(bright upbeat music) >> Hey, good morning from Las Vegas. It's Lisa Martin and Paul Gillin here. We are on day three of AWS re:Invent. We started Monday night, we went all day yesterday, we are going all day today and all day tomorrow. The amount of content coming at you from theCUBE, great, interesting, fascinating conversations with AWS, its customers, its ecosystem partners is incredible. Paul, what's your take so far on re:Invent? We've been here two and a half days. >> Well, it's just a fire hose. Like I've said before, this morning's keynote was about was about ML, machine learning and AI, and I stopped counting at 15 new announcements during about a 90 minute keynote, it's just one thing after another. And that's the nature of re:Invent, you know? It's always a showcase for new stuff. And they talk about customers, you talk about customers, I love it when we have a chance to talk to customers on theCUBE as we are about to do. >> We are about to talk to one of the nation's leading digital banks, you know them well, Capital One. Please welcome, Lo Li, Managing Vice President of Customer Digital Experience and Payments. Thank you so much, Lo, for joining us. >> Why, thank you, I'm glad to be here. >> Talk a little bit about your role where it fits within the organization, what it encompasses? >> Sure, yeah. So, I lead the retail bank technology organization which is a form of, you know, we have teams that lead digital experiences for our consumers. We look after agent in-person experiences with their cafes in branches, our call centers and as well as of our MarTech and payments ecosystem. >> So you're new to Capital One, in the last less than a year, you know, we all know it, we love it, we know the tagline, what's in your wallet? I think we can all recite that. It's as I said in the opening, it's one of the nation's leading digital banks and technology is really core to its business strategy and delivering value to customers. What attracted you to Capital One and talk about it really as a digital bank that delivers all that value. >> Of course. Yeah, so, you know, I spent 20 years of my career in a digital space in retail, and fashion and hospitality. And that is what I love about IT and the industry that I'm in and what I do, which is bringing really great solutions and products to consumers and getting them excited about an experience and a brand. So I knew early on in my career I was attracted to really great brands and brands that wanted to innovate and disrupt the consumer space. So when Capital One gave me an opportunity, I couldn't be happier, right? This is an incredible bank, we have an incredible story, we're a young bank and yet we are very much on the leading edge of a digital bank experience. >> And you were in an interesting place because as we know retail banking is declining or at least bank branches are in decline. More and more people want to do their banking on their mobile apps or through their computers, particularly younger customers. And so you're having to manage all this, what are you doing? How are you tracking to these demographic changes accelerated by the pandemic and recreating the customer experience through multiple channels? >> Yeah, great question. We want to give our consumers an omnichannel experience irrespective of, you know, the few that still want to go into branches or perhaps they want to experience a cafe, and while there meet with one of our branch ambassadors to talk about their banking, we have consumers that want to go digital. So what we do is that we make sure that we're looking after the consumer holistically, irrespective of the channel. So whether they call into the call center because they need servicing or if they're physically present or they want to carry that on digitally, we make sure that we create super personalized custom experiences. We also work with a bunch of designers that are thinking through, you know, the life of a consumer now and their relationship to a bank. It is, to your point, it is no longer a branch, you know? That is a ubiquitous experience that we're by large knowing that we have to figure out and rethink. So, we're very lucky to have great designers that work with us and work on what is that experience that we want our consumers to have, from the pastries and the coffee, and the experience of being with an ambassador and how we can lead them through our iPads and digital experiences to continue to stay with us and for us to service them. >> You know, if we think about how much banking has changed especially in the last couple of years, when suddenly you couldn't get into a branch, even if you wanted to, it's amazing how we have this expectation that on my phone I can do any transaction I want in real time, I'm going to be able to see my balance, I can transfer money, I can make a payment. And we don't think about the technology on the back end but it's absolutely critical to powering that experience. >> Yeah. >> Talk about how you're doing that and is there customer feedback in that process? >> There is, but that's music to my ears by the way. The fact that you don't think about it tells me we're doing something really right, right? So first and foremost, we are super hypervigilant about security, that is top of mind, we are well managed. The cloud has enabled us to create these infrastructures that are highly secure, that are scalable and that allows us to really focus on innovation. So we use our mobile platform and our apps in that way, right? We know that this is a scalable, secure platform. We create really great products, we create very custom experiences for you that are relevant to you and your family and we create these digital products that are supposed to meet you where you are. >> But we certainly have, you know, this expectation that I'm going to get what I want, it's going to be relevant, it's going to be timely. If not, I'm going to pick up, not the phone, I'm going to go on social media and make a complaint. So from a brand reputation perspective, you guys, what you're doing is clearly going in the right direction. >> Yeah, yeah. Look, we take our bank voice and the voice of the customer extremely seriously. So, we have a really large infrastructure from a bank operations perspective. We have our bank voice agents that work with us that give us kind of really real-time feedback from our customers. You know, by the time you pick up the phone and call usually something has gone really wrong, right? So, we make sure that we stay lockstep with what our first level agents are hearing. Then we also look into our feedbacks, we have obviously ways to look into our mobile app. We look at all the reviews that we have and incorporate that into how we think about our product and how we invest and innovate on them. >> Before we turned on the cameras, you said an amazing thing. Capital One doesn't have any data centers anymore, doesn't have any mainframes anymore, it is fully in the cloud. Understanding that you weren't there in those old days but how does that change the way you think about new features, about technology, new technology developments for the customer when you don't have that legacy to drag along with you? >> It's incredible, right? Our cost efficiency, our production efficiency, how we think about going to the market now is really getting us to focus on the right parts of that product. We don't have to carry a lot of the technical debt, we don't carry that old infrastructure. So the way we develop, the way we design, the way we go to market is a lot faster than it ever was. >> Well, and the culture is there, the cultural mindset is there to be able to do that. I mean, if you think about who you compete with some of these institutions that have been around for a hundred years that also have to transform and digitize 'cause the customers expect it. That has to be a seamless process but their culture also has to be there because changing from being On-prem data centers to being completely in the cloud, it's a big change. >> Yeah, actually, you hit it, right? The cloud transformation is big, and hard and sticky. You got to move these workloads, you got to make 'em native, you got to deploy. But to your point, the harder part really is the culture, right? Because the cloud will then unleash productivity, it will unleash continuous improvement. It will bring product partners along the ride because they have to think differently about what they want to go to the market with, how they think about the cost of those units, how they think about cloud. So, you know, in my opinion, Capital One has done an incredible job bringing that entire, the entire organization along this cloud transformation including our culture, our processes, and our people. >> I know Capital One is proud of the work it's been doing in AI and machine learning. Can you talk about from the retail banking perspective, how is machine learning being applied to improve the customer experience? >> Yeah, well, you know, as you know, AI and machine learning is the heart of the bank, is the heart of Capital One. When we started in the early 90s, we were the only bank that was really trying to challenge how we use data to provide better products for our consumers, and that is ingrained in our DNA and everything that we do. So if you were to look at bank, we would start with, you know, from the time you are authenticating yourself, how we think about fraud and how do we capture bad actors, all the way to if you were to call into a call center, we use a lot of natural language processing models to make sure that we assess your sentiment, we give you the support that you need, and then of course, use that to learn more about how we service you. >> Interesting, I'm just wondering, do you think about Capital One as a technology company that does banking or a bank that is powered by technology? >> We are a technology company, and we happen to also have a bank. >> Lisa: I love that. What are some of the things that you've heard and seen at the show? Obviously, we're hearing numbers between 55 and 70,000 people here. It's crazy. And we're only getting a snapshot of that because here we are at Venetian Expo and the conference is going on all over the strip. But what are some of the things that you've heard from AWS that excite you about the partnership going forward? >> You know, I'll be honest, one of my happiest, proud moments, when we're talking about Lambda SnapStart yesterday, we actually, our team that is here today was part of the first beta of bringing in Lambda SnapStart. And we're super excited because it helps propel our serverless agenda. You know, we're continued to transform into the cloud. So, we have a lot of these partnership opportunities that, you know, make me super proud. >> Well follow up on serverless because to a lot of people, it's a concept that they don't really understand how to put it to practice. How is serverless a step forward? What has it enabled you to do that you couldn't otherwise do? >> Wow, a bunch. I think first and foremost, it helps us stay, you know, very well managed, security wise, right? It allows us to create automation and it takes away a lot of the heavy lifting that our engineers would have to do otherwise. And the byproduct of that is that we get to go focus on really fun, innovative ideas, and we get to go work on product development. We're taking a lot of the grit work of the management of the servers out of the engineer's hand and automating them. >> Banking, of course, one of the most regulated industries on the planet, has Cloud been able to help you in that respect? >> Yes. Yes it has. Look, we are in a regulated space which means everything we do has a ton of scrutiny, for the right reasons. So we actually built it into our design, so our design, our products, we design our platforms with security in mind, with the regulations in mind and make it where it's less of a thought, right? So, we obviously spend a lot of time from a risk posture helping our associates understand, really respecting the responsibility that we have to look after everybody's assets, right? Like it's, what a more incredible job than that? So, we spend a lot of time thinking about what is our risk posture, where is it, you know, from what you would imagine the regular scan vulnerabilities all the way to data protection. And now that we protect that data in Fly, like they're all things that is our number one job and we spend a ton of time focused on it. >> That's good, it's very complex but security is a topic we discuss regularly. We've seen the threat landscape change so dramatically in the last couple of years. Bad actors are getting far more sophisticated. They're leveraging the technology but when it comes to banking as Paul was talking about, from a regulations perspective, from an end customer perspective, we have this expectation that you're going to keep my data secure because nobody wants to be the next headline. >> Lo: Yes, that's right. That's right, and look, we are getting, we're getting smarter as well, right? So we are able to detect and monitor and go after the bad actors faster. We're doing it in a way that allows us configurability, it gives us time, it gives us speed, but at the same time we also work as a network, right? So a lot of our banks, we, you know, in some ways share a lot of this information to make sure that we're all going after a common enemy. >> Capital One recently launched a software company, Capital One Software, which is a relatively unusual move by a financial services organization. How has that affected the thinking at the company about what the company is and what other opportunities there might be outside of pure banking? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Capital One Software is a very exciting new line of business. I think the team that is there is doing some really incredible, innovative work. But you know what's really interesting is they were talking about our new product SlingShot, it was born out of our needs, right? We knew that we needed to have better governance around our data. We created really great tools and it was very obvious that there was a commercial applicability there. And that is how we will continue to operate, right? As a bank, we're all in the cloud, we're all in in the cloud. It will give us the ability to start sharing some of these best practices. And I think the best is yet to come, I think we got some really good stuff in the pipeline. >> Lisa: Anything you can share in the-- >> No. >> Lisa: No? Tight lips. >> Tight lips. >> Excellent, well, last couple of questions. What's the main theme here? When people walk into the Venetian Expo and they see Capital One next to all these tech companies, what's the main theme that Capital One wants to get across to the greater community? >> Yeah, look, our mission is to change banking for good, it always has been our mission. We're very fortunate to be in a position to be tech innovators, and we're fortunate to disrupt, and that's what I want people to get out of it. >> Excellent, my last question for you, kind of continuing on this theme. If you had, you were going to have the opportunity to create new branding and it's going to go in the cafes and it's going to be like a little billboard inside about Capital One being a technology company that does banking. What do you think that that billboard, that sign would say? >> I think I'm going to stick with the change banking for good. I mean, that really is at the heart of our mission. >> Paul: It's a nice double message too, yeah. >> Yeah, with technology, with disruption, ultimately that's where our hearts and minds are at. >> Awesome. Lo, it's been great to have you on the program. Thank you for sharing what you're doing at Capital One, how you're working with AWS and also emerging technologies like AI and ML to really create a seamless digital customer experience. We really appreciate your time and your insights. >> Thank you. >> All right, for our guest and for Paul Gillin I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live emerging and enterprise tech coverage. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's virtual program, covering VMware Explorer, 2022. The first time since 2019 that the VMware ecosystem is gathered in person. But in the post isolation economy, hybrid is the new format, cube plus digital, we call it. And so we're really happy to welcome Cal Al-Dhubaib who's the founder and CEO and AI strategist of Pandata. And Jonathan Seckler back in theCUBE, the senior director of product marketing at Dell Technologies. Guys, great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks a lot for having us. >> Yeah, thank you >> Cal, Pandata, cool name, what's it all about? >> Thanks for asking. Really excited to share our story. I'm a data scientist by training and I'm based here in Cleveland, Ohio. And Pandata is a company that helps organizations design and develop machine learning and AI technology. And when I started this here in Cleveland six years ago, I had people react to me with, what? So we help demystify AI and make it practical. And we specifically focus on trustworthy AI. So we work a lot in regulated industries like healthcare. And we help organizations navigate the complexities of building machine learning and AI technology when data's hard to work with, when there's risk on the potential outcomes, or high cost in the consequences. And that's what we do every day. >> Yeah, yeah timing is great given all the focus on privacy and what you're seeing with big tech and public policy, so we're going to get into that. Jonathan, I understand you guys got some hard news. What's your story around AI and AutoML? Share that with us. >> Yeah, thanks. So having the opportunity to speak with Cal today is really important because one of the hardest things that we find that our customers have is making that transition of experimenting with AI to making it really useful in real life. >> What is the tech underneath that? Are we talking VxRail here? Are you're talking servers? What do you got? >> Yeah, absolutely. So the Dell validated design for AI is a reference framework that is based on the optimized set of hardware for a given outcome. That includes it could be VxRail, VMware, vSphere and Nvidia GPUs and Nvidia software to make all of that happen. And for today, what we're working with is H2O.ai's solution to develop automatic machine learning. So take just that one more step to make it easier for customers to bring AI into production. >> Cool. >> So it's a full stack of software that includes automated machine learning, it includes NVIDIA's AI enterprise for deployment and development, and it's all built on an engineering validated set of hardware, including servers and storage and whatever else you need >> AI out of the box, I don't have to worry about cobbling it all together. >> Exactly. >> Cal, I want to come back to this trusted AI notion. A lot of people don't trust AI just by the very nature of it. I think about, okay, well how does it know it's a cat? And then you can never explain, it says black box. And so I'm like, what are they do with my data? And you mentioned healthcare, financial services, the government, they know everything about me. I just had to get a real ID and Massachusetts, I had to give all my data away. I don't trust it. So what is trusted AI? >> Well, so let me take a step back and talk about sobering statistics. There's a lot of different sources that report on this, but anywhere you look, you'll hear somewhere between 80 to 90% of AI projects fail to yield a return. That's pretty scary, that's a disappointing industry. And why is that? AI is hard. Versus traditional software, you're programming rules hard and fast. If I click this button, I expect A, B, C to happen. And we're talking about recognizing and reacting to patterns. It's not, will it be wrong? It's, when it's wrong, how wrong will it be? And what are it cost to accept related to that? So zooming back in on this lens of trustworthy AI, much of the last 10 years the development in AI has looked like this. Let's get the data, let's race to build the warehouses, okay we did that, no problem. Next was race to build the algorithms. Can we build more sophisticated models? Can we work with things like documents and images? And it used to be the exclusive domain of deep tech companies. You'd have to have teams of teams building the software, building the infrastructure, working on very specific components in this pipeline. And now we have this explosion of technologies, very much like what Jonathan was talking about with validated designs. So it removes the complexities of the infrastructure, it removes the complexities of being able to access the right data. And we have a ton of modeling capabilities and tools out there, so we can build a lot of things. Now, this is when we start to encounter risk in machine learning and AI. If you think about the models that are being used to replicate or learn from language like GPT-3 to create new content, it's training data set is everything that's on the internet. And if you haven't been on the internet recently, it's not all good. So how do you go about building technology to recognize specific patterns, pick up patterns that are desirable, and avoid unintended consequences? And no one's immune to this. So the discipline of trustworthy AI is building models that are easier to interrogate, that are useful for humans, and that minimize the risk of unintended consequences. >> I would add too, one of the good things about the Pandata solution is how it tries to enforce fairness and transparency in the models. We've done some studies recently with IDC, where we've tried to compare leaders in AI technology versus those who are just getting started. And I have to say, one of the biggest differences between a leader in AI and the rest of us is often that the leaders have a policy in place to deal with the risks and the ethics of using data through some kind of machine oriented model. And it's a really important part of making AI usable for the masses. >> You certainly hear a lot about, AI ultimately, there's algorithms which are built by humans. Although of course, there's algorithms to build algorithms, we know that today. >> Right, exactly. >> But humans are biased, there's inherent bias, and so this is a big problem. Obviously Dell, you have a giant observation space in terms of customers. But I wonder, Cal, if you can share with us how you're working with your customers at Pandata? What kind of customers are you working with? What are they asking? What problems are they asking you to solve? And how does it manifest itself? >> So when I like to talk about AI and where it's useful, it usually has to do with taking a repetitive task that humans are tasked with, but they're starting to act more like machines than humans. There's not much creativity in the process, it's handling something that's fairly routine, and it ends up being a bottleneck to scaling. And just a year ago even, we'd have to start approaching our clients with conversations around trustworthy AI, and now they're starting to approach us. Really example, this actually just happened earlier today, we're partnering with one of our clients that basically scans medical claims from insurance providers. And what they're trying to do is identify members that qualify for certain government subsidies. And this isn't as straightforward as it seems because there's a lot of complexities in how the rules are implemented, how judges look at these cases. Long story short, we help them build machine learning to identify these patients that qualify. And a question that comes up, and that we're starting to hear from the insurance companies they serve is how do you go about making sure that your decisions are fair and you're not selecting certain groups of individuals over others to get this assistance? And so clients are starting to wise up to that and ask questions. Other things that we've done include identifying potential private health information that's contained in medical images so that you can create curated research data sets. We've helped organizations identify anomalies in cybersecurity logs. And go from an exploration space of billions of eventual events to what are the top 100 that I should look at today? And so it's all about, how do you find these routine processes that humans are bottlenecked from getting to, we're starting to act more like machines and insert a little bit of outer recognition intelligence to get them to spend more time on the creative side. >> Can you talk a little bit more about how? A lot of people talk about augmented AI. AI is amazing. My daughter the other day was, I'm sure as an AI expert, you've seen it, where the machine actually creates standup comedy which it's so hilarious because it is and it isn't. Some of the jokes are actually really funny. Some of them are so funny 'cause they're not funny and they're weird. So it really underscored the gap. And so how do you do it? Is it augmented? Is it you're focusing on the mundane things that you want to take humans out of the loop? Explain how. >> So there's this great Wall Street Journal article by Jennifer Strong that she published I think four years ago now. And she says, "For AI to become more useful, it needs to become more boring." And I really truly believe in that. So you hear about these cutting edge use cases. And there's certainly some room for these generative AI applications inspiring new designs, inspiring new approaches. But the reality is, most successful use cases that we encounter in our business have to do with augmenting human decisions. How do you make arriving at a decision easier? How do you prioritize from millions of options, hundreds of thousands of options down to three or four that a human can then take the last stretch and really consider or think about? So a really cool story, I've been playing around with DALL.E 2. And for those of you who haven't heard, it's this algorithm that can create images from props. And they're just painting I really wish I had bought when I was in Paris a few years ago. And I gave it a description, skyline of the Sacre-Coeur Church in Montmartre with pink and white hues. And it came up with a handful of examples that I can now go take to an artist and say paint me this. So at the end of the day, automation, it's not really, yes, there's certain applications where you really are truly getting to that automated AI in action. But in my experience, most of the use cases have to do with using AI to make humans more effective, more creative, more valuable. >> I'd also add, I think Cal, is that the opportunity to make AI real here is to automate these things and simplify the languages so that can get what we call citizen data scientists out there. I say ordinary, ordinary employees or people who are at the front line of making these decisions, working with the data directly. We've done this with customers who have done this on farms, where the growers are able to use AI to monitor and to manage the yield of crops. I think some of the other examples that you had mentioned just recently Cal I think are great. The other examples is where you can make this technology available to anyone. And maybe that's part of the message of making it boring, it's making it so simple that any of us can use it. >> I love that. John Furrier likes to say that traditionally in IT, we solve complexity with more complexity. So anything that simplifies things is goodness. So how do you use automated machine learning at Pandata? Where does that fit in here? >> So really excited that the connection here through H2O that Jonathan had mentioned earlier. So H2O.ai is one of the leading AutoML platforms. And what's really cool is if you think about the traditional way you would approach machine learning, is you need to have data scientists. These patterns might exist in documents or images or boring old spreadsheets. And the way you'd approach this is, okay, get these expensive data scientists, and 80% of what they do is clean up the data. And I'm yet to encounter a situation where there isn't cleaning data. Now, I'll get through the cleaning up the data step, you actually have to consider, all right, am I working with language? Am I working with financial forecasts? What are the statistical modeling approaches I want to use? And there's a lot of creativity involved in that. And you have to set up a whole experiment, and that takes a lot of time and effort. And then you might test one, two or three models because you know to use those or those are the go to for this type of problem. And you see which one performs best and you iterate from there. The AutoML framework basically allows you to cut through all of that. It can reduce the amount of time you're spending on those steps to 1/10 of the time. You're able to very quickly profile data, understand anomalies, understand what data you want to work with, what data you don't want to work with. And then when it comes to the modeling steps, instead of iterating through three or four AutoML is throwing the whole kitchen sink at it. Anything that's appropriate to the task, maybe you're trying to predict a category or label something, maybe you're trying to predict a value like a financial forecast or even generate test. And it tests all of the models that it has at its disposal that are appropriate to the task and says, here are the top 10. You can use features like let me make this more explainable, let me make the model more accurate. I don't necessarily care about interrogating the results because the risk here is low, I want to a model that predicts things with a higher accuracy. So you can use these dials instead of having to approach it from a development perspective. You can approach it from more of an experimental mindset. So you still need that expertise, you still need to understand what you're looking at, but it makes it really quick. And so you're not spending all that expensive data science time cleaning up data. >> Makes sense. Last question, so Cal, obviously you guys go deep into AI, Jonathan Dell works with every customer on the planet, all sizes, all industries. So what are you hearing and doing with customers that are best practices that you can share for people that want to get into it, that are concerned about AI, they want to simplify it? What would you tell them? Go ahead, Cal. >> Okay, you go first, Cal. >> And Jonathan, you're going to bring us home. >> Sure. >> This sounds good. So as far as where people get scared, I see two sides of it. One, our data's not clean enough, not enough quality, I'm going to stay away from this. So one, I combat that with, you've got to experiment, you got to iterate, And that's the only way your data's going to improve. Two, there's organizations that worry too much about managing the risk. We don't have the data science expertise that can help us uncover potential biases we have. We are now entering a new stage of AI development and machine learning development, And I use those terms interchangeably anymore. I know some folks will differentiate between them. But machine learning is the discipline driving most of the advances. The toolkits that we have at our disposal to quickly profile and manage and mitigate against the risk that data can bring to the table is really giving organizations more comfort, should give organizations more comfort to start to build mission critical applications. The thing that I would encourage organizations to look for, is organizations that put trustworthy AI, ethical AI first as a consideration, not as an afterthought or not as a we're going to sweep this on the carpet. When you're intentional with that, when you bring that up front and you make it a part of your design, it sets you up for success. And we saw this when GDPR changed the IT world a few years ago. Organizations that built for privacy first to begin with, adapting to GDPR was relatively straightforward. Organizations that made that an afterthought or had that as an afterthought, it was a huge lift, a huge cost to adapt and adjust to those changes. >> Great example. All right, John, I said bring us home, put a bow on this. >> Last bit. So I think beyond the mechanics of how to make a AI better and more workable, one of the big challenges with the AI is this concern that you're going to isolate and spend too much effort and dollars on the infrastructure itself. And that's one of the benefits that Dell brings to the table here with validated designs. Is that our AI validated design is built on a VMware vSphere architecture. So your backup, your migration, all of the management and the operational tools that IT is most comfortable with can be used to maintain and develop and deploy artificial intelligence projects without having to create unique infrastructure, unique stacks of hardware, and then which potentially isolates the data, potentially makes things unavailable to the rest of the organization. So when you run it all in a VMware environment, that means you can put it in the cloud, you can put it in your data center. Just really makes it easier for IT to build AI into their everyday process >> Silo busting. All right, guys, thanks Cal, John. I really appreciate you guys coming on theCUBE. >> Yeah, it's been a great time, thanks. >> All right. And thank you for watching theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. Keep it right there for more action from the show floor with myself, Dave Velante, John Furrier, Lisa Martin and David Nicholson, keep it right there. (gentle music)

>>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the cubes coverage, extended coverage of the V IP gala event. Earlier in the day, we were at the Monaco crypto summit, where we had 11 years, all the fault leaders here in MoCo coming together. It's a global event. It's an inner circle. It's a beginning, it's an ELG overall event. It's a kernel of the best of the best from finance entrepreneurship government coming together here with the gala event at the yacht club in Monaco. And we got a great lineup here. We have Sherman elder wish from decentralized investment group here with me. She and I was just talking and we're gonna have a great conversation. Welcome to the cube. Thank >>You so much. Thank you for having me. >>It's kind of our laid back to not only have an anchored desk, but we're kind of have conversations. You know, one of the things that we've been talking about is, you know, the technology innovation around decentralized, right? You've been an entrepreneur 9, 9, 9 years. Yes. Plus you're in a region of the world right now where it's exploding. You're in Dubai. Tell your story. You're in Dubai. There's a lot of action what's happening. >>So to Dubai is, is really the bridge between the east and the west. And it's grown. I've, I've had the privilege of witnessing Dubai's growth for over 16 years now. So I've been based in Dubai for 16 years. I'm originally from Jordan, lived in 11 countries. You can call me a global nomad home is where my suitcases and where I, you know, where I'm, I'm literally with my friends and community and the work that I do. So I've been there and I've witnessed this grow through working with the government there as well. So nine years ago, I jumped into the world of entrepreneurship. I specialize in art and education. Also, I work extensively now in decentralized with decentralized investment group. So we specialize in defi game five and also digital assets. So it's a beautiful time to be in Dubai right now. And witness that growth in web three, there's going to be a summit that's actually happening in September. And so it's attracting all the global leaders there with the government there. So they're really investing in, >>You know, the date on that. >>Sorry, >>You know the date on that? Yeah. Oh, >>September. They're going to be September, either 27th or >>28th. So later in the month, >>Yes. Later in the month of September. Okay. So it's very exciting to be a part >>Of that. Well, I love you're on here cause I want, first of all, you look fabulous. Great. Oh, thank you. Great event. Everyone's dressed up here. But one of the things I've been passionate about is women in tech. And I know you've got a project now you're working on this. Yes. Not only because it's it's needed. Yeah, but they're taking over. There's a lot of growth. Absolutely. The young entrepreneurs, young practitioners, absolutely young women all around the world. Absolutely. And we did a five region women in tech on March 7th with Stanford university, amazing. And Amazon web services. And I couldn't believe the stories. So we're gonna do more. And I want to get your take on this because there are stories that need to be told. Absolutely. What are, what are the, some of the stories that you're seeing, some of the, some of the cautionary tales, some of the successes, >>Well, you have, I mean the middle east right now is really a space, especially in Dubai, in the UAE, the growth of women in entrepreneurship, the support that we have from incubators, there, there is a hunger for growth and learning and innovation. And that is the beauty of being there. There are so many incredible stories, not one that I could say right now, but each and every story is exquisite and extraordinary. And what's really amazing is that you have the community there that supports one another, especially women in tech. I'm, I'm actually one of the co-founders of made for you global, which is a tech platform, which attracts entrepreneurship, female entrepreneurs, and really helping them kind of grow to their potential or maximize their potential. And we're actually going to have it on web three as well and integrate it within the blockchain. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of passion for, for growth in women, in tech and, and there's so many incredible stories to come, not just one, so many. And I invite you to come to Dubai so I can introduce you to all >>These incredible. So I'm really glad you're inclusive about men. >>Of course, we're inclusive >>About men, >>You know, men and women. I mean, it's a community that brings together these ideas. >>Yeah. I will say I had to go the microphone one time because I love doing the Stanford women in data science, but they, and we have female, a host. I just wanna do the interviews right there. So smart. I said, Chuck, can we have the female interviews cuz you know, like, okay, but they included me. Oh yes. But in all serious. Now this is a major force because women entrepreneurship make up 50% of the, the target audience of all products. Absolutely. So if, why, why isn't there more developers and input into the products and policies, right? That shape our society. This has been one of those head scratching moments and we're making progress, but not fast enough. >>Absolutely. And you know what, especially after COVID, so after COVID we all learned the lessons of the hybrid models of being more flexible of being more innovative of being making use of our time more effectively. And we've witnessed like an increase in women in tech over the years and especially in web three and decentralized investment group invest heavily into women and in tech as well, >>Give some examples of some things you're working on right now, projects you're investing in. So >>We're, well, everything that we do is inclusive of women. So with game five, for example, we specialize greatly in game five through our subsidiary company, based in the us, it's called X, Y, Z, Z Y it's gaming. And actually many of our creative team are women who are the developers behind the scenes who are bringing it to life. A lot of basically we're trying to educate the public as well about how to get meta mask wallets and to enter into this field. It's all about education and growing that momentum to be able to be more and more inclusive. >>Do you think you can help us get a cube host out there? Of course, of course they gotta be dynamic. Of course smart of course and no teleprompter of >>Course. And we would love for you to come so that we can really introduce you to >>All well now, now that COVID is over. We got a big plan on going cube global, digging it out in 2019, we had London, Bahrain, Singapore, amazing Dubai, Korea. Amazing. And so we wanted to really get out there and create a node, right? And open source kind of vibe where right. The folks all around the world can connect through the network effects. And one thing I noticed about the women in tech, especially in your area is the networking is really high velocity. Absolutely people like the network out there is that, do you see that as well? Absolutely. >>Because it's a, it's a city of transition, you know? So that's the beauty of Dubai, it's positioning power. And also it's a very innovative hub. And so with all of these summits that are coming up, it's attracting the communities and there's lots of networking that happens there. And I think more and more we're seeing with web three is that it is all about the community. It's all about bringing everyone together. >>Well, we got people walking through the sets. See, that's the thing that about a cocktail party. You got people walking through the set that's good. Made, had some color. Rachel Wolfson is in the house. Rachel is here. That's Rachel Woodson. If you didn't recognize her she's with coin Telegraph. Oh bless. I don't know who they, the Glo is as they say, but that's how he went cool to me. All right. So betting back to kinda what you're working on. Have you been to Silicon valley lately? Because you're seeing a lot of peering where people are looking at web three and saying, Hey, Silicon valley is going through a transition too. You're seeing beacons of outposts, right? Where you got people moving to Miami, you got Dubai, you got Singapore, you got, you know, Japan, all these countries. Now there's a, there's a network effect. >>Absolutely. It's all about. And honestly, when I see, I mean, I've been to Miami so many times this year for all the web three events and also in Austin and GTC as well. And what you see is that there is this ripple effect that's happening and it is attracting more and more momentum because the conversations are there and the openness to work together. It's all about partnerships and collaboration. This is a field which is based on collaboration communities. >>Awesome. What are some of the advice advice you have for women out there that are watching around being an entrepreneur? Because we were talking before we came on camera about it's hard. It's not easy. It's not for the faint of heart. Yeah. As Theresa Carlson, a friend of mine used, used to say all the time entrepreneurship was a rollercoaster. Of course, what's your advice don't give up or stay strong. What's your point of view? >>Honestly, if you're passionate about what you do. And I know it sounds very cliche. It's really important to stay focused, moving forward, always. And really it's about partnerships. It's about the ability to network. It's the ability to fail as well. Yeah. And to learn from your mistakes and to know when to ask for help. A lot of the times, you know, we shy away from asking for help or because we're embarrassed, but we need to be more open to failing, to growing and to also collaborating with one another. >>Okay. So final question for you while I got, by the way, you're an awesome guest. Oh, thank you. What are you what's next for you? What are you working on right now? Next year? What's on your goal list. What's your project? What's >>Your top goal? Oh my gosh. >>Top three, >>Top three, definitely immersing myself more into web three. Web three is definitely the future getting made for you global on the ground and running in terms of the networking aspect in a female entrepreneurship, more and more giving back as well. So using web three for social good. So a lot more charitable, innovative kind of campaigns that we hope to host within the web three community to be able to educate, to innovate and also help those that are, that need it the most as >>Well. Shaman, thank you for coming on the cube. I really appreciate it. And thanks for coming on. Thank you >>So much. >>I'm so grateful. Okay. You watching the queue, we're back in the more coverage here at the after party of the event, it's the VIP gala with prince Albert and all the top guests in Monica leaning into crypto I'm John furier. Thanks for watching.

okay welcome back everyone we're here live in monaco for siliconangle thecube's coverage of the monaco crypto summit i'm john furrier your host we're here with al berger the founder of the digital bits blockchain digital bits is presented it's an open ecosystem they're the main presenters bringing everybody together al burgia is the man of the hour al great to see you cube alumni great to see you again john thanks thanks for having me back on the show it's been this is an inaugural event yeah you you and your team put together the digital bits foundation um the digits blockchains enabling technology the proof is in the pudding as i always say now you're seeing companies building on top of the ecosystem why monaco this is inaugural event what's going on here what's the motivation what does all this mean all this stuff coming together share uh why monaco i mean there's uh it's part of this next chapter for us things are happening in monaco and and um um we've yet to unveil that and we thought you know what better place to unveil what we're doing in monaco other than to do it in monaco so that was really the genesis of what gave birth this idea to have the monaco crypto summit um but that evolved beyond just sharing the nexus of it all there are organizations that here that have come from all over the world and will be sharing for the first time how they're also utilizing the digital bits watching not bad to come to monaco in the summer though it's pretty pretty nice area beautiful views yeah summer time in monaco is always great but this inaugural event first of all i love the name so congratulations on the name i think it's got a lot of legs to it i think this will be something that's going to be around for a long long time so it's a good good call there there's a lot of other dynamics going on prince albert's got some involvement he's interested in crypto we're going to hear more about that in the yacht club presentation later tonight you got startups companies building on top of the capabilities of digital bits you know you and i have talked in the past on the cube about the technology um your technologists uh followed a lot of your adventures to success and exits multiple exits in tech silicon valley knows you everyone knows you know around the world it's kind of like a cloud game but it's decentralized you've got infrastructure platform applications um there's super applications and decentralized device to all kinds of new stuff going on so you have a stack kind of going on here in a decentralized way and been validated by all the big names jumping in and changing their business models and horowitz you name it now a global financial markets converging on this huge opportunity around crypto and d-apps everything's happening so what's your reaction to someone who's been through many cycles built companies and sold them and been successful what's your analysis i mean this journey is then different and you has a unique some similarities but definitely some unique characteristics in prior journeys uh in in you know venturing off to found a company and so forth and for me it's been obviously the traditional way um you know prior to this obviously it was in the valley and and had uh uh quite the journey um what i would say this time is um with all that's happening in blockchain and cryptocurrency it's the amount of say capital formation the amount of people involvement in into an early technology into an evolving technology and there's various subcategories now across nfts metabours and um and all things fungible um there's a global stage immediately and um and it sort of creates these sort of mini vortexes of getting more people involved um it's it's kind of some semblances of like the dot-com bubble in a sense but with a much bigger ecosystem um in comparison to what we saw in the 90s um the thing about blockchain is that it it needs to the more successful blockchains out there need to evolve into becoming as decentralized as possible and so as to use your analogy of stack i mean it is incredibly important to have contributors at all layers protocol layer application d app layer in many corners of the world but it all starts with an idea so it's really hard to go from point a to point b um like any other new opportunity and so for us it's been a journey we're evolving in this next chapter um and a lot of that will be evident today throughout the course of the summit we'll start to see and start to feel even more so how uh the digitalbits ecosystem is is becoming more and more decentral we're going to see a bunch of folks coming on us off stage are going to come here sit down on thecube and chat with me about their opportunities how would you describe for the folks watching now what's going on on stage here all day and then obviously there's a vip gala tonight at the yacht club with prince albert in attendance and his team and a bunch of big power players what's happening here what's the what's the vibe what's the purpose what's being presented can you just quickly share uh take a minute to explain what's going on so relative to to the summit um it's you know organizations uh platforms um there's there's uh a few metaverse uh platforms here that will be um i mean they've been in in existence but they'll be unveiling um their connection and how they're leveraging the digital business watching for the very first time and so um but also other categories as well even um soon here massive multi-billion dollar real estate development all coming to um the digital blockchain so this is the physical world massive uh resort um real estate development completely being tokenized you just had some success in digital assets obviously the roma team i saw the announcement on on youtube was pretty big um you get digital bits on the jersey a new player so caught my attention you got sports teams you got here you got applications people building on top of digital bits why for us it yeah vision is needs to be supported by a strategy um from inception it was finding ways to take an enterprise go to market strategy and and uh some of it may be a bit of trial and error in the early you know onset from 2017-18 when it when the journey kind of began for the digital biz blockchain but um also part of it is timing and one of the things that we saw more recently again kind of like the journey and the stack you're referring to before nobody foresaw the pandemic nobody foresaw that the whole world would be at home staring at a screen um and figuring out what to do with their time and many of the world for the first time began to learn about blockchain and cryptocurrency for the first time in the onset of this pandemic and so that became a huge accelerant for the space and so um another quote you know i've i'll take away from you that i you know recall you saying many years ago um you need to have a horse on the track to be in the race yeah we're very fortunate to have a horse in the track by having already a number of years of development um awareness so that when there's kind of like these market shifts that can become an accelerant we're in a position to to move with the industry um and so it's been an incredible couple of years i mean it was great for you guys yeah and so there you know there's different contributors in the ecosystem some some that i'm affiliated with that have done things in the sports space um and other things that i'm not affiliated with there's a lot of things that again are emerging today that are happening in different categories or themes of metaverse for example um and i'm humbled by it just simply by the virtue of the fact that they're utilizing the digital that's watching but i had no um stake in building what they've built in terms of this is enabling technology so just to kind of pivot off you said yeah the pandemic was a tailwind now for um this movement for many reasons one people sitting at home boy hey this is technically vegas work on the blockchain two the future of work or the future of how things are organized is was remote work remote work is like next door neighbor to decentralization like i mean come on you're talking about people going this is not the future is not where it used to be that kind of galvanized a lot of people and also the business models have shifted so now post pandemic everything's hybrid which is virtual physical so that's the perfect storm so total acceleration agree um and we're seeing the traction now what's interesting about what you guys are doing is you're enabling people to build apps on it that's the platform and and that's that's again what i want to ask you is i had people always ask me what's digital bits so i'm going to ask you what is digital bits well digital bits is both the name of a blockchain it's also the name of a cryptocurrency the native cryptocurrency of the digital bits blockchain and so um it began 2017 as a fork of stellar in terms of the original repository um and you know there's a question i was asked earlier today in a press conference of like oh there's all these blockchains well we're still in this like early stage uh this early part of this uh evolution and so i i don't necessarily see a lot of what's happening out there as competitive but rather complementary because in unison you know there's different use cases different categories uh where kind of a blockchain can find its array of adoption in in this sort of phase of it all um for us um we've been referred to as a few different things one of which is you know the aspiration become this blockchain for brands i think today we'll learn that it's become much bigger than that in terms of its capability it's not necessarily that um it's as a result of new technology it's the tech a lot of this technology has been there it's just how it's being exploited and used um we're unveiling today for example and part of now this chapter for me is working with um community um developers hold on before you get there so okay i see digital bits i love the name by the way so thanks for that you kind of get to the news now you have a press conference take me through the press conference what's the news what are you guys announcing here today so the press conference we we did share not everything uh there's more um uh likely in store by the end of today that's not on the agenda uh and and maybe i'll be back on the show later today um we will have you back we'll find out come on but in terms of in terms of what we shared so far at the press conference um uh it was centered around two key themes i wanted to um obviously talked about the array of things to come today but focus on some of the things i'm directly involved in one of which was nico swap and the other are the number of things involved here within monaco so in terms of nico swap um by way of nane nico and in the spirit of decentralization nico in ancient greek means victory for the people so we thought that was a fitting name for the platform it's a decentralized exchange platform on uh the digital bits blockchain um filled with liquidity pool technology automated market making technology it's it's but by way of comparison digital bits is version of let's say a uniswap but lower cost faster and so forth and there's a number of organizations here today that will uh are announcing that they're deploying on nicos bringing their token to the digital bits blockchain and and launching um on on nicoswap so we're i'm super excited about that this is you know part of evolution and part of fostering decentralization um and so what that enables is by virtue of uh being able to again help helping other organizations getting their horse on the track the common denominator for us is digital bits it's um you know the fact that every application every utility token every nft you know does require digital bits including the digital bits currency to provide that security to to be used for gas fees and and and so on and so forth so um the blockchain itself the cryptocurrency it's kind of a common denominator beneficiary uh the one way you can kind of think of it um but yeah we shared a lot around an ecoswap um uh what it looks like and um its key functionality and and who are some of the organizations that are uh on on board day one the other part of the press conference today we shared um was more monaco centric digital bits in monaco and this journey is just beginning uh it's super humbling it's super exciting for me to be a part of it um there is again no real particular order there's a an ecampus that's focused around cyber security and blockchain education for both private sector and public sector so um academia so skills government issues solve some skill gap correct right it's an organization a financial institution a whole department needs to know more about blockchain how they can leverage it um digitalbits um is the blockchain um that is forming the first part of the curriculum for this ecampus that's launching here in monaco with uh uh an organization called amvini the other thing uh that we shared and announced uh today is that um the first sov first and only sovereign cloud in europe is the monaco cloud as recently launched what makes it soft and in essence is a few aspects of its characteristics but digital bits blockchain nodes are being deployed in the monaco cloud um and so beyond the nodes that already exist it's um the network is further being let's say hardest to bring your scale in resiliency you know the whole thing around censorship resistance right the more nodes there's a huge strategic aspect to obviously deploying nodes in in sovereign clouds um and so in europe the first for that is the monaco cloud so we're really honored to be working with the team there and mvne and so forth for that and then um and then as well um a number of months ago we began a journey with the prince albert of monaco foundation um the the chair president is uh prince albert and um the uh vice president ceo is olivia windham who was in attendance at the uh at the press conference as well and um and we unveiled um the foundations uh platform entirely built on the digital bits blockchain uh utilizing the digital bits cryptocurrency um as well as uh nft ticketing and so forth uh so we unveiled that we showcased that for uh for members of the press um how it will be used and and so forth some of the questions you got um i mean it went everywhere from um there was a regulatory regulation question related to europe um to questions around decentralization what are what are we doing how do we compare to uh proof of work you know why why digital bits a big part of that is i think we have a lot of common values with um the foundation of prince albert foundation uh around the environment being eco-friendly and so on and so forth and so um um questions of that sort you know how what do you know what's the next chapter look like and and how how um is more and more decentralization in my view going to be fueled and you said you got some announcements you can't talk about um coming okay so is that what's that going to be related to you get a little bit of teaser on that is it going to be something how big we be massive is it the grand finale or is it it's not a finale the unveiling it's an op unboxing of a new deal what's what's what is it a deal is it technology um it is uh um it's it's um large uh organization um that um is is leveraging uh both um the digital bits watching and digital body swerve that one okay good well al thanks for coming on and congratulations we will catch up with you either at the end of the day here on the live program or we will be at the yacht club in monaco yacht club tonight for the big event we hope to be live there but if not we will report on that yeah thanks for having me john all right congratulations digital [ __ ] really rocking the world here in monaco love the name digital bits makes tons tons of sense platform to enable applications this is the future you're going to start to see this decentralized model that kind of looks like cloud computing but not it's a technology enabling the creative and the and and the application transformations to decentralization it's coming almost every single category will be centralized we'll be covering a blanket on the cube i'm john furrier thecube thanks for watching [Music] you

>>mhm. Hello and welcome to the Cubes presentation of Women in text. Global Event Celebrating International Women's Day I'm John for your host of the Cube here in Palo Alto, California and we had a great remote guests coming in from Bahrain in the Middle East. Cather Allegheny, general manager of 9 73 Labs. Uh, thanks for coming in and and being part of the Cube our International Women's Day. You can't get any more international in Bahrain. Thank you for coming on. >>It's my great pleasure and honour to be here. John, thank you so much for this opportunity. >>Well, I'm super excited to chat with you because in our two visits with the Cube in Bahrain covering the summit there the past few years, we notice of surgeon entrepreneurship. Um, it's almost as if the region of AWS has create this revitalization and energy and vitality and and momentum around entrepreneurship. Can you >>share? What's >>the scene down there? What's the What's it like? >>Well, uh, when it comes to my country, we're lucky to have a small population. It's not that large, but we have so many creative people who is eager to try the entrepreneurial journey, and having Amazon as a data centre in Bahrain is a privilege. And they are pushing, uh, to have more entrepreneurial ideas and innovation and solutions within the ecosystem of rain. So definitely with their support, I can I can see that so many youths, they are eager to come in and contribute. >>I noticed that you're also the general manager of, uh, 9 73 labs, but also the founder of a company. So you've got two things going on here. You've got the entrepreneurial thing happening. Um, this seems to be normal. People got entrepreneurial activity and the job doing both. They're both entrepreneurial. Is that normal? >>Yes, Absolutely. Well, I started my entrepreneurial journey back in, uh, four years and I've been appointed as a general manager of 97 3 labs, which is I'm leading on digital innovation. So that compliments my passion of being an entrepreneur. And while we can acquire talented people and support them to create their own solutions the best way they can So basically, uh, following the main pillars of the lab that I'm working on, which is conducting appropriate research and data analytics, innovation and sustainability. So, uh, for my two founded cos it's not only one I've worked in Fintech and also in property as well. >>What inspired you to be an entrepreneur and technology? >>Well, I would say that my inspiration was to think outside the box, and I see problems and gaps as an opportunity. So that helps me to figure out and come up with solutions that can be beneficial for everyone. So analysing detail as well as something that I would really love. And also, um, enhancing my skills and being more creative is my inspiration. >>I know this is a lot of entrepreneur activity in Bahrain. A lot of investors are now coming into the market. Um, what are some of the things that are going on there? Can you share what the entrepreneurial scene is like there what people are working on has cloud computing accelerated that? What's what are some of the things happening there on the ground? >>Um, I would see that there is multiple competitions or hackathons run by multiple financial institutions. Uh, and also, uh, there are so many NGO s as I am a board member and technology and business society and also a member of women empowerment in the field of cheque, we are trying to motivate and accelerate the desire to be within this ecosystem of entrepreneurial journey. So, basically, uh, we have the Supreme Council of Women who is pushing as well women and ladies to be in this, uh, sector, uh, from early age from, uh, university or even high school graduates that they should start on working on their ideas and come up with solutions. So you can see that everyone is up to, uh, being part of the ecosystem by putting in their ideas. >>And the government wants to be digitally completely transformed, and >>by certain >>they're pushing it hard to >>Absolutely. Yes, we have the governmental sector trying to migrate from legacy infrastructure to the cloud. I would say, uh and it's it's more efficient for government and also to the private sector as well. >>You know, one of the things that jumped out at me when I was in my rain visiting was there was a lunch. Uh, I'm sorry. Breakfast for women in tech. And I went there because I always go to those breakfast cause I really want to see and meet people. I had to get kicked out because it wasn't a table space. So I was for all the people that were there, Um, because I was the guy that was spot for women, it was sold out, was lying and lying to get in. So there's a huge interest of women in tech. I saw that firsthand. There are more and more people want to come in. So motivating women to consider Korean tech is really the focus. What steps do you see to make that happen? How do we take that to the next level? What's your view on motivating women to get into tech? How would you talk about that? >>Well, absolutely. I think it's really crucial to have a woman contribution within the field of cheque. But I believe there is some challenges, given our cultural norms of how man perceived woman working in the field of cheque, sometimes society burden woman from, you know, pursuing her passion to be in because it's a demanding field. I would say that it's, uh, equal to the medical field. You have to keep on updating and to be aware about what's going on. Um, so basically, that might create a bit of a burden for specifically married women of looking after her husband or their families. So I think, uh, this is one of the challenges. But the steps to overcome those challenge challenges is why, uh, you know, trying to shift and change the way, uh, society think about where women should position herself and what kind of job should she should be. And, uh, So I think the other thing is by having educational curriculum that we taught in schools, teaching both genders about the importance of, uh, how we are equal and how we can complement each other in that field because the future is in technology. So the young generation should understand this very well. >>How is the women, um, entrepreneurship going? Are they being finance for their ventures out there? What's the what's the What's the momentum and progress on women starting ventures? >>Yes, absolutely. We're lucky to have our first lady, the wife of the king who is heading the Supreme Council of Women who is pushing women to create their own businesses or to come to become an entrepreneur. Also, we have financings becoming through the government with an entity called Temkin will provide different plants and support all through, not financials only, but it covers other areas of businesses as well. So financing is not a problem again for an entrepreneur. Uh, woman. As an entrepreneur, you can always seek multiple options for financing, not necessarily inside. It can be international as well. >>So a lot of good capital there also, this fellowship opportunities. I noticed you were a Halsey in, uh, fellow. The fellowship with the Halsey in organisation. Talk about that. That experience? >>Well, I really loved the experience. We started in fact, last year, and we flew to Washington in July, and we've met with Amazon people who were really supportive. We got solution architects supporting us of how to build the solution that we want to deliver. And I got my CTO to get trained by the Amazon as well. So we found so much value and the courses and the mentorship they provided, uh, and I'm really glad to be part of that family and their CEO. She said, Now, uh, for a lifetime, you are part of our family, and, you know, it's all the support that we needed to get. >>It's a great community. What advice would you give to people who are out there who want to learn and get into cloud computing and take that step towards creating value on whether it's entrepreneurial or within a company. What's the secret formula that you would say our secrets to success? >>Absolutely. I think a cloud is a a massive, and it's a brilliant opportunity for any technology to be built on myself. I believe in the cloud. Most or all of my solutions is built on cloud. And now even me leading the digital lab on building infrastructure on cloud and basically it will give you more room. Uh, identify more gaps. You do assessment. You can utilise the tools that is within cloud, which is artificial intelligence machine learning. Uh, you call it so you can seize the opportunity to the maximum, and you can skill faster. So basically, you're not limited to your, uh, country. You can go across countries as well utilising cloud >>Catherine to talk about what's next for you. What's the next step? >>Well, uh, the next step in my new role or a new job leading on a digital innovation in 973 Labs is to finalise my strategy and also to acquire talented young people And, uh, you know, go through a programme, which is I designed where they get the mentorship, the support till they get a final product that will be invested in. And they can guarantee themselves a carrier, uh, within the digital love that I'm trying to lead on. Uh, and I think the projects that will be covering not specifically only infant IQ, it could be in any other industry. So, uh, we're trying to follow the recent trends, Uh, thanks to Amazon and Google and the other companies that we can extract data and create our own reporting. So to, uh, come up where we should be investing our time. >>That's great. I wanna ask you about the demographics of the folks in Bahrain. I noticed that they're very a lot of young entrepreneurs coming up and learn a lot of them. Um, is that true? >>Yes, Uh, our population, the majority of our youth, uh and I would say, um uh, the average age is in thirties until 35 or 36. So, relatively, we have so many young people or youth who was eager to learn. But again, we need the expertise. We need older people to also mentor and coach the young generation of how they should calculate the risk and come up with a proper business models and brilliant ideas. >>Well, I'm very impressed with the folks down there, I said before the pandemic. Unfortunately, the pandemic it, But we really wanted to have a cube location there, a lot of vitality out of action, a lot of good stuff going on. Certainly with the NWS region in there, it's really create a lot of value. And so we're looking forward to hearing more. And, uh, thanks for coming on and sharing your storey with us and for the folks out there watching. What advice would you give to women who are watching around the world around entrepreneurship? What's going on from your experience? What should we be doing and talking about? What's the Storey? I'll see this theme is bias, uh, inherent bias and in the culture, um, what would you share your thoughts on to the world? >>Well, I think the only advice I can give to all of the women out there just try something new to try to solve a problem. There are so many gaps we have around. Just look around. You just take one step forward and try it. At least once in your life, you can come up with a brilliant, uh, solution that serves all humankind, not only the people of your country. So even if the road is bumpy, just be have the courage, be resilient and go for it. >>And we're all connected on the Internet. So of course, we can communicate with each other and have a good time and and grow the community. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube and celebrating International Women's Day with us as part of our special presentation. Thanks for coming on. I really appreciate it. >>Thank you. It's my pleasure. Thank you so much. >>Okay, this is the cubes presentation of women in text. Global event Celebrating International Women's Day. I'm John for a host of the Cube. Thanks for watching. Yeah,

(cheerful music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to today's session of theCUBE's presentation of AWS Startup Showcase, New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Data Analytics, Cloud Management Tools, featuring Okera from the cloud management migration track. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got two great special guests today, Nong Li, founder and CTO of Okera, and Sanjeev Mohan, principal @SanjMo, and former research vice president of big data and advanced analytics at Gartner. He's a legend, been around the industry for a long time, seen the big data trends from the past, present, and knows the future. Got a great lineup here. Gentlemen, thank you for this, so, life in the trenches, lessons learned across compliance, cloud migration, analytics, and use cases for Fortune 1000s. Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> So Sanjeev, great to see you, I know you've seen this movie, I was saying that in the open, you've at Gartner seen all the visionaries, the leaders, you know everything about this space. It's changing extremely fast, and one of the big topics right out of the gate is not just innovation, we'll get to that, that's the fun part, but it's the regulatory compliance and audit piece of it. It's keeping people up at night, and frankly if not done right, slows things down. This is a big part of the showcase here, is to solve these problems. Share us your thoughts, what's your take on this wide-ranging issue? >> So, thank you, John, for bringing this up, and I'm so happy you mentioned the fact that, there's this notion that it can slow things down. Well I have to say that the old way of doing governance slowed things down, because it was very much about control and command. But the new approach to data governance is actually in my opinion, it's liberating data. If you want to democratize or monetize, whatever you want to call it, you cannot do it 'til you know you can trust said data and it's governed in some ways, so data governance has actually become very interesting, and today if you want to talk about three different areas within compliance regulatory, for example, we all know about the EU GDPR, we know California has CCPA, and in fact California is now getting even a more stringent version called CPRA in a couple of years, which is more aligned to GDPR. That is a first area we know we need to comply to that, we don't have any way out. But then, there are other areas, there is insider trading, there is how you secure the data that comes from third parties, you know, vendors, partners, suppliers, so Nong, I'd love to hand it over to you, and see if you can maybe throw some light into how our customers are handling these use cases. >> Yeah, absolutely, and I love what you said about balancing agility and liberating, in the face of what may be seen as things that slow you down. So we work with customers across verticals with old and new regulations, so you know, you brought up GDPR. One of our clients is using this to great effect to power their ecosystem. They are a very large retail company that has operations and customers across the world, obviously the importance of GDPR, and the regulations that imposes on them are very top of mind, and at the same time, being able to do effective targeting analytics on customer information is equally critical, right? So they're exactly at that spot where they need this customer insight for powering their business, and then the regulatory concerns are extremely prevalent for them. So in the context of GDPR, you'll hear about things like consent management and right to be forgotten, right? I, as a customer of that retailer should say "I don't want my information used for this purpose," right? "Use it for this, but not this." And you can imagine at a very, very large scale, when you have a billion customers, managing that, all the data you've collected over time through all of your devices, all of your telemetry, really, really challenging. And they're leveraging Okera embedded into their analytics platform so they can do both, right? Their data scientists and analysts who need to do everything they're doing to power the business, not have to think about these kind of very granular customer filtering requirements that need to happen, and then they leverage us to do that. So that's kind of new, right, GDPR, relatively new stuff at this point, but we obviously also work with customers that have regulations from a long long time ago, right? So I think you also mentioned insider trading and that supply chain, so we'll talk to customers, and they want really data-driven decisions on their supply chain, everything about their production pipeline, right? They want to understand all of that, and of course that makes sense, whether you're the CFO, if you're going to make business decisions, you need that information readily available, and supply chains as we know get more and more and more complex, we have more and more integrated into manufacturing and other verticals. So that's your, you're a little bit stuck, right? You want to be data-driven on those supply chain analytics, but at the same time, knowing the details of all the supply chain across all of your dependencies exposes your internal team to very high blackout periods or insider trading concerns, right? For example, if you knew Apple was buying a bunch of something, that's maybe information that only a select few people can have, and the way that manifests into data policies, 'cause you need the ability to have very, very scalable, per employee kind of scalable data restriction policies, so they can do their job easier, right? If we talk about speeding things up, instead of a very complex process for them to get approved, and approved on SEC regulations, all that kind of stuff, you can now go give them access to the part of the supply chain that they need, and no more, and limit their exposure and the company's exposure and all of that kind of stuff. So one of our customers able to do this, getting two orders of magnitude, a 100x reduction in the policies to manage the system like that. >> When I hear you talking like that, I think the old days of "Oh yeah, regulatory, it kind of slows down innovation, got to go faster," pretty basic variables, not a lot of combination of things to check. Now with cloud, there seems to be combinations, Sanjeev, because how complicated has the regulatory compliance and audit environment gotten in the past few years, because I hear security in a supply chain, I hear insider threats, I mean these are security channels, not just compliance department G&A kind of functions. You're talking about large-scale, potentially combinations of access, distribution, I mean it seems complicated. How much more complicated is it now, just than it was a few years ago? >> So, you know the way I look at it is, I'm just mentioning these companies just as an example, when PayPal or Ebay, all these companies started, they started in California. Anybody who ever did business on Ebay or PayPal, guess where that data was? In the US in some data center. Today you cannot do it. Today, data residency laws are really tough, and so now these organizations have to really understand what data needs to remain where. On top of that, we now have so many regulations. You know, earlier on if you were healthcare, you needed to be HIPAA compliant, or banking PCI DSS, but today, in the cloud, you really need to know, what data I have, what sensitive data I have, how do I discover it? So that data discovery becomes really important. What roles I have, so for example, let's say I work for a bank in the US, and I decide to move to Germany. Now, the old school is that a new rule will be created for me, because of German... >> John: New email address, all these new things happen, right? >> Right, exactly. So you end up with this really, a mass of rules and... And these are all static. >> Rules and tools, oh my god. >> Yeah. So Okera actually makes a lot of this dynamic, which reduces your cloud migration overhead, and Nong used some great examples, in fact, sorry if I take just a second, without mentioning any names, there's one of the largest banks in the world is going global in the digital space for the first time, and they're taking Okera with them. So... >> But what's the point? This is my next topic in cloud migration, I want to bring this up because, complexity, when you're in that old school kind of data center, waterfall, these old rules and tools, you have to roll this out, and it's a pain in the butt for everybody, it's a hassle, huge hassle. Cloud gives the agility, we know that, and cloud's becoming more secure, and I think now people see the on-premise, certainly things that'd be on-premises for secure things, I get that, but when you start getting into agility, and you now have cloud regions, you can start being more programmatic, so I want to get you guys' thoughts on the cloud migration, how companies who are now lifting and shifting, replatforming, what's the refactoring beyond that, because you can replatform in the cloud, and still some are kind of holding back on that. Then when you're in the cloud, the ones that are winning, the companies that are winning are the ones that are refactoring in the cloud. Doing things different with new services. Sanjeev, you start. >> Yeah, so you know, in fact lot of people tell me, "You know, we are just going to lift and shift into the cloud." But you're literally using cloud as a data center. You still have all the, if I may say, junk you had on-prem, you just moved it into the cloud, and now you're paying for it. In cloud, nothing is free. Every storage, every processing, you're going to pay for it. The most successful companies are the ones that are replatforming, they are taking advantage of the platform as a service or software as a service, so that includes things like, you pay as you go, you pay for exactly the amount you use, so you scale up and scale down or scale out and scale in, pretty quickly, you know? So you're handling that demand, so without replatforming, you are not really utilizing your- >> John: It's just hosting. >> Yeah, you're just hosting. >> It's basically hosting if you're not doing anything right there. >> Right. The reason why people sometimes resist to replatform, is because there's a hidden cost that we don't really talk about, PaaS adds 3x to IaaS cost. So, some organizations that are very mature, and they have a few thousand people in the IT department, for them, they're like "No, we just want to run it in the cloud, we have the expertise, and it's cheaper for us." But in the long run, to get the most benefit, people should think of using cloud as a service. >> Nong what's your take, because you see examples of companies, I'll just call one out, Snowflake for instance, they're essentially a data warehouse in the cloud, they refactored and they replatformed, they have a competitive advantage with the scale, so they have things that others don't have, that just hosting. Or even on-premise. The new model developing where there's real advantages, and how should companies think about this when they have to manage these data lakes, and they have to manage all these new access methods, but they want to maintain that operational stability and control and growth? >> Yeah, so. No? Yeah. >> There's a few topics that are all (indistinct) this topic. (indistinct) enterprises moving to the cloud, they do this maybe for some cost savings, but a ton of it is agility, right? The motor that the business can run at is just so much faster. So we'll work with companies in the context of cloud migration for data, where they might have a data warehouse they've been using for 20 years, and building policies over that time, right? And it's taking a long time to go proof of access and those kind of things, made more sense, right? If it took you months to procure a physical infrastructure, get machines shipped to your data center, then this data access taking so long feels okay, right? That's kind of the same rate that everything is moving. In the cloud, you can spin up new infrastructure instantly, so you don't want approvals for getting policies, creating rules, all that stuff that Sanjeev was talking about, that being slow is a huge, huge problem. So this is a very common environment that we see where they're trying to do that kind of thing. And then, for replatforming, again, they've been building these roles and processes and policies for 20 years. What they don't want to do is take 20 years to go migrate all that stuff into the cloud, right? That's probably an experience nobody wants to repeat, and frankly for many of them, people who did it originally may or may not be involved in this kind of effort. So we work with a lot of companies like that, they have their, they want stability, they got to have the business running as normal, they got to get moving into the new infrastructure, doing it in a new way that, you know, with all the kind of lessons learned, so, as Sanjeev said, one of these big banks that we work with, that classical story of on-premise data warehousing, maybe a little bit of Hadoop, moved onto AWS, S3, Snowflake, that kind of setup, extremely intricate policies, but let's go reimagine how we can do this faster, right? What we like to talk about is, you're an organization, you need a design that, if you onboarded 1000 more data users, that's got to be way, way easier than the first 10 you onboarded, right? You got to get it to be easier over time, in a really, really significant way. >> Talk about the data authorization safety factor, because I can almost imagine all the intricacies of these different tools creates specialism amongst people who operate them. And each one might have their own little authorization nuance. Trend is not to have that siloed mentality. What's your take on clients that want to just "Hey, you know what? I want to have the maximum agility, but I don't want to get caught in the weeds on some of these tripwires around access and authorization." >> Yeah, absolutely, I think it's real important to get the balance of it, right? Because if you are an enterprise, or if you have diversive teams, you want them to have the ability to use tools as best of breed for their purpose, right? But you don't want to have it be so that every tool has its own access and provisioning and whatever, that's definitely going to be a security, or at least, a lot of friction for you to get things going. So we think about that really hard, I think we've seen great success with things like SSO and Okta, right? Unifying authentication. We think there's a very, very similar thing about to happen with authorization. You want that single control plane that can integrate with all the tools, and still get the best of what you need, but it's much, much easier (indistinct). >> Okta's a great example, if people don't want to build their own thing and just go with that, same with what you guys are doing. That seems to be the dots that are connecting you, Sanjeev. The ease of use, but yet the stability factor. >> Right. Yeah, because John, today I may want to bring up a SQL editor to go into Snowflake, just as an example. Tomorrow, I may want to use the Azure Bot, you know? I may not even want to go to Snowflake, I may want to go to an underlying piece of data, or I may use Power BI, you know, for some reason, and come from Azure side, so the point is that, unless we are able to control, in some sort of a centralized manner, we will not get that consistency. And security you know is all or nothing. You cannot say "Well, I secured my Snowflake, but if you come through HTFS, Hadoop, or some, you know, that is outside of my realm, or my scope," what's the point? So that is why it is really important to have a watertight way, in fact I'm using just a few examples, maybe tomorrow I decide to use a data catalog, or I use Denodo as my data virtualization and I run a query. I'm the same identity, but I'm using different tools. I may use it from home, over VPN, or I may use it from the office, so you want this kind of flexibility, all encompassed in a policy, rather than a separate rule if you do this and this, if you do that, because then you end up with literally thousands of rules. >> And it's never going to stop, either, it's like fashion, the next tool's going to come out, it's going to be cool, and people are going to want to use it, again, you don't want to have to then move the train from the compliance side this way or that way, it's a lot of hassle, right? So we have that one capability, you can bring on new things pretty quickly. Nong, am I getting it right, this is kind of like the trend, that you're going to see more and more tools and/or things that are relevant or, certain use cases that might justify it, but yet, AppSec review, compliance review, I mean, good luck with that, right? >> Yeah, absolutely, I mean we certainly expect tools to continue to get more and more diverse, and better, right? Most innovation in the data space, and I think we... This is a great time for that, a lot of things that need to happen, and so on and so forth. So I think one of the early goals of the company, when we were just brainstorming, is we don't want data teams to not be able to use the tools because it doesn't have the right security (indistinct), right? Often those tools may not be focused on that particular area. They're great at what they do, but we want to make sure they're enabled, they do some enterprise investments, they see broader adoption much easier. A lot of those things. >> And I can hear the sirens in the background, that's someone who's not using your platform, they need some help there. But that's the case, I mean if you don't get this right, there are some consequences, and I think one of the things I would like to bring up on next track is, to talk through with you guys is, the persona pigeonhole role, "Oh yeah, a data person, the developer, the DevOps, the SRE," you start to see now, developers and with cloud developers, and data folks, people, however they get pigeonholed, kind of blending in, okay? You got data services, you got analytics, you got data scientists, you got more democratization, all these things are being kicked around, but the notion of a developer now is a data developer, because cloud is about DevOps, data is now a big part of it, it's not just some department, it's actually blending in. Just a cultural shift, can you guys share your thoughts on this trend of data people versus developers now becoming kind of one, do you guys see this happening, and if so, how? >> So when, John, I started my career, I was a DBA, and then a data architect. Today, I think you cannot have a DBA who's not a developer. That's just my opinion. Because there is so much of CICD, DevOps, that happens today, and you know, you write your code in Python, you put it in version control, you deploy using Jenkins, you roll back if there's a problem. And then, you are interacting, you're building your data to be consumed as a service. People in the past, you would have a thick client that would connect to the database over TCP/IP. Today, people don't want to connect over TCP/IP necessarily, they want to go by HTTP. And they want an API gateway in the middle. So, if you're a data architect or DBA, now you have to worry about, "I have a REST API call that's coming in, how am I going to secure that, and make sure that people are allowed to see that?" And that was just yesterday. >> Exactly. Got to build an abstraction layer. You got to build an abstraction layer. The old days, you have to worry about schema, and do all that, it was hard work back then, but now, it's much different. You got serverless, functions are going to show way... It's happening. >> Correct, GraphQL, and semantic layer, that just blows me away because, it used to be, it was all in database, then we took it out of database and we put it in a BI tool. So we said, like BusinessObjects started this whole trend. So we're like "Let's put the semantic layer there," well okay, great, but that was when everything was surrounding BusinessObjects and Oracle Database, or some other database, but today what if somebody brings Power BI or Tableau or Qlik, you know? Now you don't have a semantic layer access. So you cannot have it in the BI layer, so you move it down to its own layer. So now you've got a semantic layer, then where do you store your metrics? Same story repeats, you have a metrics layer, then the data centers want to do feature engineering, where do you store your features? You have a feature store. And before you know, this stack has disaggregated over and over and over, and then you've got layers and layers of specialization that are happening, there's query accelerators like Dremio or Trino, so you've got your data here, which Nong is trying really hard to protect, and then you've got layers and layers and layers of abstraction, and networks are fast, so the end user gets great service, but it's a nightmare for architects to bring all these things together. >> How do you tame the complexity? What's the bottom line? >> Nong? >> Yeah, so, I think... So there's a few things you need to do, right? So, we need to re-think how we express security permanence, right? I think you guys have just maybe in passing (indistinct) talked about creating all these rules and all that kind of stuff, that's been the way we've done things forever. We get to think about policies and mechanisms that are much more dynamic, right? You need to really think about not having to do any additional work, for the new things you add to the system. That's really, really core to solving the complexity problem, right? 'Cause that gets you those orders of magnitude reduction, system's got to be more expressive and map to those policies. That's one. And then second, it's got to be implemented at the right layer, right, to Sanjeev's point, close to the data, and it can service all of those applications and use cases at the same time, and have that uniformity and breadth of support. So those two things have to happen. >> Love this universal data authorization vision that you guys have. Super impressive, we had a CUBE Conversation earlier with Nick Halsey, who's a veteran in the industry, and he likes it. That's a good sign, 'cause he's seen a lot of stuff, too, Sanjeev, like yourself. This is a new thing, you're seeing compliance being addressed, and with programmatic, I'm imagining there's going to be bots someday, very quickly with AI that's going to scale that up, so they kind of don't get in the innovation way, they can still get what they need, and enable innovation. You've got cloud migration, which is only going faster and faster. Nong, you mentioned speed, that's what CloudOps is all about, developers want speed, not things in days or hours, they want it in minutes and seconds. And then finally, ultimately, how's it scale up, how does it scale up for the people operating and/or programming? These are three major pieces. What happens next? Where do we go from here, what's, the customer's sitting there saying "I need help, I need trust, I need scale, I need security." >> So, I just wrote a blog, if I may diverge a bit, on data observability. And you know, so there are a lot of these little topics that are critical, DataOps is one of them, so to me data observability is really having a transparent view of, what is the state of your data in the pipeline, anywhere in the pipeline? So you know, when we talk to these large banks, these banks have like 1000, over 1000 data pipelines working every night, because they've got that hundred, 200 data sources from which they're bringing data in. Then they're doing all kinds of data integration, they have, you know, we talked about Python or Informatica, or whatever data integration, data transformation product you're using, so you're combining this data, writing it into an analytical data store, something's going to break. So, to me, data observability becomes a very critical thing, because it shows me something broke, walk me down the pipeline, so I know where it broke. Maybe the data drifted. And I know Okera does a lot of work in data drift, you know? So this is... Nong, jump in any time, because I know we have use cases for that. >> Nong, before you get in there, I just want to highlight a quick point. I think you're onto something there, Sanjeev, because we've been reporting, and we believe, that data workflows is intellectual property. And has to be protected. Nong, go ahead, your thoughts, go ahead. >> Yeah, I mean, the observability thing is critically important. I would say when you want to think about what's next, I think it's really effectively bridging tools and processes and systems and teams that are focused on data production, with the data analysts, data scientists, that are focused on data consumption, right? I think bridging those two, which cover a lot of the topics we talked about, that's kind of where security almost meets, that's kind of where you got to draw it. I think for observability and pipelines and data movement, understanding that is essential. And I think broadly, on all of these topics, where all of us can be better, is if we're able to close the loop, get the feedback loop of success. So data drift is an example of the loop rarely being closed. It drifts upstream, and downstream users can take forever to figure out what's going on. And we'll have similar examples related to buy-ins, or data quality, all those kind of things, so I think that's really a problem that a lot of us should think about. How do we make sure that loop is closed as quickly as possible? >> Great insight. Quick aside, as the founder CTO, how's life going for you, you feel good? I mean, you started a company, doing great, it's not drifting, it's right in the stream, mainstream, right in the wheelhouse of where the trends are, you guys have a really crosshairs on the real issues, how you feeling, tell us a little bit about how you see the vision. >> Yeah, I obviously feel really good, I mean we started the company a little over five years ago, there are kind of a few things that we bet would happen, and I think those things were out of our control, I don't think we would've predicted GDPR security and those kind of things being as prominent as they are. Those things have really matured, probably as best as we could've hoped, so that feels awesome. Yeah, (indistinct) really expanded in these years, and it feels good. Feels like we're in the right spot. >> Yeah, it's great, data's competitive advantage, and certainly has a lot of issues. It could be a blocker if not done properly, and you're doing great work. Congratulations on your company. Sanjeev, thanks for kind of being my cohost in this segment, great to have you on, been following your work, and you continue to unpack it at your new place that you started. SanjMo, good to see your Twitter handle taking on the name of your new firm, congratulations. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much, such a pleasure. >> Appreciate it. Okay, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, you're watching today's session presentation of AWS Startup Showcase, featuring Okera, a hot startup, check 'em out, great solution, with a really great concept. Thanks for watching. (calm music)

>>from around the globe. It's the queue with digital coverage of AWS Public sector online brought to you by Amazon Web services. Welcome back. I'm stew minimum. And this is the Cube coverage of Amazon Web service Public sectors, online summit Always love. We have phenomenal practitioner discussion. Of course, public sector includes both government agencies, universities, education, broad swath, you know, inside that ecosystem and some really, you know, important and timely discussion we're having. Of course, with the global pandemic Kobe 19 happening. I'm really happy to welcome to the program Wei Li, who is a PhD and principal investigator as well as an assistant professor both Children National Research Institute associated with George Washington University way Thank you so much for joining us. >>Yeah. Thank you for the opportunity. We're here. >>Alright. Why don't we start with Ah, give us a little bit of you know, your research focus in general. And you know what projects it is that you're working on these days? Yeah, >>sure. So, yeah, so hello, everyone. So our laboratory is many interested in using computational biology and jim editing approaches to understand human genome and human disease. And we're particularly interesting in one gene editing technology will be called CRISPR screening. So this is a fascinating, high for proven technology because it tells you whether one doctor 20,000 human genes are connected with some certain pieces fit in type in one single experiment. So in the possibly developed some of the widely used every reasons to analyze the swimming data has been downloaded off by over 60,000 times. So it's really popular, and right now there are a couple of going projects. But basically we are trying to, for example, problem in machine learning and data mining approaches to find new clues of human disease from the original mix and screening big data on. We also collaborated with a lot of blacks around the world and to use this technology to use this technology to find new cures and drugs for cancer and other decisions. So this is the basic all the way off our current research programmes. Interns off the Conradi 19 research. I think one of the major projects we are having is that, um, we noticed that Christmas winning and other similar screening methods has been widely used in many years. Many research adapted to study waters infection. So in the past 10 years we have seen people you are using their Christmas screening and our AI suite, for example, to study HIV is a car wires, best bars, Western ire virus, Ebola influencers and also coronavirus. So that raises an interesting question from us if we collect all the screening data together. But these viruses, what a new information can we find that we cannot identify for the single study, for example, coe and identify new patterns or new human genes that are that are common in responsible for many different viruses? Type of all, we can find some genes that I work only for some certain people viruses so more well, we know that there are a lot of drugs that target different genes, and we are particularly interested in, for example, can repurpose some of these drugs to treat different hyper viruses, including Kobe, 18 19. So that's the one of the major profits off ongoing research, right and left ready to call the idea, writing So India. And we hope that we can find some new new Jim functions that after that that are broader, really essential for different hyper viruses. I also new drug targets that can potentially treat existing a new drug existing and new viruses, including compared to 19 >>Yeah, crisper. Shown a lot of promise is definitely a lot of excitement in the research community to be ableto work on this. You talked a little bit about, you know, big data, obviously a lot of computational power required to do some of the things you're talking about. Can you speak a little bit to the partnership between computer science and the medicine? How do you make sure on that? You know, there's that marrying of, you know, the people in the technology focus in the medical space. >>Yeah, so I think, Yeah, my my research background is actually from computer science. I call her on the grand graduates from their committed size. So I know a lot about some of the signs and have arisen. But right now it's quite interesting because our research for focus half on computer science and half on their medicine. So it's a complete heart experience, but it's really super was a super exciting to connect both women in science and medicine together. So I think most of the time we are focusing on the coding and the average analysis on. But at the same time, we also spent a lot of time like interpreting the results. In essence, we need a lot off. Yeah, knowledge from biology and medicine to make sense, to make our results since and interpret double in the end, we hope that our results can be They went into a son, for example, canonical, actionable solutions, including new drugs. >>Yeah, it's if you think about you know, the research space. You know, often you know its projects that you're taking months or years to investigate things for talking about the current code 19 pandemic. Of course, there's a critical need today for fast moving activities. So you know what? What are the outcomes from the cover? 19 aspects of of what you're working on. What are some of the outcomes that we might be able to help patients survivability and other things regarding, You know, this specific disease? >>Yeah, So I think there are two major are I would say there are two major benefits from their outcome of our research project. So the first the first thing is that we hope to find some genes that have that can be potentially drug targets. So if they are existing drug second heavily genes, then that would be perfect because we don't need to do anything. Apologies. We just need to try that. Extend existing drugs Toe cabinet is James and in the end, we hope that these drugs can have the broad on the wire. I would say the broad answer. Borrow activity. That means that and you leave, for example, if these drugs can be potentially used to treat Cooley 19 and sometimes in in several years later in the future if there's a new virus coming out. Hopefully they were doing like they're it's already the drugs that target known Gene. Hopefully, that's there were assume the noon numerous that never happened in something the future. But I hope that when the new risk is coming, we already have the new drugs to track it this way. Already have existing drugs to target these viruses, so that's one part and the alibis that way. We have, like, spend a lot of kind of, for example, collecting the genomics and screening data, and we are hoping that our research results can be freely accessible around the road by many different researchers in different laps. So that's why we are rely on AWS to build up there to process and to analyze the data as well as to, uh, to build up an integrated database and websites such that are the outcomes off our projects can be freely accessible around the world. Many other researchers. >>Yeah, great. I'm glad you connected the dots for us. For aws can you speak a little bit too? Obviously, Cloud has, you know, the ability for us to use, you know, nearly infinite computational capabilities. What's specific about AWS helps you along that project. Uh, let's start there. >>Yeah, So I think our AWS really helps us a lot because we developed on average and process their screening data actually takes, like, two or three days to Christmas one data. But if you were talking about, like, tens or hundreds or even thousands off the screen data existing, the high high performance cross team doesn't really help because it takes maybe years to finish. AWS provides, like flexible computing resources, especially the easy two instance that we can quickly deploy and process in military short amount of time. So our estimation is that we can reduce the amount of Time Media 2% to process the poverty Christmas. We need data from months to just a few days. So that's one part and the other guys that we are trying to build up the website and database, as I mentioned before, with which we host a large amount of data. And I think in that sense, AWS and the commuting instance as well as the AWS RDS service really helped us a lot because we don't need to worry too much about. There's a lot of the details of the after deployment off their database and the website. We just go ahead and use that as a service is really straightforward and save us a lot of kind of effort. >>Yeah, and you talk about the sharing of data. Information is so important, But of course it would, talking about medical data highly regulated. So you know what's important to the cloud to make sure that you can share with all the other researchers yet still make sure that there is the security and compliance that is required? >>Yeah, so yeah, that's a really good question. So right now, we don't really need to do if the patient information because all the data we get this from the public domain, it's It's both on the human sound lines, not on human patients. So we don't have their concerns about the privacy protections at this moment. But I think in the future, if you want to integrate genomics state our reach, this screen indeed A, which is already in my research plan. I think the highly secure AWS system actually really provided a really nice for us to do this job. >>Can you give us a little bit? Look forward as to where do you see this research going? What applicability is there before? What you're doing now? Both. You know, as this current pandemic plays out as well as applicability beyond Corp in 19. >>Yeah, sure, I think I think one of their major focus off our current, The company in 19 project is that we hope to find some drug targets tohave the broader under fire activity. So I think in the future, if they knew where it's coming out of the estimated locally in the 19 we hope that we are well prepared for that. I think in the future they're sharing as well as collateral cloud computing. You'll be becoming more and more important as you can see that most of us are working from home right now. So it's really critical to require us to have the platform toe accelerate accelerating sharing between research labs and around the world. And I think many different. I think aws provides this really nice preference for us to do this job well. >>Wei Li, thank you so much for sharing with our audience your updates, really important work. We wish your team the best of luck and hope that you also stay safe. >>Yeah, thank you so much. >>Alright, Stay with us for more coverage from AWS Public sector Summit online. I'm stew Minimum And thanks as always for watching the Cube >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

from London England it's the cube covering Koopa inspire 19 emia taught to you by Koopa hey welcome to the cube Lisa Martin coming to you from London I'm at Koopa inspire 19 pleased to be joined by one of Koopas spent setters hit me here is alla Williams the managing director and chief procurement officer at Barclays al welcome to the cube Thank You Lisa thanks for having me so Barclays is a three hundred plus year old Bank three hundred and thirty five years I think I also was was headquartered in London I didn't know this until he did some research Barclays is the pioneer of the ATM yes and a credit card in the UK credit card why first credit card in the UK and the pioneer in inventor of the ATM correct yes so when we think of an organization that is three hundred and thirty five years old we think how agile is that organization how transformative can it be talk to me about what it's like at Barclays from a digital perspective before we get into some of the procurement stuff which or not but tight and culture like that's a great question right could you think about a three hundred thirty-five year old Bank how innovative could it can it be right how agile can it be and the market in the the sector we work in requires us to be very agile because banking is a disrupted sector especially on the retail and consumer side expectations around technology and mobile capabilities and digital transformation are the most significant they've ever been in this sector and so for Barclays it's it's absolutely key that we deliver on those capabilities both in terms of our front office for our consumers and our corporate clients as well as for our own employees within the bank how influential is the consumer side because as consumers we are so used to being able to get anything that we want we can buy products and services we can pay bills with a click or swipe on the on the business side it's harder for businesses to transform and innovate it's a lot of other risks and security issues how influential is Barclays Barclays is your retail your consumer business in terms of your b2b work and that's a great question because I think the the experiences that shape people's expectations come from their interactions in retail and consumer when it comes to b2b and traditionally business-to-business commerce and financial transactions haven't been nearly as sophisticated streamlined or frictionless you know as you would in a consumer model so the expectations are built on the consumer side in consumer to business type models and then the business and business models been playing catch-up for the last several years as a result talk to me about now the role of finance leaders I was reading surgery that Kupa did recently have 253 uk-based financial decision makers and a big number of them I think it was 96 percent said we don't have complete visibility of all of our spent there's a big opportunity there to work with a company like Cooper but talk to me about how the role of the chief procurement officer is changing you've been doing it for quite a while you're a veteran right some of the trends that you have seen that you've really jumped on and said this is the direction we need to be going in right so I've been the chief procurement officer of Barclays for two and half years and the CEO of a large global technology company for nine years before that so I think the the the role of the chief procurement officer has changed significantly over the course of the last say 10 years five years two years we're at a point now where the chief procurement officer is seen as a source of and the organization of procurement is seen as a source of innovation it's seen as a source of capacity creation for the the the organization for the company and it's also seen as sort of a steward of the portfolio of spins for that particular organization to ensure we're maximizing the utility and value of that spend and of that supply chain so the expectations for procurement have tripled quadrupled or more fold in the last you know four or five years some of the interesting things that we're hearing from Koopa and from their customers and partners today is beyond simply initiative to simply but beyond you know dramatically improving procurement and invoicing and dispensing and leveraging the platform as one source for visibility of all that spent but it's being transformative to completely other areas like I was hearing a story of a customer who redefined procurement and is actually positively impacting corporate sustainability yes Wow so talk to me a little bit about I know one of the things that you really thrive on is competition how are you leveraging that and maybe your old American football days to build and maybe foster a sense of collaborative competition within your team to transform procurement at Barclays yes so I think that whether it's in sport or whether it's in business I think the concept of teams is key and effective teams are built on trust they're built on empowerment they they're built on collaboration open communication limited asymmetry and information as it's passed and that's all about kind of driving agility for whether you're on this on the football field American footballer or other football or on or in a business environment of business context so you know it's really and as a CEO and for all of the leaders on my team it's also about being a player coach and knowing when you need to be a player when you need to sort of roll up sleeves contribute in a particular area or particular solving a particular problem but more importantly when you need to be coached and and help those players sort of and those team members in on the team sort of step up to the challenge and coach them to be more success see Bennet Berkeley's a couple years now talk to me about your use case the purpose has with Koopa what are you guys doing together and what are some of the transformations that both internally and externally you've been able to achieve yeah so the relationship with coop has been great again I joined to make a couple of years ago one of the sort of first pillars associated with our overall transformation journey of centralizing procurement from five different procurement or six different procurement organizations really to moving to strategic locations to building out a new organization structure and operating model for for procurement I won't go into all that but one of the key pillars was around technology and we didn't have a common procure-to-pay or source to pay capability that extended or threaded throughout the bank for managing and supply chain so early on when I joined Barclays partnered partnering with Koopa working both of our teams working very effectively together to deploy sort of country by country and region by region we're now in 11 countries with the Koopa source to pay platform we're going to point to six more by the end of this calendar year and over 95% of our spend is flowing through Koopa as a multinational banks so it's been a significant component of our overall transformation journey for for Barclays and part of that transformation journey the technology piece is important that all a lot of its cultural we talked about a history of a three hundred and thirty-five year old organization but also going from five different procurement organizations down to one using a central platform that's challenging to get folks on board right being comfortable with change is your spirit of competitiveness was that a facilitator of getting adoption so that you could get them well I think so I mean I think to get the most out of teams and the most out of any organization large or small you need to galvanize around a common set of goals and objectives the the adage we ought to be pulling on the rope together to achieve achieve the end result and I think in the case of the sort of our Koopa journey both in terms of its strategy and overall deployment it was something more or less our entire procurement organization was able able to galvanize around and in feel like they were a part of and it it created an identity for us within Barclays as a procurement organization as well and kind of put his front and center with our business units and our stakeholders in a way we had we'd never been before so in terms of procurement having a seat at the board table is that something now that you have the ability to do with Barclays and be much more of a strategic driver of business yeah and look at Barclays compared to some of my other experiences it's not an it's not an issue of not having a seat at the table we might have a seat at too many tables sometimes there's a lot of attention on procurement within Barclays to help it deliver on its strategic objectives so with that seat comes a lot of responsibility so I often will coach my teams to ensure that they understand kind of that that that component of it's not just about having a seat at the table it's about what we're going to contribute what are we going to do differently when we're at that table when we're helping shape the decisions for the organization and what are the accountabilities and responsibilities that will pick up as a result and deliver on those promises that's absolutely critical one of the things that was talked about this morning is to trust Rob Bernstein talked about it they also had a guest speaker Rachel Botsman who's a trusted expert it was such an interesting conversation you know we talked about any chuck event that the cube goes to you always talk about trust got to have trust in the data you gotta have trust in your suppliers but what they were talking about here was really being an enabler of trust but cooper really working to earn the trust of its customers tell me about how has earned your trust and also allowed you to have those better discussions at the board table so that you have marked trusted relationships with your executive and your peer team yeah I mean it all starts for Barclays at the very top of the house in front office because we're in the business of trust I mean Bank a bank is in the business of trust that's what we deliver and promise to our consumers and our corporate clients and I think you know within procurement we need to make sure we're sort of delivering on that same promise around around trust and building trust with our teams and with our suppliers in the case of Kupa frankly it was about asking them to ensure they appropriately set expectations with me with my team in terms of what we could or couldn't do with the capability right don't over promise and under deliver but actually be very prudent and practical about what we're gonna be able to get done and then deliver on those promises to the best of your ability but if something and I always do if something goes so not according to plan right it's be open communicative and direct with the issue and how we're going to address it that to me is how we build trust in any team and that's how we built trust with Kupa through our transformation over the last two years that's critical mister your point no deployment probably ever goes perfectly according to plan there are always things that happen whatever it is software hardware is that we're talking about and I think for companies to address that confront it help the customer through those challenges to me that's more valuable I'm saying everything went beautifully was flawless that's not reality right I completely agree and I think that's that's what separates good from great companies to write is their ability to build that trust whether it be within their supply chain with their clients with their employees and look it's it's a journey it's not something you're one and done and you can say okay we've got the trust you can lose it as easy as you can obtain it and you have to keep a focus on on those trusting relationships should think about that we've earned this trust but we have to focus on it so we don't lose it so we grow X having the focus on that because you're right whether it's a deployment of software it's not one and it's the same thing with any sort of trusted relationship right it's maintaining that it's ensuring that there's value right being delivered on both sides that's right tell me a little bit about your ability Barclays ability as a spend setter in this program that Cooper has to influence technology directions like they talk a lot about the community all the insights that they're able to deliver to the community because of the community as Burton is able to be a strategic her gir with Cooper rather than just a customer yeah Phil we are I mean Rob and his team Raja Ravi the entire crew are very receptive and they're very collaborative in hearing from an organization like Barclays now look I'll be the first to admit Barclays and in banking and banking specifically in the UK it's a different animal than many other companies and sectors that kupo would work in so what might work for other companies doesn't always work for us and kind of flipping that around there's certain things that we need from Koopa that that we've been able to partner with them to deliver over the course of the last two years and the relationship of coop has been fantastic they hear us they listen to us they help us understand what the solution can do what it can't do or won't be able to do in the near term and then how do we augment that in the right way so we don't create cottage industries of activity with Impa cure med when we could be leveraging the capability of ghupat to deliver on those services right so you mentioned a little bit about what's next for you guys in terms of rolling out the deployment a little bit more broadly last question for you is some of the news that came out today with the expansion of Koopa pay with American Express for example and just some of the other innovations that Koopa is making what are some of your thoughts what are some of the things that excite you about the direction are going in well yes so on the Koopa pay front I'm actually going to be on stage with Ravi tomorrow talking about Koopa pay because Mark Lee card is also a key component of that capability for the first virtual card that they integrated probably I believe it was yeah and and so so I think about payments is sort of the one not the only but one of the next frontiers from a source to pay or a procurement perspective and it's about how do we innovate in the payment space to get away from having that through the old traditional methods of adding suppliers you know detailed information to our vendor masters so that we can then eventually get an invoice and then reconcile payment remittance to invoices and sort of work through there's a lot of cost in that a lot of time and very little speed we want to move the dial on speed the value we want to move the dial on efficiencies and eventually get to a point where we can offer things like early payment discounts so by having control over our our payment process and that's where Koopa pay and the Barclaycard partnership with Koopa pay is really played a key role in making that happen so in q1 we made our commitment to deploy Koopa pay in q1 after we're through some of our deployments through the rest of this year on the base of the platform and look forward to continuing that journey next year on the payment side one last thing that just popped up I was doing some research and the b2c side is transformed much faster a lot of demand from the consumers we talked about that a moment ago do you see what the direction could the pay is going in with Barclays card for example as bringing in some of the consumer implements to start facilitating the acceleration that's needed there and I think yes I think that's exactly right because again when you think about the consumer side of payments or use it we're all using our phones we're using other digital means we're using wearables we're using different ways of buying and paying especially in retail and the first question we have to ask ourselves why can't those innovations be applied in a b2b space now kupah pay is I think a start of sort of that journey and certainly not the end you know destination but certainly I think it sets us off in the right direction yeah we as consumers are quite demanding yes I'll thank you for doing you on the cube ensuring the Barclays spends that our success rate good luck tomorrow in your keynote thank you for having me thank you pleasure I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube from cuca inspire London 19 thanks for watching

>>Live from Denver, Colorado. It's the cube covering comm vault. Go 2019 brought to you by Combolt. >>Hey, welcome back to the cubes coverage of combo go 19. Stu Miniman is here with me, Lisa Martin and we are wrapping up two days of really exciting wall to wall coverage of the new vault and we're very pleased to welcome a couple of special guests onto the program. To help us wrap up our two days, we have Miranda foster, the vice president of worldwide communications for comm vault and Al Bunty is here, the co founder, former COO and board member. Welcome Miranda and Al. Great to have you on the program. Thanks Lisa. So a lot of energy at this event and I don't think it has anything to do with our rarefied air here in the mile high city. Al, let's start with you. >>Well, there's other things in Colorado. >>There are, yeah, they don't talk about it. They talked about that on stage yesterday. So owl, you have been with convo ball as I mentioned, co-founder. What an evolution over the last 20 years. Can you take us back? >>Surely. So, um, yeah and it's been, it's, it's really kind of cool to see it coming together at this point. But if you go back 20 years when we started this, the whole idea was around data. And remember we walked into a company that was focused on optical storage. Um, we decided it would be a good company to invest in. Um, for two reasons. One, we thought they were really great people here, very creative and innovative and two, it was a great space. So if we believed we believe data would grow and that was a pretty decent thesis to go with. Yeah. And then, then it started moving from there. So I tell people I wasn't burdened with facts so I didn't understand why all these copies were being made of the same set of data. So we developed a platform and an architecture focused on indexing it so you just index at once and then could use it for many different purposes. >>And that just kept moving through the years with this very data centric approach to storage, management, backup protection, etc. It was all about the data. I happened to be lucky and said, you know, I think there's something to this thing called NAS and sand and storage networks and all those things. And I also said we have to plan for fur on scale on our solution of a million X. Now it was only off a magnitude of about a thousand on that, but it was the right idea. You know, you had to build something to scale and, and we came in and we wanted to build a company. We didn't want to just flip a company but we thought there is a longterm vision in it and if you take it all the way to the present here it's, it's really, um, it's, it feels really good to see where the company came from. It's a great foundation and now it will propel off this foundation, um, with a similar vision with great modern execution and management. >>Yeah. Al, when we had the chance to talk with you last year at the show in Nashville, it was setting up for that change. So I want to get your view there. There are some things that the company was working on and are being continued, but there's some things that, you know, Bob hammer would not have happened under his regime. So want to get your viewpoint as to the new Convolt, you know, what, what is, what are some of those new things that are moving forward with the company that might not have in the previous days? >>Yeah, that's a good questions. Do I think Mo, a lot of the innovation that you've seen here, um, would have happened maybe not as quickly. Um, we, the company obviously acquired Hedvig. Uh, we were on a very similar path but to do it ourselves. So you had kind of been a modern, we need to get to market quicker with some real pros. I think, um, the, the evolution of redoing sales management essentially was probably the biggest shift that needed to be under a new regime, if you will. Yeah. >>So Miranda, making these transitions can be really tricky from a marketing standpoint. Talk, talk us through a bit, some of the, how do you make sure trusted yet innovative and new that you've accomplished at this show? >>Well, trust it is obviously the most important because the Bob, the brand that Bob and Al built really embodies reliability for what we provide to our customers. I mean that's what gives them the peace of mind to sleep at night. But I'll tell you, Sanjay has been with us for just eight months now, February of 2019 and it's been busy. We've done a lot of things from a points on J transition with Bob and now to his point we've, we've acquired Hedvig, we've introduced this new SAS portfolio and you're exactly right. What we need to do is make sure that the reliability that customers have come to rely on Convolt for translates into what we're doing with the new Convolt and I think we've done a really good job. We've put a lot of muscle behind making sure, particularly with metallic that it was tried, it was trusted, it was beta tested, we got input from customers, partners, industry influencers. We really built it around the customer. So I think the brand that comm brings will translate well into the things that we've done with these, with these new shifts and movements within the company >>on, on that questions too as well. Um, I think Miranda is a good example of somebody that was with the company before a tremendous talent. She's got new opportunities here and she's run with it. So it's kinda that balance of some, uh, understood the fundamentals and the way we're trying to run the business. And she's grasped the new world as well. So, >>and Rob as well, right? Robin in his new, >>yeah, that's another good point. So that was all part of the transitioning here and Sanjay and the team had been very careful on trying to keep that balance. >>Change is really difficult anywhere, right? Dissect to any element of life. And you look at a business that's been very successful, has built a very strong, reliable brand for 20 years. Big leadership changes, not just with Sanjay, but all of the leadership changes. You know, analysts said, all right, you've got to upgrade your Salesforce. We're seeing a lot of movement in the area. You got to enhance your marketing. We're seeing metallic has the new routes to market, new partner focus, so PSI focuses. We're also seeing this expansion in the market, so what folks were saying, you know a year ago come on is answering in a big way and to your point in a fast way that's not easy to do. You've been here nine years since the beginning. Can you give us a little bit of a perspective, Miranda, about some of the things that were announced at the show? >>How excited everybody is, customers, partners, combo folks. How do you now extend the message and the communications from go globally after the show ends? That's an awesome question. I'm really passionate about this. So you know, Monday we announced metallic, we announced a new head of channels and alliances and Mercer Rowe, we had crazy technology innovation announcements with activate, with the acceleration of the integration with Hedvig with the momentum release that we put out today. We're also doing cool stuff with our corporate social responsibility in terms of sponsoring the new business Avengers coalition. That's something that Chris Powell is really championing here at, at the show and also within combo. So we're very excited about that. And then when you add people like yourselves, you know the tech field day folks, because not everybody can be here, right? Not everybody can be at go. So being able to extend the opportunity for, for folks to participate in combo, go through things like the cube through things like tech field day and using our social media tools and just getting all of the good vibes that are here. Because as Al says, this really is an intimate show, but we try to extend that to anybody who wants to follow us, to anybody who wants to be a part of it. And that's something that we've really focused on the last couple of years to make sure that folks who aren't here can, can get an embrace the environment here at Commonweal go. >>It's such an important piece that you're here helping with the transition I talked about. It's important that some of the existing >>get new roles and do responsibility going forward. What's your role going to be and what should we expect to see from you personally? Somebody has got to mow the lawn. >>Yeah. >>But yes, do I, I'll stay on the board. Um, we're talking through that. I think I'll be a very active board, not just the legal side of the equation. Um, try and stay involved with customers and, and strategies and, and even, uh, potential acquisitions, those kinds of things. Um, I'm also wandering off into the university environment. Uh, my Alma mater is a university of Iowa. I'm on the board there and uh, I'm involved in setting up innovation centers and entrepreneurial programs and that kind of thing. Um, I'll keep doing my farming thing and uh, actually have some ideas on that. There's a lot of technology as you guys know, attacking Nat space. So, and like I said, I'll try to keep a lot of things linked back into a combo. >>What Al can have confidence in is that I will keep him busy. So there's that. And then I will also put on the table, we agree to disagree with our college athletic loyalties. So I'm a big kid just because we don't compete really. Right. So I mean, but if I won Kansas wherever to play, then we would just politely disagree. Yeah. Well that's good that you have this agreement in place. I would love to get some anecdotal feedback from you of some of the things that you've heard over the last three days with all this news, all these changes. What are you hearing from customers and partners who you've had relationships with for a very long time? >>I think they're, I think they're all really excited, but, and maybe I'm biased, but they liked the idea that we're trying to not throw out all the old focus on customers, focus on technologies, continue the innovation. I'm pleased that we, Miranda and the team started taking this theme of what we do to a personal level, you know, recovery and those kinds of things. It isn't just the money in the business outages. It's a really a effect on a personal lives. And that resonates. I hear that a lot. Um, I asked our bigger customers and they've loved us for our support, how we take care of them. The, the intimacy of the partnership, you know, and I think they feel pleased that that's staying yet there's lot of modern Emity if that's a good word. I think fokai was what you, I think it's the blend of things and I think that really excites people. >>We've heard that a lot. You guys did a great job with having customers on stage and as a marketer who does customer marketing programs, I think there's nothing more validating than the voice of a customer. But suddenly today that I thought was a pivot on that convo, did well as Sonic healthcare was on main stage. And then he came onto the program and I really liked how he talked about some of the failures that they've been through. You know, we had the NASA talking yesterday, NASA, 60 years young, very infamous, probably for failure is not an option, but it is a very real possibility whether you're talking about space flight or you're talking about data protection and cyber attacks and the rise of that. And it was really, I'd say, refreshing to hear the voice of a customer say, these are the areas in which we failed. This is how come they've helped us recover and how much better and stronger are they? Not just as a company as Sonic healthcare, but even as an individual person responsible for that. That was a really great message that you guys were able to extend to the audience today and we wanted to get that out. >>I loved that as well. I think that was good. I have also back on driving innovation, I always felt one of my biggest jobs was to not punish people that failed. Yeah. I, you know, with the whole engineering team, the bright people in marketing, I, I would be very down on them if they didn't try, but I never wanted them to feel bad about trying and never punish them. >>And one of the things Matthew said on main stage, first of all, I love him. He's great. He's been a longtime CommonWell supporter. I love his sense of humor. He said, you know, combo came to me and said, can you identify, you know, your biggest disaster recovery moment? And he was like, no, because there's so many. Yes. Right? Like there's so many when you're responsible for this. It's just the unpredictability of it is crazy. And so he couldn't identify one, but he had a series of anecdotes that I think really helped the audience identify with and understand this is, these are big time challenges that we're up against today. And hearing his use case and how con ball is helping him solve his heart problems, I think was really cool. You're right. I loved that too. He said, I couldn't name one. There are so many. That's reality, right? As data proliferates, which every industry is experiencing, there's a tremendous amount of opportunity. There's also great risk as technology advances for good. The bad actors also have access to that sort of technology. So his honesty, I thought was, was refreshing, but spot on. And what a great example for other customers to listen to the RA. To your point, I, if I punish people for failure, we're not going to learn from it. >>Yeah, you'll never move forward. >>Miranda. So much that we learn this week at the shows. Some, a lot of branding, a lot of customers, I know some people might be taking a couple of days off, but what should we expect to be seeing from con vault post go this year, >>continue to innovation. We're not letting our foot off the gas at all. Just continuing innovation as as as we integrate with Hedvig continued acceleration with metallic. I mean those guys are aggressive. They were built as a startup within an enterprise company built on Comvalt enterprise foundation. Those guys are often running, they are motivated, they're highly talented, highly skilled and they're going to market with a solution that is targeted at a specific market and those guys are really, really ready to go. So continued innovation with Hedvig integrate, sorry, integration with Hedvig with metallic. I think you're just going to be seeing a lot more from Combalt in the future on the heels of what we consider humbled, proud leadership with the Gartner magic quadrant. You know the one two punch with the Forrester wave. I think that you're just going to be seeing a lot more from Combalt and in terms of how we're really getting out there and aggressive. And that's not to mention Al, you know what we do with our core solutions. I mean today we just announced a bunch of enhancements to the core technology, which is, which is the bread and butter of, of what we do. So we're not letting the foot off the gas to be sure >>the team stay in really, really aggressive too. And the other thing I'd add as a major investor that I'm expecting is sales. Now I'd love to just your, your final thoughts that the culture of Convolt because while there's some acceleration and there's some change, I think some of the fundamentals stay the same. Yeah, it's, it's right to, and again, that's why I feel we're at a good point on this transition process. You alluded to it earlier, but I feel really good about the leadership that's in, they've treated me terrifically. I'm almost almost part of the team. I love that they're, they're trying to leverage off all the assets that were created in his company. Technology, obviously platform architecture, support base, our support capabilities. I, I told Sandy today I wish she really would have nailed the part about, and by the way, support and our capabilities with customers as a huge differentiator and it was part of our original, Stu knows he's heard me forever. Our original DNA, we wanted to focus on two things. Great technology, keep the great technology lead and customer support and satisfaction. So those elements, now you blend that stew with really terrific Salesforce. As Ricardo says, have you guys talk with Ricardo soon? But anyway, the head of sales is hiring great athletes, particularly for the enterprise space. Then you take it with a real terrific marketing organization that's focused, Oh, had modern techniques and analytics on all those things. You know, it's, it's in my opinion, as an investor especially, I'm expecting really good things >>bar's been set well. I can't think of a better way for Sue and me to our coverage owl veranda. Thank you. This has been fantastic. You've got to go. You get a lawn to mow, you've got a vacation to get onto and you need some wordsmithing would focus your rights. You have a flight ticket. They do five hours. Hi guys. Thank you. This has been awesome. Hashtag new comm vault for our guests and I, Lisa Martin, you've been watching the cubes coverage of Convault go and 19 we will see you next time.

>> From Bahrain, it's the Cube. Covering AWS Public Sector Bahrain. Brought to you by, Amazon Web Services. >> Welcome back to the Cube coverage here in Bahrain, the Middle East, with AWS Summit celebrating the opening of their new region and all the economic development going on around it. A lot of change, cloud computing changing the landscape for startups, businesses, and the government for Cloud First. Mohamed Khalifa, senior manager, Economic Development Board for ICT. Welcome to the Cube, good to see you. >> John, it's a pleasure to see you again, and be here on the Cube with you all. >> You know, we're excited, second year the Cube's been here. What a stark contrast. Now, it's not just talk of the Amazon region being open, it's operational, startup scene is more dynamic, you guys are a big anchor in all of this. >> Absolutely. >> Give us the update. >> So, in the last year, the startup scene in Bahrain has grown by about 100% of where it previously was. Part of that's driven by the fact that Amazon is here, and the region is changing as a whole. You have Microsoft and Google and other companies all realizing the potential in this region. That's driven by the fact that there's a 40% year on year growth in cloud businesses, and uptake of those businesses as well. So, the talent pool as a result, is increasing in scope, and people are popping out of these companies and government ministries, and are energized to now start their own businesses. Aside to that, what you've started to see in Bahrain and the region as a whole, is a firm interest in governments in introducing regulations that are meaningful to these companies. Now, the way the governments work in these regions, especially in a country as small as Bahrain, is that we're able to legislate very fast on shore, and we're able to do that with a very close ear to the ground on what businesses need, and what they're requesting. So, it almost functions as a corporation and a enterprise that wants to do best for its subsidiary corporations. >> And you guys want to take care of the citizens as well, you guys listen to the societal impacts, the demographics a lot of young people. >> Absolutely. >> So the news around a cloud computing degree, bachelors degree, four years, or one years, that's going to help. >> Yeah. >> The entrepreneurial equation, you guys have been really the stewards of that. >> Mhmm. >> How is that going, is there any plans to have entrepreneurship being more formally taught in the universities, how do you guys think about the entrepreneurship equation? >> So, there are definitely thousands of people right now going through cloud training courses, because we see that as being the future. We ourselves, as a government, offer to make all of that training free. So, insofar as a person wants to attain a certification or a company wants to train one of their employees, that whole process is 100% free, granted by the governments of Bahrain. The reason why we do that, is because the human capital in the country, is seen as our single greatest asset, more so than anything else. We're not a heavy oil economy, oil is 17 and a half percent of GDP, financial services is similar level, tourism is a similar level, manufacturing is a similar level. So for us, if it's not oil, it's people. And people are what will generate everything in those subsectors that's relevant. So for us, the training programs that we're instituting with the universities, or the vocational training providers, et cetera, are all key to this. >> The insourcing strategy is something you're seeing that technology's enabling. I mean, we're seeing with corporations, they're building their own stacks. >> Yeah. >> They're building developers in house, you guys as a country saying, "hey, you know what, "we're not going to outsource to others, "we're going to build our sovereignty with the people." >> Yeah. >> This is about talent. >> Yeah. >> Now the younger generation, they want to move fast. (laughing) >> Yeah. >> They don't want anything passed down from the old guard, older folks like my age. >> Absolutely. >> They want speed, they want freedom to develop, and build something. This is kind of a cultural shift. >> Absolutely. >> What's your take on that? What's the sentiment around that culture, the younger generation, in terms of app developing technology and all them. >> Yeah, I mean, I think it's a bit split. You have a government that's very interested in insourcing. A lot of the private sector still does a lot of outsourcing. So, there's a happy middle between them. We try to make the visa policy quite straightforward for they guys that want to bring talent from abroad, where they can't fill that talent up locally. And there is a place for companies like Systems Integrators, et cetera, to fill those gaps up. But at the same time, insourcing remains key. As I mentioned, government is fully developing their own capability, and is primarily doing that by pulling students out of universities, and through those programs, and advising universities on what those programs should look like, to make sure that there's a match, and a synergy, between where we see the future of technology and the future of the services we're building with, you know, what the youth are learning. And the reason I talk about government, and it's typically not nice to talk about government as a fast mover, but in this part of the world, government tends to move faster than business when it comes down to innovation. >> Yeah. >> It's just, it's a weird flip that's happened between what you see in parts of the west, and what you see in this part of the world. So, what the changes that we make on the government side. >> Mhmm. >> End up being flags that indicate to the private sector some of the changes they're going to start seeing. >> So, that's the regulate fast piece. >> Yeah. >> So moving fast, set the pace for business, but not meddle in the startups world. >> Absolutely. >> We had a good chat with the central bank. >> Yeah. >> Same thing, they did some quick things, they got a sandbox, they do quick certifications. So I got to ask you the next question, startups. Nurturing them, attracting them, getting people excited by them, any new plans? You guys have any new programs? >> Yeah. So, right now, we've made the cloud crediting for businesses that are setting up in Bahrain, up to a certain cap, 100% free for them to use cloud credits on any cloud hosting provider basing operations in Bahrain. So, the reason we do that, is because we think, we already have a series of incentives, that already pay up to 50% of their capex and opex, we just increased the cloud side because it actually made more financial sense for us as a government. >> Yeah. >> And it drove innovation across these sectors and these industries. Aside from that, and aside from the capacity building, we've changed a series of laws, that resolve a couple of things. One is, the safety of investors in these companies, and the safety of their founders. Which include things like, including chapter 11 protection under the law, introducing laws against anti-competitive behavior at the governments level, and a few other sectors. But the more interesting thing for me, aside from those, I mean, that's obvious, right? >> Yeah. >> You want to help people fail, and you want to help remove friction from the investment environment, and you want people to build up capacity in training. But aside from that, the more interesting things that we're doing around open banking, APIs, so we're the first country in the region that has now set up a process for opening up all our banks APIs. That basically means at an infrastructure level, financial services companies can now build on top of banks, and create value added services. It's the same thing with the government, where the governments has now started building API bridges, using Amazon, and I'll give you one example of the first value added product that's come out of that. We've just released a product called EKYC, electronic KYC, entirely built out on the block chain, it's the first of its kind, globally. And in real terms, what that does, is it lowers the lifetime costs of doing electronic KYC from about $8,000 to a per-transaction cost of about $2 per transaction. So, it's a real meaningful difference for these companies, and the reason why you could deploy something like that so quickly and so effectively is because of the fact that the governments building on APIs and opening up some of that infrastructure, and the central bank is asking banks to do so as well. >> API standards, money, software innovation, kind of interesting fintech innovation strategy. >> Yeah. >> Kind of a data control plane, but the banks are protected, 'cause they're just exposing APIs. >> Yeah. >> Entrepreneurs can innovate right custom applications. >> Absolutely. >> Is that the thinking? >> Absolutely, so that combined with the fintech sandbox, which I think the central MAT bank must have talked you about. >> Yeah, it's phenomenal. >> Allows us to kind of regulate the licensing of the fintech products. So, it's safe for consumers, and it's safe for banks as well. Along side the fact that we're opening up the technical layer of the banks into these companies. >> You know, I think they got that right, I think you guys have a great collaboration equation, balancing regulatory and innovation. And the startups are going to take advantage of that. When the region's up and running, which it is, and starts humming along, you're going to start to see a flywheel of startups. >> Absolutely. >> The question that is on my mind, that I'd love to get your thoughts on is, the ecosystem support, because you said trust, and you guys have telegraphed and postured very trustfully as a country. >> Yeah. >> To entrepreneurs, that's clear. Can that ecosystem get localized? The service providers, the law firms, the angel investors, you know, the stakeholders that are always around. 'Cause people got to fall and they got to fail. >> Yeah. >> But they got to get back up again. They need that system of nurturing. >> Yeah. >> What's your take on all-- >> We spent a lot of time, my role as an economic developing board, is very much focused around keeping our ears close to the ground with respect to companies. And we listen to what both younger companies and smaller companies and large companies need. And the way we've looked at it, is why try to legislate along the lines of the fastest growing, most innovative companies, which tend to be these startups and SMEs in the country. And we tend to work, our role, is really what we call team Bahrain, and that strategy is to nurture a combination of all the regulators, >> Uh-huh. >> All the universities, all the schools, every single player, all the private sector players, students, into a collectivized understanding of where we want to go. And based on that, we constantly have an ongoing conversation with everybody, including the VCs about how we can meaningfully make impacts. >> Yeah. >> So just on the VC point, we recently set up and will have fund to funds, which is $100 million fund of funds, it puts money directly into venture capital funds, which then can redeploy that investment back into startups. The only request that we typically have for that fund, is that they set up a presence in Bahrain. In so far as they're going to receive capital. What that means is that there's going to be a critical mass in the country of venture capital funds that are now closer to those startups, and in a direct conversation with every part of society, whether it is government regulation all the way down to private sector. >> So you got some capital enablement there. >> Absolutely. >> That's awesome. >> We'll see about the capital markets, and you guys some developments goin' on there. >> Yeah. >> Final question I want to get your thoughts. From last year to this year, in looking forward, Mohamed, what are you most excited about right now? >> I'm excited about a whole lot. >> Come on, give me the top two, top three. >> So, the top three, there's stuff I can't talk about to be honest. >> Oh come on! (laughing) >> And you're going to see it come out in the next month. So there's stuff that's going to come out with respect to capital markets, and simplifying the investment. >> Yeah. >> Removing friction from the investment environment, and introducing greater amounts of volume. The other thing that I'm very excited about continues to be the capacity building that we're doing in universities with the AWS Educate program, that's continuing to expand in Bahrain. >> Mhmm. >> As well as other programs beyond AWS Educate, run by companies like Microsoft, >> Mhmm. >> Google with their development program. So there's a lot of fantastic capacity building work going on. And then I would also say, it's back to what I was saying earlier, it's just excited to see what companies are going to start building as we're opening up the infrastructure. We're working very closely with them and the regulators to make sure that as they build on top, they're not stopped by regulation, that the regulation constantly understands what they're trying to achieve. >> I like what you talk about, you got an ear to the ground, you're listening to what's going on in the marketplace, it's going to be, I think a lot of software surprises are going to come. >> Absolutely. >> You're going to start to see some, you know, what look like weird ideas turn into the best thing. Who would have thought that Airbnb would be successful. >> Yeah. >> Their original business plan was putting cots on the ground and selling cereal. >> Yeah. >> Now, they've changed the hotel industry. We're looking forward to seeing you guys do a great job, and we appreciate you supporting the Cube, to come here, it's awesome. >> Thanks for having me. >> And we hope to have the Cube in Bahrain next year as the team, covering you guys, and documenting what's going on. >> We look forward to continue to work with the team. >> Well, thank you very much, the Cube coverage at AWS Summit, Bahrain, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. Be back with more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> from Bahrain. It's the Q covering AWS Public sector Bahrain brought to you by Amazon Web service is >> Okay Welcome back, everyone to the cube coverage We are hearing by rain for a W s summit where cloud computing is changing the games. The Fintech panel discussion Yasmine el Sharif, head of Fintech Innovation Unit, Central Bank of Rain Thank you for joining >> us. Thank you for having me >> Elmo Yacht. Whose founder and CEO of Ammonia Technologies Thank you for coming on. Thank you for having so We're very robust Conversation before they turn on the cameras Fit in tech is hot. I'll see in global fintech Everyone knows what that is, but it's interesting because entrepreneurship and innovation is not just for start ups. It's for countries and hearing by rain, this ecosystem and the mandate to go cloud first has had a ripple effect. We were talking about open banking, mandate, open banking versus regulation, chasing innovation, holding it back. You guys here taking a different approach. Take a minute to explain the philosophy. >> Yeah, I think there's there's benefits to being late adopters to the game. I think in the case of behind it's been a very interesting journey. I think the we started with the whole AWS. But if you look at the prerequisites of technical adoption and creating Data Pool's for analytics to run on, I think the what's interesting about Bahrain is it's really led by regulation. If you look at the prerequisites of creating a digital economy, what's happening in financial service is, or the digitization or openness of financial service. Is it really one context off the bigger picture of Bahrain's digitization plan or the economic strategy? And really, what happens here is if you look at first built the data fools and or the data centers bring a W. A s in and create the data centers. Number two is creator data or cloud First policy. Move the entire government onto the cloud and then give the ownership of the data to the people by implementing the Bahrain personal data protection laws. Once you've done that, then you've given the ownership to the people and you've created what we have is we started with a unique identifies. So the citizens of the country or the residents of the country have a unique identify our number where they're known by once you've done that and then you start mandating certain sectors to open up with a P I integrations. You're creating a very, very interesting value proposition. It creates a much faster you leap frog, a generation of technology. You're going from the classic screen scraping technologies or whatever to a very a completely open infrastructure and open a P I. Where things air cryptographic Lee signed. People are in control of their data, people can control the mobility of their date, and you're really creating a very robust data pool for a lot of algorithms to sit on. >> You know what I love about this has me were talking before he came on cameras that you guys are thinking holistically as a knocking operating system is being in a geek that I am. I love that. But it's not just one thing you're doing, it's a it's a system and it's it's a modernization view. Now we all know that financial systems, power economies and fin tech innovation unit, but you're in. This is important. You gotta have that. That leg of the stool, that pillar that's working absolutely sandbox. You have technology mechanisms to roll in tech, move things quickly moving fast. What's the strategy? What if some of the key things What's the sandbox? >> Let me start by saying The Kingdom of Bahrain has always been considered as a centre of excellence as a financial centre of excellence. And we do realize at the Central Bank in order for us to maintain that position, we have to innovate. We have to remain dynamic and agile enough to make the necessary reforms within our regulations to meet the dynamics off the digital economy. Technology is changing the paradigm off the financial system on the changes happening extremely fast. Regulators have had to come up with a mechanism whereby they can harness and test the feasibility of these innovations whilst putting the risks in a controlled environments as regulators were not typically assigned to host incubators to host startups. However, because of all this change in technology, it has become extremely essential that we come up with a regulatory approach to enable startups as well as existing financial institutions to test out their innovative financial solutions in a controlled environment. So a sandbox is really a controlled live bounds time bounds environment, enabling startups as well as existing financial institutions to test out their innovative solutions under the strict supervision off the regulator, without being required to abide by full regulatory requirements directly with volunteer customers. >> You have to put this trick standards now but means sandboxes. What developers? No, it's a collaborative approach, absolutely not being an incubator. But you're setting up a rules of engagement, Senator startups to take what they know how to do >> exactly >> end up sandboxes in the cloud. That's what everyone does >> absolutely, and our journey with the sandbox has been very successful. We've launched our sandbox back in 2000 and 17. Up to date, we have 35 companies that have been admitted into the sun box. We have been able to graduate to companies successfully. One of them has been licensed as a crypto acid provider, the other as an open biking service provider. We have four other companies in the pipeline ready to graduates. I think all in all, our experience with Sun Box has enabled us to grow and develop his regulators. It has enabled us to maintain open communication with animators, to come tea, to learn the needs of innovators and to enable innovators to live, get familiar realized. With the regulatory environment of the Kingdom of Bahrain, >> you know, you guys are doing some really pioneering work. I wouldn't want to say it's really commendable. I know it's fast and new, but if you look at the United States with Facebook there now asking to be regulated regulation if it comes too late is bad because you know things got out of control and if you're too early, you can put a clamp down and stifle innovation. So the balance between regulation and innovation has always been an art, if you will. >> Exactly. >> What do you guys, How do you view that? What's the philosophy? >> So from a regular perspective, we think that regulation and innovation goes hand in hand, and we have to embrace innovation open heartedly. However, having said that, regulators have to run all common sense checks, meaning that we don't accept an innovation that will potentially pulls more harm to the financial stability of the economy as opposed to the advantages that puzzles. We've passed the number of different regulations to support innovation in the financial services sector dating back to 2014 when we first issued our payment service provider licenses allowing more competition and innovation within the payments sector. We've issued CROWDFUNDING regulations. We've issued robo advisory regulations. We've issued insurance aggregator regulations, crypto asset service provider regulations, open banking regulations, Justin in a few. And I think that each of the regulations that we have issued solves a specific pain point, whether it's to enhance financial inclusion, whether it's to empower customers by retaining ownership back, uh, of their financial information and data, Whether it's too also empower startups and to enable them to get it gain access to funding through digital platforms. >> Have dual. I want to get you in here because as an entrepreneur, like I love all that great, I just wanna get funded. I want my product to market. I need a capital market that's going to be robust. And I need to have that's capital providers state venture capital for private equity supporting their limited partners. So I want to see that I don't wanna be standing there when I need gas for my car. I need fuel. I got to get to the next level. This is what I want And he bought >> on. I think, the one thing John that is very important that people look at in the context of fintech today. Raising money investing into fintech Regulatory uncertainty is one that defines scalability today. Once your technology is proven, where you go next really is dependent on the regulator that you'll be dealing with in the context of that specific activity that you'll be performing. In the case of Bahrain, I must say we were blown away by the receptiveness. We in what way? Yes, yes, mean mentioned open banking, for example. We got into the regulatory sandbox, which you hear a lot about sandboxes all around the world. We got into the sandbox. We got into the sandbox with contact with with with an idea of building and accounts aggregator direct FBI integration to these banks. And we got into the sandbox. We There were no regulations at the time. They like the idea. We started bouncing ideas back and forth on how to develop it. We developed the technology. We started piloting the technology. We integrated to 15 banks in the country on a sandbox environment. The consul, the white paper on open banking, was listed. They sent it out for consultation. We integrated on a production environment to more than 70% of the banks in it in the country. The central Bank of Bahrain mandated open banking across the entire nation. With every retail bank all in a period of less than 18 months. That's insane. That's the kind of context. So as a no Vester exactly so as an investor or as an entrepreneur that looks at the sector. The question is here. If anything, I think the regulator in Bahrain is the one that's leading the innovation and these air the benefits of being late adopters. We get to test out and see what's going on in the rest of the world and really develop great regulations that will embrace and and foster innovation. >> You know, I love the liquidity conversation because this neck goes to the next level. Liquidity is a wonderful thing started. Wanna go public? If that's what happens in the U. S. Mergers and acquisitions, we have an incubator that we're gonna interview here flat Six labs just had to come. One of their companies got sold to match dot com. So you're seeing a lot of cross border liquidity. Yeah, this is a new dynamic. It's only gonna get stronger, more come. He's gonna come out of my reign in the region. Liquid is important. Absent. So how do you guys want to foster that? What's the strategy? Continue to do the same. >> So from a regular perspective again, we don't really holds. Thank you. Beaters are actually two accelerators, but what we do as we refined our regulations to support startups to gain access to liquidity, for example, are crowdfunding regulations that have been passed in 2017 and they support both. Equity is one of financing crowdfunding, including conventional as well as Sharia compliant. Crowdfunding transactions were also currently working on refining our regulations for enabling venture capitalists to take roots and marine and to support these startups. >> Yeah, I think John, you mentioned two things you mentioned regulation leading. When you mandate something like open banking, you are ultimately pushing the entire sector forward, saying you better innovators fastest possible. And there's a gap that you need to you need to basically bridge, and that really loosens up a lot of liquidity when it comes to partnerships. When it comes to acquisitions, when it comes to these banks ultimately looking for better solutions, so they that's the role of the regulator. Here we are seeing a lot of VC activity come to the region right now, the region is only starting to open up. AWS just went live a few months ago. We're seeing the cloud adoption start to really take effect, and this is where you'll start seeing real scalability. But I think the most compelling thing here is Previously people would look at the Middle East with a boot with a bit of skepticism. How much innovation can really take place and the reality is here. There are a few prerequisites that have been put in place. Foreign ownership is at 100% cloud. First policy. There's a lot of things that can really foster innovation. And we're, I mean, where as an entrepreneur, where living proof off this whole Team Bahrain initiative of the fact that you can get in you can build in accounts aggregator in a country that never even had the regulations to adopted to mandate it and to be Ultimately, I think Bahrain will become the global reference point for open banking very soon because it has mandated a regulation of open AP eyes with cryptographic signatures ultimate security frameworks with a robust infrastructure across an entire nation. And don't forget, we still have a population of below the age of 30 70% of our population below. So it gives a very compelling story t test your technology. And then what we end up saying is, once you're on AWS or any cloud for that matter than the scalability of the technology just depends on where you want to go in there. >> No doubt the demographics are solid here, and I love the announcement here. The bachelor's degree. Yeah, cloud computing. We've seen some data science degrees, so new skills are coming on. My vision is interesting. I think that would interest me about the region of Amazon. Being here is these regions create revitalisation? >> Yeah, you >> guys are in perfect position with this Modernization trend is beautiful, not only to be a template for the world but a center for global banking. So I think to me, is that, you know is I'm trying to put together and connect the dots of where this goes in the next two decades. I mean, if crypto currency market continues to get matured and stabilized, that's still flowing with a lot of money. A lot of money in the relay >> absolutely >> was not just the region business to do here for couples to come here. It's you guys playing a role in global financial system. That's of interest to me. What's your vision? >> Absolutely. I think that regulators around the world are starting to realize the importance of collaborating together, to try and work on policy challenges in line with innovation within the financial service of sector and to share experiences to share lessons learned at the Central Bank of Bahrain were a member of the Global Financial Innovation Network, which is an initiative that has Bean passed by the F C A in the UK Again, we're also a member of the authentic working group of the GCC and through these two different initiatives, we work alongside other regulators to collaborate on solving policy issues, to solve, to share experiences and knowledge and to try and harmonize our regulations. Because of the end of the day, startups and innovators ultimately will want to scale up and want to serve customers across the friend jurisdictions. So it's important to have that kind of harmonization in terms of regulations to foster innovation as well as to safeguard the overall security of the international financial. Um, >> keep partnerships. Do you guys need to do to kind of go global on this 20 year vision? Is there other things they have to fall into place? That needs to happen? >> I think >> 20 years is a long time, I say in the next. Let's take five years, for example. If you say in the next five years and where I see this going, the question is, what do entrepreneurs and startups need to look at a jurisdiction and say That's where I want to test my technology. You need a robust infrastructure. You need a regulator than embraces you. You need technical subsidies and financial subsidies that are available, and then you need an independent arm that can really hand hold you and take you to that >> thrust. Its critical trust, money making absolutely ability. >> Just add to that and Byron, we take great pride in our human capital, which we believe is one of our biggest assets. And today, with having your Amazon web service is in Bahrain, this has enabled training of young Bahrainis for the data and knowledge economies which is expected Thio greet around 5000 jobs within becoming five years through different schemes such as Amazon education. For example. >> This is super exciting, which we had more time. Congratulations. Love the vision again. Occupiers like to make money. They wanted environments could be trustworthy and some scalability on behind it. So good luck. We're behind you. We'll keep following up. Thanks for having a cube coverage here and by rain for AWS. I'm John Ferrier. Stay tuned for more after this short break.

>> From Bahrain, it's the Cube. Covering AWS Public Sector, Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Everyone welcome to the Cube here in Bahrain, for AWS in the Middle East, Manama Summit. I'm John for the Cube coverage. It's cloud computing, new Amazon region, a lot of innovation. But two great guests we have, Huda Ahmed Mohsen, who's the Chief of Information Technology and the Ministry of Information and Authority. Welcome to the Cube. And Sameera Mohammed Al Atawi. You are the Information and Communication Technology Director at the American University in Bahrain. Thank you for coming on. >> Thank you so much for having me here. >> Great to have you on. The ministries are mandated to move to the cloud, Huda, so we know what's coming for you, 2020. The goal is cloud first in Bahrain. We covered this last year. How's that going? On plan? >> It is on plan and is in the process. We start in November 2017. We start our journey with the clouds. We start moving our load smoothly. We're planners. Face a lot of challenge in the beginning, of course, as all of the ministries. Then with help the IGA with our governments, we move smoothly. I think now we reach a good position that we can reach our vision in Salah. >> Well, it's great that the government in Bahrain has a mandate for all the ministries to move to the cloud. I have to ask you, share with the folks watching, why the move to the cloud? What was the big reason why the cloud first was in place? >> See, technology's moving fast now, and the speed and security and the availability is very important to us as a ministry, especially for ministry information. That's why we decide, and as a government, vision, of course, we did decide to move to the cloud. >> A lot of integration from the old way to the new way. What are some of your observations between the two? >> Of course, a lot of changing, a lot of difference, because if you need to just establish any projects in an a normal way, how much time you will have spent, and how much resources you will have spent? And a cloud, you can just imagine. It is with a click. >> Sameera, you're in a new role. Talk about your new role where you were before. This is not new to you, the cloud. You've had your toe in the water before. You've been playing around with the cloud. Now with the American University in Bahrain, full steam ahead, a lot of pressure, lot of need, desire? >> I think, yes, it is not new for me. I'm in the IT field like know for ages. I wouldn't say the years. But then, yes, it's not new, but in Bahrain polytechnic we are having the same journey, like migrating to the cloud. It's a new challenge in the American University of Bahrain. It's a new startup, entrepreneur university. But then the interesting thing that I have joined them like three weeks ago and now the IT is up and running within two weeks. So with the help of the cloud and AWS, our servers now all up and running. By the way, this is our first day in school. So our students there just taking their formal classes as per today. So this is a very proud moment. >> And the servers are on the cloud, powering everything? >> Yes, we have more data on the cloud at the moment, and we have also 5365, and we have our ERPC Stem, as well. It's all in the cloud. So within two weeks, that's an amazing story to be told. >> Versus the old way was months, years? >> Well, actually, it's for every institution there are some challenges and there are some pros and cons, but I think the most beautiful thing about Bahrain polytechnic that everybody was working as a team and we understand each others issues. So regardless the time, there always been a support and faith and trust in IT just to deliver the organization mission and vision. This is the same with the American University of Bahrain. There is a huge trust and faith in IT that they will derive the trust formation, or the change to the future. Ironically, the future's here. >> Yeah, and the cloud region is beautiful out here. The impact academic is something that we're going to be watching closely, because the training is coming too. We're seeing that in the announcements here around a cloud computing degree, more skill development. But I have to ask you from a business standpoint in the academic area, what's the main use cases for cloud? Is it the curriculum? Is it the operations? What is some of the key cloud areas you're innovating on? >> Very interesting question. I think we have like a blend of use cases. We have the operational use cases, and we have the academic use cases as well. I mean, the most important for us is in the university is the academic. Now how we can empower our students to face the challenges of the future and the market demand. So we are sensing a lot of interest about the artificial intelligence, robotics, big data, and this morning when I was just scrolling down the menu of AWS, I've been seeing this a lot. So how we can imbed this technology or the reading material like an AWS educate in our courses and material, versus the operational use cases, how we can deliver the business objective in an entire mode and in a most efficient way. You know, like in university, we have so much critical time that we don't afford losing IT, like exams, posting grades, even for our students graduation projects. It's become easier and easier for the business, however with the aid of IT. >> And the agility is very important because the expectation from the students is high. >> It's way high. I mean, the expectation and the use is already there. So, not like before, not like my age, you know, like students, they get to introduce technology when they got to the university. Now all of our students, they already know and use the technology before they join. >> Huda, talk about the ministry, because you guys on the government side, very progressive, doing new things. You got Amazon's region here, which is going to create a revitalization. You're in the middle of it. What are some of your observations on the things that are going on that are new for you guys that are a positive? >> Seeing now a cloud maybe as a ministries and as a government project, the most new thing that we get that the new environment. This is totally new environment. You know if you just have any new thing or any new environment, you have resistance from everyone, because it's a new thing. >> People fear change. >> Yes. >> They don't want to change. >> Of course. Even sometimes the change is good, but this is the mentality of people to resist a change. As a government because we have one vision, which is all the ministries working within this vision. We really plan it well, I think. And we do it well. As you see now in Bahrain, the time that they establish the cloud until now, you can see how many projects in the process, how many project already done. >> You know, cultural change, we cover this. We go to hundreds of events. We cover all around the world, mostly in the United States, but culture's number one. People always want to push back against change. However, the benefits that you were pointing out, Sameera, are undeniable. Two weeks, talk about standing up critical infrastructure for whether it's curriculum or for services for citizens. It's hard to debate, to justify the old way. It's pretty hard. (chuckles) Maybe some political in there, but, I mean, ultimately, the proof is there. That has to be factored in. How do you guys do that? Do you just show people the data? Look what we did. Is that how you get things through? Is it more cultural? >> I think we just discuss in a panel about even let's talk about only the part of the financially thing. Before I was in IT, if you want to just make anything, and data sent out on any projects, how much time you will have spent to bring the devices, to bring the servers, to connect it, to do it. How much time you will have spent, even in the financially procedures, as a government, of course? Now it is, if you have any problem or any projects, you just by click finish it and done. >> I'm very impressed with Iran, second year the Cube's been here. The things we've talked about last year have been executed. They're executing. The region's up and running. The cryptocurreny is in place. We covered that just now. We're going to hear about some curriculum for degrees. But last year, you mentioned the panel. You guys were just on the AWS We Power Tech. Last year, Teresa Cross hosted a big breakfast, and I was lucky enough to attend that. I actually got kicked out of my seat, because with so many women that wanted to sit down, I happily gave up my seat for that. It was a packed house. Women in tech is very real and growing. You guys were just on a great panel talking about this. What was going on in the panel? What was the key topic? >> Well, actually, the key topic is celebrating women in IT. And I think women now they are flourishing in the IT field. We're showing lots of power and strength. Also I think women in nature, we are dealing with problem solving like in a natural way, as well as team buildings. So it comes with our genes. On top of that, the technical power and the technical thinking and the experience in the IT field, of course it adds a lot of confidence when we are presenting our plans. And we see that society is welcoming the woman workforce in IT field more and more every day. So I think this is something that we should celebrate and we should put a lot of highlight on it. Knowing that the value of woman is really growing. >> You were just talking about the time change, how things are faster. Things are getting done much faster, so things are accelerating, and combined with more job openings, more roles are opening. It's not just coding. It's creative, design thinking. So you're seeing a surface area of opportunities. Huda, you're seeing this as well in the government. This is a bigger field now. Your thoughts on how you see the panel. >> Yes, but maybe Sameera will have more experience in this area. >> On the skill gaps question that comes up a lot, there's so many job openings coming. There's a region here, there's entrepreneurs and startups. What are some of the new skills that folks are trying to learn? What do you guys think? >> Well, actually on that, coming from an educational field, we know that cloud computing is like number one set of skills that is on demand for the coming few years. But again, knowing that, it will be as essential as we should not think about it. It just will be transforming as a very catalyst. The way that we're thinking of electricity. At the beginning it was a big deal. Later on, it just there, and it has to be there for us to move as a society, for us to move as an economy. Then we're moving to the real things as, for example, blockchains and we're talking about artificial intelligence. And the technology itself is just not as important unless it has some feed in the economy development or in the society change. So I think this is how we can see that happening. >> So overall, you both think that cloud computing is going to revitalize the area? >> Definitely. >> Of course. >> Definitely, in a big way. I mean, the market, the first skill set is looked at in the IT field and is how many training, how many certificates have you taken in cloud computing? On top of that, robotics, big data, but the most important thing, how to make the technology benefit the citizens. In our case, the students, how we can deliver our classes in a better way. How we can transform the business of university from on campus to study from anywhere. Though we have a very amazing campus in American University of Bahrain. >> Looking forward to covering you guys. Final question for you guys. What's next? What do you guys have coming up in this next year? A lot of activities? What are the goals? What are some of the things you're trying to accomplish? >> Our next thing that we are planning to complete on this cloud project, to shift all our environment to the cloud to success in this, and to implement it in a good way that we can really use it in a good way, because you know, sometimes you will see the cloud and do lose it, but you cannot use it and really benefit way that you can get all the benefit from it. So it show our religion now and our next step to use it inventory. >> I think for us and the American University of Bahrain, we had yesterday an amazing meeting with Teresa, and having our CEO, Dr. Susan in the meeting as well. And I think there is a lot of great anticipation of what we can do together. So something that is put on the table that we want to sort of strengthen this relationship in terms of integrating our courses with AWS, as well as looking forward for new opportunities like training and certificate in the field and so forth. >> This is super exciting, benefits the citizens, students, new educational opportunities, new jobs, new services, whole new oasis. >> I think this is all, it's all about... >> The cloud oasis. This is the Cube coverage. We are here in Bahrain for AWS Summit here. I'm John Furrier, be back with more after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee. (light upbeat music) It's theCUBE. (light upbeat music) Covering Commvault GO 2018. (light upbeat music) Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome back to Nashville, Tennessee. This is Commvault GO, and you're watching theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman. My cohost is Keith Townsend. And I am thrilled to welcome to the program, Al Bunte, who's the Chief Operating Officer at Commvault. Thanks so much for having us and pleasure to see ya. >> Thanks for having me. >> Hold on. In your keynote this morning, your CEO did a little bit of the talking. We made the joke that you might be the Teller to his Penn there. >> (laughing) >> So Keith and I will talk for a little bit, and then we'll let you get in. >> Fine. >> All right. >> I'm used to that. >> All right. So Al, we've really had a good day here. We've talked to some of your customers, talked to partners, talked to a lot of people here. The story that's coming across is Commvault's a company we know but maybe don't know the Commvault of today. So what's some of the messages you want customers to kind of come away with from the show, and then we'll get in from it from there. >> Yes, so we're focusing on trying to get the message across that we've simplified. We're in a complex world, as you guys well know. You have to do it through automation. Lots of it. Orchestration, et cetera. And we're trying to drive outcomes that are better for our IT customers out there. Almost that simple. >> Yeah, you use the word simple. Actually I liked in the keynote there was a little back and forth you had. Cloud was supposed to be simple and cheap. And when people actually got in and did it, they found out that it really was neither. >> Al: Correct. >> The word that was used in the keynote was, well you want to be smart and that might lead to things that are simpler and everything. Bring us inside a little bit to what Commvault is doing that is smarter to lead to easier, simpler down the road. >> And or better outcomes. >> Stu: Sure. >> I agree. So yeah, again as you guys know, as new technologies and or infrastructures come out like cloud, their initial use case is we're just a parking lot for data. So just write it up there and whatever works. Well it turns out that's simple, but now if you really want to use that data and those capabilities up in the cloud for cooler use cases, now you should be doing it smarter. So we talked, guys, about automation again. We talked about how you even write that data initially. Write it natively, so there isn't a conversion back and forth. That's a lot of latency. And then throughout everything we're talking about, we're adding a lot of machine learning, analytic capabilities, maybe overusing the word AI but you know leading down that path, and it makes a big difference. Cause these are big complex operations. >> So let's talk about this simple and smarter lesson. We've obviously seen a lot of change come out of Commvault. I went to Commvault GO last year. Just between this year and last year, you guys have made strides. Licensing model completely changed. As you talk to customers who are dealing with these complexities as a result of cloud and they look at simplified licensing, what have been some of the lessons learned over the past twenty years that have made you guys comfortable making which I have to say is a pretty bold decision in licensing? What has enabled that decision? >> It's a good question, Keith. I think it gets at that's what they want (laughing). >> (laughing) >> It's about that simple. >> Seems simple enough. >> Yeah we went off and talked to not just enterprise customers but midmarket customers. Remember, we're doing a lot of our activity through partners, so you have a third party. You don't want to get too confusing there. So we pushed hard on that idea, both in quoting, selling, and applying, and we just worked it a lot with our customer base and determined simplicity, by the way, is the number one criteria these days. It trumps cost, it trumps risk reduction, it trumps capabilities. People want it's got to be simple. Or I prefer simplified. Not simple dumb, simple smart. >> All right so Al, Commvault has quite a few employees. >> Yes. >> You've got quite a lot of customers. >> Al: Yes. >> You've got some very well-funded startups in this space. How does a Commvault compete? As the COO, how do you put the organizational structure in place, and how do you enable the company to be able to compete against some of these well-funded new players? >> Yeah so that's always a challenge, it really is. So I think personally, I have to have philosophies like, you have to change as a company. No resting on your laurels. You guys know that in tech industry, you can't rest on your laurels. Number one. Number two, we used to have to compete and change just a little faster than our competition. Now you have to change faster than startups. So everything we do, we're trying to drive change, we're trying to drive responsiveness, we've moved to rapid dev models. Again, I know you guys are well versed on it. We want to be able to respond to the market back to pricing, licensing, messaging, extremely fast. Back to the way Bob and I started the business, is we always, always, always believed you have to have the best technology. You can't go to sleep on that. You can't go on autopilot. And in our space you have to have the best support. So don't try to finesse those things. There may be other things to finesse, but just go all out and really drive the technology, the support, and then where you guys are going now get your act together on marketing, packaging, pricing, messaging, positioning, all those things. And that's where we're really bringing our game up. >> Well on that competition front, you guys have a, I don't know if it's an advantage, disadvantage, you can tell me, against your competitors. You have up to 100,000 customers who have used this product or a variation of this product for 20 years. So disruption may not be the word they're looking to hear. Some of these customers may be wanting to hear steady, reliable solution that I've used over the years, served me well, while you're trying to appeal to a customer that we had on earlier that said, "Man, the idea that Commvault is going to sass and having these rapid deployment cycles is what I love about the company." Brand new customer to Commvault, how do you balance those two, and is it an advantage or disadvantage? >> It's a great question, and it's tricky >> Keith: (laughing) >> is the right answer. But I think I've heard a lot of people, Keith, say as well, "Wow, in your space, "we don't necessarily want simple and limited. "It's got to be reliable, it's got to be consistent, "it's got to be," tada tada tada, all those same kind of things. Experienced people really like that level of experience. So, the real simple answer is, sorry for overusing simple, is that you got to do both. You got to try and simplify, and again that's why I distinguish between simple and simplified. So, put automation against them, make it simple, save some minutes and steps in those IT guys' day. And try to do both. We've actually used the tag line, I don't think I did today, on powerful simplicity. So you got to do both kind of idea, if that makes sense. >> Yeah taking automation and using these automation techniques to make what was a complex job simple, bottle that up, abstract it and allow customers to use services. So how are your >> Al: Yeah. >> traditional customers reacting to the new combo? >> I think very well. Gotten really a lot of great feedback, new products through the summertime, through even back to the springtime. I happen to believe enterprises are coming around more to the idea that you have to consolidate your platform. The platform idea, you guys, to automate. I'm running into customers 50% of their activity is tied to compliance. Well and that takes a ton of automation, and you don't want to be doing scripts and all that stuff everyday, cause it's repeatable. So again take those kind of ideas, simplify the environment, sorry the operations, and yet still keep a ton of capabilities and features. >> Yeah it's funny, if we dial the clock back two decades, things like intelligently managing our data and building in automation probably wouldn't have sounded that foreign. But >> I agree. >> today, it's a little bit different. We've talked about a decade ago, metadata was something I think most of us in the storage industry were like, this is critically important, but today it's actually happening. Why is today so important and is it? We would love to hear your6 viewpoint on that. >> Another great question. I don't know is the honest answer for sure, but I think it's all got to be driven with just the mountain of data, as you guys know, just tremendous data growth, I think point one. Point two is, I think a lot of organizations are seeing that it's required to run their business. I mean if you saw Steve Connell this morning, he talked about data is the new water. It's like that. So more and more people are coming to that conclusion. You know, I can't go into a business meeting and say, "Guys, I think we out to do this," and they go, "What do you base that on?" It's just an instinct. That doesn't play anymore. So, it's about the data. It's using the data. And that's been tricky in this space. I always said in the back up arena, people just backed it up because they were supposed to. It didn't even occur to them that they might need to use it. So it's like a big dumping ground, but, yep, check the box we backed it up. So all those sorts, velocity, its volume, those kind of things too, and Keith, I think is probably where it's going. >> Yeah, it's interesting. We've been hearing for a number of years now, data's going to drive everything. You must have data, you can't have opinions. But we're still early to see data-driven businesses. >> Al: Yeah, I agree. >> Do you have some kind of early exemplars, or what do you expect to see over the next couple of years that will drive things even more? >> Well we're focused right now on the operations side of it. So we're using tons of these techniques. I don't know if you saw my example today, but take a typical run, you have 48,000 events and logs. How the heck you going to do that without advanced analytics and machinery? And you saw my example, and this is all true stuff. It got it down to six issues that you needed to deal with. So, again we're focused on that side of the equation, but we have a ton of customers wanting to do, and you're hearing all the BI type-of-use cases out there, be it retail, be it security, be it the media industry. How do I capture and save and understand what bits of media clips I have. Today it's just in a big pile, right? So, want to be nicer with your user. >> So Al, you're entrepreneur, you're farm boy background. >> Good word. >> You're a COO of a company going through tremendous transformation. As you talk to your peers, whether it's peers within other technology companies, the farming community, et cetera, all these industries that are being disruptive, what advice have you given to them? Commvault GO, is a great example of Five years ago you guys didn't have a show. You're transforming the company. What advice have you given to your peers or even received that you'd like to share? >> I think it's you can't kick the can down the road, really. You got to deal with it. It's a tough question, Keith, but I think just deal with it and start investing. We go into so many places, and I'd have to be careful on how I say this but in a lot of companies the capabilities that they have within their companies of dealing with major architectural issues and data issues is: A, some of that talent has left, and B, they got other, more short term activities that are pressing 'em. So, guys, just back up, take a broad view, take a long view. Go get your foundations in place, and do this data thing right. I guarantee it's going to pay off for ya. Or you're going to be really disappointed if you don't. So just embrace it. >> All right, well Al, really appreciate catching up with you. I think, summarize what you were saying there, you can't just think about it, you need to go. >> (laughing) >> Stu: All right. >> Oh, you're tricky. >> For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Couple more left here at Commvault GO in Nashville, Tennesse. Thanks so much for watching theCube.

>> Live from Bahrain it's theCUBE. Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you be Amazon Web Services. >> Okay welcome back everyone, we are here in Bahrain for the special exclusive coverage of AWS Summit in the region and the big announcement of the AWS region being deployed here, and that's scheduled for Q1 roughly in 2019 as Teresa Carlson told us today on theCube. This is exciting opportunities for the Middle East and the region and around the world, a big spot where Amazon needed a region, of course we get all that coverage. Our next guest here is Lana Al Attar, founder of Gud Juju, and amazing logo on their card, empowering good, welcome to theCube, good to see you. >> Thank you for having me. >> Great to meet you. Yesterday, we were chatting, take a minute to explain what Gud Juju is, and we'll get to the meaning of the logo, if you can see it, I'm not sure if you can see it. Go ahead, what's Gud Juju? >> Gud Juju means good magic. We're a digital agency with a conscience, and how we do that is, a lot of our clients are people that have any kind of social good to them, so we're talking autism schools, or even normal schools, for example, they might charge money, but they're still in the industry of education, so it's fantastic. So, we help the little guys, we give them the technology they need, we empower them with technology, and that's what Gud Juju's about. On the other side of the spectrum, we also hire mostly women to do the development, so we hire and train. We hire refugees as well, and most recently we've signed a contract with a company and they provide us differently abled people, but they're fantastic designers and developers, so we've expanded into that as well. So, we pay our staff to be heroes, they are heroes day in and day out, and that's why I told you to wait (laughter) I can see you're impressed. >> Oh my god, I'm impressed. Well, no, I mean, there's a little bit of capitalism in there too that makes me go "Wow, that's a brilliant idea" (mumbles) In the labor market, but they're also helping people, and you're giving, tapping into passion. Taking a passion project, turning it into a business, help people, bring it all together, magic. >> Exactly. >> We help people >> That's good magic! >> Exactly, that's where the name Gud Juju comes from. >> Great mission, I love your mission, tell me about some of the things you're working on. >> Oh, okay, so most recently we're working on a "diversity on board" project, and initially it will be to, so we handle the tech part of this. A lot of people, they come to us and they try to partner with us, or even get us to complete their project. And, this particular project, if you go to any part of the world, usually in the Middle East, it'll be Middle Eastern men on the boards, and if you go to the States, it'll be middle aged white men on the boards, so there's no diversity. And that can be a problem for certain companies because if you want a 360 view, >> That's a big problem. It's a problem, period. I think, pretty much, people have figured out that diversity gives you more. >> Of course. >> Than not having it. >> You see things from different angles, because if you have the same kind of age group, and the same kind of gender, and the same everything, then you will not foresee the different challenges or opportunities that come by. So, this is a matchmaking portal that we're working on and it's soon to be launched, we're already testing internally in beta, and then then we're going to expand it into a private beta group, so that's one of the things that I'm working on, I recently, within the company, did one for the Women Power Summit, it was the largest summit in Bahrain for women, we had 500 woman attendees, and about 50 speakers, some of them were international as well, all women, men were welcome but a majority of them were women. And, just to really up the game in the gender equality. So we did the technology for that as well, so we did an online ticketing system, a credit card debit card payment and reservation, so it was a lot of fun. >> So who's coding all these apps? >> Oh, it's us, internally in the team. We have about nine in Bahrain, and most of them are women except for one, the digital marketer. >> People are getting down and dirty and coding away. >> Yes, though it does take a lot of training. So, in Bahrain, there's been a shift, so I also run a local development community, so the Google developer group in Manama, the Manama chapter, and we have like 651 members, so it's picking up. >> Wow. TensorFlow is like candy for developers. People love TensorFlow. >> We did do a few TensorFlow, yeah, definitely, AI, machine learning, deep learning, it's on right now. >> It really is. So how do you find all these people? Do they come to you, you got an open policy hiring refugees, >> Mm-hmm. >> So is there like a network, are you tapping your own network? >> So what we usually try to do is find people that are on the ground, and then they tell us "we have this kind of facility setup, so can you find us a job?" and I will never say no to people wanting jobs and to be very honest, in my line of work, especially when you're catering to charities and NGOs, you have an abundance of clients, it's overflowing. Because, they don't have the capital that they need in order to accomplish their projects. >> And even big firms are like conglomerates, now. We want to tap into these big agencies, you need to write a big check, >> Yeah, exactly. and you might not get the service you need anyway. And if you're an NGO, you don't get the love that the big commercial clients would get. >> Exactly. So, we cater to those kinds of clients. And also, we have, so our slogan is "empowering good". So we empower those who empower other people. We would never sell our clients something that they don't need, for example, we focus primarily on like, sometimes they want a website and an app and the whole nine yards, and they just need one page to accept payments and donations online, and that's all they really need, And some good branding. And so we make sure they focus that capital that they already have, and then, and really capitalize on that capital that they have, and give them the maximum bang for their buck, basically. >> That's awesome. Now, who do you work with? Do you have any partners, are you doing it solo, what are your... >> It's just me leading a staff of nine, and then we tap into a global market of ten, so we have associates that we bring on. I believe in the gig market, I don't think that having full-time staff long term is something that is sustainable. So I recently came back from China, from the annual meeting of champions, and the common theme over there, whether it was the future of work, the future of education, or even the future of... Wait, there was work, there was education, and there was one more. >> There was something. >> Yeah, oh, E-commerce, there we go. Digital, like online sales. And we noticed, there was a very big trend towards everything being digitalized. And with the exception of having community clubhouses, to have that human factor over there. So people love to still have that, you know, that engagement, that bonding, that I belong to that company, or I belong to that mission or vision, but everything is going online. So, I really believe that the gig market's going to, it's already started taking off. So, it's going to be a thing. >> And then being a part of community really brings the shared experiences together. And when you have that kind of co-creation or interaction, it makes people feel part of something bigger. And that's bonding. >> Exactly. So even if you look at e-commerce stores, a lot of them have their flagship stores, but they're not there for sales, because most of their sales get done online. They're there for giving that experience, so when you walk in a store, you have that experience. >> Yeah. >> That's super. What's the biggest thing that you've learned doing this? Is there anything that surprised you, things that jumped out at you, things you didn't expect, things that were successful, you go "wow, that was amazing", things you tripped over >> Oh, I tripped over a lot. (both laugh) It's constant tripping. >> Of course. Well that's how you learn! >> Yeah. So when I first started, I mean, people think like, okay, so you're going to help charities and you're going to help people and you're going to make money, how does that work? I learned very earlier on that people value what they pay for, so don't give things for free. You charge people, but charge them reasonably. So you say, okay I'll charge you this much for this kind of service, and this bit you can do by yourself. We'll give you the guidelines, we've done it over and over, and we'll tell you what your branding is, and then you go out, find the pictures, or write up the copywriting or whatever. So there was that, there was a lot of, so for example, "oh you can't hire refugees", and "why can't I hire refugees", there's a lot of trial and error. Obviously, you'd have people that will sell their (laughs) >> You got to give it a shot, give it a try. >> yeah, of course. And, the experience has been unbelievable. Some of them start out with wordpress development, and then end up with full-stack Javascript. Right? And you give people a chance, it's just like that example of professor Muhammed Yunus in Grameen bank, where they said "oh you can't loan to beggars" and he's like "why not?", and the default rate is so much more lower than the conventional banks. And they don't have any credit ratings! Right, so, I learned to not, I try not to follow the status quo, my mission is purely to empower people, whether I'm employing them, or I'm doing a project for them, so there's always that angle. And it's very different when you know what your values are. And you go in, so... >> And then you got having alignment. Well, Lana, thanks for coming on theCube this year, great to hear your story. >> Thank you. I think Bahrain is going to be a great tech scene. Obviously, I'm very encouraged by the entrepreneurs that I met. You can kind of spot an entrepreneur a mile away, they chirp a lot, they want to go faster, where's the cash, where's the collaboration? Not in a mean way, I don't mean that. And the other thing is that surprised me was Teresa's Women's Breakfast yesterday, that was blowing me away. How dynamic the group was, thought that was phenomenal. Just great to see this startup community here in Bahrain doing, just so much energy and support. >> We have a very tight ecosystem, I'm sure some of the other people probably have already mentioned this. Everybody talks to everybody, so you either, you're always one step away from whatever it is that you need. So, either you ask a person, they know exactly what you need, or they refer you to that person, and they give you like, name and number, right then and there, so, we're all intertwined. I think you've seen us all, how the ecosystem is amazing. >> It's important, and it's super important as communities with open source, you can see this when Amazon comes here, it's going to be a goodness of open source. >> Oh, it is! We're going to have navscale, we're going to have pull, new opportunities going to be coming in, >> Fantastic. it's going to be really, it should be a fun ride, I'm looking forward to covering you guys. >> I've been telling everyone that it is an amazing time to be a woman tech entrepreneur in this region. Amazing. >> Congratulations, and our doors are always open in Silicon Valley if you need anything. >> Awesome. >> Okay, there's more Cube coverage, stay with us! All day, wall to wall, stay with us. We got a couple more interviews, be right back after this short break. 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>> Live from Bahrain, it's theCUBE! Covering AWS Summit Bahrain. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here, live in Bahrain, for the exclusive CUBE coverage of AWS Summit here in the region. Obviously, huge news, Amazon's having a region here, a full region, that's going to create a lot of connections, new opportunities, and hopefully make the life easier for all the developers and whatnot. Great guest here, so we're just talking with Kim on camera, about all the exciting developments on Amazon. We've got Abdul Raman, who's the group EVP of tech, at the ATG, which is the Al Tayyar Travel Group, in Saudi Arabia. >> Yep. >> Thanks for joining me today. >> Thanks a lot for having me. >> So, I'll quickly fast forward, you guys started in 2015, programming in the cloud, your like, we were late. I think that's actually a good time, 'cause Amazon had a lot of mature services ready. Went from zero to billions in revenue. >> Correct. >> Really big success story, that's large scale, all cloud based right? >> Yep, correct. >> Tell your story, what do you guys do, real quick, take a minute to explain your group, what you guys do, and then, what were the architectural things you decided, how did you get the growth? >> So, we are a 40 years old company, we started in 1979, we are the largest travel and tourism company in the Middle East. We went public, through our IPO in 2012. And 2015, our new board, and new management, including myself, we started building our ten-year strategy plan. And we said, we need to diversify our investment, so it mandated that we need to have an online presence. In 2015, we had a choice to build our online presence, which is very late, either on-premise using, building a data center, or we go to the cloud. We had multiple metrics including the cost efficiency, including scalability, security and so on, and all these metrics, when we compared on-premise versus cloud, cloud always win. And we selected Amazon to build our online presence. And beginning of 2015, we had zero presence, zero revenue. Our total revenue from the classic legacy systems, for the retail was almost two billion dollars. But we had zero revenue from the online. We were able, within six weeks, to build the proof of concept, and launch it immediately, and we started heavily investing in various components, from back-end, front-end, DevOps, and so on. And this year, we anticipate, we're going to be generating more than two billion riyal of revenue, that's about 450 >> Online >> Online only. >> Via cloud. >> Exactly, only on Amazon. And for us, that has been the best success story we had for years. >> It's an amazing success story actually. >> We look backward to our decision back then. >> I'll break for you, that's like actually really amazing. This is something that I think people don't really understand, what about the cloud, and certainly Amazon, and the kind of scale that you can get, if you get something right, both on the business model side and architecturally, you can be a unicorn. You're really a unicorn in revenue, that's the word that they hear in the startup world, unicorn, but mostly that's stock value, that's not actually real cash, in how many years? This is pretty phenomenal. This is the entrepreneurial dream, that is now a reality. >> Yep, that's correct. >> This is the story here. >> Exactly, and I'm happy that you mentioned that. We actually, when we started this venture, we said, to the founders, you guys are a startup. We rented out, in 2015, a garage, literally. >> Yeah, get out of the way. >> A house, A very old warehouse, we brought like, five guys, you are the core team, we told them, you are a startup, give us whatever you want to do. And it has been very successful since then. >> It's kind of like the Steve Jobs story, you got Apple, with the Mac II, and then the little group over here, you know, doing the Macintosh. >> Yep, yep, yep. >> That's your group, because you got to get out of their way, it's a mindset, I want to ask you that, that was one of my questions, but we got there a little early, but, this is a cultural shift. Cloud is a different mindset. >> Yep. >> It's not the old way of planning, team-building. >> Yep. >> It really is a different dynamic both execution wise, but team makeup. >> Correct. >> Can you share that piece of it? >> We gave our founders complete freedom, in how they're going to make up their management style. So we have a complete agile team, we have diverse geographical locations, we have people from India, developers in Egypt, in Dubai, in Saudi, and be all work and collaborate, using DevOp tools from Amazon, so we divide the work load, our product teams, weekly launch feature list. They tell us when they would like to launch every two weeks, or three weeks, a new version of the website, or the mobile apps. So, we have a completely agile development methodology, and we give our new venture a truly startup culture. >> And the key for you, if I get this right, is to have executive leadership say, we're doing this? >> Yep. >> Was that in place, did you drive that? >> Absolutely, so when our board said, told us, the new board in 2015, guys we don't have an online, go and get it, me and the CEO said, the best way to do it, is just spin off a completely different unit, completely independent, startup mentality, intro manuals, and told them, guys, sky is limit. We need to be the number one player in the Middle East. >> So, I got to dig deeper, 'cause I love, you know, it's all sexy, and great story when you say, this is how we started, and we finished strong, but as Andy Jassy would say, the CEO of AWS, the learning's in the middle, the ups and downs, as you figure things out, 'cause a lot of things about cloud, is iteration. >> Yep. >> 'Cause you have the ability to move very fast, and you get smart people together, so there's a glorious start and a glorious outcome, but in the middle is the experimentation, that's where the real work gets done. Can you share some of the learnings? Was it a technology selection? Did you really, do you have more queuing, more database, as you start to play with Amazon, this becomes, actually, a business process. >> Our biggest, yeah. >> Playing with the different pieces and which services are right for which process. Can you share something? >> Correct. So our biggest challenge was finding the right skillset, who are people who understand how Amazon, AWS, works. In the Middle East, we don't have that many skillset, or skillful people, so we had to wait, train the people, send them to Amazon workshops, be very patient with the mistakes, we don't mind people refactoring all the old code. Every month we start from scratch. We were very aware that this is, what we are doing, is never been done before in the Middle East. And what we have developed, in terms of, for example, the big data, the big data platform we build today, is one of the largest, we are processing terrabytes of data every week. It's one of the largest in the Middle East. The number of developers we have today, more than 500, working on AWS. I don't think any company in the Middle East, have that number of developers, working on this platform. So we're very proud that we gave our developers the trust and we are aware that you need to fail fast, learn, and quickly adapt. >> And it's a contagious mindset too, when you start seeing success. >> Yep. >> So talk about some of the architectural, talk about the stack that you're using. Obviously, you must be using a variety of the Amazon goodness, EC2, that's pretty obvious, are you guys using the queuing, are you using Kinesis? How you, can you talk about some of the architectural things, if you can? >> Yep, so we have, the front-end that we have today, is completely built on Node.js and AngularJS, so it's very fast, very agile. Our back end is built on Java, most of the code built on Java. We have multiple messaging buses, that asynchronous mode, so whenever there is something that needs to be given to a certain component, we don't have to wait for serial queuing. It's all parallel. At the same time, we have a lot of Auto Scaling components. One of the examples I gave earlier today, is that, we had, the beginning of this summer, we had so many marketing campaigns, and we were surprised by how successful these marketing campaigns. We have noticed, in one marketing campaign, that our demand, from our customer, have reached 300 percent, within 24 hours, and the Auto Scaling that we have in place, have been very successful. We were able to immediately meet that demand. >> Talk about how good the Auto Scaling is. Isn't that a relief? >> Absolutely. >> I mean, explain how it works because, essentially, when the demand comes in, explain how it works. >> Yep, so, just to give an example, if we had this infrastructure on-premise, we would have needed six weeks to procure a new infrastructure, install it, configure it, and we would have lost all this six weeks of revenue. >> And then, by the way, you would have lost the first 24 hour surge, then you'd go over-billed, and then wait around, and then not know if you over-provisioned. >> Absolutely. >> This is, the old way. The new way is, you configure Auto Scaling, based on policy, and then it just spins up. >> Absolutely. >> Resources. >> Absolutely. >> While you're sleeping. >> Exactly, so in a few seconds, the Auto Scaling fires up a lot of instances, and we immediately cope with the demand. >> You know, it's funny you mentioned that. One of the comments we have inside our company is, you know you're successful online, when you're making money while you're sleeping. And, you know, if you have Auto Scaling, and things of that nature, these things are programmatic, this is what elastic is all about, this is what coders, >> Yep. >> Not system administrators do >> True. >> And once they do it, they're highly motivated not to manage it again. >> Correct, absolutely. >> Again, this is back to the culture of DevOps. >> Yep, yep. >> How have you guys innovated on that piece, can you give some other examples? >> Yes, so today we have, our big data has feeds from all the buys from the big social networks, Twitter and Facebook, and also from Google, and we have all this analytical data, into our big data, and we analyze all our customer behavior, what they're looking for, what kind of destinations, holidays, business travel, and we try to adapt every two, three weeks, our product and services to meet our customer demand. Next year, we're going to be launching our machine learning, and AI infrastructure. This way, we'll be able to do real time, predictive analysis, and we will be able to serve each customer, unique, fully personalized, customized, web page and experience. We will be able to exceed our customer expectations, and we'll be able to give our customer exactly what they're looking for. >> Abdul, I got to ask you a personal question. >> Sure. >> What are you most proud of, of this success story? What are some of the things, that you look back and say, wow, we really knocked it out of the park, we did great on this, and then an example where you had a good learning experience. Maybe a trip and a fall, that was a learning opportunity. What are you most proud of? And areas that you learned the most about from, tripping and falling, and failure. >> Yep, so I think the most thing I'm proud of, is we have gathered great minds, and we have created great culture. I think great companies have great people behind them, and this, I've learned from reading the stories of Apple or Microsoft, or Google and so on. So, I think we've been very successful in this area, in the Middle East, where the resources are very scarce, and the ability to attract very smart people is very difficult, to bring them in the Middle East. And I think, we've been very successful in that regard, we've been able to gather a lot of smart people, and create great culture. >> You know, Marc Andreessen wrote that article, book about, or maybe it was a tweet, I can't even remember, the 10x engineer. >> Yep. >> And that concept is one engineer, that does cloud and DevOps right is worth ten engineers in the old world. And so, if you can collect, a selection of these 10x multipliers, that can do architecture. >> Correct. >> Now I personally believe that the full-stack developer, might be obsoleted with the cloud, or reduce the requirement for full-stack developer, but you'll still need full-stack developers for cloud, in general, but you don't need to stockpile full-stack developers. >> True, true, I agree. >> If you have good full-stack developers, you then can hire application developers >> True. >> Because the full-stack takes care of all the scale. >> Exactly, you can always repurpose those guys, and up-skill them to do something different. Instead of being a full-stack, you really want to focus on solution developer. >> Google's proven this with their SRE, if you've seen, they have operators, and developers. And this, as you scale, you're operating infrastructure, or you're writing code for applications. >> Correct. >> Alright, so what's the learnings that have been magnified for you? In the middle of the journey here, there's always the, you know, situation were, you know, you have to take care of personnel issue, or technology selection tweak or change, iteration, I won't say pivot, 'cause people don't pivot, when they're succeeding, it's just navigating through the journey. What was something that you've experienced that was magnified in the learnings, that have helped you get better? >> Yep, I believe that the multi-culture and the multi-nationalities and multi-discipline and people coming from different backgrounds. We have people from Asia, from Europe, from the U.S., in our company, and this helped having different backgrounds, different experiences, and this has helped us to build a nice, multi-dimensional solutions. And people have been able to share this experience, in a very nice way. >> That's great, Abdul, thanks so much for sharing, taking the time. >> Thank you. >> Here on theCUBE, and sharing your insight, and amazing success story, congratulations to you and your team, really love to hear these amazing success stories, essentially building from zero start, online, to billions in revenue, that's an amazing success story. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> And it certainly is great. Exclusive coverage here, we are in Bahrain, this exclusive CUBE coverage, I'm John Furrier. You can reach me on Twitter @furrier, or just search my name, reach out to me, let me know what you think. Stay with us for more coverage, after this break. (techno music fades out)