(upbeat music) >> Hi, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of International Women's Day. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. As part of International Women's Day, we're featuring some of the leading women in business technology from developer to all types of titles and to the executive level. And one topic that's really important is called Getting a Seat at the Table, board makeup, having representation at corporate boards, private and public companies. It's been a big push. And former technology operating executive and corporate board member, she's a board machine Sue Barsamian, formerly with HPE, Hewlett Packard. Sue, great to see you. CUBE alumni, distinguished CUBE alumni. Thank you for coming on. >> Yes, I'm very proud of my CUBE alumni title. >> I'm sure it opens a lot of doors for you. (Sue laughing) We're psyched to have you on. This is a really important topic, and I want to get into the whole, as women advance up, and they're sitting on the boards, they can implement policy and there's governance. Obviously public companies have very strict oversight, and not strict, but like formal. Private boards have to operate, be nimble. They don't have to share all their results. But still, boards play an important role in the success of scaled up companies. So super important, that representation there is key. >> Yes. >> I want to get into that, but first, before we get started, how did you get into tech? How did it all start for you? >> Yeah, long time ago, I was an electrical engineering major. Came out in 1981 when, you know, opportunities for engineering, if you were kind, I went to Kansas State as an undergrad, and basically in those days you went to Texas and did semiconductors. You went to Atlanta and did communication satellites. You went to Boston or you went to Silicon Valley. And for me, that wasn't too hard a choice. I ended up going west and really, I guess what, embarked on a 40 year career in Silicon Valley and absolutely loved it. Largely software, but some time on the hardware side. Started out in networking, but largely software. And then, you know, four years ago transitioned to my next chapter, which is the corporate board director. And again, focused on technology software and cybersecurity boards. >> For the folks watching, we'll cut through another segment we can probably do about your operating career, but you rose through the ranks and became a senior operating executive at the biggest companies in the world. Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and others. Very great career, okay. And so now you're kind of like, put that on pause, and you're moving on to the next chapter, which is being a board director. What inspired you to be a board director for multiple public companies and multiple private companies? Well, how many companies are you on? But what's the inspiration? What's the inspiration? First tell me how many board ships you're on, board seats you're on, and then what inspired you to become a board director? >> Yeah, so I'm on three public, and you are limited in terms of the number of publics that you can do to four. So I'm on three public, and I'm on four private from a tech perspective. And those range from, you know, a $4 billion in revenue public company down to a 35 person private company. So I've got the whole range. >> So you're like freelancing, I mean, what is it like? It's a full-time job, obviously. It's a lot of work involved. >> Yeah, yeah, it's. >> John: Why are you doing it? >> Well, you know, so I retired from being an operating executive after 37 years. And, but I loved, I mean, it's tough, right? It's tough these days, particularly with all the pressures out there in the market, not to mention the pandemic, et cetera. But I loved it. I loved working. I loved having a career, and I was ready to back off on, I would say the stresses of quarterly results and the stresses of international travel. You have so much of it. But I wasn't ready to back off from being involved and engaged and continuing to learn new things. I think this is why you come to tech, and for me, why I went to the valley to begin with was really that energy and that excitement, and it's like it's constantly reinventing itself. And I felt like that wasn't over for me. And I thought because I hadn't done boards before I retired from operating roles, I thought, you know, that would fill the bill. And it's honestly, it has exceeded expectations. >> In a good way. You feel good about where you're at and. >> Yeah. >> What you went in, what was the expectation going in and what surprised you? And were there people along the way that kind of gave you some pointers or don't do this, stay away from this. Take us through your experiences. >> Yeah, honestly, there is an amazing network of technology board directors, you know, in the US and specifically in the Valley. And we are all incredibly supportive. We have groups where we get together as board directors, and we talk about topics, and we share best practices and stories, and so I underestimated that, right? I thought I was going to, I thought I was going to enter this chapter where I would be largely giving back after 37 years. You've learned a little bit, right? What I underestimated was just the power of continuing to learn and being surrounded by so many amazing people. When, you know, when you do, you know, multiple boards, your learnings are just multiplied, right? Because you see not just one model, but you see many models. You see not just one problem, but many problems. Not just one opportunity, but many opportunities. And I underestimated how great that would be for me from a learning perspective and then your ability to share from one board to the other board because all of my boards are companies who are also quite close to each other, the executives collaborate. So that has turned out to be really exciting for me. >> So you had the stressful job. You rose to the top of the ranks, quarterly shot clock earnings, and it's hard charging. It's like, it's like, you know, being an athlete, as we say tech athlete. You're a tech athlete. Now you're taking that to the next level, which is now you're juggling multiple operational kind of things, but not with super pressure. But there's still a lot of responsibility. I know there's one board, you got compensation committee, I mean there's work involved. It's not like you're clipping coupons and having pizza. >> Yeah, no, it's real work. Believe me, it's real work. But I don't know how long it took me to not, to stop waking up and looking at my phone and thinking somebody was going to be dropping their forecast, right? Just that pressure of the number, and as a board member, obviously you are there to support and help guide the company and you feel, you know, you feel the pressure and the responsibility of what that role entails, but it's not the same as the frontline pressure every quarter. It's different. And so I did the first type. I loved it, you know. I'm loving this second type. >> You know, the retirement, it's always a cliche these days, but it's not really like what people think it is. It's not like getting a boat, going fishing or whatever. It's doing whatever you want to do, that's what retirement is. And you've chose to stay active. Your brain's being tested, and you're working it, having fun without all the stress. But it's enough, it's like going the gym. You're not hardcore workout, but you're working out with the brain. >> Yeah, no, for sure. It's just a different, it's just a different model. But the, you know, the level of conversations, the level of decisions, all of that is quite high. Which again, I like, yeah. >> Again, you really can't talk about some of the fun questions I want to ask, like what's the valuations like? How's the market, your headwinds? Is there tailwinds? >> Yes, yes, yes. It's an amazing, it's an amazing market right now with, as you know, counter indicators everywhere, right? Something's up, something's down, you know. Consumer spending's up, therefore interest rates go up and, you know, employment's down. And so or unemployment's down. And so it's hard. Actually, I really empathize with, you know, the, and have a great deal of respect for the CEOs and leadership teams of my board companies because, you know, I kind of retired from operating role, and then everybody else had to deal with running a company during a pandemic and then running a company through the great resignation, and then running a company through a downturn. You know, those are all tough things, and I have a ton of respect for any operating executive who's navigating through this and leading a company right now. >> I'd love to get your take on the board conversations at the end if we have more time, what the mood is, but I want to ask you about one more thing real quick before we go to the next topic is you're a retired operating executive. You have multiple boards, so you've got your hands full. I noticed there's a lot of amazing leaders, other female tech athletes joining boards, but they also have full-time jobs. >> Yeah. >> And so what's your advice? Cause I know there's a lot of networking, a lot of sharing going on. There's kind of a balance between how much you can contribute on the board versus doing the day job, but there's a real need for more women on boards, so yet there's a lot going on boards. What's the current state of the union if you will, state of the market relative to people in their careers and the stresses? >> Yeah. >> Cause you left one and jumped in all in there. >> Yeah. >> Some can't do that. They can't be on five boards, but they're on a few. What's the? >> Well, and you know, and if you're an operating executive, you wouldn't be on five boards, right? You would be on one or two. And so I spend a lot of time now bringing along the next wave of women and helping them both in their career but also to get a seat at the table on a board. And I'm very vocal about telling people not to do it the way I do it. There's no reason for it to be sequential. You can, you know, I thought I was so busy and was traveling all the time, and yes, all of that was true, but, and maybe I should say, you know, you can still fit in a board. And so, and what I see now is that your learnings are so exponential with outside perspective that I believe I would've been an even better operating executive had I done it earlier. I know I would've been an even better operating executive had I done it earlier. And so my advice is don't do it the way I did it. You know, it's worked out fine for me, but hindsight's 2020, I would. >> If you can go back and do a mulligan or a redo, what would you do? >> Yeah, I would get on a board earlier, full stop, yeah. >> Board, singular, plural? >> Well, I really, I don't think as an operating executive you can do, you could do one, maybe two. I wouldn't go beyond that, and I think that's fine. >> Yeah, totally makes sense. Okay, I got to ask you about your career. I know technical, you came in at that time in the market, I remember when I broke into the business, very male dominated, and then now it's much better. When you went through the ranks as a technical person, I know you had some blockers and definitely some, probably some people like, well, you know. We've seen that. How did you handle that? What were some of the key pivot points in your journey? And we've had a lot of women tell their stories here on theCUBE, candidly, like, hey, I was going to tell that professor, I'm going to sit in the front row. I'm going to, I'm getting two degrees, you know, robotics and aerospace. So, but they were challenged, even with the aspiration to do tech. I'm not saying that was something that you had, but like have you had experience like that, that you overcome? What were those key points and how did you handle them and how does that help people today? >> Yeah, you know, I have to say, you know, and not discounting that obviously this has been a journey for women, and there are a lot of things to overcome both in the workforce and also just balancing life honestly. And they're all real. There's also a story of incredible support, and you know, I'm the type of person where if somebody blocked me or didn't like me, I tended to just, you know, think it was me and like work harder and get around them, and I'm sure that some of that was potentially gender related. I didn't interpret it that way at the time. And I was lucky to have amazing mentors, many, many, many of whom were men, you know, because they were in the positions of power, and they made a huge difference on my career, huge. And I also had amazing female mentors, Meg Whitman, Ann Livermore at HPE, who you know well. So I had both, but you know, when I look back on the people who made a difference, there are as many men on the list as there are women. >> Yeah, and that's a learning there. Create those coalitions, not just one or the other. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. >> Well, I got to ask you about the, well, you brought up the pandemic. This has come up on some interviews this year, a little bit last year on the International Women's Day, but this year it's resonating, and I would never ask in an interview. I saw an interview once where a host asked a woman, how do you balance it all? And I was just like, no one asked men that. And so it's like, but with remote work, it's come up now the word empathy around people knowing each other's personal situation. In other words, when remote work happened, everybody went home. So we all got a glimpse of the backdrop. You got, you can see what their personal life was on Facebook. We were just commenting before we came on camera about that. So remote work really kind of opened up this personal side of everybody, men and women. >> Yeah. >> So I think this brings this new empathy kind of vibe or authentic self people call it. Is remote work an opportunity or a threat for advancement of women in tech? >> It's a much debated topic. I look at it as an opportunity for many of the reasons that you just said. First of all, let me say that when I was an operating executive and would try to create an environment on my team that was family supportive, I would do that equally for young or, you know, early to mid-career women as I did for early to mid-career men. And the reason is I needed those men, you know, chances are they had a working spouse at home, right? I needed them to be able to share the load. It's just as important to the women that companies give, you know, the partner, male or female, the partner support and the ability to share the love, right? So to me it's not just a woman thing. It's women and men, and I always tried to create the environment where it was okay to go to your soccer game. I knew you would be online later in the evening when the kids were in bed, and that was fine. And I think the pandemic has democratized that and made that, you know, made that kind of an everyday occurrence. >> Yeah the baby walks in. They're in the zoom call. The dog comes in. The leaf blower going on the outside the window. I've seen it all on theCUBE. >> Yeah, and people don't try to pretend anymore that like, you know, the house is clean, the dog's behaved, you know, I mean it's just, it's just real, and it's authentic, and I think that's healthy. >> Yeah. >> I do, you know, I also love, I also love the office, and you know, I've got a 31 year old and a soon to be 27 year old daughter, two daughters. And you know, they love going into the office, and I think about when I was their age, how just charged up I would get from being in the office. I also see how great it is for them to have a couple of days a week at home because you can get a few things done in between Zoom calls that you don't have to end up piling onto the weekend, and, you know, so I think it's a really healthy, I think it's a really healthy mix now. Most tech companies are not mandating five days in. Most tech companies are at two to three days in. I think that's a, I think that's a really good combination. >> It's interesting how people are changing their culture to get together more as groups and even events. I mean, while I got you, I might as well ask you, what's the board conversations around, you know, the old conferences? You know, before the pandemic, every company had like a user conference. Right, now it's like, well, do we really need to have that? Maybe we do smaller, and we do digital. Have you seen how companies are handling the in-person? Because there's where the relationships are really formed face-to-face, but not everyone's going to be going. But now certain it's clearly back to face-to-face. We're seeing that with theCUBE as you know. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But the numbers aren't coming back, and the numbers aren't that high, but the stakeholders. >> Yeah. >> And the numbers are actually higher if you count digital. >> Yeah, absolutely. But you know, also on digital there's fatigue from 100% digital, right? It's a hybrid. People don't want to be 100% digital anymore, but they also don't want to go back to the days when everybody got on a plane for every meeting, every call, every sales call. You know, I'm seeing a mix on user conferences. I would say two-thirds of my companies are back, but not at the expense level that they were on user conferences. We spend a lot of time getting updates on, cause nobody has put, interestingly enough, nobody has put T&E, travel and expense back to pre-pandemic levels. Nobody, so everybody's pulled back on number of trips. You know, marketing events are being very scrutinized, but I think very effective. We're doing a lot of, and, you know, these were part of the old model as well, like some things, some things just recycle, but you know, there's a lot of CIO and customer round tables in regional cities. You know, those are quite effective right now because people want some face-to-face, but they don't necessarily want to get on a plane and go to Las Vegas in order to do it. I mean, some of them are, you know, there are a lot of things back in Las Vegas. >> And think about the meetings that when you were an operating executive. You got to go to the sales kickoff, you got to go to this, go to that. There were mandatory face-to-faces that you had to go to, but there was a lot of travel that you probably could have done on Zoom. >> Oh, a lot, I mean. >> And then the productivity to the family impact too. Again, think about again, we're talking about the family and people's personal lives, right? So, you know, got to meet a customer. All right. Salesperson wants you to get in front of a customer, got to fly to New York, take a red eye, come on back. Like, I mean, that's gone. >> Yeah, and oh, by the way, the customer doesn't necessarily want to be in the office that day, so, you know, they may or may not be happy about that. So again, it's and not or, right? It's a mix. And I think it's great to see people back to some face-to-face. It's great to see marketing and events back to some face-to-face. It's also great to see that it hasn't gone back to the level it was. I think that's a really healthy dynamic. >> Well, I'll tell you that from our experience while we're on the topic, we'll move back to the International Women's Day is that the productivity of digital, this program we're doing is going to be streamed. We couldn't do this face-to-face because we had to have everyone fly to an event. We're going to do hundreds of stories that we couldn't have done. We're doing it remote. Because it's better to get the content than not have it. I mean it's offline, so, but it's not about getting people to the event and watch the screen for seven hours. It's pick your interview, and then engage. >> Yeah. >> So it's self-service. So we're seeing a lot, the new user experience kind of direct to consumer, and so I think there will be an, I think there's going to be a digital first class citizen with events, so that that matches up with the kind of experience, but the offline version. Face-to-face optimized for relationships, and that's where the recruiting gets done. That's where, you know, people can build these relationships with each other. >> Yeah, and it can be asynchronous. I think that's a real value proposition. It's a great point. >> Okay, I want to get, I want to get into the technology side of the education and re-skilling and those things. I remember in the 80s, computer science was software engineering. You learned like nine languages. You took some double E courses, one or two, and all the other kind of gut classes in school. Engineering, you had the four class disciplines and some offshoots of specialization. Now it's incredible the diversity of tracks in all engineering programs and computer science and outside of those departments. >> Yeah. >> Can you speak to the importance of STEM and the diversity in the technology industry and how this brings opportunity to lower the bar to get in and how people can stay in and grow and keep leveling up? >> Yeah, well look, we're constantly working on how to, how to help the incoming funnel. But then, you know, at a university level, I'm on the foundation board of Kansas State where I got my engineering degree. I was also Chairman of the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering, which was all about diversity in STEM and how do you keep that pipeline going because honestly the US needs more tech resources than we have. And if you don't tap into the diversity of our entire workforce, we won't be able to fill that need. And so we focused a lot on both the funnel, right, that starts at the middle school level, particularly for girls, getting them in, you know, the situation of hands-on comfort level with coding, with robot building, you know, whatever gives them that confidence. And then keeping that going all the way into, you know, university program, and making sure that they don't attrit out, right? And so there's a number of initiatives, whether it's mentoring and support groups and financial aid to make sure that underrepresented minorities, women and other minorities, you know, get through the funnel and stay, you know, stay in. >> Got it. Now let me ask you, you said, I have two daughters. You have a family of girls too. Is there a vibe difference between the new generation and what's the trends that you're seeing in this next early wave? I mean, not maybe, I don't know how this is in middle school, but like as people start getting into their adult lives, college and beyond what's the current point of view, posture, makeup of the talent coming in? >> Yeah, yeah. >> Certain orientations, do you see any patterns? What's your observation? >> Yeah, it's interesting. So if I look at electrical engineering, my major, it's, and if I look at Kansas State, which spends a lot of time on this, and I think does a great job, but the diversity of that as a major has not changed dramatically since I was there in the early 80s. Where it has changed very significantly is computer science. There are many, many university and college programs around the country where, you know, it's 50/50 in computer science from a gender mix perspective, which is huge progress. Huge progress. And so, and to me that's, you know, I think CS is a fantastic degree for tech, regardless of what function you actually end up doing in these companies. I mean, I was an electrical engineer. I never did core electrical engineering work. I went right into sales and marketing and general management roles. So I think, I think a bunch of, you know, diverse CS graduates is a really, really good sign. And you know, we need to continue to push on that, but progress has been made. I think the, you know, it kind of goes back to the thing we were just talking about, which is the attrition of those, let's just talk about women, right? The attrition of those women once they got past early career and into mid-career then was a concern, right? And that goes back to, you know, just the inability to, you know, get it all done. And that I am hopeful is going to be better served now. >> Well, Sue, it's great to have you on. I know you're super busy. I appreciate you taking the time and contributing to our program on corporate board membership and some of your story and observations and opinions and analysis. Always great to have you and call you a contributor for theCUBE. You can jump on on one more board, be one of our board contributors for our analysts. (Sue laughing) >> I'm at capacity. (both laughing) >> Final, final word. What's the big seat at the table issue that's going well and areas that need to be improved? >> So I'll speak for my boards because they have made great progress in efficiency. You know, obviously with interest rates going up and the mix between growth and profitability changing in terms of what investors are looking for. Many, many companies have had to do a hard pivot from grow at all costs to healthy balance of growth and profit. And I'm very pleased with how my companies have made that pivot. And I think that is going to make much better companies as a result. I think diversity is something that has not been solved at the corporate level, and we need to keep working it. >> Awesome. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. CUBE alumni now contributor, on multiple boards, full-time job. Love the new challenge and chapter you're on, Sue. We'll be following, and we'll check in for more updates. And thank you for being a contributor on this program this year and this episode. We're going to be doing more of these quarterly, so we're going to move beyond once a year. >> That's great. (cross talking) It's always good to see you, John. >> Thank you. >> Thanks very much. >> Okay. >> Sue: Talk to you later. >> This is theCUBE coverage of IWD, International Women's Day 2023. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Chicago. The Cube is excited to be live on day two of Ansible Fest, 2022. Lisa Martin and John Fur. You're here having some great conversations, a lot of cube alumni, a lot of wisdom from the Ansible community coming at you on this program this week. You know, John, we've been, we've been hearing stories about the power and the capabilities and the collective wisdom of the Ansible community. You can feel it here. Yeah, there's no doubt about that. It's, Ansible is nothing, as Stephanie Chair said yesterday, if not a community and the significant contributions that it makes over and over again, or it's fuel. >>I mean the power of the community is what drives Ansible is gonna drive the future of, I think, cloud in our next generation modern application environment. And it's collective intelligence. It's a production system at the end of the day. And I think these guys have harnessed it. So it should be a really great segment to talk about all the contributor work that's been done. So I'm looking forward to it. >>We've got two great alumni here to talk about the contributor work, how you can get involved. Please welcome back to the cube. Carol Chen, principal community architect at Red Hat. Adam Miller joins us as well, fresh from the keynote stage senior principal software engineer at Red Hat. Guys, great to have you on the cube. Great to be here. Yeah, thank you. So we, we talked, we enjoyed your keynotes, Adam, and what you were talking about on stage, the Ansible contributor summit. That's, you guys have been doing what, this is the seven you've had seven so far in just a couple of years. >>Well, we had seven virtual contributor summits. >>Seven virtual. This is the first Monday was the first in person in. >>First in person since the pandemic and actually the 15th contributor summit overall >>15th overall. Talk about the contributor summits, what the contributors are able to do and the influence that it's having on Ansible Red Hat and what people are able to do with cloud. At the Edge automation. Yeah. >>So our community contributors have always had ways to influence and contribute to the project. But the contributor Summit is really a place where we can get people together, preferably in the same place so that we can, you know, have a really great dynamic conversations and interactions. But we also want to make sure that we don't leave out people who have been constantly online joining us. So this year we are so happy to be here in Chicago in person. We've had about 60 to 70 here joining us. And at first I thought maybe we'll have one third of the attendees joining online because about 30 to 40 people signed up to join online. But in the end, we have more than 100 per people watching our live stream. So that's more than half of the attendees overall, were joining us online. So that really shows where, you know, the contributors are interested in participating for >>Develop. Right. Yeah, it's been, it's been interesting. It's been since 2019, since the in-person Ansible Fest in Atlanta. Now we're in Chicago, we had the pandemic. Couple interesting observations from our side that I wanna get your reaction to Adam Carol. And that is one Ansible's relevance has grown significantly since then. Just from a cloud growth standpoint, developer open source standpoint, and how people work and collaborate has changed. So your contributor based in your community is getting more powerful in scope, in my opinion. Like in, as they become, have the keys to the kingdom in the, in their respective worlds as it gets bigger and larger. So the personas are changing, the makeup of the community's changing and also how you guys collaborate is changing. Can you share your, what's going on with those two dynamics? Cause I think that power dynamic is, is looking really good. How are you guys handling >>That? Yeah, so I mean, I, I had the opportunity to represent the community on stage yesterday as part of the keynote and talk to this point specifically is one of the things that we've seen is the project has had the opportunity to kind of grow and evolve. There's been certain elements that have had to kind of decompose from a technology perspective. We actually had to kind of break it apart and change the architecture a little bit and move things into what are called Ansible collections, which, you know, folks here are very familiar with No One Love. And we've seen a lot of community work in the form of working groups coalesce around those organically. However, they've done so in kind of different ways. They, they pick tools and collaboration platforms that are popular to their subject matter expertise audience and things like that. So we find ourselves in a place where kind of the, the community itself had more or less segmented naturally in a way. And we needed to find ways to, you know, kind of ke that >>Fragmentation by demographics or by expertise or both as >>A Mostly, mostly expertise. Yeah. And so there was a open source technology called Matrix. It is a open source, standardized, federated messaging platform that we're able to use to start to bridge back some of those communities that have kind of broken off and, and made their their own home elsewhere on the internet. So now we're able to, for example, the right, the docs organization, they had a, a group of people who was very interested in contributing to the Ansible documentation, but they'd already self-organized on Discord. And what was interesting there is the existing team for the Ansible documentation, they were already on internet Relay Chat, also known as irc. And Matrix allowed us to actually bring those two together and bridge that into the other matrix cha chat channels that we had. So now we're able to have people from all over the world in different areas and different platforms, coalesce and, and cross. It's like a festival cross pollinate. Yeah. >>And you're meeting the contributors exactly where they are and where they want to be, where they're comfortable. >>Yes. Yeah, we always say we, we reach out to where they are. So, >>And, and, and much in the way that Ansible has the capability to reach out to things in their own way, Right. And allow that subject matter expertise to, you know, cause the technology has the potential and possibility and capability to talk to anything over any protocol. We're able to do, you know, kind of the same thing with Matrix, allowing us to bridge into any chat platform that it has support for bridging and, and we're able to bring a lot of people >>Together. Yeah. And how's that, how's the feedback been on that so far? >>I, I think it has been very positive. For example, I want to highlight that the technical writers that we have contributing via Discord is actually a group from Nigeria. And Dave also participated in the contributor summit online virtually joining us in, in, you know, on the matrix platform. So that, that bridge that really helps to bring together people from different geographical regions and also different topics and arenas like that. >>So what were some of the outcomes of the contributor summit? The, the first in person in a while, great. That you guys were able to do seven virtually during the pandemic. That's hard. It's hard to get people together. You, there's so much greatness and innovation that comes when we're all together in person that just can't replicate by video. You can do a lot. Right. But talk about some of the outcomes from Monday. What were some of the feedback? What were some of the contributions that you think are really going to impact the community? >>I think for a lot of us, myself included, the fact that we are in person and meeting people face to face, it helps to really build the connections. And when we do talk about contribution, the connection is so important that you understand, well this person a little bit about their background, what they've done for the SPO project and or just generally what, what they're interested in that builds the rapport and connection that helps, you know, further, further collaboration in the future. Because maybe on that day we did not have any, you know, co contributions or anything, but the fact that we had a chance to sit together in the same place to discuss things and share new ideas, roadmaps is really the, the kind of a big step to the future for our community. Yes, >>Yes. And in a lot of ways we often online the project has various elements that are able to function asynchronously. So we work very well globally across many time zones. And now we were able to get a lot of people in the same place at the same time, synchronously in the same time zone. And then we had breakout sessions where the subject matter, you know, working groups were able to kind of go and focus on things that maybe have been taking a little while to discuss in, in that asynchronous form of communication and do it synchronously and, you know, be in the same room and work on things. It's been, it's been fantastic >>Developers there, like they, they take to asynchronous like fish to water. It's not a problem. But I do want to ask if there's any observations that you guys have had now that we're kind of coming out of that one way, but the pandemic, but the world's changed. It's hybrid, hybrid work environment, steady state. So we see that. Any observations on your end on what's new that you observed that people are gravitating to? Is there a pattern of styles is or same old self-governing, or what's new? What do you see that's coming out of the pandemic that might be a norm? >>I I think that even though people are excited to get back in person, there are, things have changed, like you said, and we have to be more aware of, there are people who think that not be in person, it's okay. And that's how they want to do it. And we have to make sure that they, they are included. So we, we did want to make a high priority for online participation in this event. And like I said, even though only 4 30, 40 people signed up to join us online initially, so that it was what we were expecting, but in the end, more than 100 people were watching us and, and joining participation in >>Actually on demand consumption be good too, >>Right? Yeah. So, you know, I think going forward that is probably the trend. And as, as much as we, we love being in person, we, we want this to continue that we, we take care of people who are, has been constantly participating online and contributing you >>Meaning again, meaning folks where they are, but also allowing the, the, those members that want to get together to, to collaborate in person. I can only imagine the innovation that's gonna come even from having part of the back, Right. >>And, and not to continue to harp on the matrix point, but it, it's been very cool because Matrix has the ability to do live video sessions using open source another to open source technology called jy. So we're able to actually use the same place that we normally find ourselves, you know, congregating and collaborating for the project itself in an asynchronous and, you know, somewhat synchronous way to also host these types of things that are, are now hybrid that used to be, you know, all one way or all the other. Yeah. And it's been, it's >>Been incredible. Integration is, the integration is have been fascinating to watch how you guys do that. And also, you know, with q we've been virtual too. It's like, it's like people don't want another microsite, but they want a more of a festival vibe, a hub, right? Like a place to kind of check in and have choice, not get absolutely jammed into a, you know, forum or, you know, or whatever. Hey, if you wanna be on Discord, be on Discord, right? Why >>Not? And we still, you know, we do still have our asynchronous forms of >>Work through >>Our get GitHub. We have our projects, we have our issues, we have our, you know, wiki, we have various elements there that everybody can continue to collaborate on. And it's all been, it's all been very good. >>Speaking of festivals, octoberfest that's going on, not to be confused with Octoberfest, that was last month. Talk about how the Ansible project and the Ansible community is involved in Octoberfest. Give us the dates, Carol. So >>YesTo Fest is a annual thing in October. So October Octoberfest, I think it's organized by Digital Ocean for the past eight or nine years. And it's really a, a way to kind of encourage people to contribute to open source projects. So it's not anal specific, but we as an Ansible project encourage people to take this opportunity to, you know, a lot of them doing their first contributions during this event. And when, when we first announced, we're participating in Octoberfest within the first four days of October, which is over a weekend actually. We've had 24 contributions, it, 24 issues fixed, which is like amazing, like, you know, just the interest and the, the momentum that we had. And so far until I just checked with my teammates this morning that we've had about 35 contributions so far during the month, which is, and I'm sorry, I forgot to mention this is only for Ansible documentation. So yeah, specifically. And, and that's also one thing we want to highlight, that contributions don't just come in code in, you know, kind of software side, but really there's many ways to contribute and documentation is such a, a great way for first time users, first time contributors to get involved. So it's really amazing to see these contributions from all over the world. And also partly thanks to the technical writers in Nigeria kind of promoting and sharing this initiative. And it's just great to see the, the results from that. Can >>You double click on the different ways of contribution? You mentioned a couple documentation being one, code being the other, but what is the breadth of opportunities that the contributors have to contribute to the project? >>Oh, there's, there's so many. So I actually take care more of outreach efforts in the community. So I helped to organize events and meetups from around the world. And now that we're slowly coming out of the pandemic, I've seen more and more in person meetups. I was just talking to someone from Minneapolis, they're trying to get, get people back together again. They have people in Singapore, in Netherlands from pretty much, you know, all corners of the globe wanting to form not just for the Ansible project, but the local kind of connection with the re people in the region, sometimes in their own language, in their local languages to really work together on the project and just, >>You know, you to create a global Yeah. Network, right? I mean it's like Ansible Global. >>Exactly. >>Create local subnets not to get all networking, >>Right? >>Yeah. >>Yeah. One, one quick thing I want to touch on Theto Fest. I think it's a great opportunity for existing contributors to mentor cause many people like to help bring in new contributors and this is kind of a focal point to be able to focus on that. And then to, to the the other point we, you know, it, it's been, it's been extremely powerful to see as we return these sub communities pop up and, and kind of work with themselves, so on different ways to contribute. So code is kind of the one that gets the most attention. I think documentation I think is a unsung hero, highly important, great way. The logistical component, which is invaluable because it allows us to continue with our adoption and evangelization and things like that. So specifically adoption and evangelize. Evangelization is another place that contributors can join and actually spawn a local meetup and then connect in with the existing community and try to, you know, help increase the network, create a new subject. Yeah. >>Yeah. Network affects huge. And I think the thing that you brought up about reuse is, is part of that whole things get documented properly. The leverage that comes out of that just feeds into the system that flywheel. Absolutely. I mean it's, that's how communities are supposed to work, right? Yep. Yes. >>That's what I was just gonna comment on is the flywheel effect that it's clearly present and very palpable. Thank you so much for joining John, me on the program, talking about the contributors summit, the ways of contribution, the impacts that are being made so far, what Octoberfest is already delivering. And we're, we still have about 10 days or so left in October, so there's still more time for contributors to get involved. We thank you so much for your insights and your time. Thank >>You. Thank you so much for having us. >>Our pleasure. For our guests and John Purer, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching The Cube Live from Chicago, day two of our coverage of Red Hat Ansible Summit 22. We will see you right n after this short break with our next guest.

(gentle music) >> Hello from Chicago, Lisa Martin here at AnsibleFest 2022 with John Furrier. John, it's great to be here. The transformation of enterprise and industry through automation. This is not only the 10th anniversary of Ansible, this was the first in-person AnsibleFest since 2019. >> It's awesome, it's awesome, Lisa, and I want to welcome everyone to our live performance here in Chicago. We were remote for two years, 2019 in Atlanta. AnsibleFest, part of Red Hat now, Red Hat part of IBM. So much has happened in the past couple years and I think one of the things that we're going to cover this week here in Chicago, is the evolution of Ansible, where it fits into the new cloud-native ecosystems emerging, and also, kind of, what it means for developers and operators. And we're going to see a lot of that here at AnsibleFest with wall-to-wall coverage, keynote just happened. Very interesting to see, you know, Ansible stayed true to their knitting, as you say, you know. What do they do? No big announcements. Some big community news. But humble. >> Very humble. Very humble, but also very excited. All the keynotes did a great job of addressing that community, and being grateful to the community for, really, the evolution that we see at Ansible and now 10 years later. They were talking a lot about smoothing operations for the developers, democratizing automation across the organization. They talked a little bit about that skills gap. I wanted to get your opinion, 'cause as we know there's, they talked about it from a demand perspective, there's over 300,000 open positions on LinkedIn for Ansible skills. So a lot of opportunity there, a lot of opportunity for them to help democratize automation across organizations. >> Yeah, I mean, I think the big theme last year we heard, "Three things, top three things at AnsibleFest 2021, Animation, Automation, Automation." Again, this year the same theme, "Automate everywhere" is what they're talking about. But I think you're right, there's a cultural shift where the entire cloud ecosystems kind of spun to the doorstep of what Ansible's ecosystem stood for for many years in the decade, which is configuration, running things at scale. That notion is now persistent across all the enterprise. And I think the key takeaway from the keynote, in my opinion, is that configuration and automation around devices and infrastructure stuff is an enterprise architecture now, it's not just a, kind of a corner case, or a specific use case, it's going to be native across the entire enterprise architecture. And that's why we heard a lot of cultural shift conversations. And that is where the people who are running the Ansible stuff, they're going to be the keys to having the keys to the kingdom. And I think you're going to see a lot more of this automation at scale. I love the introduction of ops-as-code, that's a little piggyback off of infrastructure-as-code and infrastructure-as-configuration. They're saying operations now is the new software model and it's like ops dev, not dev ops. So it's really interesting to see how the operator is now a very big important role in the next level of cloud native. And it's really exciting because this is kind of what we've been reporting on theCUBE, for over 12 years. So, watching Ansible grow organically into a powerhouse community is very interesting. To see how they operationalize this, you know, going forward. >> Well the operator's becoming really pivotal catalysts in this next way, that you've been covering for 12 years. You know, if we think about some of the challenges and the barriers to adopting automation that organizations have had, one of them has been skills, staff rather. The other has been, "Hey, we need to really determine which processes to automate, that's actually going to give us the most ROI, most bang for our buck." They talked a little bit about that today, but that's still something that Ansible is working with its customers and the community to help sort of demystify. >> Yeah and I think that they were front and center around, "You on the room," people in the room, "you make this happen." They're very much, it's not a top-down corporate thing, Ansible staying true to their roots as I mentioned. But the thing about skills gap is interesting, you heard Kaete Piccirilli talking about, "Level Up how your organization automates, push your people, expand your scope." So the theme is, the power is in the hands of this community to essentially be the new enterprise architecture for operations. At the same time that feeds the trend around, we're seeing this accelerated cloud-native developer we're seeing, we're going to be at KubeCon next week, that cloud-native developer, they want to go faster, they want self-service. So you're seeing higher velocity cloud-native development putting pressure on the ops teams to level up, so the theme kind of connects for me. I think Red Hat has got it right here, with Ansible, that the theme is shifting to ops better get their act together, to level up and to the velocity of what the developers are expecting. At the same time, giving them the freedom to be using infrastructure-as-code, infrastructure-as-configuration, and ultimately, ops-as-code. To me, I think this is like the evolution of how infrastructure-as-code, which is the nirvana of DevOps, now is ops-as-code. Which means, if that's true, ops becomes much more invisible, if you will, which is what developers want. >> And we're going to be breaking down ops-as-code today, no doubt, in our conversations with some of the great Ansible community folks and partners and leaders that we have on, as well as tomorrow in our full two days of coverage. You talked about cultural shift, we talk about that a lot John, it's challenging, but one of the things I think that was very palpable this morning, is the power of the Ansible community. Not just those folks that are here with us in Chicago, but all the folks watching virtually online. >> Yeah. >> Truly help drive that cultural shift that is needed for organizations to really be able to streamline cloud ops. >> Yeah and I think Adam Miller who came on, I thought his portion was excellent, around community. He talked about, you know, the 10 years, put a little exclamation point on that. Managing the communications within the community. He actually brought up IRC and Slack and then, "We have Discord." And they introduced a new standard for communications it's called Matrix, which is open-source based. And even in their decision making, their principles around open source stay true. Again, they checked the box there, I thought that was really cool. The other thing that, within the meat of the product, the automation platform, Matt Jones was talking about the scale, the managing at scale, is one thing. But the thing that I think that hit, jumped out at me, was that this trusted automation messaging was really huge. Signing, having signatures, that really hits the supply chain that we've been talking about, and we're going to talk about it next week at KubeCon, the software supply chain is trusting the code. And I think as you have automation, it's a really big part of the new platform. So, I thought that was really the meat on the bone there. >> That was a very strong theme, was the trust this morning. You know, another thing that was important was Walter Bentley, who's coming on, I believe, later today, talked about how organizations really need to think about the value that automation can deliver to the business and then develop an automation strategy, really thinking at it strategically rather than what a lot of folks have done. And they've put automation in sort of in silos and pockets. He's really talking about, how can you actually make it strategic across the organization and make sure that you really fully see and understand and can articulate the value to the business, from a competitive advantage perspective, that it's going to deliver. >> Yeah, and Stefanie Chiras who's coming on too, she mentioned a lot about the multi-cloud, multi-environment layer, how Ansible can sit across all the environments and then still support the cloud-native through what she called "an automation loop". That's going to be really talking to what we're seeing as multi-cloud or super-cloud, next-gen cloud, where Ansible's role of automating isn't just corner case in the enterprise. Again, if it's an enterprise-wide architecture, it will be a centerpiece of multi-cloud, multiple capabilities. Whether that's compatibility services or, you know, stuff running best of breed on different clouds. 'Cause, obviously Amazon was on stage here, they're talking about this, big Ansible supporter. So, we've got Google supporting Ansible, so you got the multiple clouds and even VM-Ware environments. So, Ansible sits across all this. And so, I think the big opportunity that I'm seeing come out of this, is that if Ansible is in this position, this could be a catalyst for them to be the multi-cloud hybrid architecture for configuration and operations, and I think, the edge is going to be a really interesting conversation. We have a lot of guests coming on, I'll talk about that. But, I think running distributed workloads across multiple clouds in multiple environments, that's a killer app and we'll see if they can pull it off. We're going to be drilling everyone on that topic today, so I'm looking forward to it. >> We're going to be dissecting that. I like how you paint that picture of Ansible really as the nucleus of that hybrid cloud strategy. You know, so many organizations are living in a hybrid cloud world for many reasons, but for Ansible to be able to be that catalyst. And question for you, if we think about that, when we talk about multi-cloud strategically or organically or whatnot, where is automation moving in terms of the customer conversation? We know Ansible's really focused on smoothing the developer experience, but where is automation going, in your vision, up the C-suite stack? >> Well, multi-cloud is a C-suite message and they love to hear that, but you talk to anyone who's in the trenches, they hate multi-cloud. It's more complexity and there's a lot of issues around latency. So what you're seeing is, you're starting to see an evolution of more about compatibility and interoperability. And this is kind of classic enterprise abstraction layers when you start getting into these inflection points, as things get better, so it gets sometimes more complex. So I think Ansible's notion of simplicity and ease of use, could be the catalyst for this abstraction layer between clouds. So it's all about reducing the complexities, because at the end of the day, if you want to do something on multiple clouds, whether that's run common services across, that's not making it simpler. You got to, it's going to be harder before it gets easier. So, if that makes any sense. So doing multi-cloud sounds great on paper, but it's really hard and that's why no one's really doing it. So you're going to start to see multi-cloud, what we call super-cloud, which is more capabilities on one cloud. And then having them still differentiate the idea that some standard's going to emerge, is complete fantasy. I think you're going to, we still need more innovation. Amazon does a great job, Microsoft's coming up on number two position as well, the clouds still need to differentiate. But that doesn't change Ansible's position. They can still be that shim layer or bolt-on, to whatever clouds do best. If you run 'em on machine learning on Google, that's cool. You want to use Amazon for this? How do you make those work? That's a hard problem. And, again, that's where automation ends up. >> And with that context, do you think that Ansible has the capability of helping to dial down some of the complexity that's in this hybrid multi-cloud world? >> Yeah, I mean, I think the thing about what's going on great here, that's unique in the history of the computer industry, is open source is so powerful and it continues to power away with growth. So, more code is coming. So, software supply chain is a big issue, we heard that with the trusted thing, but also now, how people buy now is different. You can actually try stuff out on open source and then go to Red Hat, Ansible, and say, "Hey, I'm going to get some support." So there's a lot of community collective intelligence involved in decision making, not just coding, but buyer selection and consumption. So the entire paradigm of purchasing software and using it, has completely changed. So, that puts Ansible in a leading position because they got a great community, and now you've got open source continuing to thrive away. So, if you're a customer, you don't need the big enterprise sales pitch you can just try the code, if you like it, then you go with Ansible. So it's really kind of set up nicely, this cloud market, for companies like Ansible, because they have the community and they got the software, it's open and it is what it is, it's transparent, everything's above board. >> Yeah, you know, you talk about the community, you mentioned Matrix earlier, and one of the things that was also quite resonant during the keynote this morning was the power of collaboration and how incredibly important that is to them, to stay native to their open-source roots, as you you said. But also really go to where the customers are. And they talked about that with respect to Matrix and Discord and that was an interesting, this is the community reaching out to really kind of grow upon itself. >> Well, being someone who's used all those tools, even IRC 'cause I'm old, all the old folks use IRC. Then the, kind of, Gen X'ers use, and the millennials use Slack. Discord, the way they mentioned Discord, it's so true. If you're a gamer, you're younger, you're using Discord. Now, Matrix is new, they're trying to introduce an open source, 'cause remember they don't control Discord and they don't control Slack. So Slack's Salesforce now, and Discord is probably going to try to get bought by Microsoft, but still, it's not open. So Matrix is their open-sourced chat service. And I thought that was interesting and I think, that got my attention, because that went against the principles of users that like Slack. So, it'd be great. I mean if Matrix, if that takes off, then that's going to be a case study of going against-the-grain on the best-of-breed package software like Slack or Discord. But I think the demographic shift is interesting. Discord is for younger generations, let's see how Matrix will do. And the uptake wasn't that big. Only been around for a couple months, we've seen almost 5,000 members. But, you know, not a failure. >> Right. >> But not a home run either. >> Right. Well we'll have to see how that progresses- >> Yeah, we'll see how that plays out. >> as all of the generations in the workforce today try to work together and collaborate. You know, if we think about some of the things that we're going to talk about today and tomorrow, business outcomes, increasing business agility, being able to ensure compliance, with security and regulatory requirements, which are only proliferating, really also helping organizations to optimize those costs and be as competitive as they possibly can. So I'm excited to dissect the announcements that came out today, some of the things that we're going to hear today and tomorrow, and really get a great view of the automation infrastructure marketplace and what's going on. >> Yeah, it's going to be great. Infrastructure-as-code, infrastructure-as-config, operations-as-code, it's all leading to, you know, distributed computing edge. It's hybrid. >> Yep. All right John- >> Yeah. >> looking forward to two days of wall-to-wall CUBE coverage with you, coming to you live from Chicago, at the first AnsibleFest in person, since 2019. Lisa Martin and John Furrier with you here all day today and tomorrow, stick around, our first guest joins us. We're going to dissect ops-as-code, stick around. (gentle music)

>>The Cube presents UI Path Forward. Five. Brought to you by UI Path. >>Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of UI Path Forward. Five from Las Vegas. We're inside. The formerly was The Sands, now it's the Venetian Convention Center. Dave Nicholson. David, Deb. I've never seen it set up like this before. UI Path's. Very cool company. So of course the setup has to be cool, not like tons of concrete. James Furlong is here, the Vice President of Supply Chain Management and projects at Puma. And Derek Weimer is the CEO of Robo, who's an implementation partner, expert at Intelligent Automation. Folks, welcome to the Cube. Good to see you. Great to have you on. >>Thank you. It's a pleasure. >>So what's happening at Puma these days? I love your sneakers, but you guys probably do more than that, but let's tell us about, give us the update on Puma. >>Yeah, absolutely. Puma's one of the world's leading sports, sports brands. So we encompass all things sports. We do footwear, we do apparel, we do accessories. Cobra, Puma golf is underneath our umbrella as well. So we get the added benefit of having that category as well. And yeah, trade, trade all over the world and it's an exciting, exciting brand to be with. >>And di Robo Atlanta based really specialists in intelligent automation. That's pretty much all you do, is that right? >>Yeah, we are a pure play intelligence automation professional services firm. That's all we do. We're the world's largest firm that focuses only on automation headquarter in Germany, but with a large presence here in Americas. >>So we hear from a lot of customers. We've heard from like with the journey it started, you know, mid last decade, Puma James is just getting started. We April you mentioned. So take us through that. What was the catalyst as you're exiting the, the pandemic, the isolation economy we call it? Yeah. What was the catalyst tell, take us through the sort of business case for automation. >>Sure, absolutely. So Puma, our mission is forever faster. It's, it's our mantra and something we live and breathe. So naturally we have an intense focus on innovation and, and automation. So with that mindset, the way this all kicked off is that I had the opportunity to go into some of our distribution facility and I was unbelievably impressed with the automation that I saw there. So how automation augmented the employee workforce. And it was just very impressive to see that some of our state of the art technology and automation at the same time. Then I went back to the office with that excitement and that passion and I saw that we had the opportunity to take that to our employee base as well. We sort of lacked that same intense focus on how do we take automation and technology like I saw at the distribution facilities and bring it to our employees because picture a large workforce of talented, dedicated employees and they just couldn't keep up with the explosive growth who's seen explosive growth over the last couple of years and they just couldn't keep up with it. So I said that that's it. We need to, to take that same passion and innovation and enter in hyper hyper automation. So we went to the leadership team and no surprise they were all in. We went with them with the idea of bringing hyper automation, starting with RPA to, to our office employees. And they were in, they support innovation and they said, Great, what do you need? Really? Go for it. >>The first question wasn't how much, >>Actually the first question I will say that the funny part is, is they said, Well I like this, it sounds too good to be true. And because it, it really does. If you're new to it like we were and I'm pitching all the benefits that RPA could bring, it does sound too good to me. True. So they said, All right, you know, we trust you and, and go for it. What do you need? Resources, just let us know. So sure enough, I had a proof of concept, I had an idea, but now what? I didn't know where to go from there. So that's where we did some intensive research into software suppliers, but also implementation partners because now we knew what we wanted to do. We had excitement, we had leadership buy-in now, now what do I do? So this is when we entered our partnership to figure out, okay, help Puma on this journey. >>How'd you guys find each other? You know, >>Just intensive research and spoke with a lot of people here. Is there a lot of great organizations? But at the end of the day, they really supported everything that Houma stood for, what we're looking to do and had a lot of trust in the beginning and Dirk and his team and how he could help us on this journey. Yeah. >>Now James, your, your job title system for supply chain management. It is, but I understand that you have had a variety of roles within the organization. Now if we're talking about another domain, artificial intelligence, machine learning. Yeah. There's always this concept of domain expertise. Yeah. And how when you're trying to automate things in that realm, domain expertise is critical. Yeah. You have domain expertise outside of your job title. Yeah. So has that helped you with this journey looking at automation, being able to, being able to have insight into those other organizations? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I think when we were pitching it to the leadership team in the beginning, that enabled me to look at each one sitting at the table and saying, alright, and on the sales, on a commercial side, I was a head of sales for one of the trade channels. I could speak directly to him in the benefits it could have with not with tribal knowledge and with an expertise. So it wasn't something that, it was just, oh, that's supply chain. I could sit, you know, with the, our CFO and talk to him about the, the benefits for his group merchandising and legal so on. I was really able to kind of speak to each one of them and how it would support, because I had that knowledge from being blessed of 15 years experience at, at Puma. So yeah, I was able to take all of that and figure out how do I make sure not just supply chain benefits from rpa, but how does the whole organization benefit from not only RPA but the hyper automation strategy. >>So what's an engagement look like? You start, I presume you, you gotta do some type of assessment and, and you know, of some upfront planning work. Yeah. What does that look like? How, what's the starting point? Take us through that >>Journey. Yeah, so exactly. So the, the key when you're trying to get value from Intel automation is finding the right opportunities, right? And you can automate a lot of things, but which are the things that are gonna drive the most value and, and the value that actually matters to the company, right? So where are you trying to get to from a strategic level, your objectives and how do you actually use automation to help you get to there? So the first thing is, what are the opportunities gonna help you do that? And then once you identify, what we recommend is start with something that's gonna be, you know, accessible, small, You're gonna get a quick win. Cuz then the important thing is once you get that out there, you build the momentum and excitement in the organization that then leads to more and more. And then you build a proper pipeline and you and you get that the, the engagement. >>So what was that discovery like? Was it you fly up there and do a, a chalk talk? Or did you already know James, like where you wanted to focus? >>Yeah, I knew I had a solid proof of concept with the disruptions in supply chain we couldn't keep up with, with all the changes and supply. So right away I knew that I have a very substantial impact on the organization and it would be a solid proof of concept. It was something that not only would supply chain steal, but our customers would feel that we would be servicing them better. Our sales team, the commercial team, marketing impacted everybody. But at the same time it was tangible. I saw two people that just physically couldn't get their, their work done despite how talented and hardworking they were. So I, I was in on that proof of concept and then I just took that idea with some strong advice from Dirk and and his team on, okay, well how do I take that? But then also use that to evangelize through the organization. What are some pitfalls to avoid? Because as a proof of concept, they just told me it's too good to be true. I believe in it. So it was so important to me that it >>Was successful. >>It get your neck out. Oh, I sure was. Which is a little scary, but I had confidence that we would >>Do it. But your poc you had to have a systems view. Yes. Right? Cuz you were trying to, I think you, I'm inferring that you had two people working really hard, but they couldn't get their job done. Yeah, for sure. They were just sitting on their hands. Right. Waiting. Okay. So you kind of knew where the bottlenecks were. Yes. And that's what you attacked and or you helped James and her the team think through that or, >>Yeah, exactly. So, so a couple points you were asking about her domain model of knowledge earlier, and I think that's really key to the puma's success with it, is that they've come at it from a business point of view, what matters to the business. And at the point, you know, supply chain challenges, how do we use automation to address that? And then, you know, and then it's gonna, it's actually gonna, you know, pick opportunities that are gonna matter to the business. Yeah, >>Yeah. At the same time, we, we knew this could be a scary thing, right? If it's not done right, you know, automation definitely can, can take a, a wrong path. So what we relied on them for is tell us how to make this successful. We wanted structure, we wanted oversight, we wanted to balance that with speed and really, you know, developing our pipeline, but at the same time, tell us how to do this right? How do we set up a center, our first ever center of excellence? They help us set that up. Our steerco, our process definition documents are like, they really helped us add that structure to how to make this successful, sustainable and make sure that we were standing things up the right way versus launching into a strong proof, proof of concept. But then it's not gonna be scalable if we didn't really take their strong advice on how to make this something, you know, that had the right oversight, the right investment. So that was, that was key as >>Well for us. So when you looked at the POC and James was saying there were potential pitfalls, what were those pitfalls? Like what did you tell Puma, Hey, watch out for this, watch out for that. What was sort of the best advice there? >>Yeah, so I think one is understanding complexity, right? So a lot of opportunities sound good, but you want to make sure that it's, it's feasible with the right tool set. And also that you're not bit off too much in the beginning is really important. And so some of that is that bringing that expertise to say, Okay, yeah, look, that does something, a good process. You're gonna get value out. It's not gonna be overly complicated. It's a good place to start. And then also, I guess the thing too to mention is it's more than just a technology project. And that's the thing that we also really focus on is it's actually as much about the change management, it's much about, you know, what is the right story, the business case around it, the technology actually in a way is the easy part and it's all the stuff around it that really makes the POC effective, >>Obviously the process. Yeah. Been the people I presume getting to adopt, >>Right? And I think, again, with our, our brand mantra forever faster, we, we get that support that the buy-in from the top is is there from, from the beginning. So that's a benefit that some companies don't, they don't have, right? They have a little resistance maybe from the top. We're trying to get everyone's buy in it. And we had that. So we had, you know, the buy-in the engagement, we were ready to go. So now we just needed someone to kind of help us. >>One more if I may. Yeah, yeah. Gabe, six months in. Yes. That's the business impact that, can >>You tell you? That was tremendous. Yeah. >>Really already six months. Wow. >>Yeah, >>Absolutely. Cfo, CFO's dream. Yeah. >>And again, and, and we had a CFO change mid, mid project. So the new CFO comes in, not new to Puma, the same thing. Super, super smart guy. And I had to sit and again pitch, you know, pitch what it is and the support that I needed by way of investment. And he saw the results and he was all in, you know, what do you need, what's next? And instantly was challenging his departments, Why don't he got competitive, right? We're a competitive bunch, so why don't you know, you should have more in the pipeline. And he was, he was bought in. So there was that fear of a new CFO coming in and how do you show value? Because some of it is, it's very easy to show right away, You know, we were able to refocus those two full-time employees on, on higher value chain activity and you know, they're doing a tremendous job and they're, you know, they have the, the bot and the automation supporting them. So he saw that right away. And we can show him that. But he also understands, as does the whole leadership team, the concept of downstream impacts that you can't necessarily, you know, touch and, and put on paper. So he sees some, but then he also recognizes all the other upstream and downstream impacts that it's had and he's all in and supports whatever, whatever we need. >>Yeah. New CFOs like George Seaford taking over for bill walls. >>Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We >>Have, we have to keep showing results and it has to be sustainable. So that's, again, we'll rely on our partnership to say, okay, this is the beginning, you know, what's next? Keep us, you know, honest on oversight and, and any pitfalls that we should avoid because he's excited. But at the same time, we need to make sure that we sustain those results and, and show what's next. Now they all gotta taste to the apple and they're very eager to see what's next in, in, in this hyper automation journey. >>Well, Dirk, you've partnered on this journey, this specific journey with, with, with Puma. But from your perspective in the broader marketplace, what would be the perfect low hanging fruit opportunity that you would like to have somebody call you and say, Hey, we've got, we've got this perspective engagement with a client. What would be the, what would be the like, Oh yeah, that's easy, that's huge roi really quickly, What does that look like? >>Yeah, I think there's, there's a few areas, right? You know, one task automation RPA is a, is a really good entry point, right? Because it's, it's, it's not overly complex. It doesn't involve a lot of complicated technologies. And I'd say the, the usual starting areas, you know, you, you finance back office, you know, shared service, invoice processing, you know, payables is a very good opportunity area. HR is also an area I would look at, you know, in new, new employee onboarding process or you know, payroll, et cetera. And then supply chain is actually becoming more and more, more common, right? So those would be I guess, top three areas I would mention. And >>Then, and then kind of follow onto that, what's the tip of this sphere? What's the sort of emerging market Yeah. >>For >>This kind of technology? >>I think there's two things. One, it's taking a holistic into end view and leveraging multiple, you know, technology, you know, beyond just rpa, right? You know, intelligent document processing, iml, you know, bringing all this to bear to actually do a true digital transformation. That's, that's number one. And then I'd say the second is going from focusing on cost and efficiency to actually getting into the front office and how do you, how do you actually increase revenue? How do you increase margin? How do you actually, you know, help with that, that top line growth. I think that's really, and that's where you're leveraging technologies, you know, like the, the AI as an example to really help you understand how do you optimize. >>So James, that's, that becomes then an enterprise wide initiative. Yeah. That's, that's, is that your vision? Maybe maybe lay that out for >>Us a bit. Yeah, ab absolutely. The, the vision is now that we've seen what, what it can do, how do we take it from being managed by just, you know, supply chain and this proof of concept cuz I manage projects, but now it's bigger than just a supply chain project. And how do we sort of evangelize that through the whole organization And you know, they mentioned on main stage this, the creation of new jobs and, and roles and how a, a company might set out their strategic directive now is, is changing and evolving. So you know that that's our idea now and that what we'll need support next is how should we structure now for success. And so that it's across the whole enterprise. But that's, that's the vision for >>Sure. What worries you do, you worried about it like taking off and getting outta control and not being governed and so you have to be a little bit careful there. >>Yeah, for sure. That was really important to us. And we actually got to leverage a lot of heavy lifting that Puma Global had done at the same time that we were coming up and, and thinking of the idea of rpa. They were having the same thoughts and they did a lot of heavy lifting again, about not only the software providers but also what does the structure look like, the oversight, a center of excellence globally. So we were able to really leverage a lot of best practices and SOPs that they had set out and we were able to kind of leverage those, bring those to Puma North America so that we didn't face that fear cuz that would be a limiting factor for us. So because we were so disciplined and we could leverage the work that they had done, that fear wasn't, wasn't there. Now we have to stay, you know, on top of it. And as people get excited, how do you kind of mirror the excitement and with it at the same time that the oversight and not getting, you know, too, too big, too fast. So that's the balance that we'll, we'll work through now. It's a good problem to have. >>Well, exactly. It is super exciting. Great story. Congratulations on, on the success and good luck. Thank you. Yeah, you very much for coming to the, Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. All right. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there. Dave Nicholson Andante right back, the cube live from Las Vegas UI path forward. Five.

>>Welcome back to Boston. Everybody watching the cubes coverage, OFS reinforce 22 from Boston, Atlanta chow lobster, the SOS a ruin in my summer, Andy and Smith is here is the CMO of laminar. Andy. Good to see you. Good >>To see you. Great to be >>Here. So laminar came outta stealth last year, 2021, sort of, as we were exiting the isolation economy. Yeah. Why was laminar started >>Really about there's there's two mega trends in the industry that, that created a problem that wasn't being addressed. Right? So the two mega trends was cloud transformation. Obviously that's been going on for a while, but what most people doesn't don't realize is it really accelerated with COVID right? Being all, everybody having to be remote, et cetera, various stats I've read like increased five times, right? So cloud transformation are now you are now problem, right? That's going on? And then the other next big mega trend is data democratization. So more data in the cloud than ever before. And this is, this is just going and going and going. And the result of those two things, more data in the cloud, how am I securing that data? You know, the, the, the breach culture we're in like every day, a new, a new data breach coming up, et cetera, just one Twitter, one yesterday, et cetera. The, those two things have caused a gap with data security teams and, and that's what he >>Heard at attract. Yeah. So, you know, to your point and we track this stuff pretty carefully quarterly, and you saw, it was really interesting trend. You actually saw AWS's growth rate accelerate during the pandemic. Absolutely. You know? Absolutely. So you're talking about, you know, a couple of hundred billion dollars for the big four clouds. If you, if you include Alibaba and it's still growing at 35, you know, 40% a year, which is astounding, so, okay. So more cloud, more data. Explain why that's a, a problem for practitioners. >>Yeah, exactly. The reality is in, in the security, what, what are we doing? What all the security it's about protecting your data in the end, right? Like, like we're here at this at, at reinforce all these security vendors here really it's about protecting your data, your sensitive data. And, but what, what had been happening is all the focus was on the infrastructure, the network, et cetera, et cetera, and not as much focus, particularly on the data and, and the move to the cloud gave the developers and the data scientists, way more power. They don't longer have to ask for permission. And so they can just do what they want. And it's actually wonderful for the business. The business is moving faster, you spin up applications sooner, you get new, new insights. So all those things are really great, but because the developer has so much power, they can just copy data over here, make a backup over here, new et cetera. And, and security has no idea about all these copies of the, of the data that are out there. And they're typically not as well protected as that main production source. And that's the gap that >>Exists. Okay. So there was this shift from sort of perimeter hardening the perimeter, hardening the infrastructure and, and now your premises, it's moving to the data we saw when, when there was during the pandemic, there was definitely a shift to end point security. There was a shift to cloud security rethinking the network, but it was still a lot of, you know, kind of cha chasing the whackamole and people have talked about this is a data problem for years. Yeah. But it was, it's taken a while for, for companies, for the technology industry to, to come at it. You guys are one of the first, if not the first. Yeah. Why do you think it took so long? Is this cuz it's really hard. >>Yeah. I mean, it, it's hard. You need to focus on it. The, the traditional security has been around the network and the box, right. And those are still necessary. It's important to, you know, your use identity to cover the edge, to, to make sure people can't get into the box, but you also have to have data. So what, what happens is there's really good solutions for enterprise data security, looking at database, you know, technology, et cetera. There are good solutions for cloud infrastructure security. So the CSP of the world and the CWPP are protecting containers, you know, protecting the infrastructure. But there really wasn't much for cloud everything you build and run in the cloud. So basically your custom application, your custom applications in the IAS and PAs environments, there really wasn't anything solving that. And that's really where laminar is focused. >>Okay. So you guys use this term shadow data. We talk about shadow. It what's shadow data. >>Yeah. So what we're finding at a hundred percent of our customer environments and our POVs and talking to CISOs out there is that they have these shadow data assets and shadow data elements that they have no clue that existed. So here's the example. Everybody knows the main RDS database that is in production. And this is where, you know, our, our data is taken from. But what people don't realize is there's a copy of that. You know, in a dev environment, somebody went to run a test and they was supposed to be there for two weeks. But then that developer left forgot, left it there. They left the company, oh, now it's been there for two years that there was an original SQL database left over from a lift and shift project. They got moved to RDS, but nobody deleted that thing there, you know, it's a database connected to an application, the application left, but that database, that abandoned database is still sitting. These are all real life customer examples of shadow data that we run into. And there's, and what the problem is that main production data store is secured pretty well. It's following all your policies, et cetera. But all these shadow data resources are typically less well protected unmonitored. And that is what the attackers are after. >>So you're, you know, the old, the, the Watergate follow the money, you're following the data, >>Following the data. >>How do you follow that data if there's so much of it, it, and it's, you know, sometimes, you know, not really well understood where it is. How do you know where >>It is? Yeah. It's the beauty of partnering with somebody like AWS, right? So with each of the cloud providers, we actually take a role in your cloud account and use the APIs from the cloud provider to see all the changes in all the instances are going on. Like it is, the problem is way more complicated in the cloud because I mean, AWS has over 200 services, dozens of ways to store data, right. It's wonderful for the developer, but it's very hard for the security practitioner. And so, because we have that visibility through the cloud provider's APIs, we can see all those changes that are happening. We can then say, ah, that's a data store. Let me go analyze, make a copy, have a snapshot of that and do the analyzing of that data right inside our customer's account without pulling the data out. And we have complete visibility to everything. And then we can give that data catalog over to the customer. >>All right. I gotta ask you a couple Colombo questions. So if you know, we talk about encryption, everything's encrypted everything. If, if the data is encrypted, why then would I need laminar? >>Because I mean, we'll make sure that the data's encrypted okay. Right. Often. So it's not supposed to be and not right. Two is, we're gonna tell you what type of data is inside there. Oh, is this, is this health information? Is it personal identify information? Is it credit cards? You know, et cetera, C so we'll classify the data for you. We will also, then there's things like retention, period. How long should we, I hold onto that data, all the things about what are, who has access, what's the exposure level for that data. And so when you, when you think about data security posture, what's the posture of that data you're looking at at those data policies. It's something that has been very well defined and written down. But in the past, there was just no way to go verify that those, that, that, that policy is actually being followed. And so we're doing that verification automatically. >>So without the context, you can't answer those other questions. So you make sure it's encrypted. If it's not, or you can at least notify me that it's not, you don't do the encryption. Right. Or do you, >>We don't do it ourselves, but we can give you here. Here's the command in and the Amazon to go encrypt it >>Right. Then I can automate that. And then the classification is key because now you're telling me the context. So I can say, okay, apply this policy to that data, retain it for this long, get rid of it after X number of years, or if it's work, process, get rid of it now. Yeah. And then who should have access to that data. And so you can help at least inform how to enforce those policies. >>Exactly. And so we, we, we call it guided remediation because what we're, you know, talking to a CISO, they're like, I need 400 more alerts, like a hole in the head like that. Doesn't do me any good. If you can't tell me how to resolve the, the, the, this security gap that I have or this, then it doesn't do any good. And, and the first, first it starts with who do I need to go talk to? Right. So they have hundreds, if not thousands of developers. Oh, great. You found this issue. I, I, I don't know who to go. Like, I can't just delete it myself, but I need to go talk to somebody really, should this be deleted? We need, do we really, really need to hold onto this? So we, we help guide who the data owner is. So we give you who to talk to. You, give you all the context. Here's the data, here's the data asset that it's in. Here's our suggestion. Here's the problem. Here's our suggestion for >>Solution. And you started the company on AWS >>Started on AWS. Absolutely. >>So what's of course it's best cloud and why not start there? So what's the relationship like, I mean, how'd you get started? You said, okay, Hey, we're we got an idea for a company. We're gonna build it on AWS. We're gonna become a customer. We're gonna, you know, >>We actually, so insight partners is our main investor. Yeah. And they were very helpful in giving us access to literally hundreds of CSOs, who we had conversations with before we actually launched the company. And so we did some shifting and to, to figure out our exact use case. But by the time we came to market, it was in February this year, we actually GAed the product that, where like product market fit nailed because we'd had so many conversations that we knew the problem in the market that we needed to solve. And we knew where we needed to solve it first. And, and the, the, the relationship we AWS is great. We just got on the marketplace, just became a, a partner. So really good. Good >>Start. So I gotta ask you, so I always ask this question. So how do you actually know when you have product market fit? >>You it's about those conversations. Right. You know, so like, I I've been to lots of startups and sometimes you're you're, you, you each have a conversation and then they, they saying, oh, well kind of want this. And we kind of like that. And so it, the more conversations you have, the more, you know, you're solving a real problem. Right. And, and, and, and, and you re react to what that, what that prospect is telling you back and, or that advisor or that whoever we're talking to. And, and every single one of the CISO conversations we had was I don't have a good inventory of my data in the cloud. >>The reason I asked that, cause I always ask the startups, like, when do you scale? Cause I think startups sometimes scale too fast. They try to scale too fast, they'll hire 50 sales people. And then they, you know, churn, you know, they, they got a 50% churn, but they're trying to optimize their go to market when they got 50% of their customers are gonna leave. So it's, it's gotta be the sequential thing. So, so you got product market fit. So are, are you in the scaling phase >>Now? We are. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So now it's about how quickly can we deliver? We, we we're ramping customer base significantly. And, and you know, we've got a whole go to market team in, you know, sales and marketing in the us and, and often off to the races >>And you just run on AWS or you run another clouds. >>It's multi-cloud so AWS, Azure, GCP, et cetera. >>Okay. So then my least my next question is it sort of, you can do this within each of the individual clouds today. Do you see a day and maybe it's here today is where you can create a single experience across those clouds >>Today. It's a single experience across cloud. So our SaaS, we have our SaaS portion runs in AWS, but the actual data analysis runs in each cloud provider. So AWS, Azure, GCP and snowflake too, actually. >>Ah, okay. So I come through your whatever portal, like if I can use that term. Yep. And that's running on AWS. Yes. You're SAS, as you say, and then you go out to these other environments, GCP, Azure, AWS itself, and snowflake. Yep. And I see laminar, is that right? Or >>There's a piece running inside our customer's environment. Okay. So, so we have a customer, they, the, we have, we get a role inside of their cloud account or read only role inside of their cloud account. And we spin up serverless functions in that cloud account. That's where all the analysis happens. And that's why we don't take any data out of the environment. So it all stays there. And, and therefore we don't, we don't actually see the data outside of the environment. Like, I, I can tell you there's a metadata comes out. I can tell you, there are credit cards inside that data store, but I can't tell you exactly which credit card it is cuz I don't know. So all the important actions happens are there and just the metadata metadata comes out. So we can give you a cross cloud dashboard of all your sensitive data. >>And of course, so take the example of snowflake. They're going across clouds, they're building what we call super cloud sort of, of a layer that floats on top. You're just sort of going wherever that data goes. >>Yeah, exactly. So, so each of there's a component that lives in the customer's environment in the, in those multi-cloud environments and then a single view of the world dashboard that is our SaaS component that runs an AWS. So >>You guys are, is, am I correct? You're series a funded >>Series, a funded yeah, exactly. >>And, and already scaling to go to market. Yeah. Which is, which is early to scale. Right. I mean you've got startup experience. Right? >>Absolutely. >>How does it compare? >>Well, what was amazing here was access. I mean, really it was through the relationship with insight. It was access to the CISOs that I had never had at any of the other startups I was with. You're trying to get meetings, you're meeting with a lot of practitioners, you know, et cetera. But getting all those conversations with buyers was, was super valuable for us to say, ah, I know I'm solving a real problem that has value that they will pay for. Right. And, and, and so that, that was a year and a half probably still of all that work going on. We just, just waited to GA until we understood the market >>Better. Yeah. Insight. They're amazing. The way to talk about scaling. I mean, they've just the last 10 years that comp that, that PE firm has just gone wild in terms of just their, their philosophy, their approach, their cadence, their consistency. And now of course their portfolio. >>Yeah. And, and they started doing a little bit earlier and earlier stage. I mean, I, I always think of them as PE too, but you know, they, they did our seed round. Right. They did our a round and, and they're doing earlier stages, but particularly what they saw in Laar was exactly what we started this conversation with. They saw cloud transformation speeding up, they saw data democratization happening. They're like, we need to invest in this now because this is a now a problem to solve. >>Yeah. It's interesting. Cuz when you go back even pre 2010, you talk to, you know, look at insight, they would wait. They would invest in companies unless there was, you know, on the way to five plus million dollar ARR, they weren't doing seed deals. Totally. Like they saw, wow, these actually can be pretty lucrative and we can play and we have a point of view and yeah. So cool. Well, congratulations. I'll give you the final word. What, what should we be watching for from, from Laar as sort of, you know, milestones that you guys want to hit and, and indicators of success. >>Yeah. Now it's all about growth partnerships, you know, integrations with, with other of the players out here. Right. And so, you know, like scaling our AWS partnership is one of the key aspects for us. And so, you know, just look for, look for the name out there and, and you'll start, you'll start to see it a lot more. And, and if, if you have the need, you know, come look us up. Laar security.com. >>Awesome. Well thanks very much for coming to Cuban. Good luck. Appreciate it. All right. >>Wonderful. Thanks. You're >>Welcome. All right. Keep it right there, everybody. This is Dave ante. We'll be back right after this short break from AWS reinvent 2022 in Boston. You're watching the cue.

(soft instrumental music) >> Welcome back everyone, to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We're here in person at a live physical event with real people. Of course, it's a hybrid event. Great stuff online. Check it out on the Amazon site, as well as theCUBE zone. We've got great guests, talking about the cloud vision for getting talent in to the marketplace, in being productive and for society Accenture always great content. Denise Reese, Managing Director of the South Market Unit Lead at Accenture, AABG, which stands for "Accenture Area Business Group" and Gina Gina Fratarcangeli who is also the managing director of Midwest sales leader. Ladies, thanks for coming, I appreciate you coming on and talking about the vision of talent. >> I guess >> Thanks for having us. >> Yes, absolutely. It's a pleasure to be here. >> So, Amazon's got this dangerous goal, to train 29 million people. Maureen Lonergan came on yesterday, who I've known for a long time, doing a great job. It's hard to get the talent in. First of all, it sounds harder than it really is, that's my opinion. You know, you get some training certifications and you're up and running. So, talent's a big thing. What do you guys do? Give us the overview. >> Sure. Well, we're having a lot of activity at Accenture trying to get talent in. Across the entire country we're spending a tremendous amount of effort to do that. A couple of critical things we're doing in the Midwest is bringing in and searching for different talent streams that we haven't typically done in the past. For instance, one thing that we're doing is, we set up an apprentice program where we're reaching out into the market to find diverse talent, who aren't coming through the critical normal college path and bringing folks in like that. And we've got 1200 people that we've brought in that way, just in the Midwest. Which has been a phenomenal new talent stream for us. And supporting our inclusion and diversity. One of the other exciting things is what we call "The Mom Project", where we're intentionally working with an organization called the Mom Project, to bring women back into the workplace who may have left while they were taking care of their families and helping them get certified in all the new cloud technology and getting back to work. >> I love how you guys are going after this whole places that not everyone's looking at, because what I love about Cloud is that, it's a level up kind of opportunity where you don't really have to have that pedigree, or that big-big school. Of course, I went to a different school. So, I have a little chip on my shoulder. I didn't go to MIT, wasn't North-east but still good school. But, I mean, you could really level up from anywhere. >> Gina: That's right. >> And the opportunities with Cloud are so great. This is like a huge thing. No I'm surprised no one knows about it. >> Absolutely. I would add to that. So, we've in the South, in Georgia in particular. We've just launched an initiative with the technical college system of Georgia and AWS. So, it's a public-private partnership, where we're actually helping to set the curriculum for those students that are going through programs, through the technical colleges. It's one of the largest parts of the university system of Georgia. And, we're actually helping to frame the curriculum. And, giving folks what they need, to your point. It is an opportunity to level up. It's a great way to get talent in non-traditional spaces. It helps us to achieve our inclusion and diversity roles or goals, rather. But, then it also allows us to really continue to fill that pipeline with folks that we may not have had access to otherwise. >> Is there a best practice that you see developing in the acquisition of talent? Or enticing people to come in? Because that's just economics you know, Maureen was telling me that it was this person she was unemployed, and she got certified and she's making six figures. >> Both: Yeah. >> She's like oh my God, this is great. So, that's the Cloud growth. Is there a way to entice people? Is there a pattern? Is it more economic? Is it more, hey, be part of something. What's the data showing? >> There's definitely a war for talent out there. And so in this space we continuously hear from our clients that they can't hire enough people. So in the past, in the technology space, a lot of clients were hiring their own teams and here they just can't get the skills fast enough. So we're spending a tremendous amount of time being proactive. We started a women in Cloud organization where we're proactively reaching out to the community to bring women in, let them know that we will help them get those certifications and partnering with organizations like Women in Cloud, which is a global organization to create new funnels of talent. >> I think the women angle is great. The mom network coming out of the work for back into the workforce, because things change. Like we were talking about how Amazon just changed over the past five years now that this architectural approach is changing. So that's cool. Also we were involved in the women in data science, out of Stanford University, they have that great symposium. This is power technical women. >> Yes >> And it's got a global following. So the women networks that are developing are phenomenal. So that's not just an Accenture thing, right? That's outside of Accenture. >> I think it's a combination because I think we do a really good job inside of Accenture to create opportunities for women of various ethnicities lived experiences to be able to come together to network internally, but then also to pour some of that talent that they have into the communities where we live and we all do business as well. So I think I'm seeing definitely a two-pronged approach there. >> Let me ask you a question, I don't mean to put you on the spot, but I kind of will, Accenture's known as a pretty great firm. So working at Accenture is kind of a big deal. Does that scare people? Because if you could work at a Accenture I mean, that's good pedigree right there. So like, when you're trying to get people coming into the cloud, do they get the Accenture mojo or does it work for them? And can you share your experiences on that? >> I've been here five years and it's been a phenomenal ride for me. I've really enjoyed the fact having a female CEO, I think, and having a CEO who is so committed to diversity on all aspects, right? Her commitment is 50% diversity parody by 2025 at every level of our organization. And that doesn't happen without really intentional efforts at the entry-level and everywhere through the process to ensure that women are not only promoted, but really given the support network among all of our leaders and mentorship to be successful. And it's not just words, it's something that we're really spending a lot of time doing with intention. And that word is out in the space now, as women come in, they're loving it and they're recruiting their other women into the organization and diverse groups as well as what I'm seeing. >> And so I actually just started at Accenture in March. So I've been around eight months. I actually joined from AWS, interestingly enough. And I can tell you from my own experience, the intentionality that Gina spoke to you is it's evident at all levels. I feel like the way that I was courted to the firm was nothing short of amazing. That's another story for another day, but I feel like my being where I am, being hired in as a managing director, as an experienced hire, I think my presence is a testament to the focus that Accenture has on inclusion diversity and the equity component as well. And then also in Atlanta, we are exceptionally fortunate. We have close to 30 black and Latin X managing directors and senior managing directors out of the Atlanta office. So what we're doing there is pretty magical and it's something that I've never experienced in my 25 years. >> It's contagious I hope, the magic is contagious. >> Yeah. >> Yes, absolutely. >> And it's exciting because we're known as a management consulting business, right? So our product is the people >> That's right. >> And so there is intention from day one as to what you want from your career and setting your career plan. So everyone is given those career counselors and the expectation that someone is thinking about your business and your personal business, and what is your role today and what should your role be in two years, and what skills do you need to get there? Which is awesome, it's a lot of fun. >> It's also walking the talk too, right? I mean, Amazon here, they had a 50% women on stage. I don't know if you noticed on the keynote, they was two men and two women, 50%. Of course the United Airlines, it's got to be three. We got to get a 51%,, 'cause technically 51% So it should be three to one, but yeah, like, okay, that was cute notice but that's good. But this is real, I've been a big proponent of software development. Customers are women too that's 51%. So I think this whole representation thing has to be more real and more intentional. And so I want to ask you, how would you share the best practice of making that real from the essential playbook? What could people learn and what mistakes should they avoid? I think people who do want to try with it, but they don't know what to do. >> You know, I think get started, right. Do the work. I feel like since I started in technology, we've been having this conversation about diversity and inclusion and bringing more people into the space. And now it's time for us to just do that. And I feel like Accenture is doing that in spades. I think also again, I've been using this word. I was on a breakout panel yesterday talking about our partnership with AWS and intentionality keeps coming up. But I think also it helps to have a CEO who's creating diversity as an imperative at the most senior levels of the firm and folks are being incentivized as a result. So you've got to put the mechanisms in place to ensure that folks understand that this is not just lip service. >> That's a great point. It's not only just the people, but the mechanisms. And one of the things that I've been saying early on in the top of the interview was Cloud is an instant leveler there, because if you can be so capable so fast. So like when you start thinking about getting people in the market, producing talent, this notion of meritocracy isn't lip service, because if you have the capabilities and the people side lineup, then it truly can be like that. 'Cause your game does the talking, right. >> And we're doing it with intention at every level in the organization so much though, that every people leader, one of their metrics is the diversity. And as we look at the promotions, making sure that that parody is there, but every person who's managing people has diversity as a metric that they're being measured on. And so I think that's really critical as well as having the people who are being the advocates and being the allies and really asking the questions as the teams are getting put together. You know, my job is to review all the deals in the Midwest. And when the teams come forward, I say, "Great where are the women on the team? Who are we putting it?" We're all talking about the diversity. So when we're going to a client meeting, where are the women who are you're taking to that meeting? And if the answer is well, there's not one who's technical yet, the most senior, the most technical, well, great bring her on and use this as a training opportunity. We need to walk the walk and talk the talk and show that to our clients. >> I think that's really good. You guys are senior leaders, one can do that, demonstrate that, but also you're in the field for Accenture. You're in front of your customers. What are you seeing out there and what excites you about being in these industry? >> Yeah, I love the fact that there are so many more women in this space. I love that we're having so many women out there with intention. We've had six female CEOs do women in Cloud panel discussions with us and with our team. So you made the comment early about cloud moving so fast. That's the most exciting thing for me and the fact that it is moving at such a pace that no one client is going to be able to get the skills fast enough. They need companies like Accenture. They need companies like AWS to help them where we're leveraging all the knowledge from our own other clients and bringing that together so we can help them accelerate their development. What about you? >> Absolutely. Now I would echo that as we used to say at AWS plus one to that. But I'm really hopeful because what I'm seeing is the number of folks with my lived experience better at senior executive levels, not only within Accenture and AWS, but in our customers. And I think going back to the point that you were making earlier regarding Cloud being a level up and giving folks opportunity, folks have to be able to see a path, right? It's one thing to just get a certification and tick a box, that's great. But if you don't see a pathway to being able to utilize that in a way that allows you to move up and seeing where we are now, just as a firm, just really, really excites me that every time I get onto a call and I see another strong, amazing woman, I'm like, man, this is amazing. And it's something that... I think it's a phenomenon that I've started to see maybe within the last like five years or so. And probably even within the last two to three years, I've started to see that even more so, so that really excites me. >> Well, first of all, you guys are great. You're contagious, okay? Which is good, a good thing. I love how you brought the whole path thing because path finders was a big part of Adam's Leslie's keynote, and it must be really fun to see people taking the path that you guys are pioneering- >> We're ploughing, we're ploughing >> Yes we are. We're ploughing and you know what else we're doing? We're lifting, as we climb. That is important. I would say that, we don't have all of these amazing opportunities and blessings just to talk about what we have, but if you're not actually bringing somebody else along and giving those opportunities to folks, then it's all for not. >> You got people and the Cloud, to get them people, which is, we're humans and the mechanisms software to bring it together, magic. >> Absolutely >> Congratulations. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Both: Thanks for having us. >> Okay this is theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in global tech coverage from re:Invent 2021 AWS web services. Thanks for watching (soft instrumental music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to transforming ideas into insights, presented with theCUBE and made possible by Cloudera. My name is Dave Vellante from theCUBE and I'll be your host for today. In the next hundred minutes, you're going to hear how to turn your best ideas into action using data and we're going to share the real-world examples of 12 industry use cases that apply modern data techniques to improve customer experience, reduce fraud, drive manufacturing efficiencies, better forecast retail demand, transform analytics, improve public sector service and so much more. How we use data is rapidly evolving. That is the language that we use to describe data. I mean, for example, we don't really use the term big data as often as we used to, rather we use terms like, digital transformation and digital business. But you think about it. What is a digital business? How is that different from just a business? Well, a digital business is a data business and it differentiates itself by the way it uses data to compete. So whether we call it data, big data or digital, our belief is we're entering the next decade of a world that puts data at the core of our organizations. And as such, the way we use insights is also rapidly evolving. You know, of course we get value from enabling humans to act with confidence on let's call it near perfect information or capitalize on non-intuitive findings, but increasingly insights are leading to the development of data products and services that can be monetized. Or as you'll hear in our industry examples, data is enabling machines to take cognitive actions on our behalf. Examples are everywhere in the forms of apps and products and services, all built on data. Think about a real time fraud detection, know your customer and finance, personal health apps that monitor our heart rates. Self-service investing, filing insurance claims on our smart phones and so many examples. IOT systems that communicate and act machine to machine. Real-time pricing actions, these are all examples of products and services that drive revenue, cut costs or create other value and they all rely on data. Now, while many business leaders sometimes express frustration that their investments in data, people and process and technologies haven't delivered the full results they desire. The truth is that the investments that they've made over the past several years should be thought of as a step on the data journey. Key learnings and expertise from these efforts are now part of the organizational DNA that can catapult us into this next era of data transformation and leadership. One thing is certain, the next 10 years of data and digital transformation won't be like the last 10. So let's into it. Please join us in the chat. You can ask questions. You can share your comments. Hit us up on Twitter. Right now, it's my pleasure to welcome Mick Holliston and he's the president of Cloudera. Mick, great to see you. >> Great to see you as well, Dave. >> Hey, so I call it the new abnormal, right? The world is kind of out of whack. Offices are reopening again. We're seeing travel coming back. There's all this pent up demand for cars and vacations, line cooks at restaurants. Everything that we consumers have missed, but here's the one thing, it seems like the algorithms are off. Whether it's retail's fulfillment capabilities, airline scheduling, their pricing algorithms, commodity prices, we don't know. Is inflation transitory? Is it a long-term threat, trying to forecast GDP? It seems like we have to reset all of our assumptions and Mick, I feel a quality data is going to be a key here. How do you see the current state of the industry in the role data plays to get us into a more predictable and stable future? >> Well, I can sure tell you this, Dave, out of whack is definitely right. I don't know if you know or not, but I happened to be coming to you live today from Atlanta and as a native of Atlanta, I can tell you there's a lot to be known about the airport here. It's often said that whether you're going to heaven or hell, you got to change planes in Atlanta and after 40 minutes waiting on an algorithm to be right for baggage claim last night, I finally managed to get some bag and to be able to show up, dressed appropriately for you today. Here's one thing that I know for sure though, Dave. Clean, consistent and safe data will be essential to getting the world and businesses as we know it back on track again. Without well-managed data, we're certain to get very inconsistent outcomes. Quality data will be the normalizing factor because one thing really hasn't changed about computing since the dawn of time, back when I was taking computer classes at Georgia Tech here in Atlanta and that's what we used to refer to as garbage in, garbage out. In other words, you'll never get quality data-driven insights from a poor dataset. This is especially important today for machine learning and AI. You can build the most amazing models and algorithms, but none of it will matter if the underlying data isn't rock solid. As AI is increasingly used in every business app, you must build a solid data foundation. >> Mick, let's talk about hybrid. Every CXO that I talked to, they're trying to get hybrid right. Whether it's hybrid work, hybrid events, which is our business, hybrid cloud. How are you thinking about the hybrid everything, what's your point of view? >> With all those prescriptions of hybrid and everything, there was one item you might not have quite hit on, Dave and that's hybrid data. >> Oh yeah, you're right, Mick, I did miss that. What do you mean by hybrid data? >> Well, Dave, in Cloudera, we think hybrid data is all about the juxtaposition of two things, freedom and security. Now, every business wants to be more agile. They want the freedom to work with their data, wherever it happens to work best for them, whether that's on premises, in a private cloud, in public cloud or perhaps even in a new open data exchange. Now, this matters to businesses because not all data applications are created equal. Some apps are best suited to be run in the cloud because of their transitory nature. Others may be more economical if they're running a private cloud. But either way, security, regulatory compliance and increasingly data sovereignty are playing a bigger and more important role in every industry. If you don't believe me, just watch or read a recent news story. Data breaches are at an all time high and the ethics of AI applications are being called into question everyday. And understanding lineage of machine learning algorithms is now paramount for every business. So how in the heck do you get both the freedom and security that you're looking for? Well, the answer is actually pretty straightforward. The key is developing a hybrid data strategy. And what do you know, Dave, that's the business Cloudera is in. On a serious note, from Cloudera's perspective, adopting a hybrid data strategy is central to every business' digital transformation. It will enable rapid adoption of new technologies and optimize economic models, while ensuring the security and privacy of every bit of data. >> Okay, Mick, I'm glad you brought in that notion of hybrid data because when you think about things, especially remote work, it really changes a lot of the assumptions. You talked about security, the data flows are going to change. You got the economics, the physics, the local laws come into play, so what about the rest of hybrid? >> Yeah, that's a great question, Dave and certainly, Cloudera itself as a business and all of our customers are feeling this in a big way. We now have the overwhelming majority of our workforce working from home. And in other words, we've got a much larger surface area from a security perspective to keep in mind, the rate and pace of data, just generating a report that might've happened very quickly and rapidly on the office ethernet may not be happening quite so fast in somebody's rural home in the middle of Nebraska somewhere. So it doesn't really matter whether you're talking about the speed of business or securing data, any way you look at it, hybrid I think is going to play a more important role in how work is conducted and what percentage of people are working in the office and are not, I know our plans, Dave, involve us kind of slowly coming back to work, beginning this fall. And we're looking forward to being able to shake hands and see one another again for the first time, in many cases, for more than a year and a half. But yes, hybrid work and hybrid data are playing an increasingly important role for every kind of business. >> Thanks for that. I wonder if we could talk about industry transformation for a moment because it's a major theme of course, of this event. So, here's how I think about it. I mean, some industries have transformed. You think about retail, for example, it's pretty clear. Although, every physical retail brand I know has not only beefed up its online presence, but they also have an Amazon war room strategy because they're trying to take greater advantage of that physical presence. And reverse, we see Amazon building out physical assets, so there's more hybrid going on. But when you look at healthcare, for example, it's just starting with such highly regulated industry. It seems that there's some hurdles there. Financial services is always been data savvy, but you're seeing the emergence of FinTech and some other challenges there in terms of control of payment systems. In manufacturing, the pandemic highlighted, America's reliance on China as a manufacturing partner and supply chain. And so my point is, it seems at different industries, they're in different stages of transformation, but two things look really clear. One, you got to put data at the core of the business model, that's compulsory. It seems like embedding AI into the applications, the data, the business process, that's going to become increasingly important. So how do you see that? >> Wow, there's a lot packed into that question there, Dave. But yeah, at Cloudera, I happened to be leading our own digital transformation as a technology company and what I would tell you there that's been an interesting process. The shift from being largely a subscription-based model to a consumption-based model requires a completely different level of instrumentation in our products and data collection that takes place in real-time, both for billing for our customers and to be able to check on the health and wellness, if you will, of their Cloudera implementations. But it's clearly not just impacting the technology industry. You mentioned healthcare and we've been helping a number of different organizations in the life sciences realm, either speed the rate and pace of getting vaccines to market or we've been assisting with testing process that's taken place. Because you can imagine the quantity of data that's been generated as we've tried to study the efficacy of these vaccines on millions of people and try to ensure that they were going to deliver great outcomes and healthy and safe outcomes for everyone. And Cloudera has been underneath a great deal of that type of work. And the financial services industry you pointed out, we continue to be central to the large banks, meeting their compliance and regulatory requirements around the globe. And in many parts of the world, those are becoming more stringent than ever. And Cloudera solutions are helping those kinds of organizations get through those difficult challenges. You also happened to mention public sector and in public sector, we're also playing a key role in working with government entities around the world and applying AI to some of the most challenging missions that those organizations face. And while I've made the kind of pivot between the industry conversation and the AI conversation, what I'll share with you about AI, I touched upon a little bit earlier. You can't build great AI, you can't build great ML apps unless you've got a strong data foundation underneath. It's back to that garbage in, garbage out comment that I made previously. And so, in order to do that, you've got to have a great hybrid data management platform at your disposal to ensure that your data is clean and organized and up to date. Just as importantly from that, that's kind of the freedom side of things. On the security side of things, you've got to ensure that you can see who's touched not just the data itself, Dave, but actually the machine learning models. And organizations around the globe are now being challenged. It's kind of on the topic of the ethics of AI to produce model lineage in addition to data lineage. In other words, who's had access to the machine learning models? When and where and at what time and what decisions were made perhaps, by the humans, perhaps by the machines that may have led to a particular outcome? So, every kind of business that is deploying AI applications should be thinking long and hard about whether or not they can track the full lineage of those machine learning models, just as they can track the lineage of data. So, lots going on there across industries. Lots going on as those various industries think about how AI can be applied to their businesses. >> It's a pretty interesting concept you're bringing into the discussion, the hybrid data, sort of, I think new to a lot of people. And this idea of model lineage is a great point because people want to talk about AI ethics, transparency of AI. When you start putting those models into machines to do real-time inferencing at the edge, it starts to get really complicated. I wonder if we could talk, we're still on that theme of industry transformation. I felt like coming into the pre-pandemic, there was just a lot of complacency. Yeah, digital transformation and a lot of buzz words and then we had this forced march to digital, but people are now being more planful, but there's still a lot of sort of POC limbo going on. How do you see that? Can you help accelerate that and get people out of that state? >> There definitely is a lot of a POC limbo or I think some of us internally have referred to as POC purgatory, just getting in that phase, not being able to get from point A to point B in digital transformation. And for every industry, transformation, change in general, is difficult and it takes time and money and thoughtfulness. But like with all things, what we've found is small wins work best and done quickly. So trying to get to quick, easy successes where you can identify a clear goal and a clear objective and then accomplish it in rapid fashion is sort of the way to build your way towards those larger transformative efforts. To say it another way, Dave, it's not wise to try to boil the ocean with your digital transformation efforts, as it relates to the underlying technology here and to bring it home a little bit more practically, I guess I would say. At Cloudera, we tend to recommend that companies begin to adopt cloud infrastructure, for example, containerization. And they begin to deploy that on-prem and then they start to look at how they may move those containerized workloads into the public cloud. That'll give them an opportunity to work with the data and the underlying applications themselves, right close to home. In place, they can kind of experiment a little bit more safely and economically and then determine which workloads are best suited for the public cloud and which ones should remain on prem. That's a way in which a hybrid data strategy can help get a digital transformation accomplished, but kind of starting small and then drawing fast from there on customer's journey to the cloud. >> Well Mick, we've covered a lot of ground. Last question, what do you want people to leave this event, this session with and thinking about sort of the next era of data that we're entering? >> Well, it's a great question, but I think it could be summed up in two words. I want them to think about a hybrid data strategy. So, really hybrid data is a concept that we're bringing forward on this show really, for the first time, arguably. And we really do think that it enables customers to experience what we refer to, Dave, as the power of ANT. That is freedom and security and in a world where we're all still trying to decide whether each day when we walk out, each building we walk into, whether we're free to come in and out with a mask, without a mask, that sort of thing, we all want freedom, but we also also want to be safe and feel safe for ourselves and for others. And the same is true of organization's IT strategies. They want the freedom to choose, to run workloads and applications in the best and most economical place possible, but they also want to do that with certainty that they're going to be able to deploy those applications in a safe and secure way that meets the regulatory requirements of their particular industry. So, hybrid data we think is key to accomplishing both freedom and security for your data and for your business as a whole. >> Nick, thanks so much, great conversation. I really appreciate the insights that you're bringing to this event, into the industry, really. Thank you for your time. >> You bet, Dave, pleasure being with you.

>>Have you ever wondered how we sequence the human genome, how your smartphone is so well smart, how we will ever analyze all the patient data for the new vaccines or even how we plan to send humans to Mars? Well, at Cloudera, we believe that data can make what is impossible today possible tomorrow we are the enterprise data cloud company. In fact, we provide analytics and machine learning technology that does everything from making your smartphone smarter, to helping scientists ensure that new vaccines are both safe and effective, big data, no problem out era, the enterprise data cloud company. >>So I think for a long time in this country, we've known that there's a great disparity between minority populations and the majority of population in terms of disease burden. And depending on where you live, your zip code has more to do with your health than almost anything else. But there are a lot of smaller, um, safety net facilities, as well as small academic medical colleges within the United States. And those in those smaller environments don't have the access, you know, to the technologies that the larger ones have. And, you know, I call that, uh, digital disparity. So I'm, Harry's in academic scientist center and our mission is to train diverse health care providers and researchers, but also provide services to underserved populations. As part of the reason that I think is so important for me hearing medical college, to do data science. One of the things that, you know, both Cloudera and Claire sensor very passionate about is bringing those height in technologies to, um, to the smaller organizations. >>It's very expensive to go to the cloud for these small organizations. So now with the partnership with Cloudera and Claire sets a clear sense, clients now enjoy those same technologies and really honestly have a technological advantage over some of the larger organizations. The reason being is they can move fast. So we were able to do this on our own without having to, um, hire data scientists. Uh, we probably cut three to five years off of our studies. I grew up in a small town in Arkansas and is one of those towns where the railroad tracks divided the blacks and the whites. My father died without getting much healthcare at all. And as an 11 year old, I did not understand why my father could not get medical attention because he was very sick. >>Since we come at my Harry are looking to serve populations that reflect themselves or affect the population. He came from. A lot of the data you find or research you find health is usually based on white men. And obviously not everybody who needs a medical provider is going to be a white male. >>One of the things that we're concerned about in healthcare is that there's bias in treatment already. We want to make sure those same biases do not enter into the algorithms. >>The issue is how do we get ahead of them to try to prevent these disparities? >>One of the great things about our dataset is that it contains a very diverse group of patients. >>Instead of just saying, everyone will have these results. You can break it down by race, class, cholesterol, level, other kinds of factors that play a role. So you can make the treatments in the long run. More specifically, >>Researchers are now able to use these technologies and really take those hypotheses from, from bench to bedside. >>We're able to overall improve the health of not just the person in front of you, but the population that, yeah, >>Well, the future is now. I love a quote by William Gibson who said the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. If we think hard enough and we apply things properly, uh, we can again take these technologies to, you know, underserved environments, um, in healthcare. Nobody should be technologically disadvantage. >>When is a car not just a car when it's a connected data driven ecosystem, dozens of sensors and edge devices gathering up data from just about anything road, infrastructure, other vehicles, and even pedestrians to create safer vehicles, smarter logistics, and more actionable insights. All the data from the connected car supports an entire ecosystem from manufacturers, building safer vehicles and fleet managers, tracking assets to insurers monitoring, driving behaviors to make roads safer. Now you can control the data journey from edge to AI. With Cloudera in the connected car, data is captured, consolidated and enriched with Cloudera data flow cloud Dara's data engineering, operational database and data warehouse provide the foundation to develop service center applications, sales reports, and engineering dashboards. With data science workbench data scientists can continuously train AI models and use data flow to push the models back to the edge, to enhance the car's performance as the industry's first enterprise data cloud Cloudera supports on-premise public and multi-cloud deployments delivering multifunction analytics on data anywhere with common security governance and metadata management powered by Cloudera SDX, an open platform built on open source, working with open compute architectures and open data stores all the way from edge to AI powering the connected car. >>The future has arrived. >>The Dawn of a retail Renaissance is here and shopping will never be the same again. Today's connected. Consumers are always on and didn't control. It's the era of smart retail, smart shelves, digital signage, and smart mirrors offer an immersive customer experience while delivering product information, personalized offers and recommendations, video analytics, capture customer emotions and gestures to better understand and respond to in-store shopping experiences. Beacons sensors, and streaming video provide valuable data into in-store traffic patterns, hotspots and dwell times. This helps retailers build visual heat maps to better understand custom journeys, conversion rates, and promotional effectiveness in our robots automate routine tasks like capturing inventory levels, identifying out of stocks and alerting in store personnel to replenish shelves. When it comes to checking out automated e-commerce pickup stations and frictionless checkouts will soon be the norm making standing in line. A thing of the past data and analytics are truly reshaping. >>The everyday shopping experience outside the store, smart trucks connect the supply chain, providing new levels of inventory visibility, not just into the precise location, but also the condition of those goods. All in real time, convenience is key and customers today have the power to get their goods delivered at the curbside to their doorstep, or even to their refrigerators. Smart retail is indeed here. And Cloudera makes all of this possible using Cloudera data can be captured from a variety of sources, then stored, processed, and analyzed to drive insights and action. In real time, data scientists can continuously build and train new machine learning models and put these models back to the edge for delivering those moment of truth customer experiences. This is the enterprise data cloud powered by Cloudera enabling smart retail from the edge to AI. The future has arrived >>For is a global automotive supplier. We have three business groups, automotive seating in studios, and then emission control technologies or biggest automotive customers are Volkswagen for the NPSA. And we have, uh, more than 300 sites. And in 75 countries >>Today, we are generating tons of data, more and more data on the manufacturing intelligence. We are trying to reduce the, the defective parts or anticipate the detection of the, of the defective part. And this is where we can get savings. I would say our goal in manufacturing is zero defects. The cost of downtime in a plant could be around the a hundred thousand euros. So with predictive maintenance, we are identifying correlations and patterns and try to anticipate, and maybe to replace a component before the machine is broken. We are in the range of about 2000 machines and we can have up to 300 different variables from pressure from vibration and temperatures. And the real-time data collection is key, and this is something we cannot achieve in a classical data warehouse approach. So with the be data and with clouded approach, what we are able to use really to put all the data, all the sources together in the classical way of working with that at our house, we need to spend weeks or months to set up the model with the Cloudera data lake. We can start working on from days to weeks. We think that predictive or machine learning could also improve on the estimation or NTC patient forecasting of what we'll need to brilliance with all this knowledge around internet of things and data collection. We are applying into the predictive convene and the cockpit of the future. So we can work in the self driving car and provide a better experience for the driver in the car. >>The Cloudera data platform makes it easy to say yes to any analytic workload from the edge to AI, yes. To enterprise grade security and governance, yes. To the analytics your people want to use yes. To operating on any cloud. Your business requires yes to the future with a cloud native platform that flexes to meet your needs today and tomorrow say yes to CDP and say goodbye to shadow it, take a tour of CDP and see how it's an easier, faster and safer enterprise analytics and data management platform with a new approach to data. Finally, a data platform that lets you say yes, >>Welcome to transforming ideas into insights, presented with the cube and made possible by cloud era. My name is Dave Volante from the cube, and I'll be your host for today. And the next hundred minutes, you're going to hear how to turn your best ideas into action using data. And we're going to share the real world examples and 12 industry use cases that apply modern data techniques to improve customer experience, reduce fraud, drive manufacturing, efficiencies, better forecast, retail demand, transform analytics, improve public sector service, and so much more how we use data is rapidly evolving as is the language that we use to describe data. I mean, for example, we don't really use the term big data as often as we used to rather we use terms like digital transformation and digital business, but you think about it. What is a digital business? How is that different from just a business? >>Well, digital business is a data business and it differentiates itself by the way, it uses data to compete. So whether we call it data, big data or digital, our belief is we're entering the next decade of a world that puts data at the core of our organizations. And as such the way we use insights is also rapidly evolving. You know, of course we get value from enabling humans to act with confidence on let's call it near perfect information or capitalize on non-intuitive findings. But increasingly insights are leading to the development of data, products and services that can be monetized, or as you'll hear in our industry, examples, data is enabling machines to take cognitive actions on our behalf. Examples are everywhere in the forms of apps and products and services, all built on data. Think about a real-time fraud detection, know your customer and finance, personal health apps that monitor our heart rates. >>Self-service investing, filing insurance claims and our smart phones. And so many examples, IOT systems that communicate and act machine and machine real-time pricing actions. These are all examples of products and services that drive revenue cut costs or create other value. And they all rely on data. Now while many business leaders sometimes express frustration that their investments in data, people, and process and technologies haven't delivered the full results they desire. The truth is that the investments that they've made over the past several years should be thought of as a step on the data journey. Key learnings and expertise from these efforts are now part of the organizational DNA that can catapult us into this next era of data, transformation and leadership. One thing is certain the next 10 years of data and digital transformation, won't be like the last 10. So let's get into it. Please join us in the chat. >>You can ask questions. You can share your comments, hit us up on Twitter right now. It's my pleasure to welcome Mick Holliston in he's the president of Cloudera mic. Great to see you. Great to see you as well, Dave, Hey, so I call it the new abnormal, right? The world is kind of out of whack offices are reopening again. We're seeing travel coming back. There's all this pent up demand for cars and vacations line cooks at restaurants. Everything that we consumers have missed, but here's the one thing. It seems like the algorithms are off. Whether it's retail's fulfillment capabilities, airline scheduling their pricing algorithms, you know, commodity prices we don't know is inflation. Transitory. Is it a long-term threat trying to forecast GDP? It's just seems like we have to reset all of our assumptions and make a feel a quality data is going to be a key here. How do you see the current state of the industry and the role data plays to get us into a more predictable and stable future? Well, I >>Can sure tell you this, Dave, uh, out of whack is definitely right. I don't know if you know or not, but I happen to be coming to you live today from Atlanta and, uh, as a native of Atlanta, I can, I can tell you there's a lot to be known about the airport here. It's often said that, uh, whether you're going to heaven or hell, you got to change planes in Atlanta and, uh, after 40 minutes waiting on algorithm to be right for baggage claim when I was not, I finally managed to get some bag and to be able to show up dressed appropriately for you today. Um, here's one thing that I know for sure though, Dave, clean, consistent, and safe data will be essential to getting the world and businesses as we know it back on track again, um, without well-managed data, we're certain to get very inconsistent outcomes, quality data will the normalizing factor because one thing really hasn't changed about computing since the Dawn of time. Back when I was taking computer classes at Georgia tech here in Atlanta, and that's what we used to refer to as garbage in garbage out. In other words, you'll never get quality data-driven insights from a poor data set. This is especially important today for machine learning and AI, you can build the most amazing models and algorithms, but none of it will matter if the underlying data isn't rock solid as AI is increasingly used in every business app, you must build a solid data foundation mic. Let's >>Talk about hybrid. Every CXO that I talked to, they're trying to get hybrid, right? Whether it's hybrid work hybrid events, which is our business hybrid cloud, how are you thinking about the hybrid? Everything, what's your point of view with >>All those descriptions of hybrid? Everything there, one item you might not have quite hit on Dave and that's hybrid data. >>Oh yeah, you're right. Mick. I did miss that. What, what do you mean by hybrid data? Well, >>David in cloud era, we think hybrid data is all about the juxtaposition of two things, freedom and security. Now every business wants to be more agile. They want the freedom to work with their data, wherever it happens to work best for them, whether that's on premises in a private cloud and public cloud, or perhaps even in a new open data exchange. Now this matters to businesses because not all data applications are created equal. Some apps are best suited to be run in the cloud because of their transitory nature. Others may be more economical if they're running a private cloud, but either way security, regulatory compliance and increasingly data sovereignty are playing a bigger and more important role in every industry. If you don't believe me, just watch her read a recent news story. Data breaches are at an all time high. And the ethics of AI applications are being called into question every day and understanding the lineage of machine learning algorithms is now paramount for every business. So how in the heck do you get both the freedom and security that you're looking for? Well, the answer is actually pretty straightforward. The key is developing a hybrid data strategy. And what do you know Dave? That's the business cloud era? Is it on a serious note from cloud era's perspective? Adopting a hybrid data strategy is central to every business's digital transformation. It will enable rapid adoption of new technologies and optimize economic models while ensuring the security and privacy of every bit of data. What can >>Make, I'm glad you brought in that notion of hybrid data, because when you think about things, especially remote work, it really changes a lot of the assumptions. You talked about security, the data flows are going to change. You've got the economics, the physics, the local laws come into play. So what about the rest of hybrid? Yeah, >>It's a great question, Dave and certainly cloud era itself as a business and all of our customers are feeling this in a big way. We now have the overwhelming majority of our workforce working from home. And in other words, we've got a much larger surface area from a security perspective to keep in mind the rate and pace of data, just generating a report that might've happened very quickly and rapidly on the office. Uh, ether net may not be happening quite so fast in somebody's rural home in, uh, in, in the middle of Nebraska somewhere. Right? So it doesn't really matter whether you're talking about the speed of business or securing data, any way you look at it. Uh, hybrid I think is going to play a more important role in how work is conducted and what percentage of people are working in the office and are not, I know our plans, Dave, uh, involve us kind of slowly coming back to work, begin in this fall. And we're looking forward to being able to shake hands and see one another again for the first time in many cases for more than a year and a half, but, uh, yes, hybrid work, uh, and hybrid data are playing an increasingly important role for every kind of business. >>Thanks for that. I wonder if we could talk about industry transformation for a moment because it's a major theme of course, of this event. So, and the case. Here's how I think about it. It makes, I mean, some industries have transformed. You think about retail, for example, it's pretty clear, although although every physical retail brand I know has, you know, not only peaked up its online presence, but they also have an Amazon war room strategy because they're trying to take greater advantage of that physical presence, uh, and ended up reverse. We see Amazon building out physical assets so that there's more hybrid going on. But when you look at healthcare, for example, it's just starting, you know, with such highly regulated industry. It seems that there's some hurdles there. Financial services is always been data savvy, but you're seeing the emergence of FinTech and some other challenges there in terms of control, mint control of payment systems in manufacturing, you know, the pandemic highlighted America's reliance on China as a manufacturing partner and, and supply chain. Uh it's so my point is it seems that different industries they're in different stages of transformation, but two things look really clear. One, you've got to put data at the core of the business model that's compulsory. It seems like embedding AI into the applications, the data, the business process that's going to become increasingly important. So how do you see that? >>Wow, there's a lot packed into that question there, Dave, but, uh, yeah, we, we, uh, you know, at Cloudera I happened to be leading our own digital transformation as a technology company and what I would, what I would tell you there that's been arresting for us is the shift from being largely a subscription-based, uh, model to a consumption-based model requires a completely different level of instrumentation and our products and data collection that takes place in real, both for billing, for our, uh, for our customers. And to be able to check on the health and wellness, if you will, of their cloud era implementations. But it's clearly not just impacting the technology industry. You mentioned healthcare and we've been helping a number of different organizations in the life sciences realm, either speed, the rate and pace of getting vaccines, uh, to market, uh, or we've been assisting with testing process. >>That's taken place because you can imagine the quantity of data that's been generated as we've tried to study the efficacy of these vaccines on millions of people and try to ensure that they were going to deliver great outcomes and, and healthy and safe outcomes for everyone. And cloud era has been underneath a great deal of that type of work and the financial services industry you pointed out. Uh, we continue to be central to the large banks, meeting their compliance and regulatory requirements around the globe. And in many parts of the world, those are becoming more stringent than ever. And Cloudera solutions are really helping those kinds of organizations get through those difficult challenges. You, you also happened to mention, uh, you know, public sector and in public sector. We're also playing a key role in working with government entities around the world and applying AI to some of the most challenging missions that those organizations face. >>Um, and while I've made the kind of pivot between the industry conversation and the AI conversation, what I'll share with you about AI, I touched upon a little bit earlier. You can't build great AI, can't grow, build great ML apps, unless you've got a strong data foundation underneath is back to that garbage in garbage out comment that I made previously. And so in order to do that, you've got to have a great hybrid dated management platform at your disposal to ensure that your data is clean and organized and up to date. Uh, just as importantly from that, that's kind of the freedom side of things on the security side of things. You've got to ensure that you can see who just touched, not just the data itself, Dave, but actually the machine learning models and organizations around the globe are now being challenged. It's kind of on the topic of the ethics of AI to produce model lineage. >>In addition to data lineage. In other words, who's had access to the machine learning models when and where, and at what time and what decisions were made perhaps by the humans, perhaps by the machines that may have led to a particular outcome. So every kind of business that is deploying AI applications should be thinking long and hard about whether or not they can track the full lineage of those machine learning models just as they can track the lineage of data. So lots going on there across industries, lots going on as those various industries think about how AI can be applied to their businesses. Pretty >>Interesting concepts. You bring it into the discussion, the hybrid data, uh, sort of new, I think, new to a lot of people. And th this idea of model lineage is a great point because people want to talk about AI, ethics, transparency of AI. When you start putting those models into, into machines to do real time inferencing at the edge, it starts to get really complicated. I wonder if we could talk about you still on that theme of industry transformation? I felt like coming into the pandemic pre pandemic, there was just a lot of complacency. Yeah. Digital transformation and a lot of buzz words. And then we had this forced March to digital, um, and it's, but, but people are now being more planful, but there's still a lot of sort of POC limbo going on. How do you see that? Can you help accelerate that and get people out of that state? It definitely >>Is a lot of a POC limbo or a, I think some of us internally have referred to as POC purgatory, just getting stuck in that phase, not being able to get from point a to point B in digital transformation and, um, you know, for every industry transformation, uh, change in general is difficult and it takes time and money and thoughtfulness, but like with all things, what we found is small wins work best and done quickly. So trying to get to quick, easy successes where you can identify a clear goal and a clear objective and then accomplish it in rapid fashion is sort of the way to build your way towards those larger transformative efforts set. Another way, Dave, it's not wise to try to boil the ocean with your digital transformation efforts as it relates to the underlying technology here. And to bring it home a little bit more practically, I guess I would say at cloud era, we tend to recommend that companies begin to adopt cloud infrastructure, for example, containerization. >>And they begin to deploy that on-prem and then they start to look at how they may move those containerized workloads into the public cloud. That'll give them an opportunity to work with the data and the underlying applications themselves, uh, right close to home in place. They can kind of experiment a little bit more safely and economically, and then determine which workloads are best suited for the public cloud and which ones should remain on prem. That's a way in which a hybrid data strategy can help get a digital transformation accomplish, but kind of starting small and then drawing fast from there on customer's journey to the we'll make we've >>Covered a lot of ground. Uh, last question. Uh, w what, what do you want people to leave this event, the session with, and thinking about sort of the next era of data that we're entering? >>Well, it's a great question, but, uh, you know, I think it could be summed up in, uh, in two words. I want them to think about a hybrid data, uh, strategy. So, uh, you know, really hybrid data is a concept that we're bringing forward on this show really for the, for the first time, arguably, and we really do think that it enables customers to experience what we refer to Dave as the power of, and that is freedom, uh, and security, and in a world where we're all still trying to decide whether each day when we walk out each building, we walk into, uh, whether we're free to come in and out with a mask without a mask, that sort of thing, we all want freedom, but we also also want to be safe and feel safe, uh, for ourselves and for others. And the same is true of organizations. It strategies. They want the freedom to choose, to run workloads and applications and the best and most economical place possible. But they also want to do that with certainty, that they're going to be able to deploy those applications in a safe and secure way that meets the regulatory requirements of their particular industry. So hybrid data we think is key to accomplishing both freedom and security for your data and for your business as a whole, >>Nick, thanks so much great conversation and really appreciate the insights that you're bringing to this event into the industry. Really thank you for your time. >>You bet Dave pleasure being with you. Okay. >>We want to pick up on a couple of themes that Mick discussed, you know, supercharging your business with AI, for example, and this notion of getting hybrid, right? So right now we're going to turn the program over to Rob Bearden, the CEO of Cloudera and Manny veer, DAS. Who's the head of enterprise computing at Nvidia. And before I hand it off to Robin, I just want to say for those of you who follow me at the cube, we've extensively covered the transformation of the semiconductor industry. We are entering an entirely new era of computing in the enterprise, and it's being driven by the emergence of data, intensive applications and workloads no longer will conventional methods of processing data suffice to handle this work. Rather, we need new thinking around architectures and ecosystems. And one of the keys to success in this new era is collaboration between software companies like Cloudera and semiconductor designers like Nvidia. So let's learn more about this collaboration and what it means to your data business. Rob, thanks, >>Mick and Dave, that was a great conversation on how speed and agility is everything in a hyper competitive hybrid world. You touched on AI as essential to a data first strategy and accelerating the path to value and hybrid environments. And I want to drill down on this aspect today. Every business is facing accelerating everything from face-to-face meetings to buying groceries has gone digital. As a result, businesses are generating more data than ever. There are more digital transactions to track and monitor. Now, every engagement with coworkers, customers and partners is virtual from website metrics to customer service records, and even onsite sensors. Enterprises are accumulating tremendous amounts of data and unlocking insights from it is key to our enterprises success. And with data flooding every enterprise, what should the businesses do? A cloud era? We believe this onslaught of data offers an opportunity to make better business decisions faster. >>And we want to make that easier for everyone, whether it's fraud, detection, demand, forecasting, preventative maintenance, or customer churn, whether the goal is to save money or produce income every day that companies don't gain deep insight from their data is money they've lost. And the reason we're talking about speed and why speed is everything in a hybrid world and in a hyper competitive climate, is that the faster we get insights from all of our data, the faster we grow and the more competitive we are. So those faster insights are also combined with the scalability and cost benefit they cloud provides and with security and edge to AI data intimacy. That's why the partnership between cloud air and Nvidia together means so much. And it starts with the shared vision making data-driven, decision-making a reality for every business and our customers will now be able to leverage virtually unlimited quantities of varieties, of data, to power, an order of magnitude faster decision-making and together we turbo charge the enterprise data cloud to enable our customers to work faster and better, and to make integration of AI approaches a reality for companies of all sizes in the cloud. >>We're joined today by NVIDIA's Mandy veer dos, and to talk more about how our technologies will deliver the speed companies need for innovation in our hyper competitive environment. Okay, man, you're veer. Thank you for joining us over the unit. >>Thank you, Rob, for having me. It's a pleasure to be here on behalf of Nvidia. We are so excited about this partnership with Cloudera. Uh, you know, when, when, uh, when Nvidia started many years ago, we started as a chip company focused on graphics, but as you know, over the last decade, we've really become a full stack accelerated computing company where we've been using the power of GPU hardware and software to accelerate a variety of workloads, uh, AI being a prime example. And when we think about Cloudera, uh, and your company, a great company, there's three things we see Rob. Uh, the first one is that for the companies that will already transforming themselves by the use of data, Cloudera has been a trusted partner for them. The second thing seen is that when it comes to using your data, you want to use it in a variety of ways with a powerful platform, which of course you have built over time. >>And finally, as we've heard already, you believe in the power of hybrid, that data exists in different places and the compute needs to follow the data. Now, if you think about in various mission, going forward to democratize accelerated computing for all companies, our mission actually aligns very well with exactly those three things. Firstly, you know, we've really worked with a variety of companies today who have been the early adopters, uh, using the power acceleration by changing the technology in their stacks. But more and more, we see the opportunity of meeting customers, where they are with tools that they're familiar with with partners that they trust. And of course, Cloudera being a great example of that. Uh, the second, uh, part of NVIDIA's mission is we focused a lot in the beginning on deep learning where the power of GPU is really shown through, but as we've gone forward, we found that GPU's can accelerate a variety of different workloads from machine learning to inference. >>And so again, the power of your platform, uh, is very appealing. And finally, we know that AI is all about data, more and more data. We believe very strongly in the idea that customers put their data, where they need to put it. And the compute, the AI compute the machine learning compute needs to meet the customer where their data is. And so that matches really well with your philosophy, right? And Rob, that's why we were so excited to do this partnership with you. It's come to fruition. We have a great combined stack now for the customer and we already see people using it. I think the IRS is a fantastic example where literally they took the workflow. They had, they took the servers, they had, they added GPS into those servers. They did not change anything. And they got an eight times performance improvement for their fraud detection workflows, right? And that's the kind of success we're looking forward to with all customers. So the team has actually put together a great video to show us what the IRS is doing with this technology. Let's take a look. >>My name's Joanne salty. I'm the branch chief of the technical branch and RAs. It's actually the research division research and statistical division of the IRS. Basically the mission that RAs has is we do statistical and research on all things related to taxes, compliance issues, uh, fraud issues, you know, anything that you can think of. Basically we do research on that. We're running into issues now that we have a lot of ideas to actually do data mining on our big troves of data, but we don't necessarily have the infrastructure or horsepower to do it. So it's our biggest challenge is definitely the, the infrastructure to support all the ideas that the subject matter experts are coming up with in terms of all the algorithms they would like to create. And the diving deeper within the algorithm space, the actual training of those Agra algorithms, the of parameters each of those algorithms have. >>So that's, that's really been our challenge. Now the expectation was that with Nvidia in cloud, there is help. And with the cluster, we actually build out the test this on the actual fraud, a fraud detection algorithm on our expectation was we were definitely going to see some speed up in prom, computational processing times. And just to give you context, the size of the data set that we were, uh, the SMI was actually working, um, the algorithm against Liz around four terabytes. If I recall correctly, we'd had a 22 to 48 times speed up after we started tweaking the original algorithm. My expectations, quite honestly, in that sphere, in terms of the timeframe to get results, was it that you guys actually exceeded them? It was really, really quick. Uh, the definite now term short term what's next is going to be the subject matter expert is actually going to take our algorithm run with that. >>So that's definitely the now term thing we want to do going down, go looking forward, maybe out a couple of months, we're also looking at curing some, a 100 cards to actually test those out. As you guys can guess our datasets are just getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and it demands, um, to actually do something when we get more value added out of those data sets is just putting more and more demands on our infrastructure. So, you know, with the pilot, now we have an idea with the infrastructure, the infrastructure we need going forward. And then also just our in terms of thinking of the algorithms and how we can approach these problems to actually code out solutions to them. Now we're kind of like the shackles are off and we can just run them, you know, come onto our art's desire, wherever imagination takes our skis to actually develop solutions, know how the platforms to run them on just kind of the close out. >>I rarely would be very missed. I've worked with a lot of, you know, companies through the year and most of them been spectacular. And, uh, you guys are definitely in that category. The, the whole partnership, as I said, a little bit early, it was really, really well, very responsive. I would be remiss if I didn't. Thank you guys. So thank you for the opportunity to, and fantastic. And I'd have to also, I want to thank my guys. My, uh, my staff, David worked on this Richie worked on this Lex and Tony just, they did a fantastic job and I want to publicly thank him for all the work they did with you guys and Chev, obviously also. Who's fantastic. So thank you everyone. >>Okay. That's a real great example of speed and action. Now let's get into some follow up questions guys, if I may, Rob, can you talk about the specific nature of the relationship between Cloudera and Nvidia? Is it primarily go to market or you do an engineering work? What's the story there? >>It's really both. It's both go to market and engineering and engineering focus is to optimize and take advantage of invidious platform to drive better price performance, lower cost, faster speeds, and better support for today's emerging data intensive applications. So it's really both >>Great. Thank you. Many of Eric, maybe you could talk a little bit more about why can't we just existing general purpose platforms that are, that are running all this ERP and CRM and HCM and you know, all the, all the Microsoft apps that are out there. What, what do Nvidia and cloud era bring to the table that goes beyond the conventional systems that we've known for many years? >>Yeah. I think Dave, as we've talked about the asset that the customer has is really the data, right? And the same data can be utilized in many different ways. Some machine learning, some AI, some traditional data analytics. So the first step here was really to take a general platform for data processing, Cloudera data platform, and integrate with that. Now Nvidia has a software stack called rapids, which has all of the primitives that make different kinds of data processing go fast on GPU's. And so the integration here has really been taking rapids and integrating it into a Cloudera data platform. So that regardless of the technique, the customer's using to get insight from that data, the acceleration will apply in all cases. And that's why it was important to start with a platform like Cloudera rather than a specific application. >>So I think this is really important because if you think about, you know, the software defined data center brought in, you know, some great efficiencies, but at the same time, a lot of the compute power is now going toward doing things like networking and storage and security offloads. So the good news, the reason this is important is because when you think about these data intensive workloads, we can now put more processing power to work for those, you know, AI intensive, uh, things. And so that's what I want to talk about a little bit, maybe a question for both of you, maybe Rob, you could start, you think about the AI that's done today in the enterprise. A lot of it is modeling in the cloud, but when we look at a lot of the exciting use cases, bringing real-time systems together, transaction systems and analytics systems and real time, AI inference, at least even at the edge, huge potential for business value and a consumer, you're seeing a lot of applications with AI biometrics and voice recognition and autonomous vehicles and the like, and so you're putting AI into these data intensive apps within the enterprise. >>The potential there is enormous. So what can we learn from sort of where we've come from, maybe these consumer examples and Rob, how are you thinking about enterprise AI in the coming years? >>Yeah, you're right. The opportunity is huge here, but you know, 90% of the cost of AI applications is the inference. And it's been a blocker in terms of adoption because it's just been too expensive and difficult from a performance standpoint and new platforms like these being developed by cloud air and Nvidia will dramatically lower the cost, uh, of enabling this type of workload to be done. Um, and what we're going to see the most improvements will be in the speed and accuracy for existing enterprise AI apps like fraud detection, recommendation, engine chain management, drug province, and increasingly the consumer led technologies will be bleeding into the enterprise in the form of autonomous factory operations. An example of that would be robots that AR VR and manufacturing. So driving quality, better quality in the power grid management, automated retail IOT, you know, the intelligent call centers, all of these will be powered by AI, but really the list of potential use cases now are going to be virtually endless. >>I mean, this is like your wheelhouse. Maybe you could add something to that. >>Yeah. I mean, I agree with Rob. I mean he listed some really good use cases. You know, the way we see this at Nvidia, this journey is in three phases or three steps, right? The first phase was for the early adopters. You know, the builders who assembled, uh, use cases, particular use cases like a chat bot, uh, uh, from the ground up with the hardware and the software almost like going to your local hardware store and buying piece parts and constructing a table yourself right now. I think we are in the first phase of the democratization, uh, for example, the work we did with Cloudera, which is, uh, for a broader base of customers, still building for a particular use case, but starting from a much higher baseline. So think about, for example, going to Ikea now and buying a table in a box, right. >>And you still come home and assemble it, but all the parts are there. The instructions are there, there's a recipe you just follow and it's easy to do, right? So that's sort of the phase we're in now. And then going forward, the opportunity we really look forward to for the democratization, you talked about applications like CRM, et cetera. I think the next wave of democratization is when customers just adopt and deploy the next version of an application they already have. And what's happening is that under the covers, the application is infused by AI and it's become more intelligent because of AI and the customer just thinks they went to the store and bought, bought a table and it showed up and somebody placed it in the right spot. Right. And they didn't really have to learn, uh, how to do AI. So these are the phases. And I think they're very excited to be going there. Yeah. You know, >>Rob, the great thing about for, for your customers is they don't have to build out the AI. They can, they can buy it. And, and just in thinking about this, it seems like there are a lot of really great and even sometimes narrow use cases. So I want to ask you, you know, staying with AI for a minute, one of the frustrations and Mick and I talked about this, the guy go problem that we've all studied in college, uh, you know, garbage in, garbage out. Uh, but, but the frustrations that users have had is really getting fast access to quality data that they can use to drive business results. So do you see, and how do you see AI maybe changing the game in that regard, Rob over the next several years? >>So yeah, the combination of massive amounts of data that have been gathered across the enterprise in the past 10 years with an open API APIs are dramatically lowering the processing costs that perform at much greater speed and efficiency, you know, and that's allowing us as an industry to democratize the data access while at the same time, delivering the federated governance and security models and hybrid technologies are playing a key role in making this a reality and enabling data access to be hybridized, meaning access and treated in a substantially similar way, your respect to the physical location of where that data actually resides. >>That's great. That is really the value layer that you guys are building out on top of that, all this great infrastructure that the hyperscalers have have given us, I mean, a hundred billion dollars a year that you can build value on top of, for your customers. Last question, and maybe Rob, you could, you can go first and then manufacture. You could bring us home. Where do you guys want to see the relationship go between cloud era and Nvidia? In other words, how should we, as outside observers be, be thinking about and measuring your project specifically and in the industry's progress generally? >>Yeah, I think we're very aligned on this and for cloud era, it's all about helping companies move forward, leverage every bit of their data and all the places that it may, uh, be hosted and partnering with our customers, working closely with our technology ecosystem of partners means innovation in every industry and that's inspiring for us. And that's what keeps us moving forward. >>Yeah. And I agree with Robin and for us at Nvidia, you know, we, this partnership started, uh, with data analytics, um, as you know, a spark is a very powerful technology for data analytics, uh, people who use spark rely on Cloudera for that. And the first thing we did together was to really accelerate spark in a seamless manner, but we're accelerating machine learning. We accelerating artificial intelligence together. And I think for Nvidia it's about democratization. We've seen what machine learning and AI have done for the early adopters and help them make their businesses, their products, their customer experience better. And we'd like every company to have the same opportunity. >>Okay. Now we're going to dig into the data landscape and cloud of course. And talk a little bit more about that with drew Allen. He's a managing director at Accenture drew. Welcome. Great to see you. Thank you. So let's talk a little bit about, you know, you've been in this game for a number of years. Uh, you've got particular expertise in, in data and finance and insurance. I mean, you know, you think about it within the data and analytics world, even our language is changing. You know, we don't say talk about big data so much anymore. We talk more about digital, you know, or, or, or data driven when you think about sort of where we've come from and where we're going. What are the puts and takes that you have with regard to what's going on in the business today? >>Well, thanks for having me. Um, you know, I think some of the trends we're seeing in terms of challenges and puts some takes are that a lot of companies are already on this digital journey. Um, they focused on customer experience is kind of table stakes. Everyone wants to focus on that and kind of digitizing their channels. But a lot of them are seeing that, you know, a lot of them don't even own their, their channels necessarily. So like we're working with a big cruise line, right. And yes, they've invested in digitizing what they own, but a lot of the channels that they sell through, they don't even own, right. It's the travel agencies or third party, real sellers. So having the data to know where, you know, where those agencies are, that that's something that they've discovered. And so there's a lot of big focus on not just digitizing, but also really understanding your customers and going across products because a lot of the data has built, been built up in individual channels and in digital products. >>And so bringing that data together is something that customers that have really figured out in the last few years is a big differentiator. And what we're seeing too, is that a big trend that the data rich are getting richer. So companies that have really invested in data, um, are having, uh, an outside market share and outside earnings per share and outside revenue growth. And it's really being a big differentiator. And I think for companies just getting started in this, the thing to think about is one of the missteps is to not try to capture all the data at once. The average company has, you know, 10,000, 20,000 data elements individually, when you want to start out, you know, 500, 300 critical data elements, about 5% of the data of a company drives 90% of the business value. So focusing on those key critical data elements is really what you need to govern first and really invest in first. And so that's something we, we tell companies at the beginning of their data strategy is first focus on those critical data elements, really get a handle on governing that data, organizing that data and building data products around >>That day. You can't boil the ocean. Right. And so, and I, I feel like pre pandemic, there was a lot of complacency. Oh yeah, we'll get to that. You know, not on my watch, I'll be retired before that, you know, is it becomes a minute. And then of course the pandemic was, I call it sometimes a forced March to digital. So in many respects, it wasn't planned. It just ha you know, you had to do it. And so now I feel like people are stepping back and saying, okay, let's now really rethink this and do it right. But is there, is there a sense of urgency, do you think? Absolutely. >>I think with COVID, you know, we were working with, um, a retailer where they had 12,000 stores across the U S and they had didn't have the insights where they could drill down and understand, you know, with the riots and with COVID was the store operational, you know, with the supply chain of the, having multiple distributors, what did they have in stock? So there are millions of data points that you need to drill down at the cell level, at the store level to really understand how's my business performing. And we like to think about it for like a CEO and his leadership team of it, like, think of it as a digital cockpit, right? You think about a pilot, they have a cockpit with all these dials and, um, dashboards, essentially understanding the performance of their business. And they should be able to drill down and understand for each individual, you know, unit of their work, how are they performing? That's really what we want to see for businesses. Can they get down to that individual performance to really understand how their business >>Is performing good, the ability to connect those dots and traverse those data points and not have to go in and come back out and go into a new system and come back out. And that's really been a lot of the frustration. W where does machine intelligence and AI fit in? Is that sort of a dot connector, if you will, and an enabler, I mean, we saw, you know, decades of the, the AI winter, and then, you know, there's been a lot of talk about it, but it feels like with the amount of data that we've collected over the last decade and the, the, the low costs of processing that data now, it feels like it's, it's real. Where do you see AI fitting? Yeah, >>I mean, I think there's been a lot of innovation in the last 10 years with, um, the low cost of storage and computing and these algorithms in non-linear, um, you know, knowledge graphs, and, um, um, a whole bunch of opportunities in cloud where what I think the, the big opportunity is, you know, you can apply AI in areas where a human just couldn't have the scale to do that alone. So back to the example of a cruise lines, you know, you may have a ship being built that has 4,000 cabins on the single cruise line, and it's going to multiple deaths that destinations over its 30 year life cycle. Each one of those cabins is being priced individually for each individual destination. It's physically impossible for a human to calculate the dynamic pricing across all those destinations. You need a machine to actually do that pricing. And so really what a machine is leveraging is all that data to really calculate and assist the human, essentially with all these opportunities where you wouldn't have a human being able to scale up to that amount of data >>Alone. You know, it's interesting. One of the things we talked to Nicolson about earlier was just the everybody's algorithms are out of whack. You know, you look at the airline pricing, you look at hotels it's as a consumer, you would be able to kind of game the system and predict that they can't even predict these days. And I feel as though that the data and AI are actually going to bring us back into some kind of normalcy and predictability, uh, what do you see in that regard? Yeah, I think it's, >>I mean, we're definitely not at a point where, when I talked to, you know, the top AI engineers and data scientists, we're not at a point where we have what they call broad AI, right? You can get machines to solve general knowledge problems, where they can solve one problem and then a distinctly different problem, right? That's still many years away, but narrow why AI, there's still tons of use cases out there that can really drive tons of business performance challenges, tons of accuracy challenges. So for example, in the insurance industry, commercial lines, where I work a lot of the time, the biggest leakage of loss experience in pricing for commercial insurers is, um, people will go in as an agent and they'll select an industry to say, you know what, I'm a restaurant business. Um, I'll select this industry code to quote out a policy, but there's, let's say, you know, 12 dozen permutations, you could be an outdoor restaurant. >>You could be a bar, you could be a caterer and all of that leads to different loss experience. So what this does is they built a machine learning algorithm. We've helped them do this, that actually at the time that they're putting in their name and address, it's crawling across the web and predicting in real time, you know, is this a address actually, you know, a business that's a restaurant with indoor dining, does it have a bar? Is it outdoor dining? And it's that that's able to accurately more price the policy and reduce the loss experience. So there's a lot of that you can do even with narrow AI that can really drive top line of business results. >>Yeah. I liked that term, narrow AI, because getting things done is important. Let's talk about cloud a little bit because people talk about cloud first public cloud first doesn't necessarily mean public cloud only, of course. So where do you see things like what's the right operating model, the right regime hybrid cloud. We talked earlier about hybrid data help us squint through the cloud landscape. Yeah. I mean, I think for most right, most >>Fortune 500 companies, they can't just snap their fingers and say, let's move all of our data centers to the cloud. They've got to move, you know, gradually. And it's usually a journey that's taking more than two to three plus years, even more than that in some cases. So they're have, they have to move their data, uh, incrementally to the cloud. And what that means is that, that they have to move to a hybrid perspective where some of their data is on premise and some of it is publicly on the cloud. And so that's the term hybrid cloud essentially. And so what they've had to think about is from an intelligence perspective, the privacy of that data, where is it being moved? Can they reduce the replication of that data? Because ultimately you like, uh, replicating the data from on-premise to the cloud that introduces, you know, errors and data quality issues. So thinking about how do you manage, uh, you know, uh on-premise and, um, public as a transition is something that Accenture thinks, thinks, and helps our clients do quite a bit. And how do you move them in a manner that's well-organized and well thought of? >>Yeah. So I've been a big proponent of sort of line of business lines of business becoming much more involved in, in the data pipeline, if you will, the data process, if you think about our major operational systems, they all have sort of line of business context in them. And then the salespeople, they know the CRM data and, you know, logistics folks there they're very much in tune with ERP, almost feel like for the past decade, the lines of business have been somewhat removed from the, the data team, if you will. And that, that seems to be changing. What are you seeing in terms of the line of line of business being much more involved in sort of end to end ownership, if you will, if I can use that term of, uh, of the data and sort of determining things like helping determine anyway, the data quality and things of that nature. Yeah. I >>Mean, I think this is where thinking about your data operating model and thinking about ideas of a chief data officer and having data on the CEO agenda, that's really important to get the lines of business, to really think about data sharing and reuse, and really getting them to, you know, kind of unlock the data because they do think about their data as a fiefdom data has value, but you've got to really get organizations in their silos to open it up and bring that data together because that's where the value is. You know, data doesn't operate. When you think about a customer, they don't operate in their journey across the business in silo channels. They don't think about, you know, I use only the web and then I use the call center, right? They think about that as just one experience and that data is a single journey. >>So we like to think about data as a product. You know, you should think about a data in the same way. You think about your products as, as products, you know, data as a product, you should have the idea of like every two weeks you have releases to it. You have an operational resiliency to it. So thinking about that, where you can have a very product mindset to delivering your data, I think is very important for the success. And that's where kind of, there's not just the things about critical data elements and having the right platform architecture, but there's a soft stuff as well, like a, a product mindset to data, having the right data, culture, and business adoption and having the right value set mindset for, for data, I think is really >>Important. I think data as a product is a very powerful concept and I think it maybe is uncomfortable to some people sometimes. And I think in the early days of big data, if you will, people thought, okay, data is a product going to sell my data and that's not necessarily what you mean, thinking about products or data that can fuel products that you can then monetize maybe as a product or as a, as, as a service. And I like to think about a new metric in the industry, which is how long does it take me to get from idea I'm a business person. I have an idea for a data product. How long does it take me to get from idea to monetization? And that's going to be something that ultimately as a business person, I'm going to use to determine the success of my data team and my data architecture. Is that kind of thinking starting to really hit the marketplace? Absolutely. >>I mean, I insurers now are working, partnering with, you know, auto manufacturers to monetize, um, driver usage data, you know, on telematics to see, you know, driver behavior on how, you know, how auto manufacturers are using that data. That's very important to insurers, you know, so how an auto manufacturer can monetize that data is very important and also an insurance, you know, cyber insurance, um, are there news new ways we can look at how companies are being attacked with viruses and malware. And is there a way we can somehow monetize that information? So companies that are able to agily, you know, think about how can we collect this data, bring it together, think about it as a product, and then potentially, you know, sell it as a service is something that, um, company, successful companies, you're doing great examples >>Of data products, and it might be revenue generating, or it might be in the case of, you know, cyber, maybe it reduces my expected loss and exactly. Then it drops right to my bottom line. What's the relationship between Accenture and cloud era? Do you, I presume you guys meet at the customer, but maybe you could give us some insight. >>Yeah. So, um, I, I'm in the executive sponsor for, um, the Accenture Cloudera partnership on the Accenture side. Uh, we do quite a lot of business together and, um, you know, Cloudera has been a great partner for us. Um, and they've got a great product in terms of the Cloudera data platform where, you know, what we do is as a big systems integrator for them, we help, um, you know, configure and we have a number of engineers across the world that come in and help in terms of, um, engineer architects and install, uh, cloud errors, data platform, and think about what are some of those, you know, value cases where you can really think about organizing data and bringing it together for all these different types of use cases. And really just as the examples we thought about. So the telematics, you know, um, in order to realize something like that, you're bringing in petabytes and huge scales of data that, you know, you just couldn't bring on a normal, uh, platform. You need to think about cloud. You need to think about speed of, of data and real-time insights and cloud era is the right data platform for that. So, um, >>Having a cloud Cloudera ushered in the modern big data era, we kind of all know that, and it was, which of course early on, it was very services intensive. You guys were right there helping people think through there weren't enough data scientists. We've sort of all, all been through that. And of course in your wheelhouse industries, you know, financial services and insurance, they were some of the early adopters, weren't they? Yeah, absolutely. >>Um, so, you know, an insurance, you've got huge amounts of data with loss history and, um, a lot with IOT. So in insurance, there's a whole thing of like sensorized thing in, uh, you know, taking the physical world and digitizing it. So, um, there's a big thing in insurance where, um, it's not just about, um, pricing out the risk of a loss experience, but actual reducing the loss before it even happens. So it's called risk control or loss control, you know, can we actually put sensors on oil pipelines or on elevators and, you know, reduce, um, you know, accidents before they happen. So we're, you know, working with an insurer to actually, um, listen to elevators as they move up and down and are there signals in just listening to the audio of an elevator over time that says, you know what, this elevator is going to need maintenance, you know, before a critical accident could happen. So there's huge applications, not just in structured data, but in unstructured data like voice and audio and video where a partner like Cloudera has a huge role to play. >>Great example of it. So again, narrow sort of use case for machine intelligence, but, but real value. True. We'll leave it like that. Thanks so much for taking some time. Yes. Thank you so much. Okay. We continue now with the theme of turning ideas into insights. So ultimately you can take action. We heard earlier that public cloud first doesn't mean public cloud only, and a winning strategy comprises data, irrespective of physical location on prem, across multiple clouds at the edge where real time inference is going to drive a lot of incremental value. Data is going to help the world come back to normal. We heard, or at least semi normal as we begin to better understand and forecast demand and supply and balances and economic forces. AI is becoming embedded into every aspect of our business, our people, our processes, and applications. And now we're going to get into some of the foundational principles that support the data and insights centric processes, which are fundamental to digital transformation initiatives. And it's my pleasure to welcome two great guests, Michelle Goetz. Who's a Kuba woman, VP and principal analyst at Forrester, and doing some groundbreaking work in this area. And Cindy, Mikey, who is the vice president of industry solutions and value management at Cloudera. Welcome to both of >>You. Welcome. Thank you. Thanks Dave. >>All right, Michelle, let's get into it. Maybe you could talk about your foundational core principles. You start with data. What are the important aspects of this first principle that are achievable today? >>It's really about democratization. If you can't make your data accessible, um, it's not usable. Nobody's able to understand what's happening in the business and they don't understand, um, what insights can be gained or what are the signals that are occurring that are going to help them with decisions, create stronger value or create deeper relationships, their customers, um, due to their experiences. So it really begins with how do you make data available and bring it to where the consumer of the data is rather than trying to hunt and Peck around within your ecosystem to find what it is that's important. Great. >>Thank you for that. So, Cindy, I wonder in hearing what Michelle just said, what are your thoughts on this? And when you work with customers at Cloudera, does, are there any that stand out that perhaps embody the fundamentals that Michelle just shared? >>Yeah, there's, there's quite a few. And especially as we look across, um, all the industries that we're actually working with customers in, you know, a few that stand out in top of mind for me is one is IQ via and what they're doing with real-world evidence and bringing together data across the entire, um, healthcare and life sciences ecosystems, bringing it together in different shapes and formats, making the ed accessible by both internally, as well as for their, um, the entire extended ecosystem. And then for SIA, who's working to solve some predictive maintenance issues within, there are a European car manufacturer and how do they make sure that they have, you know, efficient and effective processes when it comes to, uh, fixing equipment and so forth. And then also, um, there's, uh, an Indonesian based, um, uh, telecommunications company tech, the smell, um, who's bringing together, um, over the last five years, all their data about their customers and how do they enhance our customer experience? How do they make information accessible, especially in these pandemic and post pandemic times, um, uh, you know, just getting better insights into what customers need and when do they need it? >>Cindy platform is another core principle. How should we be thinking about data platforms in this day and age? I mean, where does, where do things like hybrid fit in? Um, what's cloud era's point >>Of view platforms are truly an enabler, um, and data needs to be accessible in many different fashions. Um, and also what's right for the business. When, you know, I want it in a cost and efficient and effective manner. So, you know, data needs to be, um, data resides everywhere. Data is developed and it's brought together. So you need to be able to balance both real time, you know, our batch historical information. It all depends upon what your analytical workloads are. Um, and what types of analytical methods you're going to use to drive those business insights. So putting and placing data, um, landing it, making it accessible, analyzing it needs to be done in any accessible platform, whether it be, you know, a public cloud doing it on-prem or a hybrid of the two is typically what we're seeing, being the most successful. >>Great. Thank you, Michelle. Let's move on a little bit and talk about practices and practices and processes as the next core principles. Maybe you could provide some insight as to how you think about balancing practices and processes while at the same time managing agility. >>Yeah, it's a really great question because it's pretty complex. When you have to start to connect your data to your business, the first thing to really gravitate towards is what are you trying to do? And what Cindy was describing with those customer examples is that they're all based off of business goals off of very specific use cases that helps kind of set the agenda about what is the data and what are the data domains that are important to really understanding and recognizing what's happening within that business activity and the way that you can affect that either in, you know, near time or real time, or later on, as you're doing your strategic planning, what that's balancing against is also being able to not only see how that business is evolving, but also be able to go back and say, well, can I also measure the outcomes from those processes and using data and using insight? >>Can I also get intelligence about the data to know that it's actually satisfying my objectives to influence my customers in my market? Or is there some sort of data drift or detraction in my, um, analytic capabilities that are allowing me to be effective in those environments, but everything else revolves around that and really thinking succinctly about a strategy that isn't just data aware, what data do I have and how do I use it, but coming in more from that business perspective to then start to be, data-driven recognizing that every activity you do from a business perspective leads to thinking about information that supports that and supports your decisions, and ultimately getting to the point of being insight driven, where you're able to both, uh, describe what you want your business to be with your data, using analytics, to then execute on that fluidly and in real time. And then ultimately bringing that back with linking to business outcomes and doing that in a continuous cycle where you can test and you can learn, you can improve, you can optimize, and you can innovate because you can see your business as it's happening. And you have the right signals and intelligence that allow you to make great decisions. >>I like how you said near time or real time, because it is a spectrum. And you know, one of the spectrum, autonomous vehicles, you've got to make a decision in real time, but, but, but near real-time, or real-time, it's, it's in the eyes of the holder, if you will, it's it might be before you lose the customer before the market changes. So it's really defined on a case by case basis. Um, I wonder Michelle, if you could talk about in working with a number of organizations, I see folks, they sometimes get twisted up and understanding the dependencies that technology generally, and the technologies around data specifically can have on critical business processes. Can you maybe give some guidance as to where customers should start, where, you know, where can we find some of the quick wins and high return, it >>Comes first down to how does your business operate? So you're going to take a look at the business processes and value stream itself. And if you can understand how people and customers, partners, and automation are driving that step by step approach to your business activities, to realize those business outcomes, it's way easier to start thinking about what is the information necessary to see that particular step in the process, and then take the next step of saying what information is necessary to make a decision at that current point in the process, or are you collecting information asking for information that is going to help satisfy a downstream process step or a downstream decision. So constantly making sure that you are mapping out your business processes and activities, aligning your data process to that helps you now rationalize. Do you need that real time near real time, or do you want to start grading greater consistency by bringing all of those signals together, um, in a centralized area to eventually oversee the entire operations and outcomes as they happen? It's the process and the decision points and acting on those decision points for the best outcome that really determines are you going to move in more of a real-time, uh, streaming capacity, or are you going to push back into more of a batch oriented approach? Because it depends on the amount of information and the aggregate of which provides the best insight from that. >>Got it. Let's, let's bring Cindy back into the conversation in your city. We often talk about people process and technology and the roles they play in creating a data strategy. That's that's logical and sound. Can you speak to the broader ecosystem and the importance of creating both internal and external partners within an organization? Yeah. >>And that's, uh, you know, kind of building upon what Michelle was talking about. If you think about datas and I hate to use the phrase almost, but you know, the fuel behind the process, um, and how do you actually become insight-driven? And, you know, you look at the capabilities that you're needing to enable from that business process, that insight process, um, you're extended ecosystem on, on how do I make that happen? You know, partners, um, and, and picking the right partner is important because a partner is one that actually helps under or helps you implement what your decisions are. Um, so, um, looking for a partner that has the capability that believes in being insight-driven and making sure that when you're leveraging data, um, you know, for within process on that, if you need to do it in a time fashion, that they can actually meet those needs of the business, um, and enabling on those, those process activities. So the ecosystem looking at how you, um, look at, you know, your vendors are, and fundamentally they need to be that trusted partner. Um, do they bring those same principles of value of being insight driven? So they have to have those core values themselves in order to help you as a, um, an end of business person enable those capabilities. So, so yeah, I'm >>Cool with fuel, but it's like super fuel when you talk about data, cause it's not scarce, right? You're never going to run out. So Michelle, let's talk about leadership. W w who leads, what does so-called leadership look like in an organization that's insight driven? >>So I think the really interesting thing that is starting to evolve as late is that organizations enterprises are really recognizing that not just that data is an asset and data has value, but exactly what we're talking about here, data really does drive what your business outcomes are going to be data driving into the insight or the raw data itself has the ability to set in motion. What's going to happen in your business processes and your customer experiences. And so, as you kind of think about that, you're now starting to see your CEO, your CMO, um, your CRO coming back and saying, I need better data. I need information. That's representative of what's happening in my business. I need to be better adaptive to what's going on with my customers. And ultimately that means I need to be smarter and have clearer forecasting into what's about ready to come, not just, you know, one month, two months, three months or a year from now, but in a week or tomorrow. >>And so that's, how is having a trickle down effect to then looking at two other types of roles that are elevating from technical capacity to more business capacity, you have your chief data officer that is shaping the exp the experiences, uh, with data and with insight and reconciling, what type of information is necessary with it within the context of answering these questions and creating a future fit organization that is adaptive and resilient to things that are happening. And you also have a chief digital officer who is participating because they're providing the experience and shaping the information and the way that you're going to interact and execute on those business activities, and either running that autonomously or as part of an assistance for your employees and for your customers. So really to go from not just data aware to data driven, but ultimately to be insight driven, you're seeing way more, um, participation, uh, and leadership at that C-suite level. And just underneath, because that's where the subject matter expertise is coming in to know how to create a data strategy that is tightly connected to your business strategy. >>Right. Thank you. Let's wrap. And I've got a question for both of you, maybe Cindy, you could start and then Michelle bring us home. You know, a lot of customers, they want to understand what's achievable. So it's helpful to paint a picture of a, of a maturity model. Uh, you know, I'd love to go there, but I'm not going to get there anytime soon, but I want to take some baby steps. So when you're performing an analysis on, on insight driven organization, city, what do you see as the major characteristics that define the differences between sort of the, the early, you know, beginners, the sort of fat middle, if you will, and then the more advanced, uh, constituents. >>Yeah, I'm going to build upon, you know, what Michelle was talking about as data as an asset. And I think, you know, also being data where, and, you know, trying to actually become, you know, insight driven, um, companies can also have data and they can have data as a liability. And so when you're data aware, sometimes data can still be a liability to your organization. If you're not making business decisions on the most recent and relevant data, um, you know, you're not going to be insight driven. So you've got to move beyond that, that data awareness, where you're looking at data just from an operational reporting, but data's fundamentally driving the decisions that you make. Um, as a business, you're using data in real time. You're, um, you're, you know, leveraging data to actually help you make and drive those decisions. So when we use the term you're, data-driven, you can't just use the term, you know, tongue in cheek. It actually means that I'm using the recent, the relevant and the accuracy of data to actually make the decisions for me, because we're all advancing upon. We're talking about, you know, artificial intelligence and so forth. Being able to do that, if you're just data where I would not be embracing on leveraging artificial intelligence, because that means I probably haven't embedded data into my processes. It's data could very well still be a liability in your organization. So how do you actually make it an asset? Yeah, I think data >>Where it's like cable ready. So, so Michelle, maybe you could, you could, you could, uh, add to what Cindy just said and maybe add as well, any advice that you have around creating and defining a data strategy. >>So every data strategy has a component of being data aware. This is like building the data museum. How do you capture everything that's available to you? How do you maintain that memory of your business? You know, bringing in data from your applications, your partners, third parties, wherever that information is available, you want to ensure that you're capturing and you're managing and you're maintaining it. And this is really where you're starting to think about the fact that it is an asset. It has value, but you may not necessarily know what that value is. Yet. If you move into a category of data driven, what starts to shift and change there is you're starting to classify label, organize the information in context of how you're making decisions and how you do business. It could start from being more, um, proficient from an analytic purpose. You also might start to introduce some early stages of data science in there. >>So you can do some predictions and some data mining to start to weed out some of those signals. And you might have some simple types of algorithms that you're deploying to do a next next best action for example. And that's what data-driven is really about. You're starting to get value out of it. The data itself is starting to make sense in context of your business, but what you haven't done quite yet, which is what insight driven businesses are, is really starting to take away. Um, the gap between when you see it, know it and then get the most value and really exploit what that insight is at the time when it's right. So in the moment we talk about this in terms of perishable insights, data and insights are ephemeral. And we want to ensure that the way that we're managing that and delivering on that data and insights is in time with our decisions and the highest value outcome we're going to have, that that insight can provide us. >>So are we just introducing it as data-driven organizations where we could see, you know, spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations and lots of mapping to help make sort of longer strategic decisions, or are those insights coming up and being activated in an automated fashion within our business processes that are either assisting those human decisions at the point when they're needed, or an automated decisions for the types of digital experiences and capabilities that we're driving in our organization. So it's going from, I'm a data hoarder. If I'm data aware to I'm interested in what's happening as a data-driven organization and understanding my data. And then lastly being insight driven is really where light between business, data and insight. There is none it's all coming together for the best outcomes, >>Right? So people are acting on perfect or near perfect information or machines or, or, uh, doing so with a high degree of confidence, great advice and insights. And thank you both for sharing your thoughts with our audience today. It's great to have you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Now we're going to go into our industry. Deep dives. There are six industry breakouts, financial services, insurance, manufacturing, retail communications, and public sector. Now each breakout is going to cover two distinct use cases for a total of essentially 12 really detailed segments that each of these is going to be available on demand, but you can scan the calendar on the homepage and navigate to your breakout session for choice of choice or for more information, click on the agenda page and take a look to see which session is the best fit for you. And then dive in, join the chat and feel free to ask questions or contribute your knowledge, opinions, and data. Thanks so much for being part of the community and enjoy the rest of the day.

(gentle music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of PagerDuty Summit. I'm your host for "theCUBE", Natalie Erlich. And now we're joined by the CEO and Chairperson for PagerDuty. We're joined by Jennifer Tejada. Thanks very much for joining the program. >> Hi, Natalie. It's great to have you, and "theCUBE", with us again. >> Fantastic, well, let's do an overview of what PagerDuty does and how it's helping its customers. >> Well, PagerDuty is a digital operations management platform. And what that means is that we use software to detect real-time issues and events from the complex ecosystem of technology that's really hard for humans to manage. We then intelligently orchestrate that work to the right teams, the right people with the right expertise, in the moments that matter the most to your business. And that's become especially important as the whole world has moved to a digital-first world. I mean, pretty much everything we do we can experience on demand today but that's only made possible through the complex technology and infrastructure that's managed and operated by responders all over the world. And PagerDuty's digital operation solution communicates issues in real time to ensure a perfect customer experience every time. >> Terrific, and if you could go through some of the key features like on-call management, incident response, event intelligence and analytics, it would be really great. >> Sure, so, our heritage started with automation of the on-call situation for engineers. So, back in the day, many organizations had software engineers building apps, platforms, infrastructure, but then they would throw that over the wall to an ops team who would manage it in production. That led to poor code quality, it led to lots of challenges when people would release software in the middle of the night on a Saturday, et cetera. And it meant that it took a very long time for companies to manually get a problem into the hands of the right person to solve it. We automated all of that using an API-based ecosystem that connects to over 460 of the most popular applications, observability stacks, monitoring systems, security applications, ticketing environments, cloud environments, et cetera. And so, all of that is now seamless. What that data enabled us to do was build an event management solution, which we call Event Intelligence, which now uses AI and machine learning to help responders understand the nature of all the different events coming at them. So, for instance, instead of seeing 100 events coming at you from 16 different monitoring environments in your infrastructure, PagerDuty will use AI to know that of those 175 are part of the same incident. They're events conspiring to becoming a business-impacting incident. And that allows our teams to get ahead of things, to become proactive versus reactive. We've also built analytics into our solution which helps our customers benchmark themselves and their operational efficiency versus their peer group. It helps them measure the health of their teams and understand which services are causing them the biggest challenges and the most expense whether that's labor expense or customer impact. And most recently, we've been really thrilled with our acquisition of Rundeck which helps us automate the remediation of events which now means that PagerDuty can automate incident management and incident response, both upstream, in terms of identifying events as they flow in, and also downstream, safe self-healing of infrastructure, application and platform environments to get things back to the way they need to work in order to serve end customers and serve employees across an enterprise. We're really excited as our vision has expanded to become the ubiquitous platform, the de facto platform, for real-time work. And what we've seen over the years is our customers coming up with very imaginative ways to use our software to solve real-time unstructured, unpredictable work across the company. That can be legal teams managing across different geographies and business units to close contracts at the end of the quarter, it could be financial services companies that are managing their physical security as well as their digital security through PagerDuty where time really, really matters if you have a data breach or a potential physical security incident. It could be customer service where customer service and support teams are working very closely with engineering teams to identify issues that are causing customers problems and to manage those issues collaboratively so that the customer experience is protected. So, just some examples of how PagerDuty is getting leveraged. And we're really excited to talk about some new innovations at Summit. >> Terrific, well, you really have your thumb on the pulse of corporate America, and as you know, last year, we talked about the pandemic and now we're looking at going back to the workforce, we're looking at the future of work. What does that look like for you? >> Well, the future of work is here and one thing is for sure, it has changed permanently. I think we all learned from the past year that remote work can provide a lot of flexibility and can level the playing field for people all around the world. It means you can access talent from different geographies. It means you can have a different level of work-life balance, but it also comes with its own set of complications. And one of the reasons we pulled Summit earlier from September into June was we really wanted to be a part of this kind of grand moment of reopening that we're seeing around the world. And that means that every organization that we're working with is redesigning their future. But that didn't start today, that started several months ago, as companies learned from their remote work experience, learned from their on-demand experience in dealing with their own customers. And it took some of those innovations and brought them forward into kind of the new design for the way teams will work, the way brands interact with their customers. And at Summit, you're going to hear us discuss why now is the moment, now is the moment to harness your digital acceleration because that's really the way that business is getting done. I mean, frankly, every business is now a software business and all business is now digital business. And PagerDuty has proven itself as the essential infrastructure on which all companies, all brands, can build their success. And as we widen our aperture we think about building the platform for not just today's challenges, but tomorrow's challenges. So, at Summit, you'll hear us talking a lot about resilience and how your entire organization and your brand will be judged on your ability to stand up a resilient business, a resilient brand experience for your customers. Today, uptime is money and resilience and reliability are the currency of tomorrow. We're entering into this era where autonomy is everything when it comes to work. I mean, employees, and generally humans, do not want to be stuck managing mundane tasks. And the hybrid work arrangements that we're anticipating mean that PagerDuty's platform will become even more essential for customers because hybrid work drives more complexity. It means your teams are distributed, they maybe distributed across regions, co-located, remote at home, in different time zones. And when something's going down that's really causing a problem in your business, you need to orchestrate work across the right people that can make a difference in that moment. Autonomy and flexibility, frankly, is what people expect from work. And they also expect to engage with apps and platforms that are easy to use, that are intuitive, that deliver really fast time to value. And that has long been at the core of PagerDuty's offering and value proposition. And none of these autonomous or automation investments replace human expertise. They allow our platform to channel that expertise and the expertise of your users to give them context and visibility to make the best possible decisions in the moment that matters. And I think that is so empowering as we think about this flexible new hybrid way of working. And then lastly- >> And I love the points. >> Oh yeah, go ahead. >> Yeah, I love the points that you make about resilience and autonomy. I'd love it if you could just drive a little further how we can build more connection now that we're going into the office and also integrating this kind of hybrid system. >> Well, I think it's really interesting because in some ways I feel super connected to my employees 'cause I'm engaging with them one-to-one, my box and their box. I have had the opportunity to stay connected to customers and executives across the industry over course of the pandemic. And yet, I'm an extrovert, I miss the in-person opportunity that kinetic energy that comes with being together in a room. And I'm looking forward to being back in studio, doing interviews with you, Natalie. But at the same time, I appreciate the convenience that I've gained. Like, I'm not looking forward to commuting again. I mean, I plan to only get on the road during off hours in the future. And I realize that I don't have to travel six hours for a two-hour meeting on the other side of the U.S., or 15 hours to have a meeting in Europe, I can get a lot of business done online. Having said that, that connection is so important. The social contract that you create with your customers and your businesses is so important. And making sure that we can connect the complex technology that runs the world today is also really important. And that's where PagerDuty plays a role. PagerDuty really helps you know who you need, what you can leverage them for, and gets them in touch when you need them, like I said, on the work that is somewhat unpredictable but can be very high priority, the highest priority in the case of a security breach or a major customer-impacting incident. And so, using AI apps, or sorry, using AI and automation to make sure that we can intelligently route work to the right people is a big part of how our platform has come together and really become the central nervous system of the digital economy. >> Yeah, I mean, these are really great points and it's a bit of a silver lining actually with the pandemic, learning that we can really stay connected despite not being in the office and now have more hybrid systems of work. But let's switch now gears to talk about leadership in our communities and how we can truly activate change and a far more just and equitable world. >> Well, I am a huge believer in social responsibility and social impact, and I really appreciate how all of our employees have come together to leverage PagerDuty's platform for good. When we went public, we launched pagerduty.org which was led by Olivia Khalili. And I know you'll hear from her and some of our impact customers this week at Summit, but I think what's really important is how engaging it is for our employee base. Last year, 93% of PagerDuty employees have volunteered their time for social causes and philanthropy. And that's in a time when we were all enduring a hardship of our own, we were all facing an unprecedented pandemic. We've donated over a million dollars in financial grants to over 400 organizations through strategic giving and employee-match programs. And we've opened civic engagement. We've opened source civic engagement with our Day for Change for our employees and our toolkits which we've shared broadly throughout the industry. We signed on to the Board Challenge which I was thrilled to do because I'm a big believer that more diversity in the boardroom is going to lead more equity in corporate America. And thrilled to add Bonita Stewart and Dr. Alec Gallimore to our board last year. And I think representation is so important at the board level, not just because it's the right thing to do, not just because it's the right thing for business, but it's the right thing for career growth for your employees, showing them the path to what's possible for them with your company. And finally, we published PagerDuty's first ever "Inclusion Diversity and Equity Report", which is part of our effort to provide transparency around not just what we're doing, but how we're measuring it, how we're progressing, so that we can get better every year. And we've highlighted our work to support time-critical health, our work to support equity in the response to COVID including vaccine distribution. And I really enjoy some of the impact stories that we hear from our non-for-profit partners that are working with us at pagerduty.org. So, leadership is what you make of it and you can lead from every chair in an organization. And I'm so proud of the leadership, our employees, and many of our customers have demonstrated in this time of particular challenge around the globe. And we're not through it entirely yet, and so, I'm just really hopeful that we can all come out of this better together. >> Right, and speaking about leadership, why do you think that diversity is so critical for effective leadership? >> Well, first of all, I think it's our responsibility to reflect the communities that we serve. My users do not all look the same, they don't come from the same background, they're from over 150 countries around the world. They're solving a diverse set of problems. And in fact, the problems they're solving with our platform is growing every day as they imagine how to apply our technology, our digital operations platform, to different types of real-time work around their companies. But diversity is also important in problem solving, in looking at challenges through different lenses, in thinking about the different stakeholders that you serve in that process, and in creating an equitable community around you, creating opportunity for people around you. I mean, one of the things that we did that was a business decision a couple of years ago was to open an office in Atlanta. And part of that was to create a path, create opportunities for Georgians and people in the Metro Atlanta area to participate in the tech industry. This was before everybody was working from home, before those geographical barriers were broken down. And I'm thrilled to say, we have a thriving community now in Atlanta that's growing and we're hiring. But that's just one example. That was the smart thing to do for our business, but it was also a great thing to do, I think, for the community. And we've brought new minds and all kinds of new people into our business. And this month we're celebrating Pride Month at PagerDuty, which I'm thrilled to do. We have very active LGBTQ community who contribute hugely to our efforts and to our customers' success. And we think that everybody deserves an equal shot at opportunity at the lifestyle they want and the opportunity to build their own bright future. >> Great, and just lastly, what's the main focus for PagerDuty in the next year? >> The main focus for PagerDuty next year is really executing on our strategy to become the defacto platform for real-time work, ensuring that we can leverage the largest domain-agnostic ecosystem of connected apps and services, that we can leverage the largest dataset based on responder data, workflows, events and incidents to help our customers deliver the resiliency, the autonomy, and the connectedness that they're looking for to serve their customers and accelerate their digital prospects and frankly, to prosper in the future. So, it really is about becoming that de facto platform for action for all your real-time, unstructured and important work. >> Well, Jennifer Tejada, the CEO and Chairperson of PagerDuty, loved having you on this program. Really appreciate your insights on diversity and leadership, and, of course, the next phase for PagerDuty itself. I'm your host for "theCUBE" now covering the PagerDuty Summit. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>Really excited about this year's data, citizens with so many of you together. Uh, I'm going to talk today about accessible data, because what good is the data. If you can get it into your hands and shop for it, but you can't understand it. Uh, and I'm here today with, uh, bald, really thrilled to be here with Paul. Paul is an award-winning author on all topics data. I think 20 books with 21st on the way over 300 articles, he's been a frequent speaker. He's an expert in future trends. Uh, he's a VP at cognitive systems, uh, over at IBM teachers' data also, um, at the business school and as a champion of diversity initiatives. Paul, thank you for being here, really the conformance, uh, to the session with you. >>Oh, thanks for having me. It's a privilege. >>So let's get started with, uh, our origins and data poll. Um, and I'll start with a little story of my own. So, uh, I trained as an engineer way back when, uh, and, um, in one of the courses we got as an engineer, it was about databases. So we got the stick thick book of CQL and me being in it for the programming. I was like, well, who needs this stuff? And, uh, I wanted to do my part in terms of making data accessible. So essentially I, I was the only book that I sold on. Uh, obviously I learned some hard lessons, uh, later on, as I did a master's in AI after that, and then joined the database research lab at the university that Libra spun off from. Uh, but Hey, we all learned along the way. And, uh, Paula, I'm really curious. Um, when did you awaken first to data? If you will? >>You know, it's really interesting Stan, because I come from the opposite side, an undergrad in economics, uh, with some, uh, information systems research at the higher level. And so I think I was always attuned to what data could do, but I didn't understand how to get at it and the kinds of nuances around it. So then I started this job, a database company, like 27 years ago, and it started there, but I would say the awakening has never stopped because the data game is always changing. Like I look at these epochs that I've been through data. I was a real relational databases thinking third normal form, and then no SQL databases. And then I watch no SQL be about no don't use SQL, then wait a minute. Not only sequel. And today it's really for the data citizens about wait, no, I need SQL. So, um, I think I'm always waking up in data, so I'll call it a continuum if you will. But that was it. It was trying to figure out the technology behind driving analytics in which I took in school. >>Excellent. And I fully agree with you there. Uh, every couple of years they seem to reinvent new stuff and they want to be able to know SQL models. Let me see. I saw those come and go. Uh, obviously, and I think that's, that's a challenge for most people because in a way, data is a very abstract concepts, um, until you get down in the weeds and then it starts to become really, really messy, uh, until you, you know, from that end button extract a certain insights. Um, and as the next thing I want to talk about with you is that challenging organizations, we're hearing a lot about data, being valuable data, being the new oil data, being the new soil, the new gold, uh, data as an asset is being used as a slogan all over. Uh, people are investing a lot in data over multiple decades. Now there's a lot of new data technologies, always, but still, it seems that organizations fundamentally struggle with getting people access to data. What do you think are some of the key challenges that are underlying the struggles that mud, that organizations seem to face when it comes to data? >>Yeah. Listen, Stan, I'll tell you a lot of people I think are stuck on what I call their data, acumen curves, and you know, data is like a gym membership. If you don't use it, you're not going to get any value on it. And that's what I mean by accurate. And so I like to think that you use the analogy of some mud. There's like three layers that are holding a lot of organizations back at first is just the amount of data. Now, I'm not going to give you some stat about how many times I can go to the moon and back with the data regenerate, but I will give you one. I found interesting stat. The average human being in their lifetime will generate a petabyte of data. How much data is that? If that was my apple music playlist, it would be about 2000 years of nonstop music. >>So that's some kind of playlist. And I think what's happening for the first layer of mud is when I first started writing about data warehousing and analytics, I would be like, go find a needle in the haystack. But now it's really finding a needle in a stack of needles. So much data. So little time that's level one of mine. I think the second thing is people are looking for some kind of magic solution, like Cinderella's glass slipper, and you put it on her. She turns into a princess that's for Disney movies, right? And there's nothing magical about it. It is about skill and acumen and up-skilling. And I think if you're familiar with the duper, you recall the Hadoop craze, that's exactly what happened, right? Like people brought all their data together and everyone was going to be able to access it and give insights. >>And it teams said it was pretty successful, but every line of business I ever talked to said it was a complete failure. And the third layer is governance. That's actually where you're going to find some magic. And the problem in governance is every client I talked to is all about least effort to comply. They don't want to violate GDPR or California consumer protection act or whatever governance overlooks, where they do business and governance. When you don't lead me separate to comply and try not to get fine, but as an accelerant to your analytics, and that gets you out of that third layer of mud. So you start to invoke what I call the wisdom of the crowd. Now imagine taking all these different people with intelligence about the business and giving them access and acumen to hypothesize on thousands of ideas that turn into hundreds, we test and maybe dozens that go to production. So those are three layers that I think every organization is facing. >>Well. Um, I definitely follow on all the days, especially the one where people see governance as a, oh, I have to comply to this, which always hurts me a little bit, honestly, because all good governance is about making things easier while also making sure that they're less riskier. Um, but I do want to touch on that Hadoop thing a little bit, uh, because for me in my a decade or more over at Libra, we saw it come as well as go, let's say around 2015 to 2020 issue. So, and it's still around. Obviously once you put your data in something, it's very hard to make it go away, but I've always felt that had do, you know, it seemed like, oh, now we have a bunch of clusters and a bunch of network engineers. So what, >>Yeah. You know, Stan, I fell for, I wrote the book to do for dummies and it had such great promise. I think the problem is there wasn't enough education on how to extract value out of it. And that's why I say it thinks it's great. They liked clusters and engineers that you just said, but it didn't drive lineup >>Business. Got it. So do you think that the whole paradigm with the clouds that we're now on is going to fundamentally change that or is just an architectural change? >>Yeah. You know, it's, it's a great comment. What you're seeing today now is the movement for the data lake. Maybe a way from repositories, like Hadoop into cloud object stores, right? And then you look at CQL or other interfaces over that not allows me to really scale compute and storage separately, but that's all the technical stuff at the end of the day, whether you're on premise hybrid cloud, into cloud software, as a service, if you don't have the acumen for your entire organization to know how to work with data, get value from data, this whole data citizen thing. Um, you're not going to get the kind of value that goes into your investment, right? And I think that's the key thing that business leaders need to understand is it's not about analytics for kind of science project sakes. It's about analytics to drive. >>Absolutely. We fully agree with that. And I want to touch on that point. You mentioned about the wisdom of the crowds, the concept that I love about, right, and your organization is a big grout full of what we call data citizens. Now, if I remember correctly from the book of the wisdom of the crowds, there's, there's two points that really, you have to take Canada. What is, uh, for the wisdom of the grounds to work, you have to have all the individuals enabled, uh, for them to have access to the right information and to be able to share that information safely kept from the bias from others. Otherwise you're just biasing the outcome. And second, you need to be able to somehow aggregate that wisdom up to a certain decision. Uh, so as Felix mentioned earlier, we all are United by data and it's a data citizen topic. >>I want to touch on with you a little bit, because at Collibra we look at it as anyone who uses data to do their job, right. And 2020 has sort of accelerated digitization. Uh, but apart from that, I've always believed that, uh, you don't have to have data in your title, like a data analyst or a data scientist to be a data citizen. If I take a look at the example inside of Libra, we have product managers and they're trying to figure out which features are most important and how are they used and what patterns of behavior is there. You have a gal managers, and they're always trying to know the most they can about their specific accounts, uh, to be able to serve as them best. So for me, the data citizen is really in its broadest sense. Uh, anyone who uses data to do their job, does that, does that resonate with you? >>Yeah, absolutely. It reminds me of myself. And to be honest in my eyes where I got started from, and I agree, you don't need the word data in your title. What you need to have is curiosity, and that is in your culture and in your being. And, and I think as we look at organizations to transform and take full advantage of their, their data investments, they're going to need great governance. I guarantee you that, but then you're going to have to invest in this data citizen concept. And the first thing I'll tell you is, you know, that kind of acumen, if you will, as a team sport, it's not a departmental sport. So you need to think about what are the upskilling programs of where we can reach across to the technical and the non-technical, you know, lots and lots of businesses rely on Microsoft Excel. >>You have data citizens right there, but then there's other folks who are just flat out curious about stuff. And so now you have to open this up and invest in those people. Like, why are you paying people to think about your business without giving the data? It would be like hiring Tom Brady as a quarterback and telling him not to throw a pass. Right. And I see it all the time. So we kind of limit what we define as data citizen. And that's why I love what you said. You don't need the word data in your title and more so if you don't build the acumen, you don't know how to bring the data together, maybe how to wrangle it, but where did it come from? And where can you fixings? One company I worked with had 17 definitions for a sales individual, 17 definitions, and the talent team and HR couldn't drive to a single definition because they didn't have the data accurate. So when you start thinking of the data citizen, concept it about enabling everybody to shop for data much. Like I would look for a USB cable on Amazon, but also to attach to a business glossary for definition. So we have a common version of what a word means, the lineage of the data who owns it, who did it come from? What did it do? So bring that all together. And, uh, I will tell you companies that invest in the data, citizen concept, outperform companies that don't >>For all of that, I definitely fully agree that there's enough research out there that shows that the ones who are data-driven are capturing the most markets, but also capturing the most growth. So they're capturing the market even faster. And I love what you said, Paul, about, um, uh, the brains, right? You've already paid for the brains you've already invested in. So you may as well leverage them. Um, you may as well recognize and, and enable the data citizens, uh, to get access to the assets that they need to really do their job properly. That's what I want to touch on just a little bit, if, if you're capable, because for me, okay. Getting access to data is one thing, right? And I think you already touched on a few items there, but I'm shopping for data. Now I have it. I have a cul results set in my hands. Let's say, but I'm unable to read and write data. Right? I don't know how to analyze it. I don't know maybe about bias. Uh, maybe I, I, I don't know how to best visualize it. And maybe if I do, maybe I don't know how to craft a compelling persuasion narrative around it to change my bosses decisions. So from your viewpoint, do you think that it's wise for companies to continuously invest in data literacy to continuously upgrade that data citizens? If you will. >>Yeah, absolutely. Forest. I'm going to tell you right now, data literacy years are like dog years stage. So fast, new data types, new sources of data, new ways to get data like API APIs and microservices. But let me take it away from the technical concept for a bit. I want to talk to you about the movie. A star is born. I'm sure most of you have seen it or heard it Bradley Cooper, lady Gaga. So everyone knows the movie. What most people probably don't know is when lady Gaga teamed up with Bradley Cooper to do this movie, she demanded that he sing everything like nothing could be auto-tuned everything line. This is one of the leading actors of Hollywood. They filmed this remake in 42 days and Bradley Cooper spent 18 months on singing lessons. 18 months on a guitar lessons had a voice coach and it's so much and so forth. >>And so I think here's the point. If one of the best actors in the world has to invest three and a half years for 42 days to hit a movie out of the park. Why do we think we don't need a continuous investment in data literacy? Even once you've done your initial training, if you will, over the data, citizen, things are going to change. I don't, you don't. If I, you Stan, if you go to the gym and workout every day for three months, you'll never have to work out for the rest of your life. You would tell me I was ridiculous. So your data literacy is no different. And I will tell you, I have managed thousands of individuals, some of the most technical people around distinguished engineers, fellows, and data literacy comes from curiosity and a culture of never ending learning. That is the number one thing to success. >>And that curiosity, I hire people who are curious, I'll give you one more story. It's about Mozart. And this 21 year old comes to Mozart and he says, Mozart, can you teach me how to compose a symphony? And Mozart looks at this person that says, no, no, you're too young, too young. You compose your fourth symphony when you were 12 and Mozart looks at him and says, yeah, but I didn't go around asking people how to compose a symphony. Right? And so the notion of that story is curiosity. And those people who show up in always want to learn, they're your home run individuals. And they will bring data literacy across the organization. >>I love it. And I'm not going to try and be Mozart, but you know, three and a half years, I think you said two times, 18 months, uh, maybe there's hope for me yet in a singing, you'll be a good singer. Um, Duchy on the, on the, some of the sports references you've made, uh, Paul McGuire, we first connected, uh, I'm not gonna like disclose where you're from, but, uh, I saw he did come up and I know it all sorts of sports that drive to measure everything they can right on the field of the field. So let's imagine that you've done the best analysis, right? You're the most advanced data scientists schooled in the classics, as well as the modernist methods, the best tools you've made a beautiful analysis, beautiful dashboards. And now your coach just wants to put their favorite player on the game, despite what you're building to them. How do you deal with that kind of coaches? >>Yeah. Listen, this is a great question. I think for your data analytics strategy, but also for anyone listening and watching, who wants to just figure out how to drive a career forward? I would give the same advice. So the story you're talking about, indeed hockey, you can figure out where I'm from, but it's around the Ottawa senators, general manager. And he made a quote in an interview and he said, sometimes I want to punch my analytics, people in the head. Now I'm going to tell you, that's not a good culture for analytics. And he goes on to say, they tell me not to play this one player. This one player is very tough. You know, throws four or five hits a game. And he goes, I'd love my analytics people to get hit by bore a wacky and tell me how it feels. That's the player. >>Sure. I'm sure he hits hard, but here's the deal. When he's on the ice, the opposing team gets more shots on goal than the senators do on the opposing team. They score more goals, they lose. And so I think whenever you're trying to convince a movement forward, be it management, be it a project you're trying to fund. I always try to teach something that someone didn't previously know before and make them think, well, I never thought of it that way before. And I think the great opportunity right now, if you're trying to get moving in a data analytics strategy is around this post COVID era. You know, we've seen post COVID now really accelerate, or at least post COVID in certain parts of the world, but accelerate the appetite for digital transformation by about half a decade. Okay. And getting the data within your systems, as you digitize will give you all kinds of types of projects to make people think differently than the way they thought before. >>About data. I call this data exhaust. I'll give you a great example, Uber. I think we're all familiar with Uber. If we all remember back in the days when Uber would offer you search pricing. Okay? So basically you put Uber on your phone, they know everything about you, right? Who are your friends, where you going, uh, even how much batteries on your phone? Well, in a data science paper, I read a long time ago. They recognize that there was a 70% chance that you would accept a surge price. If you had less than 10% of your battery. So 10% of battery on your phone is an example of data exhaust all the lawns that you generate on your digital front end properties. Those are logs. You can take those together and maybe show executive management with data. We can understand why people abandoned their cart at the shipping phase, or what is the amount of shipping, which they abandoned it. When is the signal when our systems are about to go to go down. So, uh, I think that's a tremendous way. And if you look back to the sports, I mean the Atlanta Falcons NFL team, and they monitor their athletes, sleep performance, the Toronto Raptors basketball, they're running AI analytics on people's personalities and everything they tweet and every interview to see if the personality fits. So in sports, I think athletes are the most important commodity, if you will, or asset a yet all these teams are investing in analytics. So I think that's pretty telling, >>Okay, Paul, it looks like we're almost out of time. So in 30 seconds or less, what would you recommend to the data citizens out there? >>Okay. I'm going to give you a four tips in 30 seconds. Number one, remember learning never ends be curious forever. You'll drive your career. Number two, remember companies that invest in analytics and data, citizens outperform those that don't McKinsey says it's about 1.4 times across many KPIs. Number three, stop just collecting the dots and start connecting them with that. You need a strong governance strategy and that's going to help you for the future because the biggest thing in the future is not going to be about analytics, accuracy. It's going to be about analytics, explainability. So accuracy is no longer going to be enough. You're going to have to explain your decisions and finally stay positive and forever test negative. >>Love it. Thank you very much fall. Um, and for all the data seasons is out there. Um, when it comes down to access to data, it's more than just getting your hands on the data. It's also knowing what you can do with it, how you can do that and what you definitely shouldn't be doing with it. Uh, thank you everyone out there and enjoy your learning and interaction with the community. Stay healthy. Bye-bye.

>>mhm Yes, everyone, welcome back to the cubes coverage of dr khan 2021. I'm john for your host of the cube. Got a great segment here. One of the big supporters and open source amazon web services returning back second year. Dr khan virtual Deepak Singh, vice president of the compute services at AWS Deepak, Great to see you. Thanks for coming back on remotely again soon. We'll be in real life. Reinvent is going to be in person, we'll be there. Good to see you. >>Good to see you too, john it's always good to do these. I don't know how how often I've been at the cube now, but it's great every single time your >>legend and getting on there, a lot of important things to discuss your in one of the most important areas in the technology industry right now and that is at the confluence of cloud scale and modern development applications as they shift towards as Andy Jassy says, the new guard, right. It's been happening. You guys have been a big proponent of open source and enabling open source is a service creating business models for companies. But more importantly, you guys are powering, making it easier for folks to use software. And doctor has been a big relationship for you. Could you take a minute to first talk about the doctor, a W S relationship and your involvement and what you're doing? >>Yeah, actually it goes back a long way. Uh you know, Justin, we announced PCS had reinvented 2014 and PCS at that time was very much managed orchestration service on top of DACA at that time. I think it was the first really big one out there from a cloud provider. And since then, of course, the world has evolved quite a bit and relationship with DR has evolved a lot. The thing I'd like to talk to is something that we announced that Dr last year, I don't remember if I talked about it on the cube at that time. But last year we started working with DR on how can we go from doctor Run, which customers love or DR desktop, which customers love and make it easy for people to run containers on pcs and Fergie. Uh so most new customers running containers and AWS today start with this Yes and party or half of them and we wanted to make it very easy for them to start with where they are on the laptop which is often bucket to stop and have running services the native US. So we started working with DR and that that collaboration has been very successful. We want to keep you look forward to continuing to work on evolving that where you can use Docker compose doctor, desktop, doctor run the fuel that darker customers used and the labour grand production services on the end of your side, which is the part that we've got that on. So I think that's one area where we work really well together. Uh, the other area where I think the two companies continue to work well together. It's open source in general as some of, you know, AWS has a very strong commitment to contain a. D uh, EKS our community service is moving towards community. Forget it actually runs all on community today and uh, we collaborate dr Rhonda on the Ocr specification because, you know, the Oc I am expect is becoming the de facto packaging format idea. W S. This morning we launched yesterday, we launched a service called Opera. And the main expected input for opera is an Ocr image are being in this Atlanta as well, where those ci images now a way of packaging for lambda. And I think the last one I like to call out and it has been an amazing partnership and it's an area where most people don't pay attention is amid signing. Uh, there's a project called Notary. We do the second version of the Notary Spec for remit signing and AWS Docker and a couple of other companies have been working very closely together on bringing that uh, you know, finalizing no tv too, so that at least in our case we can start building services for our customers on top of that. You know, it's it's a great relationship and I expect to see it continue. >>Well, I think one of the themes this year is developer experience. So good. Good call out there in the new announcements on the tools you have and software because that seems to be a great developer integration with Docker question I have for you is how should the customers think about things like E C. S and versus E K. S. App, Runner lambda uh for kind of running their containers. How do they understand the difference is, what's there? What's the, what's the thought process there? What's >>that? It's a good question actually been announced after. And I think there was one of the questions I started getting on twitter. You know, let's start at the very beginning. Anyone can pick up a Docker container and run it on easy to today. You can run it on easy to, we can run a light sail, but doc around works just fine. It's the limits machine. Then people want to do more complex things. They want to run large scale orchestrated services. They won't run their entire business and containers. We have customers will do that today. Uh, you know, you have people like Vanguard who runs a significant portion of the infrastructure on pcs frg or you have to elope with the heavy user of chaos, our community service. So in general, if you're running large scale systems, you're building your platforms, you're most likely to use the csny Chaos. Um, if you come from a community's background, you're, you're running communities on prem or you want the flexibility and control the communities gives you, you're gonna end up with the chaos. That's what we see our customers doing. If you just want to run containers, you want to use AWS to its fullest extent where you want the continue a P I to be part of the W A S A P. I said then you pick is yes. And I think one of the reasons you see so many customers start with the CSN, Forget is with forget to get the significant ease of use from an operational standpoint. And we see many start ups and you know, enterprises, especially security focus enterprises leaning towards farming. But there's a class of customers that doesn't want to think about orchestration that just wants. Here's my code, here's my container image just run my service for me and that's when things like happen, I can come and that's one of the reasons we launched it. Land is a little bit different. Lambda is a unique service. You buy into an event driven architecture. If you do that, then you can figure our application into this. That's they should start its magic. Uh, the container part, there is what land announced agreement where they now support containers, packaging. So instead of zip files, you can package up your functions as containers. Then lambda will run them for you. The advantage it gives you with all the tooling that you built, that you have to build your containers now works the land as well. So I won't call and a container orchestration service in the same sense of the CSC cso Afrin are but it definitely allows the container image format as a standard packaging format. I think that's the sort of universal common theme that you find across AWS at this point of time. >>You know, one of the things that we're observing at this at this event here is a lot of developers Coop con and Lennox foundations. A lot of operators to kubernetes hits that. But here's developers. And the thing is I want to ease of use, simplicity experience, but also I want the innovation. Yeah, I want all of it. When I ask you what is amazon bring to the table for the new equation, what would you say? >>Yeah, I mean for me it's always you've probably heard me say this 100 times. Many 1000 times. It's foggy fog. It's unique to us. It takes a lot of what we have learned about operating infrastructure scale. The question we asked ourselves, you know, in many ways we talk about forget even before belong pcs but we have to learn on what it meant and what customers really wanted. But the idea was when you are running clusters of instances of machines to run containers on, you have to start thinking about a lot of things that in some ways VMS but BMS in the car were taken away capacity. What kind of infrastructure to run it on? Should have been touched. Should have not been back. You know, where is my container running? Those are things. They suddenly started having to think about those kind of backwards almost. So the idea was how can we make your containerized bundles? So TCS task or community is part of the thing that you talk to and that is the main unit that you operate on. That is the unit that you get built on and meet it on. That's where Forget comes in and it allows us to do many interesting things. We've effectively changed the engine of forget since we've launched it. Uh, we run it on ec two instances and we run it on fire cracker. Uh, we have changed the forget agent architecture. We've made a lot of underneath the hood, uh, changes that even take the take advantage of the broader innovation, the rate of us, We did a whole bunch more to launch acronym trans on top of family customers don't have to think about it. They don't have to worry about it. It happens underneath the hood. It's always your engine as as you go along and it takes away all the operational pain of managing clusters of running into picking which instances to use to getting out, trying to figure out how to bend back and get efficiency. That becomes our problem. So, you know, that is an area where you should expect to see a Stuart done more. It's becoming the fabric of so many things that eight of us now. Uh, it's, you know, in some ways we're just talking a lot more to do. >>Yeah. And it's a really good time. A lot more wave of developers coming in. One of the things that we've been reporting on on Silicon England cube with our cute videos is more developers keep on coming on, more people coming in and contributing to the open source community. Even end users, not just the normal awesome hyper scholars you're talking about like classic, I call main street enterprises. So two things I want to ask you on the customer side because you have kind of to customers, you have the community that open source community and you have enterprise customers that want to make it easier. What are you seeing and hearing from customers? I know you guys work backwards from the customer. So I got to ask you work backwards from the community and work backwards from the enterprise customer. What's going on in their environment? What's the key trends that they're riding? What's the big challenges? What's the big opportunities that they're facing and saying for the community? >>Yeah, I start with the enterprise. That's almost an easier answer. Which is, you know, we're seeing increasingly enterprises moving into the cloud wholesale. Like in some ways you could argue that the pandemic has just accelerated it, but we have started seeing that before. Uh they want to move to the cloud and adult modern best practices. Uh If you see my talk agreement last few years, I've talked about modernization and all the aspects of modernization, and that's 90% of our conversation with enterprises, I've walked into a meeting supposedly to talk about containers, whatever half a conversation is spent on. How does an organization modernize? What does an organization need to do to modernize and containers and serverless play a pretty important part in it, because it gives them an opportunity to step away from the shackles of sort of fixed infrastructure and the methods and approaches that built in. But equally, we are talking about C I C. D, you know, fully automated deployments. What does it mean for developers to run their own services? What are the child, how do you monitor and uh, instrument uh, your services? How do you do observe ability in the modern world? So those are the challenges that enterprises are going towards, and you're spending a ton of time helping them there. But many of them are still running infrastructure on premises. So, you know, we have outpost for them. Uh, you know, just last week, you're talking to a bunch of our customers and they have lots of interesting ideas and things that they want to do without both, but many of them also have their own infrastructure and that's where something like UCS anywhere came from, which is hey, you like using Pcs in the cloud, You like having the safety i that just orchestrates containers for you. It does it on on his in an AWS region. It will do it in an outpost. It'll do it on wavelength, it'll do it on local zone. How about we allow you to do it on whatever infrastructure you bring to us. Uh you want to bring a raspberry pi, you can do that. You want to bring your on premises data center infrastructure, we can do that or a point of sale device, as long as you can get the agent running and you can connect to an AWS region, even though it's okay to lose connectivity every now and then. We can orchestrate a container for you over there and, you know, the same customer that likes the ease of use of Vcs. And the simplicity really resonated with that message really resonates with them. So I think where we are today with the enterprise is we've got some really good solutions for you in eight of us and we are now allowing you to take those a. P. I. S and then launch containers wherever you want to run them, whether it's the edge or whether it's your own data center. I think that's a big part of where the enterprise is going. But by and large, I think yes, a lot of them are still making that change from running infrastructure and applications the way they used to do a modern sort of, if you want to use the word cloud native way and we're helping them a lot. We've done, the community is interesting. They want to be more participatory. Uh that's where things like co pilot comes from. God, honestly, the best thing we've ever done in my order is probably are open road maps where the community can go into the road map and engage with us over there, whether it's an open source project or just trying to tell us what the feature is and how they would like to see it. It's a great engagement and you know, it's not us a lot. It's helped us prioritize correctly and think about what we want to do next. So yeah, I think that's, that >>must be very hard to do for opening up the kimono on the road map because normally that's the crown jewels and its secretive and you know, and um, now it's all out in the open. I think that is a really interesting, um, experiment and what's your reaction to that? What's been the feedback on the road map peace? Because I mean, I definitely want to see, uh, >>we do it pretty much for every service in my organization and we've been doing it now for three years. So years forget, I think about three years and it's been great. Now we are very we are very upfront, which is security and availability. Our job 000 and you know, 100 times out of 100 at altitudes between a new feature and helping our customers be available and safe. We'll do that. And this is why we don't put dates in that we just tell you directionally where we are and what we are prioritizing Uh, there every now and then we'll put something in there that, you know, well not choose not to put a feature in there because we want to keep it secret until it launches. But for the most part, 99% of our own myself there and people engaged with it. And it's not proven to be a problem because you've also been very responsible with how we manage and be very transparent on whether we can commit to something or not. And I think that's not. >>I gotta ask you on as a leader uh threaded leader on this group. Open source is super important, as you know, and you continue to do it from under years. How are you investing in the future? What's your plan? Uh plans for your team, the industry actually very inclusive, Which is very cool. It's gonna resonate well, what's the plans? Give us some details on what you're investing in, what your priorities? What's your first principles? >>Yeah, So it goes in many ways, one when I I also have the luxury also on the amazon open source program office. So, you know, I get the chance to my team, rather not me help amazon engineers participate in open source. That that's the team that helps create the tools for them, makes it easy for them to contribute, creates, you know, manages all the licenses, etcetera. I'll give you a simple example, you know, in there, just think of the cr credential helper that was written by one of our engineers and he kind of distorted because he felt it was something that we needed to do. And we made it open source in general, in in many of our teams. The first question we asked is should something the open why is this thing not open source, especially if it's a utility or some piece of software that runs along with services. So they'll step one. But we've done some big things also, I, you know, a couple of years ago we launched Lennox operating system called bottle Rocket. And right from the beginning it was very clear to us that bottle Rocket was two things. It was both in AWS product. But first it was an open source project. We've already learned a little bit from what we've done at Firecracker. But making bottle rocket and open source operating system is very important. Anyone can take part of Rocket the open source to build tooling. You can run it whatever you want. If you want to take part of Rocket and build a version and manage it for another provider. For another provider wants to do it, go for it. There's nothing stopping you from doing that. So you'll see us do a lot there. Obviously there's multiple areas. You've seen WS investing on the open source side. But to me, the winds come from when engineers can participate in small things, released little helpers or get contributions from outside. I think that's where we're still, we can always have that. We're going to continue to strive to make it better and easier. And uh, you know, I said, I have, you know, me and my team, we have an opportunity to help their inside the company and we continue to do so. But that's what gets me excited. >>Yeah, that's great stuff. And congratulations on investing in the community, really enjoys it and I know it moves the needle for the industry. Deepak, I gotta ask you why I got you here. Dr khan obviously, developers, what's the most important story that they should be paying attention to as a developer because of what's going on shift left for security day two operations also known as a I ops getups, whatever you wanna call it, you know, ongoing, you get server lists, you got land. I mean, all kinds of great things are going on. You mentioned Fargate, >>um >>what should they be paying attention to that's going to really help their life, both innovation wise and just the quality of life. >>Yeah, I would say look at, you know, in the end it is very easy developers in particular, I want to build the buildings and it's very easy to get tempted to try and get learn everything about something. You have access to all the bells and whistles and knobs, but in reality, if you want to run things you want to, you want to focus on what's important, the business application, that and you the application. And I think a lot of what I'll tell developers and I think it's a lot of where the industry is going is we have built a really solid foundation, whether it's humanity, so you CSN forget or you know, continue industries out there. We have very solid foundation that, you know, our customers and develop a goal of the world can use to build upon. But increasingly, and you know, they are going to provide tools that sort of take that wrap them up and providing a nice package solution After another great example, our collaboration, the doctor around Dr desktop are a great example where we get all the mark focus on the application and build on top of that and you can get so much done. I think that's one trend. You'll see more and more. Those things are no longer toys, their production grade systems that you can build real world applications on, even though they're so easy to use. The second thing I would add to that is uh, get uh, it is, you know, you can give it whatever name you want. There's uh, there's nuances there, but I actually think get up is the way people should be running the infrastructure, my virus in my personal, you know, it's something that we believe a lot in homicide as hard as you go towards immutable infrastructure, infrastructure, automation, we can get off plays a significant role. I think developers naturally gravitate towards it. And if you want to live in a world where development and operations are tightly linked, I think it after the huge role to play in that it's actually a big part of how we're planning to do things like yes, anywhere, for example, a significant player and that it would be a proton. I think get up will be a significant in the future of proton as well. So I think that's the other trend. If you wanted to pick a trend that people should pay attention. That's what I believe in a lot. >>Well you're an expert. So I want to get you a quick definition. What is get Ops, how would you define it? Because that's a big trend. What does it, what does that mean? >>Electricity will probably shoot me for getting this wrong. I tell you how I think about it. Which is, you know, in many cases, um, you when you're doing deployments are pushing a deployment getups is more of a full deployment. When you are pushing code to get depository, you have a system that knows that the event has happened and then pulls from there and triggers the thing as opposed to you telling it take I have this new piece of code now go deployed everywhere. So to me, the biggest changes that Two parts one is it's more for full mechanism where you're pulling because something has changed. So it needs systems like container orchestrators to keep them, you know, to keep them in sync. And the second part of the natural natural evolution of infrastructure score, which is basically everything is called the figures code. Infrastructure as code, code is code and everything is getting stored in that software repo and the software repo becomes your store of record and drives everything. Uh So for a glass of customers, that's going to be a pretty big deal. >>Yeah, when you're checking in code, that's again, it's like a compiler for the compiler, a container for the container, you've got things for each other. Automation is ultimately what we're talking about here. And that's to me where machine learning kicks in. So again, having this open source foundational fabric, as you said, forget out the muck or the undifferentiated heavy lifting. This is what we're talking about automation, isn't it? Deepak? >>Yes. I mean I said uh one thing where we hang our hat on is there's such good stuff out there in the world which we like to contribute to, but the thing we like to hang our hat on is how do you run this? How do you do it this in ways that you can uniquely bring capabilities to customers where there's things like nitro or things are nitro open stuff. Well, the fact that we have built up this operational infrastructure over the last in a decade plus or in the container space over the last seven years where we really really know how to run these things at scale and have made all the investments to make it easy to do. So that's that's where we have hanger hard keeping people safe, helping them only available applications, their new startup, that just completely takes off in over the weekend. For whatever reason, because, you know, you're the next hot thing on twitter and our goal is to support you whether you are, you know, uh enterprise that's moving from the main train or you are the next hot startup, that's you know, growing virally and uh, you know, we've done a lot to build systems help both sides and yeah, it's >>interesting if you sing about open source where it's come from, I mean I remember that base wouldn't open source wasn't open, I would be peddling software, there's a free copy of Linux, UNIX um in college and now it's all free. But I mean just what's changed now. It used to be just free software, download software. You got it now, it's a service. Service now can be monetized quickly. And what you guys are offering with AWS and cloud scale is you've done all these things as I don't have to have a developer. I get the benefits of the scale, I can bring my open source code to the table, make it a service integrated in with other services and be the next snowflake, be the next, you know, a company that could scale. And that is that's the that's the innovation, right? That's the this is a new phenomenon. So it also changes the business model. >>Yeah, actually you're you're quite right. Actually, I I like one more thing to it. But you look at how a lot of enterprises use containers today. Most of them are using something like this year, Symphony or GS to build an internal developer platform and internal developer portal. And then the question then becomes this hard to scale this modern and development practices to an entire organization. What is your big bank that's been around as thousands and thousands of ID stuff That may not all be experts are running communities running container is when you scale it out different systems that proton come into play. That was actually the inspiration is how do you help an organization where they're building these developer Portholes and developer infrastructure, developer platforms, How do you make it easy for them to build it? Be almost use it as a way to get these modern practices into the hands of all the business units, where they may not have the time to become experts at the modern ways of running infrastructure because they're busy doing other things. And I think you'll see the a lot more happening that space that's not happening in the open source community. There's proton, there's a bunch of interesting things happening here and be interesting to see how that evolves. >>And also, you know, the communal, communal aspect of not just writing code together, but succeeding, right, building something. I mean, that's when you start to see the commercial meets open kind of ethos of communal activity of working together and sharing a big part of this year's. Dakar Con is sharing not just running and shipping code but sharing. >>Yeah, I mean if you think about it uh Dockers original value was you build run and shit right? You use the same code to build it, you use the same code to ship it, the same sort of infrastructure interface and then you run it and that, you know, the fact that the doctor images such a wonderfully shareable entity uh that can run every girl is such a powerful and it's called the Ci Image. Now I still call him Dr images because it's just easier. But that to me like that is a big deal and I think it's becoming and become an even bigger deal over the years. I came from something before, Amazon has to work in The sciences and bioinformatics and you know, the ability to share codeshare dependencies, package all of that up in a container image is a big deal. It's what got me one of the reasons I got fascinated with container 78 years ago. So it will be interesting to see where all of systems. >>It's great, great stuff. Great success. And congratulations. Deepak, Great to always talk to you got a great finger on the pulse. You lead a really important organizations at AWS and you know, doctor has such a huge success with developers, even though the company has gone through kind of a uh change over and a pivot to what they're doing now. They're back to their open source roots, but they have millions and millions of developers use Docker and new developers are coming in dot net developers are coming in. Windows developers are coming in and and so it's no longer about Lennox anymore. It's about just coding. >>Yeah. And it's it's part of this big trend towards infrastructure, automation and and you know development and deployment practices that I think everyone is going to adopt faster than we think they will. But you know, companies like Doctor and opens those projects that they involved are critical in making that a lot easier for them. And then you know, folks like us get to build on top of that orbit them and make it even easier. >>Well, great testimony the doctor that you guys based your E C. S on Docker Doctor has a critical role in developing community. I run composed in their hub with dr desktop and we'll be watching amazon and and the community activity and see what kind of experiences you guys can bring to the table and continue that momentum. Thank you Deepak for coming on the >>cube. Thank you, john. That's always a pleasure. >>Okay. Mr cubes. Dr khan 2021 virtual coverage. I'm john for your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From the CUBE Studios in Palo Alto, in Boston. Connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hi, everybody. Welcome to the special Cube Conversation. With COVID-19 hitting, organizations really had to focus on business resiliency, and we've got two great guests here to talk about that topic. Bob Bender's the chief technology officer at Founders Federal Credit Union. And he's joined by Jim Shook, who is the director of cybersecurity and compliance practice at Dell Technologies. Gentlemen, thanks for coming on the CUBE, great to see you. >> Thanks, Dave, great to see you, thank you. So, Bob, let's start with you, give us a little bit of background on Founders and your role. >> Founders Federal Credit Union is a financial institution that has about 225,000 members, serving them in 30 different locations, located in the Carolinas. I serve as chief technology officer bringing in the latest technology and cyber resilient direction for the company. >> Great. And Jim, talk about your role. Is this a new role that was precipitated by COVID or was this something that Dell has had for a while? Certainly relevant. >> It's actually been around for a while, Dave. The organization invested in this space going back about five years, I founded the cyber security and compliance practice. So really, my role is most of the time in the field with our customers, helping them to understand and solve their issues around the cyber resilience and cyber recovery field that we're talking about. But I also, to do that properly, spend a lot of time with organizations that are interested in that space. So it could be with an advisory partner, could be the FBI, might be a regulator, a particular group like Sheltered Harbor that we've worked with frequently. So it's just really, as you point out, taken off first with ransomware a couple of years ago, and then with the recent challenges from work from home in COVID. So we're really helping out a lot of our customers right now. >> Bob, I've talked privately to a number of CIOs and CSOs and many have said to me that when COVID hit that their business continuance was really much too (voice cuts out) Now, you guys actually started your journey way back in 2017. I wonder if you could take us back a few years and what were the trends that you were seeing that precipitated you to go on this journey? >> Well, I think we actually saw the malware, the horizon there. And I'll take you back a little further 'cause I just love that story is, when we looked at the relationship of Dell EMC, we talked to the 1% of the 1%, who is protecting their environment, their data capital, the new critical asset in our environment. And Dell EMC was the top of the line every time. When we looked at the environment and what it required, to put our assets under protection, again, we turned to Dell EMC and said, where do we need to go here? You look at this Mecklenburg County, you look at the city of Atlanta, you look at Boeing and I hate to use the examples, but some very large companies, some really experienced companies were susceptible to this malware attacks that we just knew ourself it was going to change us. So the horizon was moving fast and we had to as well. >> Well, you were in a highly regulated industry as well. How did that factor into the move? Well, you're exactly right. We had on our budget, our capital budget horizon, to do an air gap solution. We were looking at that. So the regulatory requirements were requiring that, the auditors were in every day talking about that. And we just kept framing that in what we were going to do in that environment. We wanted to make sure as we did this purpose built data bunker, that we looked at everything, talk to the experts, whether that was federal state regulation. You mentioned Sheltered Harbor, there's GDPR. All these things are changing how are we going to be able to sustain a forward look as we stand this environment up. And we also stood up a cyber security operations center. So we felt very confident in our Runbooks, in our incident response, that you would think that we would be ready to execute. I'll share with you that we reached out every which way and a friend called me and was actually in a live ransomware event and asked if I wanted to come on to their site to help them through that incident. We had some expertise on our staff that they did not possess at that time. So going into that environment, spending 30 hours of the last 72 hours of an attack we came back changed. We came back changed and went to our board and our executives and said, "We thought we knew what we were doing." But when you see the need to change from one to 10 servers recovery to 300 in 72 hours, we just realized that we had to change our plan. We turned to the investment we had already made and what we had looked at for some time, and said, "Dell EMC, we're ready to look at that "PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution. "How can you stand this up very quickly?" >> So, Jim, Bob was saying that he looked at the 1% of the 1%, so these guys are early adopters, but anything you can add to that discussion in terms of what you saw precipitate the activity, let's go pre-COVID, certainly ransomware was part of that. Was that the big catalyst that you saw? >> It really was. So when we started the practice, it was following up on the Sony Pictures attack, which only hit Sony in that. But it was unique in that it was trying to destroy an organization as opposed to just steal their data. So we had financial industry really leading the way, the regulators in the financial industry saying, "Gosh, these attacks could happen here "and they would be devastating." So they led the way. And as our practice continued, 2016 became the year of ransomware and became more prevalent, with the attackers getting more sophisticated and being able to monetize their efforts more completely with things like cryptocurrencies. And so as we come around and start talking to Bob, he still was well ahead of the game. People were talking about these issues, starting to grow concerned, but didn't really understand what to do. And Dave, I know we'll get to this a little bit later, but even today, there's quite a bit of disconnect, many times between the business, understanding the risks of the business and then the technology, which really is the business now, but making those pieces fit together and understanding where you need to improve to secure against these risks is a difficult process. >> Well, I think I'd love to come back to Bob and try to understand how you pitch this to the board, if you will, how you made the business case. To Jim's point, the adversaries are highly capable. It's a lucrative business. I always talk to my kids about ROI numerator and denominator. If you can raise the denominator, that's going to lower the value. And that's the business that you're in is making it less attractive for the bad guys. But how did you present this to the board? Was it a board level discussion? >> It was, exactly. We brought Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution to them and said, not only you're experiencing and seeing in the news daily, these attacks in our regions, but we have actually gone out into an environment and watch that attack play out. Not only that is when we stepped away, and we ran through some tabletops with them and we stepped away. And we said, "Are you okay? "Do you know how it got in? "Are you prepared to protect now and detect that again?" Within 30 days, they were hit again by the same ransomware attacks and hackers. So I hate to say this, but I probably fast forwarded on the business case and in the environment, the horizon around me, players, they made my case for me. So I really appreciated that top down approach. The board invested, the executive invested, they understood what was at risk. They understood that you don't have weeks to recover in the financial institution. You're dealing with hundreds of thousand transactions per second so it made my case. We had studied, we had talked to the experts. We knew what we wanted. We went to Dell EMC and said, "I have six months and here's my spend." And that's from equipment hitting our CoLOS and our data centers, standing it up, standing up the Runbooks and it's fully executed. And I wanted an environment that was not only holistic. We built it out to cover all of our data and that I could stand up the data center within that environment. I didn't need another backup solution. I needed a cyber recovery environment, a lifestyle change, if you would say. It's got to be different than your BCP/DR. While it inherits some of those relationships, we fund it with employees separately. We treated the incident response separately, and it is really benefited. And I think we've really grown. And we continue to stress that to educate ourselves not only at the board level, but a bottom up approach as well with the employees. 'cause they're a part of that human firewall as well. >> I think you've seen this where a lot of organizations, they do a checkbox on backup or as I was saying before, DR. But then in this world of digital, when a problem hits, it's like, "Oh-oh, we're not ready." So I wonder Jim, if we can get into this solution that Bob has been talking about the Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery solution, there's a mouthful there. You got the power branding going on. What is that all about? Talk to us about the tech that's behind this. >> It's something that we've developed over time and really added to in our capability. So at its core, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery is going to protect your most critical data and applications so that if there is a cyber attack, a ransomware or destructive attack, they're safe from that attack. And you can take that data and recover the most important components of the business. And to do that, we do a number of things, Dave. The solution itself takes care of all these things. But number one is we isolate the data so that you can't get there from here. If you're a bad actor, even an insider, you can't get to the data because of how we've architected. And so we'll use that to update the critical applications and data. Then we'll lock that data down. People will use terms like immutability or retention lock. So we'll lock it down in that isolated environment, and then we'll analyze it. So it's one thing to be able to protect the data with the solution, it's another, to be able to say that what I have here in my data vault, in my air gapped isolated environment is clean. It's good data. And if there was an attack, I can use that to recover. And then of course over time, we've built out all the capabilities. We've made it easier to deploy, easier to manage. We have very sophisticated services for organizations that need them. And then we can do a much lighter touch for organizations that have a lot of their built in capabilities. At its core, it's a recover capability so that if there was an attack that was unfortunately successful, you don't lose your business. You're not at the mercy of the criminals to pay the ransom. You have this data and you can recover it. >> So Bob, talk to us about your objectives going into this. It's more than a project. It really is a transformation of your resiliency infrastructure, I'll call it. What were your objectives going in? A lot of companies are reacting, and it's like, you don't have time to really think. So what are the objectives? How long did it take? Paint a picture of the project and what it looked like, some of the high level milestones that you were able to achieve. >> Well, I think several times Dell EMC was able to talk us off the edge, where it really got complicated. The Foundation Services is just one of your more difficult conversations, one of the top three, definitely, patch management, notification, and how you're going to rehydrate that data, keeping that window very small to reduce that risk almost completely as you move. I think other area this apply is that we really wanted to understand our data. And I think we're on a road to achieving that. It was important that if we were going to put it into the vault, it had a purpose. And if we weren't going to put it in a vault, let's see why would we choose to do that? Why would we have this data? Why would we have this laying around? Because that's a story of our members, 225 stories. So their ability to move into financial security, that story is now ours to protect. Not only do we want to serve you in the services and the industry and make sure you achieve what you're trying to, but now we have that story about you that we have to protect just as passionately. And we had that. I think that was two of the biggest things. I think the third is that we wanted to make sure we could be successful moving forward. And I'll share with you that in the history of the credit union, we achieved one of the biggest projects here, in the last two years. That umbrella of the Cyber Recovery solution protection was immediate. We plugged in a significant project of our data capital and it's automatically covered. So I take that out of the vendor of responsibility, which is very difficult to validate, to hold accountable sometimes. And it comes back under our control into this purpose built data security and cyber resilient, business strategy. That's a business strategy for us is to maintain that presence. So everything new, we feel that we're sized, there's not going to be a rip and replace, a huge architectural change because we did have this as an objective at the very beginning. >> Tim, when you go into a project like this, what do you tell customers in terms of things that they really should be focused on to have a successful outcome? >> I'm going to say first that not everybody has a Bob Bender. So we have a lot of these conversations where we have to really start from the beginning and work through it with our customers. If you approach this the right way, it's really about the business. So what are the key processes for your business? It can be different from a bank than from a hospital than from a school point. So what are the key things that you do? And then what's the tech that supports that and underlies those processes? That's what we want to get into the vault. So we'll have those conversations early on. I think we have to help a lot of organizations through the risks too. So understand the risk landscape, why doing one or two little things aren't really going to protect you from the full spectrum of attackers. And then the third piece really is, where do we start? How do we get moving on this process? How do we get victory so that the board can understand and the business can understand, and we can continue to progress along the way? So it's always a bit of a journey, but getting that first step and getting some understanding there on the threat landscape, along with why we're doing this is very important. >> So, Bob, what about any speed bumps that you encountered? What were some of those? No project is ever perfect. What'd you run into? How'd you deal with it? >> Well, I would say the Foundation Services were major part of our time. So it really helped for Dell EMC to come and explain to us and look at that perimeter and how our data is brought into that and size that for us and make sure it's sustainable. So that is definitely, could be a speed bump that we had to overcome. But today, because of those lifts, those efforts invested the Runbooks, the increase in new products, new data as our business organically grows is a non-event. It's very plug and play and that's what we wanted from the start. Again, you go back to that conversation at 1% of the 1%, it's saying, who protects you? We followed that. We stayed with the partner we trusted, the horizon holistically has come back and paid for itself again and again. So speed bumps, we're just enjoying that we were early adapters. I don't want to throw anybody out there, but you look about two weeks ago, there was a major announcement about an attack that was successful. They got them with ransomware and the company paid the ransom. But it wasn't for the ransomware, it was for the data they stole so that they would delete it. That's again, why we wanted this environment is we needed time to react in the case that these malwares are growing much faster than we're capable of understanding how they're attacking. Now it's one, two punch, where's it going to be? Where is it going to end? We're not going to likely be patient zero, but we're also not going to have to be up at night worrying that there's a new strain out there. We have a little time now that we have this secure environment that we know has that air gap solution that was built with the regulatory consideration, with the legal considerations, with the data capital, with the review of malware and such. You can go back in time and say, "Scan to see if I have a problem. So again, the partnership is while we focus on our business, they're focusing on the strategy for the future. And that's what we need. We can't be in both places at once. >> How long did the project take from the point of which you agreed, signed the contract to where you felt like you were getting value out of the solution? >> Six months. >> Really? >> We were adamant. I'd put it off for a year and a half, that's two budget cycles basically is what it felt. And then I had to come back and ask for that money back because we felt so passionate that our data, our critical data didn't need to be at that risk any longer. So it was a very tight timeline. And again, product on prem within six months. And it was a lot of things going on there. So I just wasn't idle during that time. I was having a conversation with Dell EMC about our relationship and our contracts. Let's build that cyber resilience into the contract. Now we've got this, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery environment, let's build it here where you also agree to bring on extra hardware or product if I need that. Let's talk about me being on a technology advisory panel So I can tell you where the pricing of the regulations are going, so you can start to build that in. Let's talk about the executive board reporting of your products and how that can enable us. We're not just talking about cyber and protecting your data. We're talking about back then 60% of your keep the lights on IT person will spend with auditors, talking about how we were failing. This product helped us get ahead of that to now where we're data analytic. We're just analysts that can come back to the business table and say, "We can stand that up very quickly." Not only because of the hardware and the platform solution we have, but it is now covered with a cyber resilience of the the cyber security recovery platform. >> I want to ask you about analytics. Do you feel as though you've been able to go from what is generally viewed as a reactive mode into something that is more anticipatory or proactive using analytics? >> Well, I definitely do. We pull analytics daily and sometimes hourly to make sure we're achieving our KPIs. And looking at the KRIs, we do risk assessments from the industry to make sure if our controls layer of defenses are there, that they will still work what we stood up three years ago. So I definitely think we've gone from an ad hoc rip and replace approach to transformation into a more of a threat hunting type of approach. So our cyber security operation center, for us, is very advanced and is always looking for opportunities not only to improve, to do self-assessments, but we're very active. We're monetizing that with a CUSO arm of the credit union to go out and help others where we're successful, others that may not have that staff. It's very rewarding for us. And I hate to say it sometimes it's at their expense of being in-evolved in the event of a ransomware attack or a malware event. We learned so much the gaps we have, that we could take this back, create Runbooks and make the industry stronger against these types of attacks. >> Well, so Jim, you said earlier, not every company has a Bob Bender. How common is it that you're able to see customers go from that reactive mode into one that is proactive? Is that rare or is it increasingly common? It can't be a 100%, but what are you seeing as trends? >> It's more common now. You think of, again, back to Bob, that's three plus years ago, and he's been a tireless supporter and tireless worker in his industry and in his community, in the cyber area. And efforts like those of Bob's have helped so many other organizations I think, understand the risks and take further action. I think too, Bob talks about some of the challenges with getting started in that three year timeframe, PowerProtect Cyber Recovery has become more productized, our practice is more mature. We have more people, more help. We're still doing things out there that nobody else is touching. And so we've made it easier for organizations that have an interest in this area, to deploy and deploy quickly and to get quick value from their projects. So I think between that some of the ease of use, and then also there's more understanding, I think, of what the bad actors can do and those threats. This isn't about somebody maybe having an outage for a couple of hours. This is about the very existence of a business being threatened. That if you're attacked, you might not come back from it. And there've been some significant example that you might lose hundreds of millions of dollars. So as that awareness has grown, more and more people have come on board and been able to leverage learnings from people like Bob who started much earlier. >> Well, I can see the CFO saying, "Okay, I get it. "I have no choice where we're going to be attacked. "We know that, I got to buy the insurance. You got me." But I can see the CFO saying, "Is there any way we can "get additional value out of this? "Can we use it to improve our processes and cut our costs? "Can we monetize this in some way?" Bob, what's the reality there? Are you able to find other sources of value beyond just an insurance policy? >> Definitely, Dave you're exactly right. We're able to go out there and take these Runbooks and really start to educate what cyber resilience means and what air gap means, what are you required to do, and then what is your responsibility to do it. When you take these exercises that are offered and you go through them, and then you change that perspective and go through a live event with other folks that see that after 60 hours of folks being up straight, it really changes your view to understand that there's no finish line here. We're always going to be trying to improve the product and why not pick somebody that you're comfortable with and you trust. And I think that's the biggest win we have from this is that was a Dell EMC partnership with us. It is very comfortable fit. We moved from backup and recovery into cyber resilience and cybersecurity as a business strategy with that partner, with our partner Dell, and it hasn't failed us. It's a very comforting. We're talking about quality of life for the employee. You hear that, keep the lights on. And they've really turned into professionals to really understand what security means differently today and what that quality of data is. Reports, aren't just reports, they're data capital. The new currency today of the value we bring. So how are we going to use that? How are we going to monetize that? It's changing. And then I hate to jump ahead, but we had our perimeters at 1% of our workforce remote and all of a sudden COVID-19 takes on a different challenge. We thought we were doing really good and next, we had to move 50% of our employees out in five days. And because of that Dell EMC, holistic approach, we were protected every step of the way. We didn't lose any time saying, we bought the wrong control, the wrong hardware, the wrong software. It was a very comfortable approach. The Runbooks held us, our security posture stayed solid. It's been a very rewarding. >> Well, Bob, that was my next question, actually is because you've started the journey. >> Sorry. >> No, no, it's okay. Because you started the journey early, were you able to respond to COVID in a more fast sell manner? it sounds like you just went right in. But there's nuance there, because you've got now 50% or more of the workforce working at home, you got endpoint security to worry about. You got identity access management, and it sounds like you were, "No problem. "We've got this covered." Am I getting that right? >> You're exactly right, Dave. We test our endpoints daily. We make sure that we understand what residue of data is where. And when we saw that employee shift to a safe environment, our most consideration at that time, we felt very comfortable that the controls we had in place, again, Dell and their business partners who we are going to hold true and be solid. And we test those metrics daily. I get reports back telling me, what's missing in patch management, what's missing in a backup. I'll go back to keeping BCP and cyber security separate. In the vault, we take approach of recovery and systems daily. And now that goes from maybe a 2% testing rate almost to 100% annually. So again, to your point, COVID was a real setback. We just executed the same Runbooks we had been maturing all along. So it was very comfortable for employees and it was very comfortable for our IT structure. We did not feel any service delays or outages because of that. In a day, when you have to produce that data, secure that data, every minute of every day of every year, it's very comforting to know it's going to happen. You don't push that button and nothing happens. It's executed as planned. >> Jim, did you see a huge spike in demand for your services as a result of COVID and how did you handle it? You guys got a zillion customers, how did you respond and make sure that you were taking care of everybody? >> We really did see a big spike, Dave. I think there were a couple of things going on. As Bob points out, the security posture changes very quickly when you're sending people to work from home or people remotely, you've expanded or obliterated your parameter, you're not ready for it. And so security becomes even more important and more top of mind. So with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery, we can go in and we can protect those most critical applications. So organizations are really looking at their full security posture. What can we do better to detect and protect against these threats? And that's really important. For us, we're focusing on what happens when those fail? And with that extension and people going home, and then the threat actors getting even more active, the possibilities of those failures become more possible and the risks are just in front of everybody. So I think it was a combination of all of those things. Many, many customers came to us very quickly and said, "Tell us more about what you're doing here. "How does it fit into our infrastructure? "What does it protect us against? "How quickly can we deploy?" And so there has been a huge uptake in interest. And we're fortunate in that, as you pointed out early on, Dave, we invested early here. I'm five years into the practice. We've got a lot of people, very mature, very sophisticated in this area, a lot of passion among our team. And we can go take care of all those customers. >> Bob, if you had a mulligan, thinking about this project, what would you do differently if you had a chance to do it over? >> I think I would start earlier. I think that was probably the biggest thing I regret in that realizing you need to understand that you may not have the time you think you do. And luckily, we came to our senses, we executed and I got to say it was with common sense, comfortable products that we already understood. We didn't have to learn a whole new game plan. I don't worry about that. I don't worry about the sizing of the product 'cause we did it, I feel correctly going in and it fits us as we move forward. And we're growing at an increased rate that we may not expect. It's plug and play. Again, I would just say, stay involved, get involved, know that what we know today about malware and these attacks are only going to get more complicated. And that's where I need to spend my time, my group become experts there. Why I really cherish the Dell EMC relationship is from the very beginning, they've always been very passionate on delivering products that recover and protect and now are cyber resilient. I don't have to challenge that, you pay for what you get for. And I just got to say, I don't think there's much other than I would have started earlier. So start today, don't put it off. >> So you said earlier though, you're never done, you never are, in this industry. So what's your roadmap look like? Where do you want to go from here with this capability? >> I definitely want to keep educating my staff, keep training them, keep working with Dell. Again, I tell you they're such forward thinking as a company. They saved me that investment. So if you're looking at part of the investment, it's got to be, are you with a partner that's forward thinking? So we definitely want to mature this, challenge it, keep challenging, keep working with Dell and their products to deliver more. Again, we go to the federal and state regulatory requirements. You go to the Sheltered Harbor, the ACET testing from the NCUA regulators, just software asset management. You can keep on going down the line. This product, I hate to say it, it's like the iPhone. You think about how many products the iPhone has now made not relevant. I don't even own a flashlight, I don't think. This is what the Dell product line brings to me is that I can trust they're going to keep me relevant so I can stay at the business table and design products that help our members today. >> Jim, how about from Dell's perspective, the roadmap, without giving away any confidential information, where do you want to take this? We talk about air gaps. I remember watching that documentary Zero Days and hearing them say, "We got through an air gap. "No problem." So analytics obviously plays a role in this machine intelligence, machine learning, AI. Where does Dell want to take this capability? Where do you see that going? >> We've got some things in mind and then we're always going to listen to our customers and see where the regulations are going to. And thus far, we've been ahead of those with the help of people like Bob. I think where we have a huge advantage, Dave is with PowerProtect Cyber Recovery. It's a product. So we've got people who are dedicated to this full time. We have a maturity in the organization, in the field to deliver it and to service it. And having something as a product like that really enables us to have roadmaps and support and things that customers need to really make this effective for them. So as we look out on the product, and thanks for your reminder, I don't want to risk saying anything here I'm going to get in trouble for. We look at things in three paths. One is we want to increase the ability for our customers to consume the product. So they want it in different forms. They might want it in appliances, in the Cloud, virtual, all of those things are things that we've developed and continue to develop. They want more capabilities. So they want the product to do more things. They want it to be more secure, and keeping up. As you mentioned, machine learning with the analytics is a big key for us. Even more mundane things like operational information makes it easier to keep the vault secure and understand what's going on there without having to get into it all the time. So those are really valuable. And then our third point, really, we can't do everything. And so we have great partners, whether they're doing delivery, offering cyber recovery as a service or providing secure capabilities, like our relationship with Unisys. They have a stealth product that is a zero knowledge, zero trust product that helps us to secure some of the connections to the vault. We'll keep iterating on all of those things and being innovative in this space, working with the regulators, doing things. Bob's mentioned a couple of times, Sheltered Harbor. We've been working with them for two years to have our product endorsed to their specification. Something that nobody else is even touching. So we'll continue along all those paths, but really following our customer's lead in addition to maybe going some places that they haven't thought about before. >> It's great guys. I have to fear that when you talk to SecOps pros, you ask them what their biggest challenge is, and they'll say lack of talent, lack of skills. And so this is a great example, Jim, you're mentioning it, you've productized this. This is a great example of a technology company translating, IT labor costs into R&D. And removing those so customers can spend time running their business. Bob and Jim, thanks so much for coming on the CUBE. Great story. Really appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thank you, Dave. >> Thanks, Bob. >> All right. And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the CUBE. We'll see you next time. (instrumental music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCube with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020 special coverage sponsored by AWS Worldwide Public Sector. >> Hi, and welcome to theCube Virtual in our coverage of AWS re:Invent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by Shawn Snyder. She is the managing director at Deloitte and Cloud Migration market leader. Thanks for coming on the show Shawn. >> Thank you, Rebecca. I'm glad to be here. >> So we're talking today about cloud migration in the public sector in the COVID era, but I want to start by having you introduce yourself to our viewers tell them a little bit about what you do at Deloitte. >> Sure, I'm Shawn Snyder. I'm a managing director based out of Atlanta. I lead our cloud migration offering for our government and public sector clients. So that really means that I serve clients in the government, both public sector local government agencies, as well as federal agencies and helping them move to the cloud, and I'm also responsible for building out our capabilities, our tools, our resources, and people to help clients do that in a very fast and accelerated way. >> So even putting aside the pandemic for a second, shifting to the cloud is such a big and daunting undertaking for so many organizations, including federal agencies. How do you help CIOs and clients think through the processes and what they need to do and how they need to do it? >> Yeah, I mean, it all starts with where are they at on this journey, right? We actually have a show our clients like a typical journey to the cloud and, you know, we have a method and set of tools that we can work with them depending on where they are but if they're just in the initial stages of exploring, moving to cloud, it typically starts with a strategy and really understanding what, you know, how engaged is the mission and the agencies in supporting this. Are they really looking to continue to build their own talent? What is the end state look like? Do they want to build cloud skills and cloud engineering skills within their organization, or are they looking to do more of a managed service model? So a lot of these conversations happen and also around what platforms they want to use and then we typically look at their portfolio of applications. So it could be, you know, they're looking to move out of a data center and go more to a cloud virtual environment. It could be that they're looking to move a couple of mission critical applications that are highly complex with lots of data and sensitive information, so. It really kind of depends on what they're trying to achieve and what is the business result that they're looking to gain. >> And how do you help them think through the business case for this? Because I know that that is definitely an imperative. >> So we take a couple of, I can give you an example. So when we were working with a state in local agency, looking at a big mission critical integrated eligibility system, they wanted to be able to move because they were, the technology was getting a little dated. It was eating inflexible to maintain and when they were looking at the maintenance costs that they were spending on both the infrastructure and the application, it was starting to, you know, take up to 90% of the budget and so the lack of ability to be able to do new capabilities and new innovation when you're talking about especially post COVID, which I know we haven't gotten into, but when they're looking, there's actually more and more products and aid that's being made available. So they need more flexibility, and so what we did was we actually did a bunch of analysis around what does that technology stack look like? What's the cost drivers and then we built out what the future would look like on the, in this particular case was the AWS platform. How could they take advantage of some native services and reduce some of their licensing costs? How could they upgrade through our products? We have a seamless way to upgrade to cloud suitable operating systems. So in this case, they were on an outdated Windows and Linux platforms. We were able to update that to cloud suitable, which allowed them to, you know, save a lot of money in terms of their infrastructure costs to maintain some of that outdated infrastructure and then we get them on end state tools around security monitoring, around infrastructure monitoring and so they can really streamline some of those infrastructure costs as they are spending tremendous amount of money just on the tools when they're managing all of that on-prem, on a complex system. >> So thinking about now we are in this pandemic, which has changed everything about the way we live and the way we work, moving to the cloud was a business goal. Something that a lot of organizations sort of had, in they're two and three year, two and five-year plan. Now it is an absolute mandate. What are you seeing? What are you hearing? What are organizations saying to you now? >> There's just such a, there's such a demand for speed and doing it at scale very fast. So prior to COVID, like you said, it was a multi-year journey. We'll get to it when we can, but there were other priorities that automatic, always got in the way of that and also just the cost justification, right? When you're talking about migration and a lot of times these systems that's portfolio systems are outdated, they're not cloud suitable. So how do you have to refactor them? That can get pretty costly pretty quickly. Now our clients want to move fast and they have a virtual work workforce, they need more scale. They need more storage for some of the data. They need to be able to integrate with other partners, especially in the healthcare space, whether it's at the state and local agency level or in the federal space, that ability to create that ecosystem of being able to transmit and share data in a very secure way at a very large volume is becoming, you know, mission critical with combating COVID with being able to protect our citizens. >> Speed is the name of the game, as you're saying. So what, how is Deloitte investing in automation and what kinds of migration accelerators are you bringing to clients now? >> So a few different things. One, we are partnering with AWS, both on a professional services perspective, as well as with some programs. So we've integrated our methodologies and we've been certified by AWS for our methodology around migration acceleration program. So that's the map because of our qualifications of the amount of migrations we do globally, as well as our methodology and tool set, we're able to offer this joint map program, which allows us to team with AWS. Go on site in quickly use our tools to diagnose what applications are actually at cloud ready to move, how fast can they move? And it gives a lot of information around technical configurations, what servers they reside on, and all of basically the affinities, all of the information you would need to be able to move those applications and if it's not cloud suitable, we can detect if it, how quickly we could get it cloud suitable. What would need to be done is an application code, or is it database, or is it operating system? What are those things that need to get upgraded to move it to the cloud? And is it worth moving to the cloud? So we actually look at the business value that each of these applications are providing and saying, you know, this might be more suited to stay on-prem for now. So we work with them through this map program to really come up with that detailed migration schedule and plan and we then use that information that we collected during that diagnostic phase feeds into our migration tools. So the migration is actually automated with the information that was collected during the diagnostics and the landing zones, and all of the sizing of the infrastructures able to be sized appropriately based on the information that was collected. >> I want to ask you about innovation. In a lot of these Cube Virtual conversations that we're having, we're hearing from a lot of executives that the pandemic has been a forcing mechanism in sort of forcing people to think more resourcefully, more ingenuitively about how they solve these pressing problems. What have you experienced, and have you seen in particular examples of innovation that have been inspiring and exciting for you? >> Yes, absolutely. So I actually work in the federal health space most, and our ability to be able to stand up an application or a service, whether it's a Salesforce service, the AWS platform, but we've been able to stand up contact tracing for local agencies, for state agencies. We've been able to set up cloud native services that allow the data that's getting collected across these different organizations to be able to make meaningful information using machine learning and some of the other native services that are available within cloud and they can be stood up very quickly and very cost-effectively and I think that's the other value that cloud is unlocking for organizations and really now starting to realize that they can move towards innovation and start to spend much more money on innovation than what they were doing previously on spending most of the budget on maintenance. >> When you're talking to clients now about the future, what are they thinking? What's on their minds in this sort of this 12 to 24 month plan? Are they just thinking we just need to get through this next period and cope with this uncertainty? Or are they thinking about the future. >> Moving to cloud isn't just an infrastructure move. I think that's getting your head around what does it mean? What does your workforce have to look like? What does, how do you collaborate with the business? What are the, what is the future innovation use cases? What is going to, how do you actually start to use those use cases to demonstrate early value and start to do things much more in an agile and iterative way instead of, you know, delivering something in a, you know, several months or years. So it, it really is shifting, it's a transformation for how the office of the CIO or how they actually operate. It's creating integrated teams within the CIO organization. We're actually embedding different disciplines like engineering, infrastructure, IT operations, security operations, risk management, financial management, these disciplines as part of these, what we call DevOps DevSecOps type teams, and be able to deliver an end-to-end product on a particular platform in a very agile way. >> In thinking about the future of the workforce and how the pandemic is changing people's careers. I know that you serve as the technology campus champion at Georgia Tech, and you're very active in recruiting bright young business talent. Can you talk to our viewers a little bit about the changes that you foresee in terms of how people plan their careers and their professional development and anything in particular that Deloitte is doing to make sure that the pandemic does not have such a damaging effect, you know, from a lot of statistics that women are dropping out of the workforce in large numbers. >> Yes, so let me unpack your question a couple of ways. So, you know, first of all, you know, I'm really passionate about talent development and recruiting, and I've learned recruiting efforts at the undergrad for many, many years, and I've always been a technologist. So now, like just seeing how technology is embedded in all of the business that we do and it's so mission critical, you now, I'm very focused on making sure there's more women and more minorities going into technology oriented degrees. There's so much you can do with a technology degree and the of career careers that are available, you know, are unlimited. We can't hire enough people that have the right skills. There's just a war on talent for people that have the right security and cybersecurity skills, cloud engineering skills, and just the analytical skills. I mean, this is very complex stuff that you're trying to, you know, build stuff and create stuff that hasn't been created before. So I find it extremely fascinating and I hope that people can see the creative side of things and the scientific it's really bringing it both together and that's what I try to mentor a lot of the recruits on campus. In addition to that, so I think that there's tremendous amount of opportunity for folks going into those types of degrees, as well as for women I, you know, it's been a challenge because people are, you know, some schools aren't closed are not open. If you have a dual working family, it can be a big challenge if you're taking care of children or elderly parents, for example. So at Deloitte, we actually recently implemented a dependent care policy for folks that could take advantage of additional stipend to subsidize, you know, childcare or dependent care. So that's helped a little bit, we're also really focused on diversity inclusion. So, you know, really having candid conversations, individual conversations around what are your boundaries at work right now? Can, do you have to be off right now from, you know, dinner time till bedtime? What does that look like? And we're trying to really help people have the tools and feel comfortable about having those conversations, 'cause it's not just women, it's men, too. I mean, this, these are difficult situations that we're all, you know, co living with our spouses and our significant others and our children, and potentially, you know, extended family members and trying to work in the same environment and is very challenging, and so we're trying to create space for people to be able to have those conversations and make it work for them. >> Don't I know it's Shawn. So just in terms of thinking about the future and what is next for Deloitte, and you've just talked about how you are a technologist at heart, and you see so much excitement about bringing in different disciplines, different functions to solve these urgent and pressing problems. What do you foresee for yourself and for Deloitte over these next couple of years, as we emerge hopefully out of this crisis situation. >> I think Deloitte, you know, one reason I've stayed at Deloitte for so long is that we've always been really focused on how does the technology solve the business problem, the mission problem? And so we have a real opportunity to continue to be able to bring the IT and the technology enablement and make sure it aligns to the business strategy and so the business use cases, you know, we've invested a lot in our labs Capabilities where we're able to bring different disciplines, whether it's, you know, HR and talent thinking about workforce of the future, you know, that technology stack and the architects together, as well as the thinking about across the ecosystem, what are some of the future use cases that you're not even thinking about? So we're able to bring a lot of these different disciplines or subject matter experts together. Now I'll be in a very virtual way, but we've been able to take these lab concepts and it really helps kind of get that out of the possible defined and really strong alignment across these different constituents across the enterprise. So that is really exciting to me. I also think the investment that we're making in our cloud engineering practice, in our alliances with companies like AWS, it really gives us insight into where the technology is going and making sure our staff and our tools and our resources available to us are aligned to that more than investments are being made in the technology. >> So well Shawn thank you so much for coming on theCube Virtual. It's a pleasure having you on the show. >> Thank you very much Rebecca. >> I'm Rebecca Knight stay tuned for more of theCube Virtual's coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Yeah. Welcome to the cubes. Virtual coverage of 80 was reinvent 2020. I'm John for your host. We are the Cube virtual not there in person, but we're doing remote, as is a W s. Although there there on stage live. And we're here with Dave Brown, Vice President of the Sea, to compute. Great to see you again. Great keynote last night, kicking off everything for the opening night. Great stuff. >>Yeah, well, John, it's always good to be on the Cuban. Thanks for having me back. >>You know, you're in the hot seat these days in the sense of there's so much going on. I mean, Andy, that could do a three week announcement. Keynote. It was like in three hours of nonstop you take a break to go The bathroom. You missed two announcements, right? So, so much going on. You opened up reinvent 2020 with your announcement ec2 of mac instances. And there was a ton of compute. And the theme was really you know, reinventing and reimagining compute both. I want to get into that. But let's start with the hard news. Tell me about the Mac instances. Um, you had a great use case there, That kind of illustrated in your talk. But where is this coming from? It's obviously Mac developers are big, but is this market something that you guys saw from customers or was a necessity? Take us through the thinking around the Mac instance. Easy to for Mac instances, um are going for >>absolutely absolutely So I mean me personally Matthews, a longtime Matthews that we've often thought about. Could we ever bring Mac OS to AWS? Right This thing we've spoken about on and off for many, many years and, you know, it was about a year and a half about two years ago. You know, we're always hearing new use cases from customers, and that's kind of what we're doing. So we're saying what a customer is trying to do that we don't support today, and how would we support them in that? And we started a year from customers that they have been able to successfully migrate all of the AWS workloads to AWS. So most of the server workloads to AWS and then they've got this Mac bold workload that they just weren't able to bring to us. We just didn't support Max into. It was a great example who I had on stage with me last night where you know, they over the last couple of years have been moving Ah, lot of their workloads to AWS. And and then they had these Mac money sitting around that they had to manage themselves. And so we said, could we actually do this? And so that was the one thing the customer ask. And the other thing that we realized was with the nitro system in the work that we've been doing there over the last, you know, six years, seven years since 2012, Really? And just where we are from the From nitro system point of view, we were able to wrap a Mac money without making any changes to it with nitro cards plugging a FireWire to the thunderbolt port and and and actually control that device. And so it means that you get the best of Apple hardware, which is what Apple's all about is the hard way that they make and the way that their software works with it. together with the nitric system and the cards around that inte integrating with the rest of AWS. So we're giving you, you know, high speed secure networking. We're giving you great access to elastic block store Was just integrates natively into the magma Nias? Well, a So we realized that the technology was there, the customer asked, was there and then obviously went to Apple and worked with them very closely to make it happen. And so that's kind of how it all came together. And I was incredibly excited to announce it last night. And the feedback today has just been amazing. A lot of excitement. >>Yeah, take me through the use case because, you know, obviously there's two trends going on. There's custom chips and server list kind of thing happening where you guys, I mean, really doing a good job of the eye as layer, innovating there and then platform as a service. All that software on top. I totally get that. You could see that happening. Chips custom ships to Intel, A, M, D. And others. Now you got Mac hardware. Where's the innovation use case because one would start would say, Hey, why don't you care about whether it's Mac hardware or not. Because I'm server lists. I should be programming the infrastructure actually be getting compute generically. Where does the Mac tying come in? Because that's the first question I was thinking of was, I'm a Mac user. I love Mac, but I'm also got some windows actually going on now. And ultimately, do I really care if it's compute? What's your reaction to that? Yeah, >>absolutely. I mean, if you look at Apple's ecosystem today, right, they have millions of applications in the APP store. They have 28 million developers worldwide, actually building those applications just incredible. And many of those applications, all these millions in the In the APP store itself, there's many more applications that are both by enterprises and companies, right? We have an application that we use internally at Amazon is available on my phone. That's not in the APP store, and you know, many companies are doing that and to build applications for the ecosystem, they have to be built on Mac hardware. And that's just how Apple works, right? So if you wanna build for iPad or iPhone or even Apple TV and Apple watch, you have to build those applications on a Mac. And so what we see companies doing is, you know, the old develop a meme off. Well, it works on my computer, right when you build something, you don't wanna be bullied on your local laptop for production. So they typically have a fleet of machines that they either under somebody's desk or in a data center somewhere that they use for for building these Mac applications. And so it's not possible to build a Mac application on anything other than a Mac itself. And we when we looked at it, we really didn't feel that virtualization made sense, right? Apple? I mean, they have some some virtualization that they're able to do within Mac OS itself. But if you think about how do we solve the customer use case, it's really bringing apple hardware too easy to to solve the problem and giving customers that exactly same exact same experience that they have on prep. And if you look into it like that, models just worked right. We gave them better access. Uh, you know, they've been using that data which you normally say, Hey, don't don't run production workloads on a beta. But you know, I found out if I interview with the BPS at Intuit critique that they've actually moved 80% of their production pulled wear clothes too easy to already to run on the Mac instances. And so that, and that's in the space of two months. And so, just as seamless ability to move because it's the same hardware is kind of what we were going >>after. Great, thanks for sharing that and say, one thing I wanna point out is Mac does have their own chips as well. They're going custom chips. Amazon's going custom chips. And I think I think you nailed what I was trying to understand, which is this developer community for Mac. And there's some things that are purpose built for Mac devices. So on Mac ecosystem, get the marketplace as well as you know, that that was the hardware PCs and devices, and they're only doing more and more. So this brings me to the i o t. Um, piece of it, because Apple does make devices that people wear and I watch is, um, iPhones. I mean, they're not computers anymore. They're everything. So this kind of brings up the edge conversation. So whether it's an iPhone or a five G in a Metro or I'm a stadium watching a football game and there's some sensor camera vision industrial thing there, this is the new normal. This is where you guys are kind of eating, eating up the software side that that business, because there's new capabilities here. Can you explain how compute he's, particularly C two gets to the edges because no one wants to move data around. They wanna move, compute, not data, because data is expensive and it's and it's fat. So we we talked about that we keep on years ago, but you gotta move. Compute. So how does that work Take us through your vision? >>Absolutely. And this is This is a massively growing area for us. I mean, you mentioned Apple's new M one silicon Apple silicon that they just launched a swell, and we're super excited about Apple's been doing there. We've been doing the same thing with our grab. It's on two processor and really saving customers. An incredible amount on price performance. Tried customers moving and getting 40% improvement and price performance just by moving to grab it on too. It's just incredible. Um, in terms of the edge, you know, we started this journey. We started this journey quite some time ago and bringing, you know, Lambda functions to cloudwatch and things like that. How do we bring compute to the edge? We took a look at five G, which I think it's gonna feel a lot of this right if if we look at our cell phones today was actually just talking to the Apple team yesterday with the iPhone, only came out, you know, 13 years ago. It's kind of amazing to think just how much progress we've had and what four g did for the device that's in our pocket in terms of, you know, just how much we rely on that today and what we get. Well, five g is just a step function in both in terms of latency, but also in terms of throughput. And so, you know, one of the projects we announced last year with Verizon and we now Andy announced this morning we're also gonna be rolling out with Katy D I and SK Telecom and Vodafone next year. Um is a project always like that brings aws compute to the edge of the telco network. And so with Verizon, we now have eight locations around the U. S. Where we have AWS compute capacity. And what I mean by that is literally C five instances uh, G four GPU instances for customers that want to do influence and graphics processing on the edge. And that's embedded into the five G network on DSO customers. You know, we've got a number of customers that are doing a lot of interesting things with five G in the sports area, where they have five G cameras that are, you know, submitted directly to wavelength. We no longer need to drive a truck to a stadium to record a game. You just have five G cameras, um, to, you know, automated factories where they doing robotics in factories and yet really low latency. And they don't want the computer, the factory they wanted in five G and so just exciting area for us. That's growing really, really quickly. Thea Other thing we did is obviously with local zones. We launched our first local zones in L a X last year, Los Angeles on that's being used by the movie industry, so you know right now is a lot of exciting up and running off the covert and shut down for a period of time and filming the next release of all of our favorite episodes and across all of these various streaming platforms. And a lot of that work is actually the post production is being done on on AWS on G four instances within the Los Angeles region. So, you know, very low agency for colorization animation, special effects, all that sort of things happening there. What we heard from a lot of customers was they loved outposts as well, which is our offering to put a server into a data center. And you heard from riot games in Andy's Keynote, where they actually bought a number of outposts and put them all over the U. S. And also other places of the world to really lower the Leighton see for their latest game. And so what Andy also just announced is the availability off three additional local zones. So Atlanta, Miami and Houston Sorry, Boston Miami in Houston available today, and then additional 12 available local zones next year, and what that does is that sort of spreads AWS capacity compute capacity at the edge in all of our major metropolitan hubs all of their capacities on the AWS backbone as well, but brings customers that low latency connectivity that they're looking for. Gaming developers were, you know, every every millisecond counts in terms of gameplay on so super excited to be going after that use case, which I think, you know, it's difficult to tell what the next 10 years is gonna be like. But I think Layton's he's gonna have a big part to play in the types of applications we see on our phones going forward. >>Great stuff, final question for you as we wrap up, obviously with virtualization with virtualization. But you know, the cove it is. And he pointed out, People are gonna change, is gonna be winners and losers. He kind of clearly pointed out, But the people who do lean into the cloud who have been on the cloud or taking advantage of the tail winds of cove in because of the capabilities there are two bills air higher, and you should be happy for that. But they're also gonna have more demand for you to say, Hey, I need more services. So How do you speak to those people who are leaning in who are leveraging, more, compute? What should they be looking at? What kinds of services should be connecting into compute? How should they be thinking about the future of compute so that they can take advantage of those capabilities? The lower costs, higher performance? What things are complementary for these customers as they come in, not toe dip in the water kind of things against really driving. And what do they need? >>Yeah, absolutely. And this has been a big focus on us. You know, things has bean, as I cover in my keynote, which leadership session that I'm doing tomorrow Wednesday. You know, a lot of this year has been helping customers through covert and what covert is meant for their business. Whether that is cost savings for many of them or whether it's just demand, you know that they've never experienced are expected before. I mean, we've been incredibly hard at work in servicing those customers, right? I actually catch up with Scott Sikora. In my keynote. He leads our capacity team. We talked through what it meant and how we actually provided the capacity that our customers needed during Colbert Times. But for a customer moving to us, the first thing is obviously we wanna find ways to make them very successful in the cloud, but more importantly, lower price performance for them. So what we wanted to do is give them the best possible performance that's available at the lowest possible cost. And if you look at a number of the announcements that Andy made today, you know whether it's our latest graviton processor where you can, you know, when you move to arm. I think customers often overestimate how much work it will be to move to arm. And when I talked to them after they have moved, that's ahead. Wasn't actually that much work. We actually got it up and running relatively quickly. So what's simpler than people expect? But that's an opportunity to save 40% on price performance. You know these new newer workloads like our graphics. We just launched a new G four a D, which is an AMG based GPU solution, the first time we have had an AMG GPU on the EEC too. And that's also looking to say, if you know upwards of 40% price performance of other GPU offering so just incredibly exciting for graphics, work, clothes and then in the machine learning space. Like I think, if you know, machine learning is just become the new normal, like everybody is doing it. And you know, just three years ago, everybody was thinking about whether they should do it. How would how they would use it Now that it's a lot of companies are doing it. It's really How do you How do I use it more? And that comes down to again saving costs. And so what we know with without Inferential Chip and then the new Habbaniya chip we just announced it with with the work with Intel that we're doing and then a new trainee, um, ship for training, training. We're really working to lower the cost of machine learning. And so, like we've seen many customers like Alexa was a great use case the other day. Being able to lower the cost of inference for Alexa by 35% again just helps customers, you know, move to the cloud. But I mean, just generally, you know, we're trying to support customers everywhere where there were, you know, if there are many customers are in their own data centers looking to move to AWS. You know, we have great models that can support them with our existing compute. A new savings plan offering we announced last year just great for saving costs on getting the price down So a lot. You can look at it. You know, I could go on forever. Really. It >>Certainly it's certainly is MAWR. We'll we'll do a deeper dive follow up after reinvent, but it is a wake up call. As I wrote in my post, um, for a cloud on Finally, I've been saying this for years. Horizontal scalability is a disruption on the infrastructure side, but you've got vertical specialization with data to create great modern apse of machine learning. And I actually playing out in full display here is Andy said, um, net right now. So all this benefits and all these opportunities to disrupt horizontally and then leverage the data all tied together, all coming together. You're clear. Leading the team. Great Brown, vice president of E C. Two in charge of the team that's driving the future. Compute. Thanks for coming on The Cube Cube Live coverage. Thanks. >>Thanks for having me. >>Okay. I'm John for the Q back for more live coverage after this short break

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of Dell Technologies. World Digital Experience Brought to you by Dell Technologies. Hey, welcome back. You're ready. Jeffrey here with the Cube. Welcome back to our ongoing coverage of Dell Technology World 2020. The Digital Experience. I'm coming to you from Palo Alto. It's a digital event, just like everything else in 2020. But we're excited to have our next guest. I think he's coming in all the way from Atlanta, Georgia. He's Jim Shook, the director of cyber security and compliance practice at Del Technology. Jim, Great to see you. >>Thanks, Jeff. It's quite the title there. Thanks for getting all that out. >>I have a big posted notes so that, uh, that's very helpful. But, you know, it's it's actually kind of an interesting thing because you have compliance and cybersecurity and your title, and it's it's It's interesting relationship between compliance as a motivator of behavior versus you know, you need to go a lot further than just what the compliance says. So I'm curious if you can talk about that relationship between yeah, we need to be compliant, and we need to follow the rules. But you need to think a lot bigger than that. >>Yeah, definitely. I mean, there's so many different standards out there and requirements. So typically, what we'll see on the regulatory side is very much a minimum baseline, and leading the way, as usual in the cybersecurity space, will be financial and health care organizations. That's particularly true in the US, but pretty much globally, at least on the financial side. So they'll set some baselines. A lot of industries don't really have many. And so what we look at many times is just general risk to the business. And, of course, if you're a publicly traded company, that might trigger some SEC requirements or other things like that. But again, we really look at those requirements as minimum baselines, and you have to work up from there based on the organization's risk profile. >>Yeah, yeah, and we see that we see that, too, with privacy and a whole a whole bunch of stuff where traditionally the regs and the compliance kind of lag, you know where the technologies and where the markets moving. So let's before we get too deep into it. Let's let's talk about the cove it impact because obviously a huge thing. Insecurity, Uh, you know, a light switch moment in mid March when everybody had to work from home. So suddenly your tax surfaces increase exponentially. People are working out of home environments that you don't necessarily know what's going on there. Who's going on there, The shared networks with the spouse and the kids and and everybody else. And but now we're, you know, 678 months into this. This is something that's going to be going on for a while, and even the new normal will have some type of a hybrid relationship with with, you know, an increased level of remote remote work once they work from home. But it's really work from anywhere. So I wonder if you could share your thoughts about how things have transitioned from you know, what happened in mid March, taking care of your own business and your own people to, you know, then taking care of your customers and the emergencies that they had. But now really thinking in terms of more of kind of a long term, fundamental shift in the security profile that people have with all their data and information >>Yeah. Gosh, it's been really interesting. I think organizations have done an amazing job when you think about the things that they've had to get done just really overnight. So a lot has been written about the pandemic, and you mentioned Jeff to really that expanded threats surface. All of a sudden, you've got people working from home. There wasn't enough VPN capacity. A lot of places. I talked to some organizations. Employees just took their desktop off of their desk and brought it home so it wasn't really ready toe work at a remote location. But organizations really adapted well to it. Meanwhile, that was opportunity for the criminals, and they've taken it. But Jeff, one of the things that I think about two is to an extent, this is the new normal, not necessarily the work from home, but the shift that's going to consistently happen in cybersecurity. Things change. The criminals air really smart, they adapt. So that was work from home. What's the next thing going to be? There's I O T. There's remote devices. There will be some vulnerabilities. We just have to get used to this pace and continue it. Unfortunately, >>right, right, right Yeah, it's always it's always a little bit of, Ah, a cat and mouse game, Right? But what? And then one of the other trends that we're seeing, I don't know, maybe more visibility or maybe higher profile is is the ransomware attacks, right? So we've seen, you know, kind of this thing really interesting continuation of different types of security threats between just the the local kid who's just trying to do it because it's fun versus, you know, competitive stuff where people are trying to take out their competitors versus nation states and nation states being, um, you know, kind of driving these attacks. But the ransom, the ransom where we've seen before, but it seems to be increasing in frequency. Maybe we're just hearing about it. What's special about ransom, where as a specific type of security threat. >>So I started this practice about five years ago, and at that point, ransom or was just barely a blip, it was really about destruction and the way that we talk about it in the cybersecurity spaces. There's this triad, these three components of our data that we're trying to protect. So one of those is confidentiality, and that traces back to the attacks you're talking about. That's when somebody steals your data. You don't want them to do that. That breaks the confidentiality of the data. And that's really where the cybersecurity controls kind of grew up around, that you didn't want credit cards, intellectual property, healthcare information. And that's still a problem with ransom, where they're affecting the availability of the data or the integrity of the data. And those were the other two prongs that go with confidentiality. And so these attacks. That's why they feel different. Their impact in your ability to access the data, which in many cases can shut a business down. There have been headlines over the last couple of months. Some businesses that really were closed off for components of their business that were shut down, and it's because they didn't have their data or their systems, and then eventually they either found a way to recover them. Or perhaps in many cases, the speculation is they paid the ransom to get the data back, >>right. And of course, the problem with ever paying a ransom, um, is that you don't necessarily know you're going to get the data back. That you may just be encouraging them to hit you again. Eso paying the ransom is is not necessarily the best solution. And then then, in talking about this thing, turns out that in fact, not only may it not be the right solution, you may be breaking the law. This is a pretty interesting thing. I had no idea that there's really laws dictating, you know, I guess responding to a criminal threat. What? Where does that go? What's that from? >>Yeah, that's we've talked about this for a while. But it wasn't until about two weeks ago that some information was released from the Department of Treasury. So the idea here is that every not every country, many countries, the US among them have lists of countries and organizations that you can't do business with. So essentially a prohibited or sanctions list. And, as it turns out, many of the ransomware bad actors and Jeff is actually real name of one of them evil court. It sounds like a movie or a book, but that's one of the ransomware bad actors there on those lists. So if you get attacked by an organization that's on the list and you pay them. You have now completed a transaction with a prohibited entity and you're subject to potential sanctions. There was a lot written about this being a new law, or the US came up with this law, and that's not the case. The laws have been on the books for a while. It was the Department of Treasury, kind of issuing some guidance, just nudging people. Hey, by the way, you shouldn't be doing this and some of the research I've done a lot of countries have these laws. So while it's just the US that came out with this advisory, which was very public and certainly a big wake up call, these laws exist in a lot of other countries. So organizations really need to be prepared for what they're going to do if they get hit with the Ransomware attack. Not really counting on paying the ransom for the reasons that you said, Plus, it may be against the law. >>And just to make sure I understand you, it's against the law because you're effectively doing business by having a financial transaction with one of these, prohibited either organizations or they're in a prohibited country complete. >>That's correct Yeah, mostly about the organization, um, and then an interesting component of this and we won't get into too much of the weeds on the legal side. But the law is actually a strict liability. So that means it doesn't matter whether you knew or should have known that the entity was on a prohibited list. The mere fact of having that transaction makes you liable. And then the way that the the regulations are written, you can't get someone else to do your dirty work for you. So if you are facilitating that transaction anyway, you may be running afoul of those laws. >>Jesus. One more thing to worry about where you're trying to get business. You're trying to get your business back up and running, but specifically with with with ransomware and why it's different. I mean, there's been business continuity, planning forever. You know, you guys have backup and recovery solutions. Uh, you know, there's so much effort around that What's different here? Is it just because of the time in which you have to respond the availability of those backups toe to come back and get in production? What makes Ransomware so special from a business continuity perspective besides the fact that you're not allowed to pay him because it might be breaking the law. >>Ah, lot, You hit on a couple things there. So we've known forever that with D R. Disaster recovery One of the major things you're doing there is your replicating data quickly so that if you lose sight A you can pop up its site B With ransomware, you're replicating the corrupted data, so you lose that with backups. The bad guys know, just like you mentioned that if you have a backup, you could use that to recover. So they are more frequently now gathering their credentials and attacking the backup. So many cases we see the backups being deleted or otherwise destroyed. And that's really where we have focused with our power. Protect cyber recovery solution is creating a new, extra offline air gapped copy of the most critical applications. That's not going to be susceptible to the attack or the follow up attack that deletes the data. >>So let's jump into that a little bit, um, in a little bit more detailed. So this is a special solution, really targeted, um, as a defense against Ransomware because of the special attributes that ransom where, uh, e guess threatens threatens or the fact that they they also go after your backup in recovery at the same time, knowing you're gonna use that to basically lower the value of their ransom attack. That's crazy. >>Yeah, they're smart. You know, these these Attackers air smart. There's billions of dollars at stake. E think organizations like Evil Corp estimates are they could be making hundreds of millions of dollars. So they're they're not even small businesses. They're almost industries unto themselves. They have advanced tactics, They're leveraging capabilities, and they have. They have products, essentially. So when you think about your production data, your backups, your disaster recovery, those air, all in environments, that they're not accessible on the Internet. But that's where you're doing business. So there is access there. There's employees that have access, and the bad guys find ways to get in through spear phishing attacks, where they're sending emails that look like they're from somebody else and they get a foothold. Once they have that foothold, they can leverage that access to get throughout that production environment. They have access to that data, and they deleted with cyber recovery. What we're doing is we're creating a vaulted environment that's offline. They can't get there from from where they are, so they can't get access to that data. We lock it down, we analyze it, we make sure that it's good and then this happens automatically and day over day. So you've always got that copy of data. If your worst case scenario develops and you lose your production environment, that happens. You've got this copy of data for your most critical applications. You don't want to copy everything in there, but you can use to actually recover and that recover capability. Jeff is one of the pillars of a cyber security structure, so we focus a lot, kind of like you said before. What's different about these attacks? We focus a lot on protecting data and detecting bad guys. This is the recover capability that is part of all these frameworks, >>right? So there's a lot to unpack there before we get into the recovery. And kinda actually, why don't we just start there and then I want to get into the air gap because that's a great That's a great thing to dig in on the recovery what's kind of your targeted s l A Is it based on the size of the application? Um, is it based on on, you know, a different level of service. I mean, what is what is the hope? If I buy into this this solution that I can get my recovery and get back into business if I choose, not toe to pay these guys? What? What does it? What does that kind of look like? >>Most of the time, we're providing a product that our customers are deploying, and then we have some partners that will deployed as a service to, so the SLS may vary, but what we're targeting is a very secure environment, and you can look at how it's architected and think about the technologies. If it's properly operated, you can't get there. You can't get to the data. So the points that we're really looking at is how frequently do we want to update that data? So in other words, how much data can you afford to lose? And then how long will it take you to recover? And both of those? You can leverage the technologies to shorten those up to kind of your requirements. So loosely speaking, the in the shorter you make the time may cost you a little bit more money, a little bit more effort. But you can tighten those up pretty much what your requirements are going to be, >>right? Right? And then let's talk about air gaps because air gaps. That means something very, very specific. It literally means classically right, an air gap. There is a space in between these systems until electrons learn how to jump. Um, they're they're they're physically separated. Um, but that's harder and harder to do, right, because everything is now a P I based, and everything is an app that's based on a bunch of other APS, and there's calls and there's, you know, everything is so interconnected now. But you talked about something specifically said, an automated air gap. And you also said that you know, we're putting this data where it is not connected for some period of time. So I wonder if you could explain a little bit more detail how that works, how it's usually configured, um t to reintroduce an air gap into this crazy connected world. >>Yeah, it's kind of going backward to go forward in a lot of ways. When we're careful about the term, we'll use the term logical air gap because you're right, Jeff on Air Gap is there's a gap, and what we're doing is we're manipulating that air gap in a way that most of the time that data are are safe. Data are vaulted, data is on the other side of the air gap, so you can't get there. But we'll bring it up in air. Gap will logically enable that air gap so that there is a connection which enables us to update the data that's in the vault, and then we'll bring that connection back down. And the way that we've architected the solution is that even when it's enabled like that, we've minimized the capability to get into the vault. So, really, if you're a bad actor, if you know everything that's going on, you might be able to prevent the update. But you can't get into the vault unless you're physically there. And, of course, we put some controls on that so that even insiders are very limited what they can do if they get inside the vault and the A. P. T s, the advanced persistent threats. People who are coming from other countries. Since they're not physically there, they can't access that data. >>That's good. So it's on its off, but it's usually off most of the time, so the bad guys can't get across there. >>Yeah, and again it's It's important that even when it's on it za minimal exposure there. So you think about our triad, the confidentiality, integrity, availability. You know, we're blocking them from getting in so they can maybe do a denial of service type of attack. But that's it. They can't get into break into the vault and break things and destroy the data like they would in production. >>I want to shift gears a little bit gym, and I've I've gone to our essay, I think, for the last three or four years of fact, I think it was the last big live event we did in 2020 before everything came to a screeching halt. And, you know, one of the things I find interesting about the security industry is this one of these opportunities for cooperative Shin um within the security industry that even though you might work for a company that competes with another company. You know there's opportunities to work with your peers at other companies. So you have more of a unified front against the bad guys as well as learn from what's going on. Uh, with some of the other you know, people. So you can learn from the from the attacks that they're surfacing. There's interesting, uh, organization called Sheltered Harbor that it came across and doing research for this. You guys have joined it. It was basically it looks like it was built around 100 30. This this article is from earlier in the years. Probably groaning is from February 130 participating financial institutions, which collectively hold 72% of all deposit accounts and 71% of all U. S retail brokerage assets. It's a big organization focused on security, Del joined not as a financial institution but as a vendor. I wonder if you can share what this organizations all about. Why did you guys join and what? Where you see some of the benefits both for you as well as your customers? >>Yeah, there's a lot there, Jeff. I've been part of that process for a little bit over two years and kicked it off after we identified. Sheltered Harbor is an organization that we wanted to work with. So, as you said, founded by some of the banks and credit unions and other financial institutions in the US, and what's unique about it is it's designed to protect the U. S. Financial system and consumer confidence. It's not actually designed to protect the bank. So of course, that's an outcome there if you're protecting consumer confidence than it's better for the banks. But that's really the goal. And so it's a standards based organization that looked at the problem of what happens if a bank it's attacked, what happens to the customers. So they actually came up with the specifications, which follows so closely to what we do with cyber recovery. They identified important data. They built requirements, not technologies, but capabilities that a vault would need to have to protect that data. And then the process is to recover that data if an event occurred. So we talked to the team for a while. We're very proud of what we've been able to accomplish with them is the only solution provider in their advisory program, and the work that we've done with the power protect cyber recovery solution. We have some more news coming out. I'm not permitted toe announce it yet. It's pretty soon, so stay tuned, and it's just been a really great initiative for us to work with, and the team over there is fantastic. >>So I just one or two. If you can share your thoughts as as the role of security has changed over the last several years from, you know, kind of a perimeter based point of view and you know, protection and walls and, uh, firewalls and and and all these things which is completely broken down now to more of a integrated security approach and baking security into your data to your encryption to your applications, your access devices, etcetera and really integrating security more into the broader flow of product development and and delivery and and how that's impacted the security of the of the customers and impacted professionals like you that are trying to look down the road and get ahead of the next. You know, kind of two or three bad things that are coming. How is that security posture really benefited everybody out there? >>It gets a really difficult problem that we just keep working at it again. We don't have a goal, because if we're targeting here, the threat actors is a bad actors. They're gonna be here. I was reading an article today about how they're already the bad actors already employing machine learning to improve what they're doing and how they target their phishing attacks and things like that. So thinking about things like security by design is great. We have millions billions of devices, and if we start from the ground up that those devices have security built in, it makes the rest of the job a lot easier. But that whole integration process is really important to I mentioned before the recovery capability and protect and detect Well, if you look at the nice cybersecurity framework has five pillars that have capabilities within each one, and we need to keep focusing on our capabilities in those space, we can't do one and not the other. So we do multi factor authentication. But we need to look at encryption for our devices. We need to build from the ground up. We need to have those recover capabilities. It's just kind of a never ending process. But I feel like one of the most important things that we've done over the last year, partly driven by the changes that we've had, is that we're finally recognizing that cyber security is a business issue. It's not a nightie issue. So if your digital and your assets are digital, how can you confine this to a nightie group? It's It's the business. It's risk. Let's understand what risk is acceptable cover the risk that isn't and treated like a business process that it ISS. >>That's great, because because I always often wonder, you know, if you think of it as an insurance problem, you know, then you're gonna be in trouble because you can't You can't just lock everything down, right? You gotta you gotta do business. And you always think of the, you know, ships or safest, uh, at harbor. But that's not what ships are built for, right? You can't just lock everything down, but if you take it more of a business approach, so you're you're measuring investments and risk and putting dollar amounts on it. Then you can start to figure out how much should I invest in security because you can't spend ah, 100% of your revenue on security. What is the happy medium? How do you decide and how do you apply that investment where, you know, it's kind of a portfolio strategy problem >>it is. And and that's one of the areas that again my five years in the building, the practice we've seen organizations start to move to. So you want to protect your most important assets the best. And then there are things that you still want to protect, but you can't afford the time, the budget, the operational expense of protecting everything. So let's understand what really drives this business if I'm a law firm might be my billion and document management systems and health care. It's a electronic medical record and manufacturing the manufacturing systems. So let's protect the most important things the best and then kind of moved down from there. We have to understand what those systems are before we can actually protect them. And that's where the business really needs to work more closely. And they are with the I T teams with cyber security teams, >>right, and like, I like a lot of big problems, right? You gotta break it down. You gotta You gotta prioritize. You gotta, you know, start just knocking off what's important and not so overwhelmed by, you know, trying to protect everything to the same degree. This is not practical, and it's not not a good investment. >>That's exactly the case. And there's the ongoing discussions about shortage of people in the cybersecurity space, which there are. But there are things that we can do that to really maximize what those people do, get them to focus on the higher level capabilities and let the tools do some of the things that the tools air good at. >>Right. So, you know, you triggered one last point and we'll wrap on this, but I'll give you the last word. Aziz, you look forward. Two things like automation and two things like artificial intelligence and machine learning that you can apply to make those professionals more effective on automate some stuff. Um, how do you see that evolving? And does that give you big smiles or frowns as you think about your use of AI in a nml versus the bad guys, they have some of the same tools as well. >>They dio and look, we have to use those to keep up. I'll give you example with with power, protect cyber recovery. We already use AI and ML to analyze the data that's in our vault. So how do you know that the data is good? We're not gonna have somebody in the vault looking through the files by leveraging those capabilities. We could give a verdict on that data. And so you know that it's good. I think we we have to continue to be careful that we understand what the tools are. We deploy them in the right way. You can't deploy tool just to deploy honor because it's hot or because it's interesting that goes back to understanding the systems that we need to protect the risks that we can accept or perhaps cover with insurance and the risks that gosh, we really can't accept. We need to make sure that the business continues to operate here, so I think it's great. Um, the communities have really come together. There's more information sharing than ever has gone on. And that's really one of our big weapons against the bad actors. >>All right, Well, Jim, thank you so much for sharing your insight. I think your job security is locked in for the foreseeable future. We didn't even get into five G and I o t and ever increasing attack, surface and sophistication of the bad guys. So thank you for doing what you do and helping keep us safe. Keep your data safe and keeping our companies running. >>Thank you for the opportunity. >>Alright, He's Jim. Mom. Jeff. Thanks for watching the cubes. Continuous coverage of Dell Technology World 2020. The Digital Experience. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of AnsibleFest 2020, brought to you by Red Hat. >> Hello, everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of AnsibleFest 2020. We're not face-to-face this year, we're in virtual remote mode. This is theCUBE virtual and obviously it's AnsibleFest 2020 virtual. We've got a great panel of experts and leaders at Red Hat and Ansible. I want to introduce them. Dave Lindquist, general manager and vice president of engineering of hybrid cloud management at Red Hat. Joe Fernandes, vice president and general manager of the Core Cloud platforms at Red Hat. And Tom Anderson, vice President at Red Hat, Ansible Automation Platform, the big news and feature of this event. Tom, great to see you, Joe and David, thanks for coming on. >> Great to be here. >> Every year I love talking about Red Hat because I remember going back a few years ago, Arvind from IBM was on at Red Hat Summit in San Francisco, and you can see the twinkle in his eye. This was three, four years ago. Cloud native was really gearing up and now it's kind of mainstream. Last year at AnsibleFest, all the buzz was collaboration, collections, and you can start to see that integration piece kicking in, and this year at the event, the big story is the same. More collections, more integrations, a lot of collaboration around code. Content equals code. So it really points to the trend with Kubernetes of multi-cloud, multi-cluster. So the first question for you guys is, why would anyone want to deploy multiple clusters simultaneously and why is multi-cluster such a big deal? Tom, we'll start with you. >> Great, okay, yeah. So why is multi-cluster such a big deal? Basically, Kubernetes and our OpenShift container platform have now become a strategic part of our customers' environments, of their infrastructure for building and deploying cloud native applications on. And as becoming a strategic part of that, when you're deploying production applications you're going to need all kinds of things like scale out, redundancy, cloud location for access to different cloud provider locations for application requirements and whatnot. So there are a bunch of requirements for why customers would deploy OpenShift in a multi-cluster way. And maybe I'll turn it over to Joe Fernandes a little bit 'cause he's got a lot of background on the OpenShift side of this. >> Joe, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, thanks, Tom. Yeah, so I mean, as Tom mentions, a number of reasons why customers may deploy or need to deploy more than one Kubernetes cluster. So within a cluster, you can certainly have multiple applications, multiple developers, multiple teams work, but as you start to scale your usage you may want additional clusters. It could be because you want to separate your production environments from your dev and test environments. It could be for capacity, right? You have more development teams or more production environments than you want to sort of tie to a single cluster. Then you start expanding out into locations, right? Maybe you started in the data center, then you started doing deployments to one public cloud, then to other public clouds, and then that's only going to grow. We see more and more customers deploying multi-cloud strategies. And then the new thing right now that everybody wants to talk to us about is edge, and as you get into edge deployments, now those, the number of clusters could really explode into the hundreds or thousands. And so it all points back to you need a sane way to manage across all these clusters regardless of where they run and regardless of how many you have, and that's really what we've been working on with the Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes. >> What's the big draw? What's drawing the customers in with multi-cluster and multi-cloud? Obviously, the multi-cloud makes a lot of sense, you have multiple clouds. Sounds easier just saying it than doing it. But what is it about multi-cluster and multi-cloud that's drawing customers and people into this concept? >> Yes, I can start. I think what's drawing customers in is the need, the desire to have sort of a common abstraction for the applications that's consistent regardless of where they happen to run, right? So making sure that the developers don't have to worry about what infrastructure the applications are landing on, and they have that consistent experience that it's, abstracts their applications away from that infrastructure. So that gives the developers more flexibility, but it's also about flexibility and agility for those infrastructure owners, right, because they too want to make decisions on where stuff runs. Not because they're particularly tied to an infrastructure, but based on things like cost or security or other concerns. And so these are all drivers for multi-cluster and multi-cloud strategies and I think our hybrid cloud strategy at Red Hat really hits the mark to address those needs. >> Well, you guys had great performance. We've been following the past few years just the OpenShift and beyond, kind of the whole Red Hat, and Ansible specifically too, is doing real well in the marketplace so congratulations. David, I want to ask you about the management piece. This comes up over and over again. It's all good having the abstraction layer, you got all kinds of new sets of services, but multi-cluster management is not, (laughs) is not trivial. There's challenges for ops and automation teams. Could you share your perspective on how you guys are looking at the multi-cluster management? >> Sure, sure. The first thing we saw, and this kind of follows on the points that Joe and Tom are making, is that as customers start embracing the development with containers and leveraging Kubernetes, you start finding that they're putting up clusters across their data centers, across cloud, to support different parts of the life cycle of development, or supporting their own production environment or distributed workloads across clouds, across the data centers. And so the challenges that operations and management run into, and security in particular, is how do you start managing the clusters, their life cycle. It's easy to put 'em up, to provision 'em quickly, but how do you update and upgrade those? How do you make sure they're compliant with your various regulatory compliance like PCI, HIPAA, or the various federal standards? How do you make sure that compliance is adhered to across, and security across those clusters, as well as the applications themselves? How do you manage the applications through their life cycle? How do you have deployment policies? So the challenges for ops and automation and security are to have a consistent policy-driven way to take care of the clusters across these hybrid environments, and making sure they adhere to the compliance and security of the enterprise. >> Tom, multi-cluster deployments is a big part of this integration. We heard a little bit, obviously, compliance and governance is huge. IT's been living this world of policies and governance, but when we start moving fast into these new cutting edge services that are providing a lot of value, integration into existing IT infrastructure is important with clusters. How do you view that because this is where I think maybe collections are other things are, is this an indicator of what's happening? Can you give your thoughts on the customers out there who want to do multiple clusters for all the benefits, but then go, "Oh, I got to integrate it into existing IT infrastructure"? >> Yeah, absolutely. So that's what's happening right now. As Kubernetes and as OpenShift has become a strategic platform for our customers, the idea of, I'm going to say, kind of normalizing the operations of that platform as part of a greater IT ecosystem has become a challenge for them. And for the most part, they've already automated security, network, provisioning, app deployment, application updates, using the Ansible Automation Platform, and so it only makes sense that as Kubernetes and as OpenShift becomes a strategic platform for them, they want to use that same language, that same tool set, that same automation fabric, if you will, to integrate the applications that are running on OpenShift with the rest of the environment. So, for example, when I add a new node to a cluster or more capacity to a cluster or to clusters, I probably want to update my systems of record, right? My CMDBs or my ITSM systems. When I deploy a new app or make an update to an app on a cluster or across clusters, I'm probably going to want to update my load balancer to be able to direct traffic correctly to that, and that load balancer probably isn't running, my enterprise load balancer is kind of platform independent, so I'd need to be able to update that load balancer to properly direct traffic. Well, IT has already automated that function using Ansible. So by creating the collections that we have created for OpenShift and for Kubernetes, it makes it much easier for our customers to be able to just plug that in and adapt that to their existing automation infrastructure. So now it just becomes part of their overall IT environment. >> So just a follow-up real quick, if you don't mind. What are some of the challenges you're hearing from your customers around containerization and that growing space? I just talked to the IDC research analyst earlier at another virtual CUBE session where she says, roughly their estimate is 5 to 10% of enterprises are containerized, which is huge growth opportunities. The headroom in containers is massive, so what are some of the challenges? Is it easy to get started? This seems to be a nice opportunity for you guys. What's your take on that? >> Yeah, I think that the way of looking at it with all that growth space, it's also the speed at which Kubernetes adoption and containerized application adoption is happening. And so, IT organizations are having to respond faster than they ever have before as this environment grows, and it is a multi-cloud environment. They have Kubernetes, OpenShift running on-prem, in the cloud, multiple data centers, as both Joe and Dave have said, and it becomes critical that they automate that correctly and accurately to ensure security, consistency, performance, availability. All of the other things that drive the requirement for automation standardization, all of those things that drive the requirements for automation are applicable to Kubernetes environments and containerized environments as well except they're moving and expanding faster, so teams have to respond quicker to the need. >> Joe, what's your take on this? I mean, to me, I'm the glass half full. I think I've seen containers be great and that maybe I'm looking at the early adopters, but those numbers seem a little bit low to me. What does that mean to you? More people are now getting up to speed. Is it a tipping point? It just seems a little bit low, and David, if you want to comment too, I think this an important number there. Joe, what's your take? >> Yeah, I mean, I think the rate represents an opportunity, but I see the growth as having been tremendous even in just the first few years. But to get to that broader market we did continue making it easier for customers to bring their applications to this new environment, to ride on existing infrastructure, and ultimately for our customers that means an evolution, right? An evolution of how they are going to manage those applications, how they're going to build and deploy them. And so with the integration of OpenShift and our advanced container management platforms with Ansible we can bring that automation to the mix to sort of tie those together, right? So to tie in the existing compute infrastructure, to tie in storage and networking and configure those as needed. And then as Tom mentioned, all those other systems, whether it's an IT service management system, something like a ServiceNow or other ticketing systems or other enterprise systems that exist that you just can't ignore. Because the more you try to go against the grain and do something different, the even harder it'll be. So we need to help customers evolve to take advantage of cloud and cloud native approaches, and the solutions that we're bringing to market are all about enterprise Kubernetes, enterprise container platforms. The combination of those technologies with something like Ansible really helps pave the path for the next phase of growth that we're expecting. >> So, ready for prime time right now. >> Right. >> David, your thoughts real quick on this. Containerization upside. >> Yeah, real quick, the development organizations, development teams, have picked up on containers very rapidly. Everybody is leveraging containers when they develop new applications or modernize the existing applications. So what we found is that a lot of the folks that pushed out very quickly, some greenfield apps, that's the 5, 10, 15, 20% that you're seeing occur. What started getting complex is how you really scale this to your enterprise. How do you really run this at scale from management operations and security perspective? OpenShift is critical, that gives a consistent platform across the hybrid cloud environments. What we're doing with ACM and the Advanced Cluster Management brings in the security and compliance. And what you'll see through AnsibleFest, what we're doing with Ansible is then, how do we then hook these environments right into all the existing IT environments? That's, to me, what's critical to really bring this to scale to the enterprise. >> Yeah, I think this, to me, the number points to exactly what you guys said. Ready for prime time, scale's there, and the demand's there. And I think, Tom and Joe, I want to ask you specifically the relationship between OpenShift and Ansible, but before that, I remember, forget what year it was, we were doing a CUBE event at, I think it might've been OpenStack, going back to the day, but I remember OpenShift and it was a moment where OpenShift adopted containers and then next year Kubernetes. And I remember talking to the team, them saying, "This is going to be a big bet for OpenShift." Looks like it was a good bet. (laughs) It paid out real well, congratulations. And it was good, you guys stayed the course. But you made it easier, and one of the things was is that the complaint at the time was they didn't want Kubernetes to be the next Hadoop. Easy to use but gets out of control. Not that I meant they're comparable, but Hadoop had that problem of it was easy open source but then it was hard to manage. So OpenShift really took advantage of that. You guys, I think, did a good job on that. But now you got Ansible winning the game on developers, on easy to deploy, so as that scales up, automation's there. So I'd like to hear you guys talk about the connection between OpenShift and Ansible and how that expands the scope of what both products can do for customers. >> Yeah, maybe I'll give it a shot first and then let Joe go after me, which is, look, here's what we have, is we have lots and lots and lots of customers, Red Hat customers that are OpenShift users and that are Ansible users, right? So we have this two large pools. They also represent two very large and vibrant open source community projects. The Ansible project and the Kubernetes project are two hugely popular, vibrant communities, and so it just made sense to kind of be a catalyst in those communities, to bring those two things together, to work together, to the benefit of our customers and to kind of capture the innovation that's going on upstream in the communities. So we decided to get really kind of serious about the integration of these two platforms and integrated Ansible in a native way on Kubernetes so that OpenShift and Kubernetes operators, as well as application developers, could take advantage of that integration without having to learn something new or foreign in order to be able to do it. So it was a native integration using operators, which is the right way to integrate with the Kubernetes platform, with OpenShift in particular. And so that's the way we kind of brought it together to the benefit of our customers. Our customers are, like I said, normalizing the operations of OpenShift as a strategic part of their infrastructure, deploying production applications, and want to be able to tie that into their other systems and other parts of their infrastructure, both from an app deployment process as well as from an infrastructure deployment and management process. So it only made sense that it actually, our customers have been asking us for this and talking to us about this, so it only kind of made perfect sense to kind of get out there and do that, get the communities together innovating, and then take that innovation out for our customer. >> Joe. >> Yeah, the only thing I'd add to that, there's really two specific personas at play here, right? When you think of, there's the IT operations and infrastructure teams. They own those clusters, the provisioning, the configuration, the management of those clusters. And with ACM, with Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, we have now an interface that they can use to see and manage the life cycle of all their clusters. So through that we can integrate Ansible as another automation tool in their portfolio to do things that need to happen when those clusters first get configured or when those clusters get updated and so forth. So if they need to update an ITSM system or configure a network or do whatever it needs to, you have Ansible automation scripts that can be plugged in at the appropriate time in that cluster's life cycle to do that. On the other side, you have the developer and DevOps teams that are consumers of these platforms, right? And what they care about is the applications that they're building, but there's a lot that goes into building it, right? There's the source code management systems, there's the CI systems, the CD systems, there's the test environments and stage and prod. And so there's a lot of moving parts, and again, and then there's the services themselves that they're configuring so you have, or building, not configuring, you have Ansible again ready to sort of take on some of those tasks, automation tasks that go beyond what Kubernetes is focused on or what you're trying to do with OpenShift. And again, doing it at the appropriate time in the life cycle, all tied in through Advanced Cluster Management which can actually see out to all those clusters and be in that sort of application deployment workflow across those clusters. So those are sort of some of the specific areas and how they pertain to those specific personas that are driving the activity. >> What's interesting, this automation piece really is key across multiple environments, and we've heard that from some of your customers. 'Cause you got now private clouds out there, you got large scale. But, Dave, I want to ask you, what makes Advanced Cluster Management a natural fit with OpenShift and Ansible? What's your take? >> Yeah, good question, John. First, ACM is purpose-built for the Kubernetes environment. It's a cloud native management system, and as we said earlier, we really focused on managing the cluster life cycles, managing the security compliance, and managing applications deployed into these environments. So it was a very natural extension of OpenShift, to be able to manage OpenShift, multiple clusters of OpenShift in hybrid environments. Within your data center, across data centers, across clouds, and the combination. So, very natural fit with OpenShift. As we've been all talking about, as we looked at how did we then bring OpenShift and these resources closer through automation to many of the other parts of your IT environment, that made it natural from ACM to call out into the playbooks of Ansible. So just a simple example, and I think we circled around this a few times. You're deploying a cluster or you're deploying, say, an application to that cluster. You need to configure that into a firewall. Maybe configure it into a load balancer. Maybe register it with a service management system. That, all those calls, they come out through policy from ACM over into Ansible to take advantage of the wealth of playbooks that are available in Ansible to perform those operations. Whether it's security, network, service management, storage, et cetera. >> Real quick follow-up for you is, how has bringing your ACM team and product into Red Hat changed the scope and approach of what you're trying to do? >> Yeah, well, let me say first of all it's been a great experience bringing the team into Red Hat. The environment, the open culture, it's really been invigorating for the whole team. Also, getting much, much closer into the open communities and open sourcing ACM and doing development in the open has really brought us closer really to users, the ecosystem, the communities, accelerating our delivery quality, as well as really getting much more closer insights, getting insights into what's happening in the community, what's happening with the users. So it's really, it's been a great experience all the way around. >> Joe and Tom, quick comment, what do you think people should pay attention to this year at AnsibleFest 2020? What's the big story? Obviously we're in a pandemic. We're going to come out of the pandemic. People want to have a growth strategy that has the right projects on the right rails. They want to either maybe downplay some of the projects that maybe not be a fit, that were exposed during the pandemic. Best practices that are emerging, shifting left for security is one. You're seeing remote workers. People have kind of had a wake-up call on cloud native being relevant for the modern app. Now they're running as fast as they can to build the infrastructure, and guess what? People are not actually in the workplaces. The workforce, the workplace has all changed. Can you guys share your expertise over the years on what is the best practice and approach to take? Because the clock's ticking. >> Yeah, from my perspective and from an Ansible perspective here, we had always been about kind of automate everything, right? Automate every task that is automatable, right? A repeatable task, automate it. Repeatable task, automate it. And over the past couple of years we've really been focused on automation across teams by using Ansible content, the actual automation code, if you will, itself to bring teams together and to cross teams and cross functions. So not just focused on what a network operations person or a network engineer needs to do in their day-to-day job, but connect that to what a security operations person is doing day-to-day in their job in terms of threat detection and intrusion response, or intrusion detection and threat response, and connecting those two teams together via automation to make both of them more responsive and more effective. So we've been on this bandwagon for the past couple of years around Ansible content, and now Ansible collections and Automation Hub, to try and accelerate the way these teams can collaborate together. The pandemic and the pressures that put on the system with remote users and having to do things in a different way only exacerbated, it only kind of enhanced the requirement for that collaboration, that automation across teams. So in a lot of ways, the past six, seven months, both for our Ansible business as well as for the way our customers have been using the technology, has really been an accelerator for that kind of cross-team collaboration, our subscription business, and our Ansible consumption. >> Yeah, well, I said it last year in-person when we were in Atlanta for AnsibleFest 2019, a platform approach is a great way to go. You start out as a tool, you become a platform. You guys are doin' the work over there. I really appreciate it and I want to call that out 'cause I think it's worth calling out. Joe, cloud platforms. Cloud is certainly an enabler. Red Hat and OpenShift has been a great success and can, only has got more work to do. People still got to build out these platforms, and you're seeing private cloud not going away. I mean, we just had a conversation at OpenStack and you guys got customers with a lot of private cloud everywhere. (laughs) So you got private, you got hybrid, you got multi, and you got public. It's pretty crazy. What's your thoughts on what people should take away from AnsibleFest and then going forward post-pandemic? >> Yeah, so, first Tom hit on a number of key points there, right? COVID-19 and everything going on in the world has really just accelerated a lot of these transformations that were already in the works at many of our enterprise customer accounts, right? And now when we're all working remotely, we're all meeting virtually, we're educating our children remotely, it just exacerbates the need to scale our networks, to extend security out to remote workforces, and to do all of these things at much larger scales than we ever envisioned before, and you can't do that without automation. And I would argue, without taking advantage of some of these modern cloud native platforms and cloud native development approaches. And we always say Red Hat's been a big proponent of hybrid cloud, of our open hybrid cloud strategy. We've been talking about that for years, and what we always say is even if that's a strategy that you aren't specifically looking for, it's something that, everybody ends up there, right? Because nobody's running everything in the data center anymore, but as they move out to public cloud they're not completely shutting those data centers off either. As they expand their consumption of public cloud, they tend to start exploring multi-cloud strategies, and now that hybrid cloud is extending out to the edge. So the hybrid cloud is sort of where everybody is, right? And the ability to sort of manage consistently, to run consistently across all those environments, to be able to secure all those environments and scale those environments, and that's what we're all about here at Red Hat and that's sort of the key to our open hybrid cloud strategy and what we're really trying to do with our entire portfolio. >> Awesome, David, final word. We're in a systems world now. The cloud is one big distributed computer. We got the edge, we heard that. Developers just want to code, they want infrastructure as code, you guys got to help 'em get there. What's your take on the importance of AnsibleFest and this systems world we live in? >> Well, there's probably not a more critical time. We've all been saying this and seeing this the last 10 months now. The transformation digitally that's been going on for years, the development transformations, it's all hit a fever pitch. It's been accelerated through COVID. In particular, how quickly can I adjust to a digital transformation? How quickly can I adjust my business processes? How quickly can I really become a very agile DevOps SRE organization? That is so critical. So at AnsibleFest what we're doing is bringing together platforms with automation with the ability to manage it at scale with security. That's what's going on from Red Hat in a open environment, open world, with communities and huge ecosystems. That, to me, is the critical rallying points, and really necessary to drive this accelerated transformation. >> Yeah, and again, open source continues to power it. One thing I'm impressed with is this concept of content, not content as in a video, but content as code. It's collaboration. It's what people are sharing their playbooks and they're sharing their, are opening things up. I think there's going to be a whole 'nother level of developer collaboration that's going to emerge and you guys are on the front end of all of this. I think it's going to be pretty powerful. I don't think yet clearly understood yet by most folks, but when you start seeing the automation benefits, Tom, I'm sure your team will be like, "Yeah, see, automation platform." Thank you so much for coming on, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thanks a lot. >> Thanks. >> I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, hosting theCUBE virtual for AnsibleFest 2020 virtual. Thanks for watching. (relaxing music)