 and 2, and what these are, are basically universal platforms that allow customers to put various different, whether it be gimbals or sensors, it's kind of just a blank slate DJI product. That way you're not constrained to the limitations of an M200 or an Aspire or anything like that. When Quadrocopter began almost a decade ago, we prided ourselves on delivering custom-tailored systems to various different customer needs, so we felt right at home when DJI unveiled the Wind series. >> So really what you mean is it's kind of stripped down to its bare bones components so that you can design it at whatever payloads you want for the specific application, and they're also big, heavy lifters, right? We saw the agricultural one, I think it holds like two and a half gallons, 22 pounds of liquid, so these are also heavy lift machines, these are not little Mavics or Sparks. >> Yeah, precisely, yeah. If you need to lift something lightweight, there's the Wind 1. If you need to lift something extremely heavy, there's the Wind 4 and the Wind 8 which can lift well over 20 to 25 pounds of payload, so you're lifting some big stuff with this. >> So when you talk to enterprise customers, and kind of their journey into getting into and using a drone platform for their business process, how do they get started, you know, what do you see as kind of their first steps where people have some success and then you know, build into more of a fleet if you will, integrate it more to their processes? How do most companies get started? Do they say yeah this looks like a cool platform, how do we use it? >> That's kind of exactly how it happens. It just all starts with an idea. Most of our customers if they're not already existing UAS corporations and companies, they can be just somebody like you or I that comes up with an interesting UAV solution and you know, they do some Google searching, they do some research, they find something like this doesn't exist. Where do I go from here? So it doesn't take them very long to start making phone calls, and more often than not they call us at Quadrocopter, and one of my pet peeves is I don't like saying no to a customer when they have an idea, so that basically takes their idea, it takes our resources whether it be DJI or third party integrations, and making their dream a reality, so it's not always cinematography and cameras, it can be sensors or you name it, so yeah! >> So what are some of the more innovative uses that you've seen people use the DJI platform for that you would have never thought of, most people on the street would never have an idea that this is a useful application for this platform? >> Sure, well, I'll talk a little bit about the latest Wind application that we designed this year. We utilized the larger of the four copters, the Wind 8, which is an octocopter, and the client had the idea of inspecting methane pipelines. Now these pipelines need to be inspected every six months per governmental regulation. Currently, the only way that most companies like BP and other gas industries are doing this is by foot, by ATV, with handheld sensors, or on a large scale with rotorcraft like helicopters and people hanging off the sides of them, again with handheld devices. >> And what, they've got specialty sensors that they're looking for leaks and this and that, it's not really visual inspection I take it, or is it both probably? >> A lot of times they use either a laser-based or a thermal-based handheld sensor, so like a flare thermal camera. In our case, we didn't want to be constrained to the environmental influences that thermal can sometimes have, whether it's cold or it's dark or bright out, it can really skew the results, so in our case, it was our goal to find something that isn't influenced by the external environments. So we officially landed on a laser-based methane detector and paired that with the Wind 8, which then flies the pipeline route in 10 to 20 foot segments, comes back, and that data is used in mapping software to find out what the results were along that pipeline. If it is found that something is leaking, that file that is pulled off the aircraft will say exactly where it was, how concentrated it was at that exact point, at which point somebody can on the ground inspect that further. It totally gets rid of the whole safety issue of somebody on the ground or in the air and the expensive part of man power, of walking a pipeline. We can do it more efficiently, we can do it way more safer, and we get if not better results. >> The 10 to 20 feet doesn't sound like very long. Is that just because of, >> 20 miles. >> Oh 20 miles. You said feet. So it's 10 to 20 mile runs, then in parts they take the data and run it again. And what was the weight of that payload? >> The sensor itself doesn't really weigh much, I'd say two or three pounds. Most of the payload on the Wind 8 is actually the batteries. So the whole all-up weight of the craft is somewhere around 30 pounds. It's not extremely heavy, but for endurance sake, she'll fly for well over an hour. So at 10, 15 miles per hour, you can really cover some pipeline with battery to spare. >> So was that an initial trial for this customer, to try this solution? >> Yeah, this particular combination of sensor and copter had never been tried before, so it very much is an industry first in this regard, at least with DJI and the sensor. >> So where do they want to go next? I mean, it begs the question. The whole theme of today's keynote was like scale, no longer single operator, single machine, single data, but really starting to think in terms of fleets and multi-units, so is that somewhere where this particular customer wants to go, or how do you see it progressing for them? >> This particular client is a third party, so they aren't directly with BP, but BP often, I don't want to speak on behalf of BP, but a lot of gas companies outsource their inspection services to other different companies, so this particular land surveying company will use this and meet their demands of inspecting whatever section of pipeline that they're designated every six months. >> Yeah, that's great, alright, Chris, thank you for spending a few minutes, I mean that's a great case study and using the big heavy lift stuff, much more fun probably than the Spark! >> Absolutely, yeah, if you guys have any questions, hit me up at quadrocopter.com! >> Alright, he's Chris Boots, I'm Jeff Frick, you are watching the Cube. We're at DJI AirWorks 2017 in Denver. Catch you next time; thanks for watching.