>>Oh, well, the back to the cubes coverage of ADA bus reinvent, 2021 executive seminar, I'm John ferry hosts of the cube. We've got a great segment here on the modernization. We were ringing in the success with Amazon web services, Vodafone digital in the UK, an example of modern engineering examples using Amazon, the cloud, looking at where we're cloud native is actually changing the game two great guests, Ben Collie, head, head of digital engineering, Vodafone UK, and Maynard Williams, managing director of center. Gentlemen, thank you for coming on the cube and sharing the story. >>Thanks, John. Appreciate it. So >>I gotta, I gotta ask you guys one of the main themes that we've been covering all year and even even pre pandemic, we, we saw the cloud native wave coming pretty hard containers. Great for modernization sets the table. You seeing things like Kubernetes and now serverless changing the game on all aspects of how modernization is happening. And everyone's talking about application modernization shift left all great for business, but you have to, you have to kind of take care of things under the, under the covers a little bit, the infrastructure, making sure the engineering teams are all set. So this has been a top topic. This is kind of what you guys are doing. Can you guys explain to me the needs that Vodafone has, um, that brought about this transformation? >>Yeah, sure. Um, so we we've been on this transformation for around four years, but you're absolutely right. The, uh, the pandemic has been a real catalyst for, for all kinds of organizations like ours around the world. Uh, so we were really driving a digital first agenda for quite a long time. Uh, and that, that came as, as you just said, John, it, it really did start with the, uh, the cloud hosted, uh, and then, uh, and then moving and realizing the difference between that and become native to the, to the cloud and really leveraging the services, uh, like AWS, um, in order to really drive pace, uh, and, and the outcomes that we needed for the business. Uh, we've seen a huge change over the last, uh, purely over the last 18 months, really. Um, our daily traffic, uh, these days is as it was on our highest ever, uh, uh, like an iPhone launch day, for example, um, before the pandemic, is I a daily traffic these days. And so that scalability and flexibility and that leveraging those services has been absolutely fundamental to supporting the, the changing needs and expectations of our customers. >>You know, back in the old days, uh, Maynard, you know, it's oh yeah, black Friday surge, you need the cloud to scale up and be flexible. Agile elastic, you know, scale is definitely now table stakes. And if you're not dealing with scale and some sort of either SRE fashion or whatever, you, you really ain't going to be behind the curve, but the next level that's being discussed is how do you leverage the scale for not just customer experience and business value, but we're talking about system architecture, kind of thinking there's kind of, this is our system design is now a big part of it. Can you talk about how this kind of threads together? Because we always talk about consumer experience, customer experience CX, but now there's a new system was mindset out there. Can you kind of share your vision on that >>Thing that stands out for me is if I look at digital, we've designed it to a point where the scale is just as you say, it's the table stakes, and only for launch with something that two years ago needed to be planned and thought about. And it's now absolutely routine. We think about the business side of it, but a big increase in scale really is seamless. But if I look at the full stack, we're still connected into some of the older backend systems, um, where any production, uh, they were on prime actually tasks. This is on AWS now, which is a big step forward, but when you've got to manage scaling in a way that translates from backend systems that are on premises on prime, and therefore we can't lastingly scale through to the front tab where we have to be able to scale up very seamlessly and balancing that across with, uh, an architecture that supports that level of scale and makes it so seamless on something like, as you say, iPhone launches or back Friday, any product coming out is actually key to the way we've architected that. >>So you're saying that essentially AWS combined with Vodafone worked on this solution that was more of a cloud native solutions that the innovation here, can you just summarize and unpack a little bit of what is the innovation, what problems did you solve together with essentially those and Vodafone? What was the core challenge? Yes. >>I think that the core is actually, how do you get to the point where, um, at the scaling is seamless, where you can move from being on the cloud to cloud native has been, just touched on what the same time you're actually connected into an enterprise state where the production systems are all on prem and don't have that ability to scale in the same fraction. So you can't, for example, push you to load into, uh, an on-prem backend system and, and simply expected to scale in the same fashion. So between our three organizations architecting something that is robust scales, we usable and takes away a load of pieces that actually were quite complex two years ago. And turns them into just routine has been a big step forward. >>And I want to get your reaction to this because, you know, you're, you're the you're on the, on the front line saying, Hey, be more agile at Basel saying, be agile, do different left, take that hill. Um, it's, it's easier said than done. Talk about what goes on when you have to implement and the stakes involved. Again, there's always the old way, new way. Can you just kind of give some color on what's going on? What's your perspective showing? >>And as I just said, that the real benefits and the story behind this was the ability to launch an iPhone. For example, as a event for Vodafone previously was weeks and months of preparation and design and testing and confidence building. And now it really is, it just happens. Uh, and we watched things scale and, and, and then down again, gracefully, um, and really do celebrate the, the another level up, if you like the leveling up of us as an organization, allowing our commercial colleagues to, to launch propositions or to launch campaigns without needing us to be involved anymore, because they're confident, we're all that things will, will flex like that. But you're absolutely right, that, that the changes and the demands of us as a, as a team, but also the, the expectations of our stakeholders, uh, have been changing for quite a long time now. Uh, and we're really excited now to be able to meet them by leveraging the services that we're discussing. >>Yeah. So the guys say said launched the iPhone, no big deal routine, hit the pub. Everyone's happy having a good day. >>Uh, >>Let's get into the solution, how it works. Talk about what's going on with the covers. How does this all work? Can you take us through, what's the state of the art of the, of the solution? Sure. >>Well, uh, as you mentioned earlier, we were very much inclined to serverless these days. So we rolled out fire gate, um, a few, uh, uh, started about 18 months ago. Um, and that really has, um, freed us up in, into all kinds of, um, uh, scalability, uh, measures, but also really about, about reusing and applying this across much more than just the, the engineering or the digital part of Vodafone, where we, where we began. So that's been a really big part of our agenda, uh, and that's, that's informed all kinds of things, the ability to scale and flex like that, and the architecture beneath us, um, and the containerization and orchestration that that goes along with that has really enabled us to, um, to flex that, uh, ability to, to reuse it across other areas. And because of that, now it's driven our hiring policy or tooling and, uh, technical, uh, our procedural approaches, uh, it all now leverages that ability to move a patient, to be able to scale, uh, not just in, um, uh, infrastructure or ability to serve customers, but in ability to deliver for the business commercially as well. Uh, and this is all now informed on our direction. I think, as an organization, >>It's interesting, you mentioned far you far gate than a trigger of events happens. People get excited, opens up new doors of opportunities as a chain reaction from that. Um, talk about the impact to the staff and the operations, because you almost, it's motivating at some level you get new things happening, but you're actually making things go better and faster, cheaper. >>Yeah. Uh, well, the, the impact is one, uh, because we're on a journey at Vodafone of this transformation, really becoming a technology business first and foremost, rather than a telco classically like our competitors, uh, we're able to really drive cultural change as well. So the impact on our people is a really, it's been particularly engaging. One with, we've also been part of, uh, a real recruitment drive. We've just announced 7,000 new, uh, roles, uh, joining our team across Europe and that these are engineering roles, um, driving more of the same, uh, behaviors and principles of a modern software engineering business like ours. Uh, and that really is fueled by our, our ability to experiment and try, but become cloud native and, and, uh, employ these services in the way that they're designed to be >>Maynard. I'd like to get your take on this and, and, and shift to a topic around how, what this all means. Um, if you zoom out and you say, okay, with the pandemic, it's become a mobile virtual hybrid. Now world around work play, all those lines are kind of blurring. It's not as clean as it used to be. Oh, the network segmented over here. This is over here. These legacy systems were built around the notion of things when nicely segmented. Um, now you have this whole kind of mashup, if you will, of how you just want to work, right. There's mobilization is a huge thing. So access identity, these are things that we're all kind of set up nicely before the pandemic, or at least, you know, not as, uh, stable, maybe not scalable, but what's your take on this? What's the big picture what's all happening. >>I think, I mean, the pandemic has accelerated a set of changes that were already happening anyway. And I'd say the other particles is under the covers. A lot of the work's been done has been to create the microservices that stitch together to produce those journeys, but, you know, running the containers. And so that, that opens up an omni-channel future that starts to move away from saying actually businesses are organized around the environment in which they're serving. Is it a retail store? Is it, is it online that additional and so on, and actually into much more of a space where you're building the best journeys and those journeys come and are served through digital or through a call center or through a store and so on. And that makes a huge difference because the focus on improving the customer's experience has been enormous. And I think that's one of the other parts that come out of the whole cloud native setup. >>And the ability to experiment has been iteratively and endlessly improving the experience for the customer. And that's, that's a, that's a massive step forward. So we can talk about the fact that we deploy a huge number of times more frequently than we did even a year ago, uh, or the, you know, our quality has improved by a massive percentage and so on. And I think the thing that's really interesting is the improvement in the experience and the endless improvement and iteration of that, because we can make lots and lots of small changes and do every day. That's a big one, >>You know, what's interesting Ben, and let's get your reaction on this. And if you don't mind to just add a little color to this, this is just another example of reports that we've been talking with folks on where it's not about just replatforming to the cloud. It's refactoring the business, uh, with, with the engineering, the modernization. And so there's two things that go on one, you see the efficiencies and new doors open up new things are happening. People are getting excited, good, some good Mo morale boosting things are becoming clear, but then there's actually new business, new business value being created or new propositions engineering propositions. Can you share from a digital standpoint, because this seems to be the new role of the digital person, whether it's engineering or on the business side, make things run faster, cheaper, and better, and then create new opportunities, new propositions, what's your >>Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. It's fundamentally around pace of delivery. Uh, being able to, as, as may not says, uh, moving from a world, uh, two or three years ago where we were deploying once every two or three months, uh, this is a website once every two or three months where we were, uh, to now it's happening all the time every day. Uh, it's, it's, it's a skill that we've given us as an organization that we couldn't have leveraged before. And what we're able to do with that now is experiment our way and iterate our way to new value streams, as you say, but also trial and error. What we already know, uh, or expects to be true with our customers much, much more easily and much, much more frequently, very little a barrier to production or friction between us and the customer these days, and the almost instant response and feedback we get from customers. Um, we, we learn constantly about because of that. And it's, uh, it's become much less of a stab in the dark with large business cases where they work well, they worked and are much more experimental initiative. Uh, we, most of the propositions we know about, but also to the experiments, um, and unknowns in our future. Um, that also now unlocked, >>That's a great point. You mentioned about the whole timing of, you know, the old way, months, weeks, just for website stuff, uh, Maynard. And if you guys can share this new world order is actually pretty exciting, but also daunting if you're not like in the water, so to speak, right? So, you know, some people are actually, you know, putting their toe in the water, they're experimenting, but it's a game changer. I mean, a significant step up of value. What's your advice about solutions and they're not easy. I mean, you just got to get your hands around the sensor. You guys have been doing a lot more of these projects is seeing more and more of these, these kinds of partnerships, uh, and the value is there. Can you guys share your, your, uh, opinion and advice to folks out there watching saying, how do I do this and is it going to be worth it? Is that bridge to the future there? >>I mean, I think there's a mechanical piece. How do I enable this? And we can talk about dev ops and moving to cloud native, and actually some of the, some of the process side of as an organization, how do I get really comfortable with deploying very frequently and it being low risk and routine. And so the other part for me, which we sort of haven't touched on is as much as we talk about experimentation, it's about the data and the analytics and the knowledge that we create of that. So the, the, the small changes we're making are highly scientific. And when we think about actually understanding how we're optimizing experiences, that's all about the whole set of data points that I'm pinning up. And so I'll take two parts is know the, the journey we've been on here is, is about enablement. It's about moving the architecture. It's about moving the ways of working so that a lot of things that were hard or required thinking about two years ago on that quality team. But the other part of it is understanding the data and having the analytics capability and being able to make a very scientific experiment where you can see the result in the day-to-day >>Ben, what's your reaction advice to folks watching as they modernize exciting, challenging. It's a lot of hard work, but what's it look, it's the end game, >>All of those things, yes. I'd say it's, um, more than anything, it's a necessity these days we have to embark on this journey. It is, it is daunting. And, and of course, a lot of large organizations like ours, we were successful for doing things in a particular way, uh, have built up a lot of, uh, protection mechanisms for doing, for making sure we protect that. And so to come at it from a new angle is, is obviously daunting. And it's very challenging as well. There is an immune system in all of our organizations that is real, but I'll deal with it. Um, but the, the real, um, success behind, uh, the real, I think the reasons behind a lot of our success has been beat by being able to quickly prove value to quickly prove that outcomes are deliverable and achievable. Um, and then to build on those and iterate on it. And as, as I said, it's, it's about being able to move at pace for us in Vodafone. It's about leveraging our scale. We're a huge organization. Um, and we're, we're now coming together as one to really make sure that we do just lean on that scale more than we have them. Yeah, that's really about iterating, as I said, and, and, um, finding things that work, keep doing it, finding things that hold you back and get rid of them as quickly as you can, uh, is what I would say for us. >>It's interesting. You mentioned the scale. The thing about the cloud is when I hear the common pattern is it takes advantage of the strengths of your environment. You know, so every environment is a bit different, but you guys have the scale. I have to ask you while you're here. What are some of the anecdotal comments that kind of, you hear from folks that make you happy? When about the results? I think saying, Hey man, I'm not even seeing this anymore, or, wow. This is faster. What's some of the sound bites that you guys take as proof points of the success of this project. >>Yeah. It's, uh, I'd say it's mainly an R there's two things I would say, uh, the ability to rely less on it delivery if you like. So empowering our commercial business to make changes for themselves in a safe and secure manner. So providing these self-service capabilities, we've started to see a real pace about our commercial business, as well as our technology business. Uh, but also the, the time it takes to get things out is probably one of the biggest, uh, really tangible results and outcomes for us at the moment. Um, just the sheer amount of things we can release to production, uh, in, in sorts of short space, space of time really does bring to life, our ability to now trial and error, to AB test a Canary deploy. Things like that is really, um, it's been a real superpower for our, um, transformation, I think yes. >>Kind of kidding about can't make time to go to the pub, but in reality, it's free time freeing up people from doing those tasks that were slower shifting that value. >>Yeah. Whereas as you mentioned, Johnny, it really is much more than a technical journey. This is a cultural one as well for a lot of organizations and, um, by being more connected, by being more connected to the outcomes or the value that you add into production, uh, it really does drive a new culture and engagement across our teams. You know, if it's six months between writing a line of code and seeing it in production by up no sense of ownership or pride in what I've done there, but if I can deploy code immediately see an impact good or bad, um, then, uh, I really do feel connected to the outcomes and the value that I'm driving to, to the business and to our customers. So there really is a great cultural, >>Yeah. I remember Andy Jassy last year when he was a sea of AWS on stage and talked about that dynamic of the teamwork, people rowing in the right direction. Um, feeling part of it may know this is a cultural shift on how companies do business. I know center I've covered probably a dozen or so killer projects that have just been awesomely new and kind of different, but successful built on the cloud. So a lot of replatforming refactoring you're in the front lines, working with, uh, companies that essentially what's the pattern that you see that's that's happening right now. What's the, what's your view of the current market? >>Um, I mean, I think there's a huge shift to this, that this journey too has been part of the move from being on the cloud to being proud nature. I'm really getting that value because there's a, um, a kind of, almost a example. I see there's a light bulb moment where ownership of what you put in production means that you move away from a model of we change code because either the business tell us too, because they have a functional requirement or because something's broken. When we get into the model of that, I want to improve the thing that I feel ownership of. That's not leave. And you suddenly see how much difference that makes to the experience of it, the quality of it, the stability, all of those things improving. And so if, if I look more generally that cultural shift is it is an evolution that organizations go through and it starts with actually delivering it in a more agile way. At some large scale, you see agility moving up into kind of business agility and starting to affect things like budgeting cycles and the kind of corporate functions. If you like that tend to sit around, uh, you know, supporting Pete pieces of delivery. And there's a lot more of that happening at the moment, a load with more organizations pushing into being properly cloud native and transforming rather than the kind of first wave, which was the shift onto the cloud. Now it's actually, that's really leveraged what we've got with the, >>Yeah. And you guys essentially have been riding on the wave of AWS and the cloud for many, many years. We've been covering it. Ben great success story. Thanks for coming on the cube, a head of digital engineering, Vodafone UK, great example of modern engineering at work using AWS in Europe. Uh, thanks for coming on the Cuban, sharing your story. Maynor thank you for also coming on and the work you're doing at Accenture and AWS. Thank you. Thanks John. The cube coverage of AWS reinvent 2021 executive summit. I'm John furry, your host. Thanks for watching.

(tranquil music) >> Alation was an early pioneer in solving some of the most challenging problems in so-called big data. Founded early last decade, the company's metadata management and data catalog have always been considered leading examples of modern tooling by customers and analysts alike. Governance is one area that customers identified as a requirement to extend their use of Alation's platform. And it became an opportunity for the company to expand its scope and total available market. Alation is doing just that today, announcing new data governance capabilities, and partner integrations that align with the market's direction of supporting federated governance. In other words, a centralized view of policy to accommodate distributed data in this world of an ever expanding data cloud, which we talk about all the time in theCUBE. And with me to discuss these trends and this announcement is Satyen Sangani, who's the CEO and co-founder of Alation. Satyen, welcome back to the CUBE. Good to see you. >> Thank you Dave, It's great to be back. >> Okay, so you heard my open, please tell us about the patterns that you were seeing in the market and what you were hearing from customers that led you in this direction and then we'll get into the announcement. >> Yeah, so I think there are really two patterns, right? I mean, when we started building this notion of a data catalog, as you said a decade ago, there was this idea that metadata management broadly classified was something that belonged in IT, lived in IT and was essentially managed by IT, right? I always liken it to kind of an inventory management system within a warehouse relative to Amazon.com, which has obviously broadly published for the business. And so, with the idea of bringing all of this data directly to the business and allowing people arbitrarily, depending on their role to use the data. You know, you saw one trend, which was just this massive, shift in how much data was available at any given time. I think the other thing that happened was that at the same time, data governance went through a real transitionary phase where there was a lot of demand often spurred by regulations. Whether that's GDPR, CCPA or more recently than that, certainly the Basel accord. And if you think about all of those regulations, people had to get something in a place. Now what we ended up finding out was when we were selling in to add accounts, people would say, well guess what? I've got this data governance thing going on, but nobody's really using it. I built this business glossary, it's been three years. Nothing's been really very effective. And we were never able to get the value and we need to get value because there are so many more people now accessing and using and leveraging the data. And so with that, we started really considering whether or not we needed to build a formal capability in the market. And that's what we're today that we're doing. >> I liked the way you framed that. And if you think back, we were there as you were in the early big day-to-days. And all the talk was about volume, variety and velocity. And those are sort of IT concepts. How do you deal with all these technical challenges? And then the fourth V which you just mentioned was value. And that's where the line of business really comes in. So let's get into the news. What are you announcing today? >> So we're announcing a new application on top of Alation's Catalog platform, which is an Alations data governance application. That application will be released with our 2021.3 release on September 14th. And what's exciting about that is that we are going to now allow customers to discreetly and elegantly and quickly consume a new application to get data governance regimes off the ground and initiatives off the ground, much more quickly than they've ever been able to do. This app is really all about time to value. It's about allowing customers to be able to consume what they need when they need it in order to be able to get successful governance initiatives going. And so that's what we're trying to deliver. >> So maybe you could talk a little bit about how you think about data governance and specifically your data governance approach. And maybe what's different about Alation's solution. >> Yeah, I think there's a couple of things that are different. I think the first thing that's most critically different is that we move beyond this notion of sort of policy declaration into the world of policy application and policy enforcement, right? I think a lot of data governance regimes basically stand up and say, look you know, it's all about people and then process and then technology. And what we need to do is declare who all the governors are and who all the stewards are. And then we're going to get all our policies in the same place and then the business will follow them. And the reality is people don't change their workflows to go off and arbitrarily follow some data governance policy that they don't know exists, or they don't want to actually have to follow up. And so really what you've got to do is make sure that the policy and the knowledge exists as in where the data exists. And that's why it's so critical to build governance into the catalog. And so what we're doing here is we're basically saying, look, you could declare policies with a new policy center inside of Alation. Those policies will get automatically created in some cases by integrating with technologies like Snowflake. But beyond that, what we're also doing is we're saying, look, we're going to move into the world of taking those policies and applying them to the data on an automated basis using ML and AI and basically saying that now it doesn't have to be some massive boil the ocean three-year regime to get very little value in a very limited business loss rate. Rather all of your data sets, all of your terms can be put into a single place on an automated basis. That's constantly being used by people and constantly being updated by the new systems that are coming online. And that's what's exciting about it. >> So I just want to follow up on that. So if I'm hearing you correctly, it's the humans are in the loop, but it's not the only source of policy, right? The machines are assisting. And in some cases managing end-to-end that policy. Is that right? >> You've got it. I think the the biggest challenge with data governance today is that it basically relies a little bit like the Golden Gate Bridge. You know, you start painting it and by the time you're done painting it, you've got to go back and start painting it again, because it relies upon people. And there's just too much change in the weather and there's too much traffic and there's just too much going on in the world of data. And frankly in today's world, that's not even an apt analogy because often what happens is midway through. You've got to restart painting from the very beginning because everything's changed. And so there's so much change in the IT landscape that the traditional way of doing data governance just doesn't work. >> Got it, so in winning through the press release, three things kind of stood out. I wonder if we could unpack them, there were multi-cloud, governance and security. And then of course the AI or what I like to call machine intelligence in there. And what you call the people centric approach. So I wonder if we could dig in into these and help us understand how they fit together. So thinking about multi-cloud governance, how do you think about that? Why is that so challenging and how are you solving that problem? >> Yeah, well every cloud technology provider has its own set of capabilities and platforms. And often those slight differences are causing differences in how those technologies are adopted. And so some teams optimize for certain capabilities and certain infrastructure over others. And that's true even within businesses. And of course, IT teams are also trying to diversify their IT portfolios. And that's another reason to go multi-cloud. So being able to have a governance capability that spans, certainly all of the good grade called megascalers, but also these new, huge emerging platforms like Snowflake of course and others. Those are really critical capabilities that are important for our customers to be able to get a handle on top of. And so this idea of being cloud agnostic and being able to sort of have a single control plane for all of your policies, for all of your data sets, that's a critical must have in a governance regime today. So that's point number one. >> Okay and then the machine learning piece, the AI, you're obviously injecting that into the application, but maybe tell us what that means both maybe technically and from a business stand point. >> Yeah, so this idea of a data policy, right? Can be sometimes by operational teams, but basically it's a set of rules around how one should and should not be able to use data, right? And so those are great rules. It could be that people who are in one country shouldn't be able to access the data of another country, very simple role, right? But how do you actually enforce that? Like you can declare it, but if there is a end point on a server that allows you to access the data, the policy is effectively moot. And so what you got to go do is make sure that at the point of leverage or at the point of usage, people know what the policy happens to be. And that's where AI come in. You can say let's document all the data sets that happened to be domiciled in Korea or in China. And therefore make sure that those are arbitrarily segregated so that when people want to use that as datasets, they know that the policy exists and they know that it's been applied to that particular dataset. That's somewhere where AI and ML can be super valuable rather than a human being trying to document thousands of databases or tens of thousands of data sets, which is really kind of a (mumbles) exercise. And so, that application of automation is really critical and being able to do governance at the scale that most enterprises have to do it. >> You got it 'cause humans just can't do that at scale. Now what do you mean by people-centric approach? Can you explain that? >> Yeah, often what I find with governance is that there's this notion of kind of there's this heavy notion of how one should deal with the data, right? So often what I find is that there are certain folks who think, oh well, we're going to declare the rules and people are just going to follow them. And if you've ever been well, a parent or in some cases seeing government operate, you realize that that actually isn't how things work. And involve them in how things are run. And if you do that, right? You're going to get a lot more success in how you apply rules and procedures because people will understand that and people know why they exist. And so what we do within this governance regime is we basically say, look, we want to make sure that the people who are using the data, leveraging the data are also the people who are stewarding the data. There shouldn't be a separate role of data steward that is arbitrarily defined off, just because you've been assigned to a job that you never wanted to do. Rather it should be a part of your day job. And it should be something that you do because you really want to do it. And it's a part of your workflow. And so this idea of being people centric is all about how do you engage the analyst, the product managers, the sales operation managers, to document those sales data sets and those product data sets. So that in fact, those people can be the ones who are answering the questions, not somebody off to the side who knows nothing about the data. >> Yeah, I think you've talked in previous CUBE interviews about context and that really fits to this discussion. So these capabilities are part of an application, which is what? it's a module onto your existing platform. And it's sort of it's a single platform, right? I mean, we're not bespoke products. Maybe you can talk about that. >> Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, it's funny because we've evolved and built a relation with a lot of capability. I mean, interestingly we're launching this data governance application but I would say 60% of our almost 300 customers would say they do a form or a significant part of data governance, leveraging relations. So it's not like we're new to this market. We've been selling in this market for years. What's different though, is that we've talked a lot about the catalog as a platform over the last year. And we think that that's a really important concept because what is a platform? It's a capability that has multiple applications built on top of it, definitionally. And it's also a capability where third party developers can leverage APIs and SDKs to build applications. And thirdly, it has all of the requisite capabilities and content. So that those application developers, whether it's first party from Alation or third party can really build those applications efficiently, elegantly and economically well. And the catalog is a natural platform because it contains all of the knowledge of the datasets. And it has all of the people who might be leveraging data in some fundamental way. And so this idea of building this data governance module allows a very specialized audience of people in governance to be able to leverage the full capabilities of the platform, to be able to do their work faster, easier, much more simply and easily than they ever could have. And that's why we're so excited about this launch, because we think it's one example of many applications, whether it's ourselves building it or third parties that could be done so much more elegantly than it previously could have been. Because we have so much knowledge of the data and so much knowledge of how the company operates. >> Irrespective of the underlying cloud platform is what I heard before. >> irrespective of the underlying cloud platform, because the data as you know, lives everywhere. It's going to live in AWS, it's going to live in Snowflake. It's going to live on-premise inside of an Oracle database. That's not going to be changed. It's going to live in Teradata. It's going to live all over the place. And as a consequence of that, we've got to be able to connect to everything and we've got to be able to know everything. >> Okay, so that leads me to another big part of the announcement, which is the partnership and integration with Snowflake. Talk about how that came about. I mean, why snowflake? How should customers think about the future of data management. In the context of this relationship, obviously Snowflake talks about the data cloud. I want to understand that better and where you fit. >> Yeah, so interestingly, this partnership like most great partnerships was born in the field. We at the late part of last year had observed with Snowflake that we were in scores of their biggest accounts. And we found that when you found a really, really large Snowflake engagement, often you were going to be complementing that with a reasonable engagement with Alation. And so seeing that pattern as we were going out and raising our funding route at the beginning of this year, we basically found that Snowflake obviously with their Snowflake Ventures Investment arm realized how strategic having a great answer in the governance market happened to be. Now there are other use cases that we do with Snowflake. We can certainly get into those. But what we realized was that if you had a huge scale, Snowflake engagement, governance was a rate limiter to customers' ability to grow faster. And therefore also Snowflake's ability to grow faster within that account. And so we worked with them to not only develop a partnership but much more critically a roadmap that was really robust. And so we're now starting to deliver on that roadmap and are super excited to share a lot of those capabilities in this release. And so that means that we're automatically ingesting policies and controls from Snowflake into Alation, giving full transparency into both setting and also modifying and understanding those policies for anybody. And so that gives you another control plane through which to be able to manage all of the data inside of your enterprise, irrespective of how many instances of Snowflake you have and irrespective of how many controls you have available to you. >> And again, on which cloud runs on. So I want to follow up with that really interesting because Snowflake's promise of the data cloud, is it essentially abstracts the underlying complexity of the cloud. And I'm trying to understand, okay, how much of this is vision, how much is is real? And it's fine to have a Northstar, but sometimes you get lost in the marketing. And then the other part of the promise, and of course, big value proposition is data sharing. I mean, I think they've nailed that use case, but the challenge when you start sharing data is federated governance. And as well, I think you mentioned Oracle, Teradata that stuff's not all in the cloud, a lot of that stuff on-prem and you guys can deal with that as well. So help us sort of to those circles, if you can. Where do you fit into that equation? >> I think, so look, Snowflake is a magical technology and in the sense that if you look at the data, I mean, it reveals a very, very clear story of the ability to adopt Snowflake very quickly. So any data team with an organization can get up and running with the Snowflake instance with extraordinary speed and capability. Now that means that you could have scores, hundreds of instances of Snowflake within a single institution. And to the extent that you want to be able to govern that data to your point, you've got to have a single control plane through which you can manage all of those various instances. Whether they're combined or merged or completely federated and distinct from each other. Now, the other problem that comes up on governance is also discoverability. If you have all these instances, how do you know what the right hand is doing if the left hand is working independently of it? You need some way to be able to coordinate that effort. And so that idea of discoverability and governance is really the value proposition that Alation brings to the table. And the idea there is that people can then can get up and running much more quickly because, hey, what if I want to spin up a Snowflake instance, but there's somebody else, two teams over those already solved the problem or has the data that I need? Well, then maybe I don't even need to do that anymore. Or maybe I can build on top of that work to be able to get to even better outcome even faster. And so that's the sort of kind of one plus one equals three equation that we're trying to build with them. >> So that makes sense and that leads me to one of my favorite topics with the notion is this burgeoning movement around the concept of a data mesh in it. In other words, the notion that increasingly organizations are going to push to decentralize their data architectures and at the same time support a centralized policy. What do you think about this trend? How do you see Alation fitting in? >> Yeah, maybe in a different CUBE conversation. We can talk a little bit about my sort of stylized history of data, but I've got this basic theory that like everybody started out what sort of this idea of a single source of truth. That was a great term back in the 90s where people were like, look, we just need to build a single source of truth and we can take all of our data and physically land it up in a single place. And when we do that, it's going to all be clean, available and perfect. And we'll get back to the garden of Eden, right? And I think that idea has always been sort of this elusive thing that nobody's ever been able to really accomplish, right? Because in any data environment, what you're going to find is that if people use data, they create more data, right? And so in that world, you know, like that notion of centralization is always going to be fighting this idea of data sprawl. And so this concept of data mesh I think is, you know, there's formal technical definitions. But I'll stick with maybe a very informal one, which is the one that you offered. Which is just sort of this decentralized mode of architecture. You can't have decentralization if nobody knows how to access those different data points, 'cause otherwise they'll just have copies and sprawl and rework. And so you need a catalog and you need centralized policies so that people know what's available to them. And people have some way of being able to get conformed data. Like if you've got data spread out all over the place, how do you know which is the right master? How do you know what's the right customer record? How do you know what's your right chart of accounts? You've got to have services that exist in order to be able to find that stuff and to be able to leverage them consistently. And so, to me the data mesh is really a continuation of this idea, which the catalog really enabled. Which is if you can build a single source of reference, not a single source of truth, but a single place where people can find and discover the data, then you can govern a single plane and you can build consistent architectural rules so that different services can exist in a decentralized way without having to sort of bear all the costs of centralization. And I think that's a super exciting trend 'cause it gives power back to people who want to use the data more quickly and efficiently. >> And I think as we were talking about before, it's not about just the IT technical aspects, hey, it works. It's about putting power in the hands of the lines of business. And a big part of the data mesh conversation is around building data products and putting context or putting data in the hands of the people who have the context. And so it seems to me that Alation, okay, so you could have a catalog that is of the line of businesses catalog, but then there's an Uber catalog that sort of rolls up. So you've got full visibility. It seems that you've fit perfectly into that data mesh. And whether it's a data hub, a data warehouse, data lake, I mean, you don't care. I mean, that's just another node that you can help manage. >> That's exactly right. I mean, it's funny because we all look at these market scapes where people see these vendor landscapes of 500 or 800 different data and AI and ML and data architecture vendors. And often I get asked, well, why doesn't somebody come along and like consolidate all this stuff? And the reality is that tools are a reflection of how people think. And when people have different problems and different sets of experiences, they're going to want to use the best tool in order to be able to solve their problem. And so the nice thing about having a mesh architecture is you can use whatever tool you want. You just have to expose your data in a consistent way. And if you have a catalog, you can be able to have different teams using different infrastructure, different tools, different fundamental methods of building the software. But as long as they're exposing it in a consistent way, it doesn't matter. You don't necessarily need to care how it's built. You just need to know that you've got good data available to you. And that's exactly what a catalog does. >> Well, at least your catalog. I think the data mesh, it should be tools that are agnostic. And I think there are certain tools that are, I think you guys started with that principle. Not every data catalog is going to enable that, but I think that is the trend Satyen. And I think you guys have always fit into that. It's just that I think you were ahead of the time. Hey, we'll give you the last word. Give us the closing thoughts and bring us home. >> Well, I mean that's exactly right. Like, not all the catalogs are created equal and certainly not all governance is created equal. And I think most people say these words and think that are simple to get into. And then it's a death by a thousand cuts. I was literally on the phone with a chief data officer yesterday of a major distributor. And they basically said, look, like we've got sprawl everywhere. We've got data everywhere. We've got it in every type of system. And so having that sophistication turned into something that's actually easy to use is a super hard problem. And it's the one that we're focused on every single day that we wake up and every single night when we go to sleep. And so, that's kind of what we do. And we're here to make governance easy, to make data discovery easy. Those are the things that we hold our hats on. And we're super excited to put this release out 'cause we think it's going to make customers so much more capable of building on top of the problems that they've already solved. And that's what we're here to do. >> Good stuff, Satyen. Thanks so much, congratulations on the announcement and great to see you again. >> You too, Dave. Great talking. >> All right, thanks for watching this CUBE conversation. This is Dave Vellante, we'll see you next time. (tranquil music)

>> live from Las Vegas it's the cube, covering Magento Imagine 2019. Brought to you by Adobe. >> Hey welcome back to the cube, Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick live at The Wynn Las Vegas for Magento Imagine 2019, with about 3500 people here give or take a few. We're very pleased to welcome Magento evangelist Ben Marks to the Cube, Ben welcome >> Thank you for having me, I appreciate you making time. >> And thanks for bringing the flair to our set. >> I've got to let people know where my allegiances lie, right? >> So this is the first Magento Imagine post adobe acquisition, that was announced about a year ago completed about six or seven months ago. You have a very strong history with Magento the last 10 years, Magento is very much known for their developer community, their open source history and DNA. Talk to us about, how things are now with the community and really the influence that the developers have. >> Well if it's up to me we retain this really strong influence in the business. I mean at the the core of Magento since its inception the very humble beginnings that it had back in back in 2007 has been this this developer ecosystem. And that is what takes the software basically all the output and all of the expertise and intuition that we have that we put into our products and our services, it only goes so far. Now it is a platform that tends to fit in a lot of places but it only goes so far and we have that last mile, that is the most important distance that we cross and we cannot do it without this ecosystem. They are the ones that they know, they understand the merchant requirements, they understand the vertical, they understand the region, they understand cross border concerns, whatever it may be they know our product from an expert perspective and then they take that and they make it make sense. That being the case, Adobe I think so far has shown excellent stewardship in terms of recognizing the value. A big part of that 1.7 billion price tag, they paid for the community. They knew this ecosystem was the real, has always been the x-factor in Magento and so they've been very diligent, well now that I'm an employee we've been very introspective about what that means as part of adobe, is part of this this massive set of opportunities and new addressable market that we have. And we're just all trying to make sure that we look after all of these people who are at the end of the day probably our biggest champions. >> Just curious how you've been able to maintain that culture because to be kind of open source and open source first timer, first isn't the right word but open source neutral or pro, along with your proprietary stuff and to really engage developers it's such a special town and as a special culture because by rule you're saying that there's more smart people outside of our walls than inside of our walls and embracing and loving that. But you guys have gone through all kinds of interesting kind of evolutions on the business side in terms of ownership and management. How've you been able to maintain that? And what is kind of the secret sauce? Why are the developers so passionate to continue to develop a Magento? Because let me tell you we go to a lot of conferences and a lot of people are trying really hard to get that developer to spend that next time working on their platform versus a different one. >> Yeah, well you know it's endemic to our culture that whether it's a developer, someone who's working who's an expert in administering Magento stores, just whatever someone's focus is in this ecosystem, it is interesting we've always had at the underpinning everything has been this open source ethos. So from the very beginnings of Magento, the creators Roy Rubin and Yoav Kutner, they sought out as they announced this Magento thing back in the day. They intentionally made it open-source because they knew that, that had been proved by a previous open-source commerce software and they knew that that was really where they were going to win that was the force multiplier. Again the thing that would get them into markets that they couldn't address with their very small agency that they were walking out of. So through the years that grew and in large part we can thank the Doc community, especially in Germany, the Dutch community, there's just the general open source ethos there. But I learned about open source from Magento, I had someone help me out when I was first starting at my first week working with Magento as a developer there was no documentation, I had to go into a chatroom and ask for help and this guy he actually spent about a couple of hours helping me and we remain close friends to this day. But at the end of it I'm like so should I pay you? And he was this guy this guy from outside of Heidelberg he's just no this is open source, is like just as you learn give it back. And that's a perfect summation for a big part of the spirit here. It helps who are in commerce, there's money kind of flowing all around but at the end of the day we provide options, we provide flexibility where there's nothing wrong with the sass platforms there's nothing wrong with some of the the larger like API driven platforms, it's just at some point if you have a custom requirement that they can't satisfy and that happens regularly, guess what? You got to go with the platform that gives you the extensibility. So they feel a sense of ownership I think because of that and they're sort of proud to take this wherever they can. >> So with the Adobe acquisition being complete around six eight months you mentioned Adobe doing a good job of welcoming this community but you also talked about this core ethos that Magento brings. I believe in the press release, announcing the acquisition last year, Adobe said open source is in our DNA. Have you found that one to be true? And two how much has the Magento open source community been able to sort of open the eyes and maybe open the door to Adobe's ethos of embracing it? >> Let's see how much trouble can I get in to today? >> So I have a good counterpart over Alberto Dobby and it's a stretch for me to call him a counterpart. He's got his JD,he's been big in the open source world for since forever but, Matt Asay probably... >> CUBE alum >> ...if you follow tech online, you've seen this post, you've seen him as an postulating on open source and it was interesting a lot of us were asking the same question from Magento world because a lot of us remembere the eBay days and an eBay had a sort of a different plan and vision for Magento that ultimately, that whole thing they were trying to create just didn't work out. Magento survived, but we're a bit wary we all knew it was coming it's the natural progression from private equity ownership but really, where is this open source that we were told about? And Matt is a kind of a big a piece there but as it turns out he jumped on Twitter immediately when none of us was supposed to be talking about anything of course but that's in Matt's nature. Because there is a lot of open source at Adobe in fact there's a lot of open source technology that underpins even these Enterprise Solutions that they offer. I visited with with several of our team members in the Basel office and there are Apache Software Foundation board members. I mean you want to to talk about the beginnings of open source and the impact its had on the world? These are some of these people and so yes it's there I think it's not a secret to say that Adobe really hasn't done a great job of telling that story. So as I've met and kind of toured around with some of the Adobe vice presidents who've been visiting here and I love that they're engaged. They get this, they want this to expand. It's been it's been really interesting watching them and encounter this and then start to be inspired by us as much as we are inspired by again the opportunities that exist as we all come together. >> It's great, yeah and Matt's been on his Trevi a week cover, CNCF and will be a cube con I think next week and in Barcelona so we're huge advocates, but so it's such a different way of looking at the world again accepting that there's more smart people outside your four walls than are inside your four walls. Which just by rule is the way that it has to be, you can't hire all the smart people. So to use that leverage and really build this develop wrapped advocacy is a really tremendous asset. >> Better together, is what we say, and it could not be true. I mean there there is no way we could know at all, we can't hope to. So what we've done actually in the last couple of years really under some brilliant leadership by Jason Woosley we've been able to double down on our open-source investment and I'd say that was a moment when we truly became an open-source company with through and through because we spun up and we took our best architects and just put them on a project called community engineering that they're dedicated to enabling contribution of fixes improvements and features from our ecosystem. So by doing that we all of a sudden we now have worldwide engineering that is that they're all experts in their individual domains so that line of code that some contributor from somewhere is contributing, he or she has become an expert let's say in something as glamorous like totals calculation like the logic that has to go into that. Because of their real-world experience we get the highest quality code that's just backed up by a lot of trial and tribulation. And from that we basically get to cover all of our bases and they tend to write things in a way that's way more extensible than probably we could ever envision. I don't know of a better formula for having a product that satisfies something so varied and challenging and just constantly evolving as e-commerce. >> Well and I think Jason mentioned this morning that the community engineering program was only launched a couple of years ago. >> Literally a two years ago February. >> So significant impacts in a very short period of time. >> Yeah we were fascinated to see that while we'd had this kind of haphazard almost ad hoc open source engagement up to that point, once we really built machinery around it We've we've managed to build something that is a model for any other company that wants to try to do this. Once we did that we very quickly got to some of our big releases where over 50% of the new lines of code were written externally. And that was cool for about a week and then we realized that that's not even the story the story is everything else I talked about which is just that degree of ownership that degree of informed engineering that we would never come up with on our own. And it was a real signal to this very patient and resilient ecosystem that hey, we're all in this together. And of course we've done that also, we've replicated that with our developer documentation, it's all open source and able to be contributed to and we sort of look at how that can expand and even to the point where our core architecture team now all of their discussions so you can go to github.com/magento, you can see our backlog, you could see where we're discussing features and kind of planning what's coming next. You can also go to our architecture repository and you see all of our core architects having their dialogue with each other in public so that the public is informed and they can be involved and that is literally the highest stage I believe of open source evolution. >> That's a great story now the other great thing though that it don't be brought to you is some really sophisticated marketing tools to drive the commerce in your engine, so I'm just curious your perspective. You've been playing in this for a long time but you guys are really kind of taken over at the transactional level now to have that front-end engagement tools, partners, methodologies, I mean you got to be excited. >> Well really so going back to my, I remember my agency days I remember why some of the Google Analytics code looks the way it does because I remember the product that it was before. Urgent analytics right and I remember when we could first do split tests and one of the first cool projects I ever worked on in Magento 1.1 was sort of parsing Google's cookies to be able to sort of change the interface of Magento and test that for conversion rights. And to think of how far we've come, now we have the power and the mandate really to absolutely know everything about the customer experience, the customer journey and then I'm sitting there in our keynotes you know in the general session yesterday, looking up and I'm looking at the slide and I'm seeing like 14 trillion transactions that are captured in our various apparatus and I think that it's tremendous responsibility, it's tremendous power. And if we if we combine, if we use this insight responsibly, what we do is we continue to do what I think Magento has done all along which has allowed us to be at not just at the forefront of where commerce evolves but really to set the standard that consumers begin to expect. And I know we've all felt it, when you have when you have that experience and it feels very full of friction I know we can do better and I will immediately go away from any website that makes it hard for me to do what I want to do any website that seems like they are kind of a partner on my journey that's where I mean that's we're going to spend my time and my money and that's really what we're trying to really lean into here. >> Which is essential, because as you mentioned if I'm doing something on my phone I expect a really fast transaction and there's friction points, I'm gone. I will be able to find another service or product that meets my need because there is so much choice and there's so much competition for almost every product and service. So being able to leverage the power of advertising, analytics, marketing and commerce to really deliver the fundamentals of the business needs to truly manage the customer experience is a game changer. >> Yap it is so what we're what we're looking to these days you know Magento, just before the acquisition was announced made a tremendous investment to start up it's completely independent trade association called the Magento Association. It's a place for our community to collect under. And and when we're here and Magento is still a big champion of ours a big source of investment and we are you know we are looking and I kind of wear both hats right because I'm a board member of that group as well as being a Magento Adobe employee. But one of the focus that we have is still that collaborative spirit where we start to carry the message and the capabilities of this tooling so that we can ensure that this ecosystem remains and powered to deliver the experiences that our customers and their customers expect. >> Absolutely, well Ben thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and your enthusiasm and passion >> Yeah did that come through I was hoping. >> You could next time dial it up a little bit more. >> Okay good. >> Awesome and bring more flair. >> I'll bring more flair next time. [Lisa Mumbling] >> I'm still wondering what happened to the capes? >> The magician master capes yes. >> I can I can probably go grab you a couple. >> That would be awesome orange is my favorite color. >> Good to know. >> Ben it's been a pleasure having you on the program we look forward to next year. >> Likewise thank you both. >> Our pleasure. For Jeff Rick, I'm Lisa Martin and you are watching theCube live at Magento imagine 2019 from Vegas. Thanks for watching. (upbeatmusic)

>> Announcer: From Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering Cloud Foundry Summit 2018 brought to you by the Cloud Foundry Foundation. >> I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Cloud Foundry Summit 2018 here in Boston, Massachusetts, happy to welcome back to the program Abby Kearns who's the executive director and goddess of the Cloud Foundry Foundation. Abby. >> Yes. >> Thanks so much for being here, good morning, good evening. >> Good afternoon. >> You've been running, doing so many sessions here, so, we're really glad that we get to have you on to help us wrap up our coverage. >> My pleasure, what better way to wrap up another amazing day at Cloud Foundry Summit than hanging out with you, Stu? >> Thanks, Abby, it's a pleasure. Look, really, I've said it a few times, but I mean it. One of the reasons I wanted to come here is, I get to talk to a bunch of users and they have great stories, so, it's always cool to talk to the startup doing something neat and different, but another thing, too, when you talk to the US Air Force and they talk about how they're doing drastic change, talk to T-Mobile, you talk to some of these bigger, older companies, and gosh, that's a bad word in the industry, right? But making some big changes, so, take a breath and tell us what your experience has been at the show so far. >> Well, I mean, you hit on my favorite part of the whole show, is getting to spend time with the community, but also the end users. What's so unique about Cloud Foundry Summit is half the attendees are end users. And it's so great to see them all come here and really be willing to put it all out there and get up on stage and talk about what they've done, how they got there, or hear them all fight about who's the more agile hundred-year-old company, which has been a funny conversation today. Allstate was chiming in that they were the young one in the group at 85 years old, so it's... But honestly, we get really caught up in the tech but hearing how people are using it and what they're doing and how it's changing their company is really I think the interesting story. If I'm a journalist, that's what I want to cover, because that's the interesting stuff. >> We had a media dinner and we're not supposed to share the details of them, but I love this discussion. This stuff isn't easy. We actually have the customers sharing the rewards, the challenges, the problems, well, working at a big company, change is definitely not easy. Working with some of this tech, it's not the simplest thing out there. We're working, there's lots of projects, there's lots of different interfaces there, but, still getting measurable great value out of what they're doing. To use an old term, moving the needle on what they're doing, so, it's exciting to see that. You've been in so many sessions, give us some highlights from, say, if you've got a couple of examples or things that, any customer story that you'd want to share. >> I mean, today, I heard a lot about Boeing. Boeing and the journey that they're on has been amazing to hear them talk about how they're changing their company, and even, in fact, they ask, all right, we're going to talk about this at Summit, but I don't want to talk about the tech. I don't want to talk about how we're using CICD, I don't want to talk about any of that. I want to talk about the culture change and having user after user say, I'm actually, want to get onstage and talk, but I don't want to talk about the tech, and that, I think, really shows the excitement and enthusiasm around the transformation process and what that means for them, and for me, as someone watching this outside, you're like, oh my god, this is amazing, and this is such a powerful story to really reflect the role technology has played in enabling that, but also the hard work that has to come into that. >> We often say that the technology is the easy part, it's the people and process stuff that'll be hard. The Foundation and this ecosystem and all the users that are involved, there's a lot of technical challenges, though, that are people working through, so, I wonder, do they underplay some of the technology things that they have to, I mean, learning new technologies, learning new skills, some of that is cultural, but, there is kind of that full spectrum that they have to get engaged with. >> Yeah, well, I just think that Cloud Foundry makes it easy (laughing) from the technology standpoint, because it really pulls a lot of things in together, but, collectively and particularly in open source, the opportunity exists for us to all move forward together. One of my big things I'm pushing for this year is interoperability, and continuing to let the technology evolve and taking advantage of new and innovative technologies, either alongside the platform or inside the platform, but really that's going to be a big focus and it was so great to hear from a lot of these end users, but that's important to them, too. >> Yeah, interoperability, you know, there are some that would look at this and they'd say, oh, they know Cloud Foundry because that thing that came out of VMware and there's this company, Pivotal, filed an S-1, they're going to go public, but, maybe talk a little bit about the ecosystem. There are so many solutions out there which don't yet have the Cloud Foundry branding on it but leverage the technologies in there. >> Yeah, it was really great to announce our eight certified distributions for 2018. We've had two new ones join SUSE Cloud Application Platform and, the most surprising one is Cloud.gov is now a certified distribution. Cloud.gov has done so much to bring digital transformation to the government, and so for them, and AT and F in particular, being able to offer up a platform like Cloud Foundry and the digital transformation initiatives around that, to federal agencies, is such a powerful story. They are literally changing our government, and hearing more and more stories like that have been really exciting, so to see that they now have a certified distribution, so regardless of what industry you're in, or what geo you're in, you have access to a certified distribution, the ability to run it on any cloud, for example, AliCloud is now, it's Cloud Foundry CPI is now available for AliCloud. You can run it on any cloud in the world and that is really showcasing that Cloud Foundry is not only leading the industry in terms of driving this change in these companies and with the technology but the ecosystem around it is continuing to grow and build. >> Maybe share a little bit, the tracks got kind of redone and there's some interesting tracks to kind of highlight, some of those focus areas that you had at the show this year. >> Yeah, for the first time ever, we had a government track. We had so many government use cases. You mentioned the Air Force earlier, AT and F. We have governments around the world that are running Cloud Foundry, so we added a government track. We had also a containers and serverless track. We actually added, last year we added an enterprise track, which is essentially users getting up on stage and talking about what they do. We added a whole track because we had so many submissions for that, and so it's really, again, an interesting opportunity to talk about the core technology and the platform, what's happening around that, but also more importantly how it's being used, and really being able to capture that is important for us. >> All right, the other kind of metric, if you look at the growth, is, when you talk about the ecosystem, there's, I believe it's the Foundry, which is the online marketplace. Speak a little bit to how that's been growing. >> Right, so we launched the Foundry last year in October at our summit in Basel. We launched in initially with 600 services. In short, it's an online marketplace for end users to find services, capabilities, and support, so it lists certified distributions, training partners, as well as technologies that are available that they could run on or alongside the platform and since October, we had now announced this week that we actually have over 4900 services in there now, so it's continuing to grow, but also, one thing I hadn't mentioned is it is our most highly trafficked page in our website, so it's continuing to drive the most traffic because end users care about it, but it's also really an area where we can showcase the breadth of the Cloud Foundry ecosystem. >> Yeah, I talked a little bit with Chip about this, but, there's not just one project, there's so many things getting involved. Maybe give us a little bit of the philosophy from the Foundation. What's the most important thing and how do you keep growing without sprawling? (laughing) >> Well, I think Cloud Foundry has always had really strong opinions about where we go and one of the things that we work, collectively work together on, is keeping a core shared vision, so there is a common core where the innovation continues to grow and happen, but allowing space and room for everyone to be able to differentiate from either different commercial go-to-market, or extensibility or extensions. For example, if you look at just our distributions alone, we've got one that focuses on federal government, we've got Pivotal Cloud Foundry, but we've got also an SAP cloud platform and really it's focusing on changing not only SAP customers, but also the way SAP thinks about software, and so seeing these different variations of the same core technology, is also a big driver of the inspiration, it's like, so many different perspectives around the table that really can drive and push the technology to do new and innovative things. >> All right, Abby, want to give the the final word. People that haven't been to the show, there's so much online. Any special things you'd want to call out, or final thoughts? >> Well, one, if you haven't been to the show, you should definitely come. We have another one coming up in October 11th and 12th in Basel, Switzerland, so if you've never been to Basel, it's a great way to come experience Summit for the first time. All the videos from all the sessions and key notes will be made available on YouTube usually within about a week, so anything that you missed if you were here, you can catch up there, and we're going to just keep talking about what we're doing and continuing to promote it and we'd love for more people to join us on the process. >> All right, well, Abby Kearns, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thanks to the Foundation again for helping us bring this coverage, all of our content, of course, is always out there. It will be on theCUBE.net. Talking to many of the people in the Cloud Foundry ecosystem at many shows throughout the year, so, thanks, Abby, and the whole Foundation. A great lineup of customers, partners, and thought leaders in this space. Thanks to Brian and Alex for helping us do this coverage and be sure to check out all of our coverage on theCUBE.net. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> Announcer: Live from New York, it's theCUBE covering Machine Learning Everywhere, Build Your Ladder To AI, brought to you by IBM. (techy music playing) >> Welcome back to New York City as we continue here at IBM's Machine Learning Everywhere, Build Your Ladder To AI bringing it to you here on theCUBE, of course the rights to the broadcast of SiliconANGLE Media and Dave Vellante joins me here. Dave, good morning once again to you, sir. >> Hey, John, good to see you. >> And we're joined by Madhu Kochar, who is the Vice President of Analytics Development and Client Success at IBM, I like that, client success. Good to see you this morning, thanks for joining us. >> Yeah, thank you. >> Yeah, so let's bring up a four letter / ten letter word, governance, that some people just cringe, right, right away, but that's very much in your wheelhouse. Let's talk about that in terms of what you're having to be aware of today with data and all of a sudden these great possibilities, right, but also on the other side, you've got to be careful, and I know there's some clouds over in Europe as well, but let's just talk about your perspective on governance and how it's important to get it all under one umbrella. >> Yeah, so I lead product development for IBM analytics, governance, and integration, and like you said, right, governance has... Every time you talk that, people cringe and you think it's a dirty word, but it's not anymore, right. Especially when you want to tie your AI ladder story, right, there is no AI without information architecture, no AI without IA, and if you think about IA, what does that really mean? It means the foundation of that is data and analytics. Now, let's look deeper, what does that really mean, what is data analytics? Data is coming at us from everywhere, right, and there's records... The data shows there's about 2.5 quintillion bytes of data getting generated every single day, raw data from everywhere. How are we going to make sense out of it, right, and from that perspective it is just so important that you understand this type of data, what is the type of data, what's the classification of this means in a business. You know, when you are running your business, there's a lot of cryptic fields out there, what is the business terms assigned to it and what's the lineage of it, where did it come from. If you do have to do any analytics, if data scientists have to do any analytics on it they need to understand where did it actually originated from, can I even trust this data. Trust is really, really important here, right, and is the data clean, what is the quality of this data. The data is coming at us all raw formats from IOT sensors and such. What is the quality of this data? To me, that is the real definition of governance. Right, it's not just about what we used to think about compliance, yes, that's-- >> John: Like rolling a rag. >> Right, right. >> But it's all about being appropriate with all the data you have coming in. >> Exactly, I call it governance 2.0 or governance for insights, because that's what it needs to be all about. Right, compliance, yes indeed, with GDPR and other things coming at us it's important, but I think the most critical is that we have to change the term of governance into, like, this is that foundation for your AI ladder that is going to help us really drive the right insights, that's my perspective. >> I want to double click on that because you're right, I mean, it is kind of governance 2.0. It used to be, you know, Enron forced a lot of, you know, governance and the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure forced a lot of sort of even some artificial governance, and then I think organization, especially public companies and large organizations said, "You know what, we can't just do "this as a band-aid every time." You know, now GDPR, many companies are not ready for GDPR, we know that. Having said that, because it is, went through governance 1.0, many companies are not panicked. I mean, they're kind of panicking because May is coming, (laughs) but they've been through this before. >> Madhu: Mm-hm. >> Do you agree with that premise, that they've got at least the skillsets and the professionals to, if they focus, they can get there pretty quickly? >> Yeah, no, I agree with that, but I think our technology and tools needs to change big time here, right, because regulations are coming at us from all different angles. Everybody's looking to cut costs, right? >> Dave: Right. >> You're not going to hire more people to sit there and classify the data and say, "Hey, is this data ready for GDPR," or for Basel or for POPI, like in South Africa. I mean, there's just >> Dave: Yeah. >> Tons of things, right, so I do think the technology needs to change, and that's why, you know, in our governance portfolio, in IBM information server, we have infused machine learning in it, right, >> Dave: Hm. >> Where it's automatically you have machine learning algorithms and models understanding your data, classifying the data. You know, you don't need humans to sit there and assign terms, the business terms to it. We have compliance built into our... It's running actually on machine learning. You can feed in taxonomy for GDPR. It would automatically tag your data in your catalog and say, "Hey, this is personal data, "this is sensitive data, or this data "is needed for these type of compliance," and that's the aspect which I think we need to go focus on >> Dave: Mm-hm. >> So the companies, to your point, don't shrug every time they hear regulations, that it's kind of built in-- >> Right. >> In the DNA, but technologies have to change, the tools have to change. >> So, to me that's good news, if you're saying the technology and the tools is the gap. You know, we always talk about people, process, and technology the bromide is, but it's true, people and process are the really-- >> Madhu: Mm-hm. >> Hard pieces of it. >> Madhu: Mm-hm. >> Technology comes and goes >> Madhu: Mm-hm. >> And people kind of generally get used to that. So, I'm inferring from your comments that you feel as though governance, there's a value component of governance now >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's not just a negative risk avoidance. It can be a contributor to value. You mentioned the example of classification, which I presume is auto-classification >> Madhu: Yes. >> At the point of use or creation-- >> Madhu: Yes. >> Which has been a real nagging problem for decades, especially after FRCP, Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, where it was like, "Ugh, we can't figure "this out, we'll do email archiving." >> Madhu: Mm-hm. >> You can't do this manually, it's just too much data-- >> Yeah. >> To your point, so I wonder if you could talk a little bit about governance and its contribution to value. >> Yeah, so this is good question. I was just recently visiting some large banks, right, >> Dave: Mm-hm. >> And normally, the governance and compliance has always been an IT job, right? >> Dave: Right. >> And they figure out bunch of products, you know, you can download opensource and do other things to quickly deliver data or insights to their business groups, right, and for business to further figure out new business models and such, right. So, recently what has happened is by doing machine learning into governance, you're making your IT guys the heroes because now they can deliver stuff very quickly, and the business guys are starting to get those insights and their thoughts on data is changing, you know, and recently I was talking with these banks where they're like, "Can you come and talk to "our CFOs because I think the policies," the cultural change you referred to then, maybe the data needs to be owned by businesses. >> Dave: Hm. >> No longer an IT thing, right? So, governance I feel like, you know, governance and integration I feel like is a glue which is helping us drive that cultural change in the organizations, bringing IT and the business groups together to further drive the insights. >> So, for years we've been talking about information as a liability or an asset, and for decades it was really viewed as a liability, get rid of it if you can. You have to keep it for seven years, then get rid of it, you know. That started to change, you know, with the big data movement, >> Madhu: Yeah. >> But there was still sort of... It was hard, right, but what I'm hearing now is increasingly, especially of the businesses sort of owning the data, it's becoming viewed as an asset. >> Madhu: Yes. >> You've got to manage the liabilities, we got that, but now how do we use it to drive business value. >> Yeah, yeah, no, exactly, and that's where I think our focus in IBM analytics, with machine learning and automation, and truly driving that insights out of the data. I mean, you know, people... We've been saying data is a natural resource. >> Dave: Mm-hm. >> It's our bloodline, it's this and that. It truly is, you know, and talking to the large enterprises, everybody is in their mode of digital transformation or transforming, right? We in IBM are doing the same things. Right, we're eating our own, drinking our own champagne (laughs). >> John: Not the Kool-Aid. >> You know, yeah, yeah. >> John: Go right to the dog. >> Madhu: Yeah, exactly. >> Dave: No dog smoothie. (laughs) >> Drinking our own champagne, and truly we're seeing transformation in how we're running our own business as well. >> Now what, there are always surprises. There are always some, you know, accidents kind of waiting to happen, but in terms of the IOT, you know, have got these millions, right, of sensors-- >> Madhu: Mm-hm. >> You know, feeding data in, and what, from a governance perspective, is maybe a concern about, you know, an unexpected source or an unexpected problem or something where yeah, you have great capabilities, but with those capabilities might come a surprise or two in terms of protecting data and a machine might provide perhaps a little more insight than you might've expected. So, I mean, just looking down the road from your perspective, you know, is there anything along those lines that you're putting up flags for just to keep an eye on to see what new inputs might create new problems for you? >> Yeah, no, for sure, I mean, we're always looking at how do we further do innovation, how do we disrupt ourselves and make sure that data doesn't become our enemy, right, I mean it's... You know, as we are talking about AI, people are starting to ask a lot of questions about ethics and other things, too, right. So, very critical, so obviously when you focus on governance, the point of that is let's take the manual stuff out, make it much faster, but part of the governance is that we're protecting you, right. That's part of that security and understanding of the data, it's all about that you don't end up in jail. Right, that's the real focus in terms of our technology in terms of the way we're looking at. >> So, maybe help our audience a little bit. So, I described at our open AI is sort of the umbrella and machine learning is the math and the algorithms-- >> Madhu: Yeah. >> That you apply to train systems to do things maybe better than, maybe better than humans can do and then there's deep learning, which is, you know, neural nets and so forth, but am I understanding that you've essentially... First of all, is that sort of, I know it's rudimentary, but is it reasonable, and then it sounds like you've infused ML into your software. >> Madho: Yes. >> And so I wonder if you could comment on that and then describe from the client's standpoint what skills they need to take advantage of that, if any. >> Oh, yeah, no, so embedding ML into a software, like a packaged software which gets delivered to our client, people don't understand actually how powerful that is, because your data, your catalog, is learning. It's continuously learning from the system itself, from the data itself, right, and that's very exciting. The value to the clients really is it cuts them their cost big time. Let me give you an example, in a large organization today for example, if they have, like, maybe 22,000 some terms, normally it would take them close to six months for one application with a team of 20 to sit there and assign the terms, the right business glossary for their business to get data. (laughs) So, by now doing machine learning in our software, we can do this in days, even in hours, obviously depending on what's the quantity of the data in the organization. That's the value, so the value to the clients is cutting down that. They can take those folks and go focus on some, you know, bigger value add applications and others and take advantage of that data. >> The other huge value that I see is as the business changes, the machine can help you adapt. >> Madhu: Yeah. >> I mean, taxonomies are like cement in data classification, and while we can't, you know, move the business forward because we have this classification, can your machines adapt, you know, in real time and can they change at the speed of my business, is my question. >> Right, right, no, it is, right, and clients are not able to move on their transformation journey because they don't have data classified done right. >> Dave: Mm-hm. >> They don't, and you can't put humans to it. You're going to need the technology, you're going to need the machine learning algorithms and the AI built into your software to get that, and that will lead to, really, success of every kind. >> Broader question, one of the good things about things like GDPR is it forces, it puts a deadline on there and we all know, "Give me a deadline and I'll hit it," so it sort of forces action. >> Madhu: Mm-hm. >> And that's good, we've talked about the value that you can bring to an organization from a data perspective, but there's a whole non-governance component of data orientation. How do you see that going, can the governance initiatives catalyze sort of what I would call a... You know, people talk about a data driven organization. Most companies, they may say they are data driven but they're really not foundational. >> Mm-hm. >> Can governance initiatives catalyze that transformation to a data driven organization, and if so, how? >> Yeah, no, absolutely, right. So, the example I was sharing earlier with talking to some of the large financial institutes, where the business guys, you know, outside of IT are talking about how important it is for them to get the data really real time, right, and self-service. They don't want to be dependent on either opening a work ticket for somebody in IT to produce data for them and god forbid if somebody's out on vacation they can never get that. >> Dave: Right. >> We don't live in that world anymore, right. It's online, it's real time, it's all, you know, self-service type of aspects, which the business, the data scientists building new analytic models are looking for that. So, for that, data is the key, key core foundation in governance. The way I explained it earlier, it's not just about compliance. That is going to lead to that transformation for every client, it's the core. They will not be successful without that. >> And the attributes are changing. Not only is it self-service, it's pervasive-- >> Madhu: Yeah. >> It's embedded, it's aware, it's anticipatory. Am I overstating that? >> Madhu: No. >> I mean, is the data going to find me? >> Yeah, you know, (laughs) that's a good way to put it, you know, so no, you're at the, I think you got it. This is absolutely the right focus, and the companies and the enterprises who understand this and use the right technology to fix it that they'll win. >> So, if you have a partner that maybe, if it is contextual, I mean... >> Dave: Yeah. >> So, also make it relevant-- >> Madhu: Yes. >> To me and help me understand its relevance-- >> Madhu: Yes. >> Because maybe as a, I hate to say as a human-- >> Madhu: Yes. >> That maybe just don't have that kind of prism, but can that, does that happen as well, too? >> Madhu: Yeah, no. >> John: It can put up these white flags and say, "Yeah, this is what you need." >> Yeah, no, absolutely, so like the focus we have on our natural language processing, for example, right. If you're looking for something you don't have to always know what your SQL is going to be for a query to do it. You just type in, "Hey, I'm looking for "some customer retention data," you know, and it will go out and figure it out and say, "Hey, are you looking for churn analysis "or are you looking to do some more promotions?" It will learn, you know, and that's where this whole aspect of machine learning and natural language processing is going to give you that contextual aspect of it, because that's how the self-service models will work. >> Right, what about skills, John asked me at the open about skillsets and I want to ask a general question, but then specifically about governance. I would make the assertion that most employees don't have the multidimensional digital skills and domain expertise skills today. >> Yeah. >> Some companies they do, the big data companies, but in governance, because it's 2.0, do you feel like the skills are largely there to take advantage of the innovations that IBM is coming out with? >> I think I generally, my personal opinion is the way the technology's moving, the way we are getting driven by a lot of disruptions, which are happening around us, I think we don't have the right skills out there, right. We all have to retool, I'm sure all of us in our career have done this all the time. You know, so (laughs) to me, I don't think we have it. So, building the right tools, the right technologies and enabling the resources that the teams out there to retool themselves so they can actually focus on innovation in their own enterprises is going to be critical, and that's why I really think more burn I can take off from the IT groups, more we can make them smarter and have them do their work faster. It will help give that time to go see hey, what's their next big disruption in their organization. >> Is it fair to say that traditionally governance has been a very people-intensive activity? >> Mm-hm. >> Will governance, you know, in the next, let's say decade, become essentially automated? >> That's my desire, and with the product-- >> Dave: That's your job. >> That's my job, and I'm actually really proud of what we have done thus far and where we are heading. So, next time when we meet we will be talking maybe governance 3.0, I don't know, right. (laughs) Yeah, that's the thing, right? I mean, I think you hit it on the nail, that this is, we got to take a lot of human-intensive stuff out of our products and more automation we can do, more smarts we can build in. I coined this term like, hey, we've got to build smarter metadata, right? >> Dave: Right. >> Data needs to, metadata is all about data of your data, right? That needs to become smarter, think about having a universe where you don't have to sit there and connect the dots and say, "I want to move from here to there." System already knows it, they understand certain behaviors, they know what your applications is going to do and it kind of automatically does it for you. No more science fake, I think it can happen. (laughs) >> Do you think we'll ever have more metadata than data... (laughs) >> Actually, somebody did ask me that question, will we be figuring out here we're building data lakes, what do we do about metadata. No, I think we will not have that problem for a while, we'll make it smarter. >> Dave: Going too fast, right. >> You're right. >> But it is, it's like working within your workforce and you're telling people, you know, "You're a treasure hunter and we're going to give you a better map." >> Madhu: Yeah. >> So, governance is your better map, so trust me. >> Madhu: Hey, I like that, maybe I'll use it next time. >> Yeah, but it's true, it's like are you saying governance is your friend here-- >> Madhu: Yes. >> And we're going to fine-tune your search, we're going to make you a more efficient employee, we're going to make you a smarter person and you're going to be able to contribute in a much better way, but it's almost enforced, but let it be your friend, not your foe. >> Yes, yeah, be your differentiator, right. >> But my takeaway is it's fundamental, it's embedded. You know, you're doing this now with less thinking. Security's got to get to the same play, but for years security, "Ugh, it slows me down," but now people are like, "Help me," right, >> Madhu: Mm-hm. >> And I think the same dynamic is true here, embedded governance in my business. Not a bolt on, not an afterthought. It's fundamental and foundational to my organization. >> Madhu: Yeah, absolutely. >> Well, Madhu, thank you for the time. We mentioned on the outset by the interview if you want to say hi to your kids that's your camera right there. Do you want to say hi to your kids real quick? >> Yeah, hi Mohed, Kepa, I love you so much. (laughs) >> All right. >> Thank you. >> So, they know where mom is. (laughs) New York City at IBM's Machine Learning Everywhere, Build Your Ladder To AI. Thank you for joining us, Madhu Kochar. >> Thank you, thank you. >> Back with more here from New York in just a bit, you're watching theCUBE. (techy music playing)

>> Narrator: It's theCUBE covering Sapphire Now 2017 brought to you by SAP Cloud Platform and HANA Enterprise Cloud. >> Welcome back everyone to our special Sapphire Now 2017 coverage in our Palo Alto Studios. We have folks on the ground in Orlando. It's the third day of Sapphire Now and we're bringing our friends and experts inside our new 4500 square foot studio where we're starting to get our action going and covering events anywhere they are from here. If we can't get there we'll do it from here in Palo Alto. Our next guest is Satyen Sangani, CEO of Alation. A hot start-up funded by Custom Adventures, Catalyst Data Collective, and I think Andreessen Horowitz is also an investor? >> Satyen: That's right. >> Satyen, welcome to the cube conversation here. >> Thank you for having me. >> So we are doing this special coverage, and I wanted to bring you in and discuss Sapphire Now as it relates to the context of the biggest wave hitting the industry, with waves are ones cloud. We've known that for a while. People surfing that one, then the data wave is coming fast, and I think this is a completely different animal in the sense of it's going to look different, but be just as big. Your business is in the data business. You help companies figure this out. Give us the update on, first take a minute talk about Alation, for the folks who aren't following you, what do you guys do, and then let's talk about data. >> Yeah. So for those of you that don't know about what Alation is, it's basically a data catalog. You know, if you think about all of the databases that exist in the enterprise, stuff on Prem, stuff in the cloud, all the BI tools like Tableau and MicroStrategy, and Business Objects. When you've got a lot of data that sits inside the enterprise today and a wide variety of legacy and modern tools, and what Alation does is, it creates a catalog, crawling all of those systems like Google crawls the web and effectively looks at all the logs inside of those systems, to understand how the data is interrelated and we create this data social graph, and it kind of looks >> John: It's a metadata catalog? >> We call you know, we don't use the word metadata because metadata is the word that people use when you know that's that's Johnny back in the corner office, Right? And people don't want to talk about metadata if you're a business person you think about metadata you're like, I don't, not my thing. >> So you guys are democratizing what data means to an organization? That's right. >> We just like to talk about context. We basically say, look in the same way that information, or in the same way when you're eating your food, you need, you know organic labeling to understand whether or not that's good or bad, we have on some level a provenance problem, a trust problem inside of data in the enterprise, and you need a layer of you know trust, and understanding in context. >> So you guys are a SAS, or you guys are a SAS solution, or are you a software subscription? >> We are both. Most of this is actually on Prem because most of the people that have the problem that Alation solves are very big complicated institutions, or institutions with a lot of data, or a lot of people trying to analyze it, but we do also have a SAS offering, and actually that's how we intersect with SAP Altiscale, and so we have a cloud base that's offering that we work with. >> Tell me about your relation SAP because you kind of backdoored in through an acquisition, quickly note that we'll get into the conversation. >> Yeah that's right, So Altiscale to big intersections, big data, and then they do big data in the cloud SAP acquired them last year and what we do is we provide a front-end capability for people to access that data in the cloud, so that as analysts want to analyze that data, as data governance folks want to manage that data, we provide them with a single catalog to do that. >> So talk about the dynamics in the industry because SAP clearly the big news there is the Leonardo, they're trying to create this framework, we just announced an alpha because everyone's got these names of dead creative geniuses, (Satyen laughs) We just ingest our Nostradamus products, Since they have Leonardo and, >> That's right. >> SAP's got Einstein, and IBM's got Watson, and Informatica has got Claire, so who thought maybe we just get our own version, but anyway, everyone's got some sort of like bot, or like AI program. >> Yep. >> I mean I get that, but the reality is, the trend is, they're trying to create a tool chest of platform re-platforming around tooling >> Satyen: Yeah. >> To make things easier. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> You have a lot of work in this area, through relation, trying to make things easier. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> And also they get the cloud, On-premise, HANA Enterprise Cloud, SAV cloud platform, meaning developers. So the convergence between developers, cloud, and data are happening. What's your take on that strategy? You think SAP's got a good move by going multi cloud, or should they, should be taking a different approach? >> Well I think they have to, I mean I think the economics in cloud, and the unmanageability, you know really human economics, and being able to have more and more being managed by third-party providers that are, you know, effectively like AWS, and how they skill, in the capability to manage at scale, and you just really can't compete if you're SAP, and you can't compete if your customers are buying, and assembling the toolkits On-premise, so they've got to go there, and I think every IT provider has to >> John: Got to go to the cloud you mean? >> They've got to go to the cloud, I think there's no question about it, you know I think that's at this point, a foregone conclusion in the world of enterprise IT. >> John: Yeah it's pretty obvious, I mean hybrid cloud is happening, that's really a gateway to multi-cloud, the submission is when I build Norton, a guest in latency multi-cloud issues there, but the reality is not every workloads gone there yet, a lot of analytics going on in the cloud. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> DevTest, okay check the box on DevTest >> Satyen: That's right. >> Analytics is all a ballgame right now, in terms of state of the art, your thoughts on the trends in how companies are using the cloud for analytics, and things that are challenges and opportunities. >> Yeah, I think there's, I think the analytics story in the cloud is a little bit earlier. I think that the transaction processing and the new applications, and the new architectures, and new integrations, certainly if you're going to build a new project, you're going to do that in the cloud, but I think the analytics in a stack, first of all there's like data gravity, right, you know there's a lot of gravity to that data, and moving it all into the cloud, and so if you're transaction processing, your behavioral apps are in the cloud, then it makes sense to keep the data in an AWS, or in the cloud. Conversely you know if it's not, then you're not going to take a whole bunch of data that sits on Prem and move it whole hog all the way to the cloud just because, right, that's super expensive, >> Yeah. >> You've got legacy. >> A lot of risks too and a lot of governance and a lot of compliance stuff as well. >> That's exactly right I mean if you're trying to comply with Basel II or GDPR, and you know you want to manage all that privacy information. How are you going to do that if you're going to move your data at the same time >> John: Yeah. >> And so it's a tough >> John: Great point. >> It's a tough move, I think from our perspective, and I think this is really important, you know we sort of say look, in a world where data is going to be on Prem, on the cloud, you know in BI tools, in databases and no SQL databases, on Hadoop, you're going to have data everywhere, and in that world where data is going to be in multiple locations and multiple technologies you got to figure out a way to manage. >> Yeah. I mean data sprawls all over the place, it's a big problem, oh and this oh and by the way that's a good thing, store it to your storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, data legs are popping out, but you have data links, for all you have data everywhere. >> Satyen: That's right. >> How are you looking at that problem as a start-up, and how a customer's dealing with that, and what is this a real issue, or is this still too early to talk about data sprawl? >> It's a real issue, I mean it, we liken it to the advent of the Internet in the time of traditional media, right, so you had you had traditional media, there were single sort of authoritative sources we all watched it may be CNN may be CBS we had the nightly news we had Newsweek, we got our information, also the Internet comes along, and anybody can blog about anything, right and so the cost of creating information is now this much lower anybody can create any reality anybody can store data anywhere, right, and so now you've got a world where, with tableau, with Hadoop, with redshift, you can build any stack you want to at any cost, and so now what do you do? Because everybody's creating their own thing, every Dev is doing their own thing, everybody's got new databases, new applications, you know software is eating the world right? >> And data it is eating software. >> And data is eating software, and so now you've got this problem where you're like look I got all this stuff, and I don't know I don't know what's fake news, what's real, what's alternative fact, what doesn't make any sense, and so you've got a signal and noise problem, and I think in that world you got to figure out how to get to truth, right, >> John: Yeah. And what's the answer to that in your mind, not that you have the answer, if you did, we'd be solving it better. >> Yeah. >> But I mean directionally where's the vector going in your mind? I try to talk to Paul Martino about this at bullpen capital he's a total analytics geek he doesn't think this big data can solve that yet but they started to see some science around trying to solve these problems with data. What's your vision on this? >> Satyen: Yeah you know so I believe that every I think that every developer is going to start building applications based on data I think that every business person is going to have an analytical role in their job because if they're not dealing with the world on the certainty, and they're not using all the evidence, at their disposable, they're not making the best decisions and obviously they're going to be more and more analysts and so you know at some level everybody is an analyst >> I wrote a post in 2008, my old blog was hosted on WordPress, before I started SilicionANGLE, data is the new developer kid. >> That's right. >> And I saw that early, and it was still not as clear to this now as obvious as least to us because we're in the middle, in this industry, but it's now part of the software fabric, it's like a library, like as developer you'd call a library of code software to come in and be part of your program >> Yeah >> Building blocks approach, Lego blocks, but now data as Lego blocks completely changes the game on things if you think of it that way. Where are we on that notion of you really using data as a development component, I mean it seems to be early, I don't, haven't seen any proof points, that says, well that company's actually using the data programmatically with software. >> Satyen: Yeah. well I mean look I think there's features in almost every software application whether it's you know 27% of the people clicked on this button into this particular thing, I mean that's a data based application right and so I think there is this notion that we talked a lot about, which is data literacy, right, and so that's kind of a weird thing, so what does that exactly mean? Well data is just information like a news article is information, and you got to decide whether it's good or it's bad, and whether you can come to a conclusion, or whether you can't, just as if you're using an API from a third-party developer you need documentation, you need context about that data, and people have to be intelligent about how they use it. >> And literacies also makes it, makes it addressable. >> That's right. >> If you have knowledge about data, at some point it's named and addressed at some point in a network. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> Especially Jada in motion, I mean data legs I get, data at rest, we start getting into data in motion, real-time data, every piece of data counts. Right? >> That's exactly right. And so now you've got to teach people about how to use this stuff you've got to give them the right data you got to make that discoverable you got to make that information usable you've got to get people to know who the experts are about the data, so they can ask questions, you know these are tougher problems, especially as you get more and more systems. >> All right, as a start up, you're a growing start-up, you guys are, are lean and mean, doing well. You have to go compete in this war. It's a lot of, you know a lot of big whales in there, I mean you got Oracle, SAP, IBM, they're all trying to transform, everybody is transforming all the incumbent winners, potential buyers of your company, or potentially you displacing this, as a young CEO, they you know eat their lunch, you have to go compete in a big game. How are you guys looking at that compass, I see your focus so I know a little bit about your plan, but take us through the mindset of a start-up CEO, that has to go into this world, you guys have to be good, I mean this is a big wave, see it's a big wave. >> Yeah. Nobody buys from a start-up unless you get, and a start-up could be even a company, less than a 100-200 people, I mean nobody's buying from a company unless there's a 10x return to value relative to the next best option, and so in that world how do you build 10x value? Well one you've got to have great technology, and then that's the start point, but the other thing is you've got to have deep focus on your customers, right, and so I think from our perspective, we build focus by just saying, look nobody understands data in your company, and by and large you've got to make money by understanding this data, as you do the digital transformation stuff, a big part of that is differentiating and making better products and optimizing based upon understanding your data because that helps you and your business make better decisions, >> John: Yeah. >> And so what we're going to do is help you understand that data better and faster than any other company can do. >> You really got to pick your shots, but what you're saying, if I hear you saying is as a start-up you got to hit the beachhead segment you want to own. >> Satyen: That's right. >> And own it. >> Satyen: That's exactly. >> No other decision, just get it, and then maybe get to a bigger scope later, and sequence around, and grow it that way. >> Satyen: You can't solve 10 problems >> Can't be groping for a beachhead if you don't know what you want, you're never going to get it. >> That's right. You can't solve 10 problems unless you solve one, right, and so you know I think we're at a phase where we've proven that we can scalably solved one, we've got customers like, you know Pfizer and Intuit and Citrix and Tesco and Tesla and eBay and Munich Reinsurance and so these are all you know amazing brands that are traditionally difficult to sell into, but you know I think from our perspective it's really about focus and just helping customers that are making that digital analytical transformation. Do it faster, and do it by enabling their people. >> But a lot going on this week for events, we had Informatica world this week, we got V-mon. We had Google I/O. We had Sapphire. It's a variety of other events going on, but I want to ask you kind of a more of a entrepreneurial industry question, which is, if we're going through the so-called digital transformation, that means a new modern era an old one movie transformed, yet I go to every event, and everyone's number one at something, that's like I was just at Informatica, they're number one in six squadrons. Michael Dell we're number in four every character, Mark Hurr at the press meeting said they're number one in all categories, Ross Perot think quote about you could be number one depends on how you slice the market, seems to be in play, my point is I kind of get a little bit, you know weirded out by that, but that is okay, you know I guess theCUBE's number one in overall live videos produced at an enterprise event, you know I, so we're number one at something, but my point is. >> Satyen: You really are. >> My point is, in a new transformation, what is the new scoreboard going to look like because a lot of things that you're talking about is horizontally integrated, there's new use cases developing, a new environment is coming online, so if someone wanted to actually try to keep score of who number one is and who's winning, besides customer wins, because that's clearly the one that you can point to and say hey they're winning customers, customer growth is good, outside of customer growth, what do you think will be the key requirements to get some sort of metric on who's really doing well these are the others, I mean we're not yet there with >> Yeah it's a tough problem, I mean you know used to be the world was that nobody gets fired for choosing choosing IBM. >> John: Yeah. >> Right, and I think that that brand credibility worked in a world where you could be conservative right, in this world I think, that looking for those measures, it is going to be really tough, and I think on some level that quest for looking for what is number one, or who is the best is actually the sort of fool's errand, and if that's what you're looking for, if you're looking for, you know what's the best answer for me based upon social signal, you know it's kind of like you know I'm going to go do the what the popular kids do in high school, I mean that could lead to you know a path, but it doesn't lead to the one that's going to actually get you satisfaction, and so on some level I think that customers, like you are the best signal, you know, always, >> John: Yeah, I mean it's hard, it's a rhetorical question, we ask it because, you know, we're trying to see not mystical with the path of fact called the fashion, what's fashionable. >> Satyen: Yeah. >> That's different. I mean talk about like really a cure metro, in the old days market share is one, actually IDC used a track who had market shares, and they would say based upon the number of shipments products, this is the market share winner, right? yeah that's pretty clean, I mean that's fairly clean, so just what it would be now? Number of instances, I mean it's so hard to figure out anyway, I digress. >> No, I think that's right, I mean I think I think it's really tough, that I think customers stories that, sort of map to your case. >> Yeah. It all comes back down to customer wins, how many customers you have was the >> Yeah and how much value they are getting out of your stuff. >> Yeah. That 10x value, and I think that's the multiplier minimum, if not more and with clouds and the scale is happening, you agree? >> Satyen: Yeah. >> It's going to get better. Okay thanks for coming on theCUBE. We have Satyen Sangani. CEO, co-founder of Alation, great start-up. Follow them on Twitter, these guys got some really good focus, learning about your data, because once you understand the data hygiene, you start think about ethics, and all the cool stuff happening with data. Thanks so much for coming on CUBE. More coverage, but Sapphire after the short break. (techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live from New Orleans. It's The Cube, covering VeeamON, 2017 brought to you by Veeam. >> Welcome back to New Orleans everybody. This is The Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with Stu Miniman. It's our first day of coverage at VeeamON 2017. The first time The Cube has covered VeeamON and it's quite an event. About 3,000 people here and as I say, we're being going two days of coverage talking to executives and partners and of course, the customers, we love the customer segments. Markus Marksteiner is here. He's the CTO of Baloise Group, insurance company out of Switzerland. Markus, welcome to The Cube. Thanks for coming on. >> You're welcome. >> So tell us a little bit about your company, your role and what are some of the things driving IT decisions. >> Okay, so are a life insurance and long life insurance company within Switzerland. We also have a bank in Switzerland which is included. We operate in Europe, in the country of Belgium and Germany and Luxembourg and Lichtenstein. So we are a company with about seven and a half thousand employees. And my role in there, is actually I'm a head of infrastructure and supports so I'm responsible for the data center, the user service center and the workplace environment. I also act as a group CTO because we have centralized all the data centers from the different locations to expose it to our headquarter. >> So financial services tends to be in the cutting edge of technology typically, very competitive industry and fast moving, very IT-oriented. What are some of the drivers in your business today? >> I think in the, especially in the insurance companies, we are, within Switzerland but also in Germany and Europe itself, it's a highly regulated market so. The possibility to, let's go for the public cloud is very limited because of regulation part. So therefore we have to deal with insurance companies within Europe but also within US and China, especially, which are very agile out on the market so. Therefore our business is now changing completely because from the traditional insurance which we have selled years ago, we will have to translate this into the industrialization world so meaning, we have to be more flexible on the market, to have shorter periods of production. And for me, as an IT reseller within the company, means my organization have to be agile as well. So, this is actually the most part we are changing to deal with security, that's the one part. But the other part is the agility. >> Paint a picture of your environment. What's it look like? Applications that you're supporting. What does your infrastructure look like. Your storage. Obviously, your backup, we'll talk about that. >> So we have, within Basel we have two data centers nearby. And we have now set up a third data center outside of Basel for disaster recovery because Basel is located on a earthquake area with a high risk impact so therefore our internal audit is set, it's not that good to have for the complete group data centers located on a earthquake plate so please set up a data center which is at least 100 kilometers away from our location now, so. Within the data centers, typically we have mainframes, we have servers, we have storage, all kinds of flavors. We have some centralization there. We have one with strategy in the infrastructure which a huge partnership with HP. In this area we have from storage part, we're using NetApp and DocuStorage. And as a backup software of course now, since nearly a year now, we are using Veeam for doing the backup of all the virtual machines. In the future, also the physical machines. And also we elevated Veeam because of the data implication into data center three. So this guarantees me to bring up the data at a certain time to get us into three to make the restore and the restart there. >> So you've got, two data centers within a synchronous distance and one is an asynchronous distance. Is that correct? So you have a three data center set up which is essentially is as close to zero data loss as you can get. >> Yeah, exactly. The data center three we are using not only as a cold backup standby data center, we are putting all the non-productive environment to this data center so we have all three data centers up and running and they have on a certain perspective productive level meaning for the developer, of course data center three is absolutely highly critical because they develop in data center three, all the data is there. For the productive part, we have data center one and two which is in Basel which has the availability there, so. We're using both sides and they're all connected together. >> How often do you test recovery in that set up? >> We're trying now to test it twice a year. But we cannot switch the complete data center because we have productive and-- >> Dave: It's too risky. >> It's too risky so we built up a reference model, a reference service where we have included all the environments we need to make it for the auditors visible that our infrastructure in data center three is working in case of an emergency. >> Okay. Let's talk a little bit more about the data protection strategy. So we have a high-level, we understand the data center approach but what about protecting the apps? How do you use Veeam? How did you start with Veeam and where are you now? >> I mean we came from an absolutely traditional data standards so we had a legacy backup system running based on file locks and then we started a certain time with NetApp and using snapshot technologies there. Because we had huge databases which are not able to fulfill the SLA anymore in the recovery mode so we have to switch them to them to NetApp. And then we started with data center three and then we had another problem. How can we replicate these data into data center three in a certain time to get the SLA fulfilled in case of an emergency. And there we made a revelation and Veeam was actually the one who was fulfilling all the requirements and it was easy to deal with them. So we decided, okay, let's try it Veeam. And at a certain time, we thought well, it's not only about data application with Veeam it's also about the complete backup stack, we can replace by this software. So we grow slowly with the possibilities we saw during the implementation phase. We said, okay, we can use this model and this model and then VeeamON came on so we could use the report part also for the sizing of the virtual machines and now on we just backing up almost everything with Veeam, so. >> Can you speak to organizationally, you know, how many people you have managing kind of backup and DR and what that experience has been like? >> In the past we had about three people which were responsible for the complete backup process. But they're very focused on their tooling, they could not tell me if the backup was correct. If the data was backuped correctly. They only say, yeah, my system is running and it's backuping but is it really also consistent. I don't know so we had to ask the engineers. With Veeam now, we switched completely. We do not have any responsible anymore for backup purposes itself. We took this because of the ease of use, the tool, we gave them directly to the engineers of Linux, of Citrix, or of Windows and they are now responsible for their own data. So they can now do the backups itself and they can also assure to me that this, what they do with the backup is correct and it's restartable. Because they have to check each time. >> Yeah, so you're not only operationally more efficient but you actually know that what you have works. >> Markus: Exactly. (laughing) Yeah, yeah. >> Great. I believe it's your first time at the conference. What's the experience been so far? What value have you been getting? What brought you here? >> Actually I came here with the goal to learn more about the Veeam company itself and this was actually during the networking areas and the networking part was very helpful for me to meet directly the management of Veeam to see what is their strategy and it was also in the general session, they have a story to tell and that's what, I was coming in here to get this information and in the sessions, and today also with the talks with Baronov directly and McKay, that's really, there's a spirit in this company. That's what we are looking for. Because we have so many big companies, vendors in our thing, where you do not have the connection to the management directly and for me it's very important because we try really to grow with our business and therefore I need a partner behind where I can rely on them. With Veeam, absolutely the case. >> So you mentioned supporting physical endpoints is something that interest you. Anything else from the announcements that you heard that excites you? Anything not there, that you're looking for in the future, too? >> Yeah, for the future for me it's actually the cloud connection is very important. Because we are still in the high-regulated market but I think also the insurance and the financial sector in Switzerland, there are slightly opening for the cloud services and also for us, it's the Office365 and Amazon web services, they're coming slightly into our organization and to know that there is also a possibility with the same backup software using this in a cloud, this gives me the feeling and also the assurance that I can go to my management and tell them, hey guys, we're choosing the right vendor because we can also use them for the cloud. I do not have to evaluate another product there for fulfilling this requirement. That's good to hear. >> So you sell insurance, your company does. Backup is largely insurance. How do you make the business case, what business benefits have you seen? Can you share with any metrics, maybe they're largely cost cutting. Maybe it's enabling DR. What can you share with us? >> The one thing I can share with you is actually we had a, that's not only based on Veeam by the product, by the backup itself, but it's also based on the Veeam reporter. We had in a branch office in Belgium. We have an issue where we had several active directory controllers running there. And with VeeamON, they reported that there's two controllers broken during the weekend and there's only one active directory controller available. Meaning, if this will also fail, we have to replicate the complete staff to Basel meaning 1500 users have to wait. And they are very aware about these profiles because they are using Citrix in the background. So meaning, we will probably have an issue there for about four to five almost a whole working day where a complete branch could not work. Meaning, there we just rolled up these two active controls with Veeam in a certain time period and then nothing happened. And I mean, counted in money, this would cost us at least a half a million Euro, this outage, if it occurred. >> Markus, in the key note, you know, one of the terms that gets thrown out is digital transformation. We've talked to a lot of financial service companies that, that terms resonate. What does it mean to your organization? How has it impacted your job? >> Yeah, it has a huge impact because our business lines they are now looking for other type of insurance. Meaning, in the past, we just insured the car for one year. So, the experience of the users then, also my kids is actually, I don't want to have a car insurance for a whole year because I'm only driving twice a month, a car. So they would like to have an insurance like insure what you use. >> Stu: As a service? >> As a service. And therefore we have to adapt this into completely other models because with our legacy systems, it's impossible. So what is our business doing? They're going out, looking for startup companies. Bringing them in and the startup companies, they start, typically in a cloud environment. They're very agile. And then when they bring out the product, the first thing is they ask for a connection to the legacy systems, for customer relationship management systems and stuff like this. So I have to really change my organization completely. And so I have to go away from these silos organization parts, into DevOps. And I also have to change my data center because I have to provide these services also as a cloud service, as it is possible in the public cloud, so. Meaning, the digitalization in the business has absolutely direct impact to my organization. >> I'd buy that service. I've got four kids, three driving, two at college. They really only need it a couple of months out of the year. I'll switch insurance companies. Give me a call. (laughing) All right, excellent. Thanks very much for coming on The Cube. Markus, we really appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome, all right, keep it right there everybody. Stu and I will be back. Continuous coverage of continuous data protection, continuous content flow. VeeamON 2017. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas It's theCUBE covering Edge 2016. Brought to you by IBM. Now, here are your hosts Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE the world-wide leader in live tech coverage. Leanne Kemp is here. She's the founder and CEO of Everledger. Leanne, good to see you. >> Hello, hello. What a great place to be. >> Good joke, Las Vegas again. Stu and I spend a lot of time here. Why did you start Everledger? >> Well, you know, some might say it's my mid-life crisis but the reality is I've been in emerging technology for 25 years. In the mid 90s, now I'm giving away my age I was in radio frequency identification so at the chip and inlay level supply chain tracking. A bit boring, really. >> Stu: No, RFID is cool. >> But in the last 10 years I've worked in jewelry and insurance. And that's given me an appreciation of the size of the problems that exist in the market. And couple that with a whole lot of nerd we have the ability to solve the problems that we're solving today. >> And describe that problem. It's a problem of provenance and transparency is that right? >> Provenance, fraud, document tampering. And when you mix all of those together you have a pretty potent formula for black market trade. And sadly, some of that trade is really running into terrorist-funded activities. So, it's a pretty big problem but I think now is a very real issue that's washing the front pages of every paper on a daily event. Diamonds, of course, is one of the vehicles for anti-money laundering. And if we can go and serve to reduce some of those problems then it's worthwhile getting out of bed for. >> Okay, so you're attacking the diamond value chain. Why that? 'Cuz you have a background in jewelry? Okay, how are you solving that problem though? Describe that in a little bit more detail. >> So, attacking's pretty aggressive. I think we're enhancing. So, we're bringing transparency in a once-opaque market. You know, we're enabling, with the use of technology to bring transparency into the market so that we can start to reduce some of the problems around fraud. When you really think about I mean most people look at us as a blockchain company. I liken us to an emerging technology company. We're using the very best of blockchain and smart contracts and machine vision as an enabler to be able to identify fraudulent-related activities and reduce them in marketplaces. And we're just starting with diamonds but it's really anything that is appreciable of value that criminals like to maybe get their grubby mitts on. >> When did you get this idea, like what timeframe? 2010, 2011, 2015? >> To be honest with you I think this has been a cocktail of experience that really has brought it together at the right time. So, you know, as I said my background has been really unfolding like a patchwork quilt. But when you really see the heightened anxiety that's going on in market now particularly around synthetic diamonds that are of gem-quality standards there's no greater time to be able to bring confidence back into the diamond industry and the consumer networks. >> I guess my question is that at what point did you say okay blockchain can be addressed to enhance this problem? Did you look at Bitcoin and say hmm, that's interesting? Not a currency, it's a technology that I can apply to all the problems. >> Yeah, I mean, you know, I'm a technologist so I really am quite bored with Sudoku so I would rather sort of look at what's going on in the tech space. And so when I really saw the emergency of Bitcoin I understood where that application could lie. But because I wasn't from a banking background it was patently obvious to me that I could decouple the currency from the ledger and really use the currency as a vehicle or a tokenization of assets. And the assets is diamonds, a girl's best friend. So why wouldn't you want to protect your assets? (chuckles) >> Fascinating 'cuz I think the first time I heard of, you know, blockchain and Bitcoin it was about being anonymous and therefore there were concerns that some of those unscrupulous people that are trying to benefit off of like diamonds would use, you know, this crypto currency. They don't have to talk to banks. They don't have to talk to governments. So you've almost flipped the usage of the technology to something to help the world a little bit more. >> That's right. I guess when you really think about it, you know the Bitcoin has often been assimilated with the anarchic world. And we're really bringing it to clean and transparency. So, I guess there is a juxtaposition there. But everything's upside down for me. I'm from Australia so it's perfectly normal. >> Go ahead, Stu. >> Yeah, just when you look at Blockchain and kind of the core technology you think we're really in the early days? What kind of usage do you see out beyond the ledgers? Are there other applications be it beyond the diamonds that you guys are looking at? >> Yeah, you know, so it's interesting. In the early 2000s I worked in WAP, you know? And I was so excited. I thought wow, this tech is really going to do something. So, you know, I'm part of Team Asserti in Australia and wrote out an application. And I felt like nearly six months came into the tech. And all of a sudden, I woke up and I went where the bloody hell did WAP go? It just disappeared. There was a very real danger that this technology was likely to face the same ill fate. And we often see in any emerging technology where there are heightened promises. They often end in disappointment. So, actually most of the decisions I've made in a start-up, and we're only 18 months old have really been counterintuitive. You know, when it's the time to put the pedal straight down I've often held back to really wait to see where the maturity of the technology was going to lie. And in any emerging technology and if you're a CEO of a start-up you have to be completely articulate about where the problem is that you're solving. But not only that you need to take the time to really distill the technology to its purest essence and then enable that to be the potent shot that goes out first and foremost. And so this is a nascent technology. And maybe, you know, it has the parentage of a multilingual PhD scientist but the reality is it's only just been born. We're not even nappy feddy. We're not even out of out of our nappies right now. So we need to give it the time to really grow. And we've chosen a niche market. It just so happens that it's a bloody big niche. >> So what took longer to figure out the problem or the solution? >> You know, I think you know, I don't know. That's a really good question, actually. I think the problem for me I understood quite early but I just didn't appreciate the size of the problem globally and the extension of that problem into other areas. And really I think it's taken some time for the technology to be understood. We've taken a view that we'd like to see ourselves as the custodian of the technology. We don't want to go to market too early. We want to be sure that whenever the message is delivered to market that it's something we've already delivered that we have built that the engineering effort has already been afforded. You know, small acorns grow into mighty oaks. And so for us, it's about ensuring that we take the time to really give the right fertilizer to the growth. >> And that's a 50 billion dollar problem you said this morning is that right? Is that there- >> Just in insurance. But we have banks as our clients too so, you know, we're shooting hoops. >> So you're saying it's a multiplier of that 50 billion? >> Leanne: Of course. >> Yeah, big multiplier. >> I mean counterfeit good if you extend it into luxury goods it's 1.7 trillion dollars. >> And you talked about the sort of value chain of rough cut, 15 billion and you maybe triple that when it gets polished almost 50 billion and then another one and a half X at retail. Where are the holes in that value chain, everywhere? I mean are you seeing fraud occur throughout that value chain or- >> Effectively. You know, we don't have you know, visibility of complete provenance through the supply chain. And in fact, it's not just limited to the diamond industry. I mean I guess the diamond industry there's the allure of luxury. You know, there's the backdrop of affluence. And then, of course, there's the atrocity of what goes on in terms of or what used to go on so prolifically in blood diamonds. You know, effectively the industry isn't as burdened with technology as say financial services. It doesn't have the legacy of 50 years of technology that it needs to unwind. So, when you really consider what's going on in the market today to bring emerging technology into this space not limited to blockchain even enabling new technologies like high-definition photographs and machine vision our marketplace has the ability to consume that technology quite rapidly. And when you think about the problems in our market or the restrictions in our market it's really a lightning rod moment for us where we've just been fortunate enough to be able to build out a solid engineering rod to be able to capture that lightning bolt of problem. >> Dave: Mm-hmm. >> We've had a lot of discussions with IBM executives this week and they feel security is one of the things that IBM does really well. Talk a little bit about your relationship with IBM what IBM does well what they're good at partnering with. How is it to work with IBM? >> Dave: What they could do better. >> Yeah. >> Absolutely (chuckles). We, in the very first 12 months of Everledger we managed to onboard, you know, a million diamonds. And most people were applauding the efforts of our engineering team. And we certainly applauded ourselves. But Christmas was a very lonely path for me because I started to become shivered by the thought of what would this mean if I went from a million to 10 million to 15 million and then into rough being able to track 320 million carats of rough diamonds across 80 countries around the world. So, when you're a start-up and you're faced with some of the largest organizations and governments around the world let's face it, the industry's 130 years old. You want to be able to look towards a technology innovator like IBM that has been around and reinvented itself over a trusted 100 years. And that transactional trust is at the very core of this fabric. So, some of the things that you look at in terms of a start-up may be actually too isolated. A lot of technology companies that are in the blockchain space are just looking at the blockchain fabric. But for me, it was patently obvious we needed to stretch further. We needed to realize that we have to deliver this into a cloud solution. We have to deliver this technology in such a form that has to be secured. And the security needs to really be from the ground up at the root source right the way through to the front end. And there's no other partner that's actually doing that. There are other service providers in this space that shall not be mentioned. But they're, of course, taking whatever nascent technology is being built and putting it into the cloud. IBM has really taken the time to sew together the right security fabric. >> And that's about scale for you, right? I mean you wouldn't be able to scale without it. >> I sleep at night knowing that we have IBM. Like as a CEO, I sleep at night. >> My understanding, there's container technology that you're using in here. Most people think of containers as security's one of the holes there so, you know, how do you feel with the security of containers today? And maybe you can share a little bit about you know, what IBM's doing specifically for that. >> Yeah, I mean the container services team that we've been working with and today I had the absolute privilege it was a diary note moment for me to present on stage with Donna. You know, her background in security has afforded us the ability to really deliver this quite quickly. The work that they have been doing is recognized not only and I touched on the surface of the three markets that of real concern or focus for us is fraud and theft and cyber. And when you consider the container services and the security team that's wrapped this around I really think that actually one of the silent winners in this is the reduction in cyber crime. And maybe that hasn't been focused on too largely. And the 50 billion dollars that I was talking about was really around document tampering and, you know, the over-inflation of insurance claims. When you really think about it it's actually cyber crime that I think we could actually truly solve as part of the solution itself. >> So explain again, Leanne, how does it work? So each diamond has a unique identifies it's got a fingerprint on there. How does it get on there? >> So there are existing processes in industry. There are two parts to the market first is rough diamonds and the second is polished diamonds. And as diamonds are crossing borders as a part of international trade they're often inspected by gemologists. Those that, of course, have received licenses in the skill of identifying diamonds. But that's all- >> Dave: But that's a spot inspection, is that right or- >> Correct. >> Dave: Yeah. >> But there's also actual machinery. So there are certain types of science that have been applied and have been applied for a number of years. And one of the challenges that we faced with ourselves is to IoT-enable the diamond pipeline. So, some of these machines have been in existence. They're highly calibrated and they have precision but that data is often blackboxed. It's not, indeed, ledgered or stored for public view or even inter-office view. And so one of the tricks that we've enabled is the ability to take all of those data points 40 meta data points as well as the reputation or the expert opinion and lay that data into the blockchain. So we're layering really a reputation score not only of the person, the machine but also the diamond and the validity of that diamond. And that can only come over time with large aggregated data sets. >> Okay, and that is your providence. You said the world's provenance is locked in paper. So now you're locking it into- >> Leanne: You're listening >> The blockchain. Of course (chuckles). I knew we had to talk to you. We better listen. Okay, so all right. And then can you explain the banking crisis the liquidity crisis in the diamond business? >> Leanne: Yeah, absolutely. >> What's that stem from? I didn't quite understand. >> It's really affecting the middle part of the pipeline. We have very large mining companies and of course quite substantial retailers but it's the middle part of the pipeline that's really being caused in terms of a squeeze. And so they are the diamond cutters and polishers really generational businesses that have perfected the art and the skill of cutting diamonds. It's the middle part of the pipeline that's really being affected at the moment. And as I mentioned there are two brave Western banks that remain supporting industry. The largest, which has been really in industry for quite some time is ABN AMRO. And proudly, they still remain. And Barclay's Bank. But we've seen an announcement more recently with Standard pulling back out of the industry for a lack of transparency and a burden on their balance sheet. This, of course, has come from Basel III and some of the regulations that's been pushed down from them. And if we're able to take certification and extend transparency but also bring certification to the next level to enable a collateral management system to be built so banks can take the security on the underlying asset rather than just take a balance sheet position it will lift the burden on their balance sheet. It will give them security of the diamond. And let's face it, diamonds are worth something. And as I said when you start to understand the true effect of rough to polished to track the diamond through its lifecycle and give security is something that banks are open-minded about. >> Yes, okay. So it's not a chicken and egg problem it's a transparency begets liquidity is that right? That's the premise anyway >> Yeah >> Dave: That you're testing basically making that bet with your company. We don't have much time but I just wanted to ask you about your company. You're an entrepreneur. You started the company, you said 18 months ago. Funding, VC, you know, give us the lowdown. >> Sure, sure, sure. I mean I came into London in October of 2014. And I was desperate to talk to insurers. And so one of the largest insurers in the London market is Aviva. And they had a hackathon at Google so I thought hey, this would be all right. I'm just going to Trojan Horse the event and see if I can have a talk to the CFO and COO. So I went there. They opened up some APIs. And because I, of course, had a technical background I thought those APIs are hopeless there's not much I can do with that. But if you want to solve some of the problems here this is what you can do. You can take diamonds, take certification and put it on the blockchain as a way to reduce fraud. And at that hackathon I was awarded the innovation prize. But the managing director of Barclay's Techstars was one of the judges and came to me and invited me to join them as part of their accelerator in London which began in March 2015. And, of course, I thought this is crazy. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to be in London with a bank? It doesn't really make too much sense. And let's face it, I mean Australia is a much nicer country to spend your holidays in rather than London. But in any event, I returned and participated as part of the Barclay's accelerator and I've been supported through the process of the acceleration. But Barclay's is both a bank and an insurance company in Africa so the penny dropped and we put our head down. We wore some letters off the keyboard and Everledger was born. And away we go. >> And so Barclay's funded, in part the company or- >> Barclay's and the Techstars accelerator program have a seed funding event which is a part of the acceleration program for start-ups if you're chosen. And we were fortunate enough to be chosen. And since that time we've been we haven't disclosed who one of our backers are. >> Dave: Okay. >> But we will, in time. And so we've been funded by a selected name in industry. And we're actually just about to go into our Series A so we're looking towards that in the next number of months. >> Dave: You're not even in Series A yet? So you've gotten this far without even getting to your Series A? >> Leanne: Yeah. >> 980 thousand? >> Well, we have revenue, so- >> Dave: Yeah. >> This is my last start-up. I had to go through an intervention with my family to enable me to be here. >> Dave: This is my last So this is it. >> Dave: We've heard that before. >> I promise. I know, it's true, it's true. >> Opportunities beyond diamonds or is that getting too ahead of our speech here? >> Diamonds, watches, art, fine wine you know, and I'm completely empowered by how do we bring what the diamond industry did so well in the reduction of blood diamonds and bring ethical trade really to the forefront of the mind of the consumer and also the mind of the financial services market. So, you know, for me it's really around that part of the world. If that nexus point comes together then I'll keep getting out of bed for it. >> Awesome. Great story. Impressive entrepreneur. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Leanne: Yes, thank you. >> London's not so bad (chuckles). Comment? >> London's probably watching. (Dave and Leanne laugh) >> All right, thanks again. Keep it right there, buddy. Stu and I will be back with our next guest. We're live from IBM Edge in Las Vegas. We'll be right back. (low tempo music)

>>Live from the Mandalay convention center in Las Vegas, Nevada it's doc cube at IBM insight, 2014. Here are your hosts, John furrier and Dave Volante. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. We are here. Live in Las Vegas for IBM impact. This is the cube special presentation at IBM insight inside the digital experience. IBM insight go. Social media lounge. Uh, the social media gurus are here. John furry with David. Um, that's playing off the joke. We're just sharing on Twitter, but seriously, we're here. If I didn't see this on the noise, my coast, Dave latte, next guest Marsha Cola year. Who's the managing director of impact ingenuity at Marsha Marsha. Yes, that's your Twitter handle is awesome. Welcome. Welcome back. Welcome back. >>Well, thanks. It's thrilled to be here. >>So we were just joking about Halloween and we're going to be a social media guru. It's a little bit of a meme going around the internet. I mean, there is no social media guru. I mean, you can't really be a guru with developing technology. You can be a practitioner. I mean, I mean, guru, what is a social media? What is a social media guru? This, >>This is where, because I offered that. I would answer any question you ask me, you can ask me those things. Sure. Well, I think that's the problem. I think that's why it'd be a fabulous Halloween costume. I'm going to think about doing that one too, because people seem to be know to these folks. So following them to the ends of the earth, because of something that they sit on, social media, I mean that, that's a kind of a scary concept, but Google glass >>As well. I mean, I mean, I'm not going to go there. Um, but let's talk, let's go in into that, that theme. I mean, honestly, you know, Jeff Jonas was just on he's awesome. We always get in the weeds. He's a fun character to talk to, but he's super smart as we're on this G2 thing, observation space, but we're all internet of things, right? I mean, it reminds me of that book is to read to my kids thing one and thing two, you know, we, all things we're all in another thing. So what do you see as that impact to, uh, this digital transformation where not only are the humans connected to the machines, the data that they're exhausting or sharing or streaming, but the machines are connected and collecting as well. How is that going to change? What's your view on all this? >>While I have been in the technology sector, most of my, uh, most of my life, uh, and I appreciate and enjoy the technology. I never lose sight of the fact that this is about the people it's about us actually working together of actually learning together, doing whatever the hell it is we're needing to do. So if all of my appliances are actually then taking care of the mundane, if my water softener system is actually getting the water put in and getting delivered on the right day, you know, all, all the better. If the, if the toaster is alerting me to some sort of news, I'm thrilled. I love the idea of the technology. Actually being able to take care of all that stuff that we never wanted to do in the first place, but the technology has been so lousy over the last couple of years, actually forever, uh, that we've had to do this stuff because the technology isn't doing it for us. >>Sure. I was a patient out in the customer space because that's, you know, that's more of the home example, but even business now seems to be early innings. I mean, people are kicking the tires. You know, we've talked to all the gurus coming up here who are the tech side, IBM and customers. And the reality is we're all pro data, which we all kind of see that obvious social data and, you know, big data analytics, certainly helpful, but this transformation people are now really changing how to operate, operationalize their business with it. It's a huge daunting task and it's scary. Um, some people are like, whoa, I don't want to do it. Or, Hey, I'm jumping in. I'm cool. Is there a cool factor? Is there a scared factor? What's your, what's your observation from mountain talking to everyone out in the, in the marketplace? >>Well, first I would, I'll totally bash the, the idea that this is only a consumer play or that it doesn't apply to businesses. Think of all the, uh, the mundane and ridiculous things we have to do at work because they're not being taken care of us. We aren't taken care of for us by our desks. If you want to look at that way or our computers, I loved hearing about the, the new, uh, uh, pairing of, uh Wayblazer and, you know, Watson and the idea of the travel being taken care of us, what we discover because of the data that we're putting off each and every moment is their systems around us all the time that actually know our preferences, know how we would be handling this, but yet they don't do anything about it. So the idea that we can actually move forward in that way should be just as applicable to our business. Uh, a manager should not have to actually be asking some of the questions that they're asking the HR department is need to be asking how you're doing. It's evident by all the things that you put out into the world. And by just actually attending to what's going on, we have a huge opportunity to get back all that time that we've been wasting all these years. I'm just a stupid >>And just to what's. So what's the bottleneck is a fear security, oh, we don't want privacy. Marcia will get offended. If we tweet her, she knows that we know that she tweeted that. I mean, that's, that's a concern. People have, it seems to be, is it? Yeah. Well, look, go back up, >>But why is it a concern? It's because the people who've been doing it early are doing it horribly. I mean, they're doing it in not respectful ways. There isn't actually a real thought about how would I be okay with this doing? And then those are we're. So ahead of the curve, maybe because of the guru status, some of these social media, maybe that maybe that's the reason, >>Just look at the government, they were big data gurus and they screwed up that that whole Snowden thing was all like, Hey, just ask us, we'll give you our email addresses. You can search my email, have a nice day. >>It's a very different message. It's a very different conversation. It's a very different question. It's a very different level of respect that we have from one person working with another. I'm actually talking with people as opposed to at them. And instead of just making assumptions of actually participating, I mean, the idea that engagement is goal just implies that we haven't been engaged all these years. We haven't been thinking we haven't been doing, I haven't met. I personally, haven't met a really dumb person. It, you know, and years, and yet everything I do at would imply that we're, we're too stupid to be able to really think and act and, and be thoughtful about it. >>So you're an influencer. Um, you're out here in the digital sphere and you are, you're hearing influencer. Um, I mean, whatever you define it. Well, it's, I guess if they say so, if you are a VIP influencer, we'll go with that. Um, >>Digging on your Twitter stream here. Fantastic. >>Working on it. So share this law, you know, we'd love, we'd love to hear your stories cause you last year you were awesome with the cube. We'd love, love JV. Give us the update. What's going on with, sorry. We started together Ted at IBM conference. You super busy. Um, what's going on share with the folks out there. Some of the things you've been even into what your what's working show some, you know, some stuff that didn't work, what's going on, what's happening? What are you, what are you doing? What are you worried? All right, >>John, if you're going to ask them, I'm telling you you're really, if you're really ready, Don Damian, probably a little after I saw you last time after I was visiting here that, uh, our world's falling apart. And if all of us actually don't get on that. If we don't actually start figuring out how to use the precious time we have the, the precious money we have, the, the roles we have in our organizations, the resources at our disposal, our brains for good, not evil. I'm not so sure about the world that my son is going to be inheriting for example. And, uh, I'm, I'm at a point in my life where I realize, I, I know a heck of a lot in the world. I have a lot of skills, everybody. I know. I look at these people around me having tremendous skills. And instead of us just sort of churning out the butter one more year, uh, we best, we best be thinking about what can I do given what I have of my time and my resources, my skills, or whatever that is and apply that to what I have influence over and be able to make as much difference. >>Are we talking about God's last offer here, the sustainable world, or what's actually on all? >>Oh, you're not at the time that the timing is perfect too. If you think about it, don't seriously. >>What are we talking about? The deterioration of our planet? We're talking about social condition. Yes, >>I, well, I mean, I can go on and >>On about money return. I can, I can entertain for hours. You just made. The comment >>I made is that no matter where we look, that that scientists have pointed out that we're past the point of no return with our climate. We, uh, we look at the, uh, at the deterioration of the planet around us. I happen to live in the woods and I mean, deep in the woods and you can, you can see the change of how much rain is coming down. That didn't, I mean, I, I'm not, my intent here is not to talk about all the, that the problems around us. We all actually feel them, even if we're not acknowledging them, what I see is the wasted opportunity of us, not actually, re-examining what we're choosing to do and figure out how, whatever it is we're capable of doing could actually be helping instead of bringing it up. So how should people, let's say, people want to know that's good, but I just wanted to frame it. So let's >>Take people want to, so let's say that resonates to somebody in the audience. What should they do? How should they start pick a passion? And they >>Have, um, I mean, I, my, my approach to all the change work I do and have been doing with corporations for the last 20 years is actually not additive. It's not asking the question. What more could I do? Because that's usually what keeps people from doing it. I asked the question, what's keeping me from doing what I've always known needed to be done. So in, in our communities, you know, my experience is everybody knows who it is that could use some assistance, not in a handout sort of way in a reaching out and caring way of asking of, of having a conversation, a participating, and to be able to step back and ask that question. What's keeping me from doing that. We know what needs to be done, but we're not doing it. So how can I say, oh, well, what's keeping me from doing it. I don't have time to do it. Okay. Well, what can I do to actually just get a little bit more time to do something that matters in the world? So that that's the most, very, >>Very basic level. It could be slowly be that it's, >>It's less Twitter. It could also be a re-evaluating how much time I'm spending at work on stuff that could be automated. I mean, going back to this whole conversation about automation, it is to ask those questions. What I can do. That's just about time. Um, >>I, yeah, that is one of the biggest objections I don't have time. Right? >>Yeah. So what I find is when I talk about, uh, global health actually, is that when we look at the idea of health, not as in just exercising more or just eating, right, we're talking about fiscal health, we're talking about, uh, creating a world that is just, uh, a healthier place. When I ask people those questions, most of them can say, well, yeah, this isn't, this is important to me, but I don't know what to do about it. So one is, as you absolutely said, is finding, finding those passions and be able to figure out what you're going to do. But more importantly, to ask yourself that question, when am I going to do this? If not now, I feel like I'm, I'm falling. Like I, uh, I'm Mike is falling out. Let me, let me get that. >>Well, we chit chat a lot of hair. Yeah. Yeah. So I think, okay. So we're talking about different ways to find time. >>Um, Dave, I mean, I think it's a great time. I mean, the passionate thing, passionate thing is where the keyword is contributing, right? So like, I think it's a good time because I have, we, I, we both Dave and I both have four kids. So we see the new generation in their minds all the time because we're driving around, but they're impressionable right now is the old expression is you can grab the play though, and you can shape it. You can act, we can actually, as leaders and mature experience, instant people that have some skills in computing, we can influence like stem. We can influence women in tech. We can influence computer science curriculums or get influenced modern society because the new generation is coming in and they're natives, they're adopting and they're thirsty for leadership, but I don't think that they're seeing it. So I think there's really a good time. You've seen the Kickstarter crowdsourcing stuff is really becoming a part of this new tribe. So I believe the gravity around making things happen is participation, collaboration and data. Data is knowledge, endorsement, social proof. These are concepts that are easily transferable. If you can just, if you just wake up and do it. So I think, you know, >>If you just wake up and do it everywhere about, so Y Y if you wake up every day, why aren't you doing it today? >>We have Craig brown on earlier, he's doing $25,000 investments for kids to start companies, you know, whether the inner city kids. And that's pretty cool. I mean, so, you know, this is, this is the democratization piece, but in a connected network, it's frictionless communication. I mean, hell Twitter, overthrew governments. So you can have solidarity, peaceful solidarity as well as other rev revolution. So I think that's a very doable thing versus just checking the Basel. I volunteer to do something. And I think that has been more of like a peace Corps. I helped people. >>Uh, and I'm personally, I asked this question of everybody that I asked her, actually asked two questions of everybody I work with now. Uh, one of them is what can you not do? What can you not, not do actually. So if you, if you think to yourself, if I look back on my life, if I look back on my life, what is it that I thought to myself, oh, I didn't have time for that. Or I couldn't do it. You we've all heard that, you know, what do you want on your tombstone? However, that works. But I find that everybody, I know, think it has a burning need to be doing something useful in their lives. It's not just mission driven. It absolutely. It's a purpose. It's a connecting with, with connecting with people who are helping to move the world forward. And I just stopped. And I said, even in a business context, I say, you know, now it's time. We're kind of out of time. Get on with it, >>Please. The clock is ticking. Well, Jeff Jones was talking about the asteroid thing to geospatial smart geeky conversation. But the key thing out of that was better focus of finite resources. And that really comes down to the fundamental better decision-making. I mean, we, my wife says, so our kids will make better decisions. I mean, that's a mother talking to the kids, but that's our life now. So like, if we can make better decisions, that ultimately is the big data opportunity from social change to play to business. >>And then the second question absolutely, absolutely agree. Everything you said. I, the next big question I asked is what are you doing to improve the world? Now? I would say 50% of the people I say, just give me this completely deer in the headlights. Look, what do you mean to save the world or to improve the world, to change world? However you want to frame that. But I haven't met anybody in years that isn't interested in truly contributing, leaving the world a better place than they came into. And that's no matter what their, their demographic makeup is. That's no matter the community they live in, no matter what they're doing, people have a fundamental desire to do better. And so I asked that of every business person, every corporation I work with. And that's one of the things I love about this whole idea of, you know, building a smarter planet that should tie to every single thing we do. And, and when we lose sight of that, we see that, no, I think >>This is a really great conversation to have because it's, it's something that's emerging. And, you know, again, there's some obvious examples, oh, pebble watch crowdfunding. But if you look at really impactful things like open source software, you are seeing the playbook. I mean, the playbook is, you know, people can participate at any level. So the, the fear of getting this kind of group going is that I'm too busy or, you know, you can, the contribution doesn't have to be game changing for an individual could be one small piece of the puzzle. It could be small contribution. Someone might do more heavy lifting than the other. That's an open source concept. We've seen that work huge. A lot of leverage, a lot of participation. Um, so I think that's something that I really haven't seen get applied to at a large scale. I mean, you see the protest in Hong Kong are interesting. That's an indicator. What does that mean? Right. So what's your take on all? What do you think needs to happen to get more people tied into these shared missions? >>It's a little little over there off >>The ranch. A little bit more honesty. More honesty. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, not, not something that we talk about these sorts of events is that I I've gotten to the point where I do these large talks in front of thousands of people. And I ask everybody to turn to the person next to them and introduce themselves, honestly, like, why are you here? And why do you care? We've all gotten so wrapped up in the >>Who we are as well. And that's why I say, I love the idea of you being >>A social media guru for Halloween. It's just become, so it's so about the role that we've lost the connection with our humanity. And so I just, I asked people just to step back. So it's as simple. So yeah, I am all for the large initiatives. >>Yes. Self-aware is a really interesting concept. And that really what you're talking about here is, I mean, I make fun of myself. I put that out there. Probably gonna get some hate mail for that tweet, but no, it is what it is. I mean, I'm making fun of myself and us because we have to, because it's really not moving fast enough in the writer in my mind, at least I think, I mean, I think social media is a real, real game changer. I'm pro pro social media, but I mean, come on, if you can't make fun of yourself then, >>But what is social media do you mean? What is our untapped desire that why we're all participating in social media, where we've missed the opportunity for all these years to be human in everything that we're doing? Yeah. I mean, the idea that you can be, you know, wherever you are and be able to reach the people who have answers to be able to help you make better decisions is something that we've had that desire for a very long time. We've just been, not able to do that for so long that it's now it's time we get on >>With that. I would do the cube to Dave and I talk all the time. We want to broadcast out the data because I think people want to be part of something. And I think at the end of the day, it's human psychology is that being part of something makes psychology of the soul work better. It's like, okay, I want to be part of a group. I want to belong. It's a yearning, it's a tribe. Whatever that kind of collective group is, whether you know, the clown or the, or the guru or whatever, I think that's a people are yearning for that collectiveness of Griff groups. And I think the data gap is gravity. Like how do you a joke? It could be a serious conversation. It could be something provocative. I think content is a nice piece of gravity to kind of bring people together versus, you know, tweeting, Hey, look, how big I am. I got a zillion followers. >>Okay. So let's back up though. So content, so we can talk about the, the, the, the, the concept that has content. That's a lovely thing to do at a data conference, talking about the content it's about things we care about. That's what content is. So if we take that a step further and we actually extrapolate and say, how does this impact me? It's not because it's content it's because we're talking about topics that matter to each of us. And so the more we get back to that sort of conversation, the more we get back to that sort of point, I think we have a bigger opportunity to have conversations that matter and not be able to be. We are wasting our time doing the silly stuff. >>Okay. I'm getting the hook here, Marcia conversations that matter. That's really what it's all about. Changing the world. Thanks for calling the cube. Great to see you again. And, uh, we'll be right back after this short break live in Las Vegas date, you continues wall-to-wall coverage here, inside the cube, inside the digital experience in psycho with IBM social lounge. We right back after this short break,