>>Hey, everyone. Welcome to the cubes coverage of women in data science, 2022. I'm Lisa Martin. And I'm here with one of the key featured keynotes for this year is with events. So the Aragon, the professor and department of human centered design and engineering at the university of Washington Cecilia, it's a pleasure to have you on the cube. >>Thank you so much, Lisa Lisa, it's a pleasure to be here as well. >>You got an amazing background that I want to share with the audience. You are a professor, you are a data scientist, an aerobatic pilot, and an author with expertise in human centered, data science, visual analytics, aviation safety, and analysis of extremely large and complex data sets. That's quite the background. >>Well, thank you so much. It's it's all very interesting and fun. So, >>And as a professor, you study how people make sense of vast data sets, including a combination of computer science and art, which I love. And as an author, you write about interesting things. You write about how to overcome fear, which is something that everybody can benefit from and how to expand your life until it becomes amazing. I need to take a page out of your book. You were also honored by president Obama a few years back. My goodness. >>Thank you so much. Yes. I I've had quite a journey to come here, but I feel really fortunate to be here today. >>Talk about that journey. I'd love to understand if you were always interested in stem, if it was something that you got into later, I know that you are the co-founder of Latinas in computing, a passionate advocate for girls and women in stem. Were you always interested in stem or was it something that you got into in a kind of a non-linear path? >>I was always interested in it when I was a young girl. I grew up in a small Midwestern town and my parents are both immigrants and I was one of the few Latinas in a mostly white community. And I was, um, I loved math, but I also wanted to be an astronaut. And I remember I, when we were asked, I think it was in second grade. What would you like to be when you grow up? I said, oh, I want to be an astronaut. And my teacher said, oh, you can't do that. You're a girl pick something else. And um, so I picked math and she was like, okay. >>Um, so I always wanted to, well, maybe it would be better to say I never really quite lost my love of being up in the air and potentially space. But, um, but I ended up working in math and science and, um, I, I loved it because one of the great advantages of math is that it's kind of like a magic trick for young people, especially if you're a girl or if you are from an underrepresented group, because if you get the answers right on a math test, no one can mark you wrong. It doesn't matter what the color of your skin is or what your gender is. Math is powerful that way. And I will say there's nothing like standing in a room in front of a room of people who think little of you and you silence them with your love with numbers. >>I love that. I never thought about math as power before, but it clearly is. But also, you know, and, and I wish we had more time because I would love to get into how you overcame that fear. And you write books about that, but being told you can't be an astronaut. You're a girl and maybe laughing at you because you liked Matt. How did you overcome that? And so nevermind I'm doing it anyway. >>Well, that's a, it's a, okay. The short answer is I had incredible imposter syndrome. I didn't believe that I was smart enough to get a PhD in math and computer science. But what enabled me to do that was becoming a pilot and I B I learned how to fly small airplanes. I learned how to fly them upside down and pointing straight at the ground. And I know this might sound kind of extreme. So this is not what I recommend to everybody. But if you are brought up in a way where everybody thinks little of you, one of the best things you can possibly do is take on a challenge. That's scary. I was afraid of everything, but by learning to fly and especially learning to fly loops and rolls, it gave me confidence to do everything else because I thought I appointed the airplane at the ground at 250 miles an hour and waited, why am I afraid to get a PhD in computer science? >>Wow. How empowering is that? >>Yeah, it really was. So that's really how I overcame the fear. And I will say that, you know, I encountered situations getting my PhD in computer science where I didn't believe that I was good enough to finish the degree. I didn't believe that I was smart enough. And what I've learned later on is that was just my own emotional, you know, residue from my childhood and from people telling me that they, you know, that they, that I couldn't achieve >>As I look what, look what you've achieved so far. It's amazing. And we're going to be talking about some of the books that you've written, but I want to get into data science and AI and get your thoughts on this. Why is it necessary to think about human issues and data science >>And what are your thoughts there? So there's been a lot of work in data science recently looking at societal impacts. And if you just address data science as a purely technical field, and you don't think about unintended consequences, you can end up with tremendous injustices and societal harms and harms to individuals. And I think any of us who has dealt with an inflexible algorithm, even if you just call up, you know, customer service and you get told, press five for this press four for that. And you say, well, I don't fit into any of those categories, you know, or have the system hang up on you after an hour. I think you'll understand that any type of algorithmic approach, especially on very large data sets has the risk of impacting people, particularly from low income or marginalized groups, but really any of us can be impacted in a negative way. >>And so, as a developer of algorithms that work over very large data sets, I've always found it really important to consider the humans on the other end of the algorithm. And that's why I believe that all data science is truly human centered or should be human centered, should be human centered and also involves both technical issues as well as social issues. Absolutely correct. So one example is that, um, many of us who started working in data science, including I have to admit me when I started out assume that data is unbiased. It's scrubbed of human influence. It is pure in some ways, however, that's really not true as I've started working with datasets. And this is generally known in the field that data sets are touched by humans everywhere. As a matter of fact, in our, in the recent book that we're, that we're coming out with human centered data science, we talk about five important points where humans touch data, no matter how scrubbed of human influence it's support it's supposed to be. >>Um, so the first one is discovery. So when a human encounters, a data set and starts to use it, it's a human decision. And then there's capture, which is the process of searching for a data set. So any data that has to be selected and chosen by an individual, um, then once that data set is brought in there's curation, a human will have to select various data sets. They'll have to decide what is, what is the proper set to use. And they'll be making judgements on this the time. And perhaps one of the most important ways the data is changed and touched by humans is what we call the design of data. And what that means is whenever you bring in a data set, you have to categorize it. No, for example, let's suppose you are, um, a geologist and you are classifying soil data. >>Well, you don't just take whatever the description of the soil data is. You actually may put it into a previously established taxonomy and you're making human judgments on that. So even though you think, oh, geology data, that's just rocks. You know, that's soil. It has nothing to do with people, but it really does. Um, and finally, uh, people will label the data that they have. And this is especially critical when humans are making subjective judgments, such as what race is the person in this dataset. And they may judge it based on looking at the individual skin color. They may try to apply an algorithm to it, but you know what? We all have very different skin colors, categorizing us into race boxes, really diminishes us and makes us less than we truly are. So it's very important to realize that humans touch the data. We interpret the data. It is not scrubbed of bias. And when we make algorithmic decisions, even the very fact of having an algorithm that makes a judgment say on whether a prisoner's likely to offend again, the judge just by having an algorithm, even if the algorithm makes a recommended statement, they are impacted by that algorithms recommendation. And that has obviously an impact on that human's life. So we consider all of this. >>So you just get given five solid reasons why data science and AI are inevitably human centric should be, but in the past, what's led to the separation between data science and humans. >>Well, I think a lot of it simply has to do with incorrect mental models. So many of us grew up thinking that, oh, humans have biases, but computers don't. And so if we just take decision-making out of people's hands and put it into the hands of an algorithm, we will be having less biased results. However, recent work in the field of data science and artificial intelligence has shown that that's simply not true that algorithmic algorithms reinforce human biases. They amplify them. So algorithmic biases can be much worse than human biases and can greater impact. >>So how do we pull ethics into all of this data science and AI and that ethical component, which seems to be that it needs to be foundational. >>It absolutely has to be foundational. And this is why we believe. And what we teach at the university of Washington in our data science courses is that ethical and human centered approaches and ideas have to be brought in at the very beginning of the algorithm. It's not something you slap on at the end or say, well, I'll wait for the ethicists to weigh in on this. Now we are all human. We can all make human decisions. We can all think about the unintended consequences of our algorithms as we develop them. And we should do that at the very beginning. And all algorithm designers really need to spend some time thinking about the impact that their algorithm may have. >>Right. Do you, do you find that people are still in need of convincing of that or is it generally moving in that direction of understanding? We need to bring ethics in from the beginning, >>It's moving in that direction, but there are still people who haven't modified their mental models yet. So we're working on it. And we hope that with the publication of our book, that it will be used as a supplemental textbook in many data science courses that are focused exclusively on the algorithms and that they can open up the idea that considering the human centered approaches at the beginning of learning about algorithms and data science and the mathematical and statistical techniques, that the next generation of data scientists and artificial intelligence developers will be able to mitigate some of the potentially harmful effects. And we're very excited about this. This is why I'm a professor, because I want to teach the next generation of data scientists and artificial intelligence experts, how to make sure that their work really achieves what they intended it to, which is to make the world a better place, not a worse place, but to enable humans to do better and to mitigate biases and really to lead us into this century in a positive way. >>So the book, human centered data science, you can see it there over Sicily, his right shoulder. When does this come out and how can folks get a copy of it? >>So it came out March 1st and it's available in bookstores everywhere. It was published by MIT press, and you can go online or you can go to your local independent bookstore, or you can order it from your university bookstore as well. >>Excellent. Got to, got to get a copy of, get my hands on that. Got cut and get a copy and dig into that. Cause it sounds so interesting, but also so thoughtful and, um, clear in the way that you described that. And also all the opportunities that, that AI data science and humans are gonna unlock for the world and humans and jobs and, and great things like that. So I'm sure there's lots of great information there. Last question I mentioned, you are keynoting at this year's conference. Talk to me about like the top three takeaways that the audience is going to get from your keynote. >>So I'm very excited to have been invited to wins this year, which of course is a wonderful conference to support women in data science. And I've been a big fan of the conference since it was first developed here, uh, here at Stanford. Um, the three, the three top takeaways I would say is to really consider the data. Science can be rigorous and mathematical and human centered and ethical. It's not a trade-off, it's both at the same time. And that's really the, the number one that, that I'm hoping to keynote will bring to, to the entire audience. And secondly, I hope that it will encourage women or people who've been told that maybe you're not a science person or this isn't for you, or you're not good at math. I hope it will encourage them to disbelieve those views. And to realize that if you, as a member of any type of unread, underrepresented group have ever felt, oh, I'm not good enough for this. >>I'm not smart enough. It's not for me that you will reconsider because I firmly believe that everyone can be good at math. And it's a matter of having the information presented to you in a way that honors your, the background you had. So when I started out my, my high school didn't have AP classes and I needed to learn in a somewhat different way than other people around me. And it's really, it's really something. That's what I tell young people today is if you are struggling in a class, don't think it's because you're not good enough. It might just be that the teacher is not presenting it in a way that is best for someone with your particular background. So it doesn't mean they're a bad teacher. It doesn't mean you're unintelligent. It just means the, maybe you need to find someone else that can explain it to you in a simple and clear way, or maybe you need to get some scaffolding that is Tate, learn extra, take extra classes that will help you. Not necessarily remedial classes. I believe very strongly as a teacher in giving students very challenging classes, but then giving them the scaffolding so that they can learn that difficult material. And I have longer stories on that, but I think I've already talked a bit too long. >>I love that. The scaffolding, I th I think the, the one, one of the high level takeaways that we're all going to get from your keynote is inspiration. Thank you so much for sharing your path to stem, how you got here, why humans, data science and AI are, have to be foundationally human centered, looking forward to the keynote. And again, Cecilia, Aragon. Thank you so much for spending time with me today. >>Thank you so much, Lisa. It's been a pleasure, >>Likewise versus silly Aragon. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of women in data science, 2022.

(energetic music) >> Announcer: Live, from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, it's The Cube, covering Women in Data Science Conference 2018. Brought to you by Stanford. >> Welcome back to The Cube. We are live at Stanford University at the third annual Women in Data Science Conference. I am Lisa Martin. We've had a really exciting day so far, talking with a lot of female leaders in different parts of STEM fields. And I'm excited to be joined by my next guest, who is a speaker at this year's WIDS 2018 event, Daniela Witten, the Associate Professor of Statistics and Biostatistics at the University of Washington. Daniela, thanks so much for stopping by The Cube. >> Oh, thanks so much for the invitation. >> So here we are at Stanford University. You spent quite a lot of time here. You've got three degrees from Stanford, so it's kind of like coming back home? >> Yeah, I've spent from 2001 to 2010 here. I started with a bachelor's degree in math and biology, and then I did a master's, and finally a PhD in statistics. >> And so now you're up at the University of Washington. Tell us about that. What is your focus there? >> Yeah, so my work is in statistical machine learning, with applications to large scale data coming out of biology. And so the idea is that in the last ten or 20 years, the field of biology has been totally transformed by new technologies that make it possible to measure a person's DNA sequence, or to see the activity in their brain. Really, all different types of measurements that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. But unfortunately, we don't yet know really how to make sense of these data statistically. So there's a pretty big gap between the data that we're collecting, or rather, the data that biologists are collecting, and then the scientific conclusions that we can draw from these data. So my work focuses on trying to bridge this gap by developing statistical methods that we can use to make sense of this large scale data. >> That sounds exciting. So, WIDS, this is the third year, and they have grown this event remarkably quickly. So, we had Margot Garritsen on the program a little bit earlier, and she had shared 177 regional WIDS events going on today, this week, in 53 countries. And they're expecting to reach 100,000 people. So, for you, as a speaker, what is it that attracted you to participate in the WIDS movement, and share your topic, which we'll get to in a second, what was it that sort of attracted you to that? >> Well, first of all, it's an honor to be invited to participate in this event, which, as you mentioned, is getting live streamed and so many people are watching. But what's really special for me, of course, as a woman, is that there's so many conferences out there that I speak at, and the vast majority have a couple of female speakers, and it's not because there's a lack of talent. There are plenty of very qualified women who could be speaking at these conferences. But often, the conference organizers just don't think of women right away, or maybe add a couple women as an afterthought to their speaker lineups. And so it's really wonderful to be part of a conference where all of the speakers are women, and so we can really see the broad ways in which women are contributing to data science, both in and out of industry. >> And one of the things that Margot shared was, she had this idea with her co-founders only three years ago in 2015, and they got from concept to their first event in six months. >> Daniela: Women know how to get things done. >> We do, don't we? (laughs) But also what it showed, and even in 2015, and we still have this problem in 2018, is there's a massive demand for this. >> Yeah. >> The statistics, speaking of statistics, the numbers show very few women that are getting degrees in STEM subjects are actually working in their field. I just saw this morning, it's really cool, interactive infographic that someone shared with me on Twitter, thank you very much, that showed that 20 percent of females get degrees in engineering, but only 11 percent of them are working in engineering. And you think, "How have we gone backwards in the last 30 years?" But at least now we've got this movement, this phenomenon that is WIDS to start, even from an awareness perspective, of showing we don't have a lot of thought diversity. We have a great opportunity to increase that, and you've got a great platform in order to share your story. >> Yeah. Well, I think that you raise a good point though, as, even though the number of women majoring in STEM fields, at least in some areas of STEM has increased, the number of women making it higher up in the STEM ladder hasn't, for the most part. And one reason for this is possibly the lack of female role models. So being able to attend a conference like this, for young women who are interested in developing their career in STEM, I'm sure is really inspirational and a great opportunity. So it's wonderful for Margot and the other organizers to have put this together. >> It is. Even on the recruiting side, some of the things that still surprise me are when some, whether it's universities or companies that are going to universities to recruit for STEM roles, they're still bringing mostly men. And if there are females at the events, they're, often times they're handing out swag, they're doing more event coordination, which is great. I'm a marketer. There's a lot of females in marketing. But it still shows the need to start from a visibility standpoint and a messaging standpoint alone. They've got to flip this. >> I completely agree with that, but it also works the other way. So, often a company or an academic department might have a few women in a particular role, and those women get asked to do everything. Because they'll say, "Oh, we're going to Stanford to recruit. We need a woman there. We're having some event, and we don't want it to look totally non-diverse, so we need a woman there too." And the small number of women in STEM get asked to do a lot of things that the men don't get asked to do, and this can also be really problematic. Even though the intent is good, to clearly showcase the fact that there's diversity in STEM and in academia, the end outcome can actually be hurtful to the women involved who are being asked to do more than their fair share. So we need to find a way to balance this. >> Right. That balance is key. So what I want to kind of pivot on next is, just looking at the field of data science, it's so interesting because it's very, I like 'cause it's horizontal. We just had a guest on from Uber, and we talk to on The Cube, people in many different industries, from big tech to baseball teams and things like that. And what it really shows, though, is, there's blurred lines, or maybe even lines that have evaporated between demarcated career A, B, C, D. And data science is so pervasive that it's impacting, people that are working in it, like yourself, have the ability to impact every sector, policy changes, things like that. Do you think that that message is out there enough? That the next generation understands how much impact they can make in data science? >> I think there is a lot of excitement from young people about data science. At U-dub, we have a statistics major, and it's really grown a lot in popularity in the last few years. We have a new master's degree in data science that just was started around the same time that WIDS was started, and we had 800 applicants this year. >> Wow. >> For a single masters program. Truly incredible. But I think that there's an element of it that also maybe people don't realize. So data science, there's a technical skill set that comes with it, and people are studying undergrad in statistics, and getting master's in data science in order to get that technical skill set. But there's also a non-technical skill set that's incredibly important, because data science isn't done in a vacuum. It's done within the context of interdisciplinary teams with team members from all different areas. So, for example, in my work, I work with biologists. Your previous guest from Uber, I'm sure is working with engineers and all different areas of the company. And in order to be successful in data science, you need to really not only have technical skills, but also the ability to work as a team player and to communicate your ideas. >> Yeah, you're right. Balancing those technical skills with, what some might call soft skills, empathy, collaboration, the ability to communicate, seems to be, we talked about balance earlier, a scale-wise. Would you say they're pretty equivalent, in terms of really, that would give somebody a great foundation as a data scientist? >> I would say that having both of those skill sets would give you a good foundation, yes. The extent to which either one is needed probably depends on the details of your job. >> True. So, I want to talk a little bit more about your background. Something that caught my eye was that your work has been featured in popular media. Forbes, three times, and Elle magazine, which of course, I thought, "What? I've got to talk to you about that!" Tell me a little bit about the opportunities that you've had in Forbes and in Elle magazine to share your story and to be a mentor. >> Yeah. Well, I've just been lucky to be getting involved in the field of statistics at a time when statistics is really growing in importance and interest. So the joke is, that ten years ago, if you went to a cocktail party, and you said that you were a statistician, then nobody would want to talk to you. (Lisa laughs) And now, if you go to a cocktail party and you say you're a statistician, everyone wants to know more and find out if you know of any job openings for them. >> Lisa: That's pretty cool! >> Yeah. So it's a really great time to be doing this kind of work. And there's really an increased appreciation for the fact that it's not enough to have access to a lot of data, but we really need the technical skills to make sense of that data. >> Right. So share with us a little bit about the session that you're doing here: More Data, More Statistical Problems. Tell us a little bit about that and maybe some of the three, what are the three key takeaways that the audience was hearing from you? >> Yeah. So I think the first real takeaway is, sometimes there's a feeling that, when we have a lot of data, we don't really need a deep understanding of statistics, we just need to know how to do machine learning, or how to develop a black box predictor. And so, the first point that I wanted to make is that that's not really right. Actually, the more data you have, often the more opportunity there is for your analysis to go awry, if you don't really have the solid foundations. Another point that I wanted to make is that there's been a lot of excitement about the promise of biology. So, a lot of my work has biomedical applications, and people have been hoping for many years that the new technologies that have come out in recent years in biology, would lead to improve understanding of human health and improve treatment of disease. And, it turns out, that it hasn't, at least not yet. We've got the data, but what we don't know how to do is how to analyze it yet. And so, the real gap between the data that we have and achieving its promise is actually a statistical gap. So there's a lot of opportunity for statisticians to help bridge that gap, in order to improve human health. And finally, the last point that I want to make is that a lot of these issues are really subtle. So we can try to just swing a hammer at our data and hope to get something out of it, but often there's subtle statistical issues that we need to think about, that could very much affect our results. And keeping in mind sort of the effects of our models, and some of these subtle statistical issues is very important. >> So, in terms of your team at University of Washington, or your classes that you teach, you work with undergrads. >> Yeah, I teach undergrads and PhD students, and I work mostly with PhD students. And I've just been lucky to work with incredibly talented students. I did my PhD here at Stanford, and I had a great advisor and really wonderful mentoring from my advisor and from the other faculty in the department. And so it's really great to have the opportunity now, in turn, to mentor grad students at University of Washington. >> What are some of the things that you help them with? Is it, we talk about inspiring women to get into the field, but, as you prepare these grad students to finish their master's or PhD's, and then go out either into academia or in industry, what are some of the other elements that you think is important for them to understand in terms of learning how to be assertive, or make their points in a respectful, professional way? Is that part of what you help them understand and achieve? >> That's definitely part of it. I would say another thing that I try to teach them, so everyone who I work with, all my students, they're incredibly strong technically, because you don't get into a top PhD program in statistics or biostatistics if you're not technically very strong, so what I try to help my students do is figure out not just how to solve problems, because they can solve any problem they set their mind to, but actually how to identify the problems that are likely to be high impact. Because there's so many problems out there that you can try to solve statistically, and, of course, we should all be focusing our efforts on the ones that are likely to have a really big impact on society, or on health, or whatever it is that we're trying to influence. >> Last question for you. If you look back to your education to now, what advice would you give your younger self? >> Gosh, that's a really great question. I think that I'm happy with many of the career decisions I've made. For example, getting a PhD in statistics, I think is a great career move. But, at the same time, maybe I would tell a younger version of me to take more risks, and not be so worried about meeting every requirement on time, and instead, expanding a little bit, taking more courses in other areas, and really broadening instead of just deepening my skill set. >> We've heard that sentiment echoed a number of times today, and one of the themes that I'm hearing a lot is don't be afraid to get out of your comfort zone. And it's so hard for us when we're in it, when we're younger, 'cause you don't know that, you don't have any experience there. But it's something that I always appreciate hearing from the women who've kind of led the way for those of us and then, the next generation, is, don't be afraid to get comfortably uncomfortable and as you said, take risks. It's not a bad thing, right? Well, Daniela, thanks so much for carving out some time to visit us on The Cube, and we're happy to have given you the opportunity to reach an even bigger audience with your message, and we wish you continued success at U-dub. >> Oh, thanks so much. >> We want to thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin live with The Cube at WIDS 2018 from Stanford University. Stick around, I'll be back with my next guest after a short break. (energetic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering AWS re:Invent 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel and our ecosystem of partners. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. Live here this is theCUBE in Las Vegas for AWS Amazon Web Services re:Invent 2017. Our 5th year covering the event. Wall to wall coverage. Three days, this is our day two. 45,000 people here. Developers and business connecting together this year. Big show. Amazon continues its growth. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Justin Warren. Our next guest is from Washington County Sheriff's Office using Amazon, Amazon Recognition, Chris Adzima, who is the Senior Information Systems Analyst at the Washington County Sheriff. Welcome to theCUBE. >> Nice to have you. >> So Chris. >> be here. >> So, so tons of cool stuff we saw on stage today. You know they've had polylex out for awhile. But you're gonna start to see some of these multi-media services around. Human identification, transcription, Recognition's been out for awhile. With the power of the cloud, you can start rollin' out some pretty cool services. You have one of 'em, talk about your solution and what you guys are doing with it. >> Sure, about last year when Recognition was announced, I wanted to provide our deputies at the Sheriff's office with the way to identify people based on videos that we get from either surveillance or eyewitnesses. So, I looked into Recognition and decided that we should give it a try by giving all of our booking photos or mugshots up to the cloud for it to be indexed. So, that's what I did. I indexed all, about 300,000 booking photos, we have in the last 10 years, and put that into a Recognition Collection. And now I can use the simple tools that AWS gives me to search against that index for any new image that we get in, either from surveillance or an eyewitness, allowing us to get identification within seconds as opposed to having to go through all 700 employees at the Sheriff's Office for the chance that they might have known the person. >> So the old way was essentially grab the footage, and then do the old mugshot kinda scan manually, right? >> Yeah, manually. It wasn't in a book, it was on a website, but essentially, yeah, you had to-- >> I made my point, it sucks. It's hard as hell. >> It's very difficult, very difficult. >> You see on TV all the magic pictures goin' on and the facial recognition, you see on the movies and stuff. How close are we to that right now in terms of that capability? >> Well as far as facial recognition goes it all depends on the data that you have at your fingertips. Right now I have booking photos, so I can identify people with a very high level of certainty if they've been in our jail. If they haven't been in our jail, I obviously don't have much of a chance of identifying them. So, what you see on the TV where it's like, we looked through all the DMV records. We looked through all of the people on the street and all this stuff, We're pretty far off from that because nobody has a catalog of all those images. >> You need to incorporate of all the pictures, all the data. >> Yeah, but when you have the data, it's very simple. >> Right, and it's a lot like scanning for fingerprints. It's like, people would have seen that. You know, you have a fingerprint that you've collected from the crime scene-- >> Chris: Exactly. >> We see it on NCIS or something where you scan through all of that. So, it's pretty similar to that. >> Yeah, it's similar to that, or DNA, or anything like that. If you have the data set, it's very easy to search for those people. >> Yeah. >> So, faces are no different. >> So, how long did it take you to get up and running? Did you have to ingest the photos? How did you do that or? >> So... >> John: They're on a website so you had 'em on digital already. >> From never knowing anything about Amazon Web Services, to a fully-functional prototype of this product took me 30 days. >> John: Wow. >> I had the photos uploaded and the ability to actually run the searches via the API in three. So, extremely easy. Extremely easy. >> So, given the success that you've had with that particular producr, are there other services at AWS that you're looking into? That say, hey, that would actually be really useful for us? >> Yes, a couple that were announced today. First off, the recognition for video. Something that we have a problem with, and I'm hoping recognition for video's going to help with is when you have a surveillance camera, people are moving all the time. Therefore, trying to get a screenshot is going to get a blurry image. We're not getting good results with low-light or low frame rate. But recognition for video is gonna be able to take that movement and still look at the face. Hopefully we're gonna be able to get a better facial identification that way. >> Justin: Okay. >> Another thing that I want to look into is this DeepLens they just announced today. >> John: Awesome. >> That looks extremely promising in the way of me being able to teach it things that we need. A great example of what I would use this for is when a inmate comes in, we take pictures of scars, marks and tattoos. That way, we have a database of all the scars, marks and tattoos on somebody. In case, if they recommit a crime and our eye-witness says, "They had a skull tattoo on their chest" we can then look through all of the people that have a skull tattoo and say, "These are our list of possible suspects." The problem with that is, is that you may enter somebody in as a skull, and you may enter it in as crossbones. Somebody else might put an accidental I in there. So it's very hard to do a text search against that. But if recognition were to come through, or it wouldn't be recognition in this case. If whatever model I built with the DeepLens came through, and said this is a skull and this is the word we use, then I'd be able to index all of those images, quickly pull them up, so we wouldn't even need a picture. We would just need to know, from an eye-witness, that there was a skull on that person's chest. >> John: We had a guest on yesterday from Thorn, which Intel is doing AI for good, and they use essentially, and they didn't say Craigslist, but trying to look for women who were being sold for prostitution, and exploited children and whatnot. And it's all machine learning, and some natural language processing. When you look at the Sage announcement, that looks promising, 'cause they're gonna make, as I was try to democratize the heavy-lifting around all of this, you know, voodoo machine learning. Which, I mean, if you're totally a computer science geek and that's all you do, yeah, you could probably master machine learning. But if you're a practitioner, you're just whipping up. >> Well, yeah, and that's a good example. Because I am not a data scientist. I have no idea how this stuff works in the back end. But being able to utilize, stand on the shoulders of these giants, so to speak, is allowing people like me who A, I only have seven people on my team to devote to this kind of thing. We don't have a lot of resources. We wouldn't be able to get a data scientist. But opening this stuff up to us allows us to build these things, like this facial recognition and other things based on machine learning. And ultimately keep our citizens safe through the work that AWS does in getting this to us. >> Justin: Yeah, and we've been saying at a couple of different interviews so far, that humans don't scale. So these tools that provide the humans that you do have a lot more leverage to get things done. So, we were talking just before, before we started recording that these are tools that assist the humans. You're not replacing the humans with machines that just go oh we're gonna cede all decision-making to you. This is just another tool like being able to fingerprint people and search that. It's one more way of doing the standard policing that you are already doing. >> Exactly, and the tool that I've already created, and any tool I create after that, doesn't ever look to replace our deputies or our detectives. We give them things so that they don't have to do the things like flipping through that book for hours upon hours. They can be out in the field, following the leads, keeping the community safe and apprehending these criminals. >> Do they have on body cameras too? >> Not yet. We are currently looking into body cameras. >> John: That's a trend. They're gonna be instrumented basically like warriors: fully loaded, you know, cameras. >> I tend not to think of it like that. Only because, again, that's a tool that we use. Not to, you know, be that land-warrior so to speak. But more of a-- >> Documentation, I mean, you see 'em on cars when people get pulled over. >> Exactly. >> You've got the evidence. >> It's documentation, just like anything else. It's just that one more tool that helps that deputy, that detective, that police officer get a better idea of the entire situation. >> Maybe I shouldn't have said war. Maybe I'm just into the Twitch culture where they're all geared up with all the gear. Okay, so next question for you is what's your vibe on the show? Obviously you have great experience working at Amazon. You're a success study because you're trying to get a job done, you got some tools and, >> Right. >> making it happen. What's your take this year? What's your vibe of the show? >> I'm really excited about a lot of stuff I'm seeing at the show. A lot of the announcements seemed like they were almost geared towards me. And I know they weren't obviously, but it really felt like announcement after announcement were these things that I'm wanting to go home and immediately start to play with. Anywhere from the stuff that was in the machine learning to the new elastic containers that they are announcing, to the new LAM defunctions that they're talking about. I mean, just all over the board. I'm very excited for all these new things that I get to go home and play with. >> What do you think, Justin? What's your take on the vibe show? >> I find that it's an interesting show. I'm finding it a little different than what I was expecting. This is my first time here at AWS re:Invent. I go to a lot of other trade shows and I was expecting more of like a developer show. Like I'm going to CubeCon next week and that's full of people with spiky hair, and pink shoes, and craziness. >> John: That's the area, by the way. >> Oh that's the area, right. It's a bit more casual than some of the other more businessy sort of conferences. I mean, here I am, wearing a jacket. So I don't feel completely out of place here, but it does feel like it's that blending of business and use cases and the things that you actually get done with it as well as there being people who have the tools that they want to go and build amazing new things with. >> Chris: Right, right, yeah. >> So it's a nice blend, I think. >> Yeah, I've found that it definitely doesn't feel like any other developer conference I've been to. But being in the public sector, I tend to go to the more business-suit conferences. >> John: This is like total developer for you, from a public sector perspective. >> From where I'm coming from, this is very laid back. And extremely... >> Oh yeah. >> But at the same time, it's very like a mixture. Like you said, you see executives mingling with the developers talking about things-- >> John: You're a good example I think of Amazon. First of all, there's the builder thing in the area is supposed to be pretty cool. I was told to go there last night. People came back, it was very much builder, kind of maker culture. They're doing prototypes, it was very developer-oriented. But the public sector, I'm astonished by Amazon's success there because the stuff is easy and low-cost to get in. And public sector is not known for its agility. >> Chris: No. >> I mean, it's music to your ears, right? I mean, if you're in the public sector, you're like, "What? Now I can get it done?" >> Very much so. And one thing I love to share about our solution is the price, right? Because I spent $6 a month for my AWS bill. Right? >> John: Wow. >> That's extremely easy to sell to tax payers, right? It's extremely easy to sell to the higher-ups in government to say, I'm gonna tinker around with this, but even if we solve one crime, we've already seen a return on our investment above and beyond what we expected. >> Yeah. >> No brainer, no brainer. Chris, thanks so much for sharing your story. We really appreciate it. Congratulations on your success and keep in touch with theCube. Welcome to theCube Alumni Club. >> Alright. >> John: For coming out, it's theCube here. Amazon re:Invent, bringing all the action down, all of the success stories, all of the analysis. I'm John Furrier with theCube. More live coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's continuing coverage of AMD's fourth generation EPYC launch. I've got a special guest with me today from Prowess Consulting. His name is Evan Touger, he's a senior technical writer with Prowess. Evan, welcome. >> Hi, great to be here. Thanks. >> So tell us a little bit about Prowess, what does Prowess do? >> Yeah, we're a consulting firm. We've been around for quite a few years, based in Bellevue, Washington. And we do quite a few projects with folks from Dell to a lot of other companies, and dive in. We have engineers, writers, production folks, so pretty much end-to-end work, doing research testing and writing, and diving into different technical topics. >> So you- in this case what we're going to be talking about is some validation studies that you've done, looking at Dell PowerEdge servers that happened to be integrating in fourth-gen EPYC processors from AMD. What were the specific workloads that you were focused on in this study? >> Yeah, this particular one was honing in on virtualization, right? You know, obviously it's pretty much ubiquitous in the industry, everybody works with virtualization in one way or another. So just getting optimal performance for virtualization was critical, or is critical for most businesses. So we just wanted to look a little deeper into, you know, how do companies evaluate that? What are they going to use to make the determination for virtualization performance as it relates to their workloads? So that led us to this study, where we looked at some benchmarks, and then went a little deeper under the hood to see what led to the results that we saw from those benchmarks. >> So when you say virtualization, does that include virtual desktop infrastructure or are we just talking about virtual machines in general? >> No, it can include both. We looked at VMs, thinking in terms of what about database performance when you're working in VMs, all the way through to VDI and companies like healthcare organizations and so forth, where it's common to roll out lots of virtual desktops, and performance is critical there as well. >> Okay, you alluded to, sort of, looking under the covers to see, you know, where these performance results were coming from. I assume what you're referencing is the idea that it's not just all about the CPU when you talk about a system. Am I correct in that assumption and- >> Yeah, absolutely. >> What can you tell us? >> Well, you know, for companies evaluating, there's quite a bit to consider, obviously. So they're looking at not just raw performance but power performance. So that was part of it, and then what makes up that- those factors, right? So certainly CPU is critical to that, but then other things come into play, like the RAID controllers. So we looked a little bit there. And then networking, of course can be critical for configurations that are relying on good performance on their networks, both in terms of bandwidth and just reducing latency overall. So interconnects as well would be a big part of that. So with, with PCIe gen 5 or 5.0 pick your moniker. You know in this- in the infrastructure game, we're often playing a game of whack-a-mole, looking for the bottlenecks, you know, chasing the bottlenecks. PCIe 5 opens up a lot of bandwidth for memory and things like RAID controllers and NICs. I mean, is the bottleneck now just our imagination, Evan, have we reached a point where there are no bottlenecks? What did you see when you ran these tests? What, you know, what were you able to stress to a point where it was saturated, if anything? >> Yeah. Well, first of all, we didn't- these are particular tests were ones that we looked at industry benchmarks, and we were examining in particular to see where world records were set. And so we uncovered a few specific servers, PowerEdge servers that were pretty key there, or had a lot of- were leading in the category in a lot of areas. So that's what led us to then, okay, well why is that? What's in these servers, and what's responsible for that? So in a lot of cases they, we saw these results even with, you know, gen 4, PCIe gen 4. So there were situations where clearly there was benefit from faster interconnects and, and especially NVMe for RAID, you know, for supporting NVMe and SSDs. But all of that just leads you to the understanding that it means it can only get better, right? So going from gen 4 to- if you're seeing great results on gen 4, then gen 5 is probably going to be, you know, blow that away. >> And in this case, >> It'll be even better. >> In this case, gen 5 you're referencing PCIe >> PCIe right. Yeah, that's right. >> (indistinct) >> And then the same thing with EPYC actually holds true, some of the records, we saw records set for both 3rd and 4th gen, so- with EPYC, so the same thing there. Anywhere there's a record set on the 3rd gen, you know, makes us really- we're really looking forward to going back and seeing over the next few months, which of those records fall and are broken by newer generation versions of these servers, once they actually wrap to the newer generation processors. You know, based on, on what we're seeing for the- for what those processors can do, not only in. >> (indistinct) Go ahead. >> Sorry, just want to say, not only in terms of raw performance, but as I mentioned before, the power performance, 'cause they're very efficient, and that's a really critical consideration, right? I don't think you can overstate that for companies who are looking at, you know, have to consider expenditures and power and cooling and meeting sustainability goals and so forth. So that was really an important category in terms of what we looked at, was that power performance, not just raw performance. >> Yeah, I want to get back to that, that's a really good point. We should probably give credit where credit is due. Which Dell PowerEdge servers are we talking about that were tested and what did those interconnect components look like from a (indistinct) perspective? >> Yeah, so we focused primarily on a couple benchmarks that seemed most important for real world performance results for virtualization. TPCx-V and VMmark 3.x. the TPCx-V, that's where we saw PowerEdge R7525, R7515. They both had top scores in different categories there. That benchmark is great for looking at database workloads in particular, right? Running in virtualization settings. And then the VMmark 3.x was critical. We saw good, good results there for the 7525 and the R 7515 as well as the R 6525, in that one and that included, sorry, just checking notes to see what- >> Yeah, no, no, no, no, (indistinct) >> Included results for power performance, as I mentioned earlier, that's where we could see that. So we kind of, we saw this in a range of servers that included both 3rd gen AMD EPYC and newer 4th gen as well as I mentioned. The RAID controllers were critical in the TPCx-V. I don't think that came into play in the VM mark test, but they were definitely part of the TPCx-V benchmarks. So that's where the RAID controllers would make a difference, right? And in those tests, I think they're using PERC 11. So, you know, the newer PERC 12 controllers there, again we'd expect >> (indistinct) >> To see continued, you know, gains in newer benchmarks. That's what we'll be looking for over the next several months. >> Yeah. So I think if I've got my Dell nomenclature down, performance, no no, PowerEdge RAID Controller, is that right? >> Exactly, yeah, there you go. Right? >> With Broadcom, you know, powered by Broadcom. >> That's right. There you go. Yeah. Isn't the Dell naming scheme there PERC? >> Yeah, exactly, exactly. Back to your comment about power. So you've had a chance to take a pretty deep look at the latest stuff coming out. You're confident that- 'cause some of these servers are going to be more expensive than previous generation. Now a server is not a server is not a server, but some are awakening to the idea that there might be some sticker shock. You're confident that the bang for your buck, the bang for your kilowatt hour is actually going to be beneficial. We're actually making things better, faster, stronger, cheaper, more energy efficient. We're continuing on that curve? >> That's what I would expect to see, right. I mean, of course can't speak to to pricing without knowing, you know, where the dollars are going to land on the servers. But I would expect to see that because you're getting gains in a couple of ways. I mean, one, if the performance increases to the point where you can run more VMs, right? Get more performance out of your VMs and run more total VMs or more BDIs, then there's obviously a good, you know, payback on your investment there. And then as we were discussing earlier, just the power performance ratio, right? So if you're bringing down your power and cooling costs, if these machines are just more efficient overall, then you should see some gains there as well. So, you know, I think the key is looking at what's the total cost of ownership over, you know, a standard like a three-year period or something and what you're going to get out of it for your number of sessions, the performance for the sessions, and the overall efficiency of the machines. >> So just just to be clear with these Dell PowerEdge servers, you were able to validate world record performance. But this isn't, if you, if you look at CPU architecture, PCIe bus architecture, memory, you know, the class of memory, the class of RAID controller, the class of NIC. Those were not all state of the art in terms of at least what has been recently announced. Correct? >> Right. >> Because (indistinct) the PCI 4.0, So to your point- world records with that, you've got next-gen RAID controllers coming out, and NICs coming out. If the motherboard was PCIe 5, with commensurate memory, all of those things are getting better. >> Exactly, right. I mean you're, you're really you're just eliminating bandwidth constraints latency constraints, you know, all of that should be improved. NVMe, you know, just collectively all these things just open the doors, you know, letting more bandwidth through reducing all the latency. Those are, those are all pieces of the puzzle, right? That come together and it's all about finding the weakest link and eliminating it. And I think we're reaching the point where we're removing the biggest constraints from the systems. >> Okay. So I guess is it fair to summarize to say that with this infrastructure that you tested, you were able to set world records. This, during this year, I mean, over the next several months, things are just going to get faster and faster and faster and faster. >> That's what I would anticipate, exactly, right. If they're setting world records with these machines before some of the components are, you know, the absolute latest, it seems to me we're going to just see a continuing trend there, and more and more records should fall. So I'm really looking forward to seeing how that goes, 'cause it's already good and I think the return on investment is pretty good there. So I think it's only going to get better as these roll out. >> So let me ask you a question that's a little bit off topic. >> Okay. >> Kind of, you know, we see these gains, you know, we're all familiar with Moore's Law, we're familiar with, you know, the advancements in memory and bus architecture and everything else. We just covered SuperCompute 2022 in Dallas a couple of weeks ago. And it was fascinating talking to people about advances in AI that will be possible with new architectures. You know, most of these supercomputers that are running right now are n minus 1 or n minus 2 infrastructure, you know, they're, they're, they're PCI 3, right. And maybe two generations of processors old, because you don't just throw out a 100,000 CPU super computing environment every 18 months. It doesn't work that way. >> Exactly. >> Do you have an opinion on this question of the qualitative versus quantitative increase in computing moving forward? And, I mean, do you think that this new stuff that you're starting to do tests on is going to power a fundamental shift in computing? Or is it just going to be more consolidation, better power consumption? Do you think there's an inflection point coming? What do you think? >> That's a great question. That's a hard one to answer. I mean, it's probably a little bit of both, 'cause certainly there will be better consolidation, right? But I think that, you know, the systems, it works both ways. It just allows you to do more with less, right? And you can go either direction, you can do what you're doing now on fewer machines, you know, and get better value for it, or reduce your footprint. Or you can go the other way and say, wow, this lets us add more machines into the mix and take our our level of performance from here to here, right? So it just depends on what your focus is. Certainly with, with areas like, you know, HPC and AI and ML, having the ability to expand what you already are capable of by adding more machines that can do more is going to be your main concern. But if you're more like a small to medium sized business and the opportunity to do what you were doing on, on a much smaller footprint and for lower costs, that's really your goal, right? So I think you can use this in either direction and it should, should pay back in a lot of dividends. >> Yeah. Thanks for your thoughts. It's an interesting subject moving forward. You know, sometimes it's easy to get lost in the minutiae of the bits and bites and bobs of all the components we're studying, but they're powering something that that's going to effect effectively all of humanity as we move forward. So what else do we need to consider when it comes to what you've just validated in the virtualization testing? Anything else, anything we left out? >> I think we hit all the key points, or most of them it's, you know, really, it's just keeping in mind that it's all about the full system, the components not- you know, the processor is a obviously a key, but just removing blockages, right? Freeing up, getting rid of latency, improving bandwidth, all these things come to play. And then the power performance, as I said, I know I keep coming back to that but you know, we just, and a lot of what we work on, we just see that businesses, that's a really big concern for businesses and finding efficiency, right? And especially in an age of constrained budgets, that's a big deal. So, it's really important to have that power performance ratio. And that's one of the key things we saw that stood out to us in, in some of these benchmarks, so. >> Well, it's a big deal for me. >> It's all good. >> Yeah, I live in California and I know exactly how much I pay for a kilowatt hour of electricity. >> I bet, yeah. >> My friends in other places don't even know. So I totally understand the power constraint question. >> Yeah, it's not going to get better, so, anything you can do there, right? >> Yeah. Well Evan, this has been great. Thanks for sharing the results that Prowess has come up with, third party validation that, you know, even without the latest and greatest components in all categories, Dell PowerEdge servers are able to set world records. And I anticipate that those world records will be broken in 2023 and I expect that Prowess will be part of that process, So Thanks for that. For the rest of us- >> (indistinct) >> Here at theCUBE, I want to thank you for joining us. Stay tuned for continuing coverage of AMD's fourth generation EPYC launch, for myself and for Evan Touger. Thanks so much for joining us. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Thanks Adam from the studio. Dave, with the next interview, I had a great chance to sit down with Pete, from Microsoft Azure. Talk about 5G and all the advances in the innovation around Silicon and what's coming around under the hood. Obviously Microsoft big hyperscaler, top three cloud player. Let's hear from Pete my conversation and we'll come right back. (upbeat music) Well, we'll come back to the cubes coverage of Mobile World Congress 2021, we're onsite in-person and virtual. It's a hybrid event this year. It's in-person for the first time, since the winter of 2019 lots been passed, a lot's happened and theCube's got to cover it. Our next guest is Pete Bernard, senior director, Silicon and telecom at Azure edge devices, platform and services at Microsoft. Pete, thanks for coming on theCube for our remote coverage. Thanks for coming on. We'll be there live and as well as with the remote community. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, no, that's great to be here. I'm coming here from sunny Bellevue, Washington. I wish a wish I was going to be in Barcelona this year, but like, as you mentioned, I think the last time I was in Barcelona was 2019. So a lot has happened since then. Right? >> Well, let's get into it. First of all, we'll see you on the interwebs and the community, but let, let's get the content storyline after the number one story at mobile world. Congress is the rise of the modern developer overlay on top of this new infrastructure, 5g, what is the edge, super edge, AI edge, whatever we want to call it. It is an enabler. Okay. And it's also leveraging the assets of, of these telecom infrastructures and certainly the pandemic we've had great success, nothing crashed. It saved us. So what's your, what's your view on this? This is the big story. It's the most important story? What's your take? >> Yeah, I mean, as I mentioned, a lot has happened and there's been a lot of advancements in this area and I think, you know, the part of what's happened with the pandemic is companies have really accelerated their strategies in this area. In terms of, you know, we have tons of commercial customers that are trying to solve really difficult problems using AI and edge and, and 5g now. So the demand is tremendous and the technology has really advanced quite a bit. And you know, we're, my team is specifically focused on sort of the intersection of 5g edge and AI, and it's sort of bringing together these kinds of existing credible technology advances and it's unlocking some amazing new scenarios and business models for, for customers and partners. For sure. >> So let's get it under the hood a little bit and talk about some of the technical issues. Obviously 5g is enabling a lot of commercial benefits cloud providers like Microsoft Azure is having great edge capabilities now with, with bringing the cloud to the edge, which opens up the obvious gamers Mehta versus AI, AR VR kind of things, low latency, applications, cars, and all that good stuff, all the data coming in and then new use cases. So it's a data problem. It's a typology challenge. It's a new architecture, unpack that for us. What, where are we in this? So. >> So I mean, as you mentioned, I mean, it was kind of an infinite set of problems to be solved. And one of the things that we found was that there was actually a lot of friction out there. It's almost like so many different partners and typologies and ways to put things together. Quite often, we get with a commercial customer and they're like, look, we just need to solve this particular problem in retail or healthcare energy. And so one of the things that we introduced as part of our kind of Azure portfolio is something called Azure percept, which is an end to end system for edge AI development and deployment that now works over 5g and L PWA as well. And so a lot of what we're trying to do as a platform company is help customers and partners kind of expedite and speed that development and deployment of solutions. Because like I said, there's no shortage of demand, but they're quite complex. And as you mentioned, you could have, you know, on-prem solutions, you could have hybrid solutions that talk to on-prem hardware and then go to the cloud. You can go direct to the cloud. But the question is like, how do you put these things together in a secure way? And it get an ROI quickly out of your edge AI deployments. And that's been kind of an interesting challenge. And I think when I talked to a lot of partners, telco partners, especially Silicon partners, were all struggling with how do we expedite, expedite? Because you know, the sooner we can get people to deploy and solve their problems, obviously, you know, the sooner they're happy, the sooner we all get paid. Right? And so that's one of the things we have to be careful of is with all the new technology, how do we really sort of titrate down to, you know, what does it take to actually get things from a POC to deployment as quickly as possible? >> And one of the big things is happening is not seeing the developer ecosystem is coming hardcore into the telco cloud, whatever you want to call it. And it's interesting, you know, the word operators is used a lot, the carriers, the operators, you don't hear that in it and say, you don't say that's the operator, the operators writes it department. So you have cloud native and this operating cultures coming together, dev ops dev sec ops coming to what is a carrier grade operating model, which is like a steady build solid foundation. That's what they expect. So you kind of have this classic OT it collision. And this has been talked about in the edge. What's different though, because now you've got to move faster. You got to have a lot of it like cloud scale with automation and AI at the same time I need full Bulletproof operations. Yeah. >> And so it's, you know, we're trying to expose a consistent developer fabric, you know, to our community. I mean, Microsoft's got millions of developers around the world using lots of, lots of tool, tool chains, and frameworks. And we want to sort of harness the power of that whole developer community to bring workloads and applications onto the telco network, right. In, in environments that they're familiar with. And we're seeing also sort of, you mentioned sort of colliding worlds in the edge world. There's kind of traditional embedded developers that are building cameras and devices and gateways. And then there's a lot of data science, AI developers as well. And what we're trying to do is sort of help both communities sort of learn these skills so that, you know, you have developers that are enabled to do, you know, AI workloads and scenarios and all of the business logic around those things and develop it in an environment, whether it's cloud-based or edge based that they're familiar with. And, you know, so therefore a lot of the complexities of the teleco network itself get sort of obfuscated or abstracted for them. So the developer doesn't have to become a telco expert, right. To build a 5g based camera system for their retail stores. Right. And so that's, that's exciting when we start to merge some of these communities together. >> Yeah. So what would be your message to the operators this year? I mean, obviously the edge is not something you need to educate people on, but they are trying to figure out how to, you know, swap the engine of the airplane out at 35,000 feet, as I say, they got, they want to innovate and this year what's your message. Yeah. >> I mean, there's kind of two things going on. One is yes. I think we're, we are deeply involved helping telcos Cloudify their network and take advantage of 5g and virtualization. And, you know, we have recent acquisitions as a metal switching affirmed and hold that whole thing. So that's, that's that chunk of work that's ongoing. I think the other thing that's happening is really thinking about telcos. We're seeing as a hunger for solutions. And so telcos thinking of themselves as solution providers, not just connectivity providers and, you know, getting into that mindset of saying, we're going to come in and work with this city or this, you know, big retailer and we're going to help solve the problems for them. And we love working with partners like that, that are actually delivering solutions as opposed to pieces of technology. >> What solutions do you think Pete are showing the most promise for helping the telco industry digitally transformed? >> Well, I think on the NGI space, there's a couple of big verticals. I mean, you know, obviously places like agriculture are huge, you know, where you need a wide deployments. We're seeing a lot of areas in around retail, you know, retail environments when I would have leveraged like low latency 5g. One of the pieces of feedback we heard was a lot of retailers actually want less hardware in their physical store and they want to leverage 5g more to get back to the cloud. And then we're seeing, you know, energy sectors, you know, and mining and other kind of difficult to reach areas where you can leverage ciliary networks. So a lot of these verticals are, you know, turning onto the fact that they could get some of their conductivity and edge AI solutions combined together and do some amazing things. >> Right. You just made me think of a question while I got you. I got to ask this because you know, you've brought up 5g and back haul, you know, and people in the, in this business always know backhaul is always the problem. We all know we've been to a concert or a game where we've got multiple bars on wifi, but nothing's loading. Right. So we all know, right. We've seen that that's back haul. That's a choke point. If 5g is going to give me more back haul to essentially another exchange, how has the core of the internet evolved? Because as I started poking around and research and there's more direct connects now, there's not many exchanges. It used to be, we had my west and my east, those are now gone. I'm like, what's going on in the backbone? Does that simple? Is it better or worse? Is that still a good thing? >> Well, yeah. One of the exciting things around kind of the virtualization of what's going on with networking is that we're able to partner with telcos to sort of extend the Azure footprint to help with some of those congestion points, right? So we can, we can bring heavy edge equipment, pretty darn close to where the action is, and actually have direct connections into teleco networks to help them sort of expand their footprint, you know, even farther out to the edge and they can leverage our hyperscaler to, to do that. So that that's a benefit of one of the architectural improvements of 5G around virtualization. >> That's awesome. And I'm looking forward to following up on that great point. And I think it's, it sells a digital divide problem. That's been going on for over a decade, 15, 20 years, this digital divide. Now you got city revitalizations going on. You have, I mean, just the, just the, the digital revitalization in global communities is everywhere. And I think, I think this is going to be an influx point. That's not yet written about in the press now, but I think it's going to be very clear. So, so with all that, I got to ask you the importance of how you guys see an ecosystem for this transformation, because it used to be the telcos ruled the world, and now it's not going that way. They still have a footprint. I mean, everyone, the rising tide helps everybody, as they say, what's the importance of a strong ecosystem in order to drive this nutrient? >> Well, you know, it's definitely a team sport. It's definitely a team sport. And, and you know, Microsoft's been a big partner company for decades, and I think it's something like $8, a part of revenue for every dollar of revenue from the Microsoft generate. So we're heavily invested in our device, builder partners, our telco partners, the ISV community. And, you know, I think what we're trying to do is work with telcos to sort of bring those communities together, to solve these kinds of problems that customers are having. So yeah, it's definitely a team sport. And like I said, the new entrance with some really innovative software platforms, it's an opportunity for telcos, I think, to sort of reinvent and to kind of rethink about how they want to be more agile and more competitive. Again, this will be businesses. >> Okay, great. And have you on, I got it. I got ask you, we've talked about the most important story, obviously 5g edge in AI. I think you nailed it. You're you're in this cross hairs of probably one of the most exciting areas in the tech industry as distributed computing goes that last mile, so to speak pun intended, what, but what's, in your opinion, the most important story that not many people are talking about that should be talking about, what do you think is something that's being written about, but to talk about, but it's super important that that needs to be true. >> Well, you know, it's interesting. I mean, a lot of the marketing and talk about 5g is around phones, people talking about their speed on phones. And I think we're finally getting past the discussion of 5g on phones and talking about 5g for like more MTM communications and more, more kind of connecting really trillions of things together. And then that enabled me to is going to be a big, big deal moving forward. And I think that's, we'll start to see probably more coverage of that moving forward. We're on the inside of the industry. So we kind of know it, but I think on the outside of the industry, when people think 5g, they still think phones. And then hopefully that becomes, there's more of a story around all the other pieces being connected with 5g. >> Yeah. And I got to ask you about two quick things before we go open source, openness, interoperability, and security. What, how would you, what's your opinion on those two pillars? >> So I think security is kind of foundational for what we're we've been doing at Microsoft for a long time, whether it's Azure sphere that we're doing for end to end, you know, edge security or any of our security offerings that we have from services perspective. So we're trying to like with Azure percept, we actually build in like TPM encryption of AI models from edge to cloud, as an example of that. So security really is foundational to all of the stuff that we need to do. It cannot be something that you do later or add on it has to be designed in. And I think from an open source perspective, I mean, whether it's our, you know, stewardship of GitHub or the involvement in open source communities, you know, we're, we're totally excited about all the innovation that's happening there and you know, you got to let people participate. And in fact, one of the cool things that's been happening is the amount of developer reach in areas where maybe there isn't, you know, like we've had our build conferences and other Microsoft events. It enables everyone to participate virtually no matter where they are in the world, even if they can't get a ticket to Redmond Washington, and you can still be part of the developer community and learn online and be part of that. >> I think this whole embed developer market's going to come back in and massive volumes of new people as Silicon becomes important. And of course, I can't leave you without asking the Silicon angle question for our team. Silicon is becoming a competitive advantage for whether it's acceleration, offload and or core things, whether it's instance related or use case related, what's the future of Silicon and the telecom and cloud in general. >> For mine. Yeah. So I mean, the advances happening in the Silicon space are fantastic. Whether it's like process advances down to like five nanometers and below. So you're talking about, you know, much lower power consumption, much higher density, you know, packaging and, you know, AI acceleration built in as well as all these other, you know, containerized security things. So that's being driven by a lot by consumer markets, right? So more powerful PCs and phones. And that's also translating into the cloud and for some of the heavy infrastructure. So the leaps and bounds we're seeing even between now and the last MWC in person in 2019 in Silicon has been amazing. And that's going to unblock, you know, all kinds of workloads that could be done at the edge as well as incredible high-performance stuff to be done in the cloud. That's pretty exciting. >> Peter Love that word unblocked, because I think it's going to unblock them that big, you know, rock in the river. It's holding the water back. I think it's going to unleash creativity, innovation, computer science engineering down from Silicon to the modern application developer. Amazing opportunity. I think the edge is going to be the, an awesome area to innovate on. Thanks for coming on the cube. >> Sounds good. Thanks for having me. >> People in our senior director, silica telecom as your edge devices for platform services at Microsoft, a lot going on big cloud player, hyperscaler at the edge. This is the final area. In my opinion, that's called the accident habits going to be great innovation. It's part of the cloud cloud is creating massive change in telecom. We've got to cover here in the queue. Thanks for watching. Okay, Dave, that was a great interview with Pete Bernard, senior director, Silicon telecom, Azure edge devices, platform, and services. Microsoft's got all those long titles in the, in the thing, but Silicon is a key thing. You heard my interview wide ranging conversation, obviously with that kind of pedigree and expertise. He's pretty strong, but he, at the end there a little gym on the Silicon. Yeah. Okay. Because that is going to be a power source. You you've been reporting on this. You've been doing a lot of breaking analysis. Microsoft's a hyperscaler they're they're the second player in cloud, Amazon. Number one, Microsoft number two, Google number three, Microsoft. They didn't really say anything. They have something Amazon has got grab a ton, but big directional signal shift there. >> Well, I think it was interesting. It was a great interview by the way, and the things that struck me pizza, and they're focused on the intersection of 5g edge and AI. So AI is all about data-driven workloads. If you look at AI today, most of the AI in the enterprise is done in the cloud and it's modeling, but the future of AI is going to be inferencing at the edge in real time. That's where the real expenses today. And that's where you need new computing architectures. And you're right. I've written about this one of my last breaking analysis on AWS, a secret weapon, and that secret weapon is a new computing architecture. That's not based on traditional x86 architectures. It's based on their own design, but based on arm, because arm is higher performance, lower cost, better price, performance, and way cheaper. And so I guarantee you based on what you just said that, well, Amazon clearly has set the direction with nitro and graviton and, and, and, you know, gravitate on to Microsoft is I think following that playbook. And it's interesting that Pete has Silicon in his title and telecom and an edge they're going after that because it doesn't require new low powered architectures that are going to blow away anything we've ever seen on x86. >> Yeah. I mean, I think that's a killer point. You and I have been covering the enterprise, the old guard rack and stack the boxes. Amazon was early on that clearly winning low power, high density looks like a consumer, like feel in cloud scale, changes the game on economics. And then he also teased out if you squint, there's a lot of stuff to decode. We're going to unpack that video and write probably six or five blog posts there, but he said, 5g is going to change the direct connect. They're already doing it. Microsoft's putting that to the edge, that right in the same playbook as AWS, right on the almost right on the number, put the edge, make it powerful, direct connects connectivity. >> We've seen this before. The consumer piece is key. The consumer leads, we know this and the consumer apple is leading in things like AI and, and Tesla is leading at the edge. That's where you have to look for the innovation. That's going to trickle into the enterprise. And so in the cloud guys, I kicked the hyperscale. You and Sergeant Joe Hall talked about this at the startup showcase that we did was that the cloud guys, the hyperscalers, and a really strong position for the edge. >> I got to tell you, we are on this go to the siliconangle.com. Obviously that's our website, the cube.net. We are reporting on this. It's very nuanced point. But if you look at the cloud players, you can see the telco digital revolution telco. Dr. Is a digital revolution back to you, Adam, in the studio for more coverage, we'll be back at the desk shortly.

one thing i'd point out is well flashblade one of our products is scale out flasharray our first product is not scale out um you know scale out isn't a capability for a customer it's an architecture in how you build the product uh you know when i scale out i have more complicated software i have more components more components lead to more failures right if i have a piece of memory and it's going to fail at a certain annual failure rate and i have 10 pieces of memory i'm going to fail at 10 times that same rate so scale out introduces complexity it introduces more components and then you have to say what do you get from it so if our customers needed a lot more performance than we're delivering if they needed a lot more scale than we're delivering in the flash array product we then react to that and go build scale out where the flash array sells we don't see that as a major market need it's more of a niche where flashblade sells then there is much more of a need for that and that's why flashblade would scale out from day one the tam expansion really is following where solid state takes us you know we've gone from um a world that was where believe it or not most computers still had mechanical systems operating them it's sort of like having a mechanical calculator rather than an electronic calculator right we had mechanical disks in our computers literally spinning rust right and it's only been in the last decade where a semiconductor you know where solid state has taken uh the place of that called flash right well as that continues to get less expensive we now can bring not only flash performance into disk economics but more importantly now we can finally have modern software that is driving the need for having greater flexibility with our data as data grows it now we say it has gravity that is it gets heavy it gets hard to manage hard hard to move uh between different environments and now a lot of infrastructure operators are spending much more time managing their data managing the storage systems for their data than they are managing anything else in the data center environment we want to eliminate all that we want to automate all of that you know on the theme of decades two decades ago every application had its own individual communication stack there were dozens of different protocols and a dozen different networks in every company one decade ago ago every application had its own um custom hardware stack and and custom operating systems stack well today there's one network it's called the internet uh today everything every application every server is virtualized allowing mobility and yet storage is still static we we want this decade a bit to be about making storage and data dynamic and really responsive to the needs of the application environment sure so it's a it's a deep relationship that's only getting deeper and it's really at all levels it starts with the executive alignment you think about charlie giancarlo from cisco we've got a lot of just common cross-pollination there but now it extends certainly the field level tom and i are doing a lot of planning together in terms of having our teams go after common use cases but now it extends to engineering as well we had a ucs director plug-in that we've had for some time now uh but but pure is now first in terms of having integration into cisco intersight so we are first and only to have storage integration at the cisco intersight so that cisco and pure customers can really manage their uh environment from from one console so a lot of simplicity uh the single sas interface for managing everything tom why pure why first with that well you know nathan he articulated it well you can look at the executive level we talked about charlie but even you know all of our cisco executives but also to the engineering this the we started really strong uh with the field sales teams but even if you look at the little things that our customers notice but a lot of people may not like the internal development of validated design guides use cases we churn them out um with pure as uh you know our top ecosystem partner more than anybody and there's a lot of work being done our customers see that and it's really helped drive you know our go to market together it's really a very strong strategy and what is the type of data that's going to be the best fit for it there are a lot of common patterns for consumption in a.i uh speech recognition image recognition places where you have a lot of unstructured data or it's unstructured to a computer it's not unstructured to you when you look at a picture you see a lot of things in it that a computer can't see right because you recognize what the patterns are and the whole point about ai is it's going to help us get structure out of these unstructured data sets so the computer can recognize more things you know the speech and emotions that that we as humans just take for granted it's about having computers being able to process and respond to that in a way that they're not really capable of doing today absolutely absolutely yeah no i mean i think it's been a really exciting conference for us so far like you said a lot of payload coming out um you know as far as the building the bridge of the hybrid cloud this has been you know we this has been i would say a long time coming right we've been working down this path for uh for a couple years we started by bringing some of the cloud-like capabilities that customers really wanted and were able to achieve into the cloud back into the data center right so you saw us do this in terms of making our on-prem products easier to manage easier to use easier to automate you know but what working with customers over the last couple of years you know we realized is that as the cloud hype kind of subsided and people were taking a more measured view of where the cloud fits into their strategies what tools it brings you know we realized that we could add value in the in the public cloud environment the same types of enterprise capabilities the same type of features rich data services uh feature sets things like that that we do on premise in the cloud and so what we're looking to achieve is actually quite simple all right we want to give customers the choice whether whether customers want to run on premise or in the cloud that's just a choice of we wanted to we wanted to make an environmental choice we don't want to we don't want to put customers in a position where they have to make that choice and feel trapped in one location or another because of lack of features lack of capabilities um you know or or economics and so the way that we do that is by building the same types of capabilities that we do on-prem in the cloud giving customers the freedom and flexibility to be agile sure well we're a two-year-old uh startup uh headquartered out of bellevue washington and we really focus on two primary uh businesses we have a blockchain business and we have an ai business uh in blockchain we are one of the largest blockchain cryptocurrency hosting companies in north america uh we've got uh you know facilities uh uh four facilities in north carolina south carolina georgia and kentucky and you know really the the business there is helping companies to be able to take advantage of blockchain and then position them for uh the future you know um and then on the ai side of our business uh really you know we we operate that in two ways one is we can also co-locate and host people uh just like we do on the blockchain side but primarily we're focused on uh creating a public cloud focused on gpu-centric computing and artificial intelligence and we're there to help you know really usher in the new age of ai how does pure actually take that word simple from a marketing concept into reality for your customers yeah you know i i think i think simple is um the most underappreciated but biggest differentiator that pure has um i was recalling for someone you talked to cause earlier today i had a conversation about three weeks into the existence of pure excuse me with cause and we were just debating i mean this is before we wrote any code at all about what would be pure's long-term differentiator and i was kind of like i will be you know the flash people or high performance or whatever he's like no no we're going to be simple we are going to deliver a culture that drives some plus into our products and that will be game changing and i thought he was a little crazy at the time um but he's absolutely turned out to be right and if you if you look over the years that started with just an appliance experience a tent card install you know just a really easy environment but that's manifested itself into every product we create and it's really hard to reverse engineer that you know it's an engineering discipline thing that you have to build in the dna of the company so how do you see the partnership with splunk just in terms of supporting that tam expansion the next 10 years so analytics particularly log analytics have really taken off for us in the last year as we put more focus on it um we want to double down on our investments as we go through the end of this year and in the next year with with a focus on splunk um as well as other alliances um we think we are in a unique position because the uh rollout of smart store right customers are always on a different scale in terms of when they want to adopt a new architecture right it is a significant uh decision that they have to make and so we believe between the combination of flash array for the hot tier and flashblade for the cold is a nice way for customers with classic splunk architecture to modernize their platform leverage the benefits of data reduction to drive down some of the cost leverage the benefits of flash to increase the rate at which they can ask questions and get answers is a nice stepping stone and when customers are ready because flashblade is one of the few storage platforms in the market that is scale out bandwidth optimized for both nfs and object they can go through a rolling non-disruptive upgrade to smart store have you know investment protection and and if they can't repurpose that flash rate they can use pure as a service to have the flash raise the hots here today and drop it back off to us when they're done

(upbeat music) >> Narrator: Live! From Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering Microsoft Ignite. Brought to you by Cohesity. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite, I'm your host Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Stu Miniman. We are joined by Frank Artale, the Managing partner at Prime Foray, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE Frank. >> Glad to be here. >> So before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about the energy of this place, you've been to many, many an Ignite, way back before it was even called Ignite. >> Oh yeah! Yes, this is, Ignite is the evolution of something that Microsoft used to call TechEd. So it was like back in, when I was in Microsoft, so even back in the '90s, we had to figure out a way to educate the technical community, and we decided to start this thing, and interestingly enough, the first one ever was here in O\rlando, much smaller venue, I think at The Swan and the Dolphin, but I've been coming to them on and off, you know for the past, 26 years or so. >> So tell us a little bit about what you're doing now at Prime Foray, what is Prime Foray? >> So we're a boutique and advisory consulting company, and we do work with what I call ISVs, so basically someone that makes software, but we engage with folks who are at some point on a journey to cloud, and that means both from a business and technical perspective. Whether they're just getting started, thinking about moving products, that maybe they had it from on premises, onto a cloud platform, or maybe they're well on their way and they're really looking to just like amplify and accelerate that. That's where a team of people that'll have experience from product, business development, sales and marketing, to really get those companies to the place that they want to be, relative to cloud, because as we know, cloud is still the future, and everyone wants to get there. >> All right, so Frank, bring us inside. Without giving away state secrets, dealing with Microsoft today is very different from the company that we grew up with, of Windows and Office. So what's it like working with Microsoft? Give a little bit of you know, where some of the key enablers are. >> Yeah, yeah so in the early days, if you think about it right, Microsoft is always great with evangelizing to an independent software vendor, around building to the platform. So back in the day, so much of the Microsoft actual market cap, was dependent upon the ISVs building to the APIs. And the APIs were the sort of the lock, right, until the ISVs were locked. But there never was a really, let's say a great channel program for someone that was an ISV. The channel programs are largely structured for people that sold stuff. And so what you're really seeing now for the first time, and this is not exclusive to Microsoft, with other cloud partners. But of course since we're at a Microsoft show, we can highlight some of the things that Microsoft is doing here, it really is creating super incentives for ISVs to come to the platform, such that the ISVs feel like they are selling side by side, side by side with Microsoft. There are some great incentives around that, they provide some great access to technology and tools, really great credits to get onto the platform, and so they focus as much on the business, like they always put more on the business now, than on the access to the technology, to the extent that it can work side by side with a company in building their business, well the folks that are the business owners really like that. The tech guys always like bits and bytes wherever they can go. >> So, describe how the partnership works. I mean what is, as you are now holding hands with companies that are going through a digital transformation, and some working closely with Microsoft, some may be just on the fringes of working with Microsoft, describe how the partnership is working. >> Yeah, so well, I would call it, I'd like to say that it's really in someways an evolution of the way Microsoft started working with ISVs, a number of years ago, and so at the core, the way Microsoft thinks about them, thinks about the ISVs is really, you know, an extension of their own product line. Right, so a platform is only as good as the things that, that stand atop it, right? And so, if Azure is a platform, or Business Apps is a platform, or Modern Workplace is a platform, you need applications that sit atop those things. And, one of I think the, one of the key things that Microsoft has done, has really enabled the ISVs to become connected with the Microsoft Sales Organization, without having intermediaries. So when, like in a lot of ways, when you're an ISV and you go work with a larger company that you want to have a partnership with, you have to find somebody that knows somebody that's the Account Manager for some large account. What Microsoft has done is they've automated that, once you've passed through a series of hurdles and certifications, you can actually enter into a program where you're opening leads into Microsoft and you get, and that partner, gets connected with the Microsoft Sales Team on the other side. So whenever I talk to people about things that they're doing, that's what I think the ISVs are most proud of. You'll hear them say things like, well, we are in X amount of accounts together with Microsoft. And, you know we're going, and from a business perspective, why ever enter into a partnership, if you were not going to just, to sell stuff? Again, you can do bits and bytes all day, it's a lot of fun for people like me, but at the end of the day, revenue has to come out the other side. And I think from a partner perspective, they've done a better than good job at that. >> All right. So Frank, when you look back to when you were inside Microsoft, give a little bit about how the roles have been changing as we've gone into this world of cloud and AI. >> Right, how the world has changed? >> And the roles inside of Microsoft, specifically, to, you know, fit the world. >> Right right. So when I was there, you know long ago, obviously it was a much smaller place, and you actually had, you know inside the house, you had product development, and you know, outside the house, you had channel development, and then you had, then you had direct sales, and you also OEM sales which was, which actually is a very very big piece to the puzzle. But, the linkage, right, between sales and channel, wasn't really there back then. And sometimes, like even the role that I had in program management, at times we had to be, we had to be glue for that. I think what, you know, in a sense now with the roles have changed is such a way, that you have, you have people, you know inside the house now that are really responsible for not just ensuring that a partner feels good about what they're doing, but that the partners are actually selling side-by-side with folks in the field. And that would've been, you know, an impossible thing, really impossible thing to do at the time. And so the other thing that's, I think that's really changed, is now that you have, you have an overlay sales organization, called Worldwide Commercial, and also a direct sales organization. So direct sales organization, are people that carry the bag and have quota right on the accounts. But then, you have another organization, that looks after the 500 largest accounts, and there are a lot of specialists in that organization, that by definition work with partners to move both the Microsoft products and the partner's products together in there. And so those are large organizations that plain and simply just didn't exist, and they may have not even made sense at the time, 'cause at the time a lot of what we were doing in the '90s we were still distributed computing, with still really a technical curiosity, and then it became trusted infrastructure. And it's really only in the last few years that cloud computing has moved beyond that, from being a technical curiosity, to trusted infrastructure. And the way it's taken to market, is so much different, because we took finished goods to market, we relied on people to carry boxes of stuff, we relied on people to do inventory. There's no more inventory, I mean it's just there, you turn it on and you go. So I think what you'll see also from again, from where the commerce engines are setup, and the kind of people that are deployed, are really being tooled for that kind of a go to market, which is significantly different. >> So we're really just scratching the surface when it comes to cloud. As you said so many of these companies are only at the beginning of their journeys. What do you think the future holds, in terms of trends in the marketplace and what companies are going to continue to want. And are there any blind spots, that you, as someone who's being at this industry for 36 years, sort of know are there? >> Right, so like today was an interesting one, to see ARC announced. And you know, it shows the natural evolution of the way that we think about a platform. So, if we go back to even like the late 80s right, we had to build servers, right? So you got a network operating system, and there was a set of network adapters, and a set of hardware it worked on, and you had to pay a systems integrator, to go put it all together, and then you kind of hope it worked. Well then we got this stuff call plug-and-play, in the early 90s, and it flattened the playing field, and you can take an operating system like Windows NT the one that I worked on, and as long as it'd adhere to a plug-and-play standard, it generally worked on that platform. But the operating system then grew, to become a collection of services. It was a file server, it was an identity server, eventually, things like transaction processing, networking was always in there. Now if you look at what something like ARC, or any of the services that are available on other clouds, they're really services on which applications are built. So now it's just natural to see that these services like from the cloud vendors, are being taken on to other cloud infrastructures. So today, we are here at Microsoft, you see ARC which is a set of Azure services, which are being made available and useful on other platforms like on-premises, as an example. To me that's no surprise, for Microsoft, they kind of led the way with that, with their IOT technology. How you see Azure services moving onto there. So now, from an opportunity perspective, as someone who's building applications, you can say OK, I can now go look at services that are I know will be available on all clouds. So I have a, let's just say I can, I can snap to that, and now I can go to my customer and also talk about a flexible, you know flexible opportunity about where and why you might want to deploy. So more opportunities around that though, what gets complex, management gets complex, security gets complex, we're sounding like the '90s again right, where whole industries grew up around things like performance and security, you know, and systems management, around that. And so, I think, you know from a, just strictly from an opportunity perspective, you know there'll be companies here that see that, and go take advantage of it to get out in front, and there'll be ones that are already incumbents, and hang on for dear life, saying things have to be different on each cloud, but I think, as you see companies that embrace the notion of sets of services that'll be running across clouds, those are where really the opportunities will be. Just like we saw in the '90s, folks that said hey, I'll run my application on Windows NT, on any piece of hardware, right? They didn't tie themselves to I'll just say like, you know Compaq, or Tandem, folks that don't exist anymore. (Rebecca laughs) Now they've got the folks we have here today. >> All right, so Frank you know you can't get through an interview with theCUBE without getting a question from John Furrier. >> Frank: Okay, is he on? >> So John's been watching, and he wants to know, how's the restaurant scenes doing in Seattle? >> Okay so, the Seattle restaurant scene's second to none. Obviously you need cuisine. Two restaurants that I'm personally involved with, one is downtown Seattle, and a one in, one in Bellevue Washington. Both completely different cuisines, one heavy on steak, one heavy on plants, and we like to say, we're up and to the right on both of those John, so thanks for asking. >> Great, excellent. Frank Artale, always a pleasure having you on. Thanks so much. >> Great, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of Microsoft Ignite. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE Covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019. Brought to you by Pure Storage. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin live on the Pure Accelerate floor in Austin, Texas. Dave Vellante is joining me and we're pleased to welcome a couple of guests from Core Scientific for the first time to theCUBE. We have Jim Benedetto, Chief Data Officer and John Curran, the SVP of Business Development. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. >> Both: Thank you. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So John, we're going to start with you. Give our audience an overview of who Core Scientific is, what you guys do, what you deliver. >> Sure, well, we're a two year old start up. Headquartered out of Bellevue, Washington and we really focus on two primary businesses. We have a blockchain business and we have an AI business. In blockchain, we are one of the largest blockchain cryptocurrency hosting companies in North America. We've got facilities, four facilities in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Kentucky. And really the business there is helping companies to be able to take advantage of blockchain and then position them for the future, you know. And then on the AI side of our business, really we operate that in two ways. One is we can also co-locate and host people, just like we do on the blockchain side. But primarily, we're focused on creating a public cloud focused on GPU centric computing and artificial intelligence and we're there to help really usher in the new age of AI. >> So you guys you founded, you said two years ago. >> Yes. >> From what I can tell you haven't raised a ton of dough. Is that true or are you guys quiet about that? >> John: We're very well capitalized. >> Okay, so it hasn't hit crunch base yet. >> Yeah, no. So we're a very well capitalized company. We've got, you know, to give you-- >> 'Cause what you do is not cheap. >> No, no, we've got about 675 megawatts of power under contract so each one of our facilities is about 50 megawatts plus in size. So no, it's not cheap. They're large installations and large build outs. >> And to even give you a comparison, a standard data center is about five to 10 megawatts. We won't even look at a facility or a plot of land unless we can supply at least 50 megawatts of power. >> So I was going to ask you kind of describe what's different between sort of blockchain hosting at conventional data bases or data centers. You kind of just did, but are there other sort of technical factors that you guys consider? >> Absolutely. We custom build our own data centers from the ground up. We've got patent pending technology, and if you look at virtually every data center in the world today, it's built with one thing at it's core and that's the CPU. The CPU is fundamentally different than the GPU and if you try to retrofit CPU based data centers for GPUs you're not going to fully maximize the performance and the capabilities of the GPU. So we build from the ground up data centers focused with the GPU at the center and not the CPU at the center. >> And is center in quotes because I mean, you have all this alternative processing, GPUs in particular that are popping up all over the place. As opposed to traditional CPU, which is, okay, just jam as much as I can on the real estate as possible, is that a factor? >> Well there's also a lot, the GPU at the center but there's also a lot of supporting infrastructure. So you got to look at first off the power density is very, very different. GPU, they require significantly a lot more power than CPUs do and then also just from a fluid dynamic prospective, it's very, the heating and cooling of them is again fundamentally different. You're not looking at standard hot, cold aisles and raised floors. But the overall goal also is to be able to provide a supporting infrastructure, which is from an AI ready design, is the interconnected networking and also the incredibly fast storage behind it. Because the name of the game with GPUs is different than with CPUs. With GPUs, the one thing you want to do is you want to get as much data into the GPU as fast as possible. Because compute will very rarely be your limiting factor with the GPU so the supporting infrastructure is significantly more important than it is when you're dealing with CPUs. >> So the standard narrative is, well, I don't know about cryptocurrency but the underlying technology of blockchain has a lot of potential. I personally think they're very much related and I wonder if you guys can comment on that. You started during the real, sort of the latest, most recent sort of big uptick, I know it's bounced back in cryptocurrency and so must you must've had a lot of activity in really, in your early days. And then maybe the crypto winter affected you, maybe it didn't. Some of those companies were so well capitalized, it was kind of their time to innovate, right? And yeah, there were some bad actors but that's really not the core of it. So I wonder what you guys have seen in the blockchain market. We'll get to AI and Pure and all that other stuff but this is a great topic, so I wonder if you could comment. >> So you know, yes, there's certainly classicality in the blockchain market, right? I think one of the key things is being well capitalized allows you to invest through the down turns to position to come out stronger as the market came out and you know, we've certainly seen that. Our growth in blockchain continues to really be substantial. And you know, we're making all the right strategic investments, right? Whether it's blockchain or AI, because you have such significant power requirements you know, you got to be very strategic about where you put the facilities. You're looking for facilities that have large sustained power capabilities, green. You know we've seen carbon taxes come in, that'll adversely affect folks. We want to make sure we're positioned for long term in terms of the capabilities. And then some geo political uncertainty is certainly affected, you know. The blockchain side of the business and it's driven more business to North America which has been fantastic for us. >> To me you're hosting innovation, you're talking blockchain and AI and like you're saying include crypto in there, you have some cryptocurrency guys, right? >> We do blockchain or cryptocurrency mining for ourselves as well. >> For yourselves, okay. But so my take on it is a whole new internet is being built and the crypto craze actually has funded a lot of that innovation. New protocol, when's the last time, the protocols of the internet, SMTP, HTDP, they're all government funded or education funded, academic institutions and the big internet companies sort of co-opted them. So you had a dirt of innovation, that's now come back. And you guys are hosting that innovation, that's kind of how I look at it. And I feel like we've seated the base and there's going to be this massive explosion of innovation, both in blockchain, crypto, AI automation and you're in the heart of it. >> Yeah I agree, I think cryptocurrencies or digital currencies are really just the first successful experiment of the blockchain and I agree with you, I think that is is as revolutionary and is going to change as many industries as the internet did and we're still very in a nascent stage of the technology but at Core, we're working to position ourselves to really be the underlying platform, almost like the alchemy of the early days of the internet. The underlying platform and the plumbing for both blockchain and AI applications. >> Right, whether it's smart contracts, like I say, new innovation, AI, it's all powering next generation of distributed apps. Really okay, so, sorry, I love this topic. >> I know you do. (laughs) >> Okay so where do these guys fit in? >> John: So do we. >> I mean, it's just so exciting. I think it's misunderstood. I mean the people who are into it are believers. I mean like myself, I really believe in a value store, I believe in smart contracts, immutability, you know, and I believe in responsibility too and that other good stuff but so. >> Innovation in private blockchain is just starting. If you look at it, I think there's going to be multiple waves in the blockchain side and we want to be there to make sure that we're helping power and position folks from both an infrastructure as well as a software perspective. >> Every financial institution, you got VMware doing stuff, Libra, I love Libra even though it's getting a lot of criticism, it just shined a light on the whole topic but bring us back to sort of commercial mainstream, what are you guys doing here, what's going on with Pure? >> So we have built, we're the first AI ready certified data center and we've actually partnered very closely with Pure and INVIDIA. As we went through the selection process of what type of storage we're going to be using to back our GPUs, we went through a variety of different evaluation criteria and Pure came out ahead and we've decided that we're going with Pure and we, again, for me it boils down to one thing as a Chief Data Officer is how much data can I get into those GPUs as fast as possible? And what you see is if you look at a existing, current Cloud providers, you'll see that their retro fitting CPU based centers for GPUs and you see a lot of problems with that where the storage that they provide is not fast enough to drive quote unquote warm or cold data into the GPUs so people end up adding more and more GPUs, it's actually just increased GPU memory when they're usually running around a couple percents, like one or two percent, five percent compute but you have to add more just for the memory because the storage is so slow. >> So you, how Jim you were saying before when we were chatting earlier, that you have had 20 years of experience looking at different storage vendors, working with them, what were some of the criteria, you talked about the speed and the performance, but in terms of, you also mentioned John that green was, is an important component of the way that you build data centers, where was Pure's vision on sustainability, ever green, where was that a factor in the decision to go with Pure? >> If you look at Pure's power density requirements and things like that, I think it's important. One thing that also, and this does apply from the sustainability perspective, where a lot of other storage vendors say that they're horizontally scalable forever but they're actually running different heads and in a variety of different ways. Pure is the only storage vendor that I've ever come across that is truly horizontally scalable. And when you start to try to build stuff like that you get into all the different things of super computing where you got, you know, split brain scenarios and fencing and it's very complex but their ability to scale horizontally with just, not even disc, but just the storage is something that was really important to us. >> I think the other thing that's certainly interesting for our customers is you're looking at important workloads that they're driving out and so the ability to do in place upgrades, business continuity, right, to make sure that we're able to deliver them technology that doesn't disrupt their business when their business needs the results, it's critically important so Pure is a great choice for us from that perspective and the innovations they're driving on that side of the business has really been helpful. >> I read a stat on the Pure website where users of Core Scientific infrastructure are seeing performance improvements of up to 800%. Are you delighting the heck out of data scientists now? >> Yeah, I mean. >> Are those the primary users? >> That is, it again references what we see with people using GPUs in the public Cloud. Again, going back to the thing that I keep hammering on, driving data into that GPU. We had one customer that had somewhere 14 or 15 GPUs running an analytics application in the public Cloud and we told them keep all your CPU compute in one of the largest Cloud providers but move just your GPU compute to us and they went from 14 or 15 GPUs down to two. GV-100 and a DGX-1 and backed by Pure Storage with Arista and from 14 GPUs to two GPUs, they saw an 800% in performance. >> Wow. >> And there's a really important additional part to that, let's say if I'm running a dashboard or running a query and a .5 second query gets an 800% increase in performance, how much do I really care? Now if I'm the guy running a 100 queries every single day, I probably do but it's not just that, it's the fact that it allows, it doesn't just speed up things, it allows you to look at data you were never able to look at before. So it's not just that they have an 800% performance increase, it's that instead of having tables with 100s of millions of rows, they now can have tables with billions of rows. So data that was previously not looked at before, data that was previously not turned into the actionable information to help drive their business, is now, they're now getting visibility into data they didn't have access to before. >> So you're a CDO that, it sounds like you have technical chops. >> Yeah, I'm a tech nerd at heart. >> It's kind rare actually for a CDO, I've interviewed a lot of CDOs and most of them are kind of come from a data quality background or a governance and compliance world, they don't dress like you (laughs) They dress like I do. (laughs) Even quite a bit better. But the reason I ask that, it sounds like you're a different type of CDO, like even a business like yours, I almost think you're a data scientist. So describe your role. >> I've actually held, I was with the company from the beginning so I've held quite a few roles actually. I think this might be my third title at this point. >> Okay. >> But in general, I'm a very technical person. I'm hands on, I love technology. I've held CTO titles in the past as well. >> Dave: Right. >> But I kind of, I've always been very interested in data and interested in storage because that's where data lives and it's a great fit for me. >> So I've always been interested in this because you know the narrative is that CDOs shouldn't be technical, they should be business and I get all that but the flip side of that is when you talk to CDOs about AI projects, which is you know, not digital transformation but specifically AI projects, they're not, most CDOs in healthcare, financial services, even government, they're not intimately involved, they're kind of like yeah, Chief Data Officer, we'll let you know when we have a data quality problem and I don't think that's right. I mean the CDO should be intimately involved. >> I agree. >> In those AI projects. >> I think a lot of times if you ask them, you ask, a lot of people, they'll say are you interested in deploying AI in your organization? And the answer is 100% yes and then the next follow up question is what would you like to do with it? And most of the time the answer is we don't know. I don't know. So what I have found is I go into organizations, I don't ask if people want to use AI, I ask what are your problems and I think what problems are you facing, what KPIs are you trying to optimize for and there are some of those problems, there are some problems on that list that might not be able to be helped by AI but usually there are problems on that list that can be helped by AI with the right data and the right place. >> So my translation of what you're asking is how can you make more money? (laughs) >> That what it comes down to. >> That's what you're asking, how can you cut costs or raise revenue, that's really ultimately what you're getting to. >> Data. >> Find new customers. I think the other interesting thing about our partnership with Pure and especially with regards to AIRE, AIRE's is an exciting technology but for a lot of companies is they're looking to get started in AI, there's almost this moment of pause, of how do I get started and then if I look at some of the greatest technology out there, it's like, okay, well now I have to retrofit my data center to get it in there, right. There's a bunch of technical barriers that slow down the progression and what we've been able to do with AIRE and the Cloud is really to be able to help people jumpstart, to get started right away. So rather than you know, let me think for six months or 12 months or 18 months on what would I analyze, start analyzing, get started and you can do it on a very cost effective outback's model as opposed to a capital intensive CAMP-X model. >> Alright, so I got to ask you. >> Yeah. >> And Pure will be pissed off I'm asking this question because you're talking about AIRE as a, it's real and I want some color on that but I felt like when the first announcement came out with Invida, it was rushed so that Pure could have another first. (laughs) Ink was drying, like we beat the competition but the way you're talking is AIRE is real, you're using it, it's a tangible solution. It's a value to your business. >> It's a core solution in our facility. >> Dave: It's a year ago. >> It's a core thing that we go to market with and it's something that you know, we're seeing customer demand to go out and really start to drive some business value. So you know, absolutely. >> A core component of helping them jumpstart that AI. Well you guys just, I think an hour or so ago, announced your new partnership level with Pure. John, take us away as we wrap here with the news please. >> Yeah, so well we're really excited. We're one of a handful of elite level MSP partners for Pure. I think there's only a few of us in the world so that's something and we're really the one who is focused on bringing ARIE to the Cloud and so it's a unique partnership. It's a deep partnership and it allows us to really coordinate our technical teams, our sales teams, you know, and be able to bring this technology across the industry and so we're excited, it's just the start but it's a great start and we're looking forward to nothing but upside from here. >> Fantastic, you'll have to come back guys and talk to us about a customer's who's done a jumpstart with ARIE and just taking the world by storm. So we thank you both for stopping by theCUBE. >> Absolutely, we'll love to do that. >> Lisa: Alright John, Jim, thank you so much for your time. >> Thank you. >> Absolutely. >> John: Really appreciate it. >> For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE from Pure Accelerate 2019. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE covering Smartsheet ENGAGE'18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I am Lisa Martin with Jeff Rick and Jeff and I have been live at Smartsheet Engage all day Jeff, we're in not Vegas. >> Not Vegas. >> Bellevue, Washington, this has been a really electric event. They keynote kicked off this morning standing room only, they have doubled in only their second year they have about 2,000 attendees, 1,100 customer companies represented here, they had customers from 20 countries, they more than 50% female attendees for the second year in a row, but we've heard such great groundswell stories all day. >> Yeah, it's been a good day, Lisa. You know, there's a little bit of confusion in this space, I think there's a lot of tools around workplace productivity, we got to hear from a couple analysts and how they're reshaping the way that they define those tools and that's okay, and I get it, but there was no question about the three customers we had on and the passion that those three customers had, kind of old school shadow IT implementations, they brought the tool in from their prior work, plugged it in and are having tremendous success, even the last one, to the chagrin of the parent company that builds software to do the same thing, so there's really no substitute for that type of passion and you know, we've seen these kind of communities grow before, I remember early days at the ServiceNow, it kind of reminds me of that you know, a lot of passion, applause, applause at the new features which is is always an interesting one, so a really, really good day. >> And well, you talked about those three customers that we had on today, we had GE Renewable Energy which was our last guest, a woman from Sodexo, Sodexo is a massive, massive company and then we had a gentleman from the office of the CIO at PayPal. These are three massive companies and the interesting theme from each of them is that these were groundswell opportunities for Smartsheet to really go viral within these organizations and make massive business impact and it's interesting that it really, even from a sales perspective, when we talked to the V.P. of Strategic Accounts, this is not a top down sale, this is bottoms up. Even PayPal found it on their own and learned how to use Smartsheet from YouTube videos. >> I love that. >> That was fantastic. >> So I love, you know, everyone talks about the new way to work but what about the new workers, right? And both of those examples are really good. The PayPal one as great, office of the CIO and yet to figure it out they just watched YouTube videos which is how people learn things today, and they implemented it from that experience. They didn't call Smartsheet, they just put it in and it worked and then we just had GE on and his comment that he wanted something lightweight for his workers. Lightweight. Three click rule, he said he had a three click rule after we turned the cameras off and if he can't get it down to three clicks you got to go back to work and make the process a little bit simpler, so you know, these are real examples of real big companies implementing kind of at the departmental level where this is getting traction, and executing to drive differentiation. And that's pretty exciting regardless if you get confused about the messaging or this or that, those are real life examples. >> And there's nothing that's more validating, right? Than the voice of a customer who has used it and especially the voice of a customer who is not a developer, doesn't know what an API is or need to in their daily jobs. This is technology that was built from the ground up, back 12 years ago on the construct of a spreadsheet which so many people understand and they've really parlayed that you're comfortable here with these tools, there's going to be like, you were talking a lot about today very smart that you brought up, I've got so many apps open and I think Forrester said between 13 and 30 apps people have open every day, so you can't really compete for that mind share so in terms of differentiation we've heard from Smartsheet themselves that they collaborate with companies that you'd think would be their competition. >> Right. >> But they understand that how this is starting from this groundswell, they have to be able to collaborate, to integrate, to connect with Slack, Microsoft teams, Office365, CRM systems from Microsoft, Salesforce, because that's how the worker needs to see their information, and they're also giving users the ability to configure, I want to see this, my team might want to see something completely different, and we can do that while sharing the same information. >> Right, right. I think the thing that struck me as really the big competitive differentiator in this kind of, work-group management is the going outside your four walls. If you use Salesforce, if you use even G-Suite, every time I send you an email it says, Lisa's not in your G-Suite are you sure? Are you sure? Like, red flag, I'm doing something wrong, the fact that the Smartsheet licensing structure is set up that if I set up a project I can share it to people outside of my organization. They can participate in that project. A, it just makes a lot of sense 'cause more and more projects right? You've got contractors, you've got partners, you've got all these things. It's not just an isolated instance anymore but then, more importantly, for Smartsheet, it just gives exposure to the tool to a new group of people. So, I think that's a really key part of the story here, that again maybe count as under the covers in terms as some of the messaging, but a real key differentiator, we've seen this type of viral growth before. I used to work for an Atlassian Service Provider and Atlassian had a great, kind of, seed strategy. $10 for 10 licenses and the $10 goes for schools in Africa. Brilliant. Who doesn't want to pay 10 bucks to help such a worthy cause, and then to seed it in. And then people that had success with the tool, it goes with them. You know, we heard that here the last gentleman from GE used it at a prior company, brought it over, wanted a lightweight tool not a big ERP tool implemented, and now he's running, he said $100 million in assets more effectively than he could before. >> Exactly, but will you talk about in terms of that big differentiator, their ability to, if I'm a Smartsheet user and you're not, I can share something with you and we can collaborate. They've got, I think I read over the weekend, 650,000 active individual users, but they have about 3,000,000 people that are collaborators. And I think it was Mark Mader, the CEO, this morning, that shared with us. That's 40% of their business. They have a massive pipeline by just enabling this collaboration and the ability for a user who's paying license to share with a colleague that isn't. >> Right. And then this is always the small conferences, 2,000 people, still new, people are super passionate, it's not a big vendor show, it's not a big expo hall show, but people are super engaged and sharing information and you get that in kind of the early days of these conferences, which is a really neat thing to see and there's no substitute for passionate customers, at the end of the day that's all they can really hope for, and that's the validation you need to move forward. >> Absolutely and they had, I think, almost 50 customer speakers today and I know how incredibly difficult it is for a marketing team to find 10 customers. >> Yeah, you know that right? >> Right. To speak. >> To speak. >> Let alone what multiplier you need to have to get 50, four x? Maybe not here. It seems like these people that are users, PayPal, and Cisco, and Sodexo, and GE Renewable Energy, have found this on their own and are really kind of creating this virality that is, it was very infectious, contagious. >> Yeah. >> By the day. >> Which is amazing to me because there's, again, there's so many applications out there, and they don't all do the same thing and they all have pros and cons. But, to be able to find it to be able to deliver success and again another important piece at any rate in with those existing systems that already are in play. Mark was very clear, we're not expecting you to throw out the apps that you have, you may or may not be able to display some with Smartsheet, but we really want to work with them, right. We want to play together, not necessarily play separate. And again, you have to do that to be successful in 2018. >> And they're listening to their customers. They have to do that to be successful, that's driven by the customers, it's clear that, there's a push pull effect and it's going to vary based on the enterprise and their overall objectives, but their collaboration with customers to develop and prioritize all of the enhancements that people have been asking for for the last year since the first Engage was really, you felt that, you heard it. There was a lot of applause during the product announcement session this morning. They are listening, they're taking that feedback in and ultimately, what their VP of customer success talked about is they're driving change management and that is extremely difficult, culturally, to be able to do. >> It's people, right? I mean, they said it right out the top. Empower everyone to improve how they work, connect, innovate, and execute. I've said it time and time again, we do a lot of shows, I think that's a pretty straightforward path to give more people more data, the tools to manipulate the data and get the answers, and then most importantly, the authority and power to execute those decisions, especially when you're close to the customer. That's where good things happen. That's where the organization moves forward and you can't be centralized command and control everything 'cause it's moving way too fast. >> Right, right. >> Way too fast. >> Well, Jeff, I had a blast hosting with you all day today. Learned a lot, my perspective is really opened up about Smartsheet and what it is and how it can really drive a lot of transformation and accelerate digital transformation. >> I can't help but again go back to the line from Google Cloud, right? People want to move to judgment, less drudgery more judgment. That's what they're enabling here at Smartsheet and we're excited to be here and cover it and can't wait until next year. >> Awesome, thanks Jeff. Again, Lisa Martin with Jeff Rick. Thanks for watching our coverage of Smartsheet Engage 2018, from Bellevue Washington, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Bellevue, Washington it's theCUBE. Covering Smartsheet Engage '18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. We are live at Smartsheet Engage 2018 in Bellevue, Washington. I am Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick, and we've had a great day talking with Smartsheet executives, analysts, users, and we're excited to welcome to theCube for the first time, Gurmeet Mangat, the site manager Wind Power Generation at GE Renewable Energy. Gurmeet, great to have you on the program. >> Thank you Lisa, thank you Jeff. I'm really happy to be here. >> So you're a user of Smartsheet, but you're also a renegade. So before we get into your renegade status, tell us a little bit about GE Renewable Energy and your role. You got a big role as site manager. What, 75 turbines across multiple locations? So let's talk about GE Renewable Energy and your role as site manager. >> Sure, no problem. So GE Renewable Energy. One of our missions statements is to unleash limitless energy. How we do that, we harness the power of the sun, the water, and the wind. So try to produce clean efficient energy to power countries, homes, businesses, whatever needs that powered energy. As a manager I manage, like you said three wind farms, three different customers. A very complex role to have. I'm coming right from not just operations, human resources, financials. So everything's required of someone like me to manage that business end to end. It's a challenge, at the same time I seek opportunity in a lot of what's going on and leveraging Smartsheet as one of the tools. It's something I've been using over the past year to optimize the business and run those turbines. >> So it's so funny because I would say GE turbine farms and GE engines are the most quoted, often referenced IOT devices in this next gen conversation about IOT and data and how much data they throw off of any other kind of product out there, and you're sitting right in the middle of it actually managing the real machines and managing the real data. >> Yeah, exactly. So I mean the, the machines themselves are highly automated. They're spinning out a lot of data and we've got great systems in place to manage that information. Make it transferrable, viewable to a lot of the people that need it. The opportunity is not necessarily in the equipment that GE manufactures but the back-end business that drives that manufacturing, that drives those services. That's where, again we leveraged Smartsheet over the last year to close a lot of data quality issues. We're ruling out and canceling a lot of the human error of the process steps that we're seeing in a lot of businesses today. We're really taking the initiative of managing our data, bringing us, making us actually competitive in the fourth industrial revolution. I mean I've had a strong believe that if you're not managing your data correctly today, you'll market yourself out of the business, you won't stay ahead of the game. So I think, like I was saying before the biggest opportunity right now is the back-end of the business. Smart GE does a great job at manufacturing and producing high quality products. I think there's huge opportunity in saving the back end and optimizing the process that runs that. >> When you say the back end, there's always a lot of conversation about you know going from reactive to predictive to prescriptive. Analytics, again everybody likes to talk about keeping the turbine up. Are you talking about those types of processes or is it more, you know how that energy is fed into the grid and more kind of the connection to the broader ecosystem, when you say back end? >> Let's talk about the proactive and reactive situation, 'cause that's really what we're trying to drive. >> Okay. >> There can be particular cases where a turbine could fail in the middle of winter, a high-wind season and the visibility's not great. So what we've done is we've taken Smartsheet. We've given our technicians a mobile application tool to collect data as they visit turbines. We're taking information within Smartsheet, we aggregate it, we quantify it, and now we're able to predict turbine behavior based on this information. A little bit faster than some of the tools that GE provides today. A perfect example is about a month ago we determined that a turbine needed a quarter of a million dollar repair before any GE tool told us that. That was simply because of giving our technicians a tool, which is a Smartsheet webform and telling us what happens everyday you visit that turbine. That goes into the background. We take the information, aggregate it into a dashboard viewings. That gives us a great visual control and visual aid of our business. >> That visibility-- >> I was going to say, is he collecting different data, or are you processing it in a different way with the tooling that you set up with Smartsheet that gives you that visibility? >> They are, so we are collecting different data. So GE gives us a lot of data on our turbine health efficiency, how it's operating. It might quantify the number of faults per megawatt hour and per (mumbles) it for us for example. But what we're creating with Smartsheet is we're creating our own organic KPIs I'll call them, some metrics that we are creating ourselves to try to drive different behavior. So when the techs go in, we talk about parts consumptions, for example. So if this part's been consumed 20 times over the last month, you've got to ask why. You know, why do you keep visiting this turbine to do that. So that visibility drives a different discussion now, so now we can engage with engineers with different type, different information. They might be able to say, "Okay, "you know what, you guys got some good data here. "We think you're right. "We should execute this repair." >> So, that example that you gave and give me the number again that working with Smartsheets your team was able to find a, what did you say, a $250 million? >> $250,000 repair. >> Thousand dollar repair. >> That's the cost of the repair, but it's a proactive repair versus reactive so now we're not facing a long wait time, finding a crane, bringing a crane on site, getting the paperwork in place to get the job done 'cause it's not an easy repair. >> But there's a very impressive snowball effect of the benefits back to the business. You've found it faster. You were able to get, you know the parts needed faster, repair it faster. Clearly that goes all the way back up the chain from a revenue perspective. >> Absolutely. >> But you, when I alluded to you earlier, this renegade status, you brought Smartsheet in from your previous job and you've said, "This has enabled us "to find something faster than "our brand of technology's product would have been "able to do." Talk to us about this conviction that you brought in and is it kind of becoming viral within GE Renewable Energy yet? >> Good question. It's becoming viral, a lot of people are listening now. So we've talked to GE digital VPs. I've talked to the ERP providers in Europe, what they're doing with GE. So we've essentially, I call it a success story. They're not going to adopt Smartsheet. They want to build their own enterprise solution but, the reason why I call it a success story is because I've changed the way that they are thinking today. >> That's huge. Cultural change? >> I've presented a solution to them. I've essentially told them, you need to give us something that works for us faster. If you do this, it gives managers capacity to improve your business, really develop people that are working underneath you, engage them, empower them, and move the business forward not on a typical five year plan that most businesses have in place. But it's a step change. >> Right, right. >> It takes you year over year and you're stepping every year to something new, and I think in today's day and age with how fast things are moving, you need that. >> And I'm curious to unpack a little bit on this example where you said you know, it's this failing part that was giving you a leading indicator that there was a bigger problem. So that was just kind of a different way to look at the solution, right? You're identifying kind of a stupid consumption pattern on a spare part that shouldn't happen as opposed to the core data that's coming off that machine and that's what gave you kind of the unique insights. Does that come from you? Does that come techs who are in the field and have kind of a sense of, "Maybe we should be looking at this, "maybe we should be looking at that." How do you start to empower people or where do some of these different kind of points of view that then can be backed up with data in the Smartsheet process come from? >> So, it's all techs. (clears throat) Coming into the job last year, I asked one of the techs, I said, "Why are you going to this turbine?" And the question why is such a powerful question to ask. They said, "We're going to fix this." So what happened last time? They had no idea. So I said, "There's no "information to support your visit today? "And you don't understand why you're going today." They said, "As a result of something that was not "done correctly before." So we fixed that part first. We started giving them the information upfront. We gave them a tool to collect the data. So now they are empowered to provide very direct feedback to myself as a manager and even to an engineering team, like in New York for example. Something technicians never felt empowered to do before. They are the driving factors for those data collection, the decision making. I definitely appreciate that by giving them feedback on a daily basis, that what you guys are doing is changing the way that we manage the business. It's a very driven culture change by the front line. It's not something that I'm pushing down. I'm asking them to help me push it upwards to the senior level. >> And they've got to love it. They've got to love thinking that they've actually got input as opposed to just being called to go out and fix things when it breaks. >> Exactly. They're driving their day. They can go to work in the morning. They can look at the whole personality of a turbine, what's outstanding, what was done last time and the conversations are very quick in the morning. It used to be a 7 o'clock startup. They're not driving out 'til eight, 8:30, nine o'clock by the time they get their stuff together. I mean we're averaging a seven am to about 7:30 departure now. >> So each person is saving 60 to 90 minutes everyday. >> Every day now departure. >> That's a big roll up. In fact, I was looking at some of the productivity stats that Smartsheet talks about on their website and they say an average per, individual user of Smartsheet will save about 300 hours a year. An organization can save up to 60,000 hours a year. >> I believe that. That's believable. I mean there's, just a technical aspect of managing a turbine. If we even talk about you know issuing a purchase order. Managing contractor labor, invoices. The tool that we're using today is a complete end to end P & L management tool. So it takes invoicing from subcontractors, labor. We are inventory tracking, we are tracking any health and safety issues. Everything from end to end, so it's really done a great job for us. >> That's all built within your Smartsheet? >> Correct. >> Wow. >> And it's all mobile, so. I mean I'm not at my site this week, but on a daily basis I have visibility to my business. You're talking about 70, 80 plus machines, that's over you know about a hundred million dollars in assets that have to be managed effectively, efficiently, and correctly. >> You have visibility into everyday from wherever you are? >> Exactly, yes. >> That's a huge transformation. So we talked about you being a renegade and other groups within GE on divisions that are curious about this. I'm curious, have you heard anything today that they have announced that excites you, or maybe was any of this part of a feedback that you provided, as we've heard all day Jeff that they're very responsive to customer feedback in terms of product innovation. Anything you're going to go back to the office and be excited, like the next generation or what's coming available soon? Is it going to enable me to do X-Y-Z now? >> That's a good question. So GE is a very tough company to change. There will be a lot of takeaways from this trip and when I go head back. After the last conversation I had with GE digital and the team, they are going to hire a new resource and set budget aside to help close the gaps that we've identified. So I think after this visit and some of the things I've learned throughout the conference and when I head back I'll only be able to identify a few more gaps that they need to fill, and I'll push that up to them probably in the next week when I get back there and hopefully they can appreciate that candid feedback and take that and run with it. >> But you were able to fund your existing project just out of your own discretionary funds? >> Exactly. I mean that's one of the benefits of Smartsheet. It costs really nothing to create something, and my job is to manage wind farms, so I've taken initiative to create, I call it a mini-ERP system using Smartsheet with an associate of mine, and it's an organic creation. It didn't take us, I mean to run three wind farms, I started last April, it probably took us less than six months to create a working system. That's awesome feedback for Smartsheet, their tools are very user-friendly. It's lightweight, it takes away the fear of coding that Excel gives to some people. If you're a new user of any application you can kind of walk into it and run with it. That's one of the reasons why we took it from nothing to something in such a short period of time. >> Wow. >> That's a ground swell in action that has some significant results. But you'd better be careful. I'm imagining your success is going to go so viral, you're going to have way more than 75 turbines and three wind farms >> That's possible. >> to manage. (laughs) >> There's been a recent acquisition and there's other sites around me that my boss is, or my directors said, "Hey, what are you doing next week?" >> Oh! (laughs) >> "Let's go visit this site for a few minutes." Okay, I know what you're getting at. >> Kind of a good problem to have, but thanks so much for stopping by and sharing with us what you're doing as a renegade. It seems pretty contagious. >> Appreciate it, thank you for having me. >> Thanks. >> Thanks. >> For Jeff Frick I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE live from Smartsheet Engage 2018. Stick around, Jeff and I will be back to wrap up the show in just a minute. (digital music)

>> Live from Bellevue, Washington it's theCUBE covering SmartSheet ENGAGE '18. Brought to you by SmartSheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are continuing our coverage live from Bellevue, Washington. We're at SmartSheet ENGAGE 2018. I'm with Jeff Frick here. This is the second annual ENGAGE event. Huge, doubled from last year. We've had a great day so far, Jeff, of execs from ShartSheet, customers. We're now excited to welcome an analyst from the 451 Group, Chris Marsh, the Research Director for WorkFresh Productivity and Compliance; welcome to theCUBE! >> Thank you very much. >> So we have, as I was saying, this is the second annual event, some of the stats that Mark Mader, our CEO, shared in the keynote this morning, there are over 1100 companies represented here at the event, a couple thousand people, 20 countries. We've had some very enthusiastic SmartSheet customers, SmartSheeters themselves talking about this tool that's designed for the business user, that's not designed for the citizen developer, people that don't even need to know what API stands for. So talk to us about your role at 451, but then we'll kind of get into project management, program management, and some of the trends and the changes that you're seeing there. >> Sure, yeah, so, so I've had the workforce productivity compliance research practice in 451, so as a team of analysts, we cover, essentially, productivity software, right? So the different tools that members of the workforce are using to get work done. So in addition to work management companies like SmartSheet, we also look at collaboration tools, digital workspaces, we cover the content management landscape, and we cover content creation, asset creation tools as well, so, really the focus for my team is to give perspectives on how the future of work is evolving, but really what those technology and dependings of that are. >> Such a busy space. You've picked a good area to specialize in. So how should people think of it? How should they categorize it, because from the outside looking in, a lot of the tools are very similar, you know, there's some overlap, some not overlap, there's some places where they can work together. Ya know, how should leaders be thinking about approaching this opportunity, 'cos you talk a lot about, you know, that's a great place to find untapped competitive advantage, but it seems to be very, kind of, confusing to the outsider. >> Yeah, it's a super interesting space, and it's probably more interesting than it's ever been. I think for many of us, it was, to be frank, kind of not interesting, right? There's lots of kind of legacy tools that people were struggling to figure out how to do new kinds of work with. >> Beyond email! (chuckles) >> Exactly, yeah, yeah. >> Was there anything beyond email 10 years ago? Yikes! >> Exactly, I mean we as a, I think, a research team find ourselves looking as much of intersections of those five areas that we cover as much as we go deep in them, for the very fact that, you know, it's a space that's going through a lot of innovation, a lot of disruption, and vendors and segments are learning from one another. Then, of course, we have, you know, broad, kind of transversal trends brought by technologies like AI and machine learning. Beginning to have more conversations around things like Block Chain, people beginning to talk about what may be some of the use cases are around AR, VR, and the kind of mixed-reality type technologies. So, you know, lots of innovation, lots of disruption. Um, in terms of what business leaders should be looking for, it obviously depends on what they're trying to do in their workforce. I think one of the big shifts that we're seeing is, um, you know, the sort of decentralization of ownership over more complex types of work to business users, right, whereas, I think, in a lot of companies, traditionally there are centralized teams of process specialists or project management folks, and, you know, tools have kind of mediated the relationship between those centralized, you know, teams and business users; where increasingly those tools are appealing to those business users. So in the panel moderation I did this morning, I showed some statistics around, you know, users of tools like SmartSheet, and it's not the type of people we would have seen using this type of tool four or five years ago. It's leaders were then legal teams, finance teams, HR teams, marketing teams, operations teams-- so that's sort of reflective of a broad shift in productivity software of, you know, virality in terms of how these tools enter businesses, right? Lots of organic adoption and it kind of runs contrary to how a lot of enterprise technology gets sold into enterprises, which is gone a little bit more top down or into specific buying centers. Increasingly, it's going in sort of the grass roots. People are finding new use cases for technology, and it sort of spreads from there, so, yeah, it's a super hot space right now. >> So one of the things we talk about is every place we go, right? Digital transformation and innovation, everybody wants more. And it seems pretty simple to say, but hard to do, that if you get more people more data, the tools to process it, and then the power to do something, that that just can unlock a tremendous amount of untapped innovation and execution and efficiency out of a company. That said, that's easier said sitting here than done. So are you seeing, you know, kind of a continual trend towards, you know, pushing down the data, pushing down the tools, and pushing down the authority to execute decisions? >> Yeah, I think so. And actually, the work management space is a very good example of that, right? So, um, you know, for some companies culturally that's not going to come very easy, because they just culturally may have a more sort of top-down kind of culture. But I think digital transformation for everyone, essentially means more agility, more speed, you know, more quickness in how work is executed and how it's designed. And that almost inevitably means that those closest to the delivery of the work are the ones that actually have the power to design the work in the first place and can, rather than sort of relying on IT for everything and/or central teams somewhere. So, it is a broad shift, but again, it comes, to your point, it comes more easily for some companies and some industries than others. >> And we talked about that with a number of the people from SmartSheet as well as users, that this is a massive cultural shift. I think Mark Mader, the CEO, this morning was telling us a quick anecdote of a 125-year-old oil and gas company, >> Yeah. >> That is, talk about, you know, probably really married to a lot of legacy processes and ways of thinking, not just tools, and how SmartSheet probably started in, you know, one function within the organization, probably, you know, quite low, and it started, to your point before, go viral, and we started, we started to hear a number of stories from PayPal, Sodexo, how this virality that you talk about is really kind of transforming from the bottom up. But that cultural change is essential. >> The cultural change is essential, I mean, in some cases it's just being led by the fact that that's happening anyway, right? Because, you know, gone are the days when IT chooses the tools, provisions them, and, you know, there's an awareness of what's going on in the environment. There are, and it's not just the work management space, we also look at sort of, workflow automation tools. A lot of these tools are, you know, going into a company grass roots, there are then potentially hundreds if not thousands of work processes or workflows that are created on these tools before IT even figures that out, right? Which is not necessarily an ideal scenario, but it's increasingly, you know, one of the patterns that we're seeing in enterprises, so. It's a big cultural shift, but um, there's a certain amount of push and pull here. Some companies that realize that are looking proactively to give effect to it. Other people are going to be pulled, to be frank, to the fact that there are tools that enable new kind of work patterns, new styles to happen, and they almost have to get on board with that, so. So obviously you want to strike a balance, I think, somewhere in between of being the catalyst for those kind of new things to happen whilst making sure there is still the kind of centralized oversight that's required for you to maintain control over your overall technology estate, but also so that you can make sure the technologies are aligning to your strategic goals. So it's a delicate balance. >> And there's these pretty big forces at play here. There's a term that 451 Group has recently coined called a liquid enterprise. >> That's right, yeah. >> Liquid; I think of fluidity, you mentioned agility, we've heard nimbleness today, um, talk to us. What, by definition, is the liquid enterprise, and how are you helping customers to embrace it and maybe not fight the force, because the forces of pull are stronger and better; but what does that mean? >> Yeah, so liquid enterprise, I mean, you've encapsulated it very well, right? So it's all about, you know, when we speak of digital transformation, you almost always end up to about business agility. So in some ways, liquid enterprise is just our way of giving a little bit more flavor to what business agility looks like in the kind of digital age. So our kind of view is that, you know, a lot of the companies that we kind of laud now as those really interesting companies like the AirBnB's and the Uber's, those with kind of, massively scalable infrastructure and then a very simple UI. We think that whole pattern of what the, kind of, digital enterprise will look like is one that's much more able to fluidly marshal it's different resources in a way that allows them to respond much more rapidly to changes in their own market conditions, right? Because one of the things, obviously, that digital is doing is changing user behavior to user requirement. So your ability, as a company, to respond very quickly to that is becoming, you know, a primacy in most companies, and a big part of how we think about the liquid enterprise is the fact that companies will actually be able to change their own organizational structure. Not just what they offer to a market, not just the tools that enable them to do that, but actually, they'll begin to sort of re-tesselate their own organizational design, to enable that to happen. So, you know, we see early indicators of technologies that are beginning to allow companies to think in that way. I think for most companies, liquid enterprise is aspirational right now, but I think, certainly, it's a pattern a lot of companies are trying to tact towards. >> So, I'm just curious, you talk about culture as a competitive advantage. And how much of these tools are culture enablers to make that possible? How much of it are just critical, because if you don't have that culture you're going to lose? How much of it is tied to, kind of, the consumerization of IT, where again, your workforce has an expectation of the way apps work based on their interaction with Amazon and their interaction with Google and those types of things? >> Very much driven by the consumerization of IT trend. I mean, often, increasingly what we see happen in the consumer realm ends up happening in some kind of expression in the enterprise realm sooner or later. So, yeah, that's very much it. One of the other things we talk about in our research is the kind of hierarchy of employee motivation, right? So we kind of have this way of thinking about, you know, what companies need to do and what technologies need to enable to really satisfy that end user experience. I think in the productivity software space, you know, it's probably not hyperbolic to say that most tools really only satisfy end users, right? We have lots of tools, including lots of modern SAAS tools, that actually, you know, may have good usability, but aren't particularly flexible. There sort of better, more scalable versions of a lot of legacy tools. So we see this kind of passage towards tools actually doing things like, you know, decentralizing the ability to create workflows, so that, you know, business users, including non-managerial folks, can actually design work, and how that work actually happens, right? So there's a big element there in terms of motivation in your role, you know, actually making an impact, having that recognized and all of those kinds of things, which is driving a more, sort of, engaged relationship between people and technology, so we only see that continuing. And, the work management space in SmartSheet's very good examples of that. There's lots of conversations you can hear and engage where people are discussing, you know, what they're doing with their tool that they created themselves, some kind of local business team that has redesigned a certain process that is allowed better business value to be created; and they're the ones that are going to take credit for that. I think that trend is only going to accelerate. So again, from an enterprise perspective, embracing that, helping catalyze that, but again, having the ability to have central oversight over that kind of local team-based execution, it is obviously very important. >> What about just kind of the competition from my desktop? You know, what apps are open while I'm working all day, and you know, we all wish if you're driving an app company that it's your app that is on top, but the reality is many, many apps open all the time. So do you see that evolving, do you see that aggregating, do you see a couple of kind of uber apps over the top of these integrations that you'll be doing your primary workplace, or is it just kind of horses for courses depending on the types of things that you do in your day-to-day job? >> Really good question, I mean, I think one of the background trends we've seen, especially with SAAS, is just the growth and the overall enterprise application estate. Right, so just more apps. And obviously catalyzed also by end users having positive experiences in consumer apps, and then being used to choosing the way that they do things, like that, that is transitioning into the enterprise environment, as well, so. I don't envisage that the total number of apps is going to decrease, but very good question as to, you know, whether we get consolidation. Time will tell, but I think, you know, to my point earlier, we spend a lot of time looking at intersections that cross existing segments, because, each segment is really transforming. And you see lots of examples of customers here at ENGAGE using SmartSheet as a displacement tool for other ones that they previously were using. They find the automation of SmartSheet a way to sort of disintermediate other tools that they were using. We're certainly seeing some of that, whether that means the total number of applications decreases, I don't know, because we're still yet to see play out lots of cool, new, innovative technologies that will obviously give rise to new kinds of applications. Question is out as to whether it will mean further apps, but we certainly seeing a changing in the, in the sort of preference for tools based on what new ones we're enabling. >> And I would imagine in very short order, the application of AI and machine learning behind the scenes in all these apps, is also going to change the UI experience dramatically, as more and more and more of the processes are automated on the back-end, there's more kind of smart suggestions as to what to do or completely automated processes. So even the face of the most popular apps today, I would imagine you see significant change with the application of AI and machine learning. >> Yeah, I would think so. One of the, sort of, big trends here, listening to customers and listening to some of the key notes, is, you know, the shift that comes with companies trying to make from low value work to high value work, so all of that kind of granular and manual work we're having to do is so most existing applications; people just want to abstract their way. They don't want to be doing that anymore, they want to be focusing on, um, sort of resource management, team coordination, creative ideation, they want to focus on strategy execution, they want to focus on things like, you know, risks to the business, actions that they need to take, decisions that they need to make, they don't want to be doing the whole, um, who did this, when did they do it, what do I need to do now, they don't want to be sort of manually moving information from applications, they don't want to be doing sort of manual reconciliations of data, and that kind of thing. >> Right. >> So um, heh, so yeah, the kind of low value to high value work is only going to be accelerated by AI and ML, to the point where we're beginning to see much more contextual work. So the ML is the basis on which work can be surfaced contextually to end users. So that is sort of automating the abstraction of that low value work, and that's hugely exciting, because that offers a whole new paradigm for how we interact with applications, what that end user experience is. Imagine, you know, sort of going into your office loading up your computer, opening up an application, and it surfaces to you what you need to focus on that day. >> Right. >> That's where a lot of productivity application vendors are trying to get to. >> That's the dream, right there. >> Not here is the application, you decide where you need to focus, it's the kind of, these are the things you really need to put your time in. I mean, that's pretty exciting. And that's what a lot of the companies would want. >> Well even, a certain CRN company that's got a large tower in San Francisco, why do I have to put the city and the state and the zip code, I mean, we have so far to go, can't I just put the zip code in and it fills in the city and the state, and those little, you know, simple things that take a lot of time and these are the kind of data entry tasks that just drive people bananas, and discount the value, the fundamental value of the tool, because you just get stuck in a data entry mode, or a double entry mode. It's this crazy opportunity that we still have in front of us to make improvements. >> Yeah, I think, huge opportunity, obviously. But it's not quite so easy as that, I think, really it's kind of how I would talk about it. You know, AI and ML will inevitably have a transformative impact on enterprise software; I don't think anybody would dispute that. But it does rely on large data sects, against which you have to train your algorithms and your models, and that takes time for individual companies to build that data sect. They need enough work in there, they need enough people, enough workflows in there, to generate those data sects so that they will actually be useful, right? So, it's going to take a bit of time to play out. But yeah, it's going to be very impactful in the longer term. >> Well Chris, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE and sharing your insights on this new, emerging term of the liquid enterprise, we appreciate that. >> Pleasure, thanks very much. >> For Jeff Frick, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE live from SmartSheet ENGAGE 2018. Stick around, Jeff and I will be right back with our next guest. (electronic music)

>> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering Smartsheet ENGAGE'18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018. I am Lisa Martin, sitting here in Bellevue, Washington with a couple of Smart Sheeters. Next to me is Ben Canning, the VP of Product Management. >> Hey Ben. >> Hey. >> And Ignacio Martinez, the VP of Security, Risk and Compliance. Guys, thank you so much for carving out time in a very packed event agenda to come and chat with us on theCUBE. >> Happy to be here. >> Happy to be here. >> So, this is a really interesting event, couple of things that really stood out to me, this morning in the key note, as I was telling you, we cover a lot of events here on theCUBE, of all sizes, and it was really interesting how your CEO Mark Mader, who was on the program earlier this morning, went out into the audience and talked about ENGAGED in action. I thought that was fantastic. And asked customers, randomly, three customers I think, how are you being empowered by Smartsheet? And how these customers were able to get up and articulately talk about the value that Smartsheet is delivering to their business. I thought that customer connection was really quite memorable. And then additionally, product management, when Jean Thoreau came out, and to a round of applause, a number of times, during announcements of the enhancements and features and what that really. >> Multi assign too. >> Yes, what that really, sort of, said to me, is you guys deliver software that is a facilitator of collaboration that is essential to drive businesses, digital transformation, et cetera, but you're collaborating with them because clearly they were very happy to hear about a number of these announcements today. >> Yeah we have very, very passionate customers and it's one of the great things about working here and working with these customers. We're super focused on what do those customers need and how do we enable them to get those things done. We don't typically get imposed from the top down by IT. You're using Smartsheet because you chose to use it. It's the thing that makes your life easier. And we never forget that and we never forget that we need to keep that close connection with our customers and I think you see it here, at the conference today. >> You do, you got 50 customers plus speaking in breakout sessions, which for an event that's got about 2000 people, it's huge percentage. >> Yeah. >> Some great announcements. Before we get into some of the risk and compliance stuff Ignacio, Ben walk us through maybe a high level of some of the key enhancements that were announced this morning. >> Well, so we talked about a lot of things today. I think we had over 23 total announcements. Things from the range of multiple, being able to sign multiple people in the grid, to Dynamic View, which we're incredibly excited about, that allows you to have custom views on a sheet and control who gets access to which view. Really opens up tremendous new possibilities for Smartsheet. Some of the things that I get super excited about, I work a lot in the platform and administrative space. We've announced a number of things this week that are all about helping IT administrators and system admins, manage Smartsheet much more effectively when it gets to large scale. And I'll highlight a couple of them. One is the directory integration capability that we've done. We hear a lot from our customers that managing individual Smartsheet users gets kind of hard once you get over a number and I want to be able to see all the people in my organization and be able to share with them and assign tasks with them, even if they're not yet Smartsheet users. So what we announced today was a way to integrate active directory with Smartsheet so that the company directory of all the users in the company is automatically synchronized into Smartsheet so that those users can be, you can assign things to them, you can @ mention them, they'll show up in the grid with their faces and all their departmental information. It makes it much easier to manage users inside your organization. So when 100 people join the team, they automatically show up in Smartsheet. When someone leaves the organization, they get de-provisioned. And it makes it much easier to collaborate with folks throughout your organization than it ever has been before. So we're really excited to announce that as a product for our enterprise customers, starting a little bit later this year. >> Excellent. You've got customers, I was reading, doing my prep for the show, over 75,000 customers in 190 countries, of all industries. >> Yes. And I imagine, some of the things that we've heard guys from your customers on the program today that they're really benefiting from are the visibility, the configurability of the technology, the ability to have accountability, to not only improve workforce productivity, but to be able to eliminate duplicate tasks, give project owners and initiative owners full visibility, whereas they did not have that full visibility before. Ignacio, another big announcement that came out today, was what you guys are doing in the federal space. So tell us a little bit about FedRAMP, what that is and how you are working with them. >> Sure so without boring you to death on FedRAMP, I'll give you a quick overview. FedRAMP is a requirement of the federal government. It's a program developed by the government to essentially certify or authorize cloud service providers like Smartsheet to be meeting a certain security level of compliance, to be deployed in the federal agency space. So the federal government, every agency, is required to abide by it. So they should be selecting providers that have gone through FedRAMP authorization. So it is essentially security compliance program that companies voluntarily put themselves through to enable themselves to do work in the federal space. And very happy to announce, this morning, that we were not only announcing our intent to develop a program and a product to enter the federal space, to have been selected by the FedRAMP program to go through what they call FedRAMP Connect. That's an accelerated process where the FedRAMP office selects cloud service providers that they feel, based on application, have a high level of demand in the federal agency space. So they select those providers and work very closely with us to go through that compliance exercise and get authorized to be FedRAMP authorized in the FedRAMP program. So the reason the government does that is they have a strong desire to get products like Smartsheet deployed quickly among the federal agencies, because those people, think of them as an enterprise, they want all those great features that Ben talked about that we bring to enterprises in the public sector, they want them in the government agency sector as well. So we are very pleased that we were selected to go through this program and get a product to the market place in the federal space to help them improve how they work as well. >> So this isn't an entry into federal, 'cause Smartsheet has great presence and traction in federal, NASA, the National Institutes of Health and Veterans Administration. I also saw from your website, you've got customers using Smartsheet in city governments and state governments but this FedRAMP Connect Program, you mentioned it as an accelerator, but I think I heard you say that this was from demand from users, so this is that validation coming from the best place it can, right? >> Yeah it's essentially demand in the federal market place. So we're going to go through on an accelerated basis and what that does, you're right, we are currently deployed in a large number of federal agencies, state and local government, but in those cases, we'll get deployed on a limited basis, because we don't have FedRAMP authorization and they will be careful about where we're deployed. Achieving FedRAMP authorizations gives those federal government agency CIOs and CISOs the ability to say, Smartsheet can be deployed agency wide because it's now authorized under the FedRAMP Program. >> So let's talk about that from a product, maybe innovation standpoint. One of the things that's very clear from today, is how collaborative Smartsheet is with its customers and how influential they are in product innovation. From a federal perspective, you mentioned, Ignacio, that a lot of times they have the same requirements as enterprises and other organizations in the private sector, but how are you guys working together? Are there tweaks and enhancements that you need to make to the technology as part of the FedRAMP Connect Program? >> Yeah for sure. So one of the, FedRAMP institutes a very strict regime of compliance, audit, security controls, onto the product. And it ensures that we're really operating at the highest level of rigor and delivering a service that is highly reliable, highly scalable, fully audited and secure. So that requires us to invest in all of those areas. And the nice thing about FedRAMP, for even the non-federal customers, is that we make those investments consistently across the service. So while FedRAMP is an isolated instance of Smartsheet, all of Smartsheet can take advantage of the practices and procedures. We don't want to have to do things two different ways for two different parts of the service, so we impose a lot of those same practices and procedures and hardening of the service, across the board. And so that helps us to meet our promise to our customers that are not federal customers, that we're delivering a true enterprise grade fully scaled and reliable solution that they can depend on. >> And the flip side is true. Everything that Ben's team is working on, as you said, the customers cheer when we announce something, it was on our roadmap because they wanted it. So our federal customers, they would want and desire the same things that Ben's team has been developing, automation, any of those tools, because they want to work efficiently and effectively and collaborate the same way all of the private sectors do. >> Exactly. >> Yeah that's right. I mean you saw that this morning, in the keynote, right, where we heard from the North Carolina Department of Transportation. This is a federal agency that's using the power of Smartsheet to build a solution in mere days, rather than having to outsource it or wait for a large scale IT spend and RFP and all of those things. We're empowering these agencies to build solutions. The people on the ground are able to put together a solution that is really saving people's lives. >> That, exactly, Hurricane Florence that just hit, that's a life and death situation. >> Yeah and it was breathtaking and sort of moment of pride to see how quickly they were able to put that together and that's the power of Smartsheet. So we're really excited to bring that to the rest of the federal government. We see a tremendous amount of desire from them for that. >> So Ignacio, in terms of the FedRAMP Connect Program, you mentioned it's going to allow an acceleration of this process. What would it normally take if you weren't part of this Connect Program? I'm just curious how much advantage you'll get but you'll be able to pass through to your federal and non-federal customers. >> Yeah so very good point, good question. The statistics you often see thrown around about companies, cloud service providers, that want to get a product into the FedRAMP authorization space, is they'll spend on average a couple years, two years, and a million plus dollars. So it's not a small task to get FedRAMP authorized. Being part of that FedRAMP Connect accelerated program, we're working with what's called the JAB, the Joint Advisory Board, so the top three CIOs of the FedRAMP Program, they work along side us if we're wiling to invest the time and the dollars to take our product through to do it on this accelerated basis. So it is literally a joint effort, hand in hand, working with the FedRAMP office, the auditors we use for it, and our people to demonstrate that we've got the enterprise great security and that we can meet the ongoing monitoring submissions that have to be done. >> So the cost avoidance of a million dollars from two years, what are you expecting? And if you can't share that, that's okay, I'm just curious, is it going to be six months, a year? >> Well if you look at the FedRAMP Connect Program, on average, it runs approximately six months. So it's back and forth. It's a three way collaboration between the cloud service provider, the FedRAMP office and the auditors, but that program, their goal is to get it into approximately a six month timeline. So we were announced last week, so I think we said, our goal is to work with them on that timeline and early in calendar year 2019, is the timeline end that we all have on our radar. >> That's like Back to the Future acceleration, no wonder you're excited about that. >> We are and we're going to try to go faster than that, if we can manage it on the product side, but we'll see how quickly it goes. >> Well that's one of the things, that not only is that validation from the users within the federal government that they want this. But Ben, as you were saying we're not developing things in isolation or certain features for this market and this market can't use it, this is all going to be accelerating, I imagine, what Smartsheet is innovating to deliver to all segments globally. >> Yeah I think that's right. We see an increasing need for manageability and security capabilities within the platform. And our customers are asking for this across the board. Great example, another feature we announced today, is what we call the event monitoring service. So enterprise IT wants to understand who is doing what on the system. They want to be able to impose business rules, make sure that highly confidential information isn't being shared inappropriately. So we've invested in a system that we announced today that basically keeps track of all events that happen within the system, anything that's shared, new documents that are created and so forth, and gives the IT administrator a way to track that feed and make business decisions on the basis of it. Integrating with other CASB Solutions to drive business rules. So for example, we have customers that are using this system today to keep track of all of the attachments that are being added into their environment. When they see an attachment being added, they're able to go and look at that attachment and make sure that if it's a highly confidential thing, and that it's shared with an inappropriate set of folks, then they can take business action automatically to manage that environment. And that's the kind of security and audit control that enterprises need in order to feel comfortable deploying Smartsheet at wide scale. So we're very excited to be able to offer that to those enterprise administrators and help them foster Smartsheet adoption in the company. >> So some of the things that we've talked about today are this is technology that was designed for the business user, I've used it. I think I read a quote from Mark Mader that may have been from the press release for the IPO a few months ago, that said, in the beginning in the early days, 12 years ago, there were critics that said, why are you guys building this on a spreadsheet construct, and his answer and Smartsheet's answer, at a very small company, at that time, was 500 million people are familiar with this, so building something for business users, lines of business, finance, IT, sales, for example, tools that I as a marketing person don't need to be an IT expert. I don't need to even know what an API is or what it stands for, right. But you're also now, as you were saying, some of the new enhancements to facilitate IT, so what's that, kind of, yin and yang with designing a tool that is for the average user and ensuring that the IT folks who weren't probably involved in the first place, are able to manage this successfully? >> Yeah well it's definitely a balance that we have to maintain. We can never lose sight of the fact that the end user is at the center of what we do. And that we have to design for solutions that end users can implement themselves and that's at the heart of what Smartsheet does. At the same time, we look at IT administrators as partners. We know that the users love what the product does. They're desperate for it. And in general, I find that IT administrators are not trying to get in the way of what their users want. They want to be the hero and they want to be able to say, yes. So part of my job is to make sure that I give them the tools to enable them to get to a yes. That I can show them that we are secure enough, reliable enough and scalable enough, that we meet their strategic enterprise needs, that we integrate with the other systems that they have so that they're not building an island that they're going to have to deal with and doesn't connect with the rest of their estate and that they've got the tools to manage at scale, so that I'm not asking them to go one by one adding a thousand users, that's just not nice and fair. So I think we keep the end user, the business user, at the center and we look at IT as a partner and we try to find ways to help them get to yes with the product. And I don't think those two things are really in conflict. >> It's interesting, dealing with CIOs of our customers, they'll tell you, it's very strange, and it goes back to what you said earlier, value. So CIOs are tasked with delivering the most value for their organization, doing more for less, efficiently. And that often means selection of tools that then they have to go and force into an organization and deal with users that might be less than happy. I've had CIOs tell me on the phone, I have people putting together petitions to make Smartsheet the tool that we use across the organization. And so he said, that makes my life easy. I just need to work with you guys to make sure you've got the security, you've got all the tools I need as a CIO to protect the enterprise, but I don't have to worry about user acceptance. That's unique spot and we love it when the CIOs say, this makes my life easier with everything we're doing with Smartsheet. >> Oh that's music to your ears. >> Yeah it totally is. I mean, I met with a tech CIO recently as part of our enlist, talking to him about, oh well are you going to come to ENGAGE? And oh well you know, we're busy and we don't have a thing, and I said, oh you know actually there's eight people from your company, business users that are attending. >> Nice. That are attending the conference on their own dime and you can see the light bulb go off in his eyes and he's like, okay if eight people from our business groups are paying their own money to go to a tech conference, that's something I need to be paying attention to. How can you help me get my arms wrapped around this and help our users so it's a nice position to be in. >> It absolutely is. Well congratulations on being in the FedRAMP Connect Program and we're excited to hear next year all the great things coming out of that. And Ben, Ignacio, thanks so much for stopping by. >> Thanks for having us. >> It's busier than ensuring with us what's going on from your perspectives. >> Thanks a lot, thanks for having us. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin live from Smartsheet ENGAGED, 2018 in Bellevue, Washington. Stick around. I'll be right back with Jeff Frick and our next guest.

>> Live, from Bellevue, Washington. It's theCUBE. Covering, Smartsheet Engage 18. Brought to you by, Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Smartsheet Engage 2018. I am Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We are in Bellevue, Washington or, as I like to call it, not Vegas. Excited to welcome to theCUBE, Robin Sherwood, the Senior Director of Product Management at Smartsheet. Hey Robin. >> Hi, how's it goin? >> Great. This is, been a very buzzy morning, for Jeff and I here on this side. Lot's of people, this event has doubled in size. This is your second annual, so... >> Big growth in just a year. There's a, I think, Mark Mader, your CEO, shared some sats this morning. There are 1100 companies represented here customers. >> Correct. >> From twenty countries, there are more than fifty customer speakers, which is, I think there's no more validating voice, than the voice of a customer using the technology. When I was doing some research on Smartsheet, was looking at, you guys are partners with, some of your competitors. One of things I wanted to understand is, where do you have integrations with technology, versus where do you have connectors? What's the difference between those two, and how does is work >> Yeah. >> In a Smartsheet world. >> You know, I think, the integrations really are, where you're going to, you're really interacting with that other product directly, right? So, maybe it's, I want my outbound messages and notifications to go into a Slack channel, right? That's an integration. Or, I want to be able to connect to Google Drive, or 03 Secure, One Drive document, in those native stores. So, that's where we really see an integration. It's something that the end user themselves, is really interacting with. Where you see connectors is more around where I've got big systems of record in my organization, and I need data to flow between those tools. >> Like a Sales Force. >> Like a Sales Force, or a JEAR, or something like that. Microsoft Dynamics, right? I've got data there, when something happens in that system, I need it to flow magically into Smartsheet, or when something happens in Smartsheet, I need it to flow back into those systems. Cause, those are the systems of record, that my company cares about. >> So, a connection is a much bigger step in integration? >> They're just different. >> Connectors are really about the flow of data back and forth between systems of record and integrations are more about user content and user direct interactions. So, things like Drive and Box and Dropbox, and Slack and Teams and, stuff like that. Or, the web content, which we just announced. We want to be able to embed a Youtube video in a dashboard. That's not integrations, it's not, there's no data flowing back and forth, it's just a link, right? >> Got it, thank you. >> Yeah. >> So, lot of customer's we have, I think fifty customer's presenting, which is amazing out of 2,000 people in the whole conference. I don't know what the percentage is, but it's, (laughs), >> Yeah. >> Awfully large. So, just some of the all chatter here. You've been here for a couple of day now, you guys had some early training yesterday. What is some of the things you're picking up? You obviously love to hear back from the customer's. Kind of, what's the buzz on some of the new offerings, and what are you hearing, amongst the constituent here? >> I mean, it's always, you know, this is only our second year. But the energy from them is always amazing. And, you know, people were, I was talking to someone earlier and they were just blown away. By just the big list of things that we shipped, this week. And, as I was reflecting, like, I don't remember doing all that much. But then, when you see it all on one big slide, with everything listed out, it's incredible. So, it's hard to say if anybody latched on to one thing or another. Obviously, there was lots of applause during the product... >> Yes. >> Session, and we're really excited to have shipped, the multi-assign to feature, which has been our number one customer request for a while. But, it's not a, game-changing feature. Whereas, I think some of the Automation Rules ,and Updates there, and Workflow Builder, are really. People are going to go back and it's going to to change the way that they work. And, so people are really excited about that. But, really excited about Dynamic View. And being able to really, taylor the information that is shared across their organization. >> The word collaboration, like symbionic or bi-directional collaboration, popped into my mind. When Gene Pharaoh, your SVP of Product, who we had on earlier, was talking about some of the features and it was a really interesting dynamic with the audience. In that, number of times, you mentioned, the audience broke into applause. And, it probably feels pretty good. Like, yes, we're listening to you, we're doing this. Enabling, them to have technology that allows them to collaborate with and amongst teams and functions within an organization. But, you're also taking their feedback, directly and collaborating with customer's, to further innovate your product. With the spirit of collaboration, we had, Margo Visitacion on from Forrester. And she was talking about the collaborative work management CW as an emerging market. With respect to collaboration, you guys can enable sharing. I can be a licensed user, and share it with you who's not. How is that type of collaboration a differentiator for Smartsheet? >> Well, you know, I think there's a lot of tools where they're collaborative where you can comment on them. Google Doc, and that's great. But, I think where Smaresheet really excels, is really in this free collaborator model. That's not bounded by your particular organization or your team. And it really allows you to create, to spread, and create connections across customer's and vendors and other orgs within your team. And, this is where you're starting to see this these sort of step function changes in these organizations. Where, you know, you see this Office Depot example. And, he talks about, you know, taking a workflow in their organization they, going from, you know, four to six weeks, down to twenty-four hours. And, enabling people who are putting in budget request, to take action on that request, the next day. And, those are the kinds of things, that are going to fundamentally change those businesses. And so, that's where I think the collaboration piece is really powerful. You can't get that kind of compression in time. Unless, you can really span those traditional business hours. >> So Robin, one of the great things that happens always is, with tech companies is the application versus the platform exchange, right? Everybody wants to have a platform, it's really important. You get an ecosystem, lot of stuff going on, but nobody's got a line item in their budget for 2019 to buy a new platform, right? >> It's always, >> Correct >> Application centric, right. I got a problem, I've got to fix it. At the same time, you guys, you do have a platform. Meaning, you can go across a lot of different applications. So, when you're trying to balance out your priorities with the platform. Priority, in terms of more of, kind of a general purpose underly, versus and app priority, like you said, multi, how do you call... >> Multi-assignment. Yeah. >> Multi-assignment, you assign two people to the (laughs). To the no correct product management protocol, but everybody wants it, cause it's the real world. How do you kind of prioritize that? How do yo kind of look at the world when you're deciding, what are you going to roll out next, what are you going to roll out next, ware are you going to roll out next? >> It starts and ends with having conversations with real people. We've taken lots of data and we have enhancement request and usage data on how people use the product. Multi-assigning, actually, was less than 3% of all answered request in the last couple of years. But, it's our number one request. And so, it sort of. >> Oh, Wait, wait wait. So it was less than 3%. >> Of all enhancement request. >> But it was number one? >> But it's our number one. >> So you've got a giant laundry list. >> Giant laundry list of things, right. So, we can't just look at some metric and go, these are the next features we should build because we have this really strong signal. We actually, have a very, very weak signal when we look at it from a quantitative standpoint. So what we have to do is we really have to dig into these customer use cases. We have to meet with them. All of our project teams have dedicated researchers, and dedicated user experience. People that are going out, we're actually talking to people. We're testing stuff with them and we're trying to understand what commonalities exist between multiple cases across all of these different use cases. Because, there're so many different ways people use the product. There not enough people asking for one thing. >> Right. >> They're all asking for slightly different things. So, we really have to dig in and have a real, qualitative conversation with them. To understand, and bring that back and say okay, these things are related. We can build something that solves, all of these problems in a compelling way. >> Well, it's definitely more than 3% of the people cheer. When, when that. (laughs) >> Yes. >> When the feature was announced, that's for sure. So the other, kind of (mumbles), that you've got to wrestle with is, kind of a low code, no code, we want to be for everybody, yet at the same time, you want a sophisticated application. You want integrations and connectors to all these other applications. So, again, that's kind of a delicate, balancing act as well. Cause, you want to let everyone have access to be able to manipulate the tool, work with the tool, set up the tool, but at the same time, you got to keep it, pretty sophisticated to connect to all these other things. How do you kind of balance those. >> Well we... >> Priorities. >> We just try to hide as much of that as possible. You know, Smartsheets always been this tool, where it's like, it sort of looks like a spreadsheet, and it sort of looks like project management. But it's got this underlying flexibility built into it. We don't force you to, you know, if you've got a date column, we don't force you to put a date in there. If you don't know the answer, you can type in TBD. Whereas, a lot of purpose built applications, their like, this is a date, you have to enter it in the proper date format, or it doesn't work. We've always had this, sort of, flexibility and complexity trade off. The trade off is, if you give us real data, if you give us something that looks like a date, we'll draw a Gantt Chart for you. We don't need much more, it doesn't need to be more (mumbles) than that. We just won't draw the bar if you type in TBD. And so, we've always sort of danced this line, with making the tool super flexible and assume the users know what they're doing. When they're interacting withhe tool we assume they an intention and they're trinna do something. And, we shouldn't force them down a particular path. And that, sort of, plays out in all these features. The other thing that we do, is like I mentioned earlier, we do a lot of user research and we get in front of a lot of customers. And we put stuff out there, well in advance in releasing it. In a situation like this, we announced a bunch a capabilities around workflow and multi-step approvals and multi-step workflows. And, I think that's a complex feature set. That's gone through more iterations of design and review and scrapping it and back to the drawing board, than any feature I've seen at this company. But, it's probably one of the more complex features we've ever build, as well. And so that's what we would expect, right? We're not going to get this right, by just having a bunch of designers and engineers sit in a room and go, oh, we know that perfect solution to workflow management. >> Right. >> Most of our customer's don't even necessarily, use the term workflow. >> And if you look in the app, it doesn't even say. It says words and actions. You know? And little things with words matter. We have technical writers that are very specific on what we label something. It's not an if statement. It's when this happens, do this. And there's a lot of nuance and subtlety into all of this. To try and drive the complexity out of it as much as possible. >> Right. >> You can't avoid it, but you know. >> So, in hiding it, the last thing which your going to do, going forward is machine learning and artificial intelligence. Which we hear about all the time, but really the great opportunity in the field, is for you to leverage that under the covers. To hide. >> Absolutely. >> The nasty complexity to help suggest the right answer. To help suggest the right path. So, that's got to be a huge part of your roadmap. Integrating those types of capabilities, underneath the covers. >> Yeah and, there's been a lot of, we've have had tons of discussions and obviously we bought the Converse Chatbot Company back in January. And, that's been a huge sort of arrow in our quiver, so to speak, right, in that regard. We feel that we have a lot of really good information. But, at the same time, there's a lot of talk about machine learning and AI. And, the reality is, that relies on huge data sets. And it relies on a lot of analysis. And that data is not something that we can just look at, right? We take our customer's data, security data privacy very seriously. And we don't have access to that kind of information. So we need to look at this, the machine learning and the AI capabilities from a very different lens, then say a consumer product. That's sort of, you're getting to use it for free, they sort of do whatever they want with your data. And you don't really have a lot of recourse, other than leave the product. We don't start from that, we start from, your data is yours, you own it, we can't look at it. But we want to enable you, to turn these types of features on. So, we need to look at more of like an off-end model, where a customer can say oh, if I'm a big enterprise user at Smartsheet, I can turn certain capabilities on for my users, knowing that that information is going to stay in our, is going to comply with our data governance, and our data privacy rules. That our IT team puts forward. >> So the spirit of talking about abstraction, abstracting complexity, Hiding it, (mumbles). I'm curious, when you walk into a customer. Cause here we are in Bellevue, we're not in Vegas, But, we're neighors with AWS, with Microsoft, Microsoft announced Teams, about eighteen months, or so, ago. You partner with both, you compete, but you, also, you're competing with Teams. When you walk into a customer and an enterprise, likely has a mixture of, tons of different software appications, right. But they probably have, 360, Office 365, Para Bi, Excel... Why would a customer, who has such a familiarity with, say a Microsoft, work with Smartsheet versus, well we'll just extend our Microsoft expertese and bring in something like Teams? >> Yeah. >> I'm just curious, what...You've seen in that? >> Well, you know, I think it's that Smartsheet's always been good at sort of, orchestrating the actual work that's being done. And, there's a lot of tools out there where, you're having conversations and tools out there where you're creating content, and there's not a lot of tools out there, that are sort of bringing the conversation and the content together. In an actionable and accountable way, right? And that's the sort of, Gene will, you'll sometimes here hims say, use this term, shared fabric. The Smartsheet, really provides this shared fabric, that ties a bunch of these tool together. And we really, we want to partner with all these people, because every organization is different. Every organization has a different set of tools that they've already embraced. They have a different set of goals around how many tools they're going to embrace. You talk to some customer, they're like, I love Smartsheet, it's going to allow me to get rid of ten apps. And, you talk to another customer that's equal size or equal complexity two minutes later, then they'll be like, I love Smartsheet, it allows me to work with all the tools that I've already got. Very different, and they just have to different coperate goals and objectives there. And so, I think that the reason people like Smartsheet, is it doesn't, it's back to that kind of, hey, you don't have to put a date in a date cell. It's flexible. It's going to work with you and not force you to adopt the Smartsheet way about things. It's going to say look, oh, if you want to use, if you want to us Teams for your communications vehicle, and One Drive for all of your document storage, great. You want to embed a PowerPoint document in a dashboard in Smartsheet, great. We want that to be the case. We do that internally, right, we use all those. If you look at us internally, we're just like every other mordern company. We have a dozen tools or two dozen tools that we're using. And it's different from team to team and department to department. So, it's all about just embracing the reality, that as modern business and modern application, the ecosystem of applications that we all deal with on a day-to-day basis. >> So that flexibility is key. So we said about 1100 companies represented here, at this event. 2,000 people or so, fifty plus customer speakers. Is there one customer example that comes to mind, whether they're speaking here or not, that really is a great demonstrator of, we have a plethora of applications in our environment. We want to work with Smartsheet because it enables us to integrate and use these tools so much better? I didn't mean to put you on the spot. >> Yeah, no. I'm trinna think of a good. I don't know that I have a good standout example. I think that we hear little tidbits of that from everyone. And it's not, it's a very common theme. So, I don't know that. It's sort of back to the 3% thing, right? Nobody really stands out because everyone is doing that. Everyone is, I hear things, I'm going to replace this tool because you did this. Or, I'm going to now pull, integrate with this tool because, you've added this. So, you sort of take some and give some, on the same sentence almost. >> Yeah. You can do both. >> Yeah. >> Well Robin, thanks so much for stopping by. We appreciate your time. We're excited to be here. This is our first Smartsheet event. And we have some customers coming up, so looking forward to hearing some more these cases in action. >> Great, thanks a lot. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. You're watching us from Smartsheet Engage, in Bellevue, Washington. Stick around, Jeff and I will be right back, with our next guest. (tech music) (tech music) (tech music)

(electronic music) >> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE, covering Smartsheet Engage 18. Brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick, and we've been here all day at Smartsheet Engage 2018 in Bellevue, Washington. We have had lots of great conversations, Jeff, with some of the executive team at Smartsheet, some analysts, and now we're excited to welcome a customer of Smartsheet to the show. We've got Latonia Lewis, the senior director of program management at Sodexo. Latonia, it's great to have you on the program. >> Thank you all for having me. >> So, Sodexo, I'm familiar with it as, you know, being in the tech world, and I go to a client's cafe, and I will usually see branding on boxes or maybe on the chef's gear. But this is a much bigger company than I thought, 437,000 employees globally. But, for those who might not know what Sodexo is, give us a little bit of an overview. >> Sure, Sodexo is a global company. Pretty much we focus on providing quality of life services. And you might ask yourself, "What does that mean?" So, Sodexo really recognizes people as being important and feel that, in a company as well as in the environment, that people should be the main focus. And, in doing that, we focus on providing services that enhance the quality of life for people. For us, the people could be our clients, they could be our consumers, or they could be our employees. So, we pretty much center that around the services that we offer. We have our on-site services that focus on facilities management. So that's basically providing a healthy environment for people to work in, or live in, or operate in. It could be across our food services platform where we're providing healthy meals or a healthy way of living. In addition to that, we provide support for rewards and recognition programs. And, in addition to that, we also provide personal and home healthcare services. >> That's far more diverse than I ever thought. >> Yes. >> Yeah, it is diverse, and we operate across a lot of different industries. We support corporate. We support energy, education that includes both schools as well as universities, seniors, and then sports and leisure. >> Wow. >> So what's your area of focus? That's a broad scope of services. Hopefully you're not delivering all of those to every customer in the United States. >> No, no, no, no. >> Okay, good. (laughter) >> I do work in the North America, and I work for the North American service operations organization, and, pretty much, we are the internal organization that provides support across all of our different segments. We're charged with providing synergies and centers of excellence in the servicing that we do, pretty much to try to bring out the best that Sodexo has to offer its customers and its clients, as well as its employees. >> So your customers are the Sodexo folks that are delivering the services to the end customer. Is that accurate? >> That is accurate. We are internally-faced organization, pretty much focused on making sure that we're providing a safe environment for people to work in. We're enhancing our services and our service offerings in facilities management, as well as across our food service platform, and then also focusing on our growth and support. >> So you are, obviously, a Smartsheet user. That's why you're here. I imagine, though, with as cross-functional as the services you deliver are, you have a lot of stakeholders, a lot of projects, a lot of programs to manage. Tell us a little bit about, prior to your Smartsheet implementation, how were you managing projects, programs, collaborating with stakeholders. Tell us about the before scenario. >> Okay, well, pretty much, I joined Sodexo to, basically, stand up a project management office for the North American service operations organization. When I came into the role, did a little bit of analysis, did a little bit of investigation, and pretty much found that people were doing things a myriad of different ways, right? From a project management maturity perspective, there was not a lot of, what I'll call standardized process and procedures, so I was faced with really figuring out how to, basically, get our arms around the work and the projects that we were doing across our service operations organization. So, Smartsheet was being used in-house already. They had used it in the prior year, basically to try to get their arms around the work that was being done, but that ended up being an exhaustive list. So I looked at how we could leverage Smartsheet and how we could use it more effectively to track the initiative or project work we were doing across service operations. So, in doing that, I found a way to be able to harness standardization in the way that we collect data to be able to do the reporting across the portfolio. And started using dashboards, which was something new. And, of course, you know, using digital transformation from a reporting standpoint is something new. It invokes change. So it was driving a lot of transformational type of, you know, activities that were going on, but it did enable us to be able to get a strategic view of the work that was taking place in service operations, which was something that was needed in order to be able to figure out how to best utilize the resources. >> You sound so calm. It must've been a rat's nest when you walked in, between so many offerings across so many types of facilities as a global company with 400,000 people. You're still calm. I can't believe it. You can laugh. It must've been bananas. I mean, where did you start? Where do you start? Is it the data collection? Is it the reporting? I mean, where did you start? >> I think the first thing that we really had to do was, I hate to say it, go back to basics. And we had to figure out what was our roadmap and how we were going to grow from a project management maturity perspective, and then align that growth with how we were going to, basically, identify a tool to use, and how we were going to, basically, scale that tool. So we started out very, very simple. It was like, "Guys, we need to get our arms around "the key initiatives that are helping us move forward and, "basically, that are aligned with our regional priorities "at the time." So we took that approach and, in FY 18, we pretty much focused on, "Let's get the key initiatives into a format "where we can do reporting on "and we can actually create a reporting cadence "that takes place every month "to be able to bring visibility to leadership "about the projects and the work "that was going on to help them "more effectively make decisions." As we looked at the planning for FY 19, I said, "Well, okay. "I spent a lot of time standing this up, "doing a lot of manual work, you know. "It's becoming unbearable, unmanageable." So we looked at Smartsheet control center, and I kind of, like, jumped, shouted, you know, did my little happy dance, but privately. But, then, made a business case to say why I felt that, you know, we strongly needed this to be able to, not only become more effective and stop doing so many things repetitively, but also to help us foster better project management practices through the use of the standardized, what I call project assets or project templates. >> So what were some of the KPIs that you could immediately grab onto, measure, report, to show, you know, the success and why this is such an important project strategically? >> Strategically, I think the first thing was, one, just being able to get our arms around what were the key projects in the portfolio, and then being able to report out to our internal customers, which were the market segments, what was the work that we were jointly doing to help them meet their strategic objectives. So that was, basically, transparency that they did not have before, and we really weren't reporting at that level. So, if I'm a market segment, I can pretty much say, "You're going to have seven projects "that are impacting you, "and here's the status of those projects. "Here's the health of the projects. "Here's where we need your support." So that was what I call phase one. This year, fast forward, we have control center. We have more visibility. We now have dashboards pretty much at the project level, and we can roll up data a lot more dimensionally. I can do it at the project level. I can do it at our S-O professional family level. I, in turn, can now give segments more detailed at their level, and then I can roll it up at a regional level. >> So you've got, you mentioned, sorry, Jeff, you mentioned, you know, reporting. Sounds like starting small with a focus on what are all the initiatives. I imagine leveraging a tool like Smartsheet to then stack, rank, and prioritize those. You talked about visibility, and that's key. We've heard that all day. Everybody needs visibility within organizations. Were you able to give these program, these initiative teams visibility where before they had none? Was this like a dramatic opening of the curtain whereas they've got 100% visibility into all of the core components of these initiatives that they're involved in? >> That's what's happening this year in FY 19. And, to your point, yes, we are opening up the curtains. And the projects teams, which, primarily, a lot of them are actually driven by service operations, but we have to do them in conjunction with our segments who are really responsible for the actual deployment within their different lines. It's opening up the curtains. It's allowing them to have visibility at a very detailed level than they, they haven't had that before, right? We're using standardized project schedules. We're using resource allocation sheets. We're using, what we call CCT, which is change management, communication, and training plans. So bringing that visibility at a much granular level, but at the same time being able to roll it up to the appropriate stakeholder. So I'm excited about FY 19 for what control center is going to provide for us. >> And so what happened when that happens in terms of, I mean, I'm sure the individual project people around a particular project have, probably, pretty good knowledge about what they're working on. But when you open it up to the senior teams, and now they've got this portfolio of projects and now, suddenly, they have this visibility. How did it change the way they look at things? How did it change the way that, suddenly, they make decisions and they allocate additional resources once you, basically, like you said, kind of opened the curtain and showed them what's going on? >> I think, last year when we started out, when I had just started, it was more retroactive type of reporting whereas, as we started in this new year and planning for FY 19, we had more visibility into the projects, what the projects were about, what was their financial benefit, if applicable, as well as their impact in terms of the scope and the number of units that were going to be involved. So, we do a lot of our planning on an annual basis, what we call during our budgeting or planning cycle, and, this year, there was a lot more visibility into the work that's being planned for FY 19 at a much granular level, down to what we call the unit level. So, being able to share that information and have the teams realize that we're able to track that this year, was very surprising. People like the transparency. I think it's driving a lot of collaboration between the service operations and the market segments, so I think people are going to be very happy. If I come back next year, I can really tell you how the fiscal year went and what we really saw with the turnaround in leadership, but I think they're looking forward to it. >> You're giving a talk tomorrow. What's your talk on? Give us a little preview. >> Preview. I'm going to be talking about control center and, actually, the experience with implementing control center, what was the thought process for, basically, implementing control center, how I went about it, doing a little bit visualization with seeing some of the dashboards that have been created, and then just giving some lessons learned on the implementation itself. >> That's always helpful, you know. Especially with a technology like Smartsheet where, often, like, you kind of found it osmotically through your organization. I know people love to hear how did you do this, what worked. I am curious, though. You mentioned FY 19 a couple of times. Has this technology enabled you to get to planning FY 19 faster, more effectively? What's been the impact there? >> I think it's being, it's having more data up front than we had last year, understanding what it's really going to take to implement these initiatives, being able to have an understanding of the resources from a human resources that's required, as well as understanding, "Okay, if we're going to implement "these initiatives, this is what the impact is going to be." Because every project that we work on doesn't necessarily have a financial benefit. Some of the projects are required. We have to do it, and this is why we must participate in on it. I think it's opened up the door for a lot more collaboration between leaderships and understanding, "You know what, guys? "We definitely have to put more prioritization." Because what may be a priority to one segment may not be a priority to the other, and we're working with the segments in being able to do that prioritization, if possible. >> And the configurability of Smartsheet tool enables you to move projects around in terms of priority much faster, much more easily. >> Oh, you can, it's, how shall I say it? It's a very nimble tool. It's a very agile tool. You can move things around. You know, if a project, we may think that it's going to be what we deem to be a traditional project, but after discussions we're like, "No, it's not really a traditional project "in the sense that it has a defined start and end cycle. "It's more of what we've done, "and we're tracking that as a business as usual." We have the flexibility to change that on a dime. We have the flexibility to change what our key KPIs are, and still be able to incorporate that into the reporting. So it's been great having that flexibility. It's been great not having to do and create dashboards manually. Everything is based off of standardized templates and it is wonderful. I mean, literally, I've been able to create the portfolio, delete the portfolio, and re-implement it just because of some changes that we did, and that took less than a couple of days to do. >> And before it used to take how long? >> Oh, I gave way too many personal hours to stand it up, but I had a passion about it because I loved the tool I could see the ease of use with the tool, so I just gave a lot of hours to initially doing it. But now that I'm working with a lot of the project teams, making a lot of progress. And Smartsheet, it's infectious. I mean, I think one of, I was just speaking with one of your counterparts and I was explaining to him about the fact that I just worked with one of our VPs who's been there for over 20 years, and actually taking the way that he was reporting in one system and transferring it into Smartsheet, working with him. And he's able to realize now that he can do a lot more reporting. He can get more KPIs. He's excited. I've, you know, thrown up sample dashboards of how he can track in FY 19. He's got his team on board. They're looking at it, and, every time I turn around, the Smartsheet is now growing. But it's such a success story, because there is that resistance to, sort of, like, changing the way that you do things. >> Especially for an organization as large as Sodexo is. >> Absolutely >> And, I imagine, as historical it is as well, right? >> Absolutely, and to see him embrace the tool and he's like, "I get it. "I love it." His team is off running with it. Those are the types of things that, you know, really, really make me happy. >> It's funny, because you just, you basically answered the question I just wanted to ask you, which is, you know, in the keynote there's a lot of talk about empowering everyone to do their job better. >> Yes. >> And you're a trained professional project manager. It's what you came in for. You know the tools. You're a sophisticated power person in this space. But I'm curious, have you seen, you know, kind of, project management, kind of, capabilities that flows out to the no-code, low-code, everybody with the Smartsheet, kind of, implementation and, kind of, proliferation within the organization? And how has that, you know, kind of, taken what used to be, kind of, a side load, super professional specialty into a broader, you know, kind of, use-case to take advantage of this thing? >> I think the more people see Smartsheet and start to understand its capabilities and that it's not just a project management tool, right. It's a facilitator of project management. So, in the case that I was just talking about, they're tracking a whole process that's really around facilities management. So it's not necessarily tracking your traditional type of project, but he's able to leverage that to save time. The administrative burden that, you know, he used to have to deal with, with reporting in a different system, bringing information into another system, then creating reporting. Now it's all in one system. He's like, "Latonia, I'm going to use dashboards. "That's how we're going to do our reporting." So he's getting back time. Not only him, but his team is getting back time so they can really focus and go out and do the work where they had the expertise. And that's the beauty of it. It's about people, as you said, being empowered to do what they were hired to do, understanding that you still have a responsibility and are accountable for doing the reporting. But it's giving them that level of empowerment and them seeing that, "You know what, "I can actually design what I need to see "in this application. "It's not Latonia, project management, "or it's not IT, or it's not somebody else. "It's me defining what I need to see in this tool "to get what I need to get out of it to service my clients." >> So I can imagine, as Jeff was saying, you have a lot of experience in program management. Sounds like this is, I don't want to say this is making your job easier, because I think that would be unfair, but it sounds like it's really helping make it much more efficient. >> I would definitely say it's definitely doing that. I think it's helping people, also, understand what project management is all about. You say project management, most people cringe because they think of paper. They think of, "I've go to do this." >> Gantt charts. >> Gantt charts, all of this other stuff. But when you think about it, it's really just a holistic approach to the way that you execute something. And that something could be a standard project, whether it's an IT project. It could be a process that you're rolling out. It could be you planning your wedding or your next family vacation. It's just all about managing work and the execution of work. And I think, once people realize that, they're starting to step back and say, "Oh, it's not as bad as we thought." Which, I'm happy as a project management professional that Smartsheet enables that type of empowerment and it's helping to facilitate that type of knowledge. >> Did you see that quote in the keynote this morning? It was an anonymous user. I'm getting this vibe where, one of the users told Smartsheet that Smartsheet made her the queen of the world. >> Yes. >> I'm getting a vibe here, Latonia. (laughter) >> You could be the anonymous-- >> Potentially. >> No, no. >> I won't put that on you, but that empowerment-- >> Top secret. >> Is impressive what you guys have been able to achieve. We want to thank you so much-- >> Thank you. >> Latonia, for stopping by theCUBE. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> Great luck in your presentation tomorrow. I'm sure a lot of people are going to get a lot of value out of the lessons learned and the best practices that you can offer. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, bye bye. >> For Jeff Frick, I am Lisa Martin. We are live at Smartsheet Engage 2018. Stick around. Jeff and I will be right back with our next guest. (electronic music)

>> Live from Bellevue, Washington, it's theCUBE covering Smartsheet ENGAGE'18, brought to you by Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, we are live at Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018. I am Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We're in Bellevue, Washington, and pleased to welcome one of the many customers of Smartsheet to the program, we have the office of the CIO, Jeff Kelly from PayPal. Welcome Jeff, I've got a sandwich of Jeffs here. (laughing) Jeff sandwich, so Jeff, tell us a little bit. Everybody knows PayPal, I was doing some studying over the weekend. 244 million active users, I'm sure that grows by the minute, 200 markets globally served, and you're doing transactions in over 100 currencies. Everybody has been using this for a while now. It's a household term, even my mom knows PayPal, and she can use it. So, tell us about the office of the CIO at PayPal and your role. >> Sure, so my role, specifically I'm a program manager within that office, and my primary responsibility is to make sure that our environment is secure, that it's safe, that it's stable. That way, the other parts of the company, product, can focus on being more strategic. What that really involves is things like hardening our infrastructure, hardening the network, making sure that we can identify all of our assets accurately, so a number of things there just to keep the environment, like I said, stable and secure. >> And, the office of the CIO, I imagine, responsible for communicating regularly with the executive management team, needing to provide visibility? >> Exactly, I mean, our leadership, Brad Strock is the CIO, we work hand-in-hand with the other leaders of the company. But in addition to some of the things I just called out, the CIO, that office is actually responsible for a lot of the enterprise application, so it's basically the software that drives the company, so that's customer, that's our employee facing applications. >> So you're obviously a Smartsheet user which is why you're here and we're grateful for that. Tell us about the pre-Smartsheet era. How were you managing programs and projects? >> I think I've heard this story quite a bit here. So, between spreadsheets, Microsoft Project, Trello, a number of other tools, and we're still in a distributed model, but the good thing is that within the CIO we're able, at this point, in this particular area, right, to come in with a single tool, to serve as a single system of record, to really facilitate bringing the entire portfolio together. So yeah, I'd say before, very distributed, now, it's really consolidated into Smartsheet being our single system, which has really worked well. >> So they showed a video of your case-study during the keynote, and you had a real specific use case, it sounds like, for your initial Smartsheet deployment, which sounds like something that many of us struggle with each and every week, which is to roll up the data to report upstairs. So, I wonder if you can give a little bit of color on what did you have to roll up, what was the scale of effort, and why you decided, this just isn't really working very well-- >> Sure, absolutely, so we set off, around three years ago, we had a three-year program ahead of us, and I'd say at the end of year one, we realized, just, due to the magnitude, the number of people involved, the data involved, and the overall portfolio, we needed a tool to come in and really help us be able to effectively and quickly roll up that information, so that we could present and take that information to our C-suite each week. Yeah, just for effective decision-making, making sure that they're in-tune, they have a line of sight to what's critical, what's not, working on the right things, doing the right thing. So, we considered a number of tools. Again, Microsoft Project, what-not, we landed with Smartsheet, and it was really just word-of-mouth within the company. So we took a look at a handful of tools and really just tried to figure out what fit the bill for what we needed, and a couple of Smartsheet videos on YouTube, we kind of quickly came to the decision, hey, this is certainly a flexible tool, it's easy to ramp, if you know spreadsheets, you pretty much know this, if you're a project manager you know how to build a plan, quite easy. So the ramp time was very minimal. So we made a decision, watched a bunch of YouTube videos, probably spent a month doing that, myself and the team. With the tool being intuitive and those videos, we built a solution basically from the ground up. >> So this is without even having an enga-- this is PayPal, without even having an engagement with an account executive, you were able to find this, like you said, word of mouth, implement this on your own and really enable quite a bit of transformation within the executive team and what they need to see. >> Absolutely, I think, when we look back at the end of year one we made that decision, we realized, hey, we've got some high-price consultants in, and we're probably using half of their time at that point just in relating that data, so you're talking about some heavy dollars that are being spent there, just in administrative-type work. If we can cut that layer out, and go straight to the source, we're saving ourselves a ton, we can redirect those funds to other areas where we actually get some work done. >> So Jeff, how big was the initial deploy, in terms of the team size, because you said you didn't engage Smartsheet directly, you're watching some YouTube videos, and you did see enough there that you wanted to jump in. Did you jump all in from the beginning, did you do kind of a POC, how did you get started, what was kind of the scope? >> Yeah, kind of took a couple demos, straw-man that we just put together on the fly, shared with some of our key stakeholders, you know, "Does this look right? Does it feel right? Are you seeing the information that you think we need?". And the fact that we were able to come up with that so quickly just sold itself, and so yeah vetted it, socialized it a little bit, but it was a pretty easy sell from that point. It was just building it out, and I'd say right from the get go we had already had about 14 programs as part of this portfolio in place at that point in time, so each program having between, I'd say between five and 15 projects within that, so the number of players was quite large, probably about 150 direct players in the program, probably a couple hundred more indirect that want line-of-sight to what we're doing. >> So line-of-sight accountability, how was that embraced by those teams? And we talk a lot about digital transformation, Jeff, at every event, and how cultural transformation is a necessity for that. How have you been able to leverage this tool to kind of evolve that culture within the office of the CIO? >> Yeah, that's a great question. I think, with us being able to cut out that middle-man, when I say middle-man I'm talking PowerPoint slides. If we can get away from that, because a number of things happen there, but predominantly, I mean, you can finger of a PowerPoint slide and all of a sudden, 100 turns to 200 or 1000, something like that, so, hey, if we can just go straight to our system of a record, I mean, each project within this portfolio should have a project plan, they should have a risk and issues tracker, so we really decided, here's the baseline for what we need to have in terms of our data model. If we can have that, then we can produce the dashboards that just read directly from those systems of record, from an accountability perspective, right? That means, there's no tweaking a PowerPoint slide, right, you're reading directly from the project plan, so it is what it is. But, it's reality, and that's what we need to deal with, and we ultimately step in front of the C-suite, right? You need to have, here's where we are, and it needs to be an accurate and timely reflection. I mean, that's another thing, is that timeliness, I mean, this is real-time data that we're talking, so, if something changes 10 minutes before, it's there on the dashboard, we're ready to talk to it. >> Yeah, I don't think there's enough talk about the timeliness, because it is connected directly to the database. It's not something that somebody's reporting on, and so often you get these multiple layers of people extracting data, transcribing it, putting it in to whatever reporting tool they want and just, it just gets further and further from the truth with each passing minute and each passing iteration. >> Absolutely, and we've talked about speed so much here, and so that's obviously a critical factor in decision making, especially, so we want to make sure we have the latest and greatest there. >> So just curious of your experience from a project manager point of view. You're a professional project manager. I'm sure you know all of the big heavy-lifting tools. When you see something like this, which is more of a no-code, kind of low-code, kind of cross platform integration, what type of skills does that open up within the teams, within the data sources, within the ability to do something a lot less, I want to say more nimble, you know, less heavy, than kind of a traditional project management-- >> Sure, I think minimal's a great word to describe it there, because it really, it really is a tool that just is, that you can build from, more of like a grass-roots effort, as opposed to a enterprise, kind of top-down. I'm sure it works well in that use case as well, but, for us, it was something that was able to kind of fill needs that were distributed across the portfolio. Once you start building it up, filling in those gaps, then you realize, hey, we've got kind of an end-to-end tool here that really works well. >> And I'm just curious, interest as other people have engaged with your output, in the organization, in terms of, "Hey, Jeff, can you give us, can you share the PowerPoint links with us?". (mumbling) YouTube links. >> Yeah, I joke because it feels like at this point I'm doing about one demo a week to somebody else in the company, which is a great thing, leveraging best practices, and sharing that information, so, there's certainly a growing user-base within PayPal, of Smartsheet, so I try to keep up with the other teams that are using it so that we are taking our best practices from one another, that we're sharing, and then I think ENGAGE is really helping me connect to those other PayPal users, believe it or not, it's like, there's probably a bit more here than I have back home, so this is great. >> One of the things that was funny that popped up during the keynote this morning, Jeff, was a couple of customer quotes. These were anonymous, but this, what you were saying, kind of, Jeff, it sounds like, and you probably wouldn't say this about yourself so I'll say it for you, is that, this one woman who was a user of Smartsheet in her organization said that Smartsheet made her queen of the world. Sounds like there's some status elevation. But, I'm curious, so you started, you found this organically, yourself, this technology, as Jeff was saying, this is built for business users. You didn't have to have, even though you're in the office of the CIO, you didn't have to have IT's involvement here. But here you are one of the evangelists now for Smartsheet out there, even. Tell us about that engagement, pun intended, that you got with Smartsheet to be able to start, maybe, pay a thumb isn't organically, do you have a sales account exec now, if so are you having conversations with them, are you helping to influence new features and things? >> Sure, I think our admin for Smartsheet at PayPal got tired of me giving them calls, so he said, "Hey, you do know Terren Finstra's your rep, right?". So I reached out to Terren, at this point we've conversed quite a bit and she's brought a number of other kind of ideas and forward thinking to the table that we're considering for next steps, what we can do, but the engagement has been great. They've been very responsive, helped us out when we kind of hit a rock in the road and we need some help, so yeah it's been a great relationship. >> Any way to quantify the benefits, one of the things I was reading on the smartsheet website the other day was some pretty big stats on how they're helping companies save time, which in different ways translates to saving dollars. I think I read the average user of Smartsheet will save about 300 hours per year, that's a lot of time, and the average organization will save over 60,000 hours a year. What's the impact been on the weekly roll-ups that you're able to do, any way to sort of quantify how much that speed has improved? >> Yeah, I mean, if I go back to kind of the original business case, say we're spending probably half the time of two very high-price consultants doing this, I'd say it's way up there, and we were able to save, I'm sure, a couple hundred thousand dollars at least, at the minimum. So, that in itself was a big win. If we look today, kind of where we are and the time that we're able to save using the tool, given the fact that there is that middle layer's just really not there, we don't spend a lot of time on producing content at all. Instead, we can take that time and we can focus it on, okay, where are our trouble areas, where do we need to double down, where do we need to help in making sure that we're actually getting material work done in the areas that we should be rather than just administrative content-- >> Big productivity gains, well Jeff, thank you so much for joining Jeff Frick and I on the cube and sharing what you guys are doing with Smartsheet in the office of the CIO at PayPal. >> Glad to be here, thank you so much. >> Alright, we want to thank you for watching theCUBE. For Jeff and Jeff, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching the cube live from Smartsheet ENGAGE 2018, stick around. This Jeff and I will be right back with our next guest.