>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 sponsored by Intel and AWS. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the cubes. Continuing coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 Virtual the Cube Virtual. We're here covering the partner ecosystem and some of the new innovations coming from the reinvent community. Let's talk about something that anyone who drives a vehicle can relate to. Roadside assistance with me or Beth Davidson, chief marketing officer at a zero, and Raj borrows the vice president and c t o at zero folks, welcome to the Cube. >>Hello, nice to see you. >>So let's start with you. Maybe talk a little bit about your your mission, how you work with automakers. You've got, you know, a lot of good pipeline, their insurers and other others in the in the ecosystem. Tell us about the company. >>Absolutely. So for 50 years, we've been helping consumers with their cars. Um, that's what it comes down Thio. We know that one in three people has a roadside event every year on the way you think about that is, you know, if in three years you haven't had a roadside event, tick tock. You know, statistically, it's coming for you. We work with everybody. We work with the auto manufacturers. We work with the insurers. What we're trying to do is get closer to consumers. On the reason you may have never heard of a Gero is that's by design. Were white label. We work for our clients typically on. Do you know they trust us with their consumers? They trust us with their brands. Um, and we're just in the business of getting consumers back on the road. >>Thank you for that. So talk a little bit about how you approach this problem. I mean, you looked out roadside assistance, and you know, we can again all relate. Oh, am I up to date or at least the car? So there's gotta be some kind of 800 number in my glove compartment somewhere, right? So what was the state of roadside assistance before you guys got involved? And maybe we could get into sort of how you solve the problem. >>Yeah, I think that's a great question, Dave, as we look at roadside assistance, everyone things about picking up the phone number 800 number from the glove box compartment And over the years we have invested heavily on bringing a fully digital experience to our customers from insurance companies to AM. And when this Alexa opportunity came up earlier this summer, he said, Hi. How about taking that digital experience, adding, all the Alexa do goods goods about voice interaction, making it very interactive for the users to request that experience in a very normal consumer friendly, friendly were and brought that we integrated all those services got that whole uber like experience with for roadside assistance? >>Yeah. Now. So, Beth, you know, I reminded when, like the smart TV first came out, you had a type in right, and we're really getting spoiled now. It should be easy as a blink. Okay, so you're unveiling blink, you know, what's this service all about? >>So this service is about, you know, trying to get to consumers as easy as we can and getting removing the friction. Right? So what Rogers just talking about is again we asked consumers. We say, you know, imagine that tomorrow you went out and there was a flat tire on your car in your driveway. What do you dio? And universally, they pause and They're like, I don't know. I haven't thought about it, right. And then they start making up stuff. Like maybe I'm gonna go through the glove box. Maybe I'm going to go through my files. But wouldn't it be great if they could just kind of talked to the air and say, Alexa, what? Doe ideo and have it work for them, you know, And that's one friction. The second friction is consumers actually don't know their addresses or don't know it. Well, we joke around the office about the difference between saying you're on route one and Route one A is is the difference between 20 minutes of that tow truck getting to you in time. You know, these air points of friction that technology can help us with, you know, and then with payments even better, Right? So the fact that you can pay for this thing with Amazon pay and you don't have to worry about having cash for a driver or have a credit card. I mean, there's just so many points of friction that are reduced by using Alexa. >>Okay, so let's talk about the the integrations here in the technical aspects of how you put everything together and made it work, and we'll get into some of the cloud aspect >>Attack launched. We're asking users to tell what they want, and they can tell the whole address. They can get the address from the Alexa device. Or if it is Alexa Auto. The GPS will provide us the Latin belong. And we take that address and we get what kind of experience they want. Whether it is a flat tire, we're going to send somebody else to put despair. If it is a jump start, we're gonna put send somebody Thio jumps out the vehicle. So depending on that, we put pull all that information together, get this consent for the user to charge their an Amazon parrot card on profile, and then go So it's literally to come to sentences. And then we're on. We're on to sending you experience with some of the text messages that will allow you to truck tractor truck coming down to your driver. >>Now I'll show my age. So yeah, we've all I don't have all but I've been locked out of the car many times Now, in the old days, used to be able to get a coat hanger and pop it open. But so? So that people still get locked out of their cars. >>Yes, cars. More often than not, it's, you know, the key. Fob stopped working, right? Lost the battery of my key fob these days. But it's the equivalent. >>Alright, so All right, so right. What else do you guys do in the cloud? Do you use a W s for your own business? Maybe share with us some of >>the over the years. For the past 78 years, we have, uh, integrated and got all of our technologies into the AWS cloud. And we have now revamped and re innovated on top of those and create a new product lines. We have accident scene management. We do, um, handle automatic clash notifications for some of our partner customers. We dio dealer service appointments, so we do a lot of these things. And all of these are not possible without the amazing teams. 20 or so teams that we have across three continents working on 50 plus, uh, approved services on aws, uh, innovating around the clock, bringing these new innovations to our market. >>So, Beth, you were saying earlier that you, you know, want to reach out to the consumer. I mean, how do you market? Uh, you obviously go through through partners. And I'm curious system, What's your go to market and maybe how you're different from from others in the marketplace, >>right? Eso again because we're white label with most of the client side business that we do, we help our clients message better on DSO. We talked to them about how often you have to remind people that this isn't a one and done, um, on the skill store for Alexa. You know how we're different is you know, you don't aske much as I love the branding that we came up with blank roadside. You know, you don't actually have to use it. You don't have to say, Alexa, open my blank roadside. You could just say, Alexa, help me with my flat tire, which really helps cut out the fact that I actually need to market the brand like a traditional market or would have had Thio. But our biggest problem is how do you market something to someone in that moment of need, right? How do I How do I prime you to get you to think about it way, way before you ever actually have the problem. >>And how do you charge for the service? >>Eso It's it's a flat fee on did. It's better than what consumers would be able to get on their own. Or at least we believe so. But it is a flat fee for any kind of road service, so it's flat tire. It's dead batteries. It's winching you out. You know, it's it's all of those things. Um, that can happen to you that are just kind of those minor everyday mishaps. >>Okay? And so and so do I. How do I get it? Do I do I have tow hope that my you know, if I'm leasing a car that the auto has it, can I go direct? How doe I >>all direct? It's all direct. So you don't have to worry about an I d number membership number. You're just paying for it out of your Amazon account on. Do you know you don't have to worry about knowing your how many digit vin number. You know, none of that stuff. It's just one and done. >>Awesome. So, Raja, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your your scale. Um, maybe I don't know if you can share any metrics and what What factors? The cloud generally and a W s specifically has has played and enabling that scale. >>Yeah, we have amazing number of integrations with our Fortune 100 insurance companies. Um, over 35 insurance companies and we have 100 and 70 b two b clients today, Um, and we integrate with them were deeply, um, uh integrated into the building systems into their coverage systems. And all of that is to be able to provide that sub minute sub second experience to our customers when they're calling in, uh, when they need the service. Um, right now we do over a billion AP A calls. As a result of these transactions, all these integrations or for quarter and all of these, uh, our third parties, service providers who go around the on the roads and provide this location information today off the tow trucks to us, all of these 8 8000 or so trucks extreme that information to us almost on every hour. So we bring all that information together on the AWS platform, stream it back shaded back in a very secure private manner back to the customers, right at the moment of need. >>Yeah, So I mean, without the cloud, you'd be backing up. You know, the servers to the truck to the loading dock. And it would just take so much longer toe spin up new products. I would imagine that you guys have a lot of ideas about new data products or new services that you can you can provide. Um, you probably I'm sure you can tell us what they are, But but in terms of the time, it takes you to conceive toe to get to the market. That must be impressed with the cloud. >>Yeah, it's a fraction of what it used to take years ago when we were not in AWS, right? And it also allows us to not to spend all this time on worrying about the same thing that you used to worry about for every project. Now you can actually think about how, what how you let be able to leverage new innovations that are coming in and actually improve improve the experience with some kind of intelligence that is added on, which makes the experience much smoother for people. >>Well, Beth will give you last word. But first of all, thanks for helping us make our lives even even better and more convenient. But bring us home. What's the last word here? >>So the last word is, you know, we dio we do 12 million events a year right now, right? And if you if you like math, it's 35,000 day. It's 20 for every minute, you know. And the work that that Rajan team have done to make the scalable means we're ready to do the next 12 million on. Do you know we know. We know there are consumers out there having those events. We just want to be there for you, you know, take care of that frustrating event on get you back >>on the road. Well, it's just, you know, having you there and being able to push a button and talk to a device is just It's a game changer. So thank you guys for coming on the cube and sharing your story really interesting. Yeah. All right. Thanks for watching. Keep it right there. You're watching the cubes coverage of aws reinvent 2020. We'll be right back right after this short break

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios today, having ongoing conversations about diversity and really adding more women and also people of color into the corporate environment. And we're really excited to have somebody who's an expert in the field. Joining us for the first time from the East coast. She's Beth Stewart, founder and CEO of Trewstar. Before we get going, tell us a little bit about Trewstar and what you guys are all about. >> Well, we're a search firm and we specialize at the board level, so we don't do executive search. And we further focus on female candidates, and much more recently, I wouldn't want to say we never focused on racial diversity, but let's just say it's getting a lot more attention and that would include men and women. >> Right, right, so that makes a lot of sense. And specifically, what's different about running a search firm that's focused on board members than a search firm that's focused on traditional kind of leadership roles, CEO or other senior executives? >> Well, there are a couple of things. First of all, one of the criteria to be a partner at Trewstar is that you have to have been a board member yourself. And I don't think at other search firms that do the board work as part of their overall practice that that's as important, that's not to say some partners at other firms aren't board members, but it's not as consistent as it is at Trewstar. So one, we feel like we really understand what our clients' issues are. A second thing that differentiates us is that, we spend really all day every day thinking about and sourcing and meeting with and getting referrals from people about diversity candidates. So, I think other firms are focused on people that they can place into leadership positions which aren't necessarily people who are or have been or could be a board member. And going back to that focus on having been in the board room, we have a pretty good sense of who's right and who isn't maybe quite ready or never will be ready to go on a board. >> So I wonder if you could just pull the curtain back a little bit for us, 'cause everyone has worked for a manager or been a manager and had some level of exposure to kind of the senior management in their companies or CEOs. We see him speak at keynotes. That's very different than what happens in the board. So, when you talk about the candidates, and you just mentioned, some people may never be ready for a board position. What are the kind of candidate attributes that you look for that you know is somebody that's good for corporate board? >> Well, so first, it has to start with the skill set that the company has requested, based on their analysis and sometimes we help with this. But their analysis of where there is a gap in the skills on the board. And there are a lot of different people that might fit that skill. Let's just take the audit chair, because it's such an obvious one, there are many, many people who can chair an audit committee. But what we also are going to look for is somebody who you'd like to have dinner with or lunch with. Now I realize when we're in COVID times, everybody's not doing that, but assuming things return to some level of normalcy, you want to have people who are personable, who are easy to get along with, who aren't going to talk too much, who aren't going to talk over each other and who are skilled at the top of their game, if you will. So, for people who might be audit chairs, we're looking for either a CFO or a retired audit partner. And in that case, we might be looking for audit partners who have had leadership positions in their firms that's just an indication of their sort of level of outstandingness. >> Right. >> And when you look for a CFO, you might say, is this a CFO who came up through an investment banking or Treasurer background or is it a CFO who came up through an accounting background? All these depend on the situation, but those are the kinds of considerations for us. >> Right, and one of the things that came up in doing a little research for this interview, is you talked about crafting modern dynamic boards and I think probably a lot of people's perception is that boards just don't turn over that often. And I think even you've said in some of your literature, that the problem's not really a supply side problem, it's a demand side problem. So, I wonder if you can share some insight as to kind of what is happening with boards in terms of turnovers and making seats available for new people, whether that be women or women of color or whomever. Is that changing over time? Are you seeing a dynamic start to change where you're starting to get more fresh blood into corporate boards, where before that was probably a pretty glacial paced activity I would imagine? >> I wouldn't want you to think that anybody's sprinting at this point, we haven't gone from glacial to sprints, but change has happened. And so you talked about a dynamic boardroom, if you can imagine the number of people that are on corporate boards that haven't worked since before the iPhone or before the trade wars with China and other places or before #metoo or before COVID or before dealing with millennials in the workplace. So, there are a lot of people that fall in that category that do offer wisdom and stability on a board, but it's really, I believe, incumbent on them to get that sort of new perspectives and literally new information and skills and have it be a better blend. And you can't do that unless you do create openings, you can always increase the size of the board, but you can't do that unless you take the difficult step of asking some of the longer tenured and older board members to retire. Now, having said that, it's not just an ageist thing. There are often board members that for instance, on a pre-IPO company, who were venture capitalists, and the venture capitalists may not actually know the issues of a public board, they know the issues of smaller companies and growing in a private market. And sometimes you get somebody who's in the middle of their career, who doesn't have the time to spend, because they are in a full-time role. So really, what it comes down to is, someone appropriately managing the boardroom by saying, "who's really got the skills and the time and the personality that we need." And what I find most interesting, Jeff, is you can speak to anybody on a board and they know who it is that shouldn't be there anymore. It doesn't require a whole process and bringing in outsiders and doing exhaustive studies, everybody knows who it is. It's just whether there's somebody who's willing to have those difficult conversations. >> So, it's interesting 'cause you say someone willing to have those difficult conversations which would imply that there's not kind of a systematic way to make sure that things are refreshed to make sure that there's some turnover to make sure that maybe institutionally everybody knows that there's going to be turns if it's really kind of a one off conversation every time and I think, again, doing some research, you talked about, some really older folks that have been around for a long time, not necessarily because they don't have the qualifications anymore, but it's just time for them to potentially give up that chair. So, you're saying that it's not that institutionalized in terms of making sure that this thing is refreshed at some type of frequency? >> Yes, that's what I'm saying. I just don't know how to say it any differently, but it doesn't happen consistently, but what is consistently true, is the dread with which the senior person on the board, the chair of nominating governance, the chair of the board, maybe it's the CEO, has about having the conversation about asking somebody to not stand for re-election, that's consistent and systematized. And there are some other sort of old fashion ways we can expand the board while expanding the board if you've been in a board room, it's a trivial issue. Somebody makes a motion and the board's expanded by one or we can't ask somebody to retire, because their term's not up. Well, why can't you? You're supposed to be representing the shareholders. If they're not doing as great a job as the next person. Having them stay for another 18 months isn't really in the best interest of the shareholders. So, I feel it's a little bit the dirty little secret in corporate boards. This unwillingness of people to either ask somebody to move on or to move on themselves. >> Well, then there's the whole chairman-CEO thing, which I've never quite understood that how you can be both the chairman of the board as well as the CEO of the company if the board is supposed to be the CEO's boss? But I don't think we're going to solve that problem here today. >> That's a third rail that I'm not going to get into and I would suspect that it really varies by person and by situation. Sometimes I'm sure that works just perfectly well and other times, there is a reason to have a separation. >> Right, let's shift gears a little bit and talk about some positive news. You had an article that you did, it's been a while now, December 18th, saying that you placed more women in boards, the first quarter of Q1 2018, it's an old article, than you had in all 2017 which is kind of a nice interesting indicator of trending in the right direction. And as you just mentioned, before we turned on the cameras, your phones are lighting up with all this stuff going on with the black lives matter movement. So, people do seem to be in a better place than they were. So how do you see it kind of progressing? What are some ways that other people can contribute to help make sure that the momentum is going up in the correct direction? >> Sure, why don't I talk about what I think caused the change? And there's plenty of room for other people to take these actions. Certainly there has been for many years there were not for profit organizations and academic institutions that wrote about the reasons, wrote about, had conferences etcetera, about the reasons there should be diversity on boards. I have to say, parenthetically, this notion of diversity for me it goes a lot back to the idea of the dynamic board. So, it's not just being a woman per se or racially diverse person per se. It could be a person who actually has those needed skills. But anyway, so, for a long time these not for profits were focused on this. But it was March 7th, 2017, when State Street came out with their proclamation that they were not going to support chairs of nominating governance who didn't create diverse boards. And you might remember when they put the statue of the girl with her arms spread out in front of the bull on Wall Street. That was incredible and that led a number of other financial institutions who voted proxies to support that, that was huge. Another movement or another action that mattered, is the state of California, saying that they're setting up quotas. I'm no fan of quotas, but now that I've actually seen what happens in the state of California. And what's happened to the quality, we aren't putting people who aren't high quality on these boards, we're putting outstanding women on the boards, but there's more of an opportunity. And then the third thing that happened and I realized we're now getting into January of 2020, but I mention it because there are many more, so there are many more states that can do what California did. There are many more financial institutions that can do explicitly what State Street did, and many have, but there's still more. And then the last thing happened at Davos in January of 2020, when David Solomon, who's the CEO of Goldman Sachs, said that they will not take any companies public, unless this year there's at least one woman on the board and next year, two women on the board, and this is huge. So, what I would point out to you is that, in the case of State Street and in the case of Goldman Sachs, the senior member of the organization actually stepped in and did something and set a tone and set an expectation and sort of, if you will, created a rule, which is different than saying my head of diversity and inclusion is going to take care of it. Head of talent is responsible for this, it really has to come from the top. So, there are many, many other organizations with people at the top who can put in similar recommendations or basically new ways of working. >> Right, Beth, but we know from real data and real evidence that a diversity of opinion leads to better outcome and it leads to better business results. So it's funny that even with that kind of data, you still need kind of that personal touch to push it over the line, to really make it. The fearless girl statue is an amazing story, I'm happy to say I've tracked her down and got a couple pictures. I've got a few daughters that I shared it with and kind of the rallying cry that that became in fact, I think they've even moved it to a more prominent position from across from the bull, really is interesting that there's these small little symbols that can mark significant progress in kind of this ongoing journey. >> Yes, I agree with you completely, but maybe it goes back to that whole notion of why can't you? Why don't people want to retire from boards? And what's really these various things have done is it's just forced the conversation and it's forced the action. Being on a board is a great thing. You get paid a lot, you're at the top of the hierarchy, it's the pinnacle of somebody's career. So I'm very sympathetic to why nobody wants to move on, but that doesn't mean it's right. We're supposed to be doing what's right for the company and the shareholders. >> Okay, so before we let you go, just a couple of concrete things that you suggest to people that they can do to kind of help this mission along. >> Well, so back to what differentiates us, we present slates of all women. And what we recommend is interview the women first. And if we don't find a candidate who matches what you need, both the specific skills and the personality, we'll open the search to men. And while we have placed men, whenever we started with an all female slate, we've never been asked to open the slate to men. So, what does it mean? That's not us, we're a client service business, it's the client who's never asked us. So it's incumbent upon us not to just have a slate of women, but to have a slate of outstanding women. And that goes back to focusing on this and spending every day and talking to so many women in advance. So that's the first thing I would say, is that you start with an all female slate. The second thing I would say is people say to me, what's the most important thing about to get a woman on a board, and I say it starts with a signed engagement letter. And so what does that imply? What that implies is that we're a for profit organization doing this from soup to nuts. We don't just find the women and send their resumes out, we run the whole process. We understand the company, we give them materials, we organize the interviews, we do the reference checks, we do what I call the last mile logistics, so that in a three to four month period, which is quite fast for the world of boards, somebody goes on the board. We've never had a failed search. So, it's really managing a whole process. And the signed engagement letter means, somebody actually hired us to do that. So, we start in the very beginning with a board who wants the whole process and wants to have a diverse candidate. So it's not like a question at the end or whatever, it's all lined up. And we try to leave no stone unturned and I would say that that's very important when you start thinking about, there are a lot of databases out there. But sometimes when you just go to a database and get a name, it doesn't actually turn into a woman on the board. >> Right, and I'm just curious to get your personal take, since you've been doing this for a while and as you said, your phone's been lighting up looking for more diverse candidates, not just women, but people of color, etcetera. Do you see a change in attitude from the senior people that are hiring you to move beyond? "I need to check a box, I'm getting pressure I need to do this", versus, "wow I see real benefit, I see this as real important. It's important for me, it's important for my company, it's important, really, to our shareholders, our stakeholders and our constituents to actually take maybe an uncomfortable step or a step", maybe uncomfortable is the wrong word, "that I'm not necessarily used to or is new or foreign to me, to take this action and move this thing down the road." >> Yeah, I would say absolutely, but I think that even if they start with, "I know I have to do this, I might not know why I want to do it, but I'm going to do it anyway." Even for the people that are in that, like take an all male board. Truthfully the all male boards aren't really wild about this, they've been forced for one reason or another. But what's amazing is if you come up with a high quality slate of candidates, what we find over and over again is the inability to choose between one candidate and another, and often the decision to add two women. And that to me is a testament to one the openness of those all male boards to recognizing quality, and being able to now see with a live person, if you will, how that new director could really help them. So, that's terrific that that happens. Now, just to mention on the racial diversity, we're doing the exact same thing or basically, if you will, beefing up, expanding all of our connections in those areas. And one of the things that's different is we've had searches that were underway, whoever is leading the search on the side of the company has said, "Stop. It has to be a racially diverse person, stop whatever you're doing." We did a search for a media company and we had 21 African-American women on the slate that met the spec for one reason or another. And then, of the new calls that we've been getting, I'd say 60 or 70% of them we don't want anything other than a racially diverse man or woman. You talked about the phones lighting up, it's like a set of fireworks at the fourth of July in terms of what's happened here. And we're completely behind it and we've had a lot of conversations with a lot of people about what's the right way to approach this in terms of having the conversations with those racially diverse people. And anyway, we're doing all sorts of things. And we're bound and determined to be helpful and to be action-oriented in this current situation. >> That's great news, Beth, because when I talked to some of my black friends, specifically, as this has been going on, a lot of them come back and say, "I don't know why this is so different, we've been having these issues for a long period of time." So, it's nice to find some examples where hopefully, there's some step function activity going on here. And I think what you just outlined very much supports that, that this isn't just more of the same, but actually, there are changes slowly being affected kind of across many fronts, all at the same time, which would certainly be supported by what you just said. >> So, I'd love to Jeff, I don't know whether we're running out of time or not, but I had a conversation with a senior African-American male board member. 'Cause one, he's on the board of a company that's our client, I know how terrific everybody thinks he is and he chairs audit committees and he chairs nominating governance committees. And so I asked him about how to handle this. And in any case, one of the things he told me is that he would advise his friends that if anybody was going on a board to figure out the sincerity of the board, he said, "'cause I don't want to go on a board and check the box. I want to go on a board because I'm part of a company trying to make strides in these areas and where I can add value." He said, "I would tell them up front, "that if all you've got is a black woman in diversity and inclusion, that I don't think you're sincere. And if I find that you're not sincere, I'm going to resign. And when I resign, you the board, will then have to explain to everybody why I resigned and that won't be pleasant." (chuckles) So, I thought, wow, that's- >> You're putting your mouth where your money is, that's for sure. That's terrific. >> Yeah. >> Well, Beth, we could go on and on and on. Unfortunately, we have other work to do and I'm sure you do as well. But our paths cross because of some of the fantastic women that we've had on theCUBE who are also clients of yours and getting placed in board seats, which is terrific news. We're happy to highlight some of these terrific individuals, as you said, they're not just women or people of color, they're fantastic people first, and terrific executives and kind of representatives of the company. So, really excited for you and what you're doing to help put some really qualified people in places where they can make a difference. >> Yes, well, it's a wonderful job I created for myself and as I say, I only talk to successful people, because unsuccessful ones aren't available to be interviewed for board roles. >> (chuckles) All right, well, we will leave it at that. So Beth, thanks a lot and have a terrific week. >> Thank you, same to you. Thank you, Jeff. >> All right, thanks a lot. >> Bye-bye. >> All right, she's Beth, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE from Palo Alto. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (mellow music)

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape the imperative to protect data has never been more pressing as companies transform themselves from businesses into digital businesses the intrinsic value of their data Rises exponentially the problem for infrastructure pros is that everything in IT is additive it seems like nothing ever dies which means more things to manage now think about that when you're protecting data you have bare metal VMs now containers you've got cloud you got to worry about the edge all this data needs to be protected not only does this increase complexity it expands the attack surface for adversaries wanting to steal or ransom your data at the heart of all this is a build out of a massively global distributed cloud we saw wave 1 of the cloud which was public wave 2 was really hybrid and that's evolving now in parallel you're seeing the emergence of multi cloud and as I said these earlier trends are additive they're not replacements and with me to discuss these important issues and how Dell EMC specifically is pivoting toward cloud data protection is Beth Phelan who was the president of Dell emcs Data Protection Division that's great to see you well good to be here again so we know the world is hybrid it's a fundamental the on-prem stuff is part of the fundamental digital digital transformations of these these companies and now you've got data protection for the cloud so what do you see happening in that world yeah let's start with what we're seeing in the market we recently remade our global data protection index we've been doing it for many years and we've been really using that to help us understand the landscape and what our customers need and first not surprisingly it shows that continued trend of movement and reliance towards cloud environments for business applications sure continuing to increase on top of that the customers despite that are continuing to struggle with ensuring they have the right data protection for their cloud environments right so they're they're struggling you see that we see that as well what what's going on there Wow what is the data tell you yeah first of all more than half the customers don't have a comprehensive data protection solution for their Salas cloud native and multi cloud environments more than two-thirds of the customers who may be relying on their cloud service providers for data protection say that they do not have a solution that covers all of their workloads so whether they're working with a cloud service provider or some other vendor they're being really clear that they do not have a comprehensive approach to cloud data protection yeah so I mean you see the cloud adoption is going like crazy but it seems like the data protection component is lagging how is that affecting the traction in your business yeah you know it's a double-edged sword right on one level customers see the advantages of moving to a cloud but on the other hand you know they are really looking for vendors that they can partner with to still have the same confidence that the data is protected that they have on Prem and what we're seeing now is that customers are turning to us to help solve that problem we have over a thousand customers using Dell EMC for their Cloud Data Protection and we're narrowing in on three exabytes of data that we're currently protecting in the cloud so it's happening yeah that's pretty good traction so I want to talk about VMware obviously VMware is the linchpin of many customers hybrid strategy and it's a clearly an important component of Dell technologies talk a little bit about the relationship between Dell EMC data protection specifically and VMware I'm interested in you know they've announced project tenzou and there's kubernetes how are you guys working together to really deliver a value for customers so we are super excited about the opportunity to work so closely with VMware because as their in their domain we're working directly with them and that's an advantage that comes with being part of the dell technologies family and so we were the first company to bring data protection for were kubernetes environments out to market it's available now so you'll see us bring that into the tan zoom mission-critical has been moved forward partnering closely with with VMware and of course we're already fully certified for VMware cloud it's really an ongoing regular conversation about how we can work together to bring the best to our customers so Beth I gotta ask you so you're part of your role as the leader of the the division is obviously you got a you got a lot of mouths to feed big division you got to make your plan you got to deliver for customers but strategy is another key component of this how do all these cloud trends shape your strategy so core to our strategy is to be the essential provider of data protection for multi cloud environments so no matter where customers are choosing to deploy their applications they can have the same confidence that they always did that that data is protected and the way they can get it back so that's core and if you want three words to remember for our strategy think VMware cloud and cyber cloud is central to it and you're gonna be hearing a lot more about it in the weeks and months ahead okay so I gotta ask you break out your binoculars maybe even the telescope what are the future what are the futures look like when you think about the division and the market so we've been talking about cloud for a long time but we are still in the middle of this journey customers are going to rely on the cloud even more for additional use cases and especially in the data protection space right now we're seeing backup to the cloud dr to the cloud but the future will include cyber resiliency that's leveraging cloud deployments you're also going to see more and more of an emphasis on people leveraging SAS for their software consumption and for us that means not only protecting SAS applications but it also means giving customers the option to consume data protection in a SAS model we already do that today with things like cloud snapshot manager with things like the power protect management and orchestration but you're going to see us do even more of that because they're just incredible benefits of people leveraging sass to consume their software data constantly evolving lamps landscape data protection has to evolve with it that thanks so much for her thank you thank you keep it right there we'll be right back right after this short break

>> Narrator: Live from Miami, Florida. It's theCUBE. Covering IBM's data and AI forum. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to the port of Miami everybody. This is theCube, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here covering the IBM AI and data forum. Of course, the centerpiece of IBM's AI platform is Watson. Beth Smith is here, she's the GM of IBM Watson. Beth, good to see you again. >> You too. Always good to be with theCUBE. >> So, awesome. Love it. So give us the update on Watson. You know, it's beyond Jeopardy. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Oh, wow. >> That was a long time ago now. (laughs) >> Right, but that's what a lot of people think of, when they think of Watson. What, how should we think about Watson today? >> So first of all, focus Watson on being ready for business. And then, a lot of people ask me, "So what is it?" And I often describe it as a set of tools, to help you do your own AI and ML. A set of applications that are AI applications. Where we have prebuilt it for you, around a use case. And there is examples where it gets embedded in a different application or system that may have existed already. In all of those cases, Watson is here, tuned to business enterprise, how to help people operational-wise, AI. So they can get the full benefit, because at the end of the day it's about those business outcomes. >> Okay, so the tools are for the super geeks, (Beth laughs) who actually want to go in and build the real AI. >> (laughs) That's right, that's right. >> The APPS are, okay. It's prebuilt, right? Go ahead and apply it. >> That's right. >> And the embedded is, we don't even know we're using it, right? >> That's right, or you may. Like, QRadar with Watson has an example of using Watson inside of it. Or, OpenPages with Watson. So sometimes you know you're using it. Sometimes you don't. >> So, how's the mix? I mean, in terms of the adoption of Watson? Are there enough like, super techies out there, who are absorbing this stuff? Or is it mostly packaged APPS? Is it a mix? >> So it is a mix, but we know that data science skills are limited. I mean, they're coveted, right? And so those are the geeks, as you say, that are using the tool chain as a part of it. And we see that in a lot of customers and a lot of industries around the world. And then from a packaged APP standpoint, the biggest use case of adoption is really around customer care, customer service, customer engagement. That kind of thing. And we see that as well. All around the world, all different industries. Lots of great adoption. Watson Assistant is our flagship in that. >> So, in terms of, if you think about these digital initiatives, we talked about digital transformation, >> Yup. >> Last few years, we kind of started in 2016 in earnest, it's real when you talk to customers. And there was a ton of experimentation going on. It was almost like spaghetti. Throw against the wall and see what sticks. Are you seeing people starting to place their bets on AI, Narrowing their scope, and really driving you know, specific business value now? >> Beth: Yeah. >> Or is it still kind of all over the place? >> Well, there's a lot of studies that says about 51% or so still stuck in experimentation. But I would tell you in most of those cases even, they have a nice pilot that's in production, that's doing a part of the business. So, 'cause people understand while they may be interested in the sexiness of the technology, they really want to be able to get the business outcomes. So yes, I would tell 'ya that things have kind of been guided, focused towards the use cases and patterns that are the most common. You know, and we see that. Like I mentioned, customer care. We see it in, how do you help knowledge workers? So you think of all those business documents, and papers and everything that exists. How do you assist those knowledge workers? Whether or not it's an attorney or an engineer, or a mortgage loan advisor. So you see that kind of use case, and then you see customers that are building their own. Focused in on, you know, how do they optimize or automate, or predict something in a particular line of business? >> So you mentioned Watson Assistant. So tell us more about Watson Assistant, and how has that affected adoption? >> So Watson Assistant as I said, it is our flagship around customer care. And just to give you a little bit of a data point, Watson Assistant now, through our public cloud, SaaS version, converses with 82 million end users a month. So it's great adoption. And this is, this is enabling customers. Customers of our customers, to be able to get self-service help in what they're doing. And Watson Assistant, you know, a lot of people want to talk about it being a chat bot. And you can do simple chat bots with it. But it's to sophisticated assistance as well. 'Cause it shows up to do work. It's there to do a task. It's to help you deal with your bank account, or whatever it is you're trying to do, and whatever company you're interacting with. >> So chat bots is kind of a, (laughs) bit of a pejorative. But you're talking about digital systems, it's like a super chat bot, right? >> Beth: Yeah. I saw a stat the other day that there's going to be, by I don't know, 2025, whatever. There's going to be more money spent on chat bot development, or digital assistance, than there is on mobile development. And I don't know if that's true or not, >> Beth: Mhm, wow. But it's kind of an interesting thing. So what are you seeing there? I mean, again I think chat bots, people think, oh, I got to talk into a bot. But a lot of times you don't know you're, >> Beth: That's right. >> so they're getting, they're getting better. I liken it to fraud detection. You know, 10 years ago fraud detection was like, six months later you'll, >> Right. >> you'll get a call. >> Exactly. >> And so chat bots are just going to get better and better and better, and now there's this super category that maybe we can define here. >> That's right. >> What is that all about? >> That's right. And actually I would tell you, they kind of, they can become the brain behind something that's happening. So just earlier today I was, I was with a customer and talking about their email CRM system, and Watson Assistant is behind that. So chat bots aren't just about what you may see in a little window. They're really about understanding user intent, guiding the user through what they're trying to either find out or do, and taking the action as a part of it. And that's why we talk about it being more than chat bots. 'Cause it's more than a FAQ interchange. >> Yes, okay. So it's software, >> Beth: Yes. >> that actually does, performs tasks. >> Beth: Yes. >> Probably could call other software, >> Beth: Absolutely. >> to actually take action. >> That's right. >> I mean, I see. We think of this as systems of agency, actually. Making, sort of, >> That's right. >> decisions and then I guess, the third piece of that is, having some kind of human interaction, where appropriate, right? >> That's right. >> What do you see in terms of, you know, infusing humans into the equation? >> So, well a couple of things. So one of the things that Watson Assistant will do, is if it realizes that it's not the expert on whatever it is, then it will pass over to an expert. And think of that expert as a human agent. And while it's doing that, so you may be in the queue, because that human person is tied up, you can continue to do other things with it, while you're waiting to actually talk to the person. So that's a way that the human is in the loop. I would tell you there's also examples of how the agents are being assisted in the background. So they have the interaction directly with the user, but Watson Assistant is helping them, be able to get to more information quicker, and narrow in on what the topic is. >> So you guys talk about the AI ladder, >> Beth: Mhm. >> Sort of, Rob talked about that this morning. My first version of the AI ladder was building blocks. It was like data and AI analytics, ML, and then AI on top of that. >> Beth: Yup. >> I said AI. Data and IA. >> Beth: Yup. >> Information Architecture. Now you use verbs. Sort of, to describe it. >> Beth: Yup. Which is actually more powerful. Collect, organize, analyze and infuse. Now infuse is like the Holy Grail, right? 'Cause that's operationalizing and being able to scale AI. >> Beth: That's right. >> What can you tell us about how successful companies are infusing AI, and what is IBM doing to help them? >> So, I'm glad you picked up first of all, that these are verbs and it's about action. And action leads to outcome, which is, I think, critical. And I would also tell you yes, infuse is, you know, the Holy Grail of the whole thing. Because that's about injecting it into business processes, into workflows, into how things are done. So you can then see examples of how attorneys may be able to get through their legal prep process in just a few minutes, versus 10, 15 hours on certain things. You can see conversion rates of, from a sales standpoint, improve significantly. A number of different things. We've also got it as a part of supply chain optimization, understanding a little bit more about both inventory, but also where the goods are along the way. And particularly when you think about a very complicated thing, there could be a lot of different goods in various points of transit. >> You know, I was sort of joking. Not joking, but mentioning Jeopardy at first. 'Cause a lot of people associate Watson with Jeopardy. >> Beth: Right. >> I can't remember the first time I saw that. It had to be the mid part of the last decade. What was it? >> Beth: February of 2011. >> 2011, okay I thought I even saw demos before that. I'm actually sure I did. Like in, back in some lab in IBM. And of course, the potential like, blew your mind. >> Right. >> I suspect you guys didn't even know what you had at the time. You were like, "Okay, we're going to go change the world." And you know, when you drive up and down 101 in Silicone Valley, it's like, "Oh, Watson this, Watson that." You know, you get the consumer guys, doing facial recognition, ad serving. You know, serving up fake news, you know. All kinds of applications. But IBM started to do something different. You're trying to really change business. Did you have any clue as to what you had at the time? And then how much of a challenge you were taking on, and then bring us to where we are now, and what do you see as a potential for the next 10 years? >> So, of course we had a clue. So let me start there. (Dave laughs) But with that, I think the possibilities of it weren't completely understood. There's no question in my mind about that. And what the early days were, were understanding, okay, what is that business application? What's the pattern that's going to come about as a part of it? And I think we made tremendous progress on that along the way. I would tell you now, you mentioned operationalizing stuff, and you know, now it's about, how do we help companies have it more throughout their company? Through different lines of business, how does it tie to various things that are important to us? And so that brings in things like trust, explainablity, the ethics of what it's doing. Bias detection and mitigation. And I actually believe a lot of that, and the operationalizing it within the processes, is where we're going to head, going forward. Of course there'll continue to be advancements on the features and the capabilities, but it's going to be about that. >> Alright, I'm going to ask you the it's depends question. (Beth laughs) So I know that's your answer, but at the macro, can machines make better diagnosis than doctors today, and if not, when will they be able to, in your view? >> So I would actually tell you that today they cannot, but what they can do is help the doctor make a better diagnosis than she would have done by herself. And because it comes back to this point of, you know, how the machine can process so much information, and help the expert, in this case the doctor's the expert, it could be an attorney, it could be an engineer, whatever. Help that expert be able to augment the knowledge that he or she has as a part of it. So, and that's where I think it is. And I think that's where it will be for my lifetime. >> So, there's no question in your mind that machines today, AI today, is helping make better diagnosis, it's just within augmented or attended type of approach. >> Absolutely. >> And I want to talk about Watson Anywhere. >> Beth: Okay, great. >> So we saw some discussion in the key notes and some demos. My understanding is, you could bring Watson Anywhere, to the data. >> That's right. >> You don't have to move the data around. Why is that important? Give us the update on Watson Anywhere. >> So first of all, this is the biggest requirement I had since I joined the Watson team, three and a half years ago. Was please can I have Watson on-prem, can I have Watson in my company data center, etcetera. And you know, we needed to instead, really focus in on what these patterns and use cases were, and we needed some help in the platform. And so thanks to Cloud Pak for data, and the underlying Red Hat OpenShift and container platform, we now are enabled to truly take Watson anywhere. So you can have it on premise, you can have it on the other public clouds, and this is important, because like you said, it's important because of where your data is. But it's also important because the workloads of today and tomorrow are very complex. And what's on cloud today, may be on premise tomorrow, may be in a different cloud. And as that moves around, you also want to protect the investment of what you're doing, as you have Watson customize for what your business needs are. >> Do you think you timed it right? I mean, you kind of did. All this talk about multicloud now. You really didn't hear much about it four or five years ago. For awhile I thought you were trying to juice your cloud business. Saying, "You want, if you want Watson, you got to go to the IBM cloud." Was there some of that, or was it really just, "Hey, now the timing's right." Where clients are demanding it, and hybrid and multicloud and on-prem situations? >> Well look, we know that cloud and AI go hand in hand. So there was a lot of positive with that. But it really was this technology point, because had I taken it anywhere three and a half years ago, what would've happened is, every deployment would've been a unique environment, a unique stack. We needed to get to a point that was a modern day, you know, infrastructure, if you will. And that's what we get now, with a container based platform. >> So you're able to scale it, such that every instance isn't a snowflake, >> That's right. >> that requires customization. >> That's right. So then I can invest in the enhancements to the actual capabilities it is there to do, not supporting multiple platform instantiations, under the covers. >> Well, okay. So you guys are making that transparent to the customer. How much of an engineering challenge is that? Can you share that with us? You got to run on this cloud, on that cloud, or on forever? >> Well, now because of Cloud Pak for data, and then what we have with OpenShift and Kubernetes and containers, it becomes, well, you know, there's still some technical work, my engineering team would tell you it was a lie. But it's simple now, it's straightforward. It's a lot of portability and flexibility. In the past, it would've been every combination of whatever people were trying to do, and we would not have had the benefit of what that now gives you. >> And what's the technical enable there? Is it sort of open API's? Architecture that allows for the interconnectivity? >> So, but inside of Watson? Or the overall platform? >> The overall platform. >> So I would say, it's been, at it's, at it's core it's what containers bring. >> Okay, really. So it's that, it's that. It's the marriage of your tech, >> Yeah. >> with the container wave. >> That's right. That's right. Which is why the timing was critical now, right? So you go back, yes they existed, but it really hadn't matured to a point of broad adoption. And that's where we are now. >> Yeah, the adoption of containers, Kubernetes, you know, micro services. >> Right, exactly. Now it's on a very steep curve. >> Exactly. >> Alright, give your last word on, big take away, from this event. What do you hearing, you know, what are you, some of the things you're most excited about? >> So first of all, that we have all of these clients and partners here, and all the buzz that you see. And that we've gotten. And then the other thing that I would tell you is, the great client examples. And what they're bragging on, because they are getting business outcomes. And they're getting better outcomes than they thought they would achieve. >> IBM knows how to throw an event. (Beth laughs) Beth, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. >> Thank you, good to >> Appreciate it. >> see you again. >> Alright, great to see you. Keep it right there everybody, we'll be back. This is theCUBE live, from the IBM Data Forum in Miami, we'll be right back. (upbeat instrumental music)

>> Narrator: From Sand Hill Road, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's the CUBE. Presenting, The People First Network, insights from entrepreneurs and tech leaders. >> Hello everyone welcome to this special CUBE conversation, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here at Mayfield Fund, on Sand Hill Road and Menlo Park. As part of Mayfield's People First Network, co-creation with SiliconANGLE and theCUBE and Mayfield. Next guest, Beth Devin, Managing Director of Innovation Network and Emerging Technologies at Citi Ventures. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> Hey, thanks for coming in. We're here for the Mayfield fiftieth anniversary, where they're featuring luminaries like yourself, and we're talking about conversations around how the world's changing and the opportunities and the challenges can be met, and how you can share some of your best practices. Talk about what your role is at Citi Ventures and what your focus is. >> Sure, sure, and boy howdy, has it been changing. It's hard to keep up with. I've been at Citi Ventures about two years and one of the reasons I joined was to stand up an Emerging Technology practice. Citi Ventures does a lot of work in corporate venture investing. We tend to be strategic investors, for start up companies that are aligned with the strategy of Citi, as well as our client. We serve probably, eighty percent of the Fortune Five Hundred companies in the world. But we also are a really important part of the innovation ecosystem at Citi. Which is looking at how to drive culture change, broaden mindset, and really, enlist our employees to be part of the innovation process. So, we have an internal incubator, we have a Shark Tank-like process we call Discover Ten X. And what I really bring to the table with my team is monitoring, and learning about, and digesting technology that's not quite ready for commercialization but we think it might be disruptive in a good or challenging way for the bank or our clients. We try to educate and provide content that's helpful to our executives, and just the employee body at large. >> I want to get into a LinkedIn post you wrote, called the Tech Whisperer, which I love. >> Thank you. >> You're there to identify new things to help people understand what that is. But that's not what you've done. You've actually implemented technology. So, on the other side of the coin, in your career. Tell us about some of the things you've done in your career, because you've been a practitioner. >> Beth: Yeah. >> and now you're identifying trends and technologies, before you were on the other side of the table. >> That's right, and sometimes I'll tell you, I have that itch. I miss the operator role, sometimes. Yeah, you know, I feel so fortunate I sort of stumbled on computer science early when I was going to school. And, the first, I'd say twenty years of my career, were working in enterprise I.T, which at that time I couldn't even have made that distinction, like why do you have to say enterprise I.T. I was a software developer, and I was then a DBA, and I even did assembler language programing. So way back when, I think I was so fortunate to fall in to software engineering. It's like problem solving, or puzzle making, and you with your own brain and sort of typing can figure out these problems. Then over the years I became more of a manager and a leader, and sort of about a reputation for being somebody you could put on any hard problem and I'd figure a way out. You know tell me where we're trying to go it looks knotty, like not a fun project, and I would tackle that. And then I'd say, I had some experience working in lots of different industries. Which really gave me an appreciation, for you know, at the end of the day, we can all debate the role that technology plays in companies. But industries, whether it's health care or media, or financial services. There's a lot of the same challenges that we have. So I worked at Turner Broadcasting before it was acquired, you know by Time Warner and AOL. And I learned about media. And then I had a fantastic time working at Charles Schwab. That was my first big Financial Services role when it came back to the bay area. I worked at Art.Com, it was a need converse company, the first company I worked at where I was in charge of all the technology. We had no brick and mortar, and if the technology wasn't working, we weren't earning revenue, in fact, not only that, we were really making customers angry. I also had a role at a start up, where I was the third person to join the company, and we had a great CEO who had a vision, but it was on paper. And we hadn't really figured out how to build this. I was very proud to assemble a team, get an office, and have a product launch in a year. >> So you're a builder, you're a doer, an assembler, key coding, hexadecimal cord dumps back in the day. >> Way back when. We didn't even have monitors. I'll tell ya, it was a long time ago. >> Glory days, huh? Back when we didn't have shoes on. You know, technology. But what a change. >> Huge change. >> The variety of backgrounds you have, The LinkedIn, the Charles Schwab, I think was during the growth years. >> And the downturn, so we got both sides. >> Both sides of that coin, but again, the technologies were evolving. >> Yes. >> To serve that kind of high frequency customer base. >> Beth: That's right. >> With databases changing, internet getting faster. >> It has. >> Jeff: More people getting online. >> We were early adopters, I'll tell you. I still will tell people, Charles Schwab is one of the best experiences I have, even though at the end I was part of the layoff process. I was there almost seven years, and I watched, we had crazy times in the internet boom. Going in 98, 99, 2000, I can't even tell you some of the experiences we had. And we weren't a digital native. But we were one of the first companies to put trading online, and to build APIs so our customers could self service, and they could do that all online. We did mobile trading. I remember we had to test our software on like twenty different phone sets. Today, it's actually, so much easier. >> It's only three. Or two. Or one. Depending on how you look at it. >> That's right. We couldn't even test on all the phone sets that were out then. But that was such a great experience, and I still, that Schwab network, is still people I'm in touch with today. And we all sort of sprinkled out to different places. I think, I dunno, there's just something special about that company in terms of what we learned, and what we were able to accomplish. >> You have a fantastic background. Again the waves of innovation you have lived through, been apart of, tackling hard problems, taking it head on. Great ethos, great management discipline. Now more than ever, it seems to be needed, because we're living in an age of massive change. Cause you have the databases are changing, the networks changing, the coding paradigms changing. Dev ops, you've got the role of data. Obviously, mobile clearly is proliferated. And now the business models are evolving. Now you got business model action, technical changes, cultural people changes. All of those theaters are exploding with opportunity, but also challenges. What's your take on that as you look at that world? >> You know, I'm a change junkie, I think. I love when things are changing, when organizations are changing, when companies are coming apart and coming together. So for me, I feel like, I've been again, so fortunate I'm in the perfect place. But, one of the things that I really prided myself on early in my career, is being what I call the bridge, or the, the translator between the different lines of business folks that I work with. Whether it was head of marketing, or somebody in a sales or customer relationship, or service organization, and the technology teams I built and led. And I think I've had a natural curiosity about what makes a business tick, and not so much over indexing on the technology itself. So technology is going to come and go, there's going to be different flavors. But actually, how to really take advantage of that technology, to better engage your customers, which as you said, their needs and their demands are changing, their expectations are so high. They really set the pace now. Who would have though that ten years ago we'd live in an environment where industries and businesses are changing because consumers have sort of set the bar on the way we all want to interact, engage, communicate, buy, pay. So there's this huge impact on organizations, and you know, I have a lot of empathy for large established enterprises that are challenged to make it through this transformation, this change, that somehow, they have to make. And I always try to pay attention on which companies have done it. And I call out Microsoft as an example. I can still remember several years ago, being at a conference. I think it was Jeffrey Moore who was speaking, and he had on one slide... Here's all the companies in technology that have had really large success. Leading up to the internet boom days, there would be a recipe for the four companies that would come together. I think it was Sun, Oracle, and Microsoft. And then he said, and now here's the companies of today. And most young people coming out of college, or getting computer science degrees won't use any of these old technology companies. But Microsoft proved us all wrong, but they did it, focused on people, culture, being willing to say where they screwed up, and where they're not going to focus anymore, and part ways with those parts of their business. And really focus on who are their customers, what are their customer needs. I think there's something to be learned from those changes they made. And I think back to the Tech Whisperer, there's no excuse for an executive today, not to at least understand the fundamentals of technology. So many decisions have to be made around investment, capital, hiring, investment in your people. That without that understanding, you're sort of operating blind. >> And this is the thing that I think I love, and was impressed by that Tech Whisperer article. You know, a play on the Horse Whisperer, the movie. You're kind of whispering in the ears of leaders who won't admit that they're scared. But they're all scared! They're all scared. And so they need to get, maybe it's cognitive dissonance around decision making, or they might not trust their lead. Or they don't know what they're talking about So this certainly is there, I would agree with that. But there's dynamics at play, and I want to get your thoughts on this. I think this plays into the Tech Whisperer. The trend we're seeing is the old days was the engineers are out coding away, hey they're out there coding away, look at them coding away. Now with Cloud they're in the front lines. They're getting closer to the customer, the apps are in charge. They're dictating to the infrastructure what can be done. With data almost every solution can be customized. There's no more general purpose. These are the things we talk about, but this changes the personnel equation. Now you got engineering and product people talking to sales and marketing people, business people. >> And customers. >> They tend not to, they traditionally weren't going well. Now they have to work well, engineers want to work with the customers. This is kind of a new business practice, and now I'm a scared executive. Beth, what do I do? What's your thoughts on that dynamic? >> You know, I'm not sure I would have had insight in that if I hadn't had the oppurtunity to work at this little start up, which we were a digital native. And it was the first time I worked in an environment where we did true extreme programming, pair programming, we had really strong product leads, and engineers. So we didn't have project managers, business analysts, a lot of things that I think enterprise I.T tends to have. Because the folks, historically, at an enterprise, the folks that are specifying the need, the business need, are folks in the lines of business. And they're not product managers, and even product managers, I say in banking for example, they aren't software product managers. And so that change, if you really do want to embrace these new methods and dev ops, and a lot of the automation that's available to engineering and software development organizations today, you really do have to make that change. Otherwise it's just going to be a clumsy version of what you use to do, with a new name on it. The other thing though that I would say, is I don't want to discount for large enterprises is partnerships with start up companies or other tech partners. You don't need to build everything. There's so much great technology out there. You brought up the Cloud. Look at how rich these Cloud stacks are getting. You know, it's not just now, can you provision me some compute, and some storage, and help me connect to the internet. There's some pretty sophisticated capabilities in there around A.I and machine learning, and data management, and analysis. So, I think overtime, we'll see richer and richer Cloud stacks, that enables you know, every company to benefit from the technology and innovation that's going on right now. >> Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon Web Search, has always said whenever I've interviewed him, he always talks publicly now about it is, two pizza teams, and automate the undifferentiated heavy lifting. In tech we all know what that is, the boring, mundane, patching, provisioning, ugh. And deploying more creative research. Okay so, I believe that. I'm a big believer of that philosophy. But it opens up the role, the question of the roles of the people. That lonely DBA, that you once were, I did some DBA work myself. System admins, storage administrator, these were roles, network administrator, the sacred God of the network, they ran everything. They're evolving to be much more coding oriented, software driven changes. >> It's a huge change. And you know, one thing that I think is sad, is I run into folks often that are, I'll just say, technology professionals, just say, you know, we're at large. Who are out of work. You know, who sort of hang their head, they're not valued, or maybe there's some ageism involved, or they get marked as, oh that's old school, they're not going to change. So, I really do believe we're at a point, where there's not enough resources out there. And so how we invest in talent that's available today, and help people through this change, not everybody is going to make it. It starts with you, knowing yourself, and how open-minded you are. Are you willing to learn, are you willing to put some effort forth, and sort of figuring out some of these new operating models. Because that's just essential if you want to be part of the future. And I'll tell you, it's hard, and it's exhausting. So I don't say this lightly, I just think. You know about my career, how many changes and twists and turns their have been. Sometimes you're just like, okay I'm ready, I'm ready to just go hiking. (Beth laughs) >> It can be, there's a lot of institutional baggage, associated with the role you had, I've heard that before. Old guard, old school, we don't do that, you're way too old for that, we need more women so lets get women in. So there's like a big dynamic around that. And I want to get your thoughts on it because you mentioned ageism, and also women in tech has also grown. There's a need for that. So there's more opportunities now than ever. I mean you go to the cyber security job boards, there are more jobs for cyber security experts than any. >> Oh, I'll tell you, yesterday, we held an event at our office, in partnership with some different start ups. Because that's one of the things you do when you're in a corporate venture group, and it was all on the future of authentication. So it was really targeted at an audience of information security professionals and chief information security officers. And it was twenty men and one woman. And I thought, wow, you know I'm use to that from having been a CIO that a lot of the infrastructure roles in particular, like as you were saying, the rack and stack, the storage management, the network folks, just tend to be more male dominant, than I think the product managers, designers, even software engineers to some extent. But here you know, how many times can you go online and see how many openings there are for that type of role. So I personally, am not pursuing that type of role, so I don't know what all the steps would need to be, to get educated, to get certified, but boy is there a need. And that needs not going to go away. As more, if everything is digitized and everything is online. Then security is going to be a constant concern and sort of dynamic space. >> Well, we interview a lot of women in tech, great to have you on, you're a great leader. We also interview a lot of people that are older. I totally believe that there's an ageism issue out there. I've seen it first hand, maybe because I'm over fifty. And also women in tech, there's more coming but not enough. The numbers speak for themselves. There's also an opportunity, if you look at the leveling up. I talked to a person who was a network engineer, kind of the same thing as him, hanging his head down. And I said, do you realize that networking paradigm is very similar to how cyber works. So a lot of the old is coming back. So if you look at what was in the computer science programs in the eighties. It was a systems thinking. The systems thinking is coming back. So I see that as a great opportunity. But also the aperture of the field of computer science is changing. So it's not, there are some areas that frankly, women are better than men at in my opinion. In my opinion, might get some crap for that. But the point, I do believe that. And there are different roles. So I think it's not just, there's so much more here. >> Oh, that's what I try to tell people. It's not just coding, right. There's so many different types of roles. And unfortunately I think we don't market ourselves well. So I encourage everyone out there that knows somebody. (Beth laughs) Who's looking-- >> If someone was provisioned Sun micro-systems, or mini computers, or workstations, probably has a systems background that could be a Cloud administrator or a Cloud architect. Same concepts. So I want to get your thoughts on women in tech since you're here. What's your thoughts on the industry, how's it going, things you advise, other folks, men and women, that they could do differently. Any good signs? What's your thoughts in general? >> Yeah so, first of all, I'm just a big advocate for women in general. Young girls, and, young women, just getting into the work force, and always have been. Have to say again, very fortunate early in my career working for companies like a phone company, and Schwab, we had so many amazing female leaders. And I don't even think we had a program, it was just sort of part of the DNA of the company. And it's really only in the last couple of years I really seen we have a big problem. Whether it's reading about some of the cultures of some of the big tech companies, or even spending more time in the valley. I think there's no one answer, it's multifaceted. It's education, it's families, it's you know, each one of us could make a difference in how we hire, sort of checking in what our unintended biases are, I know at Citi right now, there's a huge program around diversity and inclusion. Gender, and otherwise. And one of the ways I think it's going to be impactful. They've set targets that I know are controversial, but it holds people accountable, to make decisions and invest in developing people, and making sure there's a pipeline of talent that can step up into even bigger roles with a more diverse leadership team. It will take time though, it will take time. >> But mind shares are critical. >> It absolutely is. Self-awareness, community awareness, very much so. >> What can men do differently, it's always about women in tech, but what can we, what can men do? >> I think it's a great question. I would say, women can do this too. I hate when I see a group together, and it's all women working on the women issue. Shame on us, for not inviting men into the organization. And then I think it's similar to the Tech Whisperer. Don't be nervous, don't be worried, just step in. Because, you know, men are fathers, men are leaders, men are colleagues. They're brothers, they're uncles. We have to work on this together. >> I had a great guest, and friend, I was interviewing. And she was amazing, and she said, John, it's not diversity and inclusion, it's inclusion and diversity. It's I-N-D not D-I. First of all, I've never heard of it, what's D-N-I? My point exactly. Inclusion is not just the diversity piece, inclusion first is inclusive in general, diversity is different. So people tend to blend them. >> Yes they do. >> Or even forget the inclusion part. >> Final question, since you're a change junkie, which I love that phrase, I'm kind of one myself. Change junkies are always chasing that next wave, and you love waves. Pat Gelsinger at VMWare, wave junkie, always love talking with him. And he's a great wave spotter, he sees them early. There's a big set of waves coming in now, pretty clear. Cloud has done it's thing. It's only going to change and get bigger, hybrid, private, multi Cloud. Data, AI, twenty year cycle coming. What waves are you most excited about? What's out there? What waves are obvious, what waves aren't, that you see? >> Yeah, oh, that's a tough one. Cause we try to track what those waves are. I think one of the things that I'm seeing is that as we all get, and I don't just mean people, I mean things. Everything is connected, and everything has some kind of smarts, some kind of small CPU senser. There's no way that our existing, sort of network, infrastructure and the way we connect and talk can support all of that. So I think we're going to see some kind of discontinuous change, where new models are going to, are going to absolutely be required cause we'll sort of hit the limit of how much traffic can go over the internet, and how many devices can we manage. How much automation can the people and an enterprise sort of oversee and monitor, and secure and protect. That's the thing that I feel like it's a tsunami about to hit us. And it's going to be one of these perfect storms. And luckily, I think there is innovation going on around 5G and edge computing, and different ways to think about securing the enterprise. That will help. But it couldn't come soon enough. >> And model also meaning not just technical business. >> Absolutely. Machine the machine. Like who's identity is on there that's taken an action on your behalf, or the companies behalf. You know, we see that already with RPA, these software robots. Who's making sure that they're doing what they're suppose to do. And they're so easy to create, now you have thousands of them. In my mind, it's just more software to manage. >> And a great contrary to Carl Eschenbach, former VMware CEO now at Sequoia, he's on the board of UIPath, they're on the front page of Forbes today, talking about bots. >> Yes, yes, yes, I've heard them speak. >> This is an issue, like is there a verification. Is there a fake bots coming. If there's fake news, fake bots are probably going to come too. >> Absolutely they will. >> This is a reality. >> And we're putting them in the hands of non-engineers to build these bots. Which there's good and bad, right. >> Regulation and policy are two different things, and they could work together. This is going to be a seminal issue for our industry. Is understanding the societal impact, tech for good. Shaping the technologies. This is what a Tech Whisperer has to do. You have a tough job ahead of you. >> But I love it. >> Jeff: Beth thank you for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> I'm Jeff Furrier for the People First Network here at Sand Hill Road at Mayfield as part of theCUBE and SiliconANGLE's co-creation with Mayfield Fund, thans for watching.

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Moscone here. We're at San Francisco VMworld 2019. I'm John Walls, along with Stu Miniman, here on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us here for our first of three days of coverage here at a very exciting program. I was just blown away by the keynotes this morning. We'll talk about that with Beth Phalen and Rajiv Ramaswami here. Beth is president and GM of data protection at Dell EMC, and Rajiv, of course, the chief operating officer at VMware. So thanks to you both for joining us. >> Good to be here, yeah. >> John: Good to see you both. >> Glad to be here. >> So first off, let's just talk about, if you will, the vibe of the keynotes. Pat, great command of the stage, obviously. Lot of big announcements. But I was just, I thought the whole presentation and the size of the crowd and their reactions were fairly impressive. What was your take on that? >> I totally agree. Being in the audience, it was comprehensive, it was holistic, it told a story that people could connect with, and it recognized just how much the world of IT is changing, and what VMware is doing in influencing that. I was impressed. >> Yeah, no, no, from my vantage point of view, being on the inside here-- >> Yeah. >> It's, yeah, our portfolio continues to get broader and broader. Our relevance to customers keeps getting bigger. And this year in particular, we had a whole series of announcements here. There were two major acquisitions, our largest two acquisitions, over the last week. So there was a lot to digest. And in fact, we were actually working on putting that story together at the very last minute, as you can imagine, because these acquisitions were literally announced on Thursday. (Beth laughs) So a lot came together, it came together beautifully. I thought Pat did a great job putting it all together and giving the story. >> Yeah, I know, the Pivotal, obviously, everybody went 10 days ago, two weeks ago, saying, "It can't happen that fast, can it?" Well, the answer is yes, it can happen that fast. >> Rajiv: Let me give you one more story there. >> Yes, yes. >> You might remember Callum Eade was on stage. He was the guy who swam across the English Channel-- >> Beth: Mm-hm? >> At the very beginning. So just to tell you how last-minute that was, he finished his swim, I talked to him on Friday morning, and then I went to Pat and said, "Pat, you know, one of our guys "actually swam across the English Channel." (Beth laughs) He said, "Yeah, we should have him ontage at VMworld." (Beth and John laugh) >> So we flew him over over the weekend-- >> Wow, wow. >> Here, got him to Vmworld, and there he was onstage. >> (laughs) Oh, man, that's impressive. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It was a great story. It was a good call to bring him in. >> Yes, yes. >> Yeah. >> All right, so obviously, you have this strong partnership that got a little stronger with some announcements today. >> Rajiv: Yeah. >> So let's get into that a little bit. Beth, if you would, talk a little bit about what you announced on stage, or what was announced onstage today. >> Yeah, I mean, there are three things that we're talking about this week, with our good partners at VMware. How we make sure that we have data protection for the Dell EMC cloud, for the VMware Cloud, excuse me, on Dell EMC. Previewing what we're doing to protect Kubernetes environments, which is super exciting. And then the project we talked about just quickly on stage this morning, around how we're doing work together to bring PowerProtect into, as tight as possible, to the best integration for vSphere and our VMware customers. So, Rajiv, anything that I missed, or-- >> Yeah, no, no, at the big-picture level, look, I mean, you've had a long history in data protection solutions. You modernized your portfolio quite a bit over the last year-- >> Beth: Yeah. >> With the introduction of the new X400 appliances and the IDPA PowerProtect software. >> Beth: Yeah. >> And we've been talking together for a while now about, what can we be doing together better? >> Beth: Mm-hm. >> And this just came across, you know, we've been working on this together, and now we have specific things to talk about. So on the first one, which is really data protection for VMware Cloud, now, VMware Cloud on AWS, one of the first use cases, important use cases, is actually around disaster recovery. So customers want to use the cloud or the data as a backup for a DR site. And very cost-effective to do that, it makes a lot of sense. Now, we've been working to continue and improve that solution, and making it much more broadly applicable, making use of native cloud storage capabilities. For example, Amazon S3. And so, that's really the collaboration that we are doing with Beth's team here, where we're using their underlying technology to build a VMware data disaster recovery as a service that will work on our VMware Cloud environments and make use of native cloud storage capabilities. So, very powerful, brings a lot of value for our customers together. >> John: Yeah. >> And I think that everybody watching probably understands just how important it is to have a DR site, but for many companies, it's cost-prohibitive and really old-school to think about having a dedicated DR site. So using the cloud as your destination, if something were to happen, you had to recover, it is an excellent fit, and I expect it to be one of the fastest-growing use cases. We're already seeing it. It's going to continue to grow dramatically going forward, having DR as a service as a core to people's recovery strategy. >> Yeah, Rajiv, one of the things we've been watching is, VMware's always had a robust ecosystem, but it's been going through a major shift. >> Rajiv: Yes. >> You know, VMware kind of at the center, and the server, storage, and network around it to where everything fits in the multi-cloud environment. When we see data protection with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, it's obviously a natural fit, because it's under there. What do you talk to your partners about when you say, "Okay, the Dell side of things is getting "further embedded into VMware"? How do you make sure that you have an open and robust ecosystem without unbalancing that? >> That's a great question. VMware has always prided itself on being a platform company, and you're only a platform company if you actually have a broad ecosystem of people who are building and developing on your platform. >> Stu: True. >> So we are not walking away from that one little bit. We continue to support a very broad-based set of providers across many different functions, whether it be data protection, whether it be security, whether it be compliance, you know, a whole bunch of things around the platform. What we will do, though, is we will pick a set of partners, and we will do deeper integrations with them, right? We are always going to have broad APIs available for everybody. Just as another example with Carbon Black that you saw today, yeah, we had actually partnered with Carbon Black on a deep integration between Carbon Black and AppDefense, okay? But at the same time, we have open APIs with every Guest Introspection provided that there is, and we will continue to maintain that, with every endpoint provided that there is. It's much the same way here. We're going to do deep integration with Beth's team. We are actually using some of their technologies to enhance our services, but also enabling them to do better integration with vSphere and the whole VMware environment, while at the same time allowing a rich ecosystem of third-party providers to work with us on top of our platforms. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Beth, was wondering if you could help us dig in a little bit to that Kubernetes space. >> Beth: Mm-hm. >> So, obviously, a big presence here at the show, you know, Prevalent talked in the keynote. When I walked the show floor, everybody's talking about Kubernetes. >> Beth: Mm-hm, mm-hm. >> So from the data protection standpoint, what's been done to more into that environment? What's different that people might not have known from your group from just a couple of years ago? >> Yeah, a couple of things. One, we've been working on this jointly with Jon Rose's organization and doing an incubation on this for well over a year, and working with Velero, making sure that everything we're doing is tied very closely with what's going on at VMware. And as you start talking about the container space, what you're saying with data protection, it's a different set of assets that you need to protect. You have to make sure that you're protecting the metadata, you have to bring up the whole environment. And so it's sort of a variation on a theme, and what we're particularly proud of is that we're approaching it in a way that's really ground-up and designing data protection, not retrofitting the past, but what are the needs for a Kubernetes environment, and make sure that they can restore that, come back to whatever data they need to do and whatever applications they need to get back to. >> Beth, you talked about Velero, too. I mean, so, what you're talking about, how does that enhance or how is that adding to the data protection capabilities of that, then? What are you building on, in terms of enhanced services there? >> Well, I think, what I understand about the project, I'd like to hear your point of view too, is as Velero builds out and working on the Kubernetes environment, it becomes the center for people's production environment, right? And as you move into a production environment, data protection becomes an essential part of that. So whereas a couple of years ago, Kubernetes might have been something that people were dabbling with, or maybe had not their most important applications running on, it's now becoming center and core. And so, what we're doing, working with VMware, is making sure that directly integrated into that, the UCS has that need around backup, disaster recovery, and all types of RRTO and RPOs are all met, even though now the application's being run in a Kubernetes environment. >> Sort of the conversation around, as we talked about Tanzu, VMware Tanzu-- >> Yeah. >> Which is in our portfolio. >> It's a great name, by the way. >> Thank you. (Beth and John laugh) So the portfolio, the idea here is you're going to have build, run, and manage, and when you look at the manage component of this, it's not just that every service is going to be developed by VMware. There's going to be a set of third-party services that run on top of this platform that will do functions like backup, disaster recovery, for Kubernetes clusters. And my anticipation is that Dell would be a second party, third party on that environment as part of the overall Tanzu portfolio, as a marketplace-type service. >> Beth: Yep, that's what we're working towards. >> Yeah. >> Yeah, just following up on that Tanzu, VMware has mostly been a platform, an infrastructure layer for applications-- >> That's correct. >> You know, Pivotal was the group that really dealt with the modern. >> Rajiv: Yes. >> But you've made some acquisitions. Data protection's always had that integration with the application. What's changing now that requires Dell and VMware to kind of delve upstack a little bit more than it might have in the past? >> For us it's very simple, as Pat already articulated. The world is moving to where it's all about how to build and manage your applications portfolio. That's become a CIO's top job. And so, for us to be relevant to that space, infrastructure companies naturally need to move up-- >> Mm-hm. >> Address the needs of application developers, and while at the same time the application developers need the infrastructure teams to deliver the infrastructure that they can easily build around and manage these apps without having to do it all themselves. So that's really, the bringing together of the developers and the IT operators is what we are doing. And that's the rationale for why we brought Pivotal in-house, and why we are building this overall Tanzu portfolio. >> It's kind of what goes around, comes around, right? >> Absolutely. Well, as Pat explained, right? >> Right. >> You know, six, seven years ago, we weren't really in a position to focus on it. >> Right. >> And it made sense to have Pivotal stand alone-- >> John: The time was right. >> And they invested, they built up their franchise over time, and here we are. The time is right. >> Right, Rajiv, Beth, thank you. I appreciate the time, good to see you. >> Beth: Great discussion. >> Congratulations on day one! Off to a great start, and-- >> Not over yet. (Rajiv and Beth laugh) >> (laughs) Oh, I know, I know, and nor for us. But a great start. >> Thank you so much. >> Thank you, sir, good to see you both. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Beth, always a pleasure. >> Yes. >> Thanks for being with us once again. >> Thank you. >> Oh, sorry, (laughs) sorry. >> With more live from theCUBE, you're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2019. (upbeat electronic music)

>> live from San Francisco, California It's the Q covering the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit brought to you by IBM. >> We're back. You're watching the Cube, the leader in life Tech coverage. My name is Dave Volant Day, and we're covering the IBM Chief Data officer event hashtag IBM CDO is the 10th year that IBM has been running This event on the New Cube has been covering this for the last I'd say four or five years. Beth rottenness here. She's the distinguished engineer and principal data scientist. Cognitive within GTS Large Service's organization within IBM. Bet thanks so much for coming on the Cube. >> Absolutely. Thank you for having me. >> So you're very welcome. So really interesting sort of title. I'm inferring a lot. Um, and you're sexually transforming lives through data and analytics. Talk about your role a little bit. >> So my role is to infuse workforce transformation with cognitive. I typically we go from I think you've heard the ladder to a I. But as we move up that ladder and we can actually >> apply artificial intelligence and NLP, which is a lot of what I'm doing, >> it is it's instrumental in being able to see human beings in a lot more dimensions. So when we classify humans by a particular job role skill set, we often don't know that they have a passion for things like coding or anything else. And so we're really doing a lot more where we're getting deeper and being able to match your supply and demand in house as well as know when we have a demand for someone. And this person almost meets that demand. Based on all the different dimensionality that weaken dio, >> we can >> put them into this specific training class and then allow them to go through that training class so that we can upgrade the entire upscale and reschedule the entire work force. >> So one of the challenges you're working on is trying to operationalize machine intelligence and obviously starts with that training and skill level so well, it's not easy company the size of of I B M E. You're starting the GTS group, which probably has an affinity, at least conceptually, for transformation. That's what you guys do for your clients. So how's that going? You know, where are you in that journey? >> I think that we're in the journey and we're doing really well. I think that a lot of our people and the people who are actually working on the ground, we're talking to our clients every single day. So people on the helped us, they're talking to clients and customers. They understand what that client is doing. They understand the means, the troops, the mores, the language of the customer, of the organization of the customer, in the client, giving those people skills to understand what they can do better. To help solve our client's problems is really what it's all about. So understanding how we can take all of the unstructured data, all of like the opportunity for understanding what skills those people have on the ground and then being able to match that to the problems that our clients and customers are having. So it's a great opportunity. I think, that I've been in GTS my entire career and being an I t. I think that you understand this is where you store or create or, you know, manage all of the data in an entire enterprise organization, being able to enable and empower the people to be ableto upscale and Reese kill themselves so that they can get access to that so that we can do better for our clients and customers. >> So when you think about operations, folks, you got decades of skills that have built up you. D. B A is, you got network engineers, you got storage administrators. You know the VM add men's, you know, Unix. Add men's, I mean and a lot of those jobs. Air transforming clearly people don't want to invest is much in heavy lifting and infrastructure deployment, right? They want to go up the stack, if you will. So my question is, as you identify opportunities for transformation, I presume it's a lot of the existing workforce that you're transforming. You're not like saying, Okay, guys, you're out. What is gonna go retrain or bring in new people? Gonna retrain existing folks? How's that going? What's their appetite for that? Are they eagerly kind of lining up for this? You could describe that dynamic. >> I think the bits on the ground, they're very hungry. Everyone is so, so, so hungry because they understand what's coming on. They listen to the messages, they're ready. We were also in flexing. I'm sure you've heard of the new collar program were influencing a lot of youth as early professional hires. I have 2 16 year olds in the 17 year old on my team as interns from a P Tech program in Boulder, and getting that mix in that diversity is really all what it's about. We need that diversity of thought. We need that understanding of how we can start to do these things and how people can start to reach for new ways to work. >> All right, so I love this top of the cube we've we've covered, you know, diversity, women in tech. But so let's talk about that a little bit. You just made a statement that you need that diversity. Why is it so important other than it's the right thing to do? What's the what's the business effect of bringing diversity to the table? >> I think that would. We're searching for information truth if you want. If you want to go there, you need a wide variance of thought, the white of your variance, the more standard you're me, and it's actually a mathematical theory. Um, so this is This is something that is part of our truth. We know that diversity of thoughts we've been working. I run and sponsor the LGBT Q Plus group. I do women's groups in the B A R G's and then we also are looking at neuro diversity and really understanding what we can bring in as far as like, a highly diverse workforce. Put them all together, give them the skills to succeed. Make sure that they understand that the client is absolutely the first person that they're looking at in the first person that they're using Those skills on enable them to automate, enable them to stop doing those repeatable tasks. And there's so much application of a I that we can now make accessible so that people understand how to do this at every single level. >> So it's a much wider scope of an observation space. You're sort of purposefully organizing. So you eliminate some of that sampling bias and then getting to the truth. As you say, >> I think that in order to come up with ethical and explainable, aye, aye, there's definitely a way to do this. We know how to do it. It's just hard, and I think that a lot of people want to reach for machine learning or neural nets that spit out the feature without really understanding the context of the data. But a piece of data is an artifact of a human behavior, so you have to trace it all the way back. What process? What person who put it there? Why did they put it there? What was that? When we when we look at really simple things and say, Why are all these tickets classified in this one way? It's because when you observe the human operator, they're choosing the very first thing human behaviors put data in places or human behaviors create machines to put data in places. All of this can be understood if we look at it in a little bit of a different way. >> I thought I had was. So IBM is Business is not about selling ads, so there's no one sent to future appropriate our data to sell advertising. However, if we think about IBM as an internal organism, there's certain incentive structures. There's there's budgets, there's resource is, and so there's always incentives to game the system. And so it sounds like you're trying to identify ways in which you can do the right thing right thing for the business right for people and try to take some of those nuances out of the equation. Is that >> so? From an automation perspectively build digital management system. So all the executives can go in a room and not argue about whose numbers are correct, and they can actually get down to the business of doing business. From the bottoms up perspective, we're enabling the workforce to understand how to do that automation and how to have not only the basic tenets of data management but incorporate that into a digital management system with tertiary and secondary and triangulation and correlations so that we have the evidence and we can show data providence for everything that we're doing. And we have this capability today we're enabling it and operational izing. It really involves a cultural transformation, which is where people like me come in. >> So in terms of culture, so incentives drive behavior, how have you thought through and what are you doing in terms of applying new types of incentives? And how's that working? >> So when we start to measure skills were not just looking at hard skills. We're looking at soft skills, people who are good collaborators, people who have grit, people who are good leaders, people who understand how to do things over and over and over again in a successful manner. So when you start measuring your successful people, you start incentivizing the behaviors that you want to see. And when you start measuring people who can collaborate globally in global economies that that is our business as IBM, that is who we want to see. And that's how we're incentivizing the behaviors that we want to. D'oh. >> So when I look at your background here, obviously you're you're a natural fit for this kind of transformation. So you were You have an anthropology background language. Your data scientist, you do modeling. >> I always say I'm a squishy human data scientist, but I got to work with a huge group of people to create the data science profession with an IBM and get that accredited through open group. And that's something we're very passionate about is to give people a career past so that they know where their next step is. And it's all about moving to growth and sustainable growth by making sure that the workforce knows how value they are by IBM and how valuable they are by our clients. What does >> success look like to you? >> I think success is closer than we think. I think that success is when we have everybody understanding everybody, understanding what it's like to pick up the phone and answer a customer service call from our client and customer and be able to empathize and sympathize and fix the problem. We have 350,000 human beings. We know somebody in some circle that can help fix a client's problem. I think success looks like being able to get that information to the right people at the right time and give people a path so that they know that they're on the boat together, all rowing together in order to make our clients successful. >> That's great. I love the story. Thanks so much for coming on the hearing. You're very welcome. Keep it right there, but we'll be back with our next guest is a day. Violante. We're live from Fisherman's. More for the IBM CDO Chief Data officer event. Right back sticker The cube dot net is where the

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the queue covering del Technologies. World twenty nineteen, brought to you by Del Technologies and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello. Welcome back to the Cube. At least a market with Dave Alonso. We are at Del Technologies World. This is our third day of coverage. As John has been saying, This is a cannon double cannon of Q content. We are pleased to welcome back a couple of alumni to keep. We've got Beth failing Presidents data Protection division from Italians. It's great to have you back. And Sherrod Rastogi also welcome back S VP of data protection product management Guys, Lots of news. The last three days, fifteen thousand or so people. Lot of partners. We've been hearing nothing but tremendous amount of positivity and also appreciation from your customers and partners for all of this collaboration within the Della Technologies company with partners. Some of the news, though, that you were on the keynote stage give us some anecdotes that you've heard from customers and partners the last few days about where Del Technologies is going. >> Yeah, I'm happy too. And you know, a big announcements this week. We're a power protect software and the power protect extra hundred appliance. And what we're hearing from customers is this is exactly what we needed to do because the demands on data protection are changing with more more. Brooke look being distributed with data being more more important and with the risks being more more prevalent that they were looking for us to take a bold step and introduce this next generation software to find platform. And so the feedback you're getting is you've done what you needed to do, and they're looking forward to learning more. >> So I wonder if we could sort of explore a little bit this concept of data management. So data management lead needs different things to different people. Sure, if your database person maybe maybe different from a person who's doing data protection, what does it mean in a data protection context? I think >> first of all, you know, having visibility off your data all across your infrastructure that resides in the edge. The court a cloud across multiple applications in physical virtual environments, right? So having full facility that I think is one component second is not the ability to move the data across seamlessly across any socially target but it is on track in the cloud. Robert Cloud. I think that sort of a second element, the third and probably the most important is how do you actually get value from the data, right? Already, Actually, not only unable to protect it, but make it available at the right time, right place for the right application and be able to use it because, as you know, data is the fuel of the modern visual economy. On making it available is really, really critical. And that to me. So you're combining all of that is what I would consider it at management to be. >> So double click on that. I mean, could you be more specific about the attributes of, you know, a modern data management system? So I >> would say, you know, any modern technology may be modular FBI driven, you know, it really sort of the automate scale performance coverage. All those attributes, I think are very important for any more than data protection product and be able to meet the needs of our customers. You know, high scale hi coverage and rapidly, >> and that gives you a cloud like experience presumably allows you to scale out many a performance. I've seen some of the conversations that start associating with that or scale in place Bath. You talked about that? Yeah, Well, yeah. I want to explore a little bit about your business because you know who knew? Who would have predicted a few years ago? The data protection would always because all of a sudden become this hot space veces diving in hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars being spent. And of course, you're the biggest player. So everybody wants a piece of your hide. And so and you got a portfolio. It goes back up llegado days. They have amar stuff data, domaine et cetera, et cetera. She had a sort of make sure that that was logical for your customers. Protect those customers that have made investment of you, but also shoma roadmap. Jeff Clark comes in, says, Okay, we're going to simplify, you know, marching orders. Your business in a very rapid time has transformed. Can you talk about that? What's what's taking place in your business? >> Absolutely, David, it's so interesting even comparing last year to this year, right? We're at this pivot point where we're building on the legacy of Trust and I T and knowledge and experience that we have. But we're now setting the foundation to be number one and data protection and data management for the next ten years. Introducing this new set of products were able to bring a customer's forward. We call it the path to power. So in addition to that, bring new customers into the family. We're looking for all those aspects of modern day to management, with simplicity, with multi cloud, with automation and with the new use cases where it's more than just back up. It's CCD are its analytics. It's testing toe. It's validation. So this is whole spectrum of things that we can expand into now that we have this new platform. It's really exciting. >> It is exciting. And yesterday the under Armour video was very cool, and one of the things that they set in there is that there they're leveraging data for brand reputation. I mean, they've got under Armour has incredible brand ambassadors Tom Brady, Steph Curry. But looking at it as not just a business ever. But this is actually tied to our brand reputation, did. It is so incredibly pivotal to the lifeblood of a business. It has to be protected. >> Yeah, and that's a big theme. And you probably something too. But, you know, in this day and time data is no longer something that maybe people in I'd worry about write It is now the lifeblood of most of our customers, corporations and at the same time list, like the threat of malware are very prevalent. And so things like what we've done with cyber recovery always were working with our customers to protect their data. In a survey we just did. With twenty two hundred I t professionals, twenty eight percent of them had had some data loss in the last twelve months. So the risk of data loss is real. And we take our responsibility very seriously to help our customers protect from that risk. >> So I like this message to any source. Any target, any s l a. I would I would had any workload and because on so talk about you're differentiation in the marketplace, that would be great, because it's hard sometimes, you know, squint through all the marketing. And so what makes you guys different specifically thinking >> about Delhi emcee Indiana production historically has its strength in dealing with complex work clothes at high scale, with high performance on having a wide coverage of work has been a strength and actually had very low cost, very efficient, right? So that string we sort of carry on into the future. And what we're adding on is I would say that the next degree off simplification and ease off ease off, install, upgrade use. Making those work was very, very simple, right? So I think that's another dimension. We are God. We're adding our dimension, what we call multi dimensional scale, which is both scale up and scale out the same time when you actually add more notes and more cubes, you are not only capacity, but he also improved performance, right? That's it, architecturally, a fundamentally different way in Harvey approach it. So I think that's an element of innovation, and I think on performance we're introducing our first all flash off Lions industry first, So we're super excited about that. And so I think it just helped our customers in terms of restore interactions store Do those work was a lot faster. Those are some other elements in which we continue innovating. >> That's great. Yeah, so you talk about the power protect X four hundred, which is your flesh. John Rose said something on stage. Beth, I want to ask you, Teo, sort of add some color. Hey, said this is not just secondary storage. It's protected. Managed infrastructure, >> huh? That's great face. >> What? What did he mean by that? And what should we take away? >> I mean, it shows how we're broadening the use cases that these products can help satisfy. And so much of what we're talking about Del Technologies is a simplified infrastructure across the board, not thinking about just point products, but giving the customer that experience of a seamless extendable infrastructure. So protected managed infrastructure means that your infrastructure, something you have, can confidence it's protected and that you also are not just dealing with all of these pieces and parts. But I can think of it has a managed whole. I think that that helps out and talk to John about that. But that's what I take away from what he's saying. >> If I can just add to that, I would say Like, you know, data management is sort of the perfect glue across the whole del technology infrastructure, but a server storage bm We're, you know, eighty, you know, infrastructure pivotal, right? Data management data productions are off, cuts across everything, and we can bring everything together. So >> I would like to add something to that if I make it. You know Beth on sure Art as well. Data protection Backup was always OK. We gotta back it up. Who's gonna? Okay, Bump bolted on. And what's happening is the lines are blurring. Primary storage, secondary storage. You're seeing back up in the e r. Use cases. You talked about analytics and, you know, so many new emerging. That's why it is so exciting. And so because those lines are blurring, you get more value out of the system. It goes beyond just insurance. And that means this could be a lot of money being made here >> if there is. And it is also a really important need, write one thing that we haven't touched on. But I also think it's really important is with our protect we're helping combine self service with centralized governance. So what I mean by that is, if you're a V a madman or Oracle Adnan or a sequel admin, you know, you could have control over protecting your data, but we pair that with a single, you know, governance model. So if I'm the person is responsible for my company's entire, you know, data set, I can still make sure that everything's happening is it should be. And there are no anomalies, so we're really making it as easy as possible, for the business is within our customers to protect and manage their data but not making it the Wild West. Because somebody in the end is accountable for saying I know where all the data is, and I know it's protected, so it's having both of those users. >> So as data protection has really elevated, the stay was saying to become its way beyond an insurance policy. This is absolutely table stakes because data has so much value and so much value that organisations haven't even been able to extract it right, how the conversation within the customer base changed. It's not just to the admin girl or guy anymore. Rightness is Are you saying this really leveled up Tio? Maybe a senior level C level challenge as our business imperative that the state of must be protected and readily accessible at any time. Who are you talking to? >> So answer quickly that I lied to you when we're talking to the eye to decision makers. So seo no, that level data protection strategy has become something that they have in their priority list, right? It's not really in any way what it was maybe five or ten years ago. Now it's something that there's cord of what they hold as their responsibilities, executives and and that's great. It's great to have those kind of conversations because it's strategic. >> Another conversation. Just an example from yesterday, while speaking with one of the chief architects at a major company, they're really talking about cyber security on How do you use Extend? You know what we offer into a full solution across their technology. Do address, you know, doesn't use case right. So I think it's expanding beyond just back up and protection to true protection off the data. Very most mission critical data is available and not just protected. They also want to talk about how can you recover that real quickly in very quick time, so that your operation, when you do have that cyber, if and when you have that attack So I think it's just expanding toe touch. A lot more customers, I would say Our people buying, buying decision makers across >> so that when I talk to people in division I sense a renewed energy. A renewed focus. I mean, GMC before Del. Tell'Em Steve always been really good. Taking engineering resource is to getting products out to the market. But But I I see again more focused effort here and one of the exam to keep pushing on. Is this notion of cloud model so beyond? Just okay, there's a target. How do we now get to that? You know, data protection is a service small. I know that you're working toward that. I know it's, you know, a lot of it's It's early days there, but you've got to be a leader in that, I presume. So. I want to keep watching that pushing that I won if you guys could comment on what coming >> on, both things that you said. First of all, there's absolutely a level of excitement and focus and confidence in what we're doing in the product groups. I'm really changing the way we're developing software so that we have a new customer value coming out every quarter. And they were having clarity between the top level strategies. White downs, what individual engineers are working on. So that's fun and excited because we're truly transforming the way we're developing Product says point one. And the second one, absolutely here, that theme throughout all of what we're talking about. You heard a nun day one, No, giving people that cloud that experience infrastructure has a service which certainly includes data management and data protection so they can consume it in a way that fit step business that scales with business That's automated, that doesn't require, you know, massive manual steps and is more what people expect today was a cloud like experience, even for them on from data centers. Clearly, that's where we're moving. And this one more point is you know, people really want automation they don't wanna have to think about. Did I remember to protect everything? They want the system to do that for them. So you'LL see more of that from us as well. You know how we helping them with machine learning? An A I an automation so they can have confidence that all of the assets are protected even if they haven't remember to do it all. >> I mean, I just add to it. I've bean at Delhi emcee for about a year. >> It >> has been a fantastic journey waiting. It's exciting. It's been awesome. Awesome experience. I totally see the >> focus. And I think that renewed focus the cloud like a model and the innovation. They all go hand in hand because the old waterfall model of okay, we're gonna develop properties shipment every year, eighteen months. Whatever it is that doesn't fly anymore. People want innovations, and now they want to push code every day. Right? So our baby, every quarter at least. >> Yeah. Yeah. Facing new energy to the engineers as well. >> So I mean, I understand that many of your team, if not your entire engineering team, has been trained in agile. Is that my getting it right? Is that right? >> Yeah, yeah, >> not just not just like internal train. You guys brought in outside people and really took him through some formal training. Right >> way have in multiple different kinds of training. And we have lots of communications inside to get people coaching. And it's not just a process book that we're following its really a different way of thinking about how you bring customer value in small increments, staying in a good known stay and making sure that we're maximizing our engineering capacity. >> That's big. And I wish we had more time cause that's cultural train. Yeah, yeah, that you guys are really driving. And we also didn't have time to touch on partners, but it can imagine there's a lot of excitement and your huge partner community about what you guys are doing This. Congratulations on all the announcement is gonna have to have you back because there's just so much more to dig into. But back Sherrod, Thank you for joining David me this afternoon on the you go. >> Thank you so much >> for our pleasure. For Dave Volonte and Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube live from Day three of Del Technologies, World twenty nineteen on the Cube. Thanks for watching

>> From the Silicon Angle Media office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's the cue now here's your host, Dave Alon. >> Hi, >> everybody. Welcome to this Cube conversation. My name is Dave Lan Ting here on Marlborough Studios with Beth failing. Who's the president and GM of the Delhi Emcee Data protection division. Good to see you About. >> Good to be here days. >> So the reason why we're here today is this is the third year you've released the Global Data Protection Index. We love data. We love to dig into the data. So tell us about the survey. What? It's about the size of the survey. Who? You? You're responding, so >> Yeah, absolutely. That survey talked to twenty two hundred decision makers globally and asked them questions to understand where they are in their data protection, implementations and strategy and how much data loss or data disruption impacted their business over the past twelve months. >> So when you do, these survey's over three years like you have here, you get a time. Siri's things start to, you know, pattern start to emerge. What were the key findings this time? >> There are a couple of really interesting findings that stood out one as we talk to the customers about where they were on their I T maturity journey, we found that the number of adopters people who were fully immersed in data protection when from nine percent to fifty seven percent. So it's a really big jump. Another thing we saw was the data they were protecting grew by five times over five hundred percent. So even though we know data is growing dramatically, it still is striking just how much it's growing. >> I've said many times that the industry, our industries, marks to the cadence of Moore's long You could come draw that out Logue Logue graph paper. But the Kurdish is shifting, its becoming more exponential, certainly non linear, so that that data growth is even surprising to me on but relates to the cost of downtime and the impact of disruption. There's a data in here wanted to share that with us, >> and it's pretty striking. The number of customers that were not able to recover their data after disruption grew from fourteen to twenty seven percent, and the level of cost is growing as well. The average impact of a data disruption event is half a million dollars, but if you're not able to recover your data, understandably, it's almost twice that. >> So you know it's complexity is growing, and to me, this really talks to digital transformation >> of >> the way in which people are using data and differentiating from what they've done in the past. It dramatically increases their risk because the data value is so high. >> And the study shows that companies that have gone through a digital transformation and clearly leveraging the data as an asset are too times more profitable than companies that have not data matters. More and more people are realizing that the flip side of that coin is then the cost and the impact. Your business, if you do have a disruption or a data loss, is that much more significant. >> Historically, we've had these silos of applications that have infrastructure that's hardened and fossilized around them, and increasingly, we're sharing more data across those applications. You know, Cloud, which we'LL talk about, is is really accelerating some of those transformations and so you have more and more complexity. We live in a multi vendor world because people want best of breed. They want horses for courses, but it adds a layer of complexity to the process. What did the survey tell you? >> And first off, the average is three data protection vendors per respondent. That's consistent with where we were two years ago. But what we see also Mohr dramatically is that the likelihood of not being able to recover your data after a winsome or attack if you're using multiple vendors is two times is high. So as the threats are maturing, the need for us to be able to protect ourselves and our company's from those threats needs to mature as well. And the data seems to show that having three vendors may not be the best way to be responding to this increasingly risky world. >> So that's interesting that you talk about now. Some of the challenges that were brought forth in the study always wanna ask that in the study like this, there were three big ones that stood out. Cost is always top of mind. The right technical fit on DH, then gpr Compliance is another factor. What's the data show in terms of those challenges? >> So the top three you really hit them I won was the ballooning cost and complexity. Another was the need. Thio adhere to compliance, and then the third was the need to ensure that you have data protection that covers the emerging technologies, the emerging strategies. >> So we talked about multi vendor adds complexity as cost a cz risk and just talk about the challenges. What is delle AMC doing to address these challenges? What gives you confidence that you can earn the right to stay at the table? >> Yeah, eso were first are very proud of the legacy of data protection experience that we have and what we've learned in what we helped our customers do as part of that legacy. We've protected tens of thousands of customers around the globe for for decades. But what we're doing now is modernizing our capabilities, insuring that we're protecting the multi cloud environments, the new, the new types of applications, making SNU simple products like the idea so that customers can take that confidence they have in us and bring it forward with them into the next decade. >> I'm interested in how people are leveraging the club for data protection and also what Delhi emcee strategy is there because, you know, own a public cloud your relationships with with public cloud providers. But what is your strategy there and our people reverse? How are people using the cloud for data protection. And what is your strategy? There >> are strategies to provide the best global multi cloud data protection that anybody delivers in the world. And when we do that would providing all the use cases that customers are using for the data protection. One interesting fact from the survey. It was those customers who have adopted a cloud technology. Ninety eight percent of them are leveraging that technology for data protection. In those use cases, they're evolving beyond just backup. Beyonce cuse me beyond just long term retention archive to include backup replication, data protection for the cloud workloads. We're really doing a lot to make sure we keeping up with that very dynamic market. >> The people want to get more out of their their backup in data protection than just insurance. We've talked about this a lot, just in terms of leveraging analytics and ransomware etcetera. D are bringing that together on so forth. But I want to continue on the discussion of cloud because I talked about you have some relationship specifically and mentioned it, but VM wear and eight of us every relationship. But you have to have a portfolio you can't just put all your legs in one cloud basket. What's your strategy >> and the importance of enabling customers to leverage a W eso, Google, IBM or Azure? For a PJ colleagues, Alibaba is very essential for us, and we think it's even more important that you have a standard data protection strategy. When you're leveraging multiple cloud vendors and distributing your day birth date over more and more locations, it's even more important that you have avenged. You can count on and trust to bring our there together to a single data. Protections to allergy. >> One of things I like about service like this, especially over time. You can get a sense of the maturity model, you know, however you define it. Laggards, evaluators, adopters and leaders is always your consistent on how you ask that question. You can get a time Siri's and see how things are shifting. So there's, ah, question a slide in the study that talks about that. What did you find in terms of the adoption? >> And I hinted at this at the beginning, but I find this to be one of the most striking findings from the survey. The number of respondents that fell into the category of laggards not really putting a lot of thought at all into data protection shrank from thirty eight percent to two percent. So that's massive in two years. And on the flip side of that, the number of vendors who the number of professionals who were now considered a doctor's had gone from nine percent to fifty seven percent. So we really are seeing a massive shift in the number of companies that are now focused on data protection as a core part of their strategy. >> In my view, that's because of the digital transformation that's going on is more than just the buzzword. Every CEO is trying to get digital, right? Yeah. So just to summarize. So data is growing in this non running a fashion that we talked about that's driving up costs and cumbersome costs of disruption. Cost of downtime is growing. Even the best of breed leaders are struggling to keep up. The pace of innovation is so fast. If you're not figuring out how to monetize your data in some way, shape or form, and I don't mean selling your data, we're talking about how levitate it contributes to the monetization business. Cutting costs are increasing revenue and in some way, shape or form. If you're not doing that, then you're in trouble. I'm gonna come back and ask you again. What gives you confidence? That Delhi M. C. Is going to be the preferred supplier we heard about multiple vendors is problematic. So how are you gonna win in this game? >> One thing is making sure that we're building our business strategy on wheel data like this survey. So we're staying on top of what's happening in our customers world, and we're modernizing our products in a portfolio to meet those needs in the second is building on the legacy of the I T. Infrastructure that we've protected for many, many decades. We have the trust, We have the architecture, we have the performance. We have the best day cost to protect. And now we're bringing in modern, simple multi cloud data protection. We're on this and we're going to win. >> So surveys like this are they're big, they're expensive. Can we assume you're going to continue to fund this? Absolutely. So how do we get more information of this? I say the survey's done by it into independent firm Is that seventy website somewhere We're going to get more if >> you just go out to Delhi m si dot com and you will find the information. >> Great. I bet thanks for coming in. And sharing the results of the survey is always a pleasure. We're going to see you at Del Technologies World. >> Just a few weeks. >> Yeah. End of April early. May Look forward to that. >> Yeah. Today. Thanks for having me in >> your welcome. All right. Thanks for watching everybody. This is David. Lot day. We'LL see you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Live from Boston. It's theCUBE. Covering IBM Chief Data Officer's Summit. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of IBM's CDO here in beautiful Boston, Massachusetts. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host Paul Gillen. We're joined by Beth Rudden. She is distinguished engineer, analytics at IBM. Thanks so much for coming on theCUBE, Beth. >> Thank you. >> So your background, you have a master's in anthropology and in classics and Greek. You're a former archeologist. And now here you are, distinguished engineer. There's only 672 in all of IBM. How did you, what are you doing here? (laughs) >> I think that I love data. I love that data represents human behavior and I think that understanding that puzzle and being able to tell that story is something that we need to do more of. And we need to understand how all of the data fits together and how all of the information is created and all the wisdom is created. And that takes a lot of effort from a lot of people and it involves storytelling. I think that 75,000 years of human history, we are always understanding conflict and resolution through storytelling. And I think that if we can have evidence for that using our data, and looking at our data in the business world, as it reflects our strategy, instead of force-fitting our data into our strategy. So I think that that's part of the change that we need to look at it, and I think with the, I would say, second or third hype curve of AI and what we're doing with AI and cognitive today, it really is being able to bind philosophy and psychology and look at it from a computer science perspective. And that's new. >> That's interesting. And we were just speaking with Inderpal earlier about the background that he sees CDOs coming from, and he talked very little about technology. It was all about human so-called soft skills. Are you finding that the CDO role is evolving in a less technical direction over time? >> Absolutely. And I think that, you know, when you're starting to look for outcomes, and as outcomes as they relate to our business, and as they relate to our clients and our customers, we have to be able to have a very diverse and inclusive viewpoint. And we have to be incredibly transparent. I think that is something that we are continuing to do within IBM, where we are really looking at how do we differentiate ourselves based on our expertise and based on our human capital. >> So it's differentiating yourself as an employer of choice. >> Absolutely. >> And attracting, recruiting or training the talent. >> 100%, yes. >> But then also being the expert that your clients come to. So yeah, just... >> So IBM has, you know, we have career frameworks. We have career paths. I was part of a team that created the data science profession at IBM and one of the things that we're looking at, as a differentiating feature, is that we really want people to continuously learn, continuously adapt, develop themselves, develop their skills, because that is our differentiating feature. And I think that, you know, when our clients meet our people they love our people. And this is such an amazing company to be a part of. We have a long history. 107 year history of being one of the most diverse and inclusive companies. 1899, we hired the first black and female person, and in 1953 we had equal opportunity rights 10 years before the Civil Rights Act. So I think that all of these things, you know, lead up to a company that shows that we can adapt and transform. And being an acting CDO for the largest IT system in IBM right now, we are doing amazing things because we are really investing in our people. We are investing in giving them that guidance, that career track. And allowing people to be themselves. Their true selves. >> You're speaking of Global Technology Services Operation, which is currently undergoing a transformation. >> That's right. >> What does the outcome look like? How do you envision the end point? >> I think that I envision the end point, we are in the process of developing our IBM Services Academy and it is a continuous learning platform for Bands Two through general managers. And, you know, one of the stories I like to tell is my general manager who I'm working for on this. You know, she believes so strongly in making sure that everybody has access to all of the available education and everybody is using that type of education and we are looking at transforming how we are measuring what we are doing to incentivize the behaviors that we want to see. And the behaviors that we are looking for are people who are helping other people, and making sure that we are continually being the premier leader of the intellectual brainchild of what we are doing for keeping us in the AI game, in the cognitive game, and making sure that we are understanding every single aspect of that as it relates to our transformation. >> So you're actually tracking and measuring how colleagues collaborate with each other. >> 100%. >> How do you do that? >> You look for words like we and team and you look for people who are enabling other people. And that's something that we can see in the data. Data are artifacts of human behavior. We can see that in our data. We are looking at unstructured data, we are looking at structured data. We are taking this in and we're taking it to what I would call a new level, so that we can see what we are doing, who our people are, and we are able to look at how many of the people are enabling other people and empowering other people. And sometimes this is called the glue, or glue work. I think that there is even a baseball reference for like a glue man. I think that we need to champion people who are enabling and empowering everybody to succeed. >> And are those typically the unsung heroes, would you say? >> Yes. 100%. And I want to sing the hero's song for those unsung heroes. And I want to make sure that those people are noticed and recognized, but I also want to make sure that people know that IBM is this amazing company with a very long history of making sure that we are singing the unsung hero's song. >> But how do you measure the outcome of that? There's got to be a big business bottom line benefit. What does that look like? >> Absolutely. I think that it always starts with our clients. Everything that we do starts with our clients. And in GTS, we have people, we have five to seven year relationships with our clients and customers. These are deep relationships, and they interact with our humans every single day. And we are the men and women who, you know, design and create and run and manage the foundational systems of the world. And every single person, like you cannot book an airline, you cannot pay your bill, you cannot do that, anything, without touching somebody in IBM. We are investing in those people, because those are who is interfacing with our clients and customers, and that is the most important thing to us right now. >> One of the things we were talking about earlier is bringing more women and underrepresented minorities and men into IBM, and into other industries too. So how, we know the technology industry has a very bad reputation, deservedly so, for being a bro culture. How are you personally combating it, and then how do you do it from an institutional perspective? >> Yeah. We have so many programs that are really looking at how we can take and champion diversity. I was very honored to walk into the Best of IBM with my husband a couple years ago, and he looks around and he goes, this is like a UN convention. He's like, you guys are so global. You have so much diversity. And you know, that viewpoint is something that, it's why I work for IBM. It's why I love IBM. I have the ability to understand different cultures, I have the ability to travel around the world. We have, you can work day and night. (laughs) You know, you can talk to India in morning and Australia in the afternoon. It is just, to me, you know, IBM operates in 172 different countries. We have the global infrastructure to be able to handle the type of global teams that we are building. >> When you look at the skills that will be needed in the future as organizations, big data becomes infused into the organization, how will the skill needs change? >> To me, I think that the skill needs are always going to continuously transform. We're always going to get new technology. Most of my data scientists, you know, I really push Python, I really push R, but I think that it's the will more than the skill. I think that it is how people have the attitude and how people collaborate. And that is more important, I think, than some of the skills. And a lot of people, you know, when they are performing data science or performing data engineering, they need to believe that they are doing something that is going to succeed. And that is will. And that's what we, we have seen a huge surge in oral and written communications which is not a hard skill. It's a soft skill. But to me, there's nothing soft about those skills. It takes courage and we have built resiliency because we have had the courage to really enable and empower people to get those types of skills. And that's a lot of where our education is going. >> So that's really an interesting point here. So are you hiring a self-selected group of people, or are you bringing in super smart people who maybe are not as skilled in those areas and bringing them into the culture. I mean, what's coming first here? >> Yeah. I think that we are, our culture is strong. IBM's brand is strong. Our culture is strong. We are investing in the people that we have. And we are investing in, you know, our humans in order to make sure that the people who already have that culture have the skills that they need in order to learn. And that understanding of going from disequilibrium to equilibrium to disequilibrium to learn, that's what we want to teach, so that any of the new technology, any of the new skills, or any of the new platforms that we need to learn, it's something that's inherent with people being able to learn how to learn. >> Beth, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Yes. >> It was great to have you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Paul Gillen, we will have more of theCUBE's live coverage of IBM's CDO coming up in just a little bit. (light music)

>> From the SiliconANGLE Media office in Boston, Massachusetts. It's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Dave Vellante. >> Thanks Peter. We're back for the deep dive. Beth Phalen is joining us again and Ruya Barret who's the vice president of marketing for Dell EMC's data protection division. Thanks guys for coming on. Ruya let me start with you. Why are customers, what are they telling you in terms of why they're acquiring your data protection solutions? >> Well Beth talked a little bit about the engineering effort and collaboration we've been putting in place and so did Yang Ming with Vmware. So whether that's integration into vCenter or vSphere, or vRealize operations manager, vRealize automation or vCloud director. All of this work, all of this engineering effort and engineering hours is really to do two things deliver simply powerful data protection for VMware customers. >> What do you mean by simple? >> Simple. Well simple comes in two types of approaches, right? Simple is through automation. One of the things that we've done is really automate across the data protection stack for VMware, whereas 99% of the market solutions really leave it off at policy management, so they automate the policy layer. We automate not only the policy layer but the vProxy deployment, as well as the data movement. We have five types of data movement capabilities that have been automated, whether you're going directly from storage, to protection storage, whether you're doing client to protection storage, whether you're doing application to protection storage, or whether you're doing hypervisor direct to application storage. So it really is to automate and to maximize the performance of to meet the customer's service levels. So automation is critical when you're doing that. The other part of automation could be in how easy Cloud is for the admins and users. It really has to do with being able to orchestrate all of the activities, you know, very simply and easily. Simplicity is also management. We are hearing more and more that the admins are taking on the role of doing the backups and restores so our efforts with VMware have been to really simplify the management so that they can use their native tools. We've integrated with VMware for the V admins to be able to take backup and restore just a part of their daily operational tasks. >> So when you talk about power, is that performance? You've referenced performance but is it just performance or is it more than that? >> That's also a great question Dave, thank you. Power really, in terms of data protection, is three-fold. It's power in making sure that you have a single powerful solution that really covers a comprehensive set of applications and requirements, not only for today, but also tomorrow as needs. So that comprehensive coverage, whether you're on premise or in the Cloud is really critical. Power means performance, of course it means performance. Being able to deliver the highest performing protection and more importantly restores, is critical to our customers. Power also means not sacrificing efficiency to get that performance. So efficiency we have the best source side deduplication technology in the market. That, coupled with the performance is really critical to our customers. So all of these, the simplicity, the comprehensive coverage, the performance, the efficiency, also drives the lowest cost to protect for our customers. >> All right. I want to bring Beth Phalen into the conversation. Beth, let's talk about Cloud a little bit. A lot of people feel as though I can take data, I can dump it into an object store in the Cloud, and I'm protected. Your thoughts. >> Yeah, we hear that same misconception, and in fact the exact opposite is true. It's even more important that people have world class data protection when they're bringing Cloud into their IT environment. They have to know where their data is and how is it protected and how to restore it. So we have a few innovations that are going on here. For a long time we've had our hyper Cloud extensions. You can do Cloud tearing directly from data domain, and now we've also extended what you can do if you're a VMware Cloud AWS customer so that you can use that for your Cloud DR configuration, fail over to AWS with VMware Cloud, and then fail back with Vmotion if you choose to, and that's great for customers who don't want to have a second site, but do want to have confidence that they can recover if there's a disaster. On top of that we've also been doing some really great work with VMware with VCloud director integration. Data protection as a service is growing like crazy. It's highly popular around the globe as a way to consume data protection, and so now you can integrate both your VMware tasks and your data protection tasks from one UI in the cloud director. These are just a few of the things that we're doing. Comprehensively bringing data protection to the cloud is essential. >> Great, okay. Dell EMC just recently made an announcement. The IDPA DP4400. Ruya, what's it all about? Explain it. >> Absolutely. So what we announced is really an integrated data protection appliance turn key, purpose built, to meet the specific requirements of mid-size customers. It's really to bring that enterprise sensibility and protection to our mid-size customers. It's all-inclusive in terms of capabilities so if you're talking about backup, restore, replication, disaster recovery, Cloud disaster recovery and Cloud long-term retention. All at your fingertips, all included, as well as all of the capabilities we talked about in terms of enabling VM admins to be able to do all of their daily tasks and operations through their own native tools and UIs. So it's really all about bringing simply powerful data protection to mid-size customers at the lowest cost to protect, and we now also have a guarantee under our future proof loyalty program, we are introducing a 55 to one deduplication guarantee for those exact customers. >> Okay. Beth, I wonder if you could talk about the motivation for this product. Why did you build it and why is it relevant for mid-size customers? >> So we're known as number one in enterprise data protection. We're known for our world class, best in the class, best in the world dedu capabilities, and what we've done is we've taken the learnings and the IP that we have that served enterprise customers for all of these years and then we're making that accessible to mid-size customers, and there are so many companies out there that can take advantage of our technology that maybe couldn't before these announcements. So by building this we've created a product that a mid-size company may have a small IT staff. Like I said at the beginning, may have VM admins who are also responsible for data protection. Now they can have what we bring to the market with best in class data protection. >> I want to follow up with you on simple and powerful. What is your perspective on simple? What does it mean for customers? >> I mean if you break it down, simple means simple to deploy two times faster than traditional data protection. Simple means easier to manage with modern HTML five interfaces that include the data protection, day to day tasks, also include reporting. Simple means easier to grow, growing in place from 24 terabytes up to 96 terabytes with just a simple software license to add at 12 terabyte increments. So all of those things come together to reduce the amount of time that an IT admin has to spend on data protection. >> So when I hear powerful and I hear mid-size customers I'm thinking, okay I want to bring enterprise class data protection down to the mid-size organization. Is that what it means? Can you actually succeed in doing that? >> If I'm an IT admin, I want to make sure that I can protect all of my data as quickly and efficiently as possible, and so we have the broadest support matrix in the industry. I don't have to bring in multiple products to support protection of my different applications, that's key. That's one thing. The other thing is I want to be able to scale. I don't want to have to be forced to bring in new products. With this, you have a logical five terabytes on prim. You can grow to protecting additional 10 terabytes in the Cloud, so that's another key piece of it, scalabililty. >> Petabytes, sorry, Petabytes. >> Petabytes. >> You said terabytes. (laughs) >> Of course, yes. What am I thinking? And then, last but not least, it's just performance. It runs on a 14G powered server. You're going to get the efficiency. You can protect five times as many VMs as you could without this kind of product. So all of those things come together for power, scalability, support matrix, and performance. >> Great, thank you. Okay, Ruya, let's talk about the business impact. Start with this sort of IT operations person. What does it mean for that individual? >> Yeah absolutely. So first, you're going to get your weekends back, right? So the product is just faster. We talked about it's simpler. You're not going to have to get a PhD on how to do data protection to be able to do your business. You're going to enable your V admins to be able to take on some of the tasks. So it's really about freeing up your weekends, having that sound mind that data protection is just happening, it works. We've already tried and tested this with some of the most crucial businesses with the most stringent service level requirements. It's just going to work, and by the way, you're going to look like a hero because with this 2U appliance, you're going to be able to support 15 petabytes across the most comprehensive coverage in the data center. So your boss is going to think you're just a super hero. >> Petabytes. >> Exactly. Petabytes, exactly. So it's tremendous for the IT user and also the business user. >> Wait, wait, what about the boss? What about the line of business? What does it mean to that individual? >> So if I'm the CEO or the CIO I really want to think about where am I putting my most skilled personnel, and my most skilled personnel, especially as IT is becoming so core to the business, is probably not best served doing data protection. So just being able to free up those resources to really drive applications or initiatives that are driving revenue for the business is critical. Number two, if I'm the boss, I don't want to overpay for data protection. Data protection is insurance for the business. You need it, but you don't want to overpay for it. So I think that lowest cost is a really critical requirement. The third one is really minimizing risk and compliance issues for the business. If I have the sound mind and the trust that this is just going to work, then I'm going to be able to recover my business no matter what the scenario, and that it's been tried and true in the biggest accounts across the world. I'm going to rest assured that I have less exposure to my business. >> Great. Ruya, Beth, thank you very much. Don't forget, we have an ask me anything crowd chat at the end of this session. So you can go in, login with Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook and ask any question. All right, let's take a look at the product and then we're going to come back and get the analysts' perspective. Keep it right there. (electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit, 2018 brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to San Francisco everybody. We're here covering the IBM CDO strategy summit. You're watching theCUBE, the leader and live tech coverage hashtag IBM CDO. Beth Smith is here, she's the general manager at Watson data and AI at IBM and of course Inderpal Bandari who's the global chief data officer at IBM. Folks, welcome back to theCUBE. It's great to see you both again. >> Good to be back. >> So I love these shows, they're intimate, practitioner really they're absorbing everything. You're getting some good questions, some good back and forth but Beth share with us what you're hearing from customers. What matters for enterprises right now in the context of the cognitive enterprise, the AI enterprise. >> So you know customers are looking at how did they get the benefit? They recognize that they've got a lot of valuable data, data that we haven't always called data. Sometimes it's documents and journals and other kinds of really unstructured things and they want to determine how can they get value from that and they look out and compare it to maybe consumer things and recognize they don't have the same volume of that. So it's important for customers, how do they get started and I would tell you that most of them start with a small project, they see value with that quickly they then say, okay how do we increment and grow from that. >> So Inderpal you had said I think I got this right, this is your fourth CDO gig. You're not new to this rodeo. Were you the first healthcare CDO is that right? >> I was. >> Dave: Okay you got it all started. >> There were four of us at that time. >> Okay so forth and four okay I did get that right. So you obviously bring a lot of experience here and one of the things you stressed today in your talk is you basically want to showcase IBM so you're applying sort of data enterprise data strategies to IBM and then you showcase that to your clients. Talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah I mean if you think about it, we are the quintessential complex enterprise. We're global, we're far-flung, we have literally thousands of products. We acquire companies, we move forward at a global scale and also we are always competing at a global scale. So there literally is that complexity that enterprises face which all our customers who are the large enterprises have to also deal with. So given all that we felt that the best way to talk about an AI enterprise is to use ourselves as a showcase. >> Okay Beth, I got to ask you about Watson's law. Okay so we had Moore's law we all know what that is. Metcalfe's law the network effect, Watson's law and I have a noodling on this a little bit. We're entering a new era which I think is underscored by... and names matter. We use a parlance in our industry whether it's cloud or a big data or internet or whatever it is and so we're trying to sort of figure out what this new era is like. What do you envision as Watson's law. I'd love to have a little riff on that. >> So first of all as we look at all those things and compare them back, they're all about opportunities to scale and how things changed because of a new scaling effect. So I would argue that the one we're in now, which we like to call Watson's law the future will determine what it's actually called is about scaling knowledge and applying knowledge so it's about how to use AI machine learning applied to data, all forms of data and turn that into knowledge and that's what's going to separate people and I would tell you that's also going to come back and give the incumbents an opportunity because the incumbents are strong in their industries, in their domains, they can leverage the data that they have, the knowledge and experience they have and then use that for how do they disrupt and really become the disruptors of the future. >> So okay what about the math behind this? I'm kind of writing down some notes as you were talking so my version of Watson's law and love your comment is innovation in the future and the current is going to be a function of the data, your ability to apply AI or cognitive to that data and then your ability to your point scale, the cloud economics. Does that make sense to you guys, is that where innovation is going to come? >> It's true but I have to go back at this point Dave of knowledge so I think you take data and you take AI or machine learning and those are sort of your ingredients. The scaling factor is going to be on knowledge and how does that ultimately get applied. Cloud again gives us an ingredient if you will that can be applied to it but the thing that'll make the difference on it, just like networking was in the past and opened up opportunities around the internet is that in the other will be how folks use knowledge. It's almost like you could think of it as a learning era and how that's not just going to be about individuals but about companies and business models etc. >> So the knowledge comes from applying cognitive to the data and then being able to scale it. Okay and then Inderpal, how do I address the access issue? I've got many if not most incumbents data are in silos. The marketing department has data, the sales department has data, the customer service department has data. How do you as a CDO address that challenge? >> Well what you've got to do is use the technology to actually help you address that challenge. So building data lakes is a good start for both structured and unstructured data where you bring data that's traditionally been siloed together but that's not always possible. Sometimes you have to let the data be where they are but you at least have to have a catalog that tells you where all the data is so that an intelligent system can then reason about that when working with somebody on a particular use case actually help them find that data and help them apply it and use it. >> So that's a metadata challenge correct? >> It's a metadata challenge in the AI world because the metadata challenge has always been there but now you have the potential to apply AI to not just create metadata but then also to apply it effectively to help business users and subject matter experts who are not data experts find the right data and work it. >> You guys make a big deal about automating some of this stuff up front as the point of creation or use automating. Classification is a good example. How are you solving that problem from a technology perspective? >> Well some of our core Watson capabilities are all about classification and then customers use that. It can be what I will call a simple use case of email classification and routing. We have a client in France that has 350,000 emails a week and they use Watson for that level of classification. You look at all sorts of different kinds of ticketing things you look at AI assistants and it comes down to how do you really understand what the intent is here and I believe classification is one of the fundamental capabilities in the whole thing. >> Yeah it's been a problem that we've been trying to solve in this industry for a while kind of pre AI and you really there's not a lot you can do if you don't have good classification if you can't automate it then you can't scale. >> That's right. >> So from a classification standpoint, I mean it's a fundamental always been fundamental problem. Machines have gotten much better at it with the AI systems and so forth but there's also one aspect that's quite interesting which is now you have open loop systems so you're not just classifying based on data that was historically present and so in that sense you're confined to always repeat your mistakes and so forth. You hear about hedge funds that implode because their models are no longer applicable because there's a Black Swan event. Now with the AI systems you have the opportunity to tap the realtime events as they're going and actually apply that to the classification as well. So when Beth talks about the different APIs that we have available to do classification, we also have NLP APIs that allow you to bring to bare this additional stuff that's going on and go from a closed-loop classification to an open-loop one. >> So I want to ask you about the black box problem. If you think about AI, I was saying this in my intro, I know when I see a dog but if I have to describe how I actually came to that conclusion, it's actually quite difficult to do and computers can show me here's a dog or I joked in Silicon Valley. I don't know if you guys watch that show Silicon Valley. Hot dog or not so your prescription at IBM is to make a white box, open that up, explain to people which I think is vitally important because when line of business people get in the room. like how'd you get to that answer and then it's going to be it's going to actually slow you down if you have arguments but how do you actually solve that black box problem? >> It's a much harder problem obviously but there are a whole host of reasons as to why you should look at it that way. One is we think it's just good business practice because when people are making business decisions they're not going to comply unless they really understand it. From my previous stint at IBM when I was working with the coaches of the NBA, they would not believe what patterns were being put forward to them until such time as we tied it to the video that showed what was actually going on. So it's that same aspect in terms of being able to explain it but there's also fundamentally more important reasons as well. You mentioned the example of looking at a dog and saying that's a dog but not being able to describe it. AI systems have that same issue. Not only that what we're finding is that you can take an AI system and you can just tweak a little bit of the data so that instead of recognizing it as a dog now it's completely fooled and it will recognize it as a rifle or something like that. Those are adversarial examples. So we think that taking this white box approach sets us up not just tactically and from a business standpoint but also strategically from a technical standpoint because if a system is able to explain it, describe it and really present its reasoning, it's not going to be fooled that easily either. >> Some of the themes that we hear from IBM, you own your own data, the Facebook blowback has actually been an unbelievable tailwind for that meme and most of the data in the world is not publicly searchable. So build on those themes and talk about how IBM is helping its customers take advantage of those two dynamics. >> So they kind of go hand-in-hand in the sense that because customers have most of the data behind their firewall if you will, within their business walls it means it's unlikely that it's annotated and labeled and used for a lot of these systems so we're focusing on how do we put together techniques to allow systems to learn more with less data. So that goes hand-in-hand with that. That's also back to the point of protecting your data because as we protect your data, you and your competitor we cannot mix that data together to improve the base models that are a part of it so therefore we have to do techniques that allow you to learn more with less data. One of the simplest thing is around the customization. I mean we're coming up on two years since we provided the capability to do custom models on top of visual recognition, Watson visual recognition. The other guys have been bragging about it in the last four to five months. We've been doing it in production with clients, will be two years in July so you'd say okay, well what's that about? We can end up training a base model that understands some of the basics around visual type things like your dog example and some other things but then give you the tools to very quickly and easily create your custom one that now allows you to better understand equipment that may be natural to you or how it's all installed or agricultural things or rust on a cell phone tower or whatever it may be. I think that's another example of how this all comes about to say that's the part that's important to you as a company, that's part that has to be protected that also has to be able to learn with you only spending a few days and a few examples to train it, not millions and billions. >> And that base layer is IBM, but the top layer is client IP and you're guaranteeing the clients that my IP won't seep into my competitors. >> So our architecture is one that separates that. We have hybrid models as a part of it and that piece that as you said is the client piece is separate from the rest of it. We also do it in such a way that you could see there could be a middle layer in there as well. Let's call it industry or licensed data so maybe it comes from a third party, it's not owned by the client but it's something that's again licensed not public as a part of it. That's a part of what our architecture is-- >> And you guys, we saw the block diagrams in there. You're putting together solutions for clients and it's a combination of your enterprise data architecture and you actually have hardware and software components that you can bring to bear here. Can you describe that a little bit? >> Go ahead, it's your implementation. >> Yeah so we've got again the perfect example of a large enterprise. There's significant on-prem implementations, there's private cloud implementations, there's public cloud implementations. You've got to bridge all that and do it in a way that makes it seamless and easy for an enterprise to adopt so we've worked through all that stuff. So we've learned things the hard way about well if you're truly going to do an AI data lake, you better have it on flash. For that reason we have it on flash on-prem but also on the cloud, our storage is on flash and so we were able to make those types of decisions so that we've learned through this, we want to share that with our clients. How do you involve deep learning in this space, well it's going to be proximate to your data lake so that the servers can get to all that data and run literally thousands and thousands of experiments in time that it's going to be useful for the decision. So all those hard learnings we are packaging that in the form of these showcases. We're bringing that forward but right now it's around hybrid cloud and the bridge so that because we want to talk about everything and then going forward it's all public cloud as we leverage that for the elasticity of the computer. >> Well IBM if you can do it there you can do it anywhere. It's a highly complex organization. So it's been what two years in for you now two? >> Little over two years. >> So you're making a lot of progress and I could see the practitioners eating this stuff up and that's got to feel good. I mean you have an impact obviously. >> It absolutely feels very good and I'm always in fact I kind of believe this coming into IBM that this is a company that has not only a number of products that are pertinent to this space but actually the framework to create an AI enterprise. These are not like disparate products. These are all going towards creating an AI enterprise and I think if you look across our portfolio of products and then you kind of map that back to our showcases, you'll see that come to life but in a very tangible way that yes if you truly want to create an AI enterprise, IBM is the place to be because they've got the answers across all the dimensions of the problem as opposed to just one specific dimension like let's say a data mining algorithm or something machine learning and that's basically it. When we cover the full gamut and you have to otherwise you can't really create an AI enterprise. >> In the portfolio obviously coming together IBM huge ambitions with with Watson and everybody's familiar with the ads and so you've done a great job of getting that you know top of mind but you're really starting to work with clients to implement this stuff. I know we got to end here but you had thrown out of stat 85% of executive CAI as a competitive advantage but only 20% can use it at scale so there's still that big gap, you're obviously trying to close that gap. >> Yeah so in a way I would correct it only 20% of them are using it at scale. I think Dave it's a part of how do they get started and I think that comes back to the fact that it shouldn't be a large transformational, scary multi-year project. It is about taking small things, starting with two or three or five use cases and growing and scaling that way and that's what our successful customers are doing. We give it to them in a way that they can use it directly or we leverage it within a number of solutions, like cyber security, like risk and compliance for financial services like health care that they can use it in those solution areas as well. >> Guys thanks so much for coming to theCUBE and sharing your story. We love coming to these events you see guys I used to say you see the practitioners, it's a board level discussion and these guys are right in it so good to see you guys, thank you. >> You too, thank you. >> You're welcome, all right keep it right to everybody, we'll be back with our next guest you're watching theCUBE live from the IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit in San Francisco, we'll be right back.

>> Announcer: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC, and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of day one of Dell Technologies World. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and about about 14,000 other people that are here live in Las Vegas. We're joined by a couple of folks from Dell EMC. We've got CUBE alumni Beth Phalen, President of Data Protection Division. And Sharad Rastogi, Senior Vice President of Product for Data Protection. Great to have you guys on the program. >> Thank you. >> Great to be here. >> So day one, very high energy keynote talking about four ways in which companies that are going to be successful can transform. Security, workforce, digital, IT. Beth, what are some of the trends in IT that you're seeing now in relation to data protection? >> Yeah, data protection is transforming in the same way that the rest of the IT environment is. The move towards simplicity, automation, converged infrastructures, hyper-converged infrastructures, all playing out in data protection. And it's a really hot and dynamic market right now, so there's a ton of interesting things going on. And of course, y'know we, like the rest of IT, is thinking how to help our customers best take advantage of the Cloud. >> Well, speaking of the Cloud, how has Cloud affected your business generally, and specifically, how are you responding? >> Yeah, I mean, I think Cloud is going to be a massive trend and we're already seeing that, right, and I think that really two dimensions of how the change is happening. One, I think is, just the workloads are migrating from on-frame to Cloud and we are really helping our customers save and store more data in the Cloud and do better disaster recovery from the Cloud. At the same time, y'know, people are thinking about lifting and shifting their existing workloads to the Cloud, and also having more Cloud-Native applications, how do you sort of protect that, right? So we're doing a lot of work in terms of and how those trends happen and how we help them. At the same time, with the Cloud, data protection itself is evolving, right? It's no longer just about protecting the data, but it's also about compliance and visibility, it's about governance of the data, it's really about management, making it available, so those are trends in which I think, this industry is going to basically evolve over time. >> I mean one of the challenges with data protection and generally backup specifically, it's always been an afterthought, always with bolt-on. I got one size fits all. The industry obviously has been very much aware of that and working hard to address that, is it a, what's the fix? Is it software? Is it hardware? Is it mindset, process? I wonder if you could address that, Beth. What are customers doing to make data protection y'know more resilient? >> I think making sure that data protection is tightly integrated with their applications. So whether you're the VM admin or the database admin, you don't want to have to have some other interface to go to, it just has to be a natural extension of what your day to day job is. So as we work to make our products very well integrated with the end applications and at the same time give that overall visability and governance, we can meet both needs. >> So automation is part of that, obviously, unlike my iPhone where the backup never works. (chuckles) I have to go manually initiate it, even though it's supposed to work that way, but so where does automation fit? >> So we really want to automate and simplify the workflows for data protection, right? Y'know make it very easy for our new users like the VM admins, the database admins, the Cloud admins. Y'know, how do you make it easy for them to protect the data? How do you, sort of, create role-based access for them? So, y'know, we're really simplifying and amplifying that as we go forward. >> So I want to touch, Beth, for you, on security transformation. I was mentioning earlier, Michael Dell talked about those four transformative elements that businesses need to undertake to be successful. And security transformation is one of that, but what does security transformation actually mean? If we look at, and one of the things Michael Dell also said in the keynote is, y'know, obviously proliferation of data keeps growing and growing and growing, as do attack surfaces. So how does a company leverage data protection not as an afterthought, like you were saying, or a bolt-on as it was before, but as part of a strategy to actually transform from a security perspective? >> I mean data protection can make sure that, data protection helps ensure that they can get to their data after something happens. So you can protect all that you want, there's still no 100% guarantee that you're going to be able to keep the malware out. So with things like cyber recovery, we're able to give customers the confidence that they're going to have a good copy of their data, independent of what happened to them. So it's really the flip side of the coin of security you have to provide security, you also have to provide confidence. You're going to be able to recover if you are attacked. >> So ransomware has obviously been a big topic in the news last, y'know couple years, y'know the prescription was always well, create an air gap and then you talk to the guys, y'know the black cast on his eye and he says, "Air gap, I get through that no problem." So what are your customers doing? Obviously it's a big concern of a lot of executives, comes up in the board room, what do you guys recommend? >> So I think this is actually, you're absolutely correct, it's a big board level conversation today about how do you protect your most mission critical most valuable data? And, yes, there are attacks, yes, there are threats, but really it's about how do you recover back to a stable, steady state? And y'know air gaps are valuable, I mean they do prevent you from external threats and with our cyber recovery solution, y'know we're actually helping our customers think about first, about what is your most mission critical data? And then how do you sort of protect it and how do you make it available, y'know if and when that disaster does strike you? And make it easy for you to recover back to your steady state? >> And I would think part of that is your response mechanism and the process by which you respond, how quickly you can respond. Does Dell EMC play a role in that process part of it? And what role do you play? >> Yeah, I mean absolutely. So y'know the, what's most important in a cyber recovery is that you get back to a safe state, right? It's a little bit different than a classic disaster recovery y'know where you have weather or some other event which is striking that, right? So what's different in cyber recovery versus classic DR is that you actually have a little bit more time but you want to get back to the right steady, safe state. So you also do a lot of checking of the data, you sandbox the data, you make sure it's actually all safe there's no external malware in there, you protect it and then you make it available in the recovery, where you do need to. So it's a little bit different than a classic disaster recovery. >> Right. >> So I was looking on the Dell EMC website the other day and saw a couple of stats that I'd like to get some insight on from a real world customer perspective. And I read that Dell EMC protects 150 petabytes of data in the Cloud and 2X more data in the Cloud is managed by Dell EMC Technology than the closest competitor. Give us an example, Beth, of a customer that you've really helped to facilitate resiliency, really this theme of business resilience. >> So, absolutely, and especially working with Virtustream, customers are able to seamlessly extend their data domain storage capacity into a Cloud. And so by setting up their Clouds here, data domain will automatically, based on a time policy move backups into that Cloud, into the Cloud configuration. One customer that comes to example is in the medical field, you can imagine both the importance or privacy and the importance of retention of records in the medical field and so they come to mind as somebody who's really taken advantage of being able to do Cloud tiering to keep their TCO down, but at the same time meet their requirements around record retention. >> All right, so takeaways? From Dell Technologies World? What should we know? What do you want your customers to take away from this event? >> I think, number one, I'd say y'know for data protection there is a huge value in terms of low-cost, high performance, y'know those are key requirements that remain. Simplicity, flexibility, are also very important and they're coming. And then finally I would say that, think about Cloud workloads and how you use the Cloud to better protect your data? >> Okay and then, Beth, I wonder if we could ask you, what should we be watching over the next y'know near-term, mid-term, even long-term, if you want to throw that in there, from Dell EMC? >> One, you're going to see us bringing even more products to the market that are easy to deploy, easy to configure, easy to use. In all kinds of new and exciting creative ways. And, two, as people's data sources become more and more disparate and they're moving to Sass and using a Cloud-Native environment, we will continue to be working with our customers to make sure they can still protect their data. So we're going with our customers on that Cloud journey. >> Well thank you guys so much for stopping by and sharing with us some of the trends in IT where data protection's concerned, the innovation that Dell EMC is doing and how you're helping customers to really embark on a successful security transformation. >> Yeah. Thanks, Lisa. >> Great, thank you so much. >> Great talking to you. >> Thank you! >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, we're live in Las Vegas, day one of Dell Technologies World. Stick around, we'll be right back after a short break. (light electronic music)

(computer mouse clicking) >> Hi, Lisa Martin on the ground with The Cube at Google for the sixth annual CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud Awards and we're very excited to be joined by one of the award winners, Beth Cohen. You are with Verizon, congratulations on the award, Welcome to The Cube. >> Thank you, yes. >> So tell me what you do for Verizon. >> So what I do for Verizon is I come up with new products, and we've been focusing over the last few years on software defined networking, which is a brand new, cutting edge area that not only Verizon is new to but also the entire world is new to. So what we're doing is we're taking cloud concepts and applying them to network services and I'm actually involved, in addition to that, in a new initiative called edge computing. So there's going to be white paper coming out shortly on that and that all came out of my work at Verizon on the products, the software defined networking products I've been working on. >> Wow, so you are a pioneer. We'll get to more of that a little bit later but what are some of the things that excite you about being on the leading edge of software defined networking and edge computing? >> Well, what's really exciting to me is working with the customers and getting them excited about this new technology and how it's really changing the world. And they're all excited about it because they understand that the future is here and that they need to embrace it. >> So one of the things that I found was really interesting when I was doing some research on you is you've worked with several technology companies to help them change their product strategy direction, taking advantage of the cloud. So I mentioned the work pioneer earlier but you're clearly influential. How have you been able to work with companies of presumably diverse cultures to help them change direction? >> So that's an interesting question. The company has to be ready for it and some companies are not, actually. But the companies, fortunately I've had the opportunity to work with some companies that were ready for either whether they recognized, in one case, their market was disappearing, literally, as their customers were leaving and they didn't have any new customers and they recognized that they needed to take a new direction to survive. And what they did is they had some really unique, interesting technology around high availability and survivability, which is something that companies really need but theirs was a hardware based solution and what I helped them do is to really come up with a new way of looking at it that was a software based solution that they could apply to classrooms. >> Wow, so tell me about the influence there. What's that process like to show them, like you were saying, some of them, customers are drying up, obviously this is an impetus for change, what were some of the obstacles that you helped them identify and overcome to identify, "This is why we have to shift direction, "this is going to be much more beneficial?" >> So, they obviously were in great pain, as their balance sheet was drifting down but they had to realize that their skill sets, that they had some people that had some great skill sets but they had to really think differently about what they were doing. So one of the things I did is help them understand the new technologies that they were going to be adopting. So I did some training, worked out some training with them and gave them a two day training session on a cloud technology and what it was about and how it could apply to them. I also had to understand what they were doing and their secret sauce so that I could really extend that and say, "Okay, your job's not going to go away "but you really need to add some additional skills "to be successful in this new direction." >> What are some of the fears, technology fears, that you've heard as, not just an influencer helping companies to make the right directional changes, but also even at your current career at Verizon? What are some of the things that people are afraid of regarding technology that you can help them see, "Ah, it's not so bad?" (laughing) >> So, you know, Verizon's a telecom and telecom's, what I like to say to people is, "What we're selling is reliability, right, "so every time you make that cell phone call, "it goes through, right?" And Verizon prides itself on that and every time you have that connection, it works every time. Well, there's a lot of technology and a lot of operations and a lot of support services that go on behind the scenes to make that actually happen. And the general public's probably just not aware of that. But the people inside the company are very afraid to get away from, "Well, we've always done this and we have to continue doing "this because we do have that five nines reliability that we "have to deliver," and so it's very difficult to say, "Oh, well we'll do it differently now." So, there has to be a lot of education around, and gaining the trust that yes, this new technology can be used and can deliver those five nine reliability statistics and SLA's that you're used to delivering. >> Do you think it's more of a fear of maybe cultural change than it is actual technology? >> I'd say it's probably a combination of both. Verizon's a technology company so obviously we embrace technology and we have a lot of really smart people working for the company who love technology. But we also, we want to service our customers and we don't want to get that angry phone call about, "The network's down." So, there's kind of a combination to make sure that we deliver to our customers what they expect. >> Exactly. So I mentioned the word pioneer earlier, you have a really interesting career path that I think is very inspirational. In the last couple minutes that we have here, share with us about, how did you get from what you studied in school to being a leader in software defined networking at Verizon? >> Wow, so I studied architecture, as in building architecture, I went to Rhode Island School of Design, which is completely, totally opposite. Although, I do tell people, I learned a whole lot about creativity and critical thinking, which is very valuable skills to apply to being a pioneer because when you're in cutting edge, what I spend most of my time doing is connecting the dots and saying, "Oh, this technology can be applied here," or, "These two technologies can work together, "have you ever thought of that?" "Oh wow, never." (laughing) So that's why I end up spending my career being on the cutting edge of things. >> I love that. You bring up a great point that is, in a lot of fields, no matter what you study, there are great lessons to be learned from, for example, applying the creativity and technology, there's a great value there and so I think that's very inspiring to others who might be interested in different things and know that there's a lot of cross pollination. Last question-- >> I have one more comment about that. >> Oh, please go for it. >> There's no such thing as wasted time, everything I've done over the years has always ended up being a learning experience for me. I spent two years being a cook at a fancy French restaurant in Phillidelphia and that was a learning experience too. (laughing) >> And I love that and you're absolutely right, all these experiences build one on the other on the other and I agree with you that, and I hope a lot of people feel the same, that there isn't a waste of time, it's not a wrong step, it's something that you can learn from and they'll be a better person, a better worker, a better boss for it. >> And a mean cook. >> Exactly, I got to get some recipes from you. So last question, the CloudNOW Top Women in Cloud award, really quickly, how did you find out about that and what does this award mean to you? >> I'm very excited about it. I have to admit, it was a big surprise for me. Somebody nominated me and they sent me a note on LinkedIn and I had completely forgotten about it and then I get this email and so I was like just stunned so I'm very excited about it. >> And it seems, like I've said, I've used the word pioneer a number of times, and you're very inspiring and I'm sure that the people that bestowed the award are very thrilled to have you in the class as this is the sixth year. >> Yes. >> Well Beth, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE and sharing your story and again, congratulations on the award. >> Thank you again. >> I'm Lisa Martin on the ground with The Cube at Google, thanks so much for watching. Bye for now. (upbeat music)

>> Speaker: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Yeah we're here live the Cube coverage at VMworld 2017. Behind us is the floor of the VMvillage. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Our next two guest Beth Phalen who's the President and General Manager of Data Protection Division at Dell EMC and Yanbing Li who's the Senior Vice President General Management with Storage and Availability at VMware, vSAN, all the greatness; Welcome back to the Cube. Great to see you guys. >> Yeah, great to see you. >> Got the heavy hitters here, data protection, AWS lot of great relationships synergies happening. >> Yeah. >> Give us the update. >> Yeah well go ahead yeah. >> We've been working together for a long time but recently we've really amped it up to the next level. Great discussions around enabling data protection for vSAN and as announced this week you know with Dell EMC will be first vendor to have data protection for VMware cloud on AWS. So it's a really exciting time to be here and I've been in this business for a long time. This is the best VMworld that I've seen so far and so it's just really great to be here with Yanbing. >> It's been very cohesive, I want to just stay on that for a second. This is the big milestone for VMware. >> It is. >> To have this shipping of the general availability especially with on the heels of the vCloud Air and all that controversy. Andy Jassy's on stage from Amazon web services. >> Yeah. >> Really kind of looking right at the audience and saying we got your back, this is a real deal, and the bridge to the future. I'm paraphrasing, he didn't say those exact words. >> Yeah yeah yeah. >> How do you get that data protection? Because that data protection in the cloud is hard. >> Yeah, well the nice thing is that since we've got all of our data protection running in a cloud environment now we could then use that to build the connections with VMC. So we had Data Domain Virtual Edition running, we have Data Protection Suite running in the cloud. So people can use the same technology they used on prem but now in AWS in conjunction with VMC. >> So you kind have hyper converged infrastructure meets cloud data protection. Yanbing, what is the difference? I mean what's the requirement of hyper converged infrastructure data protection? How does it differ from traditional storage and how is it evolving? >> Ah, great questions you know Beth and I we've known each other for quite a few years. I have to say our relationship hasn't been, you know, this close is and it's getting closer and closer. So coming back to your question in terms of hyper converged infrastructure. We're seeing two fundamental shifts around data protection. One is, the blurring of the boundary between backup and DR and these two really coming together as unified data protection. I think there has been a lot of discussion around this for a long time but this become even more compelling; now we talk about hyper converged infrastructure where you know our customers they so enjoy the benefit of having compute and storage combined together in a common management experience, they're looking for the same for data protection. So we're really seeing customers want to see data protection as a feature of hyper converged, as a capability that's part of that rather than yet another silo they have to manage separately. You know they want policy that manage storage, compute, and backup and DR altogether. So that's why you know that's really drive our partnership so much closer. >> You know it's interesting many of the clients that we've worked with over the years they'll have a backup strategy but they don't really have a DR strategy and they sleep with one eye open at night and they're afraid to go to the board because it's so expensive, it's expensive insurance. So you're seeing that there, sounds like they're blending those 2 together kind of killing 2 birds with one stone. Are there trade offs or things that customers should think about in that regard? How do they sort of go from where they are today which is sort of a backup bolt on to that integrated DR and backup? >> I think one of the key is the technology that we're leveraging now and we leverage something that has like CDP continuous data protection you can use that one to have data path to the secondary storage and you can use that same code to also initiate disaster recovery with near 0 RPO and RTO. So another thing that we announced this week is with our DPS for apps next edition that we now have hypervisor direct back up and what that means is that we're integrated directly with ESX and we are leveraging ProtectPoint through VM's to move data to data domain. That same technology is also leverage within RecoverPoint through VM's and so you can see the engine, the internal engine of the data movements, can be applied both to disaster recovery and to back up with different windows of RTO and RPO. >> I'm glad you said near 0 RPO causes no such thing as 0 RPO but you're seeing, more pressure to get as close to 0 as possible. What's driving that pressure and how are you meeting it? >> Well I think with all of us we know that an industry customers are expecting 24 by, you know 24 by 7 up time right. So they have many many applications that they need to have the confidence that if it does go down for any reason they're going to be able to bring it back up within minutes or hours not days. So that's really the drive for continuous availability. Getting as close to that as possible. >> If I may one more John, the challenge in data protection has always been it's, it's largely been a one size fits all and it's either I'm either under protected or I'm spending and breaking the bank. So are you able to through your technology and process improvements improve the level of granularity for different workloads that require different service levels. >> Two things come to mind, One, we're seeing more and more interesting customers integrating data protection directlywith their applications. Whether it SQL or Oracle and or the VM itself. So that's one thing. So we can custom the data protection to particular application and then on the second piece of that is where the different interfaces that VM offers we're able to do either V80P level integration or more fine grained integration like we do with CheckPoint through VM. So we are getting to the point that we can make different choices either application specific or something that is fine tuned based on the level of mission critical capabilities that application requires. >> I will get you guys perspective just a high level ballistic view for a second. We're seeing convergence of two worlds. The cloud native world that have no walls, have no perimeters they operate in a mindset of there's a security holes everywhere. Then the protections hard. >> They think of a differently. >> Yeah On prem the traditional methods, how are those coming together? Because you have customers that run VMware and do stuff with data protection and then one of them VMware in the cloud. What's different, what do customers need to know that are we on either side of that equation? If I'm on prem and I now want to use VMware in the cloud on AWS. How does data protection fit in that? Is it the same, is there tweaks, how they think about it? >> You want to answer that? >> In terms of on prem or VMware in AWS you know a big value prop is reading at the consistency in the operating model. I'm sure you have heard about this a million times said. >> Yes, talking about it all week. >> All week long. From data protection we're trying to do exactly the same. So for example VMware cloud on AWS, the very first data protection that we certify on that platform is from [Vast 00:07:39] organization is Avamar networker being the first set of solution certified and our customers definitely love the continuity of I already have the experience and licensing associated with my own prem protection solution and they want to carry that forward in today's cloud. >> So same operating module, so from the customers perspective I've been doing it this way >> Exactly. >> With VMware and Dell Data Protection, now it's the same in the cloud. No change in. >> Yeah I mean I think that's really the beauty of it, even with DDVE I mean you can have applications or you can do through different; You know you can have application in the cloud as well as another level of protection of your secondary storage. >> I think some of the changes probably not necessary. So RPD model consistency, Dave we touch upon, hyper convergence is driving a lot of functionality into a single control plate as opposed to these different silos and you know we would like to see that happen in the cloud as well and along that line you know best organization and my organizing are really looking at how we viewed the best next generation integrated technology that truly leverages the strengths of both organizations. >> That's simple and easy to use. >> Simple, easy to use, policy base, you know turn key solutions, so this is, you know what we're doing something pretty innovative by truly bring our engineering together and try to boost our next generation solution. >> Since the synergies that Michael was talking about when we interviewed Michael yesterday he's like look, the synergies are well beyond its expectations. Just it seems to be flowing nicely in the culture. When EMC had the federation there was always kind of like an interesting but now things are flowing differently. It seems to be smoother you guys. >> They are. >> Every action. >> I totally agree with what you said. I mean it feels different and I think as we go forward we have even more opportunities but we're not even a year into it and there was a distinct difference in terms of recognition around the joint opportunity and like you said the smoothness of the conversation I think is >> It's clear, it's clarity. >> It's really helpful. >> Well also you know, the rising tide floats all boats, well VMware stock as gone like this. >> It makes us all happy. >> Its got a nice slope to it. >> I definitely want to hackle Beth on that and the type of collaboration we're seeing between our two organizations, might be you is actually having multiple touch point into Dell and Dell EMC organization whether it's our VxRail and you know the vSAN based collaboration or the data protection angle and we're really seeing that happen across different functions. So we are starting from go to market collaboration you know how we provide the best set of solutions to our customers in joint go to market effort. vSAN is gaining a lot of free print in mission critical workloads and a critical requirement is data protection. So so we're doing a lot of joint solution, joint selling together. And really in the next step is that joint engineering effort leveraging the best of both worlds to build next generation products that's optimized for hyper converged, that's optimized for the cloud. >> For the software defined data centers. >> If I dial back a decade let's say as virtualization generally in VMware specifically saw its ascendancy, data protection totally changed. For a number of reasons, you had less physical resources but backup was still very resource intensive application and so; That's really where Avarmar came before. He walked the floor, back up and data protection is exploding again. It's like the hottest area. So two part question. Why is that and then how does Dell EMC with you know its large portfolio, its big install base, how do you maintain competitiveness with all that new emerging innovation? >> Yeah well I think the first question and I want to hear your answer too but what I would say is because the industry is changing so dramatically it's requiring data protection to change just as dramatically. >> Right. >> Right, so that is a lot of people are seeing opportunity there. Where is maybe, I've had people say, you know, well you don't really have to protect data in the cloud it's all stuff that's magically protected, I've had customers say that to me and I think that we're now beyond that, right and people are realizing, wow you know, just as much of a need or more of a need than it was before. So I think there's plenty of you know companies appreciate opportunity and they see opportunity right now as data protection evolves quickly to address the new IT world that we live in. On anything you would add to the first answer? >> Yeah so I think, several years ago VMworld feels like a storage shelf you know. I think there is still a lot of exciting interesting storage company but there has been quite a bit of consolidation you know. Software defined storage it seems like that market's landscape is becoming clearer and clearer and we're definitely seeing that spreading into secondary storage is now right for a disruption and we're also seeing that is disruption around secondary storage isalso impacting data protection software. It's not just the secondary storage element but you know extent to the entire software stack. I think it's very exciting and also thinking about you know what is going to be the economical benefit of cloud and how do we take best advantage of that and this is why you know our AWS relationship. You know we are rejuvenizing our DR effort. We have successful on prem product like SRM but we're seeing tremendous new opportunity to look at that in the context of cloud to truly leveraging the economy is scale of what cloud has to offer. So lots of driving factors to really revitalize that. >> It's a cloud show and you have no cloud. >> Okay Beth second part of my question is how do you keep pace, it's a pretty tremendous innovations going on, how do you keep pace, what are your thoughts on all that? >> So the really cool thing is because where you know we're Dell Technologies we have not only data protection assets, we also have servers, we also have switches, we have everything we need to build a full integrated stack which we now have without EPA. So within a integrated data protection appliance we have the best of data domain, we have the best of our software, we're leveraging also power at servers and dellium C switches. So we have everything that we need to build that end to end best in class integrated appliance and as customers change how they consume data protection to more like a converged consumption model or hyper converged consumption model we have all the pieces that we need to make that a reality and then to continue to move forward. So when you combine that with our relationship with VMware and the ability that we have to drive innovation jointly I have no doubt that we're going to be really moving ahead into you know modern data protection. >> Final question before we rap. R&D comes up, Micheal also mention and so do Pat, billions of dollars now are in R&D. Free cash was a billion dollars. Three billion for VMware. A lot of observations this week that we kind of looked and read the tea leaves one of them was at least for me was the stack a collision between hardware software stacks as IoT and servers and devices, you have hardware stacks and software stacks. Untested scenario certainly in vSAN; You see a lot of activity around untested new use cases and so it's going to put pressure on engineers. So the question is what's the vision for the R&D for you guys around data protection, because it's not just data protection anymore it's a fundamental linchpin in the equation of cloud >> Yeah. >> Thoughts on engineering road map I mean engineering R&D. >> One thing we're doing actually right now this week is we're restructuring our EMC lab dellium c lab back in Hopkinton to move to more of an open shared pivotal type environment. So you know it's clear that as we go forward doing things like pere programming on test driven development. You know enabling continuous always good known stayed like there is definitely advancements happening in software development that are accelerating innovation and so as we take advantage of that, that's how we keep pace with what's going on around us. Because you're right the number of things to get involved in is endless. >> I just want to point out before we end the segment you guys are very inspirational women in tech. I think you guys are amazing. We talk about the engineer resources. >> Thank you John. Your thoughts on the industry, as there's a lot of controversy in Silicon Valley and around the world around STEM and women in tech. Thoughts that you'd like to share to all the men watching and all the folks and young girls who might inspiration. You know it's passionate for us. >> Yeah, I'll start. So I think, first of all I want to tank the Cube for having such awareness in this topic and you know constantly featuring women in tech on your shows. You guys have been doing a great job raising the visibility women leaders. >> Thank you >> Thanks >> in the industry. Thank you. So certainly this is a topic very dear and near to my heart. This week you know we can still see not only our employee base but our customer base is heavily men dominated. But I think we're seeing unprecedented levels of awareness and attention to this topic in Silicon Valley and across the world. Really I do think we are starting to see much better transparency metric. We're seeing increased accountability in business and business leadership. So I think those and we're seeing a lot of social awareness I think those are going to drive a positive change. So let me give you a concrete example of fuzz for example things we do in VMware, we just gone through bonus allocation and compensation adjustment. I would get a report from it make sure, comparing the percentage of what we have done for the men population and women population and so you get a real time feedback in data and when we see the data is actually quite shocking hopefully we do see, unconsciously you know we may be allocating those >> Unconscious bias if you will. >> Yeah those differently. But because of those real time data and feedback we're good able to you know keep ourself accountable. So just you know this is no longer just talk this is a real data you know in the real HR practices that we are already building into our day to day practice. So I think I'm very optimistic, this will take time but this is you know we're moving in the right direction. >> Historical moment in the world if you think about it. This is super important time. The inspiration and also the young women out there too and also for the men. They need to be aware as well because inclusion includes not just women it's everyone. That seems to be >> Absolutely. >> In fact a trend we had an interview on the Cube and our Simpson who works for Mozilla she's doing some work for Tech Nation, she said they're changing it from diversity inclusion to inclusion and diversity. They're flipping it around where inclusion leads diversity cause they want to lead with the message of inclusion; >> Yeah. >> as a primary message with diversity. So it's not just the diversity message it's inclusion. >> Yeah. >> Love that. >> Yeah the only thing I would add would be the phrase "She can be it if she sees it" I think having people like myself and Yanbing be visible role models it's very impactful, especially for young women to see you know women in tech leadership positions. It's hard to imagine yourself in a role if you don't see anyone similar to in a role. So I think the more that people like us and our peers get out there and really put an effort into being visible. >> Do you see the networks forming more, I mean is there more action flowing happen. Can you compare and contrast just even a few years ago is it on the rise significantly? >> I think it's on the rise. >> Yeah I do get us to be involved in a lot of opportunistic situations, yeah. >> And of course your Twitter handle puts it right out there, @ybhighheels. >> Yeah. >> Right, your not shy about it. >> Yeah, there's nothing shy about it. I realize you know Beth and I, we are both addressed in very feminine way. I do think. >> Your capabilities are off to chart you to great and impressive executives. >> Society is increasingly more inclusive about their notions of female tech leader. It's not just one size fits all and I think it's encouraging us to show who we really are and the authentic self and I think that's very important for young girls to see because I remember when I was a young girl I didn't go into tech expecting I do not get to be who I am >> Yeah and that shouldn't reflect your capability of anyway any kind and that seem to be the greater awareness. The Google memo that went around as all of it so getting us some great videos on Silicon Angle on that topic. Again you guys are great inspiration. We love working with you you guys are great executives. >> Thank you. >> Its great content. >> Your welcome. >> We super passionate about it. We'll be at Grace Hopper for our 4th year we do that. >> Fantastic. >> As we show every year, we're learning more and more and we're going to do a podcast for guys too. >> Nice. >> Different angle. >> Love that. >> A lot of guys want to do what to do. >> Okay that's great. >> Inclusion and diversity of course; I need the help. I'm John Furrier With Dave Vellante Here. Live at Vmworld. More coverage coming after this short break.

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube covering Dell EMC World 2017. Brought to you buy Dell EMC. >> Welcome back here live in Las Vegas on The Cube at Dell EMC 2017. We are live from The Venetian continuing our Day One coverage here on the show along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walls. Did you have a good lunch? >> I'm ready to go, John. >> Excellent, excellent. It's all about data protection right now and with us to talk about that is Beth Phalen, who is the President of the Data Protection Division at Dell EMC and Jim Clancy, the SVP of Sales in Data Protection as well. Jim, good to see you, sir. >> Thanks for having us, guys. >> Alright, so big news for you today. Led off with a couple of key announcements. Beth, take us through those, what was the news that you were making from the stage? >> Absolutely, two big announcements today. First, is the Integrated Data Protection Appliance which is an end-to-end appliance that gives you box to backup in less than three hours. While the customers are looking for simplicity but they still need the fantastic dedup, up to 55:1, the performance, the scales they get with our Data Protection Suite, our data protection portfolio, so now we're bringing it to them as an integrated appliance. Couldn't be happier about it. >> Great, so big news there, and announcement number two. >> We had a second one, too, which was cloud data protection. With a special focus on cloud Disaster Recovery, our customers want to leverage the cloud to have the DR site in a cloud, a public cloud, or perhaps a separate private cloud. They also want to be able to run Data Domain in the cloud environment. So as of today, you can run Data Domain Virtual Edition on AWS Or Azure and soon you'll be able to run it in Virtustream. >> So Jim, put that into practice for me now. If I'm one of your partners and I know that I've got some extra layers or extra opportunities, now what does that mean to me? >> Well firstly, we start with our partners. I think we've had such an incredible journey together supporting our customers' requirements. Well those continue to change and they struggle with things like the amount of information that they need to recover from, they need to back up, they need to store. For us, we're giving them that next conversation with their customers. So the new challenges are being met by data protection from Dell Technologies and our partners are going to benefit from that because they have the trusted advisors in their accounts. They want to be able to go and work with their customers and the new challenges and deliver. So Beth and her team have delivered from a technology to allow us to go and capture that mind share with our customers working together with our partners. >> So Jim, backup appliance, very high market. A lot of investments and a lot of startups in that market. What differentiates this solution over those competitors? >> Well first off, we're in the number one position in this market for a reason. It really comes down to our technology. So our customers have been pushing us saying, We need it to be simple, make it simple, make it simple. Because then they're running out of time every day on what they can do. I think we're taking our industry-leading technology and bundling it together as a simple, high-performance solution is the first thing. The second thing is the total experience that Dell brings to the marketplace. Our customers always are counting on us that if there ever is a challenge, who's going to be there to help us, right? If I ever need that next application comes on the line and how am I going to protect it? Who can come in a design that? That's what we deliver. So the things that we deliver are the experience vs. a point product. And by the way, from a point product, with our new announcement we're going to be able to take on any competitor in this marketplace. But it's the full experience that separates us from anybody in this marketplace today which is why we're number one and we're going to continue that leadership. >> So Beth mentioned the second announcement, cloud, which is a huge part of our new hybrid portfolios. What cloud services are we compatible with out the gate with your new solution? >> The cloud services that we're developing at the end of the gate, is that what you said? So first of all, if we take a step back the cloud is really multi-steps for customers to take advantage of it. Some customers are extending to the cloud. So they may have a full on-prem Data center that they want to leverage the cloud for perhaps long-term retention. That's one thing you can do. The second is a lift and shift. When they may choose to move some of their applications to the cloud. Now for that, they can run DD VE with NetWorker and CloudBoost and still have that same operations for the data protection that they did from on-prem. So the first is extent of the cloud. The second is lift and shift to the cloud. The third is something that you'll hear us talk more about. It's beginning to refactor their applications to be more cloud-native. Which is another area that we're very engaged and working on. >> So for a lift and shift scenario one of the things that we're concerned about on the customer side, is cost. When we're backing up to the cloud, it doesn't cost must to get it there but getting it back. Do you guys help with that scenario? >> We do, because first of all, all of the data is going to be deduped before it gets sent out to the cloud so it's a small amount of data that needs to come back. And second, with this most recent announcement if you're using the cloud DR capabilities you can bring that application back up in the cloud itself without having to bring the data back. So the data is stored and it's sort of format on the cloud is certainly the best value. Then you could actually bring that application up in AWS, as an example. >> So let's talk too from a staff retention, or staff training rather, what do my staff have to learn new of these solutions, if anything? >> It's a great question. Because of the things we pride ourselves on is making them seamless extensions of the products that we already sell. So that you don't have to introduce a brand new product to your environment. You can manage from NetWorker from Data Protection Suite to initiate the launch and retention or the Cloud DR. >> So the look and feel is what they're using today. What we've done is we've just extended the use cases that our customers are coming to us on, saying, I need to move data to the cloud, I want to make sure that I can leverage my existing technology and get that done. That's a big advantage to us because our customers are comfortable, understand the tools that they leverage today, and if they can just extend it instead of bringing something new in and learning something new, because every one of our customers does not have time to learn new tools, new products-- >> Well they really don't want that. >> Yeah, they don't want that. >> That's the last thing they want, right. >> Yeah, and I wanted to add on to what Beth said. We've been selling in the cloud for well over a year now. So this is just another few use cases that we're adding to our customers' requirements. So we have hundreds of petabytes that are being protected in the cloud today, whether it's some of the ones that Beth mentioned or Virtustream, so we're already in the cloud. This is just a more thought leadership. This is more of a technology leadership that we're announcing today. So we're extending our leadership as we extend our customers to the cloud. >> So what are the big picture stuff? We're talking about people moving more work. You've got tons of data, right? We have so much more. How is all this coming together in terms of where your section of the business is going, how you're responding to those kinds of trends, and what do you see coming down the road? >> It's a great question. So one of the things we talk about is people moving away from data centers to centers of data. When you look at with IOT, with all the distribution of where data is stored or coming from right now, it becomes more and more of a challenge to make sure A) You know where all your data is and B) That you're confident that it's protected. So given the capabilities and more and more distributive services giving people the ability to see where all of the data resides and the protection state, is one thing. I think the term data fog is beginning to start coming into the conversation. People have been mentioning it. It makes a point, right? It's not in one place anymore, it's not a lake. It's all over the place. Think about the challenge for CIOs to have the confidence that it's still protected and that they could get it back. >> So with all this distributed data one of the challenges that we have is the metadata around that data. Knowing what's where, analytics around that. Do you guys help solve that challenge? >> We do, in a few different ways. >> One thing in particular is, as of last year, we have a SaaS offering which is ECDA, Enterprise Copy Dating Analytics. That lets you have a global view of where your data is and it's really moving into more machine learning. So it's not just reporting. It's allowing the customer to get smarter and smarter about where his or her data is maybe not as protected as it could be and where they might want to take some actions to increase their levels of protection. >> We're pretty exited about it because we've gotten an overwhelming response from our partners and our customers that this is where we need to go. So everything we're talking about has been things that we've been going through with our customers for years saying, Okay we need to get here, we need to get here. and how do you help us get to that path vs. doing these individual things? There's a strategy behind all of this but it really comes back from our customers and our partners saying, This is what we need, we know you're going to get us here but let's try to get there sooner than later. I think Beth and team have delivered on that again. >> So this is a transformation. Again, big theme of this show. Help us with the big picture. How does this copy data, secondary data market that you guys are helping us with solve that support that digital transformation? >> We heard Michael talk about it on stage today, right? The ability of what we can do having a greater amount of leverage around the data that we all have right now is mind blowing in terms of accelerating medical diagnosis, driving more capability around awareness, around risks and sometimes of security. There's a level of knowledge that we've become more adept at mining the data that we have and then leveraging, machine learning, to analyze it. It's going to give us leaps and bounds of acceleration in whatever business objective we're looking out to achieve. >> If you had to pick a use case you're most proud of when it comes to your new solution set, give us the best one. >> I'll let you go first. >> I love the new things that we've done with the cloud data protection. Giving people the ability to be able to extend seamlessly is something that they've been asking for and to have it now and be able to offer it is really fantastic. >> I'd have to agree. Our customers want data protection everywhere. They don't care where that data sits. They don't want to be handcuffed on where they can actually protect their data or recover from that data. So they're working really strongly and tightly with us because we are the leader in this market and we just proved it again that we're going to keep up that leadership. Data protection everywhere is important and I think the cloud extension and leadership is what puts us in that position. We're really excited about that. >> It's an asset no matter where it is, right? So you have to protect it. >> That's right. >> Data fog, though, I think I live my life in data fog. (laughter) >> I like that, that's cool. >> Beth and Jim, thanks for being with us. We appreciate the time on The Cube and best of luck. >> Thank you. >> Nice talking to you. >> We'll continue live here from Las Vegas with Dell EMC World 2017 and you're watching The Cube.