(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's extended coverage. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We are here in Monaco at the Yacht Club, part of the VIP Gala with Prince Albert, DigitalBits, theCUBE. theCUBE and Prince Albert celebrating Monaco leaning into crypto. I'm here with Natasha Mahfar, who's our guest. She just came on theCUBE. Great story. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much for having me. >> Tell the folks what you do real quick. >> Sure. So I actually started my career in Silicon Valley, like you have. And I had the idea of creating a startup in mental health that was voice based only. So it was peer to peer support groups via voice. So I created this startup, pretended to be a student at Stanford and built out a whole team, and unfortunately, at that time, no one was in the space of mental health and voice. Now, as you know, it's a $30 billion industry that's one of the biggest in Silicon Valley. So my career really started from there. And due to that startup, I got involved in the World XR Forum. Now, the World XR Forum is kind of like a mini Davos, but a little bit more exclusive, where we host entrepreneurs, people in blockchain, crypto, and we have a five day event covering all sorts of topics. So- >> When you host them, you mean like host them and they hang out and sleep over? It's a hotel? Is it an event? A workshop? >> There's workshops. We arrange hotels. We pretty much arrange everything that there is. >> It's a group get together. >> It's a group get together. Pretty much like Davos. >> And so Natasha, I wanted to talk to you about what we're passionate about which is theCUBE is bringing people up to have a voice and give them a voice. Give people a platform. You don't have to be famous. If you have something to say and share, we found that right now in this environment with media, we go out to an event, we stream as many stories, but we also have the virtual version of our studio. And I could tell you, I've found that internationally now as we bring people together, there are so many great stories. >> Absolutely. >> Out there that need to be told. And the bottleneck isn't the media, it's the fact that it's open now. >> Yes. >> So why aren't the stories coming out? So our mission is to get the stories. >> Wow. >> Scale stories. The more stories that are scaled, the more people can feel it. More people are impacted by it, and it changes the world. It gets people serendipity with data 'cause we're, you know, you shared some data about what you're working on. >> Yeah, of course. It's all about data these days. And the fact that you're doing it so openly is great because there is a need for that today, so. >> What do you see right now in the market for media? I mean, we got emerging markets, a lot of misinformation. Trust is a big problem. >> Right. >> Bullying, harassing. Smear campaigns. What's news, what's not news. I mean, how do you get your news? I mean, how do people figure out what's going on? >> No, absolutely. And this is such a pure format and a way of doing it. How did you come up with the idea, and how did you start? >> Well, I started... I realized after the Web 2.0, when social media started taking over and ruining the democratization . Blogging, podcasting, which I started in 2004, one of the first podcasts in Silicon Valley. >> Wow. >> I saw the network of that. I saw the value that people had when normal people, they call it user generated content, shared information. And I discovered something amazing that a nobody like me can have a really top podcast. >> Well, you're definitely not a nobody, but... >> Well, I was back then. And nobody knew me back then. But what it is is that even... If you put your voice out there, people will connect to it. And if you have the ability to bring other people in, you start to see a social dynamic. And what social media ruined, Facebook, Twitter, not so much Twitter 'cause Twitter's more smeary, but it's still got to open the API, LinkedIn, they're all terrible. They're all gardens. They don't really bring people together, so I think that stalled for about almost eight years or nine years. Now, with crypto and decentralization, you start to see the same thing come back. Democratization, level the playing field, remove the middle man and person, intermediate the middle bottlenecks. So with media, we found that live streaming and going to events was what the community wants. And then interviewing people, and getting their ideas out there. Not promotional, not getting paid to say stuff. Yeah, they get the plug in for the company that they're working on, that's good for everybody. But more share something that you're passionate about, data. And it works. And people like it. And we've been doing it for 12 years, and it creates a great brand of openness, community, and network effect. So we scaled up the brand to be- >> And it seems like you're international now. I mean, we're sitting in Monte Carlo, so I don't think it gets better than that. >> Well, in 2016, we started going international. 2017, we started doing stuff in Europe. 2018, we did the crypto, Middle East. And we also did London, a lot of different events. We had B2B Enterprise and Crypto Blooming. 2019, we were like, "Let's go global with staff and whatnot." >> Wow. >> And the pandemic hits. >> I know. >> And that really kind of allowed us to pivot and turn us into a virtual hybrid. And that's why we're into the metaverse, as we see the value of a physical face to face event where intimacy's there, but why aren't my friends connected first party? >> Right. How much would you say the company has grown from the time that you kind of pivoted? >> Well, we've grown in a different direction with new capabilities because the old way is over. >> Right. >> Every event right now, this event here, is in person. People are talking. They get connections. But every person that's connecting has a social graph behind them that's online too, and immediately available. And with Instagram, direct messaging, Telegram, Signal, all there. >> It's brilliant. Honestly, it was brilliant idea and a brilliant pivot. >> Thank you for interviewing me. >> Yeah, of course. (Natasha and John laugh) >> Any other questions? >> That should do it. >> Okay. Are you going to have fun tonight? >> Absolutely. >> What is your take of the Monaco scene here? What's it like? >> You know, I think it's a really interesting scene. I think there's a lot of potential because this is such an international place so it draws a very eclectic crowd, and I think there's a lot that could be done here. And you have a lot of people from Europe that are starting to get into this whole crypto, leaving kind of the traditional banks and finance behind. So I think the potential is very strong. >> Very progressive. Well, Natasha, thank you for sharing. >> Thank you so much. >> Here on theCUBE. We're the extended edition CUBE here in Monaco with Prince Albert, theCUBE, and Prince Albert, DigitalBits Al Burgio, a great market here for them. And just an amazing time. And thanks for watching. Natasha, thanks for coming on. Thanks for watching theCUBE. We'll be back with more after this break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Okay, I'm back. I'm John Furrier with theCube. We're here in the middle of the action at Mobile World Congress at Cloud City is where the action is. Danielle Royston and Telco DR. Digital disruption here happening. This next interview I did with Casey Choi, the Executive Vice President at Samsung. I did this remotely. He couldn't be here in person. We wanted to bring him in for a conversation. I had a chance to record this with him. He talks about the intelligent Human Edge or Industry 4.0. It was about Edge computing, Samsung as a leader. Obviously we know what they do. They're part of this IOT revolution, Casey Choi, brilliant executive I really enjoyed my conversation. Take a listen. (upbeat music) Welcome to theCube's coverage of Mobile World Congress, 2021. I'm John Furrier host of theCube. We're here with Cube alumni, Casey Choi's Executive Vice President and GM of the Global Mobile B2B Team, Communications Team at Samsung. Casey, great to see you. Thank you for coming off for the special Remote Mobile World Congress. We're here in person, but also hybrid event. We got a lot of remote interviews. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me. >> John. Great to see you. Great as always to be with you and great to be at least here, virtually with the team and in Barcelona from WC. >> You know, in Samsung, we think about the edge. You are leading a team that's driving this innovation. We've talked in the past about Industry 4.0, but the innovation at the intelligent edge, human edge is a big part of it, with 5G. It's just another G, but it's not just another G you got to have a backbone. You got to have a back haul. You got to have an interconnection. You have commercial, not just consumer technology. So the edge is becoming both this human and device commercial environment. So the industry is quickly moving to this. You call it the 4.0 trend. What do you see happening? This is a clear change over the Telco is not what it used to be. Change is coming fast. A lot of disruption, what's your view? >> Yeah, I think we see a number of things done. And certainly from our perspective, which is, I think we've got somewhat of a unique view on this because of our huge focus really in consumer use and attitudes. And certainly it's been informed by what we've seen, what we've all collectively seen over the last year and a half or so, and are still seeing today. And I think one of the things that we're certainly experiencing is I think the edge is it's expanding further out. I think it's also getting more tightly coupled in many respects to the human factor. And it's not just a set of billions of discrete sensors anymore. And I think the evolution of our thinking around this has changed quite a bit from the IOT Version One variant of this. We put more of what I would call billions of these things, communicating all kinds of information, either to the cloud or the data centers and doing it in a very voluminous way. And what we're saying is with the advent of more the human to machine interface, and certainly the capabilities that we're saying both on the network and the device side, it's really redefining how we're thinking about edge. And certainly here at Samsung and with some of our partners, and we're starting to call this more of the intelligent human edge, where the human factor really begins to play a big role in how we're defining the Internet Of Things. And those things include really people. And this is how we're looking at it. >> I love the theme, the human edge, I think that's very relevant. I want to get a human aspect of here tied into the industry side, because as we emerge from the pandemic and move to a broader economic recovery, you see the psychology of the industry where cloud is one of the shining examples of what the pandemic highlighted cloud speed, cloud agility. And now you're seeing with openness in the Teleco industry, that cloud is coming in, open cloud interoperability. So coming out of the pandemic, cloud is the theme is driving an economic recovery, which is driving the psychology of we're back to real life, we're back to business, but it's not business as usual. The fashion is changing. The attitudes are changing. You mentioned that, and now the disruption of how cloud will be implemented. And it seems to be Telco is where these edge and cloud are just completely radically changing, what was once a kind of a slow moving Telco space. So how do you see the partnerships and coming out of the pandemic, some of the response of cloud impact, cloud technology, public cloud impact on this new Telcom? >> Yeah. Let me try to unpack that a little bit. I think we see two dimensions on this, certainly on the carrier side, the operator's side of the equation, we're certainly partnered with everybody across the globe on that. Certainly there's been a definitive impact around software defined everything, right? So, and this has been accelerated really by the standards that have started to develop around 5G. And even now there's a lot of discussion and I'm sure there'll be a lot of it around WMC about 6G and what is happening there. But I think with the advent of things like O-RAN for example, and some of the activity that we're seeing really around NEC type solutions and opportunities, the traditional role of the carrier and the operator is evolving and has to evolve, right? It is now much more aligned with the provision of these types of services that are very different from the type of data or voice services that we've seen in the past. So certainly we're seeing that transition. The second big transition is really around the notion of hybridity. Now we've been talking about this now in the industry for a while, but I think it's really starting to take firm root the idea of not only multiple clouds, but clouds that are deployed either on prem or certainly, available as a service in its various forms. So I think that combination along with the advances that we're seeing in the technology, and this was both on the connectivity side. So certainly around the ultra reliable, low latency communications, what we're seeing with things like slicing, for example, starting to take root as well as frankly, the devices themselves are getting that much more powerful and compact. This is what we're saying with SOC technologies is what we're seeing with the functions being moved more and more to on device capability. So I think about hybrid, I mean, in my past to think about it more as a small data center. How do you compact it, move it out to somewhere else. Now we're thinking about it more in terms of the type of processing capability that you can put really in the hands of the human or hands of the device. And at that point, you really start to get different use cases, start to emerge from that. So this is how we're thinking about this extension and what I'm talking about more as, an expansion on the edge, further out. >> I love is it splicing or slicing, what's the term? Slicing is the technology? >> Slicing, network slicing. >> Slicing, not splicing cable. >> Yeah. >> Slicing. >> Not splicing cable, no. >> Okay so this come up a lot, so splicing kind of points to this end to end, workflows. You look at some of the modern development, the frameworks of successful, you're seeing these multifunctional teams kind of having an end to end visibility into the modern application workflow from CIC pipeline, whatever. Now, if you take the concept of O-RAN you mentioned Open Radio Access Networks, this kind of brings up this idea of interoperability, because if you're going to have end to end and you add edge to it, you have to have the ability to watch something go end to end, but it's never been like that in the past because you had to traverse multiple networks. So this becomes kind of this hybrid a little bit deeper. Can you share how you see that and how Samsung's working with folks and how you guys are addressing this because you can be at the edge, but ultimately you've got to integrate. So you've got openness, you've got the idea of interoperability issues, and you ultimately have to move around and work with other networks, other clouds and other systems. This is not, it's not always like that. So can you share how this is evolving and how real this is and what is your view on it. >> Yeah, our thinking on this. I mean, let me start by maybe tackling this in a little bit of a different angle. One of the things that we see as one of the barriers around interoperability has really been more on the application side of the equation. And this is actually the third component in making all of this work. And let me just be very clear in what I'm saying here, I think in terms of mobile architectures and really Edge architectures, it has been one of the last bastions, if you will of closed architectures, there've been very much what I would call purpose-built architectures at the edge. Certainly that's been driven by things like the industrial side coming together with more of the commercial side of the equation, but we think it's time really to extend the interoperability of what we are seeing really on the IT side of the equation and really driven by cloud native. This was really in the area of containers. It's in the area of microservices, it's in the area of cloud native development. And if we're really talking about this, we really need to extend that interoperability from the application point of view on the data point of view, really to the end point. And this is where some of the work that we're doing, and we really embarked on in earnest last year with Red Hat and IBM, and with VMware for example, in really opening up that edge architecture to really the open source community, as well as really to the microservices architectures that we have now seen propagate down from the cloud into hybrid architecture. So this has been really one of the key focus areas for us. The network interoperability has really been driven by the standards that we've seen and that have been really adopted by the industry. And when it comes to, for example 5G standards. what we've been more focused on quite honestly, is the interoperability on the application and data side. And we think that by extending, if you will, that write once run many type concepts down into the edge and into the device, that this is going to open up really a wealth of opportunity for us on the application and on the data side. >> That's awesome, I love the openness, love the innovation you guys are doing. I think that's where the action is and that's where the growth is going to be. I do have to ask you how you see edge computing in the IOT era in terms of security. Are we more vulnerable because of it now? And how are you guys addressing the issue of security and data privacy at the edge? What's your opinion on that? What's Samsung doing? >> I mean, we just have to look at the news today, it's obvious that we are more vulnerable, right? There's no doubt that points of vulnerability are being exposed and they're probably being exposed in now industrial areas, right? Certainly with what we've seen, just even recently with some of the attacks that, that have occurred. So a couple of things there, number one, we are relying very heavily on our long history around establishing root of trust in kind of zero trust environments. We've had our Knox platform as an example, we just celebrated, in fact, our 10th year of the product. In fact, it was announced at MWC back about 10 years ago. So this is something that, that we're celebrating, it's an anniversary. Our belief on this is that we really need to ensure that we maintain a hardware-based route across when it comes to the edge. We can't only rely upon software protection at that layer. We can't naturally rely upon some of the network protections that are there. So, we've shipped about 3 billion devices with our Knox Security Suite over the last 10 years. And this is something that we're relying very heavily on. Not only for again, that hardware based root of process. So one of the key solutions, there's our Knox Vault product, which we just released a few months back. This is really a safe within a safe concept, really ensuring that the biometric password and other user data is protected. It's really what drives some of our strategy around making sure that we rely upon something that protects all of the back doors that are resident, not only at the software layer, but at the hardware layer as well. And then management is the other key piece of this, security without the ability of managing these thousands to millions of devices is really somewhat compromised. So we've extended a lot of our Knox management capability at our device level really to address some of those particular attributes, as well as these fleets become more prominent. And they start to take on workloads that are more critical to IOT type workloads. >> Casey, great to have you on. Your insight's awesome. Love what you're doing at Samsung. And again, you're a leader, you've been there, you've seen those cycles of innovation. I have to ask you my final question for you is a personal one and a professional one. The last Mobile World Congress was 2019. In person, last year was canceled a lot's happened in the industry since 20 something months ago. Now we're going to be in person, a lot of hybrid still remotely, but there'll be people in person. The world's changed. What is the big change in the Telco, Telco Cloud, Telco Edge, what's happened in these 20 plus months since the last Mobile World Congress that people should pay attention to? What's the most important thing in your mind? >> Most important? Thank God John. You're putting me on the spot here, right? I think it's wisdom to be quite honest with you. I mean, we've certainly all collectively learned a lot in terms of user patterns and what people need and want. And I hope to think that collective wisdom is going to be a key part of how we drive this going forward. And then if I can just pick one more, I would say re-invention, I think what we're starting to see is that coming out of, again from 2019 to what we're seeing now, we do see this opportunity reinventing and rethinking. And I think that's the difference. And the pace of that is going to really dictate how we look at this and how we collectively solve these challenges. So I hope to think we're wiser and that we're more imaginative coming out of this. And again after being in this industry for 30 years, we've not seen the types of things that we've seen over the last couple. So I hope to think that this is a pivot point for all of us. >> Well, Samsung is certainly a leader in many areas and great to see you on theCube here and the theme in your talks around intelligence, human edge innovation, open. This is a force that's happening. And I think the big change, as you said, the wisdom combined with a reinvention is happening and it's going to be very interesting ride, should be fun to work on. >> It will be John and I thank you for our friendship and our relationship over the years. It's always great to see you and to be with you. And again, we're very optimistic as we always have, coming out of this And again, thanks for the time and have a great MWC. >> You too, Casey Choi, Executive Vice President General Manager of the Global Mobile Business to Business Unit Commercial Unit at Samsung. This is theCube's coverage of Mobile World Congress. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching. Okay. We're back here. That was Casey Choi. Talk about wisdom, collective wisdom coming out of the pandemic. Great friend of theCube, great friend of the industry doing great work there. Casey Choi. Like we are doing here on the ground at Mobile World Congress in Cloud City, as well as Adam and the team in the studio. So back to you, Adam and team.

>> Voiceover: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Hello and welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. I'm excited to have this next guest, CUBE alumni, K.C. Choi, Corporate EVP, Executive Vice President and General Manager at Samsung Mobile the B2B/B2G Team. K.C., great to see you, how you've been? >> John, it is wonderful to see you and it's been way too long. Great to be back on theCUBE with you looking forward to our conversation and I hope you're safe. >> Yeah and same to you. Great to see you, I'm so excited. One of the things I've really admired about you and our conversations in the past is you've always had your finger on the pulse of the waves and you're always involved with some really great engineering work. And I want to dig into this now because your role is really hitting the industry for that kind of wave which is the confluence of tech, media, entertainment, every vertical, big data, IOT and with the distributed computing now called the Cloud and edge. It really sets the table for what is now going to be the preferred architecture probably for the next 20 plus years. So give us your view on how you see the changing landscape in the industry. >> Yeah, I think you covered all of the major seismic shifts that are happening here. And then as we've all experienced over the last, over a year with the COVID pandemic, that's actually accelerated a lot of the thinking around edge. We've certainly seen news cases proliferate whether it be in things such as healthcare, manufacturing's also taken I think, a real hard look at the applicability of these types of solutions. We've seen things like, for example 5G pickup in these industrial applications as the industrial companies have thought about worker safety, as they've thought about automation, as they thought about utilizing more protocols, as well as bringing these technologies and processes together in a way that will help to reinvent their particular economic base, as well as the learnings that we've seen over the last year, coming from these new safety protocols as well as the need for now with the economies is picking back up, the need for productivity, as well as greater efficiencies coming from these types of solutions. So we've seen that confluence happen. And then certainly on our end, as our network connectivity has become much stronger, lower latency, as well as the endpoint capabilities have increased dramatically over the last few years, as SOC and others have taken root, we've seen the edge, if you will, start be more extreme, in the sense that it's pushing further and further out beyond what we originally envisioned the edge to be. >> And the SOC trend actually highlights that it's not so much about Moore's law as it is more about more chips, more performance. If you look at actual performance, Dave Vellante just put out a report on this, where there's actually more performance now than ever before coming in from the combined energy and combined processing power out there. So it's super, super amazing what you can do at the edge. Before we get into the edge, I want to just clarify what is your new role there? I mean, Samsung is known for obviously the B2C with the phones and everything else, but you have a specific focus, what is your main focus there? >> Yeah, our mission's pretty straightforward. And as everyone knows, Samsung is a powerhouse consumer electronics company. We pride ourselves in obviously our position in that, but we also have a very significant role really in the business to business and in the government and financial services sector space with our mobile devices, as well as with our Knox security platform solution and device management platform. We actually provide a large portion of the security devices for governments worldwide as well as the Knox platform that is built into the majority of our, both, consumer as well as business devices that really allows for that, if you will, that next protective layer on top of the Android OS that allows for things such as, personal and professional profiles. So we produce those solutions out of my team as well as we provide really the go-to-market support, as well as the RnD support for that platform, including an area that's growing rapidly for us which is in the rugged category, which is one of the key products that we're using for some of these edge applications that we'll be talking about. >> Great, let's jump into that. What are you guys doing specifically in the edge computing space? Let's dig into it. >> Yeah, I think maybe the place to start on that is we're really reenvisioning what the edge is. And I mentioned a little earlier that with what's occurring in the performance profile and really the functional profile, what is being produced at the device level. We're talking about in the last few years, the fidelity and the capabilities are in, what I would call the computer class type functions, as well as obviously mobile devices have always been communication gateways for a number of functions, whether they be videos or photos. They're multisensory in nature. And as this has become more practical and the connective tissue has gotten there with 5G as well as all kinds of other fast low latency communications capabilities and Wi-Fi 6, UWB, included within that. What we're finding is that the use case to bring applications especially cloud native and container native applications to these devices to be augmenting the endpoint user, the frontline worker, really the knowledge worker and moving that capability further away from, if you will, an extension to cloud services as well as MEC type services, this is where we see it going. And really what we're trying to work on with IBM and with Red Hat is how do we continue to fortify this, not only from an actual processing AI/ML capability, but also equip these devices so that they can fully participate as part of a multi-hybrid cloud architecture. The endpoint is really one of the last bastions where we have not conquered bringing cloud first container native applications really to that point. And we believe the time is right because of the capabilities that are there along with, again, the connectivity that is becoming much more ubiquitous now to allow for that type of architecture to exist. And we're starting to call this the intelligent human edge as well. We think that the applications that we'll see for this are ones that will make the human operator more productive, safer, certainly more efficient. And we think that this augmentation of that frontline worker is an area that we are, put our stakes on in terms of pioneering, just because of again, our experience in that mobility space and in that consumer space. >> That's great you brought up Red Hat and IBM. Obviously Red Hat was bought by IBM. Arvin, the CEO who I interviewed in 2019 in theCUBE at Red Hat summit, ironically, a couple months later, buys the company and a smile on his face. He likes cloud. >> K.C.: Maybe you had something to do with that, John. >> No, he wanted to, I could see he wanted to say it, but he loves the cloud. Everyone who knows Arvin knows that he's into the cloud in a new way. And this edge piece that you mentioned that you're using Red Hat and IBM for hybrid, this is what the new operating system is going to look like. It's a completely distributed system and the edge is just part of that operating model. This is what their vision is, which I love by the way. I think that redefines what that is. Are you saying that you guys are working with Red Hat and IBM for that hybrid edge piece? How does that work? Can you take me through that? >> Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, obviously the ecosystem is bigger than that, but IBM and Red Hat really bring the expertise really around container ecosystems, certainly the work that they have done in terms a multi hybrid cloud, certainly the work that OpenShift has brought forward in terms of, you know, multi-platform capability. We really love the concept of develop bonds run, any sort of a construct. And when you think about it, the mobile platforms specifically, you know, ours, as well as others, has really been that last baskin of areas where more of the development is on a particular platform, it's more bespoke. We think that by broaching this, you know in conjunction with IBM and Red Hat this is going to give us the ability to have these device architectures become a full voting member, if you will, of that hybrid cloud architecture and of that microservice container architecture that is becoming much more prevalent. So this is really the work that we're doing. And then obviously we're working at a vertical level to see where are the applicable use cases in places such as the design studio we have in Singapore, where with the Singaporean government we're looking at really bringing a Renaissance to industry 4.0 type applications, smart factory automation, public safety, these areas where we believe that this type of architecture can be deployed. >> That's awesome. And I totally believe that, you know the edge is still going to be pushed farther and further out, honestly, having that open standards of hybrid. So I got to ask you, on the edge just while I got you here, you know, one of the things that you see clearly as the industrial edge, it's called, factories and whatnot. You've mentioned some of those. And then you've got the human piece, which is like people have phones and wearables and other things are going to be happening. So as you start to have those end points, which are then going to be connected into a distributed network, AKA a hybrid cloud, soon to be multiple clouds. But that's the sub system within the cloud construct. The complaint has been, not complaint, but the observation has been and complaint, if you look at it that the edge is limited by power and connectivity, okay. These are like key basic concepts. How is the connectivity option? I know 5G is coming, it's here, we're seeing it being deployed. We got people saying, hey, this is our business application. Clearly got higher throughput, not as much range. Give us your take on this because this becomes important, obviously, power is battery that is driven, it's getting better and better and power is not really that much of a problem, but connectivity seems to be, what's your vision of this? >> Yeah and you know, there's a lot of ways to approach that. I will tell you on the industrial side, at least in some of the deployments and PLCs that we've been involved in over the last a year or two years, connectivity is an issue. And a lot of it has to do with the infrastructure that is available in many of these plants or factories, or points of distribution, they're not necessarily leading edge, in many cases we're dealing with what I would call sub par connectivity. It's not like an office complex where you may have state-of-the-art Wi-Fi capability or 10 gig capability or whatever it might be. So what we've found on that is it requires actually quite a bit of work, in terms of fine tuning, both, on the the network infrastructure side, whatever that might be or we've also found that on the device side, the programmability of the of the device, in terms of tuning it for whatever connective environment would be there. And we've worked with everything from, you know, Bluetooth, UWB to Wi-Fi 6 and everything in between and in many cases or multiple protocols or connectivity methods that are there. So, you know, one thing we've learned is that you can't necessarily assume that in a, especially in a factory environment that those conditions are going to allow for consistency. So you have to engineer around that, you know, in some of the things that we've done are really around making sure that we've got deployable programmability at the device as well as board dynamic network tuning capabilities that will allow for better connectivity and to handle things such as consistency. >> All right, K.C., great insight. Final question for you, why Samsung and IBM? What's the bottom line? >> Yeah, I think the bottom line is really straightforward. I mean, we've had a 30 year history of working together, you know, we've been mutual customers to each other. We do a lot of work for IBM, in regards to foundry type services and semiconductor services. And that we work very closely with them over many years on applications. So number one, there's been a natural relationship, just in the services that we provided to each other. But as we look at really the go-to-market, I mean, IBM brings so much credibility from a vertical market perspective. There's a trusted advisor type status that I think is a very profound and it's been built over many years, you know, delivering on the promises. And on our end, I think what we bring is really this cycle time that is driven by our passion in the consumer space. And when we start to apply that into more of these vertical industrial, you know, vertical sectors, I think that combination is very powerful. The services piece obviously comes into play with IBM. And then really, the Red Hat piece of this really just puts the icing on the cake with really the the market leadership in hybrid cloud and in the container native architecture, so it's just a very powerful combo and the cooperation there has been strong and we continue to look forward to delivering more through that partnership. >> K.C., great to see you, great thing to hear. You know, you got scalable infrastructure, you got modern applications, got the edge, all hybrid. Great partnership. K.C. Choi, Corporate Executive Vice President and General Manager of Samsung Mobile B2B Team. Great to see you and congratulations on your mission and it's an exciting project. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing. >> Great to see you, John, take care of yourself and looking forward to seeing you again. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft upbeat music) (melodious music)

(melodious music) >> Voiceover: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Hello and welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. I'm excited to have this next guest, CUBE alumni, K.C. Choi, Corporate EVP, Executive Vice President and General Manager at Samsung Mobile the B2B/B2G Team. K.C., great to see you, how you've been? >> John, it is wonderful to see you and it's been way too long. Great to be back on theCUBE with you looking forward to our conversation and I hope you're safe. >> Yeah and same to you. Great to see you, I'm so excited. One of the things I've really admired about you and our conversations in the past is you've always had your finger on the pulse of the waves and you're always involved with some really great engineering work. And I want to dig into this now because your role is really hitting the industry for that kind of wave which is the confluence of tech, media, entertainment, every vertical, big data, IOT and with the distributed computing now called the Cloud and edge. It really sets the table for what is now going to be the preferred architecture probably for the next 20 plus years. So give us your view on how you see the changing landscape in the industry. >> Yeah, I think you covered all of the major seismic shifts that are happening here. And then as we've all experienced over the last, over a year with the COVID pandemic, that's actually accelerated a lot of the thinking around edge. We've certainly seen news cases proliferate whether it be in things such as healthcare, manufacturing's also taken I think, a real hard look at the applicability of these types of solutions. We've seen things like, for example 5G pickup in these industrial applications as the industrial companies have thought about worker safety, as they've thought about automation, as they thought about utilizing more protocols, as well as bringing these technologies and processes together in a way that will help to reinvent their particular economic base, as well as the learnings that we've seen over the last year, coming from these new safety protocols as well as the need for now with the economies is picking back up, the need for productivity, as well as greater efficiencies coming from these types of solutions. So we've seen that confluence happen. And then certainly on our end, as our network connectivity has become much stronger, lower latency, as well as the endpoint capabilities have increased dramatically over the last few years, as SOC and others have taken root, we've seen the edge, if you will, start be more extreme, in the sense that it's pushing further and further out beyond what we originally envisioned the edge to be. >> And the SOC trend actually highlights that it's not so much about Moore's law as it is more about more chips, more performance. If you look at actual performance, Dave Vellante just put out a report on this, where there's actually more performance now than ever before coming in from the combined energy and combined processing power out there. So it's super, super amazing what you can do at the edge. Before we get into the edge, I want to just clarify what is your new role there? I mean, Samsung is known for obviously the B2C with the phones and everything else, but you have a specific focus, what is your main focus there? >> Yeah, our mission's pretty straightforward. And as everyone knows, Samsung is a powerhouse consumer electronics company. We pride ourselves in obviously our position in that, but we also have a very significant role really in the business to business and in the government and financial services sector space with our mobile devices, as well as with our Knox security platform solution and device management platform. We actually provide a large portion of the security devices for governments worldwide as well as the Knox platform that is built into the majority of our, both, consumer as well as business devices that really allows for that, if you will, that next protective layer on top of the Android OS that allows for things such as, personal and professional profiles. So we produce those solutions out of my team as well as we provide really the go-to-market support, as well as the RnD support for that platform, including an area that's growing rapidly for us which is in the rugged category, which is one of the key products that we're using for some of these edge applications that we'll be talking about. >> Great, let's jump into that. What are you guys doing specifically in the edge computing space? Let's dig into it. >> Yeah, I think maybe the place to start on that is we're really reinvisioning what the edge is. And I mentioned a little earlier that with what's occurring in the performance profile and really the functional profile, what is being produced at the device level. We're talking about in the last few years, the fidelity and the capabilities are in, what I would call the computer class type functions, as well as obviously mobile devices have always been communication gateways for a number of functions, whether they be videos or photos. They're multisensory in nature. And as this has become more practical and the connective tissue has gotten there with 5G as well as all kinds of other fast low latency communications capabilities and Wi-Fi 6, UWB, included within that. What we're finding is that the used case to bring applications especially cloud native and container native applications to these devices to be augmenting the endpoint user, the frontline worker, really the knowledge worker and moving that capability further away from, if you will, an extension to cloud services as well as MEC type services, this is where we see it going. And really what we're trying to work on with IBM and with Red Hat is how do we continue to fortify this, not only from an actual processing AI ML capability, but also equip these devices so that they can fully participate as part of a multi hybrid cloud architecture. The endpoint is really one of the last baskins where we have not conquered bringing cloud first container native applications really to that point. And we believe the time is right because of the capabilities that are there along with, again, the connectivity that is becoming much more ubiquitous now to allow for that type of architecture to exist. And we're starting to call this the intelligent human edge as well. We think that the applications that we'll see for this are ones that will make the human operator more productive, safer, certainly more efficient. And we think that this augmentation of that frontline worker is an area that we are, put our stakes on in terms of pioneering, just because of again, our experience in that mobility space and in that consumer space. >> That's great you brought up Red Hat and IBM. Obviously Red Hat was bought by IBM. Arvin, the CEO who I interviewed in 2019 in theCUBE at Red Hat summit, ironically, a couple months later, buys the company and a smile on his face. He likes cloud. >> K.C.: Maybe you had something to do with that, John. >> No, he wanted to, I could see he wanted to say it, but he loves the cloud. Everyone who knows Arvin knows that he's into the cloud in a new way. And this edge piece that you mentioned that you're using Red Hat and IBM for hybrid, this is what the new operating system is going to look like. It's a completely distributed system and the edge is just part of that operating model. This is what their vision is, which I love by the way. I think that redefines what that is. Are you saying that you guys are working with Red Hat and IBM for that hybrid edge piece? How does that work? Can you take me through that? >> Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, obviously the ecosystem is bigger than that, but IBM and Red Hat really bring the expertise really around container ecosystems, certainly the work that they have done in terms a multi hybrid cloud, certainly the work that OpenShift has brought forward in terms of, you know, multi-platform capability. We really love the concept of develop bonds run, any sort of a construct. And when you think about it, the mobile platforms specifically, you know, ours, as well as others, has really been that last baskin of areas where more of the development is on a particular platform, it's more bespoke. We think that by broaching this, you know in conjunction with IBM and Red Hat this is going to give us the ability to have these device architectures become a full voting member, if you will, of that hybrid cloud architecture and of that microservice container architecture that is becoming much more prevalent. So this is really the work that we're doing. And then obviously we're working at a vertical level to see where are the applicable use cases in places such as the design studio we have in Singapore, where with the Singaporean government we're looking at really bringing a Renaissance to industry 4.0 type applications, smart factory automation, public safety, these areas where we believe that this type of architecture can be deployed. >> That's awesome. And I totally believe that, you know the edge is still going to be pushed farther and further out, honestly, having that open standards of hybrid. So I got to ask you, on the edge just while I got you here, you know, one of the things that you see clearly as the industrial edge, it's called, factories and whatnot. You've mentioned some of those. And then you've got the human piece, which is like people have phones and wearables and other things are going to be happening. So as you start to have those end points, which are then going to be connected into a distributed network, AKA a hybrid cloud, soon to be multiple clouds. But that's the sub system within the cloud construct. The complaint has been, not complaint, but the observation has been and complaint, if you look at it that the edge is limited by power and connectivity, okay. These are like key basic concepts. How is the connectivity option? I know 5G is coming, it's here, we're seeing it being deployed. We got people saying, hey, this is our business application. Clearly got higher throughput, not as much range. Give us your take on this because this becomes important, obviously, power is battery that is driven, it's getting better and better and power is not really that much of a problem, but connectivity seems to be, what's your vision of this? >> Yeah and you know, there's a lot of ways to approach that. I will tell you on the industrial side, at least in some of the deployments and PLCs that we've been involved in over the last a year or two years, connectivity is an issue. And a lot of it has to do with the infrastructure that is available in many of these plants or factories, or points of distribution, they're not necessarily leading edge, in many cases we're dealing with what I would call sub par connectivity. It's not like an office complex where you may have state-of-the-art Wi-Fi capability or 10 gig capability or whatever it might be. So what we've found on that is it requires actually quite a bit of work, in terms of fine tuning, both, on the the network infrastructure side, whatever that might be or we've also found that on the device side, the programmability of the of the device, in terms of tuning it for whatever connective environment would be there. And we've worked with everything from, you know, Bluetooth, UWB to Wi-Fi 6 and everything in between and in many cases or multiple protocols or connectivity methods that are there. So, you know, one thing we've learned is that you can't necessarily assume that in a, especially in a factory environment that those conditions are going to allow for consistency. So you have to engineer around that, you know, in some of the things that we've done are really around making sure that we've got deployable programmability at the device as well as board dynamic network tuning capabilities that will allow for better connectivity and to handle things such as consistency. >> All right, K.C., great insight. Final question for you, why Samsung and IBM? What's the bottom line? >> Yeah, I think the bottom line is really straightforward. I mean, we've had a 30 year history of working together, you know, we've been mutual customers to each other. We do a lot of work for IBM, in regards to foundry type services and semiconductor services. And that we work very closely with them over many years on applications. So number one, there's been a natural relationship, just in the services that we provided to each other. But as we look at really the go-to-market, I mean, IBM brings so much credibility from a vertical market perspective. There's a trusted advisor type status that I think is a very profound and it's been built over many years, you know, delivering on the promises. And on our end, I think what we bring is really this cycle time that is driven by our passion in the consumer space. And when we start to apply that into more of these vertical industrial, you know, vertical sectors, I think that combination is very powerful. The services piece obviously comes into play with IBM. And then really, the Red Hat piece of this really just puts the icing on the cake with really the the market leadership in hybrid cloud and in the container native architecture, so it's just a very powerful combo and the cooperation there has been strong and we continue to look forward to delivering more through that partnership. >> K.C., great to see you, great thing to hear. You know, you got scalable infrastructure, you got modern applications, got the edge, all hybrid. Great partnership. K.C. Choi, Corporate Executive Vice President and General Manager of Samsung Mobile B2B Team. Great to see you and congratulations on your mission and it's an exciting project. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing. >> Great to see you, John, take care of yourself and looking forward to seeing you again. >> Okay, this is theCUBE's coverage IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (soft upbeat music) (melodious music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios where we have a quarantine crew and we're doing remote interviews with thought leaders in the industry and people who have been around the block, beat it through three industry cycles but also can share their perspectives on the COVID-19 situation that we're in, the challenges and the opportunities. And I have with me, Jeremy Burton, a good friend of theCUBE. Have been a CUBE alumni now for 10 years, now the CEO of Observe, it's a stealth startup. I got a little taste of it, it's a Cloud thing. It's going to be part of this whole new guard. Jeremy, great to see you. You're sheltering in place, we're sheltering in the studio. Thanks for joining me. >> No, thanks for the offer. I mean, it's funny these days I welcome chance to actually speak to somebody and particularly, somebody that's not at Observe. So this is a rare treat in the last three weeks. >> Telling the wife and kids, "Hey, I'm going to go talk to theCUBE guy." So you know, I'm going to have some fun for a while. Look, I want to just have a candid fun conversation 'cause I think one of the things that's interesting to me in one, things that we're spending a lot of time doing media on is getting the word out about some of the things that are going on. People do have anxiety, they're sheltering in place for the folks that've been in the tech industry, working at home and being virtual has been part of the thing. It's not a big thing but from some of the people it's like a first time thing. And also it's also highlighting a disruption that kind of is off the books if you will, the classic continuous operations and disaster recovery was also confined to power outages or hurricanes or all those things that we people are protected against. But this is just a surge of the herd of the people going home. It's causing an at scale problem and showing these challenges, but there's also opportunities. What's your take on this? How do you see this evolving? What's your view of the current situation and some of the comments? >> Yeah, I think for most of us we're in a little bit unchartered territory. I don't really know a whole lot about medicine or the details of the virus or how pandemics happen. But we obviously have to, we deal with the consequences of it. And so I think right now although, I think it's a fairly bad situation for a lot of people, just having been through a couple of recessions where we all went through 9/11. The world does turn around and you come out the other side. And so the key thing is you start like a very much as a cliche, but you've got to live in the moment, "What can I do right now? "What can I affect right now? "How can I make sure that what I'm working on "is a value for when we come out the other side "and when more curveballs come along?" I think you've got a reason about that with the best information you have at the time. So I almost feel like you very much, you've got to just live solid like day to day, week to week, listen to the data and adapt based on that. But it's certainly starting to reinvent how work is done. I think we've all worked from home at some point. We've all worked using our equipment at home. But the prospect of working that way for months on end and it maybe been the new way of working, is a whole new ballgame. So I'm a big believer that this will fundamentally change the way we work. I don't think we're going to go 100% back to the way that we were, and there's going to be quite a lot of readjustments, and I think in that world, there's going to be some new companies come along that are big winners. And by definition, there's going to be some big losers as well. >> Well, people who know theCUBE know that I'm a big fan of you as an executive. I've seen the vision, you have also great technical shops and product shops, but also a good operational view. You've always been a fan of digital. And I think if you look at video conferencing, for instance, WebEx as a Cisco thing, great bulletproof of the enterprise, but Zoom has come across the scene. I've never seen so many Zoom parties. I did one with my family that they actually liked it. They were having fun. We had cocktails raising the wineglasses up. So people are Zooming their CUBE in, we're doing interviews. So video now is not just a corporate thing. You're seeing the engagement of digital taking on a new life and this is a whole new roles and responsibilities that we might reimagine how people do their business because with the events being canceled that are going on, whether they're concerts or just industry or tech events or any event, that physical space is gone, now it's going to digital. So how do you replicate the business value or personal value from physical face to face to digital? It's a whole new venue, there's new roles. It's complicated, it's a complex system. What's your thought on that? >> It is though, but what I have been pleasantly surprised by, I'd love it going in the office. I love the engagement with people and hanging out in the office. And so I was not really a big fan of remote working and virtually working, but I have to say, not only now where we virtually work in and we do the Zoom meetings and that's all well and good. It's a big cultural thing with at Observe to do a game night. And so we thought, "Well, why can't we do a virtual game night "and lending some trade secrets here? "But our favorite game was Secret Hitler." >> Yeah, that's a great game. One of my family's favorite. >> Turns out there's an online Secret Hitler. And you know what? The first time we played it, one of the nice thing is we've got less than 20 people in the company. So you got 12 or 14 people online. It's actually manageable. But I have to say, I'm almost embarrassed to say, it was almost as good sitting there with a drink playing virtual Secret Hitler as it was sitting around the desk. And so now I'm thinking when we go back to work, maybe we don't need to leave our desks and go have a drink together. We can just sit there on Zoom and play the secret Hitler online. Then you start looking around, "Well, what are the games can I play online?" Not like for one or two players or five players and I'm not talking about playing kind of Halo or something like that, but good collaborative games for tens of people to play at once. There's not as many as you think. So I feel like the social aspect of it, I mean, online gaming I think is huge. But even the video conferencing software, you would have thought that we would be done WebEx by now, right? I mean Skype and WebEx, we've had those for years, right? And so how does Zoom, which does guess what, video conferencing come along and start to clear up. And Zoom is not perfect by the way, but this is almost the crisis that they needed to make a fabulous business. I do believe as we start to come out the other side, I think there's going to be much, much investment in the VC world, on improving that remote work experience Because as much as me and you can talk to a video session, we can't collaborate and work together. The tools for doing that, I think still are relatively poor. >> I think you're onto something. Zoom by the way, had 10 million active dailies in December. This month was 200 million rocket ship. They got 90,000 universities. They essentially made some good moves. I think that's going to be good, but you bring up a good point about these new kinds of opportunities that are going to come out the other side, which is, think about Secret Hitler. For the folks who don't know, is a great game that you play with people, in your family or in friend group like Cards Against Me. And if you know that game, it's a similar thing concept, but you have different games. It's really fun, you should get it. Check it out online. But think about that online gaming or just what engagement means socially. I mean the old web days or just like a couple of months ago was individual engagement, "Did you like my tweet? "Did you like my Facebook post?" You're getting at something that's little bit more of a social organizational construct of group engagement, intimacy. >> Right, and the thing is we would do game night once a month and we'd get videos in and get the teamed together. Once a month was good when everybody had their own life to deal with. Now people are craving like, "Hey can we do this like every week?" And I wouldn't be surprised if the frequency increases from that, but I think that just almost speaks to human beings and that we crave social interaction. And even though most of the people at Observe are engineers and by definition should not enjoy as much social interaction, they do. They love it, right? And to me, that gaming and social direction, that's part of work. And so you have to have a virtual environment that can reproduce that. >> I mean, it's very interesting to see some of the entrepreneurial exercises or pitches that come out of this because I think it's going to be a Renaissance, it's not Renaissance 'cause it's going to come back. It's always been there. But the new kind of entrepreneurial products coming out are going to address these things. And the question I want to ask you, 'cause you've been on the big company, you've done extremely well in your career, than you get back down to your roots to doing startup, you're launching, you haven't yet launched. So you got hit right here, you're working at home sheltering in place. I was talking to a couple of VC buddies, venture capitalists, and they're saying, "I'm reading books and I'm doing research "but I really can't meet people." So their work has changed. How do you see the investment community reacting to this? Certainly valuations might come down. Obviously, their limited partners are being hit with the stock market. You're seeing a disruption. What do you see going on in the VC world around this cold hard time? >> I mean certainly all VCs are not created equal. So I think there's going to be different perspectives based on the background of the DNA of the VC involved. I think certainly at Observe, I feel very fortunate that we've got a sort of Hill Ventures. So these guys were the investors behind Snowflake and behind Pure Storage and many other good companies but they're very longterm investors and their advice to me has been, "Well look, "some of the most innovative times if you like, "have been during and after a major crisis. "And so if you make short term decisions "to get you through those crisis, "they're all terrible but they don't last forever "and there will be another side. "And so make good business decisions "and good investment decisions through this "because there will be winners "that emerge on the other side." And that's really what I try and get the team focused on is, "Guys for now, we're sort of hunkered down "and it feels bad, "but we're probably more privileged than most. "And we have an opportunity maybe on the other side, "to take advantage, we don't have a revenue stream, "we don't have existing customers. "We can sort of take this Greenfield business "that we've got and you go on the offensive "when things returned to assemblance of normal." So The Hill had been fantastic. And I would hope that most VCs retain that perspective, which is if it was a good company three weeks ago, it's probably still a good company today. And the best way to create value is to sort of empower I think the CEOs and executive teams to make the right sort of longer term decisions. Try and capitalize when you come out the other side because there will be losers as well. And I think the wrong decisions now can put you on the losing end of that equation in three, four, five months time. >> Yeah, that's a good point. If you are a good company just a few months ago or even weeks ago or a year ago, you're still a good company. That's really going to be a tell sign to what happens in some of these companies. If I got to ask you a more focused question on this whole, which side of the street are you on? Are you riding the wave or are you going to get taken away and washed away with it? Because there are bets and well, I want to get into Observe in a minute, but you mentioned Snowflake there in the Cloud wave. Obviously, that's pretty bullish. We're still bullish on that. Obviously, it's going to be game changer. But is there a tell sign for the kind of bets that those good management teams need to make now? Because I agree with you, when the Dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and really 2004 kicked back up again. 2008, we saw that post and a lot of great companies were created. So what's your advice on which side of history do you need to be on here? I'll say Cloud is one. What is your view on that? >> Yeah, I mean we felt for many years, it's not just since I went to the startup, but I am a huge believer in this transition to digital businesses. Frictionless interactions, automation, yes, obviously people are required to run a business, but if you could run a business remotely, or the businesses automated in a way such that it doesn't require hands-on operation, then that's a beautiful thing. And my belief is that, this terrible situation will force people to really think seriously about what the digital business looks like. If you don't have one, then that you may not be able to be in business in a year, two, three years down the line, right? There'll be some carryover, but I think the smart businesses are going to be able to function in an environment such as this. >> Yeah, I think that's great. >> That's going to be playing on everybody's minds. Now more than ever, I think that the digital business is a necessity. >> Yeah, I was just talking to a colleague and we were just talking about how all of the events got canceled and you've had the history running some of those best events ever in the industry at EMC. And we participated in those and you know your staff when it comes to events, there's economic value in these physical events as a venue, Science Convention Center in Moscone here in San Francisco. I mean there's a lot of things that go on, a lot of decision-making that's been standardized over the years and there's an economic value that comes out of those events. Now that's gone, and then these little digital teams, some companies have like five people, two people, sometimes maybe if you're lucky you have 10 or more or a department. And then you've got demand generation. All these guys are being told now, "You have to make up for the shortfall "in not just leads but value." And this just has been a big burden for some of my friends out there who are like, "Wait a minute, you want to take that and move it over here?" It's been kind of a challenge. What is your view on this? Because a lot of people are trying to figure this particular problem out on how to make digital work today and have some extensibility and get success. What's your take? >> Well, I'm still a huge believer I mean, whereas sort of like we just saw digital marketing content is still very much King, right? If you can produce a compelling piece of content online, TV quality with a depth of knowledge that you're going to attract an audience, now can you then make that experience interactive? Can you engage the audience in a deeper way? Yeah, you're probably not going to have something which lasts for a full day or for three days online, but I think it's really going to force the creativity on the content side to another level, right? It can't just be talking heads and PowerPoint pictures. So that rethinking from first principles, what an online conference or an online experience actually looks like in a way that it engages the people who are watching. To me, those folks are going to go do very, very well. And the economics, I know how much it costs to put on a conference for 10 or 15,000 people. And by the way, I know how much it costs to put on a virtual event for 10 or 15,000 people. And the economics are astounding in that difference. Now if you're physically somewhere, you can feel things that you can't feel online. Come on though, this is a problem that requires some innovation to solve, right? We've talked about virtual reality and augmented reality, but it's still pretty clunky and relegated to sort of niche use cases and bad games. But at some point, that technology has to reach the point where it can be useful and engage in a new. You can approximate to that physical experience. But I think that is going to be critical but many businesses even beyond sort of marketing and virtual events and that kind of thing, many businesses are just going to have to reinvent how they engage and interact with their customers and the automation of their operations and how do you get by when you don't have as many people physically in an office or operating machines? Everybody's going to have to think through that. >> Yeah, I think that's great insight and that's going to be a great clip that I'll share and I think that's going to be inspirational for the folks trying to solve that problem. The things that we're focused in on, as you know, and this is something that we're doing a lot of work on, is the engagement with groups and you mentioned The Secret Hitler as the game, they're going to see some new clever things go on. And I think the group dynamic and having people in whether it's virtual and physical spaces exchanging credible things, ideas or jokes or whatever is going to be a new kind of dynamic. >> Yeah. >> Because that's going to have to fill the void. >> Yeah, I mean I've got a small company so we can play these individual games, but just think about some of these board type games where I want to have three teams and I want to divide the company up into three. The logistics of actually figuring that out is ridiculous and it shouldn't be that way, right? And so these are basics of human social interactions. We want to play a game together, we want to divide up into teams. But that sounds like a relatively trivial thing, but try and find the number of games available that allow you to easily do that and each team interaction independently of the others, it's almost impossible. >> It's going to be fun to watch and I think and I hope we're going to learn. Well, thanks for the device. Let's get back to your startup. Let's get a plug in for that, I want to get the plug in. I've seen you in stealth so you can't really go into great detail, but you have been talking to customers. You are obviously related, that's related to Snowflake, but you were going to do some things with Snowflake. You're in the Cloud. Can you just take a minute to give a plug for what you guys are doing for the people who want to know what you guys are leaning towards in terms of the value proposition? >> Yeah well, when I look back in my career, one of the times I enjoyed the most was the time at Oracle and working with data. And I've been fortunate enough for the last four and a half years or so to be on the board of Snowflake. Couple of ex Oracle guys, Benoit and Thierry founded the company and they've reinvented the database. And I felt like I've sat for 20 years looking for the second coming of the database and we all were sort of had fake thinking it was Hadoop. And turns out it wasn't. But I think Snowflake and the separation of storage and compute that allows them to sort of scale and have a usage-based pricing model, I just think is absolutely revolutionary and I think it's going to be one of the great companies of the new era. And so when I was there when I looked at Observe, really the thesis was that using a platform like Snowflake, you could potentially reason about unstructured log data. It's all like Splunk. You could reason about time series data, a little bit like Datadog or tracing data like AppDynamics or in fact any data, you could reason about it together. And today, if you look at the world, it's like if you want to do something with logs, you go get one product. If you want to do something with relational data, you get another, if you want to do time series data, you get another, you want to do tracing, you get an APM tool. And nobody has the big picture, right? Everybody's got their own little piece of data and their own perspective on where the issue might be in your company. But nobody really knows and it's usually put together in the brain of, of the smartest guy in the room. And so I thought it was quite simple. At Snowflake, you've got this commercial database that can do instruction data and time series data and relational data. And what if we could collect all data within an organization together, structure it, relate it, and then imagine what you could find out about your infrastructure, your applications, your business? >> Sort of unification? Does it have like unification kind of concept for users or IT? >> Yeah, I think the emerging category would be observability but it really is a collapsing of log analytics, metrics monitoring and tracing into this new category of observability. We don't necessarily just view that though as sort of data coming out of Kubernetes clusters or out of AWS or wherever. We actually could ingest security data. We could ingest data from people surfing using your app or surfing your website. We could take logs coming out of machines on a factory floor. So the way we built the product, it can be literally any kind of data. And we try and structure it and relate it and make sense of it and then make it very easy for people to navigate through it and determine issues and problems. So yeah, we're pretty excited about it. And like I said, we could not have built this even a couple of years ago because I don't think Snowflake would have been there. And in fact, that was one of the big risks when we started the company. Can we build it on Snowflake? And so here we are two years later and we think we can. Well, we're sure we can do it. >> Yeah, they've had a good run too. I mean, look at the growth of Snowflake. >> Yeah, it's crazy. I've never seen anything like it and in the last 20 years and B2B, I've never seen anything like it. So just like I felt in the mid 90s when I was at Oracle, people were making decisions to go with Oracle and then saying, "Hey, help me get all of my other data in that, "my mainframe data, my this, my that." I think Snowflake are going to go through the same sort of growth phase and hopefully with Observe, we can be like, "Hey, if you want to put "your unstructured data or time series data, "we can help you do that very easily." >> Well, this is exactly the current wave that you want to be on the right side of because like you said, just a year or so ago or a couple of years ago, it wasn't available. This is kind of the new capabilities. >> Yeah, I feel like there's going to be a lot of businesses, grow ridiculously. You talked about the Zoom numbers. These are ridiculous growth numbers and there are going to be companies come out the other side that take advantage of the new environment. And as they're growing, as they're scaling, as they build these new microservice-based applications, they're going to run into issues and we hope at least that it's products with our kind of architecture, that's going to be able to help these fast-growing businesses. So yeah, as I said, we're somewhat fortunate in that we don't have a product yet, but certainly on the other side of this, we think there's going to be plenty of opportunity to help a few folks. >> We know you got to do a launch and we're looking forward to hearing more and getting the briefing, and looking forward to hearing more about it when you go public. And yeah, thanks for coming on and taking the time today. I know you got your daughter's birthday party there and you're going to have some celebration. Thank you for sharing the insights on your vision of digital. I thought that was very compelling and great to see you and stay safe. >> Great to see you. Yeah, my 18-year-old, it's got a birthday party and she like always would worry, "What if no one shows up?" Well, today she knows no one's going to show up. >> Except for her family, yeah. >> It's going to be down in the family, yeah. So thanks for that and you guys stay safe and been great the last 10 years knowing theCUBE been that long but hopefully, here is the next 10 years after this current situation is over. >> Yeah, looking forward to it, it's going to be a lot of fun rye and get the content out there. And again, thanks for coming on during this important time and sharing your insights and also just making some entertainment here. We're getting some conversations so people can fill the void and play some games and have some fun. Jeremy, thanks. Great to see you. Jeremy Burton, senior executive in the industry. I've known him for years, been a CUBE alumni since theCUBE was formed. Now the CEO of Observe, sharing his insights on the industry but more importantly, how to be successful, how to come out the other side. Don't be too optimistic. Be focused on today and get through it. That's his advice. Of course, we're theCUBE bringing you all the data as we can now with remote interviews during this time. Thanks for watching, I'm John furrier. (soft music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Everybody, welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE here in Palo Alto, California in our studios where we have a quarantine crew and we're doing remote interviews with thought leaders in the industry and people who have been around the block, beat it through three industry cycles but also can share their perspectives on the COVID-19 situation that we're in, the challenges and the opportunities. And I have with me, Jeremy Burton, a good friend of theCUBE. Have been a CUBE alumni now for 10 years, now the CEO of Observe, it's a stealth startup. I got a little taste of it, it's a Cloud thing. It's going to be part of this whole new guard. Jeremy, great to see you. You're sheltering in place, we're sheltering in the studio. Thanks for joining me. >> No, thanks for the offer. I mean, it's funny these days I welcome chance to actually speak to somebody and particularly, somebody that's not at Observe. So this is a rare treat in the last three weeks. >> Telling the wife and kids, "Hey, I'm going to go talk to theCUBE guy." So you know, I'm going to have some fun for a while. Look, I want to just have a candid fun conversation 'cause I think one of the things that's interesting to me in one, things that we're spending a lot of time doing media on is getting the word out about some of the things that are going on. People do have anxiety, they're sheltering in place for the folks that've been in the tech industry, working at home and being virtual has been part of the thing. It's not a big thing but from some of the people it's like a first time thing. And also it's also highlighting a disruption that kind of is off the books if you will, the classic continuous operations and disaster recovery was also confined to power outages or hurricanes or all those things that we people are protected against. But this is just a surge of the herd of the people going home. It's causing an at scale problem and showing these challenges, but there's also opportunities. What's your take on this? How do you see this evolving? What's your view of the current situation and some of the comments? >> Yeah, I think for most of us we're in a little bit unchartered territory. I don't really know a whole lot about medicine or the details of the virus or how pandemics happen. But we obviously have to, we deal with the consequences of it. And so I think right now although, I think it's a fairly bad situation for a lot of people, just having been through a couple of recessions where we all went through 9/11. The world does turn around and you come out the other side. And so the key thing is you start like a very much as a cliche, but you've got to live in the moment, "What can I do right now? "What can I affect right now? "How can I make sure that what I'm working on "is a value for when we come out the other side "and when more curveballs come along?" I think you've got a reason about that with the best information you have at the time. So I almost feel like you very much, you've got to just live solid like day to day, week to week, listen to the data and adapt based on that. But it's certainly starting to reinvent how work is done. I think we've all worked from home at some point. We've all worked using our equipment at home. But the prospect of working that way for months on end and it maybe been the new way of working, is a whole new ballgame. So I'm a big believer that this will fundamentally change the way we work. I don't think we're going to go 100% back to the way that we were, and there's going to be quite a lot of readjustments, and I think in that world, there's going to be some new companies come along that are big winners. And by definition, there's going to be some big losers as well. >> Well, people who know theCUBE know that I'm a big fan of you as an executive. I've seen the vision, you have also great technical shops and product shops, but also a good operational view. You've always been a fan of digital. And I think if you look at video conferencing, for instance, WebEx as a Cisco thing, great bulletproof of the enterprise, but Zoom has come across the scene. I've never seen so many Zoom parties. I did one with my family that they actually liked it. They were having fun. We had cocktails raising the wineglasses up. So people are Zooming their CUBE in, we're doing interviews. So video now is not just a corporate thing. You're seeing the engagement of digital taking on a new life and this is a whole new roles and responsibilities that we might reimagine how people do their business because with the events being canceled that are going on, whether they're concerts or just industry or tech events or any event, that physical space is gone, now it's going to digital. So how do you replicate the business value or personal value from physical face to face to digital? It's a whole new venue, there's new roles. It's complicated, it's a complex system. What's your thought on that? >> It is though, but what I have been pleasantly surprised by, I'd love it going in the office. I love the engagement with people and hanging out in the office. And so I was not really a big fan of remote working and virtually working, but I have to say, not only now where we virtually work in and we do the Zoom meetings and that's all well and good. It's a big cultural thing with at Observe to do a game night. And so we thought, "Well, why can't we do a virtual game night "and lending some trade secrets here? "But our favorite game was Secret Hitler." >> Yeah, that's a great game. One of my family's favorite. >> Turns out there's an online Secret Hitler. And you know what? The first time we played it, one of the nice thing is we've got less than 20 people in the company. So you got 12 or 14 people online. It's actually manageable. But I have to say, I'm almost embarrassed to say, it was almost as good sitting there with a drink playing virtual Secret Hitler as it was sitting around the desk. And so now I'm thinking when we go back to work, maybe we don't need to leave our desks and go have a drink together. We can just sit there on Zoom and play the secret Hitler online. Then you start looking around, "Well, what are the games can I play online?" Not like for one or two players or five players and I'm not talking about playing kind of Halo or something like that, but good collaborative games for tens of people to play at once. There's not as many as you think. So I feel like the social aspect of it, I mean, online gaming I think is huge. But even the video conferencing software, you would have thought that we would be done WebEx by now, right? I mean Skype and WebEx, we've had those for years, right? And so how does Zoom, which does guess what, video conferencing come along and start to clear up. And Zoom is not perfect by the way, but this is almost the crisis that they needed to make a fabulous business. I do believe as we start to come out the other side, I think there's going to be much, much investment in the VC world, on improving that remote work experience Because as much as me and you can talk to a video session, we can't collaborate and work together. The tools for doing that, I think still are relatively poor. >> I think you're onto something. Zoom by the way, had 10 million active dailies in December. This month was 200 million rocket ship. They got 90,000 universities. They essentially made some good moves. I think that's going to be good, but you bring up a good point about these new kinds of opportunities that are going to come out the other side, which is, think about Secret Hitler. For the folks who don't know, is a great game that you play with people, in your family or in friend group like Cards Against Me. And if you know that game, it's a similar thing concept, but you have different games. It's really fun, you should get it. Check it out online. But think about that online gaming or just what engagement means socially. I mean the old web days or just like a couple of months ago was individual engagement, "Did you like my tweet? "Did you like my Facebook post?" You're getting at something that's little bit more of a social organizational construct of group engagement, intimacy. >> Right, and the thing is we would do game night once a month and we'd get videos in and get the teamed together. Once a month was good when everybody had their own life to deal with. Now people are craving like, "Hey can we do this like every week?" And I wouldn't be surprised if the frequency increases from that, but I think that just almost speaks to human beings and that we crave social interaction. And even though most of the people at Observe are engineers and by definition should not enjoy as much social interaction, they do. They love it, right? And to me, that gaming and social direction, that's part of work. And so you have to have a virtual environment that can reproduce that. >> I mean, it's very interesting to see some of the entrepreneurial exercises or pitches that come out of this because I think it's going to be a Renaissance, it's not Renaissance 'cause it's going to come back. It's always been there. But the new kind of entrepreneurial products coming out are going to address these things. And the question I want to ask you, 'cause you've been on the big company, you've done extremely well in your career, than you get back down to your roots to doing startup, you're launching, you haven't yet launched. So you got hit right here, you're working at home sheltering in place. I was talking to a couple of VC buddies, venture capitalists, and they're saying, "I'm reading books and I'm doing research "but I really can't meet people." So their work has changed. How do you see the investment community reacting to this? Certainly valuations might come down. Obviously, their limited partners are being hit with the stock market. You're seeing a disruption. What do you see going on in the VC world around this cold hard time? >> I mean certainly all VCs are not created equal. So I think there's going to be different perspectives based on the background of the DNA of the VC involved. I think certainly at Observe, I feel very fortunate that we've got a sort of Hill Ventures. So these guys were the investors behind Snowflake and behind Pure Storage and many other good companies but they're very longterm investors and their advice to me has been, "Well look, "some of the most innovative times if you like, "have been during and after a major crisis. "And so if you make short term decisions "to get you through those crisis, "they're all terrible but they don't last forever "and there will be another side. "And so make good business decisions "and good investment decisions through this "because there will be winners "that emerge on the other side." And that's really what I try and get the team focused on is, "Guys for now, we're sort of hunkered down "and it feels bad, "but we're probably more privileged than most. "And we have an opportunity maybe on the other side, "to take advantage, we don't have a revenue stream, "we don't have existing customers. "We can sort of take this Greenfield business "that we've got and you go on the offensive "when things returned to assemblance of normal." So The Hill had been fantastic. And I would hope that most VCs retain that perspective, which is if it was a good company three weeks ago, it's probably still a good company today. And the best way to create value is to sort of empower I think the CEOs and executive teams to make the right sort of longer term decisions. Try and capitalize when you come out the other side because there will be losers as well. And I think the wrong decisions now can put you on the losing end of that equation in three, four, five months time. >> Yeah, that's a good point. If you are a good company just a few months ago or even weeks ago or a year ago, you're still a good company. That's really going to be a tell sign to what happens in some of these companies. If I got to ask you a more focused question on this whole, which side of the street are you on? Are you riding the wave or are you going to get taken away and washed away with it? Because there are bets and well, I want to get into Observe in a minute, but you mentioned Snowflake there in the Cloud wave. Obviously, that's pretty bullish. We're still bullish on that. Obviously, it's going to be game changer. But is there a tell sign for the kind of bets that those good management teams need to make now? Because I agree with you, when the Dot-com bubble burst in 2000 and really 2004 kicked back up again. 2008, we saw that post and a lot of great companies were created. So what's your advice on which side of history do you need to be on here? I'll say Cloud is one. What is your view on that? >> Yeah, I mean we felt for many years, it's not just since I went to the startup, but I am a huge believer in this transition to digital businesses. Frictionless interactions, automation, yes, obviously people are required to run a business, but if you could run a business remotely, or the businesses automated in a way such that it doesn't require hands-on operation, then that's a beautiful thing. And my belief is that, this terrible situation will force people to really think seriously about what the digital business looks like. If you don't have one, then that you may not be able to be in business in a year, two, three years down the line, right? There'll be some carryover, but I think the smart businesses are going to be able to function in an environment such as this. >> Yeah, I think that's great. >> That's going to be playing on everybody's minds. Now more than ever, I think that the digital business is a necessity. >> Yeah, I was just talking to a colleague and we were just talking about how all of the events got canceled and you've had the history running some of those best events ever in the industry at EMC. And we participated in those and you know your staff when it comes to events, there's economic value in these physical events as a venue, Science Convention Center in Moscone here in San Francisco. I mean there's a lot of things that go on, a lot of decision-making that's been standardized over the years and there's an economic value that comes out of those events. Now that's gone, and then these little digital teams, some companies have like five people, two people, sometimes maybe if you're lucky you have 10 or more or a department. And then you've got demand generation. All these guys are being told now, "You have to make up for the shortfall "in not just leads but value." And this just has been a big burden for some of my friends out there who are like, "Wait a minute, you want to take that and move it over here?" It's been kind of a challenge. What is your view on this? Because a lot of people are trying to figure this particular problem out on how to make digital work today and have some extensibility and get success. What's your take? >> Well, I'm still a huge believer I mean, whereas sort of like we just saw digital marketing content is still very much King, right? If you can produce a compelling piece of content online, TV quality with a depth of knowledge that you're going to attract an audience, now can you then make that experience interactive? Can you engage the audience in a deeper way? Yeah, you're probably not going to have something which lasts for a full day or for three days online, but I think it's really going to force the creativity on the content side to another level, right? It can't just be talking heads and PowerPoint pictures. So that rethinking from first principles, what an online conference or an online experience actually looks like in a way that it engages the people who are watching. To me, those folks are going to go do very, very well. And the economics, I know how much it costs to put on a conference for 10 or 15,000 people. And by the way, I know how much it costs to put on a virtual event for 10 or 15,000 people. And the economics are astounding in that difference. Now if you're physically somewhere, you can feel things that you can't feel online. Come on though, this is a problem that requires some innovation to solve, right? We've talked about virtual reality and augmented reality, but it's still pretty clunky and relegated to sort of niche use cases and bad games. But at some point, that technology has to reach the point where it can be useful and engage in a new. You can approximate to that physical experience. But I think that is going to be critical but many businesses even beyond sort of marketing and virtual events and that kind of thing, many businesses are just going to have to reinvent how they engage and interact with their customers and the automation of their operations and how do you get by when you don't have as many people physically in an office or operating machines? Everybody's going to have to think through that. >> Yeah, I think that's great insight and that's going to be a great clip that I'll share and I think that's going to be inspirational for the folks trying to solve that problem. The things that we're focused in on, as you know, and this is something that we're doing a lot of work on, is the engagement with groups and you mentioned The Secret Hitler as the game, they're going to see some new clever things go on. And I think the group dynamic and having people in whether it's virtual and physical spaces exchanging credible things, ideas or jokes or whatever is going to be a new kind of dynamic. >> Yeah. >> Because that's going to have to fill the void. >> Yeah, I mean I've got a small company so we can play these individual games, but just think about some of these board type games where I want to have three teams and I want to divide the company up into three. The logistics of actually figuring that out is ridiculous and it shouldn't be that way, right? And so these are basics of human social interactions. We want to play a game together, we want to divide up into teams. But that sounds like a relatively trivial thing, but try and find the number of games available that allow you to easily do that and each team interaction independently of the others, it's almost impossible. >> It's going to be fun to watch and I think and I hope we're going to learn. Well, thanks for the device. Let's get back to your startup. Let's get a plug in for that, I want to get the plug in. I've seen you in stealth so you can't really go into great detail, but you have been talking to customers. You are obviously related, that's related to Snowflake, but you were going to do some things with Snowflake. You're in the Cloud. Can you just take a minute to give a plug for what you guys are doing for the people who want to know what you guys are leaning towards in terms of the value proposition? >> Yeah well, when I look back in my career, one of the times I enjoyed the most was the time at Oracle and working with data. And I've been fortunate enough for the last four and a half years or so to be on the board of Snowflake. Couple of ex Oracle guys, Benoit and Thierry founded the company and they've reinvented the database. And I felt like I've sat for 20 years looking for the second coming of the database and we all were sort of had fake thinking it was Hadoop. And turns out it wasn't. But I think Snowflake and the separation of storage and compute that allows them to sort of scale and have a usage-based pricing model, I just think is absolutely revolutionary and I think it's going to be one of the great companies of the new era. And so when I was there when I looked at Observe, really the thesis was that using a platform like Snowflake, you could potentially reason about unstructured log data. It's all like Splunk. You could reason about time series data, a little bit like Datadog or tracing data like AppDynamics or in fact any data, you could reason about it together. And today, if you look at the world, it's like if you want to do something with logs, you go get one product. If you want to do something with relational data, you get another, if you want to do time series data, you get another, you want to do tracing, you get an APM tool. And nobody has the big picture, right? Everybody's got their own little piece of data and their own perspective on where the issue might be in your company. But nobody really knows and it's usually put together in the brain of, of the smartest guy in the room. And so I thought it was quite simple. At Snowflake, you've got this commercial database that can do instruction data and time series data and relational data. And what if we could collect all data within an organization together, structure it, relate it, and then imagine what you could find out about your infrastructure, your applications, your business? >> Sort of unification? Does it have like unification kind of concept for users or IT? >> Yeah, I think the emerging category would be observability but it really is a collapsing of log analytics, metrics monitoring and tracing into this new category of observability. We don't necessarily just view that though as sort of data coming out of Kubernetes clusters or out of AWS or wherever. We actually could ingest security data. We could ingest data from people surfing using your app or surfing your website. We could take logs coming out of machines on a factory floor. So the way we built the product, it can be literally any kind of data. And we try and structure it and relate it and make sense of it and then make it very easy for people to navigate through it and determine issues and problems. So yeah, we're pretty excited about it. And like I said, we could not have built this even a couple of years ago because I don't think Snowflake would have been there. And in fact, that was one of the big risks when we started the company. Can we build it on Snowflake? And so here we are two years later and we think we can. Well, we're sure we can do it. >> Yeah, they've had a good run too. I mean, look at the growth of Snowflake. >> Yeah, it's crazy. I've never seen anything like it and in the last 20 years and B2B, I've never seen anything like it. So just like I felt in the mid 90s when I was at Oracle, people were making decisions to go with Oracle and then saying, "Hey, help me get all of my other data in that, "my mainframe data, my this, my that." I think Snowflake are going to go through the same sort of growth phase and hopefully with Observe, we can be like, "Hey, if you want to put "your unstructured data or time series data, "we can help you do that very easily." >> Well, this is exactly the current wave that you want to be on the right side of because like you said, just a year or so ago or a couple of years ago, it wasn't available. This is kind of the new capabilities. >> Yeah, I feel like there's going to be a lot of businesses, grow ridiculously. You talked about the Zoom numbers. These are ridiculous growth numbers and there are going to be companies come out the other side that take advantage of the new environment. And as they're growing, as they're scaling, as they build these new microservice-based applications, they're going to run into issues and we hope at least that it's products with our kind of architecture, that's going to be able to help these fast-growing businesses. So yeah, as I said, we're somewhat fortunate in that we don't have a product yet, but certainly on the other side of this, we think there's going to be plenty of opportunity to help a few folks. >> We know you got to do a launch and we're looking forward to hearing more and getting the briefing, and looking forward to hearing more about it when you go public. And yeah, thanks for coming on and taking the time today. I know you got your daughter's birthday party there and you're going to have some celebration. Thank you for sharing the insights on your vision of digital. I thought that was very compelling and great to see you and stay safe. >> Great to see you. Yeah, my 18-year-old, it's got a birthday party and she like always would worry, "What if no one shows up?" Well, today she knows no one's going to show up. >> Except for her family, yeah. >> It's going to be down in the family, yeah. So thanks for that and you guys stay safe and been great the last 10 years knowing theCUBE been that long but hopefully, here is the next 10 years after this current situation is over. >> Yeah, looking forward to it, it's going to be a lot of fun rye and get the content out there. And again, thanks for coming on during this important time and sharing your insights and also just making some entertainment here. We're getting some conversations so people can fill the void and play some games and have some fun. Jeremy, thanks. Great to see you. Jeremy Burton, senior executive in the industry. I've known him for years, been a CUBE alumni since theCUBE was formed. Now the CEO of Observe, sharing his insights on the industry but more importantly, how to be successful, how to come out the other side. Don't be too optimistic. Be focused on today and get through it. That's his advice. Of course, we're theCUBE bringing you all the data as we can now with remote interviews during this time. Thanks for watching, I'm John furrier. (soft music)

>> Announcer: From the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, it's theCUBE. Covering Coupa Inspire 2019. Brought to you by Coupa. >> Welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin on the ground at Coupa Inspire '19 from the Vegas. I'm very pleased to welcome not Bono, not Sting, it's Chandar, the CMO of Coupa. Chandar, welcome to theCUBE. >> Lisa, thank you, it's great to be here today. >> This is a really cool event. Procurement is sexy. >> It is sexy. >> It can be so incredibly transformative to any organization. I loved how the last two days, what you guys have done is a great job of articulating Coupa's value in procurement, invoicing, payments, expense, through the voices of your customers and I think there's no better brand value that you can get. >> Sure, absolutely. >> Tell us a little bit about your role as the CMO of Coupa and marketing in a fast-growing company with a product that people might go, "I haven't heard of that, what is that again?" >> Yeah, it's a good question. I think if I look at it, my role is at Coupa, especially, for Coupa, what's interesting about it, as you said, is that every company makes money, every company spends money. So, invariably, Coupa can be used across a set of different companies. One from the Golden State Warriors to Procter & Gamble to the Lukemia & Lymphoma Society. Across the board. And then, from our perspective, holistically, we're looking at business, but managed from different aspects of spend. You said procurement was in expenses. So, my role is to build a marketing engine to get the flywheel effect of first you drive awareness. All marketing starts with awareness and you said people haven't heard of it. And so, to first to drive awareness in a very thoughtful way to the right contextual community we want to go after. And, two, drive acquisition, we'll drive close synergies between sales and marketing to ultimately drive pipeline and win rates and ultimately deals. And then, very importantly in today's world, is to drive the advocacy and get your most passionate customers to evangelize about the brand, so that you create the flywheel effect of awareness, acquisition, and advocacy. And, that's really what my role today is. >> And, I love how I read an article where you call that the stairway to marketing heaven. So, I thought, I wonder if you're a guitar guy, but you're right. It's how to drive awareness, but in a meaningful, thoughtful way. Especially today, with all all the technology, we wake up with it, right? Our phone is our alarm clock. We are bombarded by ads. If we're on Instagram, following our favorite celebrities or whatnot and it's scary when they have the right context, but it has to be thoughtful. We need to know our audience. So, you describe this stairway to marketing heaven, as you just mentioned, it's awareness, it's acquisition, which is key. But, I feel like a lot of companies don't forget the advocacy part, but they don't invest enough in it because that's the best salesperson for your technology, is the people that are using it successfully, right? >> Totally. Yeah, so, in fact, there was a study about a couple of years which looked at how balanced the boat is in terms of spending in presale versus post-sale. And, it's interesting that 87% of B2B marketing spend was presale. In other words, only 13% of people were investing in retention marketing, adoption mastery, customer marketing, and this is what advocacy marketing. And, in today's world, that doesn't work because you got to balance the boat because, to your point, you're getting in a peer-bond world where your existing customers are your best sellers. And, prospects who have all the buying power today are looking to your existing customers to guide them in their purchasing decisions. So, as an organization, if you balance the boat, then you're going to get the flywheel effect going for you in terms of driving the right advocacy across all channels. Just not your own channel if you earn channels to ultimately drive that acquisition going. >> Do you think that's actually more valuable? 'Cause it's one thing to have on your .com site, your social media sites, all these great things about your technologies, etc., coming from customers or from product experts, from influencers. Talk about the value. As technology advances so much and we are influenced by so many other channels, the value of the earned channel and that peer-to-peer relationship. >> Yeah, I think, as I say, that every mom says her baby is good-looking. But, in software, not every baby is really good-looking. Which means, if you take that analogy and extend it, if you're coming to your own channel, invariably, you're going to see some great customer videos about your product, you're going to see some great endorsements and testimonials, you're going to see some great quotes about your product. The reality, there's no bad news about your product on your own website, on your own channel. But, the reality is there are some, some people who might have different opinions. If you go to Glassdoor, no company gets a five on Glassdoor. And, if you take the same thing and extend it to earned channels for advocacy, folks like G2 Crowd, TrustRadius, and B2B, for example, are becoming more relevant today than before because two things. One is 85% of our customers' journey is self-directed. >> Lisa: That much? >> That much and Forrester has anywhere from 60 to 80, but reality is whether you're buying a car or you're buying Coupa. Today, a customer is discovering more journeys. And, in that process, they are looking to more of these earned channels as validation of which ones to go after than just your own channels. So, that's why we got to balance the boat and distribute our advocacy spend dollars across both your own channels and your earned channels. And, that's really important for you and the flywheel will pay off for you over time from that perspective. >> It will and that seems like a lot of the things that Suzy Irwin was talking about to the audience earlier. That's common sense. Why is it that you see these marketing budgets that are so heavily weighted towards just getting awareness, getting customers acquired, and then not thinking about retention marketing account based marketing. >> I'll tell you why. I think any smart CMO will conceptually agree with you. Nobody's going to say, of course, this is not important for me to get advocacy. The challenge comes in in terms of how that marketing department is measured. What gets measured gets funding at the end of the day. >> Lisa: That's a good point. >> And, reality is a lot of these B2B companies are still measuring marketing based on, what's the pipeline you're driving and what's at the top of the funnel metrics that you're driving? In reality, that's a little bit of a skewed thing because then if that's what you're being measured at the board level, at the executive level, then guess what? All your funding is going to go towards that. But, really, the true measurement of marketing, one, is about, yes, you have to get pipeline. You have to influence win rates at the bottom of the funnel and that's where product marketing comes in. But, as importantly, you have to look at the number of brand advocates you create and lifetime value of a customer. >> Yes, CLV, yes. >> And, that's really, really, customer lifetime value is so important because in a SaaS business, ultimately, the Mufasa metric, I'm a Lion King fan. The Mufasa metric is really lifetime value because if a customer stays longer with you, pays you more, and is shouting from the rooftop, then, invariably, that SaaS business is doing well. And, that's why you have to balance the boat in terms of post-advocacies, post-acquisition spend into advocacy, as much as you've done in pre-acquisition. >> When you came into Coupa a couple of years ago, have you been able to shift those budgets because you're able to demonstrate the value that that advocacy piece generates with the flywheel? >> Absolutely and I have a very progressive-thinking CEO who's partners with me on this too. So, we've been absolutely able to do that. In fact, what we're trying to do at the end of the day and most software companies, the real goal should be creating a tribe. In technology, you have to create a tribe to be a titan. And, it's just not about the capability, it's about the community. And, that's really what we're trying to do at Coupa is to create the tribal community feeling. So, if the community is bigger than the brand, it is about the community itself and learning, sharing, and growing with each other and being successful. And, we're just fostering that. So, from that perspective, if you look at this conference and the investment we're making here, some of the programs we're doing in terms of advocacy, what we call spend sellers, etc., is all about that community tribal feeling and go establish that. To use some inspiration from our consumer brands, if you really think about it, people don't buy what they want. People buy what they want to be. So, let me give you what I mean by that. What I want could be a bike. It could be any motorbike, but what I want to be could be part of a very special community and that's why Harley Davidson is successful. What I want could be any stationary bike today, but what I want to be is part of some cool community like Peloton. That's why Peloton is successful. So, similarly for us, what I want could be some spend management software, but what I want to be is part of this community, this cool club, and that's the feeling we're trying to create in the post-acquisition cycle. >> I love that you said that because you talked about that this morning and I loved how you had the word community on the slide and then broke that out into communication unity. And, one of the senses that I got yesterday when-- >> Chandar: Rob was talking about it. >> Yeah, when Rob kicked off everything is this is a very collaborative community. We think about that in terms in terms even like a developer community or something like that. But, Coupa is now managing $1.2 trillion of spend through the platform that every other business that's using Coupa gets to benefit from. It's customer-centric, it's supplier-centric, but it's about applying the right technologies, AI, machine learning, to all this data, so everybody benefits. >> That's right and one of the interesting aspects of community building is one aspect of community building is that Marc Benioff had a great, evangelistic marketing was a way of community building. He would come in and really evangelize and this is where we're going and you all need to come with us. When I was at Marketo, it was interesting. Community building was through more educational marketing and doing it through this, I'm going to educate you through though leadership. Another good way of community building is through product intelligence, which is community intelligence. So, collectively, the sum of all parts are smarter than the parts themselves. And, Rob has a great line, which says, "None of us is as smart as all of us." And, the fundamental community intelligence offering is based on this first principle. So, example, if I'm the community of Coupa customers, the next customer is smarter than the previous customer because the collective intelligence grew, which means I can then go benchmark it myself. I gave an example this morning of USO, the company that provides services to the United States troops. And, when Rick Quaintance at USO benchmarked himself using community intelligence, versus the rest of the community, he realizes that his invoice cycle times are seven times lower. So, that kind of intelligence is extremely beneficial and invaluable to companies. So, that's the value of the community, is providing the collective intelligence. Waze is a great consumer example. Those of us who use Waze for traffic know that it's all community driven and each one of us is smarter because we're collectively using it. It's the same concept in applying that to B2B software. >> So, as we see, you mentioned the over 80% of the buying decision is self-directed whether we're buying a car or Coupa software. Did Coupa foresee that in the last decade to see we're going to have to go to a more community-driven collaboration because the consumer of any thing, any product or service, is going to be so empowered 'cause that's a part of the Coupa foundation. >> It is. >> Lisa: Which, we don't see a lot in companies that are 10 plus years old. >> Yeah, and credit to Rob for his vision for this. It's because I think early part of the company, he wrote into the contracts that the company can benefit. Collectively, every company can benefit by being part of this community. And, the fact is data's aggregated, abstracted, there's no information that is sensitive, etc. But, the fact is we all can collectively benefit through it. That was a great vision of Rob and early people and that's benefited us because the benefit is really over scale and time. Now, your $1.2 trillion, it is really statistically significant in each different industry to get that intelligence. And, that is one of the other reasons we launched our business spend index. It's called spendindex.com. Where we can use the billions of dollars spent in the community to provide a leading indicator of economic growth based on current business spend sentiment. You think of ADP as this payroll, it's called ADP payroll thing that comes out and the gross domestic product report comes out. Those tend to be rear-view mirror lagging indicators. But, as we're using community-based intelligence to provide a windshield, a leading indicator of where the economy is going. So, there's so many different use cases. Benefiting based on spend you're doing as well as where the economy is going and all this is based on the intelligence. >> It's so powerful because, to your point, you're not looking behind. >> Chandar: It's the windshield. >> Exactly, able to be looking forward. So, with all the announcements and the great things that have come out with the AWS expansion, what you guys are doing with Coupa Pay. I was shocked to learn the percentages of businesses that are still writing paper checks. Or, the fact that a lot of companies have 10 plus banks that they're working with. There's still so much manual processes. You must just be, the future is so bright, you got to wear shades with Coupa. But, what excites you about what you guys have announced the last coupe of days and the feedback that you're hearing from your tribe? >> I think there's two kinds of things. One is continue to set the innovation agenda for the industry. And, really, you have to look at every customer on their unique journey of maturity and maturation, so we have a very thoughtful, what we call, maturity index, The business spend management index. Whereas, you are seeing some of these customers, for example, you mentioned, may be in the first stage of this maturity, where, for them, it's just getting automation and going from paper to paperless could be the first step. But, some other customers might say, "I've gotten there, "but I want to get the next level of sophistication "to orchestrate these business spend processes." So, what's exciting for us in the feedback is we're creating product capability across this maturation journey for our customers to make them successful at each of those places. And, Coupa Pay is one example of that. Whereas, some of the other pieces we talked about, we announced about some of the community offerings that we did also is on that. So, that's one exciting piece. The other exciting piece that customers tell us at this conference is, "Foster platforms for us "to engage with each other, learn from each other, "share from each other, and grow with each other." So, even stuff that Rob talked about, which is sourced together. This concept of customers coming together to drive a sourcing process and, again, the collective intelligence in the community, that, we're getting very, very positive feedback from that perspective. And, ultimately, Rob has a really good saying that, "It is not about customer satisfaction. "It is about customer success." That's a delineation there. A customer could be very satisfied with you, but they may not be necessarily successful. And, we say, it's not about satisfaction. It's about success. And, by creating this innovation cycle and then having a post-implementation process that's getting true value, that's truly how we drive customer success. >> And, something that I've heard over and over as I've talked to a number of your customers yesterday and today is how much they're feeling Coupa is listening. Their feedback is being incorporated. They're actually influencing the development of the technology and that was loud and clear the last two days. >> Yeah, I think there is, Rob talked about the number of features that are being influenced by the community and we have these-- >> 300 plus in the last 12 months. >> Yes, 300 plus in the last 12 months. And, there's this concept of two ears, one mouth. And, listen, learn, and innovate and that's the philosophy here. But, it's a right mix of listening to customers, learning from them, and getting the right input from them for driving innovation, as well as having strategic vision on where this market is going and having the right mix of those to provide the capability to customers. >> Wow, you're on a rocket ship. Chandar, it was great to have you on theCUBE. You'll have to come back. >> Yes, Lisa, absolutely, I'll come back and it was a pleasure being here. Awesome. >> Awesome, thank you so much. For Chandar, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE from Coupa Inspire '19. Thanks for watching. (techno music)

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's The Cube, covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017 brought to you by Samsung. >> Okay, welcome back and we're live here in San Francisco for the Samsung Developer Conference, SDC2017. I'm John Furrier. This is The Cube's exclusive coverage, and I'm excited to have an amazing guest, Amanda Cooloong who's a chief storyteller, Women in Tech International, Tech TV, TechZula. She's been really a storyteller in digital for a long time. Great to have you on. Been following all your Twittersphere and your content. >> Thank you. >> You did some work with Leo Laporte, Jason Calcanis, both this week in tech's kind of version of the scene. >> Mm hm. >> What are you up to now? >> Well I am working very closely with Women in Technology International, WITI. It is the largest, oldest organization for women in tech. They have a huge summit that they put on in San Jose every year, and I'm sort of the class clown for that and emcee the conference and lead the charge there. >> Well certainly you know what's interesting you have kind of a cool vibe, you're a cool person, you know tech, you know cloud computing. >> Mm hm. >> You've been in inside baseball for the tech scene. >> Mm hm. >> But now the consumer market with digital. >> Yeah. >> Pretty powerful, I mean like finally us geeks now have a national and global stage to flex our geekness, so you see nerds- >> We're suddenly cool? >> Cool to be a geek and now you see well the programmer calls us over thank god. >> (laughs) Well is it? >> Well the bad side of it. The good side of the democratization is happening. >> Right. >> So now you have an augmented reality. So it's just some cool stuff happening. What are you most impressed with? >> What am I most impressed with? Well I love Blockchain. I've been involved with some of that for three or four years now. I actually had a podcast about Blockchain and Bitcoin. And I'm really excited about what that means for investment specifically and ICOs, Initial Coin Offerings. My friend Brock Pierce is a big, big figurehead with all of that, with Blockchain Capital. And I believe that, especially for women that are looking to get into investment and get back in the earlier stage of things, I think ICOs, Initial Coin Offerings, are a huge opportunity for them to really change up the venture world. >> So when you say ICOs, which we know a lot about 'cause we're doing one at SiliconANGLE the next couple quarters. >> Yeah. >> No rush to do it but we're going to use our own cryptocurrency. But those nuances, when you say investment do you mean as an alternative to venture capital investment or actually investing in, say, the currency itself? >> Both. But I think of it as a completely new way to invest in companies. And there are so many barriers especially for women in technology... Again, that's a big platform for me. To getting into that world that ICOs just are completely changing up the entire ecosystem there. >> Well we're seen a ton of stuff. You saw Lisa Fetterman was on earlier. >> Mm hm. >> She had a huge success with her Kickstarter. Now she's got some pretty glamorous products. The cooking thing is pretty sexy, right? >> Mm hm. >> That thing could go- >> Sous vide, even the term sous vide. I mean, it's so fresh (laughs) >> I would put money to that. I mean it's just so... But that's a good example of Kickstarter. When we look at some of the ICOs, a lot of people are raising some serious capital in utility and stock or securities. >> Mm hm. >> Although the regulations are a moving train. But on the utility side it's a no-brainer. There's some significant cash being raised. In some cases, five to 50 million plus in token sales. >> Mm hm. >> That's like Kickstarter on steroids. >> It really is, and some people are afraid of it. You know, some people are saying that's completely absurd. Why would you ever do that? I personally would say don't put all of your eggs in one basket either. We know that. There's volatility anywhere. But, again, I think it's opening a lot of doors and giving certain people opportunities that they didn't have before. >> So how is your Bitcoin position these days? >> I may have been an early investor in some Bitcoin. I may obsessively look at the value every 15 minutes or so. No, I am fortunate. I listened to my mentors, and luckily I love emerging tech, so I'm doing well in that regard. >> I saw a post on Facebook: If you just bought 10 in bitcoin and smoked weed and sat on the beach and clipped coupons all day and did nothing else, you'd be worth 20 million dollars. >> Let's just say I know people that have actually bought castles with it. I'm not joking. >> What I like about the crypto Boxchain side is that there's an early community growing. So what's your analysis, because a lot of people want to know, is it Silk Road guys? Are they bad actors? Bitcoin's the underbelly of the internet. Early adopter. >> Those stories were so funny at the beginning. I mean, I live in LA. Everyone loves the sensationalized story. And of course that existed with Bitcoin too, and yes, there was some truth to it. >> Oh of course there was. >> Yes, absolutely the Silk Road story was real. >> Anonymous and encrypted transactions. >> Oh yes. >> That's going to attract some honey to the bees. >> There's a reason why certain people can't come back into the country. Let's just leave it at that. However, we've also seen major financial institutions get onboard. You know, Fintech has exploded. There's a lot of legitimacy to Blockchain and the distributed ledger technology. >> It's one of the fastest growing products in the Linux Foundation, Hyperledger project- >> Yes. >> Which is just going gangbusters. IBM's behind it. >> Yep. >> So it's got that opensource vibe, I get that. But the community, talk about the community because there are people who are leading the community. You said you know a few of them. >> What's your take on the community? How big is it? It's emerging, obviously, it's growing. What's the protocol for new entrants coming in? What's the behavior norms? >> Sure. It's grown in leaps and bounds, I can say that. I mean, from the time I did my Bitcoin podcast a few years ago to now, back then it was very much the bro culture to a degree, a lot of libertarians (laughs), a lot of folks that couldn't come back in the country, to be quite honest. But there were certain people that came out of that movement though like Brock Pierce that really thought ahead to how do we legitimize this, how do we make sure that this is white knighted, so to speak. >> Yeah, well it's a revolutionary... It's fundamental. I had the founder of Alibaba Cloud on the record. Haven't published a video yet so this is exclusive material. He said, I asked him about Blockchain. He says it's fundamental to the internet. It is the internet. >> It is, mm hm. >> Just like TCP/IP was in the stack. >> Absolutely. >> He was adamant that this is not on top of the internet. It's fundamental to... He's talking about Blockchain. >> Yep. >> Absolutely 'cause it's supply chain, it's currency, it's a zillion things. >> It's not just coins. Everyone focused in on Bitcoin Bitcoin Bitcoin. It's a distributed ledger technology. So it goes hand in hand with the internet of things. So the two have become very much married in that regard. >> You know, all these guys I interview on The Cube over the years, and certainly I lived through it, talk about the waves, the PC wave. >> Mm hm. They talk about the client server wave. Client server essentially, it's not so much about the mini computers 'cause the mini computers were not the client server wave 'cause that was proprietary operating systems and proprietary hardware. >> Mm hm. >> HP. >> Right. >> What made client server was TCP/IP. That created Threecom, Cisco, interoperability. So that really was that second wave. People are comparing Blockchain to TCP/IP. >> I can see that. >> Dr. Wang from Alibaba Cloud. Other people are saying like the dot com bubble, euphoric excitement. >> Yeah. >> So that begs the question. Who can bring functionality... This is my thesis. I want to test it with you. >> Mm hm. >> Who can bring functionality and simplicity? Because all the successes in Web 1.0, was Yahoo a directory of links, simple, easy to use. Cisco Routers, connect your networks, it works. So simplicity and functionality seems to be the norm in the Blockchain world. >> Mm hm. >> What's your thoughts on that? Can you share your reaction to that? >> Simplicity and functionality, I mean, for me it's- >> In terms of the winners versus the losers 'cause that's what people want to know with Blockchain. Where's the scams and where the legit? >> Mm hm, well the scams are the people that came from the gaming side that had no real business expanding out the way that they did and everybody loses their coin. But we won't name names there. I think more- >> It's okay to name names. >> (laughs) But with functionality, I mean again, I keep going back to its marriage with IOT, you know, the ledger based technology and just being able to do anything transactional. That's the simplicity of it for me, the fact that it's opensource, the fact that, yeah, I think that's the core of it. >> So let's talk about Samsung. We're here's at the Samsung event. >> Sure. >> How do you see these guys? We were talking about Blockchain. It's kind of the next big wave coming. Obviously a lot of things underneath that, but above that you've got software machine learning, all the goodness of open source is growing exponentially. That wave is coming to exponential growth in opensource, code shipments, meaning more people using opensource, and things like Blockchain. How does that impact a Samsung, an Apple, an Amazon? >> Well I think opensource is necessary for IOT specifically. Obviously that would be shut down without that. I've been talking with a lot of the developers here, the Samsung-specific people saying what is it that's exciting you about this forward movement, like with the keynote this morning. What do we need? How do we move this entire industry forward with IOT? And they're excited about the platform that Samsung has announced this morning in terms of just the ubiquity of everything working together in comparison to, well, a lot of other... Sorry. >> So the crypto thing is also tying into that too. >> Yes. >> I was tying that with IOT because IOT has some security issues. >> Right. >> So we can argue maybe- >> Some security issues? (laughs) >> Well the surface area. So you know, the theme in the enterprise is, you know, cloud computing. There's no moat anymore, there's no firewall. >> Yeah. >> Perimiterless security. Perimiterless problems. It means the edge is a surface area, and we've seen these attacks coming. >> Right. >> That's a problem. >> Mm hm. >> So there's no silver bullet right now. >> Yeah. >> So Samsung probably is cagey right now on the data. >> Exactly. >> They've got some security products, but smarter things is their kind of pitch. >> And then everybody keeps saying well who owns the security piece, who's responsible for the security piece. I think that's a big question we're going to see popping up a lot because the security piece is going to be a very valuable piece to all of this, especially when you're looking at edge computing too and data being passed back and forth between the edge. I would rather see everything stay with just the edge devices, personally. >> Yeah, well it's easier to manage, why do you want to move data across the network? >> Yeah, exactly. >> Move compute it's more efficient. >> Yeah. >> So final take on augmented reality VR. >> Oh, okay. >> What's imploding? What's imploded? What's growing? What's rising? What's falling? >> Sure. >> We had a comment earlier, said VR 1.0 is over. >> It really is. I personally think AR is where it's at. I've watched a lot of things on the VR front and a lot of it was marketing speak. I think we need a bigger push on the hardware side for VR to work effectively too. We also need to look at the audience there. And a lot of people are complaining, well I don't just want to go disappear into a separate world. A lot of women, actually, are complaining about that side of it. But the AR side I think has way more application. >> Yeah, crawl, walk, run in virtual space, basically. >> Yeah, yeah. VR I think will still be a place, but I think AR is going to be a bigger explosion. >> One of the things we were talking about earlier was as folks have been through many waves you and I've seen, waves of innovation, Web 1.0, the early adopters were the adult industry with banners 'cause they were about making money. We saw this wave. We're seeing the Silk Roads and Blockchain. Arbitrage comes from usually bad actors and not usually desirable actors. >> Right. >> But one big indicator of the current user experience we're seeing is the gaming culture, right. >> Mm hm. >> Gaming right now seems to be the early adopter indicator of the major trend lines 'cause it's gamification, it's a little bit analog, multiplayer. >> Look at Unity. Unity has a huge presence here at SDC and especially on the VR front if you want to look at that. Unity's a huge player there. >> What are some of the things you see coming out of the gaming world? 'Cause we've seen virtual currencies, ICO, lot of storage, lot of dynamic, realtime. >> Yeah. Gaming mechanism too across the board always play into this too, but I think the big one is ICOs for me. That's the one I've been focusing on a lot, yeah. >> I'd like to follow up more with you on the ICO thing. We're doing a whole programming on that on November second, love to have you. >> Mm hm. Look at what Crystal Rose with Sensay's been doing. >> Who? >> Crystal Rose, Sensay, she's launched her own ICO called SENSE. >> SENSE. Great, looking forward to chatting more. >> Mm hm, out of LA. >> Final question for you for the folks not here. What's the vibe here? How would you describe SDC2017? >> I love that there's a great vibe of innovation. Honestly, I've been to some other stodgier conferences lately, and this one definitely has a nice playful, creative vibe. >> B2B is boring to boring. This is not- >> I know, you were talking about E2E, everything to everything. See, I was listening. >> You were. >> Everything to everything. Exciting to exciting. >> Exciting. >> See, I listened to that too. Yeah, I would say there's a lot of creativity here. There's a lot of side conversations happening. That's important. And I see a good balance of men and women, so that makes me happy. >> Well I'm excited from Vanessa for bringing on a great lineup, you included. >> Thank you. >> Great to meet you in person. Had a great conversation here inside The Cube. I'm John Furrier here, exclusive coverage of the SDC2017. We'll be back after this short break.