(light upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's day long coverage of Women in Data Science 2023. Live from Stanford University, I'm Lisa Martin. We've had some amazing conversations today with my wonderful co-host, as you've seen. Tracy Zhang joins me next for a very interesting and inspiring conversation. I know we've been bringing them to you, we're bringing you another one here. Dr. Irene Dankwa-Mullan joins us, the Chief Medical Officer at Marti Health, and a speaker at WIDS. Welcome, Irene, it's great to have you. >> Thank you. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you so much for this opportunity. >> So you have an MD and a Master of Public Health. Covid must have been an interesting time for you, with an MPH? >> Very much so. >> Yeah, talk a little bit about you, your background, and Marti Health? This is interesting. This is a brand new startup. This is a digital health equity startup. >> Yes, yes. So, I'll start with my story a little bit about myself. So I was actually born in Ghana. I finished high school there and came here for college. What would I say? After I finished my undergraduate, I went to medical school at Dartmouth and I always knew I wanted to go into public health as well as medicine. So my medical education was actually five years. I did the MPH and my medical degree, at the same time, I got my MPH from Yale School of Public Health. And after I finished, I trained in internal medicine, Johns Hopkins, and after that I went into public health. I am currently living in Maryland, so I'm in Bethesda, Maryland, and that's where I've been. And really enjoyed public health, community health, combining that aspect of sort of prevention and wellness and also working in making sure that we have community health clinics and safety net clinics. So a great experience there. I also had the privilege, after eight years in public health, I went to the National Institute of Health. >> Oh, wow. >> Where I basically worked in clinical research, basically on minority health and health disparities. So, I was in various leadership roles and helped to advance the science of health equity, working in collaboration with a lot of scientists and researchers at the NIH, really to advance the science. >> Where did your interest in health equity come from? Was there a defining moment when you were younger and you thought "There's a lot of inequities here, we have to do something about this." Where did that interest start? >> That's a great question. I think this influence was basically maybe from my upbringing as well as my family and also what I saw around me in Ghana, a lot of preventable diseases. I always say that my grandfather on my father's side was a great influence, inspired me and influenced my career because he was the only sibling, really, that went to school. And as a result, he was able to earn enough money and built, you know, a hospital. >> Oh wow. >> In their hometown. >> Oh my gosh! >> It started as a 20 bed hospital and now it's a 350 bed hospital. >> Oh, wow, that's amazing! >> In our hometown. And he knew that education was important and vital as well for wellbeing. And so he really inspired, you know, his work inspired me. And I remember in residency I went with a group of residents to this hospital in Ghana just to help over a summer break. So during a summer where we went and helped take care of the sick patients and actually learned, right? What it is like to care for so many patients and- >> Yeah. >> It was really a humbling experience. But that really inspired me. I think also being in this country. And when I came to the U.S. and really saw firsthand how patients are treated differently, based on their background or socioeconomic status. I did see firsthand, you know, that kind of unconscious bias. And, you know, drew me to the field of health disparities research and wanted to learn more and do more and contribute. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So, I was curious. Just when did the data science aspect tap in? Like when did you decide that, okay, data science is going to be a problem solving tool to like all the problems you just said? >> Yeah, that's a good question. So while I was at the NIH, I spent eight years there, and precision medicine was launched at that time and there was a lot of heightened interest in big data and how big data could help really revolutionize medicine and healthcare. And I got the opportunity to go, you know, there was an opportunity where they were looking for physicians or deputy chief health officer at IBM. And so I went to IBM, Watson Health was being formed as a new business unit, and I was one of the first deputy chief health officers really to lead the data and the science evidence. And that's where I realized, you know, we could really, you know, the technology in healthcare, there's been a lot of data that I think we are not really using or optimizing to make sure that we're taking care of our patients. >> Yeah. >> And so that's how I got into data science and making sure that we are building technologies using the right data to advance health equity. >> Right, so talk a little bit about health equity? We mentioned you're with Marti Health. You've been there for a short time, but Marti Health is also quite new, just a few months old. Digital health equity, talk about what Marti's vision is, what its mission is to really help start dialing down a lot of the disparities that you talked about that you see every day? >> Yeah, so, I've been so privileged. I recently joined Marti Health as their Chief Medical Officer, Chief Health Officer. It's a startup that is actually trying to promote a value-based care, also promote patient-centered care for patients that are experiencing a social disadvantage as a result of their race, ethnicity. And were starting to look at and focused on patients that have sickle cell disease. >> Okay. >> Because we realize that that's a population, you know, we know sickle cell disease is a genetic disorder. It impacts a lot of patients that are from areas that are endemic malaria. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> And most of our patients here are African American, and when, you know, they suffer so much stigma and discrimination in the healthcare system and complications from their sickle cell disease. And so what we want to do that we feel like sickle cell is a litmus test for disparities. And we want to make sure that they get in patient-centered care. We want to make sure that we are leveraging data and the research that we've done in sickle cell disease, especially on the continent of Africa. >> Okay. >> And provide, promote better quality care for the patients. >> That's so inspiring. You know, we've heard so many great stories today. Were you able to watch the keynote this morning? >> Yes. >> I loved how it always inspires me. This conference is always, we were talking about this all day, how you walk in the Arrillaga Alumni Center here where this event is held every year, the vibe is powerful, it's positive, it's encouraging. >> Inspiring, yeah. >> Absolutely. >> Inspiring. >> Yeah, yeah. >> It's a movement, WIDS is a movement. They've created this community where you feel, I don't know, kind of superhuman. "Why can't I do this? Why not me?" We heard some great stories this morning about data science in terms of applications. You have a great application in terms of health equity. We heard about it in police violence. >> Yes. >> Which is an epidemic in this country for sure, as we know. This happens too often. How can we use data and data science as a facilitator of learning more about that, so that that can stop? I think that's so important for more people to understand all of the broad applications of data science, whether it's police violence or climate change or drug discovery or health inequities. >> Irene: Yeah. >> The potential, I think we're scratching the surface. But the potential is massive. >> Tracy: It is. >> And this is an event that really helps women and underrepresented minorities think, "Why not me? Why can't I get involved in that?" >> Yeah, and I always say we use data to make an make a lot of decisions. And especially in healthcare, we want to be careful about how we are using data because this is impacting the health and outcomes of our patients. And so science evidence is really critical, you know? We want to make sure that data is inclusive and we have quality data. >> Yes. >> And it's transparent. Our clinical trials, I always say are not always diverse and inclusive. And if that's going to form the evidence base or data points then we're doing more harm than good for our patients. And so data science, it's huge. I mean, we need a robust, responsible, trustworthy data science agenda. >> "Trust" you just brought up "trust." >> Yeah. >> I did. >> When we talk about data, we can't not talk about security and privacy and ethics but trust is table stakes. We have to be able to evaluate the data and trust in it. >> Exactly. >> And what it says and the story that can be told from it. So that trust factor is, I think, foundational to data science. >> We all see what happened with Covid, right? I mean, when the pandemic came out- >> Absolutely. >> Everyone wanted information. We wanted data, we wanted data we could trust. There was a lot of hesitancy even with the vaccine. >> Yeah. >> Right? And so public health, I mean, like you said, we had to do a lot of work making sure that the right information from the right data was being translated or conveyed to the communities. And so you are totally right. I mean, data and good information, relevant data is always key. >> Well- >> Is there any- Oh, sorry. >> Go ahead. >> Is there anything Marti Health is doing in like ensuring that you guys get the right data that you can put trust in it? >> Yes, absolutely. And so this is where we are, you know, part of it would be getting data, real world evidence data for patients who are being seen in the healthcare system with sickle cell disease, so that we can personalize the data to those patients and provide them with the right treatment, the right intervention that they need. And so part of it would be doing predictive modeling on some of the data, risk, stratifying risk, who in the sickle cell patient population is at risk of progressing. Or getting, you know, they all often get crisis, vaso-occlusive crisis because the cells, you know, the blood cell sickles and you want to avoid those chest crisis. And so part of what we'll be doing is, you know, using predictive modeling to target those at risk of the disease progressing, so that we can put in preventive measures. It's all about prevention. It's all about making sure that they're not being, you know, going to the hospital or the emergency room where sometimes they end up, you know, in pain and wanting pain medicine. And so. >> Do you see AI as being a critical piece in the transformation of healthcare, especially where inequities are concerned? >> Absolutely, and and when you say AI, I think it's responsible AI. >> Yes. >> And making sure that it's- >> Tracy: That's such a good point. >> Yeah. >> Very. >> With the right data, with relevant data, it's definitely key. I think there is so much data points that healthcare has, you know, in the healthcare space there's fiscal data, biological data, there's environmental data and we are not using it to the full capacity and full potential. >> Tracy: Yeah. >> And I think AI can do that if we do it carefully, and like I said, responsibly. >> That's a key word. You talked about trust, responsibility. Where data science, AI is concerned- >> Yeah. >> It has to be not an afterthought, it has to be intentional. >> Tracy: Exactly. >> And there needs to be a lot of education around it. Most people think, "Oh, AI is just for the technology," you know? >> Yeah, right. >> Goop. >> Yes. >> But I think we're all part, I mean everyone needs to make sure that we are collecting the right amount of data. I mean, I think we all play a part, right? >> We do. >> We do. >> In making sure that we have responsible AI, we have, you know, good data, quality data. And the data sciences is a multi-disciplinary field, I think. >> It is, which is one of the things that's exciting about it is it is multi-disciplinary. >> Tracy: Exactly. >> And so many of the people that we've talked to in data science have these very non-linear paths to get there, and so I think they bring such diversity of thought and backgrounds and experiences and thoughts and voices. That helps train the AI models with data that's more inclusive. >> Irene: Yes. >> Dropping down the volume on the bias that we know is there. To be successful, it has to. >> Definitely, I totally agree. >> What are some of the things, as we wrap up here, that you're looking forward to accomplishing as part of Marti Health? Like, maybe what's on the roadmap that you can share with us for Marti as it approaches the the second half of its first year? >> Yes, it's all about promoting health equity. It's all about, I mean, there's so much, well, I would start with, you know, part of the healthcare transformation is making sure that we are promoting care that's based on value and not volume, care that's based on good health outcomes, quality health outcomes, and not just on, you know, the quantity. And so Marti Health is trying to promote that value-based care. We are envisioning a world in which everyone can live their full life potential. Have the best health outcomes, and provide that patient-centered precision care. >> And we all want that. We all want that. We expect that precision and that personalized experience in our consumer lives, why not in healthcare? Well, thank you, Irene, for joining us on the program today. >> Thank you. >> Talking about what you're doing to really help drive the volume up on health equity, and raise awareness for the fact that there's a lot of inequities in there we have to fix. We have a long way to go. >> We have, yes. >> Lisa: But people like you are making an impact and we appreciate you joining theCUBE today and sharing what you're doing, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you- >> Thank you for having me here. >> Oh, our pleasure. For our guest and Tracy Zhang, this is Lisa Martin from WIDS 2023, the eighth Annual Women in Data Science Conference brought to you by theCUBE. Stick around, our show wrap will be in just a minute. Thanks for watching. (light upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We've got a great conversation featuring Arthur AI. I'm your host. I'm excited to have Adam Wenchel who's the Co-Founder and CEO. Thanks for joining us today, appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks for having me on, John, looking forward to the conversation. >> I got to say, it's been an exciting world in AI or artificial intelligence. Just an explosion of interest kind of in the mainstream with the language models, which people don't really get, but they're seeing the benefits of some of the hype around OpenAI. Which kind of wakes everyone up to, "Oh, I get it now." And then of course the pessimism comes in, all the skeptics are out there. But this breakthrough in generative AI field is just awesome, it's really a shift, it's a wave. We've been calling it probably the biggest inflection point, then the others combined of what this can do from a surge standpoint, applications. I mean, all aspects of what we used to know is the computing industry, software industry, hardware, is completely going to get turbo. So we're totally obviously bullish on this thing. So, this is really interesting. So my first question is, I got to ask you, what's you guys taking? 'Cause you've been doing this, you're in it, and now all of a sudden you're at the beach where the big waves are. What's the explosion of interest is there? What are you seeing right now? >> Yeah, I mean, it's amazing, so for starters, I've been in AI for over 20 years and just seeing this amount of excitement and the growth, and like you said, the inflection point we've hit in the last six months has just been amazing. And, you know, what we're seeing is like people are getting applications into production using LLMs. I mean, really all this excitement just started a few months ago, with ChatGPT and other breakthroughs and the amount of activity and the amount of new systems that we're seeing hitting production already so soon after that is just unlike anything we've ever seen. So it's pretty awesome. And, you know, these language models are just, they could be applied in so many different business contexts and that it's just the amount of value that's being created is again, like unprecedented compared to anything. >> Adam, you know, you've been in this for a while, so it's an interesting point you're bringing up, and this is a good point. I was talking with my friend John Markoff, former New York Times journalist and he was talking about, there's been a lot of work been done on ethics. So there's been, it's not like it's new. It's like been, there's a lot of stuff that's been baking over many, many years and, you know, decades. So now everyone wakes up in the season, so I think that is a key point I want to get into some of your observations. But before we get into it, I want you to explain for the folks watching, just so we can kind of get a definition on the record. What's an LLM, what's a foundational model and what's generative ai? Can you just quickly explain the three things there? >> Yeah, absolutely. So an LLM or a large language model, it's just a large, they would imply a large language model that's been trained on a huge amount of data typically pulled from the internet. And it's a general purpose language model that can be built on top for all sorts of different things, that includes traditional NLP tasks like document classification and sentiment understanding. But the thing that's gotten people really excited is it's used for generative tasks. So, you know, asking it to summarize documents or asking it to answer questions. And these aren't new techniques, they've been around for a while, but what's changed is just this new class of models that's based on new architectures. They're just so much more capable that they've gone from sort of science projects to something that's actually incredibly useful in the real world. And there's a number of companies that are making them accessible to everyone so that you can build on top of them. So that's the other big thing is, this kind of access to these models that can power generative tasks has been democratized in the last few months and it's just opening up all these new possibilities. And then the third one you mentioned foundation models is sort of a broader term for the category that includes LLMs, but it's not just language models that are included. So we've actually seen this for a while in the computer vision world. So people have been building on top of computer vision models, pre-trained computer vision models for a while for image classification, object detection, that's something we've had customers doing for three or four years already. And so, you know, like you said, there are antecedents to like, everything that's happened, it's not entirely new, but it does feel like a step change. >> Yeah, I did ask ChatGPT to give me a riveting introduction to you and it gave me an interesting read. If we have time, I'll read it. It's kind of, it's fun, you get a kick out of it. "Ladies and gentlemen, today we're a privileged "to have Adam Wenchel, Founder of Arthur who's going to talk "about the exciting world of artificial intelligence." And then it goes on with some really riveting sentences. So if we have time, I'll share that, it's kind of funny. It was good. >> Okay. >> So anyway, this is what people see and this is why I think it's exciting 'cause I think people are going to start refactoring what they do. And I've been saying this on theCUBE now for about a couple months is that, you know, there's a scene in "Moneyball" where Billy Beane sits down with the Red Sox owner and the Red Sox owner says, "If people aren't rebuilding their teams on your model, "they're going to be dinosaurs." And it reminds me of what's happening right now. And I think everyone that I talk to in the business sphere is looking at this and they're connecting the dots and just saying, if we don't rebuild our business with this new wave, they're going to be out of business because there's so much efficiency, there's so much automation, not like DevOps automation, but like the generative tasks that will free up the intellect of people. Like just the simple things like do an intro or do this for me, write some code, write a countermeasure to a hack. I mean, this is kind of what people are doing. And you mentioned computer vision, again, another huge field where 5G things are coming on, it's going to accelerate. What do you say to people when they kind of are leaning towards that, I need to rethink my business? >> Yeah, it's 100% accurate and what's been amazing to watch the last few months is the speed at which, and the urgency that companies like Microsoft and Google or others are actually racing to, to do that rethinking of their business. And you know, those teams, those companies which are large and haven't always been the fastest moving companies are working around the clock. And the pace at which they're rolling out LLMs across their suite of products is just phenomenal to watch. And it's not just the big, the large tech companies as well, I mean, we're seeing the number of startups, like we get, every week a couple of new startups get in touch with us for help with their LLMs and you know, there's just a huge amount of venture capital flowing into it right now because everyone realizes the opportunities for transforming like legal and healthcare and content creation in all these different areas is just wide open. And so there's a massive gold rush going on right now, which is amazing. >> And the cloud scale, obviously horizontal scalability of the cloud brings us to another level. We've been seeing data infrastructure since the Hadoop days where big data was coined. Now you're seeing this kind of take fruit, now you have vertical specialization where data shines, large language models all of a set up perfectly for kind of this piece. And you know, as you mentioned, you've been doing it for a long time. Let's take a step back and I want to get into how you started the company, what drove you to start it? Because you know, as an entrepreneur you're probably saw this opportunity before other people like, "Hey, this is finally it, it's here." Can you share the origination story of what you guys came up with, how you started it, what was the motivation and take us through that origination story. >> Yeah, absolutely. So as I mentioned, I've been doing AI for many years. I started my career at DARPA, but it wasn't really until 2015, 2016, my previous company was acquired by Capital One. Then I started working there and shortly after I joined, I was asked to start their AI team and scale it up. And for the first time I was actually doing it, had production models that we were working with, that was at scale, right? And so there was hundreds of millions of dollars of business revenue and certainly a big group of customers who were impacted by the way these models acted. And so it got me hyper-aware of these issues of when you get models into production, it, you know. So I think people who are earlier in the AI maturity look at that as a finish line, but it's really just the beginning and there's this constant drive to make them better, make sure they're not degrading, make sure you can explain what they're doing, if they're impacting people, making sure they're not biased. And so at that time, there really weren't any tools to exist to do this, there wasn't open source, there wasn't anything. And so after a few years there, I really started talking to other people in the industry and there was a really clear theme that this needed to be addressed. And so, I joined with my Co-Founder John Dickerson, who was on the faculty in University of Maryland and he'd been doing a lot of research in these areas. And so we ended up joining up together and starting Arthur. >> Awesome. Well, let's get into what you guys do. Can you explain the value proposition? What are people using you for now? Where's the action? What's the customers look like? What do prospects look like? Obviously you mentioned production, this has been the theme. It's not like people woke up one day and said, "Hey, I'm going to put stuff into production." This has kind of been happening. There's been companies that have been doing this at scale and then yet there's a whole follower model coming on mainstream enterprise and businesses. So there's kind of the early adopters are there now in production. What do you guys do? I mean, 'cause I think about just driving the car off the lot is not, you got to manage operations. I mean, that's a big thing. So what do you guys do? Talk about the value proposition and how you guys make money? >> Yeah, so what we do is, listen, when you go to validate ahead of deploying these models in production, starts at that point, right? So you want to make sure that if you're going to be upgrading a model, if you're going to replacing one that's currently in production, that you've proven that it's going to perform well, that it's going to be perform ethically and that you can explain what it's doing. And then when you launch it into production, traditionally data scientists would spend 25, 30% of their time just manually checking in on their model day-to-day babysitting as we call it, just to make sure that the data hasn't drifted, the model performance hasn't degraded, that a programmer did make a change in an upstream data system. You know, there's all sorts of reasons why the world changes and that can have a real adverse effect on these models. And so what we do is bring the same kind of automation that you have for other kinds of, let's say infrastructure monitoring, application monitoring, we bring that to your AI systems. And that way if there ever is an issue, it's not like weeks or months till you find it and you find it before it has an effect on your P&L and your balance sheet, which is too often before they had tools like Arthur, that was the way they were detected. >> You know, I was talking to Swami at Amazon who I've known for a long time for 13 years and been on theCUBE multiple times and you know, I watched Amazon try to pick up that sting with stage maker about six years ago and so much has happened since then. And he and I were talking about this wave, and I kind of brought up this analogy to how when cloud started, it was, Hey, I don't need a data center. 'Cause when I did my startup that time when Amazon, one of my startups at that time, my choice was put a box in the colo, get all the configuration before I could write over the line of code. So the cloud became the benefit for that and you can stand up stuff quickly and then it grew from there. Here it's kind of the same dynamic, you don't want to have to provision a large language model or do all this heavy lifting. So that seeing companies coming out there saying, you can get started faster, there's like a new way to get it going. So it's kind of like the same vibe of limiting that heavy lifting. >> Absolutely. >> How do you look at that because this seems to be a wave that's going to be coming in and how do you guys help companies who are going to move quickly and start developing? >> Yeah, so I think in the race to this kind of gold rush mentality, race to get these models into production, there's starting to see more sort of examples and evidence that there are a lot of risks that go along with it. Either your model says things, your system says things that are just wrong, you know, whether it's hallucination or just making things up, there's lots of examples. If you go on Twitter and the news, you can read about those, as well as sort of times when there could be toxic content coming out of things like that. And so there's a lot of risks there that you need to think about and be thoughtful about when you're deploying these systems. But you know, you need to balance that with the business imperative of getting these things into production and really transforming your business. And so that's where we help people, we say go ahead, put them in production, but just make sure you have the right guardrails in place so that you can do it in a smart way that's going to reflect well on you and your company. >> Let's frame the challenge for the companies now that you have, obviously there's the people who doing large scale production and then you have companies maybe like as small as us who have large linguistic databases or transcripts for example, right? So what are customers doing and why are they deploying AI right now? And is it a speed game, is it a cost game? Why have some companies been able to deploy AI at such faster rates than others? And what's a best practice to onboard new customers? >> Yeah, absolutely. So I mean, we're seeing across a bunch of different verticals, there are leaders who have really kind of started to solve this puzzle about getting AI models into production quickly and being able to iterate on them quickly. And I think those are the ones that realize that imperative that you mentioned earlier about how transformational this technology is. And you know, a lot of times, even like the CEOs or the boards are very personally kind of driving this sense of urgency around it. And so, you know, that creates a lot of movement, right? And so those companies have put in place really smart infrastructure and rails so that people can, data scientists aren't encumbered by having to like hunt down data, get access to it. They're not encumbered by having to stand up new platforms every time they want to deploy an AI system, but that stuff is already in place. There's a really nice ecosystem of products out there, including Arthur, that you can tap into. Compared to five or six years ago when I was building at a top 10 US bank, at that point you really had to build almost everything yourself and that's not the case now. And so it's really nice to have things like, you know, you mentioned AWS SageMaker and a whole host of other tools that can really accelerate things. >> What's your profile customer? Is it someone who already has a team or can people who are learning just dial into the service? What's the persona? What's the pitch, if you will, how do you align with that customer value proposition? Do people have to be built out with a team and in play or is it pre-production or can you start with people who are just getting going? >> Yeah, people do start using it pre-production for validation, but I think a lot of our customers do have a team going and they're starting to put, either close to putting something into production or about to, it's everything from large enterprises that have really sort of complicated, they have dozens of models running all over doing all sorts of use cases to tech startups that are very focused on a single problem, but that's like the lifeblood of the company and so they need to guarantee that it works well. And you know, we make it really easy to get started, especially if you're using one of the common model development platforms, you can just kind of turn key, get going and make sure that you have a nice feedback loop. So then when your models are out there, it's pointing out, areas where it's performing well, areas where it's performing less well, giving you that feedback so that you can make improvements, whether it's in training data or futurization work or algorithm selection. There's a number of, you know, depending on the symptoms, there's a number of things you can do to increase performance over time and we help guide people on that journey. >> So Adam, I have to ask, since you have such a great customer base and they're smart and they got teams and you're on the front end, I mean, early adopters is kind of an overused word, but they're killing it. They're putting stuff in the production's, not like it's a test, it's not like it's early. So as the next wave comes of fast followers, how do you see that coming online? What's your vision for that? How do you see companies that are like just waking up out of the frozen, you know, freeze of like old IT to like, okay, they got cloud, but they're not yet there. What do you see in the market? I see you're in the front end now with the top people really nailing AI and working hard. What's the- >> Yeah, I think a lot of these tools are becoming, or every year they get easier, more accessible, easier to use. And so, you know, even for that kind of like, as the market broadens, it takes less and less of a lift to put these systems in place. And the thing is, every business is unique, they have their own kind of data and so you can use these foundation models which have just been trained on generic data. They're a great starting point, a great accelerant, but then, in most cases you're either going to want to create a model or fine tune a model using data that's really kind of comes from your particular customers, the people you serve and so that it really reflects that and takes that into account. And so I do think that these, like the size of that market is expanding and its broadening as these tools just become easier to use and also the knowledge about how to build these systems becomes more widespread. >> Talk about your customer base you have now, what's the makeup, what size are they? Give a taste a little bit of a customer base you got there, what's they look like? I'll say Capital One, we know very well while you were at there, they were large scale, lot of data from fraud detection to all kinds of cool stuff. What do your customers now look like? >> Yeah, so we have a variety, but I would say one area we're really strong, we have several of the top 10 US banks, that's not surprising, that's a strength for us, but we also have Fortune 100 customers in healthcare, in manufacturing, in retail, in semiconductor and electronics. So what we find is like in any sort of these major verticals, there's typically, you know, one, two, three kind of companies that are really leading the charge and are the ones that, you know, in our opinion, those are the ones that for the next multiple decades are going to be the leaders, the ones that really kind of lead the charge on this AI transformation. And so we're very fortunate to be working with some of those. And then we have a number of startups as well who we love working with just because they're really pushing the boundaries technologically and so they provide great feedback and make sure that we're continuing to innovate and staying abreast of everything that's going on. >> You know, these early markups, even when the hyperscalers were coming online, they had to build everything themselves. That's the new, they're like the alphas out there building it. This is going to be a big wave again as that fast follower comes in. And so when you look at the scale, what advice would you give folks out there right now who want to tee it up and what's your secret sauce that will help them get there? >> Yeah, I think that the secret to teeing it up is just dive in and start like the, I think these are, there's not really a secret. I think it's amazing how accessible these are. I mean, there's all sorts of ways to access LLMs either via either API access or downloadable in some cases. And so, you know, go ahead and get started. And then our secret sauce really is the way that we provide that performance analysis of what's going on, right? So we can tell you in a very actionable way, like, hey, here's where your model is doing good things, here's where it's doing bad things. Here's something you want to take a look at, here's some potential remedies for it. We can help guide you through that. And that way when you're putting it out there, A, you're avoiding a lot of the common pitfalls that people see and B, you're able to really kind of make it better in a much faster way with that tight feedback loop. >> It's interesting, we've been kind of riffing on this supercloud idea because it was just different name than multicloud and you see apps like Snowflake built on top of AWS without even spending any CapEx, you just ride that cloud wave. This next AI, super AI wave is coming. I don't want to call AIOps because I think there's a different distinction. If you, MLOps and AIOps seem a little bit old, almost a few years back, how do you view that because everyone's is like, "Is this AIOps?" And like, "No, not kind of, but not really." How would you, you know, when someone says, just shoots off the hip, "Hey Adam, aren't you doing AIOps?" Do you say, yes we are, do you say, yes, but we do differently because it's doesn't seem like it's the same old AIOps. What's your- >> Yeah, it's a good question. AIOps has been a term that was co-opted for other things and MLOps also has people have used it for different meanings. So I like the term just AI infrastructure, I think it kind of like describes it really well and succinctly. >> But you guys are doing the ops. I mean that's the kind of ironic thing, it's like the next level, it's like NextGen ops, but it's not, you don't want to be put in that bucket. >> Yeah, no, it's very operationally focused platform that we have, I mean, it fires alerts, people can action off them. If you're familiar with like the way people run security operations centers or network operations centers, we do that for data science, right? So think of it as a DSOC, a Data Science Operations Center where all your models, you might have hundreds of models running across your organization, you may have five, but as problems are detected, alerts can be fired and you can actually work the case, make sure they're resolved, escalate them as necessary. And so there is a very strong operational aspect to it, you're right. >> You know, one of the things I think is interesting is, is that, if you don't mind commenting on it, is that the aspect of scale is huge and it feels like that was made up and now you have scale and production. What's your reaction to that when people say, how does scale impact this? >> Yeah, scale is huge for some of, you know, I think, I think look, the highest leverage business areas to apply these to, are generally going to be the ones at the biggest scale, right? And I think that's one of the advantages we have. Several of us come from enterprise backgrounds and we're used to doing things enterprise grade at scale and so, you know, we're seeing more and more companies, I think they started out deploying AI and sort of, you know, important but not necessarily like the crown jewel area of their business, but now they're deploying AI right in the heart of things and yeah, the scale that some of our companies are operating at is pretty impressive. >> John: Well, super exciting, great to have you on and congratulations. I got a final question for you, just random. What are you most excited about right now? Because I mean, you got to be pretty pumped right now with the way the world is going and again, I think this is just the beginning. What's your personal view? How do you feel right now? >> Yeah, the thing I'm really excited about for the next couple years now, you touched on it a little bit earlier, but is a sort of convergence of AI and AI systems with sort of turning into AI native businesses. And so, as you sort of do more, get good further along this transformation curve with AI, it turns out that like the better the performance of your AI systems, the better the performance of your business. Because these models are really starting to underpin all these key areas that cumulatively drive your P&L. And so one of the things that we work a lot with our customers is to do is just understand, you know, take these really esoteric data science notions and performance and tie them to all their business KPIs so that way you really are, it's kind of like the operating system for running your AI native business. And we're starting to see more and more companies get farther along that maturity curve and starting to think that way, which is really exciting. >> I love the AI native. I haven't heard any startup yet say AI first, although we kind of use the term, but I guarantee that's going to come in all the pitch decks, we're an AI first company, it's going to be great run. Adam, congratulations on your success to you and the team. Hey, if we do a few more interviews, we'll get the linguistics down. We can have bots just interact with you directly and ask you, have an interview directly. >> That sounds good, I'm going to go hang out on the beach, right? So, sounds good. >> Thanks for coming on, really appreciate the conversation. Super exciting, really important area and you guys doing great work. Thanks for coming on. >> Adam: Yeah, thanks John. >> Again, this is Cube Conversation. I'm John Furrier here in Palo Alto, AI going next gen. This is legit, this is going to a whole nother level that's going to open up huge opportunities for startups, that's going to use opportunities for investors and the value to the users and the experience will come in, in ways I think no one will ever see. So keep an eye out for more coverage on siliconangle.com and theCUBE.net, thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome to theCUBE special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, or videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and AWS. This is the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS Showcase: Accelerating Business Transformation. Here in the Showcase at Samir Kadoo, worldwide VMware strategic alliance solution architect leader with AWS. Samir, great to have you. And Daniel Rethmeier, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are working together, you're the key players in this relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, greatly appreciate it. >> Great to have you guys both on. As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Gelsinger, then CEO, and then then CEO AWS at Andy Jassy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success of VM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later, we got this whole inflection point coming, you're starting to see this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side, more automation, more serverless, I mean and AI. I mean, it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kind of a whole 'nother level. Where are we? Samir, let's start with you on the relationship. >> Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced. And then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware Cloud on AWS. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware. Day in, day out, as far as advancing VMware Cloud on AWS. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with the solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements. You know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right, more recently. One of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware Cloud on AWS. And even with VMware to other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware Cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware Cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint, there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >> Great stuff. Daniel, I want to get to you in a second upon this principal architect position you have. In your title, you're the global AWS synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly VMworld, talking about how the workloads on IT has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AIOps, you got ITOps changing a lot, you got a lot more automation, edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the relationship? >> So at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware Cloud and AWS, we are also enabling us mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembles globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers. That's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the best benefits out of VMware Cloud on AWS. And over the time, we really have involved the solution. As Samir mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware Cloud on AWS. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of workloads. So for example, we just edited the I4i host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as, you mentioned it, AI workloads. >> Yeah, so I want to get us just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation, you know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in theCUBE in the past couple weeks in a big way that the ops teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds a little bit weird, but IT operations is now part of a lot more DataOps, security, writing code, composing. You know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing, what are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >> That's a great point, because originally, VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people and customers. So for example, AWS, very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the ITOps area. And usually these are very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customer needs, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, "Well, we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service. Recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure." That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on-premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >> Samir, talk about your perspective. I want to get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS re:MARS, actually it was Amazon re:MARS, machine learning automation, robotics and space was really kind of the confluence of industrial IoT, software, physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code, automation, you know, "Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster." Yeah, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services, meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >> Yeah. Yeah, totally, right? And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware Cloud on AWS, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you want to leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's going to give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with IoT, even with utilizing Alexa, or if there's any other service that you want to utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings right off the top. Though with digital transformation, right, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology even in your business. Leaders are looking to reinvent their business, they're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy, maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. >> Okay. >> Then also- >> Oh, go ahead, finish your thought. >> No, no, no, I was going to say what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that vStor admin that's used to their on-premises environment. Now with VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, you still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware Cloud on AWS too. >> Daniel, I want to get your thoughts on this because at Explore and after the event, as we prep for CubeCon and re:Invent coming up, the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators, and it's like hundreds of thousands of users and millions of people talking about and peaked on VMware, interested in VMware. The common thread was one person said, "I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to put my career in the next 10 to 15 years." And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm going to be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet. Architects, is it solution architect, SRE? So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are going to try to make these career decisions. Like what am I going to work on? And then it's kind of fuzzy, but I want to get your thoughts, how would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity? And what's going to happen? >> So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills and trainings? Is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the answer is to make digital transformation a success, we need not just to talk about technology, but also about process, people, and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware Cloud on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment, you can use the same managing and monitoring tools, if you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware Cloud on AWS. And that gives not just leaders, but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in such a complex project. >> The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go. And then now that once they're confident, they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because on your side, you've got higher level services, you've got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, a lot improvements. So, okay, nothing's changed, I can still run my job, now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the customer there? >> Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware Cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud. But if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you want to utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on-premises or even in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you want to expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >> Great stuff, I love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, 'cause people want to know what's goes on behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationships? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? Do you guys just have a Zoom meeting, do you guys fly out, you write code, go do you ship things? I mean, I'm making it up, but you get the idea. How does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >> So we hope to get more frequently together in-person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to Zoom conferences and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if you are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have regular assembles now also in-person, geo-based, so for AMEA, for the Americas, for APJ. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >> What's interesting, you know, as events are coming back, Samir, before you weigh in this, I'll comment as theCUBE's been going back out to events, we're hearing comments like, "What pandemic? We were more productive in the pandemic." I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in-person, they're happy to see people, but no one's really missed the beat. I mean, it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More, if anything, productivity gains. >> Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is even if you look at AWS's, and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said and meant earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in-person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation in VMware Cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology, we've been able to still communicate, work with our customers, even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot, we had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts. So even with the on-premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >> In our last segment we did here on this Showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean geo, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and people can reference that, we won't get into it here. But I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Because again, I think right now, we're at an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with re:Invent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >> So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked for over the last years. Whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have to add additional nodes. Now we have three different node types with different ratios of compute, storage, and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay for it. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS6 wanted a ONTAP and VMware Cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements, at the upcoming events. >> Samir, what's your reaction take on what's coming down on your side? >> Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scaled with their needs, right? So with VMware Cloud on AWS, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are going to be announcements, innovations, and whatnot with upcoming events. But together, we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS. To Daniel's point, storage for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right? Now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware Cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's going to be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events, that's going to give us the options to even advance our own services together. >> Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I want to get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in the open conversations on theCUBE is in the old days, let's go back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem, AWS had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships, and they do business together and they sell each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture, 'cause we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining and you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides, they come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem interplay. What's your thoughts on this? Because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much innovations only. You got to do innovation, but when you do innovation, you got to integrate it, you got to connect it. So how do you guys see this as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >> So we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware Cloud on AWS, moving to the cloud, firstly it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise, you can do this. If you decide you want to stay with some of your services on-premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can man manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead end, it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on-premise or the cloud, it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both worlds, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware Cloud on AWS either way in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich, later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by AWS, more than 200 different services ranging from object-based storage, load balancing, and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >> We call that super cloud in the way that we generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is kind of where cloud is right now. You guys are not commodity, amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things happen. You got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. >> Absolutely. >> And everybody wins. >> Yeah, I 100% agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with AWS, maybe more proficient with the VMware's technology. But then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud, maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are, maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware Cloud on AWS. Maybe you want to leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top, 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skillset, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the day. >> I mean, I just think it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean you don't have to do anything. You still run it. Just spear the way you're working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >> Yeah, absolutely. And if you look, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time, they can free up resources to develop new innovations and grow their business. >> Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Daniel, thank you for coming to Germany. >> Thank you. Oktoberfest, I know it's evening over there, weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir, give you the final word. AWS re:Invent's coming up. We're preparing, we're going to have an exclusive with Adam, with Fryer, we'd do a curtain raise, and do a little preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at re:Invent this year? The big show? >> Yeah, so I think Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what are called chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there, but if they want to be hands-on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, been in sysadmin world and whatnot, being hands-on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. >> Yeah, and re:Invent's an amazing show for the in-person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at theCUBE and it's becoming popular. We have more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media. So thanks for sharing that. Samir, Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the Showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS, really accelerating business transformation with AWS and VMware. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to the Cube special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Foer, host of the Cube. We've got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, our videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and aws. This is the customer successes with VMware cloud on AWS showcase, accelerating business transformation here in the showcase with Samir Candu Worldwide. VMware strategic alliance solution, architect leader with AWS Samir. Great to have you and Daniel Re Myer, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are, are working together. You're the key players in the re relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Greatly appreciate it. >>Great to have you guys both on, As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Geling, then CEO and then then CEO AWS at Andy Chasy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success. OFM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since, and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later we got this whole inflection point coming. You're starting to see, you know, this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side. More automation, more serverless, I mean, and a, I mean it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kinda a whole nother level. Where are we, Samir? Let's start with you on, on the relationship. >>Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced, and then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware cloud on aws. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware day in, day out. As far as advancing VMware cloud on aws. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with a solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements, you know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right? More recently, one of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. >>And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware cloud on aws, and even with VMware's, other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >>Great stuff. Daniel, I wanna get to you in a second. Upon this principal architect position you have in your title, you're the global a synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly world, talking about how the, the workloads on it has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AI ops, you got it. Ops changing a lot, you got a lot more automation edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the >>Relationship? So at at, at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. We are also enabling US mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembled globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers, that's, that's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the, the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. And over the time we, we really have involved the solution. As Samia mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware cloud on aws. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of, of workload. So for example, we just added the I four I host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as you mentioned it, AI workloads. >>Yeah. So I wanna guess just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation. You know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in the queue in the past couple weeks in a big way that the OPS teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds OP a little bit weird, but operation IT operations is now part of the, a lot more data ops, security writing code composing, you know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing? What are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >>That, that's a great point because originally VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people at customers. So for example, aws very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the IT ops area. And usually these are very different, very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's, it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customers, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, well we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service, recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure. That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >>Samir, talk about your perspective. I wanna get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS remar of, actually it was Amazon res machine learning automation, robotics and space. It was really kinda the confluence of industrial IOT software physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code automation, you know, Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster. Yeah, I mean, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on, on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >>Yeah, totally. Right. And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware cloud on aws, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's gonna give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with iot, even with utilizing Alexa or if there's any other service that you wanna utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings. Right off the top though, with digital transformation, right? You, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology. Even in your business leaders are looking to reinvent their business. They're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy. Maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. Okay. Then also, Oh, >>Go ahead, finish >>Your thought. No, no, I was gonna say, what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that VS four admin that's used to their on-premises at environment. Now with VMware cloud on aws, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, yeah. You still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware cloud on AWS two. >>Danielle, I wanna get your thoughts on this because at at explore and, and, and after the event, now as we prep for Cuban and reinvent coming up the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators and it's like hundreds of thousands of, of, of, of users and millions of people talking about and and peaked on VM we're interested in v VMware. The common thread was one's one, one person said, I'm trying to figure out where I'm gonna put my career in the next 10 to 15 years. And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm gonna be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet architects, is it Solution architect sre. So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are gonna try to make these career decisions, like how, what am I gonna work on? And it's, and that was kind of fuzzy, but I wanna get your thoughts. How would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity and what's gonna happen? >>So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means in, in to to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills? And, and trainings is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the, the answer is to make digital transformation a success. We need not just to talk about technology, but also about process people and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware cloud on a, on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment. You can use the same managing and monitoring tools. If you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of, of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware cloud on aws. And that gives not just leaders, but but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in, in such a complex project, >>The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go and, and then now that once they're confident they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because you know, on your side you've got higher level services, you got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, lot improvement. So, okay, nothing's changed. I can still run my job now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the, for the, for the customer there? >>Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud, but if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you wanna utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on premises or even in VMware cloud on aws, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you wanna expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >>Great stuff. I love, love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, cuz people wanna know what's goes on in behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationship? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? You guys just have a zoom meeting, Do you guys fly out, you write go do you ship thing? I mean I'm making it up, but you get the idea, what's the, what's, how does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >>So we hope to get more frequently together in person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to zoom conferences and and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if we are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have reg regular assembled now also in person geo based. So for emia, for the Americas, for aj. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >>What's interesting, you know, as, as events are coming back to here, before you get, you weigh in, I'll comment, as the cube's been going back out to events, we are hearing comments like what, what pandemic we were more productive in the pandemic. I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in person, they're happy to see people, but there's no one's, no one's really missed the beat. I mean it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More if anything, productivity gains. >>Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, even if you look at AWS's and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said met earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation and VMware cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there have been, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology we've been able to still communicate work with our customers. Even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot. We had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware cloud on AWS outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware cloud on AWS outposts. So even with the on premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >>And our last segment we did here on the, on this showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean go, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and, and people can reference that. We won't get into it here, but I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Cuz again, I think right now we're in at a, an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with reinvent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >>So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked us for over the last years. Whenever, whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware cloud on aws, you have to add additional notes. Now we have three different note types with different ratios of compute, storage and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS six one, NetApp onap, and VMware cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements at the upcoming events. >>Samir, what's your, what's your reaction take on the, on what's coming down on your side? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scale with their needs, right? So with VMware cloud on aws, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are gonna be announcements, innovations and whatnot with outcoming events. But together we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS to Daniel's point storage, for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's gonna be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events that's gonna give us the options to even advance our own services together. >>Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I wanna get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in, in the open conversations on the cube is in the old days it was going back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem they did best, had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships and they do business together and they, they sell to each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture cuz we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining. >>And this, you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides. They come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem, you know, interplay. What's your thoughts on this? And, and, and because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much. Innovation is only, you gotta do innovation, but when you do innovation, you gotta integrate it, you gotta connect it. So what is, how do you guys see this as a, as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >>So we are, we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even, even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware cloud on aws moving to the cloud, firstly it's, it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe it's some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise. You can do this if you decide you want to stay with some of your services on premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can mana manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead and it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on premise or the cloud. It it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both works, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware cloud on aws, by the way, in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by aws. More than 200 different services ranging from object based storage, load balancing and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >>We, we call that super cloud in, in a, in a way that we be generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is gonna where cloud is right now, you guys are, are not commodity. Amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things. Having got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. Absolutely. And everybody wins. >>Yeah. And a hundred percent agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it it, it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with aws, maybe more proficient with the viewers technology, but then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud. Maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are. Maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware cloud on aws. Maybe you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skill, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of, back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the >>Day. I mean, I just think it's, it's a, it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean, you don't have to do anything. You still run the fear, the way you working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >>Yeah, absolutely. And if, if you look, not every, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we gave, we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time they can free up resources to develop new innovations and, and grow their business. >>Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Danielle, thank you for coming to Germany, Octoberfest, I know it's evening over there, your weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir final give you the final word, AWS reinvents coming up. Preparing. We're gonna have an exclusive with Adam, but Fry, we do a curtain raise, a dual preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at reinvent this year? The big show? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what I call a chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking for to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there. But if they wanna be hands on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, you know, been in CIS admin world and whatnot, being hands on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. Yeah, >>Reinvents an amazing show for the in person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at the cube. It's becoming popular. We more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media, so thanks, thanks for sharing that. Samir Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud Ons, really accelerating business transformation withs and VMware. I'm John Fur with the cube, thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to this cube showcase, accelerating business transformation with VMware cloud on it's a solution innovation conversation with two great guests, Fred and VP of commercial services at aws and NA Ryan Bard, who's the VP and general manager of cloud solutions at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on this showcase. >>Great to be here. >>Hey, thanks for having us on. It's a great topic. You know, we, we've been covering this VMware cloud on abus since, since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch the evolution from people saying, Oh, it's the worst thing I've ever seen. It's what's this mean? And depress work were, we're kind of not really on board with kind of the vision, but as it played out as you guys had announced together, it did work out great for VMware. It did work out great for a D and it continues two years later and I want just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going. I'll see multiple years. Where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware explorer just recently and going in to reinvent, which is only a couple weeks away, feels like tomorrow. But you know, as we prepare a lot going on, where are we with the evolution of the solution? >>I mean, first thing I wanna say is, you know, PBO 2016 was a someon moment and the history of it, right? When Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jessey came together to announce this and I think John, you were there at the time I was there, it was a great, great moment. We launched the solution in 2017, the year after that at VM Word back when we called it Word, I think we have gone from strength to strength. One of the things that has really mattered to us is we have learned froms also in the processes, this notion of working backwards. So we really, really focused on customer feedback as we build a service offering now five years old, pretty remarkable journey. You know, in the first years we tried to get across all the regions, you know, that was a big focus because there was so much demand for it. >>In the second year we started going really on enterprise grade features. We invented this pretty awesome feature called Stretch clusters, where you could stretch a vSphere cluster using VSA and NSX across two AZs in the same region. Pretty phenomenal four nine s availability that applications start started to get with that particular feature. And we kept moving forward all kinds of integration with AWS direct connect transit gateways with our own advanced networking capabilities. You know, along the way, disaster recovery, we punched out two, two new services just focused on that. And then more recently we launched our outposts partnership. We were up on stage at Reinvent, again with Pat Andy announcing AWS outposts and the VMware flavor of that VMware cloud and AWS outposts. I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well with our federal and high certification more recently. So all in all, we are super excited. We're five years old. The customer momentum is really, really strong and we are scaling the service massively across all geos and industries. >>That's great, great update. And I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship. And, and this has kind of been the theme for AWS since I can remember from day one. Fred, you guys do the heavy lifting as as, as you always say for the customers here, VMware comes on board, takes advantage of the AWS and kind of just doesn't miss a beat, continues to move their workloads that everyone's using, you know, vSphere and these are, these are big workloads on aws. What's the AWS perspective on this? How do you see it? >>Yeah, it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move when you take the, the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on Preem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's, that's evolving quickly and, and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about. But that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the, for the customer. So it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint, from a business standpoint. And obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and, and responding to what customers want. So pretty, pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to bmc. Yeah, >>That's what great value publish. We've been talking about that in context too. Anyone building on top of the cloud, they can have their own supercloud as we call it. If you take advantage of all the CapEx and and investment Amazon's made and AWS has made and, and and continues to make in performance IAS and pass all great stuff. I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level, what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options on the market? What makes it different? What's the combination? You mentioned jointly engineered, what are some of the key differentiators of the service compared to others? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things Fred talked about is this jointly engineered notion right from day one. We were the earlier doctors of AWS Nitro platform, right? The reinvention of E two back five years ago. And so we have been, you know, having a very, very strong engineering partnership at that level. I think from a VMware customer standpoint, you get the full software defined data center or compute storage networking on EC two, bare metal across all regions. You can scale that elastically up and down. It's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency globally, right on aws EC two global regions. Now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us that customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service, right? And this was somewhat new to VMware, but we took away the pain of this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers had to provision rack, stack hardware, configure the software on top, and then upgrade the software and the security batches on top. >>So we took, took away all of that pain as customers transitioned to VMware cloud and aws. In fact, my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the lock for j debacle industry was just going through that, right? Favorite proof point from customers was before they put even race this issue to us, we sent them a notification saying we already patched all of your systems, no action from you. The customers were super thrilled. I mean these are large banks, many other customers around the world, super thrilled they had to take no action, but a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing. >>Nora, that's a great, so that's a great point. You know, the whole managed service piece brings up the security, you kind of teasing at it, but you know, there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you are doing complex logic. And as you grow your solutions, there's more bits. You know, Fred, we were commenting before we came on camera, there's more bits than ever before and, and at at the physics layer too, as well as the software. So you never know when there's gonna be a zero day vulnerability out there. Just, it happens. We saw one with fornet this week, this came outta the woodwork. But moving fast on those patches, it's huge. This brings up the whole support angle. I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well, because to me we see the value when we, when we talk to customers on the cube about this, you know, it was a real, real easy understanding of how, what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the aws. But the question that comes up that we wanna get more clarity on is how do you guys handle support together? >>Well, what's interesting about this is that it's, it's done mutually. We have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's a issue at any layer, including all the way up into the app layer, as you think about some of the other workloads like sap, we'll go end to end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them. And on top of that, we look at where, where we're improving reliability in, in as a first order of, of principle between both companies. So from an availability and reliability standpoint, it's, it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land, we're gonna go help the customer resolve. That works really well >>On the VMware side. What's been the feedback there? What's the, what are some of the updates? >>Yeah, I think, look, I mean, VMware owns and operates the service, but we have a phenomenal backend relationship with aws. Customers call VMware for the service for any issues and, and then we have a awesome relationship with AWS on the backend for support issues or any hardware issues. The BASKE management that we jointly do, right? All of the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about. I think on the front end, we also have a really good group of solution architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution. Do complex things like cloud migration, which is much, much easier with VMware cloud aws, you know, we are presenting that easy button to the public cloud in many ways. And so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day. >>You know, you had mentioned, I've got a list here, some of the innovations the, you mentioned the stretch clustering, you know, getting the GOs working, Advanced network, disaster recovery, you know, fed, Fed ramp, public sector certifications, outposts, all good. You guys are checking the boxes every year. You got a good, good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship. The question that I'm interested in is what's next? What recent innovations are you doing? Are you making investments in what's on the lists this year? What items will be next year? How do you see the, the new things, the list of accomplishments, people wanna know what's next. They don't wanna see stagnant growth here, they wanna see more action, you know, as as cloud kind of continues to scale and modern applications cloud native, you're seeing more and more containers, more and more, you know, more CF C I C D pipe pipelining with with modern apps, put more pressure on the system. What's new, what's the new innovations? >>Absolutely. And I think as a five yearold service offering innovation is top of mind for us every single day. So just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explorer. First of all, our new platform i four I dot metal, it's isolate based, it's pretty awesome. It's the latest and greatest, all the speeds and feeds that we would expect from VMware and aws. At this point in our relationship. We announced two different storage options. This notion of working from customer feedback, allowing customers even more price reductions, really take off that storage and park it externally, right? And you know, separate that from compute. So two different storage offerings there. One is with AWS Fsx, with NetApp on tap, which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based, really excited about this offering as well. >>And the second storage offering for VMware cloud Flex Storage, VMware's own managed storage offering. Beyond that, we have done a lot of other innovations as well. I really wanted to talk about VMware cloud Flex Compute, where previously customers could only scale by hosts and a host is 36 to 48 cores, give or take. But with VMware cloud Flex Compute, we are now allowing this notion of a resource defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the V C P memory and storage that maps to the applications, however small they might be. So this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that that we are launching in the market this year. And then last but not least, talk about ransomware. Of course it's a hot topic in industry. We are seeing many, many customers ask for this. We are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware cloud DR solution. >>A lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots and backups are actually safe to use. So there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well. A lot of networking innovations with Project Knot star for ability to have layer flow through layer seven, you know, new SaaS services in that area as well. Keep in mind that the service already supports managed Kubernetes for containers. It's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines. And so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMs and containers and sort of at the heart of our office, >>The networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on. Every year it's the same, same conversation, get better, faster networking, more, more options there. The flex computes. Interesting. If you don't mind me getting a quick clarification, could you explain the Drew screen resource defined versus hardware defined? Because this is kind of what we had saw at Explore coming out, that notion of resource defined versus hardware defined. What's the, what does that mean? >>Yeah, I mean I think we have been super successful in this hardware defined notion. We we're scaling by the hardware unit that we present as software defined data centers, right? And so that's been super successful. But we, you know, customers wanted more, especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally, right? Lower their costs even more. And so this is the part where resource defined starts to be very, very interesting as a way to think about, you know, here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customers request for fiber machines, five containers, its size exactly for that. And then as utilization grows, we elastically behind the scenes, we're able to grow it through policies. So that's a whole different dimension. It's a whole different service offering that adds value and customers are comfortable. They can go from one to the other, they can go back to that post based model if they so choose to. And there's a jump off point across these two different economic models. >>It's kind of cloud of flexibility right there. I like the name Fred. Let's get into some of the examples of customers, if you don't mind. Let's get into some of the ex, we have some time. I wanna unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments. One of the things we've heard again on the cube is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship, they love the cloud positioning of it. And then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like, feels great. It's just like we're running VMware on AWS and then they would start consuming higher level services, kind of that adoption next level happens and because it it's in the cloud, so, So can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware cloud on AWS on getting started, and then how do they progress once they're there? How does it evolve? Can you just walk us through a couple of use cases? >>Sure. There's a, well there's a couple. One, it's pretty interesting that, you know, like you said, as there's more and more bits you need better and better hardware and networking. And we're super excited about the I four and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around a lower variability on latency and just improving all the speeds. But what customers are doing with it, like the college in New Jersey, they're accelerating their deployment on a, on onboarding over like 7,400 students over a six to eight month period. And they've really realized a ton of savings. But what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native services too. So connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this. The, the options there obviously are tied to all the innovation that we have across any services, whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with Tanu or with any other container and or services within aws. >>So there's, there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing, which is moved quickly with full compliance, whether it's in like healthcare or regulatory business is, is allowed to then consume and use things, for example, with tech extract or any other really cool service that has, you know, monthly and quarterly innovations. So there's things that you just can't, could not do before that are coming out and saving customers money and building innovative applications on top of their, their current app base in, in a rapid fashion. So pretty excited about it. There's a lot of examples. I think I probably don't have time to go into too, too many here. Yeah. But that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform. >>Nora, what's your perspective from the VMware sy? So, you know, you guys have now a lot of headroom to offer customers with Amazon's, you know, higher level services and or whatever's homegrown where's being rolled out? Cuz you now have a lot of hybrid too, so, so what's your, what's your take on what, what's happening in with customers? >>I mean, it's been phenomenal, the, the customer adoption of this and you know, banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production grade applications, tier one applications on the service over the last five years. And so, you know, I have a couple of really good examples. S and p Global is one of my favorite examples. Large bank, they merge with IHS market, big sort of conglomeration. Now both customers were using VMware cloud and AWS in different ways. And with the, with the use case, one of their use cases was how do I just respond to these global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers? And then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the global, which there were many. And so one specific example for this company was how they migrated thousand 1000 workloads to VMware cloud AWS in just six weeks. Pretty phenomenal. If you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process, people process technology and the beauty of the technology going from VMware point A to VMware point B, the the lowest cost, lowest risk approach to adopting VMware, VMware cloud, and aws. So that's, you know, one of my favorite examples. There are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see. The good thing is we are seeing rapid expansion across the globe that constantly entering new markets with the limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap there. >>Yeah, it's great to see, I mean the data center migrations go from months, many, many months to weeks. It's interesting to see some of those success stories. So congratulations. One >>Of other, one of the other interesting fascinating benefits is the sustainability improvement in terms of being green. So the efficiency gains that we have both in current generation and new generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic, they're also saving power, which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time. They're, they're seeing those benefits. If you're running really inefficiently in your own data center, that is just a, not a great use of power. So the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads is, are pretty phenomenal just in being more green, which I like. We just all need to do our part there. And, and this is a big part of it here. >>It's a huge, it's a huge point about the sustainability. Fred, I'm glad you called that out. The other one I would say is supply chain issues. Another one you see that constrains, I can't buy hardware. And the third one is really obvious, but no one really talks about it. It's security, right? I mean, I remember interviewing Stephen Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago, this is like 2013, and you know, at that time people were saying the cloud's not secure. And he's like, listen, it's more secure in the cloud on premise. And if you look at the security breaches, it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities, not so much hardware. So there's a lot you gotta to stay current on, on the isolation there is is hard. So I think, I think the security and supply chain, Fred is, is another one. Do you agree? >>I I absolutely agree. It's, it's hard to manage supply chain nowadays. We put a lot of effort into that and I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and, and have the resources that are available and run them, run them more efficiently. Yeah, and then like you said on the security point, security is job one. It is, it is the only P one. And if you think of how we build our infrastructure from Nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers, there's nothing more important. >>And naron your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things, it's really gonna get better. All right, final question. I really wanna thank you for your time on this showcase. It's really been a great conversation. Fred, you had made a comment earlier. I wanna kind of end with kind of a curve ball and put you eyes on the spot. We're talking about a modern, a new modern shift. It's another, we're seeing another inflection point, we've been documenting it, it's almost like cloud hitting another inflection point with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer. Continue to put a lot of pressure and, and innovation in the infrastructure side. So the question is for you guys each to answer is what's the same and what's different in today's market? So it's kind of like we want more of the same here, but also things have changed radically and better here. What are the, what's, what's changed for the better and where, what's still the same kind of thing hanging around that people are focused on? Can you share your perspective? >>I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll tackle it. You know, businesses are complex and they're often unique that that's the same. What's changed is how fast you can innovate. The ability to combine manage services and new innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today. Leveraging world class hardware that you don't have to worry about that's elastic. You, you could not do that even five, 10 years ago to the degree you can today, especially with innovation. So innovation is accelerating at a, at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the, the set of services that are available to them. It's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of of engineers can go actually develop in a week. It is phenomenal. So super excited about this space and it's only gonna continue to accelerate that. That's my take. All right. >>You got a lot of platform to compete on with, got a lot to build on then you're Ryan, your side, What's your, what's your answer to that question? >>I think we are seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers are constant. I think what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop to production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly, you know, build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that motor production quickly and efficiently. I think we, we are seeing, you know, we are at the very start of that sort of of journey. Of course we have invested in Kubernetes the means to an end, but there's so much more beyond that's happening in industry. And I think we're at the very, very beginning of this transformations, enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we are inherently part of it. >>Yeah. Well gentlemen, I really appreciate that we're seeing the same thing. It's more the same here on, you know, solving these complexities with distractions. Whether it's, you know, higher level services with large scale infrastructure at, at your fingertips. Infrastructures, code, infrastructure to be provisioned, serverless, all the good stuff happen in Fred with AWS on your side. And we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator, again, being a cloud operator and developer. So the developer ops is kind of, DevOps is kind of changing too. So all for the better. Thank you for spending the time and we're seeing again, that traction with the VMware customer base and of us getting, getting along great together. So thanks for sharing your perspectives, >>I appreciate it. Thank you so >>Much. Okay, thank you John. Okay, this is the Cube and AWS VMware showcase, accelerating business transformation. VMware cloud on aws, jointly engineered solution, bringing innovation to the VMware customer base, going to the cloud and beyond. I'm John Fur, your host. Thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to the special cube presentation of accelerating business transformation on vmc on aws. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We have dawan director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on adb. This is a great showcase and should be a lot of fun. Ashish, thanks for coming on. >>Hi John. Thank you so much. >>So VMware cloud on AWS has been well documented as this big success for VMware and aws. As customers move their workloads into the cloud, IT operations of VMware customers has signaling a lot of change. This is changing the landscape globally is on cloud migration and beyond. What's your take on this? Can you open this up with the most important story around VMC on aws? >>Yes, John. The most important thing for our customers today is the how they can safely and swiftly move their ID infrastructure and applications through cloud. Now, VMware cloud AWS is a service that allows all vSphere based workloads to move to cloud safely, swiftly and reliably. Banks can move their core, core banking platforms, insurance companies move their core insurance platforms, telcos move their goss, bss, PLA platforms, government organizations are moving their citizen engagement platforms using VMC on aws because this is one platform that allows you to move it, move their VMware based platforms very fast. Migrations can happen in a matter of days instead of months. Extremely securely. It's a VMware manage service. It's very secure and highly reliably. It gets the, the reliability of the underlyings infrastructure along with it. So win-win from our customers perspective. >>You know, we reported on this big news in 2016 with Andy Chas, the, and Pat Geling at the time, a lot of people said it was a bad deal. It turned out to be a great deal because not only could VMware customers actually have a cloud migrate to the cloud, do it safely, which was their number one concern. They didn't want to have disruption to their operations, but also position themselves for what's beyond just shifting to the cloud. So I have to ask you, since you got the finger on the pulse here, what are we seeing in the market when it comes to migrating and modern modernizing in the cloud? Because that's the next step. They go to the cloud, you guys have done that, doing it, then they go, I gotta modernize, which means kind of upgrading or refactoring. What's your take on that? >>Yeah, absolutely. Look, the first step is to help our customers assess their infrastructure and licensing and entire ID operations. Once we've done the assessment, we then create their migration plans. A lot of our customers are at that inflection point. They're, they're looking at their real estate, ex data center, real estate. They're looking at their contracts with colocation vendors. They really want to exit their data centers, right? And VMware cloud and AWS is a perfect solution for customers who wanna exit their data centers, migrate these applications onto the AWS platform using VMC on aws, get rid of additional real estate overheads, power overheads, be socially and environmentally conscious by doing that as well, right? So that's the migration story, but to your point, it doesn't end there, right? Modernization is a critical aspect of the entire customer journey as as well customers, once they've migrated their ID applications and infrastructure on cloud get access to all the modernization services that AWS has. They can correct easily to our data lake services, to our AIML services, to custom databases, right? They can decide which applications they want to keep and which applications they want to refactor. They want to take decisions on containerization, make decisions on service computing once they've come to the cloud. But the most important thing is to take that first step. You know, exit data centers, come to AWS using vmc or aws, and then a whole host of modernization options available to them. >>Yeah, I gotta say, we had this right on this, on this story, because you just pointed out a big thing, which was first order of business is to make sure to leverage the on-prem investments that those customers made and then migrate to the cloud where they can maintain their applications, their data, their infrastructure operations that they're used to, and then be in position to start getting modern. So I have to ask you, how are you guys specifically, or how is VMware cloud on s addressing these needs of the customers? Because what happens next is something that needs to happen faster. And sometimes the skills might not be there because if they're running old school, IT ops now they gotta come in and jump in. They're gonna use a data cloud, they're gonna want to use all kinds of machine learning, and there's a lot of great goodness going on above the stack there. So as you move with the higher level services, you know, it's a no brainer, obviously, but they're not, it's not yesterday's higher level services in the cloud. So how are, how is this being addressed? >>Absolutely. I think you hit up on a very important point, and that is skills, right? When our customers are operating, some of the most critical applications I just mentioned, core banking, core insurance, et cetera, they're most of the core applications that our customers have across industries, like even, even large scale ERP systems, they're actually sitting on VMware's vSphere platform right now. When the customer wants to migrate these to cloud, one of the key bottlenecks they face is skill sets. They have the trained manpower for these core applications, but for these high level services, they may not, right? So the first order of business is to help them ease this migration pain as much as possible by not wanting them to, to upscale immediately. And we VMware cloud and AWS exactly does that. I mean, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to create new skill set for doing this, right? Their existing skill sets suffice, but at the same time, it gives them that, that leeway to build that skills roadmap for their team. DNS is invested in that, right? Yes. We want to help them build those skills in the high level services, be it aml, be it, be it i t be it data lake and analytics. We want to invest in them, and we help our customers through that. So that ultimately the ultimate goal of making them drop data is, is, is a front and center. >>I wanna get into some of the use cases and success stories, but I want to just reiterate, hit back your point on the skill thing. Because if you look at what you guys have done at aws, you've essentially, and Andy Chassey used to talk about this all the time when I would interview him, and now last year Adam was saying the same thing. You guys do all the heavy lifting, but if you're a VMware customer user or operator, you are used to things. You don't have to be relearn to be a cloud architect. Now you're already in the game. So this is like almost like a instant path to cloud skills for the VMware. There's hundreds of thousands of, of VMware architects and operators that now instantly become cloud architects, literally overnight. Can you respond to that? Do you agree with that? And then give an example. >>Yes, absolutely. You know, if you have skills on the VMware platform, you know, know, migrating to AWS using via by cloud and AWS is absolutely possible. You don't have to really change the skills. The operations are exactly the same. The management systems are exactly the same. So you don't really have to change anything but the advantages that you get access to all the other AWS services. So you are instantly able to integrate with other AWS services and you become a cloud architect immediately, right? You are able to solve some of the critical problems that your underlying IT infrastructure has immediately using this. And I think that's a great value proposition for our customers to use this service. >>And just one more point, I want just get into something that's really kind of inside baseball or nuanced VMC or VMware cloud on AWS means something. Could you take a minute to explain what on AWS means? Just because you're like hosting and using Amazon as a, as a work workload? Being on AWS means something specific in your world, being VMC on AWS mean? >>Yes. This is a great question, by the way, You know, on AWS means that, you know, VMware's vse platform is, is a, is an iconic enterprise virtualization software, you know, a disproportionately high market share across industries. So when we wanted to create a cloud product along with them, obviously our aim was for them, for the, for this platform to have the goodness of the AWS underlying infrastructure, right? And, and therefore, when we created this VMware cloud solution, it it literally use the AWS platform under the eighth, right? And that's why it's called a VMs VMware cloud on AWS using, using the, the, the wide portfolio of our regions across the world and the strength of the underlying infrastructure, the reliability and, and, and sustainability that it offers. And therefore this product is called VMC on aws. >>It's a distinction I think is worth noting, and it does reflect engineering and some levels of integration that go well beyond just having a SaaS app and, and basically platform as a service or past services. So I just wanna make sure that now super cloud, we'll talk about that a little bit in another interview, but I gotta get one more question in before we get into the use cases and customer success stories is in, in most of the VM world, VMware world, in that IT world, it used to, when you heard migration, people would go, Oh my God, that's gonna take months. And when I hear about moving stuff around and doing cloud native, the first reaction people might have is complexity. So two questions for you before we move on to the next talk. Track complexity. How are you addressing the complexity issue and how long these migrations take? Is it easy? Is it it hard? I mean, you know, the knee jerk reaction is month, You're very used to that. If they're dealing with Oracle or other old school vendors, like, they're, like the old guard would be like, takes a year to move stuff around. So can you comment on complexity and speed? >>Yeah. So the first, first thing is complexity. And you know, what makes what makes anything complex is if you're, if you're required to acquire new skill sets or you've gotta, if you're required to manage something differently, and as far as VMware cloud and AWS on both these aspects, you don't have to do anything, right? You don't have to acquire new skill sets. Your existing idea operation skill sets on, on VMware's platforms are absolutely fine and you don't have to manage it any differently like, than what you're managing your, your ID infrastructure today. So in both these aspects, it's exactly the same and therefore it is absolutely not complex as far as, as far as, as far as we cloud and AWS is concerned. And the other thing is speed. This is where the huge differentiation is. You have seen that, you know, large banks and large telcos have now moved their workloads, you know, literally in days instead of months. >>Because because of VMware cloud and aws, a lot of time customers come to us with specific deadlines because they want to exit their data centers on a particular date. And what happens, VMware cloud and AWS is called upon to do that migration, right? So speed is absolutely critical. The reason is also exactly the same because you are using the exactly the same platform, the same management systems, people are available to you, you're able to migrate quickly, right? I would just reference recently we got an award from President Zelensky of Ukraine for, you know, migrating their entire ID digital infrastructure and, and that that happened because they were using VMware cloud database and happened very swiftly. >>That's been a great example. I mean, that's one political, but the economic advantage of getting outta the data center could be national security. You mentioned Ukraine, I mean Oscar see bombing and death over there. So clearly that's a critical crown jewel for their running their operations, which is, you know, you know, world mission critical. So great stuff. I love the speed thing. I think that's a huge one. Let's get into some of the use cases. One of them is, the first one I wanted to talk about was we just hit on data, data center migration. It could be financial reasons on a downturn or our, or market growth. People can make money by shifting to the cloud, either saving money or making money. You win on both sides. It's a, it's a, it's almost a recession proof, if you will. Cloud is so use case for number one data center migration. Take us through what that looks like. Give an example of a success. Take us through a day, day in the life of a data center migration in, in a couple minutes. >>Yeah. You know, I can give you an example of a, of a, of a large bank who decided to migrate, you know, their, all their data centers outside their existing infrastructure. And they had, they had a set timeline, right? They had a set timeline to migrate the, the, they were coming up on a renewal and they wanted to make sure that this set timeline is met. We did a, a complete assessment of their infrastructure. We did a complete assessment of their IT applications, more than 80% of their IT applications, underlying v vSphere platform. And we, we thought that the right solution for them in the timeline that they wanted, right, is VMware cloud ands. And obviously it was a large bank, it wanted to do it safely and securely. It wanted to have it completely managed, and therefore VMware cloud and aws, you know, ticked all the boxes as far as that is concerned. >>I'll be happy to report that the large bank has moved to most of their applications on AWS exiting three of their data centers, and they'll be exiting 12 more very soon. So that's a great example of, of, of the large bank exiting data centers. There's another Corolla to that. Not only did they manage to manage to exit their data centers and of course use and be more agile, but they also met their sustainability goals. Their board of directors had given them goals to be carbon neutral by 2025. They found out that 35% of all their carbon foot footprint was in their data centers. And if they moved their, their ID infrastructure to cloud, they would severely reduce the, the carbon footprint, which is 35% down to 17 to 18%. Right? And that meant their, their, their, their sustainability targets and their commitment to the go to being carbon neutral as well. >>And that they, and they shift that to you guys. Would you guys take that burden? A heavy lifting there and you guys have a sustainability story, which is a whole nother showcase in and of itself. We >>Can Exactly. And, and cause of the scale of our, of our operations, we are able to, we are able to work on that really well as >>Well. All right. So love the data migration. I think that's got real proof points. You got, I can save money, I can, I can then move and position my applications into the cloud for that reason and other reasons as a lot of other reasons to do that. But now it gets into what you mentioned earlier was, okay, data migration, clearly a use case and you laid out some successes. I'm sure there's a zillion others. But then the next step comes, now you got cloud architects becoming minted every, and you got managed services and higher level services. What happens next? Can you give us an example of the use case of the modernization around the NextGen workloads, NextGen applications? We're starting to see, you know, things like data clouds, not data warehouses. We're not gonna data clouds, it's gonna be all kinds of clouds. These NextGen apps are pure digital transformation in action. Take us through a use case of how you guys make that happen with a success story. >>Yes, absolutely. And this is, this is an amazing success story and the customer here is s and p global ratings. As you know, s and p global ratings is, is the world leader as far as global ratings, global credit ratings is concerned. And for them, you know, the last couple of years have been tough as far as hardware procurement is concerned, right? The pandemic has really upended the, the supply chain. And it was taking a lot of time to procure hardware, you know, configure it in time, make sure that that's reliable and then, you know, distribute it in the wide variety of, of, of offices and locations that they have. And they came to us. We, we did, again, a, a, a alar, a fairly large comprehensive assessment of their ID infrastructure and their licensing contracts. And we also found out that VMware cloud and AWS is the right solution for them. >>So we worked there, migrated all their applications, and as soon as we migrated all their applications, they got, they got access to, you know, our high level services be our analytics services, our machine learning services, our, our, our, our artificial intelligence services that have been critical for them, for their growth. And, and that really is helping them, you know, get towards their next level of modern applications. Right Now, obviously going forward, they will have, they will have the choice to, you know, really think about which applications they want to, you know, refactor or which applications they want to go ahead with. That is really a choice in front of them. And, but you know, the, we VMware cloud and AWS really gave them the opportunity to first migrate and then, you know, move towards modernization with speed. >>You know, the speed of a startup is always the kind of the Silicon Valley story where you're, you know, people can make massive changes in 18 months, whether that's a pivot or a new product. You see that in startup world. Now, in the enterprise, you can see the same thing. I noticed behind you on your whiteboard, you got a slogan that says, are you thinking big? I know Amazon likes to think big, but also you work back from the customers and, and I think this modern application thing's a big deal because I think the mindset has always been constrained because back before they moved to the cloud, most IT, and, and, and on-premise data center shops, it's slow. You gotta get the hardware, you gotta configure it, you gotta, you gotta stand it up, make sure all the software is validated on it, and loading a database and loading oss, I mean, mean, yeah, it got easier and with scripting and whatnot, but when you move to the cloud, you have more scale, which means more speed, which means it opens up their capability to think differently and build product. What are you seeing there? Can you share your opinion on that epiphany of, wow, things are going fast, I got more time to actually think about maybe doing a cloud native app or transforming this or that. What's your, what's your reaction to that? Can you share your opinion? >>Well, ultimately we, we want our customers to utilize, you know, most of our modern services, you know, applications should be microservices based. When desired, they should use serverless applic. So list technology, they should not have monolithic, you know, relational database contracts. They should use custom databases, they should use containers when needed, right? So ultimately, we want our customers to use these modern technologies to make sure that their IT infrastructure, their licensing, their, their entire IT spend is completely native to cloud technologies. They work with the speed of a startup, but it's important for them to, to, to get to the first step, right? So that's why we create this journey for our customers, where you help them migrate, give them time to build the skills, they'll help them mo modernize, take our partners along with their, along with us to, to make sure that they can address the need for our customers. That's, that's what our customers need today, and that's what we are working backwards from. >>Yeah, and I think that opens up some big ideas. I'll just say that the, you know, we're joking, I was joking the other night with someone here in, in Palo Alto around serverless, and I said, you know, soon you're gonna hear words like architectural list. And that's a criticism on one hand, but you might say, Hey, you know, if you don't really need an architecture, you know, storage lists, I mean, at the end of the day, infrastructure is code means developers can do all the it in the coding cycles and then make the operations cloud based. And I think this is kind of where I see the dots connecting. Final thought here, take us through what you're thinking around how this new world is evolving. I mean, architecturals kind of a joke, but the point is, you know, you have to some sort of architecture, but you don't have to overthink it. >>Totally. No, that's a great thought, by the way. I know it's a joke, but it's a great thought because at the end of the day, you know, what do the customers really want? They want outcomes, right? Why did service technology come? It was because there was an outcome that they needed. They didn't want to get stuck with, you know, the, the, the real estate of, of a, of a server. They wanted to use compute when they needed to, right? Similarly, what you're talking about is, you know, outcome based, you know, desire of our customers and, and, and that's exactly where the word is going to, Right? Cloud really enforces that, right? We are actually, you know, working backwards from a customer's outcome and using, using our area the breadth and depth of our services to, to deliver those outcomes, right? And, and most of our services are in that path, right? When we use VMware cloud and aws, the outcome is a, to migrate then to modernize, but doesn't stop there, use our native services, you know, get the business outcomes using this. So I think that's, that's exactly what we are going through >>Actually, should actually, you're the director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on Aus. I wanna thank you for coming on, but I'll give you the final minute. Give a plug, explain what is the VMware cloud on Aus, Why is it great? Why should people engage with you and, and the team, and what ultimately is this path look like for them going forward? >>Yeah. At the end of the day, we want our customers to have the best paths to the cloud, right? The, the best path to the cloud is making sure that they migrate safely, reliably, and securely as well as with speed, right? And then, you know, use that cloud platform to, to utilize AWS's native services to make sure that they modernize their IT infrastructure and applications, right? We want, ultimately that our customers, customers, customer get the best out of, you know, utilizing the, that whole application experience is enhanced tremendously by using our services. And I think that's, that's exactly what we are working towards VMware cloud AWS is, is helping our customers in that journey towards migrating, modernizing, whether they wanna exit a data center or whether they wanna modernize their applications. It's a essential first step that we wanna help our customers with >>One director of global sales and go to market with VMware cloud on neighbors. He's with aws sharing his thoughts on accelerating business transformation on aws. This is a showcase. We're talking about the future path. We're talking about use cases with success stories from customers as she's thank you for spending time today on this showcase. >>Thank you, John. I appreciate it. >>Okay. This is the cube, special coverage, special presentation of the AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome to theCUBE special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, or videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and AWS. This is the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS Showcase: Accelerating Business Transformation. Here in the Showcase at Samir Kadoo, worldwide VMware strategic alliance solution architect leader with AWS. Samir, great to have you. And Daniel Rethmeier, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are working together, you're the key players in this relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, greatly appreciate it. >> Great to have you guys both on. As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Gelsinger, then CEO, and then then CEO AWS at Andy Jassy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success of VM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later, we got this whole inflection point coming, you're starting to see this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side, more automation, more serverless, I mean and AI. I mean, it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kind of a whole 'nother level. Where are we? Samir, let's start with you on the relationship. >> Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced. And then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware Cloud on AWS. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware. You know, one of the key things... Together, day in, day out, as far as advancing VMware Cloud on AWS. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with the solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements. You know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right, more recently. One of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware Cloud on AWS. And even with VMware to other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware Cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware Cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint, there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >> Great stuff. Daniel, I want to get to you in a second upon this principal architect position you have. In your title, you're the global AWS synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly VMworld, talking about how the workloads on IT has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AIOps, you got ITOps changing a lot, you got a lot more automation, edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the relationship? >> So at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware Cloud and AWS, we are also enabling us mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembles globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers. That's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the best benefits out of VMware Cloud on AWS. And over the time, we really have involved the solution. As Samir mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware Cloud on AWS. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of workloads. So for example, we just edited the I4i host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as, you mentioned it, AI workloads. >> Yeah, so I want to get us just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation, you know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in theCUBE in the past couple weeks in a big way that the ops teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds a little bit weird, but IT operations is now part of a lot more DataOps, security, writing code, composing. You know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing, what are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >> That's a great point, because originally, VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people and customers. So for example, AWS, very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the ITOps area. And usually these are very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customer needs, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, "Well, we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service. Recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure." That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on-premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >> Samir, talk about your perspective. I want to get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS re:MARS, actually it was Amazon re:MARS, machine learning automation, robotics and space was really kind of the confluence of industrial IoT, software, physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code, automation, you know, "Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster." Yeah, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services, meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >> Yeah. Yeah, totally, right? And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware Cloud on AWS, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you want to leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's going to give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with IoT, even with utilizing Alexa, or if there's any other service that you want to utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings right off the top. Though with digital transformation, right, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology even in your business. Leaders are looking to reinvent their business, they're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy, maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. >> Okay. >> Then also- >> Oh, go ahead, finish your thought. >> No, no, no, I was going to say what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that vStor admin that's used to their on-premises environment. Now with VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, you still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware Cloud on AWS too. >> Daniel, I want to get your thoughts on this because at Explore and after the event, as we prep for CubeCon and re:Invent coming up, the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators, and it's like hundreds of thousands of users and millions of people talking about and peaked on VMware, interested in VMware. The common thread was one person said, "I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to put my career in the next 10 to 15 years." And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm going to be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet. Architects, is it solution architect, SRE? So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are going to try to make these career decisions. Like what am I going to work on? And then it's kind of fuzzy, but I want to get your thoughts, how would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity? And what's going to happen? >> So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills and trainings? Is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the answer is to make digital transformation a success, we need not just to talk about technology, but also about process, people, and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware Cloud on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment, you can use the same managing and monitoring tools, if you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware Cloud on AWS. And that gives not just leaders, but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in such a complex project. >> The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go. And then now that once they're confident, they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because on your side, you've got higher level services, you've got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, a lot improvements. So, okay, nothing's changed, I can still run my job, now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the customer there? >> Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware Cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud. But if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you want to utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on-premises or even in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you want to expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >> Great stuff, I love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, 'cause people want to know what's goes on behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationships? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? Do you guys just have a Zoom meeting, do you guys fly out, you write code, go do you ship things? I mean, I'm making it up, but you get the idea. How does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >> So we hope to get more frequently together in-person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to Zoom conferences and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if you are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have regular assembles now also in-person, geo-based, so for AMEA, for the Americas, for APJ. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >> What's interesting, you know, as events are coming back, Samir, before you weigh in this, I'll comment as theCUBE's been going back out to events, we're hearing comments like, "What pandemic? We were more productive in the pandemic." I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in-person, they're happy to see people, but no one's really missed the beat. I mean, it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More, if anything, productivity gains. >> Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is even if you look at AWS's, and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said and meant earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in-person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation in VMware Cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology, we've been able to still communicate, work with our customers, even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot, we had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts. So even with the on-premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >> In our last segment we did here on this Showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean geo, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and people can reference that, we won't get into it here. But I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Because again, I think right now, we're at an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with re:Invent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >> So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked for over the last years. Whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have to add additional nodes. Now we have three different node types with different ratios of compute, storage, and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay for it. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS6 wanted a ONTAP and VMware Cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements, at the upcoming events. >> Samir, what's your reaction take on what's coming down on your side? >> Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scaled with their needs, right? So with VMware Cloud on AWS, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are going to be announcements, innovations, and whatnot with upcoming events. But together, we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS. To Daniel's point, storage for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right? Now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware Cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's going to be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events, that's going to give us the options to even advance our own services together. >> Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I want to get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in the open conversations on theCUBE is in the old days, let's go back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem, AWS had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships, and they do business together and they sell each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture, 'cause we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining and you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides, they come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem interplay. What's your thoughts on this? Because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much innovations only. You got to do innovation, but when you do innovation, you got to integrate it, you got to connect it. So how do you guys see this as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >> So we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware Cloud on AWS, moving to the cloud, firstly it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise, you can do this. If you decide you want to stay with some of your services on-premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can man manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead end, it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on-premise or the cloud, it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both worlds, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware Cloud on AWS either way in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich, later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by AWS, more than 200 different services ranging from object-based storage, load balancing, and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >> We call that super cloud in the way that we generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is kind of where cloud is right now. You guys are not commodity, amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things happen. You got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. >> Absolutely. >> And everybody wins. >> Yeah, I 100% agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with AWS, maybe more proficient with the VMware's technology. But then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud, maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are, maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware Cloud on AWS. Maybe you want to leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top, 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skillset, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the day. >> I mean, I just think it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean you don't have to do anything. You still run it. Just spear the way you're working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >> Yeah, absolutely. And if you look, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time, they can free up resources to develop new innovations and grow their business. >> Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Daniel, thank you for coming to Germany. >> Thank you. Oktoberfest, I know it's evening over there, weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir, give you the final word. AWS re:Invent's coming up. We're preparing, we're going to have an exclusive with Adam, with Fryer, we'd do a curtain raise, and do a little preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at re:Invent this year? The big show? >> Yeah, so I think Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what are called chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there, but if they want to be hands-on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, been in sysadmin world and whatnot, being hands-on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. >> Yeah, and re:Invent's an amazing show for the in-person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at theCUBE and it's becoming popular. We have more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media. So thanks for sharing that. Samir, Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the Showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS, really accelerating business transformation with AWS and VMware. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Women in Data Science, WiDS 2022, coming to live from Stanford University. I'm Lisa Martin. My next guest is here. Nandi Leslie, Doctor Nandi Leslie, Senior Engineering Fellow at Raytheon Technologies. Nandi, it's great to have you on the program. >> Oh it's my pleasure, thank you. >> This is your first WiDS you were saying before we went live. >> That's right. >> What's your take so far? >> I'm absolutely loving it. I love the comradery and the community of women in data science. You know, what more can you say? It's amazing. >> It is. It's amazing what they built since 2015, that this is now reaching 100,000 people 200 online event. It's a hybrid event. Of course, here we are in person, and the online event going on, but it's always an inspiring, energy-filled experience in my experience of WiDS. >> I'm thoroughly impressed at what the organizers have been able to accomplish. And it's amazing, that you know, you've been involved from the beginning. >> Yeah, yeah. Talk to me, so you're Senior Engineering Fellow at Raytheon. Talk to me a little bit about your role there and what you're doing. >> Well, my role is really to think about our customer's most challenging problems, primarily at the intersection of data science, and you know, the intersectional fields of applied mathematics, machine learning, cybersecurity. And then we have a plethora of government clients and commercial clients. And so what their needs are beyond those sub-fields as well, I address. >> And your background is mathematics. >> Yes. >> Have you always been a math fan? >> I have, I actually have loved math for many, many years. My dad is a mathematician, and he introduced me to, you know mathematical research and the sciences at a very early age. And so, yeah, I went on, I studied in a math degree at Howard undergrad, and then I went on to do my PhD at Princeton in applied math. And later did a postdoc in the math department at University of Maryland. >> And how long have you been with Raytheon? >> I've been with Raytheon about six years. Yeah, and before Raytheon, I worked at a small to midsize defense company, defense contracting company in the DC area, systems planning and analysis. And then prior to that, I taught in a math department where I also did my postdoc, at University of Maryland College Park. >> You have a really interesting background. I was doing some reading on you, and you have worked with the Navy. You've worked with very interesting organizations. Talk to the audience a little bit about your diverse background. >> Awesome yeah, I've worked with the Navy on submarine force security, and submarine tracking, and localization, sensor performance. Also with the Army and the Army Research Laboratory during research at the intersection of machine learning and cyber security. Also looking at game theoretic and graph theoretic approaches to understand network resilience and robustness. I've also supported Department of Homeland Security, and other government agencies, other governments, NATO. Yeah, so I've really been excited by the diverse problems that our various customers have you know, brought to us. >> Well, you get such great experience when you are able to work in different industries and different fields. And that really just really probably helps you have such a much diverse kind of diversity of thought with what you're doing even now with Raytheon. >> Yeah, it definitely does help me build like a portfolio of topics that I can address. And then when new problems emerge, then I can pull from a toolbox of capabilities. And, you know, the solutions that have previously been developed to address those wide array of problems, but then also innovate new solutions based on those experiences. So I've been really blessed to have those experiences. >> Talk to me about one of the things I heard this morning in the session I was able to attend before we came to set was about mentors and sponsors. And, you know, I actually didn't know the difference between that until a few years ago. But it's so important. Talk to me about some of the mentors you've had along the way that really helped you find your voice in research and development. >> Definitely, I mean, beyond just the mentorship of my my family and my parents, I've had amazing opportunities to meet with wonderful people, who've helped me navigate my career. One in particular, I can think of as and I'll name a number of folks, but Dr. Carlos Castillo-Chavez was one of my earlier mentors. I was an undergrad at Howard University. He encouraged me to apply to his summer research program in mathematical and theoretical biology, which was then at Cornell. And, you know, he just really developed an enthusiasm with me for applied mathematics. And for how it can be, mathematics that is, can be applied to epidemiological and theoretical immunological problems. And then I had an amazing mentor in my PhD advisor, Dr. Simon Levin at Princeton, who just continued to inspire me, in how to leverage mathematical approaches and computational thinking for ecological conservation problems. And then since then, I've had amazing mentors, you know through just a variety of people that I've met, through customers, who've inspired me to write these papers that you mentioned in the beginning. >> Yeah, you've written 55 different publications so far. 55 and counting I'm sure, right? >> Well, I hope so. I hope to continue to contribute to the conversation and the community, you know, within research, and specifically research that is computationally driven. That really is applicable to problems that we face, whether it's cyber security, or machine learning problems, or others in data science. >> What are some of the things, you're giving a a tech vision talk this afternoon. Talk to me a little bit about that, and maybe the top three takeaways you want the audience to leave with. >> Yeah, so my talk is entitled "Unsupervised Learning for Network Security, or Network Intrusion Detection" I believe. And essentially three key areas I want to convey are the following. That unsupervised learning, that is the mathematical and statistical approach, which tries to derive patterns from unlabeled data is a powerful one. And one can still innovate new algorithms in this area. Secondly, that network security, and specifically, anomaly detection, and anomaly-based methods can be really useful to discerning and ensuring, that there is information confidentiality, availability, and integrity in our data >> A CIA triad. >> There you go, you know. And so in addition to that, you know there is this wealth of data that's out there. It's coming at us quickly. You know, there are millions of packets to represent communications. And that data has, it's mixed, in terms of there's categorical or qualitative data, text data, along with numerical data. And it is streaming, right. And so we need methods that are efficient, and that are capable of being deployed real time, in order to detect these anomalies, which we hope are representative of malicious activities, and so that we can therefore alert on them and thwart them. >> It's so interesting that, you know, the amount of data that's being generated and collected is growing exponentially. There's also, you know, some concerning challenges, not just with respect to data that's reinforcing social biases, but also with cyber warfare. I mean, that's a huge challenge right now. We've seen from a cybersecurity perspective in the last couple of years during the pandemic, a massive explosion in anomalies, and in social engineering. And companies in every industry have to be super vigilant, and help the people understand how to interact with it, right. There's a human component. >> Oh, for sure. There's a huge human component. You know, there are these phishing attacks that are really a huge source of the vulnerability that corporations, governments, and universities face. And so to be able to close that gap and the understanding that each individual plays in the vulnerability of a network is key. And then also seeing the link between the network activities or the cyber realm, and physical systems, right. And so, you know, especially in cyber warfare as a remote cyber attack, unauthorized network activities can have real implications for physical systems. They can, you know, stop a vehicle from running properly in an autonomous vehicle. They can impact a SCADA system that's, you know there to provide HVAC for example. And much more grievous implications. And so, you know, definitely there's the human component. >> Yes, and humans being so vulnerable to those social engineering that goes on in those phishing attacks. And we've seen them get more and more personal, which is challenging. You talking about, you know, sensitive data, personally identifiable data, using that against someone in cyber warfare is a huge challenge. >> Oh yeah, certainly. And it's one that computational thinking and mathematics can be leveraged to better understand and to predict those patterns. And that's a very rich area for innovation. >> What would you say is the power of computational thinking in the industry? >> In industry at-large? >> At large. >> Yes, I think that it is such a benefit to, you know, a burgeoning scientist, if they want to get into industry. There's so many opportunities, because computational thinking is needed. We need to be more objective, and it provides that objectivity, and it's so needed right now. Especially with the emergence of data, and you know, across industries. So there are so many opportunities for data scientists, whether it's in aerospace and defense, like Raytheon or in the health industry. And we saw with the pandemic, the utility of mathematical modeling. There are just so many opportunities. >> Yeah, there's a lot of opportunities, and that's one of the themes I think, of WiDS, is just the opportunities, not just in data science, and for women. And there's obviously even high school girls that are here, which is so nice to see those young, fresh faces, but opportunities to build your own network and your own personal board of directors, your mentors, your sponsors. There's tremendous opportunity in data science, and it's really all encompassing, at least from my seat. >> Oh yeah, no I completely agree with that. >> What are some of the things that you've heard at this WiDS event that inspire you going, we're going in the right direction. If we think about International Women's Day tomorrow, "Breaking the Bias" is the theme, do you think we're on our way to breaking that bias? >> Definitely, you know, there was a panel today talking about the bias in data, and in a variety of fields, and how we are, you know discovering that bias, and creating solutions to address it. So there was that panel. There was another talk by a speaker from Pinterest, who had presented some solutions that her, and her team had derived to address bias there, in you know, image recognition and search. And so I think that we've realized this bias, and, you know, in AI ethics, not only in these topics that I've mentioned, but also in the implications for like getting a loan, so economic implications, as well. And so we're realizing those issues and bias now in AI, and we're addressing them. So I definitely am optimistic. I feel encouraged by the talks today at WiDS that you know, not only are we recognizing the issues, but we're creating solutions >> Right taking steps to remediate those, so that ultimately going forward. You know, we know it's not possible to have unbiased data. That's not humanly possible, or probably mathematically possible. But the steps that they're taking, they're going in the right direction. And a lot of it starts with awareness. >> Exactly. >> Of understanding there is bias in this data, regardless. All the people that are interacting with it, and touching it, and transforming it, and cleaning it, for example, that's all influencing the veracity of it. >> Oh, for sure. Exactly, you know, and I think that there are for sure solutions are being discussed here, papers written by some of the speakers here, that are driving the solutions to the mitigation of this bias and data problem. So I agree a hundred percent with you, that awareness is you know, half the battle, if not more. And then, you know, that drives creation of solutions >> And that's what we need the creation of solutions. Nandi, thank you so much for joining me today. It was a pleasure talking with you about what you're doing with Raytheon, what you've done and your path with mathematics, and what excites you about data science going forward. We appreciate your insights. >> Thank you so much. It was my pleasure. >> Good, for Nandi Leslie, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of Women in Data Science 2022. Stick around, I'll be right back with my next guest. (upbeat flowing music)

>>from the cube studios in Palo alto >>in boston >>connecting with thought leaders all around the >>world. This >>is a cute conversation. Hello and welcome to today's session of the AWS Global Public sector Partner Awards. I'm your host Natalie ehrlich. Today we're going to focus on the following award for best partner transformation. I'm pleased to introduce our guests, josh door smith, vice president of public sector at Effectual and jeremy Yates, deputy technology architect at jenny May. Welcome gentlemen so glad to have you on our show. >>Hi there. Very nice to be here. Thank you so much for having me >>terrific. Well josh, I'd like to start with you. How can companies leverage cloud native solutions to deliver higher quality services? >>So Natalie, that's a great question. And in the public sector and our our government customers, we run into this all the time. It's kind of our bread and butter. What what they can do is the first thing they need to be aware of is you don't have to be afraid of the cloud as some very obscure technology that is just emerging. It's been out for 10, 11 years now, customers across government space are using it lock stock and barrel to do everything from just managing simple applications, simple websites all the way through hosting their entire infrastructure, both in production and for disaster recovery purposes as well. So the first thing to note is just don't be afraid of the cloud. Um secondly, it's, it's imperative that they select the right partner who is able to kind of be there Sherpa to go into however far they want to dip their toe into the, into the proverbial cloud waters. Um to select somebody who knows whatever it is that they need to go do. So if they want to go Aws as we are talking about today, pick a partner who has the right experience, past performance designations and competencies with the cloud that they're interested in. >>Terrific. Well, you know, Jeremy, I'd love to move to you. What does modern modernization mean to jenny May? >>Sure, Thanks Natalie, great to be here. Thanks josh as well, you know. So for jenny May, modernization is really, it's not just technology is holistic across the organization. So that includes things like the business, um not just you know, the the I. T. Division. So we're looking at the various things to modernize like our culture and structural changes within the organization. Um moving to implement some, some proven practices like def sec ops and continuous integration and continuous delivery or deployment. Uh and then, you know, our overall overarching goal is to give the best and most secure technology to the business that we can to meet the Jeannie Mai mission and the needs of our customers >>terrific. Well josh, how is Effectual planning to support jenny Maes modernization plans? >>So we have been supporting jenny May for about 14 months now. Uh and back in september of last year, we rewarded a co prime 10 year contract for Jeannie Mai to do exactly that. It's to provide all things cloud to Jeannie Mai for 10 years on AWS and that's including reselling AWS. That's including providing all sorts of professional services to them. And it's, it's providing some third party software applications to help them support their applications themselves. So what Effectual is doing is kind of a threefold. We are supporting the modernization of their process, which jeremy mentioned a moment ago and that includes in stan shih ating a cloud center of Excellence for jenny May, which enables them to modernize the way they do cloud governance while they're modernizing their technology stack. We're also providing a very expert team of cloud architects and Dempsey cops engineers to be able to, to design the Jeannie Mai environment, collaborating with our co prime uh to ensure that it meets the security requirements, the compliance requirements that jerry mentions. Uh, Jeannie Mai is a federal entity, but it also has to adhere to all the finance industry uh compliance requirements as well. So very strenuous from that perspective. And then the third thing that we're doing to help them kind of along their modernization journey is in stan shih aging infrastructure as code. So in the cloud, rather than building everything in the AWS management console, we script everything to build it automatically, so it improves consistency, it improves the customer experience regardless of which resource is working on it. And it improves disaster recovery capability as well. And also, just quite frankly, the speed by which they can actually deploy things. >>And jeremy, how is this transition helping your security really enhancing it now? >>Uh From a security perspective we're implementing a number of various tools um both, you know, a W. S based as well as other software that josh mentioned. Um So we're able to utilize those in a more scalable manner than we could previously in the traditional data center. Um we've got a number of things such as we're looking at multiple vulnerability management products like 10 of Ohio and Wallace. Um we're using uh tools such as Centra fi for our our pam or privileged access management capabilities. Um Splunk a pretty industry standard. Um software for log and data correlation and analysis um will also be using that for some system and application monitoring. Um as well as uh the Mcafee envision product for endpoint and other cloud service security. So being able to pull all those in in a more scalable and more cost efficient way as well from cloud based services. Uh, it's really helped us be able to get those services and integrate them together in a way that, you know, we may not previously been able to. >>Yeah, terrific. Well, josh, let's move back to you and talk further about compliance. You know, any insight here, how Effectual is building a modern cloud infrastructure to integrate AWS services with third party tools to really achieve compliance with the government requirements. Just any further insight on that >>front? That's a great question. Natalie and I'm gonna tag team with Jeremy on this one if you don't mind, but I'll start off so jenny may obviously I mentioned earlier has federal requirements and financial requirements so focused right now on on those federal aspects. Um, so the tools that Jeremy mentioned a moment ago, we are integrating all of them with a W. S native meaning all of the way we do log aggregation in the various tools within AWS cloudwatch cloud trail. All of those things were implementing an AWS native, integrating them with Splunk to aggregate all of that information. But then one of the key requirements that's coming up with the federal government in the very near future is tick three dot or trusted internet connection. Basically in the first iteration a decade or so ago, the government wanted to limit the amount of points of presence that they have with the public facing internet fast forward several versions to today and they're pushing that that onus back on the various entities like jenny May and like hud, which Jeannie Mai is a part of but they still want to have that kind of central log repository to where all of the, all of the security logs and vulnerability logs and things like that. Get shipped to a central repository and that will be part of DHS. So what effectual has done in partnership with jenny May is create a, a W. S native solution leveraging some of those third party tools that we mentioned earlier to get all of those logs aggregated in a central repository for Ginny MaE to inspect ingest and take action from. But then also provide the mechanism to send that to DHS to do that and correlate that information with everything coming in from feeds across the government. Now that's not required just yet. But we're future proofing jenny Maes infrastructure in order to be able to facilitate adherence to those requirements when it becomes uh required. Um, and so jeremy, I'll pass it over to you to talk a little bit further about that because I know that's one of the things that's near and dear to your sister's heart as well as jenny may overall. >>Yeah, absolutely. Thanks josh. Um, so yeah, we, as you mentioned, we have implemented um, uh, sort of a hybrid tech model right now, um, to to handle compliance on that front. Um, so we're still using a, you know, some services from the legacy or our existing T two dot x models. That that josh was mentioning things such as m tips, um, uh, the Einstein sensors, etcetera. But we're also implementing that take 30 architecture on our own. As josh mentioned that that will allow us to sort of future proof and and seamlessly really transitioned to once we make that decision or guidance comes out or, you know, mandates or such. Um, so that effort is good to future proof house from a compliance perspective. Um, also, you know, the tools that I mentioned, uh, josh reiterated, those are extremely important to our our security and compliance right. Being able to ensure, you know, the integrity and the confidentiality of of our systems and our data is extremely important. Not both, not just both on the r not only on the government side, but as josh mentioned, the finance side as well. >>Terrific. Well, I'd love to get your insight to on AWS workspaces. Um, if either one of you would like to jump in on this question, how did they empower the jenny May team to work remotely through this pandemic? >>That's a great question. I guess I'll start and then we'll throw it to jeremy. Um, so obviously uh effectual started working with jenny May about three weeks after the pandemic formally started. So perfect timing for any new technology initiative. But anyway, we, we started talking with Jeremy and with his leadership team about what is required to actually facilitate and enable our team as well as the government resources and the other contractors working for jenny May to be able to leverage the new cloud environment that we were building and the very obvious solution was to implement a virtual desktop infrastructure uh type solution. And obviously Jeannie Mai had gone all in on amazon web services, so it became the national natural fit to look first at AWS workspaces. Um, so we have implemented that solution. There are now hundreds of jenny May and jenny make contractor resources that have a WS workspaces functioning in the GovCloud regions today and that's a very novel approach to how to facilitate and enable not only our team who is actually configuring the infrastructure, but all the application developers, the security folks and the leadership on the jenny may side to be able to access, review, inspect, check log etcetera, through this remote capability. It's interesting to note that Jeannie Mai has been entirely remote since the pandemic initiated. Jeremy's coming to us from, from west Virginia today, I'm coming to us from national harbor Maryland And we are operating totally remotely with a team of 60 folks about supporting this specific initiative for the cloud, not to mention the hundreds that are supporting the applications that Jamie runs to do its day to day business. So jeremy, if you wouldn't mind talking about that day to day business that jenny may has and, and kind of what the, the mission statement of Jeannie Mai is and how us enabling these workspaces uh facilitates that mission >>or you know, so the part of the overall mission of jenny Maes to, to ensure affordable housing is, is made available to uh, the american public. Um that's hud and, and jenny may as part of that and we provide um mortgage backed securities to help enable that. Um, so we back a lot of V A. Loans, um, F H A, those sort of loans, um, workspaces has been great in that manner from a technology perspective, I think because as you mentioned, josh, it's really eliminated the need for on premise infrastructure, right? We can be geographically dispersed, We can be mobile, um, whether we're from the east coast or west coast, we can access our environment securely. Uh, and then we can, you know, administer and operate and maintain the technology that the business needs to, to fulfill the mission. Um, and because we're able to do that quickly and securely and effectively, that's really helpful for the business >>Terrific. And um, you know, I'd like to shift gears a bit and uh you know, discuss what you're looking ahead toward. What is your vision for 2021? How do you see this partnership evolving? >>Yeah, you >>Take that 1/1. >>Sure. Yeah. Um you know, definitely some of the things we look forward to in 2021 as we evolve here is we're going to continue our cloud journey um you know, through practices like Deb said cops, you realize that uh that journey has never done. It's always a continual improvement process. It's a loop to continually work towards um a few specific things or at least one specific thing that we're looking forward to in the future, as josh mentioned earlier was our arctic three Oh Initiative. Um, so with that we think will be future proofed. Um as there's been a lot of um a lot of recent cyber security activity and things like that, that's going to create um opportunities I think for the government and Jeannie Mai is really looking forward to to leading in that area. >>Mhm and josh, can you weigh in quickly on that? >>Absolutely. Uh First and foremost we're very much looking forward to receiving authority to operate with our production environment. We have been preparing for that for this last year plus. Uh but later on this summer we will achieve that 80 oh status. And we look forward to starting to migrate the applications into production for jenny May. And then for future proof, it's as jerry jerry mentioned, it's a journey and we're looking forward to cloud optimizing all of their applications to ensure that they're spending the right money in the right places uh and and ensuring that they're not spending over on any of the one given area. So we're very excited to optimize and then see what the technology that we're being able to provide to them will bring to them from an idea and a conceptual future for jenny may. >>Well thank you both so very much for your insights. It's been a really fantastic interview. Our guests josh duggar smith as well as jeremy Gates. Really appreciate it. >>Thank you very much. >>Thank you so much. >>Terrific. Well, I'm your host for the cube Natalie or like to stay tuned for more coverage. Thanks so much for watching.

>>Hello, I'm CR howdy shell president at advisors, uh, excited to be participating in GreenLake day Han joined by valued long-term 15 year customer Srini Vanga he's vice president information technology at wr grace and company Srini. Thanks for joining me today, especially in light of the $570 million acquisition completed yesterday. Congratulations on that. And can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your organization, and a bit about the relationship you've had with advising? >>Sure. Uh, thank you, Sierra, let me start with grace. Grace is a $2 billion global specialty chemical manufacturing company. It's got two main business segments, catalyst technologies and materials technologies. Our FCC catalyst technologies help our petrochemical refining customers in producing, uh, mainly transportation fuel and petrochemical feedstock. So, and our materials technology business delivers silica based materials to our customers to improve their products and processes in, uh, segments like coatings, uh, consumer industrial and, uh, pharma businesses. Um, as a CRE, as you just mentioned, uh, we recently closed it in acquisition and acquired the fine chemicals business of, uh, Alvamar, which will increase our business share of a pharma business. So coming back to me, um, uh, regarding myself, I've been with the grays for 22 years. It's been a long time guys. So I I've been mainly in the SAP technology area and took over the role of the, uh, Weiss president and head of it for years back. Um, and I've been working with the advisors for almost 15 years now, and it's been an excellent strategic partnerships. >>Well, thank you. And we definitely appreciate the business and, uh, the relationship. So, uh, we'll, we'll move on to the next question. So what are, what are the most important factors for you to be successful in the business? Obviously, growth is going to be key with what you just, just accomplished with the acquisition, but, uh, one of the most important factors for you to be successful >>Since, uh, since grace is a specialty chemical manufacturing company, uh, it's very important for us to understand and, uh, sometimes even anticipate, uh, uh, exact customer requirements and then, uh, quickly create that a special material which helps improve our customer's products and processes. That's the most important thing for us. Um, the company depends on me and my team, uh, to provide value to our business and, uh, helping them make decisions quicker and in real time and, uh, adaptable, uh, to the ever changing market, the business niche this year. So that's the most important factor. >>Great. It is obviously playing a, a bigger role as, as you mean. Good. So what are some of the most, I don't like to use the word pain points, but I'll call them business challenges, you know, in your industry. >>Um, so building on my previous point, right? So chemical manufacturing is not new and it has a wall or the years and, and with numerous mergers and acquisitions along the way, uh, the systems and processes are not always, uh, harmonized are standardized. So keeping it moving together and in the same direction has, uh, has always been a challenge, right? And, and added to that COVID has affected most of the sector. And, uh, and our under our industry is no exception, especially in the refining sector. Uh, we need to be able to provide, uh, rapid customization to our customers, uh, which means our business, uh, which needs a flexible computing power, uh, to process and analyze huge amounts of these, the material properties data, and, and allow them to come up with products, uh, back to, we can go to market faster than our competitors. Yeah. >>Right. Got it. And obviously that's key, you touched on this briefly, but I'd really like to hear more about how your business has changed in the last year. You mentioned COVID so love to hear how things have changed and what you can share >>So specifically about COVID right. So about 50% of our employees have been working remotely since March of last year. Um, unless unlike other industries, uh, we cannot go a hundred percent remote, uh, because we have chemical plants to run and chemical labs to operate. So we'll always be at this 50%. So technology has enabled us to do that. We have done a lot of things remotely, which we never thought possible. Um, um, we did work two on factory visits for our pharma customers, our remote plant startup for our poly properly in, uh, uh, customers. Um, and also did virtual, um, annual customer conferences. Uh, in the end, some of this will go back to pre COVID days, but most of this is going to stay and stay here for good. >>Well, congratulations on that, because I think the whole working remote, I think we're all seeing the challenges, but obviously it looks like you've seized the challenge and it's going to be more of a business as usual going forward. Yeah. Well, congratulations. That's key obviously to the business also going forward and with that, with a hybrid model, I mean, many customers, the hybrid clouds with journey, will you share with us at wr grace and company journey for the hybrid cloud? >>Sure. So, yeah. Um, when I took over this role, uh, four years back, uh, I made a decision that I no longer want to be in this data center business. Uh, we need to focus on our core strength and core competencies as a chemical company. And, uh, I wanted it to be spending more time helping our, our business, uh, manufactured and sell our products safely and efficiently. So working with our strategic partner, uh, advisors and HPE, we moved ahead with, uh, with GreenLake, which just solved mainly my problem of this, uh, getting out of the data center business. Uh, we now have a private on-prem cloud solution that is elastic fully scalable and is, uh, based on the consumption model based model, right? So that's very similar to what these hyperscale cloud providers have. And I love it. This, the consumption based model is what, what is great about the GreenLake that I have signed up, um, with, with GreenLake, I can, uh, scale up quickly and I will, I can grow as my business needs grow. And, um, it makes, it makes this a perfect cloud solution for grace. >>That's great to hear it, especially since we are a big part of, and I'd have to agree, you know, with, with the words, getting out of the data center business, we're hearing it more and more as we, as we hear meet with more customers. So, and with that in a hybrid model, there are a lot of decisions to be made on what goes into public cloud. What should, what should remain on prem. And obviously this is a decision you had to make. This can be crucial when it comes down to business critical applications. How did you and your team approached this when you were looking at, at your SAP environment? >>Great question to CR, but for me, the answer is simple. Uh, as I told you previously, like I did not want to be in the business of data center. I also did not want to be in the business of developing custom applications. We retired most of our custom built applications in, uh, procurement sales, HR, and replaced them with the SAS providers like Ariba conquer Salesforce and success factors, which are all hosted in the cloud. Uh, these companies, uh, spend billions of dollars in R and D and come up with solutions that are state of the art in this, uh, in these processes that I talked to you about. Right? So, so unless I have a special need, which I don't in the finance procurement and HR, I don't need this custom built applications, which is the reason I went to these SAS based applications. All of which are hosted in the cloud. >>That leaves me with, uh, my mission critical application, which is SAP and there's peripherals, right. For business reasons. I wanted this on-prem. Um, so I chose the HPE GreenLake, uh, to host this on-prem in my own data center at, at our headquarters in Columbia, Maryland, but with the Dr. Capability in the cloud. Um, so that I don't have to have a colo facility, which I have right now from IDR. So I use both on-prem and cloud hybrid cloud for myself, uh, for, for grace. So I have very few custom built applications on prem. Um, and as these become more standardized, I certainly look at taking them to the cloud or even keeping them on prem. Um, so we wanted that inherent flexibility. So yeah, that's the reason we went to this model. >>That's great. Cause that leads in right into the next question I had for you many customers in this past year, they're all looking for the flexibility, right. And how important it is. Can you share with us the value you see from HPE GreenLake and, and how that provided flexibility for wr grace and company specifically to workloads that can easily scale up or down? >>The main thing that helped me make the decision for GreenLake is the GreenLake is sized with this 20% buffer that we can scale to in minutes, um, that would usually take a weeks or even months to deploy. We know how that power and the flexibility in mere minutes, uh, when not when our business comes to us with a new requirement, either for a new applications or new data analytics capability that needs computing power, I don't have to wait for two or three months to give them that capability. So I, it can be done right away with this 20% of flexibility. >>That's great. And agreed. So this is a newer question with, with the event of your, um, acquisition, how do you see that added flexibility when you're looking to integrate a new company, >>This, this is an exact, you, you hit it on the head, uh, CR that's true. If I were to, if I had to bring this on with this additional computing power, I would have had to place an order, wait for the codes, come back and do all that with this 30%, I can easily fit in a new acquisition. >>Well, that's great. And that, that, that really helps for the short and long run. I'm sure that helps the business. Yes. So last two questions really is. Can you talk about what really stood out for advisors with advice, et cetera, about advisors, you know, basically why advise X and what will you saw the benefit of working with us >>Advisor? you have a great team CR so, so I've been, I've been, I mean, I've been working with, I told you write for 15 years and, um, I've been working with the same account manager for most of these years and the team as well. Right? So, so the account manager and the team knows how I, and what I expect of the team, right. So I can call them 24, seven anytime day or night. And they, they always pick up my phone and assist me in that time of the need. That's the most important thing. That's the reason that I I've been working with adviser, extended advice, Excel always proposed good solutions to me, either with HP or with other vendors, I can always trust them. Um, we have developed a strong strategic relationship. And, um, more importantly, like I told you that there is this trust that is difficult to find, and, um, it has continued to endure. Um, and, um, I deal with a lot of it vendors and I can confidently say that advisors X is at the top of the list from the customer service perspectives here. >>Well, thank you. And listen, that means a lot. I know we've had some bumps, we, and I've been on the phone for some, some of the tougher times, but, you know, you get through those to the, to the good times like now, and, uh, really, really excited about what we're doing with GreenLake. So, and, and most importantly, appreciate that relationship. And I'm sure our on Akuna is going to love the fact that you mentioned the relationship. So thank you for that. You know, finally, you know, any, any parting words of wisdom, brother, customers, as they consider HPE GreenLake, >>Um, like a standard earlier, uh, you must ask yourself, do you really want to be in this data center business, uh, ask yourself what your core businesses and what your core competencies are and focus your business acumen to deliver those that value to your business. Um, I'm sure he will come to the same conclusion as we did, um, and take a good look at GreenLake fund itself, flexibility. Um, you be very pleased and happy with the value the solution provides to your business. >>I would have to agree and what we're seeing with the best of breed solutions you can bring forward with GreenLake. Uh, we're excited about it too. And look forward to doing more work with you and customers like wr grace and company. I just want to say thank you for the time as importantly, thank you for the business. Really do appreciate it and appreciate the, uh, the kind words. Thanks, and, uh, have a great day. >>Thank you. See ya.

>>hello. >>Welcome to the special key conversation. I'm John ferry, host of the queue here in Palo Alto, California, featuring star dog is a great hot start-up. We've got a great guest, Rob Harris, vice president of solutions consulting for star dog here talking about some of the cloud growth, um, knowledge graphs, the role of data. Obviously there's a huge sea change. You're seeing real value coming out of this COVID as companies coming out of the pandemic, new opportunities, new use cases, new expectations, highly accelerated shift happening, and we're here to break it down. Rob, thanks for joining us on the cube conversation. Great to be here. So got, I'm excited to talk to you guys about your company and specifically the value proposition I've been talking for almost since 2007 around graph databases with Neo four J came out and looking at how data would be part of a real part of the developer mindset. Um, early on, and this more of the development. Now it's mainstream, you're seeing value being created in graph structures. Okay. Not just relational. This has been, uh, very well verified. You guys are in this business. So this is a really hot area, a lot of value being created. It's cool. And it's relevant. So tell us first, what is star dog doing? What's uh, what is the company about? >>Yeah, so I mean, we are an enterprise knowledge graph platform company. We help people be successful at standing up knowledge graphs of the data that they have both inside their company and using public data and tying that all together in order to be able to leverage that connected data and really turn it into knowledge through context and understand it. >>So how did this all come about this from a tech standpoint? What is the, what is the, uh, what was the motivation around this? Because, um, obviously the unstructured wave hit, you're seeing successes like data bricks, for instance, just absolutely crushing it on, on their valuation and their relevance. You seeing the same kind of wave hit almost kind of born back on the Hadoop days with unstructured data. Is that a big part of it? Is it just evolution? What's the big driver here? >>Yeah, no, I think it's a, it's a great question. The driver early is as these data sets have increased for so many companies trying to really bring some understanding to it as they roll it out in their organizations, you know, we've tried to just try to centralize it and that hasn't been sufficient in order to be able to unlock the value of most organization status. So being able to step beyond just, you know, pulling everything together into one place, but really putting that context and meaning around it that the graph can do. So that's where we've really got started at, uh, back in the day is we really looked at the inference and reasoning part of a knowledge graph. How do we bring more context and understanding that doesn't naturally exist within the data? And that really is how we launched off the product. >>I got to ask you around the use cases because one of the things that's really relevant right now is you're seeing a lot of front end development around agile application. Dev ops is brought infrastructure as code. You're seeing kind of this huge tsunami of new of applications, but one of the things that people are talking about in some of the developer circles and it's kind of hits the enterprise is this notion of state because you can have an application calling data, but if the data is not addressable and then keeping state and in real time and all these kinds of new, new technical problems, how do you guys look at that? When you look at trying to create knowledge graphs, because maintaining that level of connection, you need data, a ton of it it's gotta be exposed and addressable and then deal dealt with in real time. How do you guys look at it? >>Yeah, that's, that's a great question. What we've done to try to kind of move the ball forward on this is move past, trying to centralize that data into a knowledge graph that is separate from the rest of your data assets, but really build a data virtualization layer, which we have integrated into our product to look at the data where it is in the applications and the unstructured documents and the structure repositories, so that we can observe as state changes in that data and answer questions that are relevant at the time. And we don't have to worry about some sort of synchronous process, you know, loading information into the graph. So that ability to add that virtualization layer, uh, to the graph really enables you to get more of a real time, look at your data as it evolves. >>Yeah. I definitely want to double, double click on that and say, but I want to just drop step back and kind of set the table for the folks that aren't, um, getting in the weeds yet on this. There's kind of a specific definition of enterprise knowledge graph. Could you like just quickly define that? What is the enterprise knowledge graph? Sure. >>Yeah, we, we really see an enterprise knowledge graph as a connected set of data with context. So it's not just storing it like a graph, but connect again and putting meaning around that data through structure, through definitions, et cetera, across the entire enterprise. So looking at not just data within a single application or within a single silo, but broadly through your enterprise, what does your data mean? How is it connected and what does it look like within context each other? >>How should companies reuse their data? >>Boy, that's a broad question, right? Uh, you know, I mean, one of the things, uh, that I think is very important as so many companies have just collected data assets over the years, they collect more and more and more. We have customers that have eight petabytes of data within their data Lake. And they're trying to figure out how to leverage it by actually connecting and putting that context around the data. You can get a lot more meaning out of that old data or the stale data or the unknown data that the people are getting right today. So the ability to reuse the data assets with in context of meeting is where we see people really be able to make huge licks for in their organization like drug companies be able to get drugs to market faster. By looking at older studies, they've done where maybe the meeting was hidden because it was an old system. Nobody knew what the particular codes and meaning were in context of today. So being able to reuse and bring that forward brings real life application to people solving business problems today. >>Rob, I got to get your thoughts on something that we always riff on here on the cube, which is, um, you know, do you take down the data silos or do you leverage them? And you know, this came up a lot, many years ago when we first started discussing containers, for instance, and then that we saw that you didn't have to kill the old to bring in the new, um, there's one mindset of, you know, break the silos down, go horizontal scalability on the data, critical data, plane control, plane, other saying, Hey, you know what, just put it, you know, put a wrapper around those, those silos and you know, I'm oversimplifying, but you get the idea. So how should someone who's really struggling with, or, or not struggling, we're putting together an architecture around their future plans around dealing with data and data silos specifically, because certainly as new data comes in there's mechanism for that. But as you have existing data silos, what do companies do? What's the strategy in your opinion? >>Yeah, you know, it is a really interesting question. I was in data warehouse and for a long, long time and a big proponent of moving everything to one place. And, uh, then I really moved into looking into data virtualization and realized that neither of those solutions are complete, that there are some things that have to be centralized and moved the old systems aren't sufficient in order to be able to answer questions or process them. But there are many data silos that we've created within organizations that can be reused. You can leverage the compute, you can leverage the storage that already exist within us. And that's the approach we've taken at start off. We really want to be able to allow you to centralize the data that makes sense, right. To get it out of those old systems, that should be shut down from just a monetary perspective, but the systems that are have actual meeting or that it's too expensive in order to, to remove them, leverage those data silos. And by letting you have both approaches in the same platform, we hope to make this not an either or architectural decision, which is always the difficult question. >>Okay. So you got me on that one. So let me just say that. I want to leverage my data silos. What do I do? Take me through the playbook. What if I got the data silos? What is the star dog recommendation for me? >>Sure. So what, what we generally recommend is you start off with building kind of a model, uh, in the, in the lingo, we sometimes say ontology Euro, some sort of semantic understanding that puts context around what is my data and what does it mean? And then we allow you to map those data silos. We have a series of connectors in our product that whether it's an application and you're connecting through a rest connector, or whether it's a database and you're connecting through ODBC or JDBC map that data into the platform. And then when you issue queries to the startup platform, we federate those queries out to the downstream systems and answer as if that data existed on the graph. So that way we're leveraging the silos where they are without you having to move the data physically into the platform. So you guys are essentially building a >>Data fabric. >>We are, yeah. Data fabric is really the new term. That's been popping up more and more with our customers when they come to us to say, how can we kind of get past the traditional ways of doing data integration and unified data in a single place? Like you said, we don't think the answer is purely all about moving it all to one big Lake. We don't think the answer is all about just creating this virtualization plane, but really being able to leverage the festival. >>All right. So, so if you, if you believe that, then let's just go to the next level then. So if you believe that they can, don't have to move things around and to have one specific thing, how does a customer deal with their challenge of hybrid cloud and soon to be multi-cloud because that's certainly on the horizon. People want choice. There's going to be architectural. I mean, certainly a cloud operations will be in play, but this on-premise and this cloud, and then soon to be multiple cloud. How do you guys deal with that? That question? >>Yeah, that's a great question. And this is really a, an area that we're very excited about and we've been investing very heavily in is how to have multiple instances of StarTalk running in different clouds or on prem on the clown, coordinate to answer questions, to minimize data movement between the platforms. So we have the ability to run either an agent on prem. For example, if you're running the platform in the cloud or vice versa, you can run it in the cloud. You are two full instances that start off where they will actually cope plan queries to understand where does the data live? Where is it resident and how do I minimize moving data around in order to answer the question? So we really are trying to create that unified data fabric across on-prem or multiple cloud providers, so that any of the nodes in the platform can answer question from any of the datas >>S you know, complexity is always the issue. People cost go up. When you have complexity, you guys are trying to tame it. This is a huge conversation. You bring up multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. And multi-cloud when you think about the IOT edge, and you don't want to move data around, this is what everyone's saying, why move it? Why move data? It's expensive to move data processes where it is, and you kind of have this kind of flexibility. So this idea of unification is a huge concept. Is that enough? And how should customers think about the unification? Because if you can get there, it almost, it is the kind of the Holy grail you're talking about here. So, so this is kind of the prospect of, of having kind of an ideal architecture of unification. So take us, take me through that one step deeper. >>Well, it is, it is kind of interesting because as you really think about unifying your data and really bringing it together, of course it is the Holy grail. And that's what people have been talking about. Um, gosh, since I started in the industry over 20 years ago, how do I get this single plain view of my data, regardless of whether it's physically located or, uh, somehow stitched together, but what are the things that, you know, our founders really strongly believed on when they started the company? Was it isn't enough. It isn't sufficient. There is more value in your data that you don't even know. And unlocking that through either machine learning, which is, of course, we all know it's very hot right now to look at how do I derive new insights out of the data that I already have, or even through logical reasoning, right? And inference looking at, what do I understand about how that data is put together and how it's created in order to create more connections within the data and answer more questions. All those are ways to grow beyond just unifying your data, but actually getting more insights out of it. And I think that is the real Holy grail that people are looking for, not just bringing all the data together, but actually being able to get business value and insights out of that data. Yeah. >>Looking for it. You guys have obviously a pretty strong roster of clients that represent that. Um, but I got to ask you, since you brought up the founders, uh, the company, obviously having a founders' DNA, uh, mindset, um, tends to change the culture or drive the culture of the covenant change with age drives the culture of the company. What is the founder's culture inside star, dog? What is the vibe there, if you could, um, what do they talk about the most when you, when they get in that mode of being founders like, Hey, you know, this is the North star, what is, what's the rap like? What's the vibe share? It takes that, take us through some star star, dog culture. >>Sure. So our three founders came out of the rusty of Maryland, all in a PhD program around semantic reasoning and logical understanding and being able to understand data and be able to communicate that as easily as possible is really the core and the fiber of their being. And that's what we see continually under discussion every single day. How can we push the limits to take this technology and your gift easier to use more available, bring more insights to the customers beyond what we've seen in the past. And I find that really exciting to be able to constantly have conversations about how do we push the envelope? How do we look beyond even what Gartner says is five or eight years in the future, but looking even further ahead. So there >>They're into they're into this whole data scene. Then big time they are >>That they are very active in the conferences and posts and you know, all that great. >>They love this agility. They got to love dev ops. I mean, if you're into this knowledge graph scene, so I gotta, I gotta ask you, what's the machine learning angle here, obviously, AI, we know what AI is. AI is essentially combination of many things, machine learning and other computer science and data access. Um, what is the secret sauce behind the machine learning and, and the vibe and the product of, of, uh, >>Yeah, a lot of times w we, the way that we leverage machine learning or the way that we look at it is how do we create those connections between data? So you have multiple different systems and you're trying to bring all that data together. Yeah. It's not always easy to tell, is this rod Harris the same as that rod Harris is this product the same as that product. So when possible we will leverage keys or we'll leverage very, uh, you know, systematic type of understanding of these things are the same, but sometimes you need to reach beyond that. And that's where we leverage a lot of machine learning within the platform, looking at things like linear regression or other approaches around the graph, you know, connectivity, analysis, page rank, things like that to say, where are things the same so that we can build that connections in that connectivity as automatically as possible. >>You don't get a lot of talks on the cube. Also. Now that's new news, new clubhouse app, where people are talking about misinformation, obviously we're in the media business. We love the digital network effect. Everything's networks, the network economy. You starting to see this power of information and value. You guys carved the knowledge graph. So I gotta, I gotta ask you, when you look at this kind of future where you have this, um, complexity and the network effect, um, how are you guys looking at that data access? Because if you don't have the data, you're not going to have that insight, right? So you need to have that, that network connection. Is that a limitation or for companies? Is that an, um, cause usually people aren't necessarily their blind spot is their data or their lack of their data. So having things network together is going to be more of the norm in the future. How do you guys see that playing out? Yeah, >>I think you're exactly right. And I think that as you look beyond where we are today, and a lot of times we focus today on the data that a company already has, what do I know? Right. What do I know about you? What, how do I interact with you? How have I interacted with you? I think that as we look at the future, we're going to talk more about data sharing, but leveraging publicly available information about being able to take these insights and leverage them, not just within the walls of my own organization, but being able to share them and, uh, work together with other organizations to bring up a better understanding of you as a person or as a consumer that we could all interact with. Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, Metcons law still holds true that, you know, more network connections bring more value. I certainly see that growing in the future, probably more around, you know, more data sharing and more openness about leveraging publicly available. >>You know, it's interesting. You mentioned you came from a data warehouse background. I remember when I broken the businessmen 30 years ago, when I started getting computer science, you know, it was, it was, there was, there was pain having a product and an enabling platform. You guys seem to have this enabling platform where there's no one use case. I mean, you, you have an unlimited use case landscape. Um, you could do anything with what you guys have. It's not so much, I mean, there's, low-hanging fruit. So I got to ask you, if you have that, uh, enabling platform, you're creating value for customers. What are some of the areas you see developing, like now in terms of low-hanging fruit and where's the possibilities? How do you guys see that? I'm sure you've probably got a tsunami of activity around corner cases from media to every vertical we do. And that's, you know, >>The exciting part of this job. Uh, part of the exciting part of knowledge press in general is to see all the different ways that they are allowed to use. But we do see some use cases repeated over and over again. Uh, risk management is a very common one. How do I look at all the people and the assets with an organization, the interactions they have to look at hotspots for risk, uh, that I need to correct within my organization for the pre-commercial pharma, that has been a very, very hot area for us recently. How do we look at all the that's available with an organization that's publicly available in order to accelerate drug development in this post COVID world, that's become more and more relevant, uh, for organizations to be able to move forward faster and the kind of bio industry and my sciences. Um, that's a use case that we've seen repeated over and over again. And then this growing idea of the data fabric, the data fabric, looking at metadata within the organization to improve data integration processes, to really reduce the need for moving data without or around the organization as much. Those are the use cases we've seen repeated over and over again over the last >>Awesome Rob. My last question before we wrap up is for the solution architect that's out there that has, you know, got a real tall order. They have to put together a scalable organization, people process and technology around a data architecture. That's going to be part of, um, the next gen, the next gen next level activity. And they need headroom for IOT edge and industrial edge, uh, and all use cases. Um, what's your advice to them as they have to look out at and start thinking about architecture? >>Yeah, that's, it's a great question. Uh, I really think that it's important to keep your options open as the technology in the space continues to evolve, right? It's easy to get locked into a single vendor or a single mindset. Um, I've been an architect most of my career, and that's usually a lot of the pitfalls. Things like a knowledge graph are open and flexible. They adhere to standards, which then means you're not locked into a single vendor and you're allowed to leverage this type of technology to grow beyond originally envisioned. So thinking about how you can take advantage of these modern techniques to look at things and not just keep repeating what you've done in the past, the sins of the past have, uh, you know, a lot of times do reappear. So fighting against that as much as possible as gritty is my encouragement. >>Awesome, great insight. And I love this. I love this area. I know you guys got a great trend. You're riding on a very cool, very relevant final minute. Just take a quick minute to give a plug for the company. What's the business model. How do I deploy this? How do I get the software? How do you charge for it? If I'm going to buy this solution or engage with star DOE what do I do? Take me through that. Sure. >>Yeah. We, uh, we are like, uh, you've sat through this whole thing. We are enterprise knowledge graph platform company. So we really help you get started with your business, uh, uh, leveraging and using a knowledge graph fricking organization. We have the ability to deploy on prem. We have on the cloud, we're in the AWS marketplace today. So you can take a look at our software today, who generally are subscription-based based on the size of the install. And we are happy to talk to you any time, just drop by our website, reach out we'll we'll get doctors. >>Rob. Great. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. That gradients said, looking forward to seeing you in person, when we get back to real life, hopefully the vaccines are coming on. Thanks to, uh, companies like you guys providing awesome analytics and intelligence for these drug companies and pharma companies. Now you have a few of them in your, on your client roster. So congratulations, looking forward to following up great, great area. Cool and relevant data architecture is changing. Some of it's broken. Some it's being fixed started off as one of the hot startups scaling up beautifully in this new era of cloud computing meets applications and data. So I'm John. Forget the cube. This is a cube conversation from Palo Alto, California. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards brought to you by Amazon web services. >> Hi, and welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman and we're here at the AWS Public Sector. Their Partner Awards, really enjoying this. We get to talk to some of the diverse ecosystem as well as they've all brought on their customers, some really phenomenal case studies. Happy to welcome to the program two first time guests. First of all, we have Jared Bell, he's the Chief Engineer of self response, operational readiness at T-Rex Solutions and T-Rex is the award winner for the most customer obsessed mission-based in Fed Civ. So Jared, congratulations to you and the T-Rex team and also joining him, his customer Michael Thieme, he's the Assistant Director for the Decennial Census Program systems and contracts for the US Census Bureau, thank you so much both for joining us. >> Good to be here. >> All right, Jared, if we could start with you, as I said, you're an award winner, you sit in the Fed Civ space, you've brought us to the Census Bureau, which most people understand the importance of that government program coming up on that, you know, every 10 year we've been hearing, you know, TV and radio ads talking about it, but Jared, if you could just give us a thumbnail of T-Rex and what you do in the AWS ecosystem. >> So yeah again, my name's Jared Bell and I work for T-Rex Solutions. T-Rex is a mid tier IT federal contracting company in Southern Maryland, recently graduated from hubs on status, and so T-Rex really focuses on four key areas, infrastructure in Cloud modernization, cybersecurity, and active cyber defense, big data management and analytics, and then overall enterprise system integration. And so we've been, you know, AWS partner for quite some time now and with decennial, you know, we got to really exercise a lot of the bells and whistles that are out there and really put it all to the test. >> All right, well, Michael, you know, so many people in IT, we talk about the peaks and valleys that we have, not too many companies in our organization say, well, we know exactly, you know, that 10 year spike of activity that we're going to have, I know there's lots of work that goes on beyond that, but it tells a little bit , your role inside the Census Bureau and what's under your purview. >> Yes, the Census Bureau, is actually does hundreds of surveys every year, but the decennial census is our sort of our main flagship activity. And I am the Assistant Director under our Associate Director for the IT and for the contracts for the decennial census. >> Wonderful and if you could tell us a little bit the project that you're working on, that eventually pulled T-Rex in. >> Sure. This is the 2020 census and the challenge of the 2020 census is we've done the census since 1790 in the United States. It's a pillar, a foundation of our democracy, and this was the most technologically advanced census we've ever done. Actually up until 2020, we have done our censuses mostly by pen, paper, and pencil. And this is a census where we opened up the internet for people to respond from home. We can have people respond on the phone, people can respond with an iPhone or an Android device. We tried to make it as easy as possible and as secure as possible for people to respond to the census where they were and we wanted to meet the respondent where they were. >> All right. So Jared, I'd love you to chime in here 'cause I'm here and talking about, you know, the technology adoption, you know, how much was already in plans there, where did T-Rex intersect with this census activity? >> Yeah. So, you know, census deserves a lot of credit for their kind of innovative approach with this technical integrator contract, which T-Rex was fortunate enough to win. When we came in, you know, we were just wrapping up the 2018 test. we really only had 18 months to go from start to, you know, a live operational tests to prepare for 2020. And it was really exciting to be brought in on such a large mission critical project and this is one of the largest federal IT products in the Cloud to date. And so, you know, when we came in, we had to really, you know, bring together a whole lot of solutions. I mean, the internet self response, which is what we're going to to talk about today was one of the major components. But we really had a lot of other activities that we had to engage in. You know, we had to design and prepare an IT solution to support 260 field offices, 16,000 field staff, 400,000 mobile devices and users that were going to go out and knock on doors for a numeration. So it was real6ly a big effort that we were honored to be a part of, you know, and on top of that, T-Rex actually brought to the table, a lot of its past experience with cybersecurity and active cyber defense, also, you know, because of the importance of all this data, you know, we had the role in security all throughout, and I think T-Rex was prepared for that and did a great job. And then, you know, overall I think that, not necessarily directly to your question, but I think, y6ou know, one of the things that we were able to do to make ourselves successful and to really engage with the census Bureau and be effective with our stakeholders was that we really build a culture of decennial within the technical integrator, you know, we had brown bags and working sessions to really teach the team the importance of the decennial, you know, not just as a career move, but also as a important activity for our country. And so I think that that really helped the team, you know, internalize that mission and really drove kind of our dedication to the census mission and really made us effective and again, a lot of the T-Rex leadership had a lot of experience there from past decennials and so they really brought that mindset to the team and I think it really paid off. >> Michael, if you could bring us inside a little a bit the project, you know, 18 months, obviously you have a specific deadline you need to hit, for that help us understand kind of the architectural considerations that you had there, any concerns that you had and I have to imagine that just the global activities, the impacts of COVID-19 has impacted some of the end stage, if you will, activities here in 2020. >> Absolutely. Yeah. The decennial census is, I believe a very unique IT problem. We have essentially 10 months out of the decade that we have to scale up to gigantic and then scale back down to run the rest of the Census Bureau's activities. But our project, you know, every year ending in zero, April 1st is census day. Now April 1st continued to be census day in 2020, but we also had COVID essentially taking over virtually everything in this country and in fact in the world. So, the way that we set up to do the census with the Cloud and with the IT approach and modernization that we took, actually, frankly, very luckily enabled us to kind of get through this whole thing. Now, we haven't had, Jared discussed a little bit the fact that we're here to talk about our internet self response, we haven't had one second of downtime for our response. We've taken 77 million. I think even more than 78 million responses from households, out of the 140 million households in the United States, we've gotten 77 million people to respond on our internet site without one second of downtime, a good user experience, a good supportability, but the project has always been the same. It's just this time, we're actually doing it with much more technology and hopefully the way that the Cloud has supported us will prove to be really effective for the COVID-19 situation. Because we've had changes in our plans, difference in timeframes, we are actually not even going into the field, or we're just starting to go into the field these next few weeks where we would have almost been coming out of the field at this time. So that flexibility, that expandability, that elasticity, that being in the Cloud gives all of our IT capabilities was really valuable this time. >> Well, Jared, I'm wondering if you can comment on that. All of the things that Michael just said, you know, seem like, you know, they are just the spotlight pieces that I looked at Cloud for. You know, being able to scale on demand, being able to use what I need when I need it, and then dial things down when I don't, and especially, you know, I don't want to have to, you know, I want to limit how much people actually need to get involved. So help understand a little bit, you know, what AWS services underneath, we're supporting this and anything else around the Cloud deployment. >> Sure, yeah. Michael is spot on. I mean, the cloud is tailor made for our operation and activity here. You know, I think all told, we use over 30 of the AWS FedRAMP solutions in standing up our environment across all those 52 system of systems that we were working with. You know, just to name a few, I mean, internet self response alone, you're relying heavily on auto scaling groups, elastic load balancers, you know, we relied a lot on Lambda Functions, DynamoDB. We're one of the first adopters through DynamoDB global tables, which we use for a session persistence across regions. And then on top of that, you know, the data was all flowing down into RDS databases and then from there to, you know, the census data Lake, which was built on EMR and Elasticsearch capabilities, and that's just to name a couple. I mean, you know, we had, we ran the gamut of AWS services to make all this work and they really helped us accelerate. And as Michael said, you know, we stood this up expecting to be working together in a war room, watching everything hand in hand, and because of the way we, were able to architect it in partnership with AWS, we all had to go out and stay at home, you know, the infrastructure remain rock solid. We can have to worry about, you know, being hands on with the equipment and, you know, again, the ability to automate and integrate with those solutions Cloud formation and things like that really let us keep a small agile team of, you know, DevSecOps there to handle the deployments. And we were doing full scale deployments with, you know, one or two people in the middle of the night without any problems. So it really streamlined things for us and helped us keep a tight natural, sure. >> Michael, I'm curious about what kind of training your team need to go through to take advantage of this solution. So from bringing it up to the ripple effect, as you said, you're only now starting to look at who would go into the field who uses devices and the like, so help us understand really the human aspect of undergoing this technology. >> Sure. Now, the census always has to ramp up this sort of immediate workforce. We hire, we actually process over 3 million people through, I think, 3.9 million people applied to work for the Census Bureau. And each decade we have to come up with a training program and actually training sites all over the country and the IT to support those. Now, again, modernization for the 2020 census, didn't only involve the things like our internet self response, it also involves our training. We have all online training now, we used to have what we called verbatim training, where we had individual teachers all over the country in places like libraries, essentially reading text exactly the same way to exactly over and over again to our, to the people that we trained. But now it's all electronic, it allows us to, and this goes to the COVID situation as well, it allows us to bring only three people in at a time to do training. Essentially get them started with our device that we have them use when they're knocking on doors and then go home and do the training, and then come back to work with us all with a minimal contact, human contact, sort of a model. And that, even though we designed it differently, the way that we set the technology of this time allowed us to change that design very quickly, get people trained, not essentially stop the census. We essentially had to slow it down because we weren't sure exactly when it was going to be safe to go knocking on door to door, but we were able to do the training and all of that worked and continues to work phenomenally. >> Wonderful. Jared, I wonder if you've got any lessons learned from working with the census group that might be applicable to kind of, the broader customers out there? >> Oh, sure. Well, working with the census, you know, it was really a great group to work with. I mean, one of the few groups I worked with who have such a clear vision and understanding of what they want their final outcome to be, I think again, you know, for us the internalization of the decennial mission, right? It's so big, it's so important. I think that because we adopted it early on we felt that we were true partners with census, we had a lot of credibility with our counterparts and I think that they understood that we were in it with them together and that was really important. I would also say that, you know, because we're talking about the go Cloud solutions that we worked, you know, we also engage heavily with the AWS engineering group and in partnership with them, you know, we relied on the infrastructure event management services they offer and was able to give us a lot of great insight into our architecture and our systems and monitoring to really make us feel like we were ready for the big show when the time came. So, you know, I think for me, another lesson learned there was that, you know, the Cloud providers like AWS, they're not just a vendor, they're a partner and I think that now going forward, we'll continue to engage with those partners early and often. >> Michael the question I have for you is, you know, what would you say to your peers? What lessons did you have learned and how much of what you've done for the census, do you think it will be applicable to all those other surveys that you do in between the big 10 year surveys? >> All right. I think we have actually set a good milestone for the rest of the Census Bureau, that the modernization that the 2020 census has allowed since it is our flagship really is something that we hope we can continue through the decade and into the next census, as a matter of fact. But I think one of the big lessons learned I wanted to talk about was we have always struggled with disaster recovery. And one of the things that having the Cloud and our partners in the Cloud has helped us do is essentially take advantage of the resilience of the Cloud. So there are data centers all over the country. If ever had a downtime somewhere, we knew that we were going to be able to stay up. For the decennial census, we've never had the budget to pay for a persistent disaster recovery. And the Cloud essentially gives us that kind of capability. Jared talked a lot about security. I think we have taken our security posture to a whole different level, something that allowed us to essentially, as I said before, keep our internet self response free of hacks and breaches through this whole process and through a much longer process than we even intended to keep it open. So, there's a lot here that I think we want to bring into the next decade, a lot that we want to continue, and we want the census to essentially stay as modern as it has become for 2020. >> Well, I will tell you personally Michael, I did take the census online, it was really easy to do, and I'll definitely recommend if they haven't already, everybody listening out there so important that you participate in the census so that they have complete data. So, Michael, Jared, thank you so much. Jared, congratulations to your team for winning the award and you know, such a great customer. Michael, thank you so much for what you and your team are doing. We Appreciate all that's being done, especially in these challenging times. >> Thank you and thanks for doing the census. >> All right and stay tuned for more coverage of the AWS public sector partner award I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS Public Sector Partner Awards Brought to you by Amazon Web Services. >> Hi and welcome to a special production of theCUBE. We're talking to the Amazon web services public sector, their partner awards program. I'm your host Stu Miniman, and we're digging in on education. It's one of the sectors, of course, public sector looks at nonprofits, it looks at the government sectors and the education, and of course, when we talk about remote learning is such a huge, important topic, especially right now in 2020 with the global pandemic. So happy to welcome to the program, we have two guests. First of all, representing the award winning-company, Mohammad Haque. He is the co-founder and senior vice president of architecture and engineering with eLumin. And joining is one of his customers, Damian Doyle, who is the associate vice president of enterprise infrastructure solutions at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, or UMBC, as it's known. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. Thanks for having us here. >> All right, first of all, Mohammad, congratulations. As I said in my intro, such an important topic. I have two children that are dealing with remote learning. I have lots of friends that work in higher education and new in the technology space. So your company is the 2020 AWS public sector award winner for best remote learning. I'm sure there is a space that has a lot of competition. And of course, leveraging public cloud is a great way to be able to ramp this sort of thing up rather fast. Give us a little bit, you know, you are the co=founder, so we'd love to hear a little bit of the origin story, your background, and tell us about what differentiates eLumin. >> Sure. eLumin, we provide managed products and services around end user compute with a focus on education for providing access to applications and other technology resources, course content, course applications in the public cloud, so that users are able to use whatever device they have wherever they are, and have access to those applications that are required for completing that course coursework. They can be in, at home, in their dorms, at a corner coffee shop, on the side of a mountain in the middle East, wherever they may be, but leveling that playing field so that they can access and have access to any of the demanding applications on any device is what we're, what our goal is, is to make sure that we're not having technology be a barrier to their learning. >> Fantastic. Damian, if we could turn to you, then. At UMBC, maybe if you could give our audience a thumbnail of the university, and I have some idea of the challenge that was put in front of you when you talk about e-learning, but maybe you could give us a little bit of the pre-COVID and what you were faced and what you were looking at when it came to dealing with the current situation. >> Sure. Be happy to. So we're, UMBC is a midsize public institution. We're sort of suburban, about 14,000 students, and we have undergrad, graduate, and doctoral programs, and we have a heavy focus on a lot of the STEM disciplines. And so pre-COVID, very based in collaborative environments, active learning, but hands-on, so a lot of our programs really do have a lot of that, and we leverage technology very heavily, even if it's in, whether it's in engineering, biology, any of those kinds of programs. As you said, the challenge became how do you very quickly pivot into an entirely online model when you sort of scattershot all of your students and you don't really have a great sense of what they're going to have access to and the abilities and connectivity they're going to have. So this kind of thing was really critical for us as we made that transition. >> Excellent. Mohammad, were you working with UMBC before the current move to go remote? Give us a little bit about the relationship and how that started. >> I believe actually that the pandemic was the impetus to kind of drive this forward. Damian and his team reached out to eLumin looking for a solution that would allow them to kind of have students access the applications that they normally would have access to in their physical computer labs, but with the change and not having access to those labs anymore, needed a remote learning solution, a remote access solution for being able to access those high compute, high graphics processing, memory-intensive applications through the cloud and taking into account the fact that students won't have the highest end computer laptop. They'll probably be working on a Chromebook or a lower-end machine, but need that compute power. And then we had to kind of provide a solution pretty quickly because it was, schools were shutting down, essentially, physically shutting down and needing to continue on with their coursework. >> Yeah, Damian, I'd like to understand from your side. Can you share with us a little bit the timeframes? How fast did you go from, oh my gosh, we need this, we need proposals, we need to roll this out, and we need to have students and teachers back up and running? >> Well, I think the one thing from our side, we had already known of eLumin and we had been looking at that pre-COVID. We knew we needed product that provided us this kind of agility and really gave the students some better access to the computing tools that they needed. So once we identified that, the thing that was amazing to me is we moved from our existing system over to production eLumin in, I think it was about two and a half weeks sort of start to finish, and to get all the images, to get all the technology running, tested, and everything up and running in two and a half weeks for a full solution for a campus is, was pretty amazing. And that was one of the real benefits we saw as going to the cloud. We also looked at this outside of COVID as something that really provided a major benefit to the students so that they could work from anywhere at any time, rather than be sort of tethered to that physical lab. >> Well, I'm glad you raised that. So if you could, Damian, a little bit help us understand how much were you using a cloud before? And it sounds like you believe that in the, I guess if we say post-COVID world, you will probably have some hybrid model. Would that be fair to say? >> Yeah, I think before we did have a different solution that was still cloud-based. It was part of our business continuity. So we still had some semblance of a virtual computing solution in the cloud, but it wasn't that extensive, and a lot of our individual programs, chemical engineering, geography, and others were using physical labs that the students would sort of schedule times and be able to work in as part of their coursework. Coming out of this, we fully expect if we're going an extended period of time where students are able to access these materials and these demanding software packages at any time from any kind of device coming out of COVID, they're not going to want to go back to that model where they're asking, they have to get permission and go in in limited hours into a physical lab and sit there. This is going to be the expectation going forward is that they have this kind of access and this kind of flexibility from now on. >> Yeah, this is, I mean, they've gotten a taste, essentially, and so they see how easy it is to complete their coursework without actually having to trek across campus into a lab and kind of fight with the population to find a seat. This basically will become an expectation of an offering. >> Yeah, Mohammad, what I'd love if you could drill in a little bit for us there. Architecturally speaking, of course, the cloud is built to be able to scale and move fast. So if you need capacity and need to scale up fast, that's great. If in the future, you still want to leverage this solution, but you can scale down, that should be possible. So maybe give us a little bit of a how AWS architecturally supports what you're doing, and just from a pricing solution standpoint, how you'll be able to support the customer in today's environment and however that path goes down the road, you'll be able to support that too. >> Right, I mean, so with AWS cloud, we're able to, as you said, scale up or down as demand is needed, but we've taken that even a little bit further where we're scaling based off of student scheduling. So if we've got a course that we know that is running from >> 10: 00 AM to 11:00 AM, prior to that course starting, we'll scale the environment up so that it's available for those students if it's more of a in course lab session and then spin things back down after the course is done so that we don't have those many, many machines sitting there running and burning the hours and running up the bill. Physical environment, once you've installed it, it's there. It's always running. You cannot do that. But with the power of the cloud, we're able to go up and down. We're able to take things, scale things down off hours. If we look at the patterns for student usage, off hours, overnight, take things down because you don't need those machines sitting there running all the time. >> And this is one of the biggest differentiators. So many times in higher ed, we struggle to have to explain to companies and vendors and providers what our needs are and how we're very different from corporations and other verticals. With the eLumin solution and the capabilities in AWS, we're really having this tailor to our students' schedules, to the class schedules, and that kind of flexibility makes the product economically viable for us, but it also means that we don't get nearly the kind of pushback from the academic side, because it is really tailored to meet their needs versus just something we're kind of shoehorning in. So that makes a huge difference in terms of adoption and the way it's perceived from a marketing and acceptance standpoint. >> Yeah, Damian, I'm curious, once you did that initial rollout, how much of an on ramp is there for both the education, the educator side, as well as the student side? And you talked about having some flexibility as to how and when students use things. That sounds great, but do you have to change office hours or the hours that the staff are leveraging that? I'm just trying to understand the ripple effect of what you're doing. >> No, it's a fair point. We have done fairly extensive training. The students picked it up very quickly. What we, with students, if there's a tool that they can use to do their work more effectively, they're going to use it, whether it's something we provide or something they find through other means. But what we've done is reached out to all of our faculty that we're training, that we're teaching in our physical labs and tried to work with them to understand what this solution is, how they can sort of rethink some of their classes. And a couple of our departments have actually taken an approach of rather than sit everybody in a virtual lab the same way they would sit people in a physical lab, they're moving some of this to more asynchronous so that the students can sort of work at their own pace and sort of rethink how they structure some of those classes because of the flexibility being provided. But it does take a lot of training from the instructional side and some rethinking of this, but the end solution is something that reaches the students where they are and the way they want to learn, which is a really powerful thing we're always trying to do. >> Excellent. Mohammad, I'm wondering just broadly learnings that you have from what's been happening. Obviously I'm sure you've been quite busy in responding to things. What's been the impact on your business? How has AWS been as a partner to be able to support the needs of what you're doing? >> Well, as you can imagine, things have just really blown up in terms of demand and being able to, again, through the power of the cloud, just being able to scale up and rapid deployment. As we spoke about earlier, this deployment was two and a half weeks from start to finish, being able to do that, being able to do that with AWS tools have been critical in moving things forward. >> Excellent. Damian, back to you on this. Obviously if you had had more time to be able to plan this out, there might be some things that you would do differently. But what have your learnings been with this? And if you've been talking to your peers, any advice that you would give as you've moved through this rapid acceleration of the move to remote? >> Certainly, I think we would've certainly done some things differently, but we had been talking about this move for three or four months ahead of COVID, so for us, it wasn't quite as rushed as the actual deployment wound up being. I think the big thing is having a vendor and having a partner where you can understand all the options. So the good and bad of the cloud is there's 100 different ways to do almost anything you want to accomplish, and taking the time to understand what the different features and the ramifications of how you deploy and how you think through that. For us, we deployed one way because we could do it very quickly, and then we took the rest of the semester and part of this summer to do some more thorough evaluations to really ask our constituents, do you like this method, or do you like some of the other possibilities, and see which user experience they liked more, and then we're able to work with eLumin, and they've been able to be very nimble in adjusting the services to meet what we've gotten our feedback on. So I think if I had to do it again, I would've done that testing ahead of time, but that's a very minor thing. These are really sort of small tweaks to just make life a little easier, not fundamental differences in what we're providing. >> Yeah, Damian, one last question, if I could. Sorry, Mohammad. Just, I'm curious from the financial standpoint how much you felt that you understood what costs would be and some of the levers as to what you were using and the impact there. We've seen great maturation over the last handful of years as to transparency and understanding how cloud actually is built. But just curious if you have any final comments on the financial piece of things, seeing that it probably wasn't something that was in your budget for the last quarter. >> It wasn't, that's very true, but we also knew that it was essential. So what we realized was we didn't know how often a lot of our physical labs and these classes were being used. So we knew there was going to be some unknowns. We'd move to this, we'd have to see what adoption was. But being able to get the reporting out and working with Mohammad and others to really start customizing in the cloud. That's the beauty of it is we recognize, we saw some really fascinating patterns where during the week people would use this sort of as you'd expect, but on the weekends, it was in the evenings. Nobody's logging on Saturday or Sunday morning, but boy, at eight p.m., there's a good bit of usage. So we could tailor and do some of that off-hours work and really slows things down. Having that visibility has made the economic piece much more viable, and really being able to tweak the computing power with two different needs of the different classes. So it's actually been fairly easy to understand, but it was a ramp up where we had to sort of guess at first and then understand our own processes. But that's more sort of the, if you don't have good data coming in, it's hard to get it out. >> Excellent. And Mohammad, I want to let you kind of give your lessons learned. Obviously it's a technology space you've been in and it's just been an acceleration of some of the things you're working on. So lessons learned, advice you would give to other companies, other universities and educational facilities out there. >> Right, and this is, again, speaking to the power of the cloud, right? Some of the, one of the biggest lessons learned here is you don't necessarily need to get it right the first time. As Damian was saying, we went back, kind of analyzed what we were seeing, and after the initial deployment, took a look at the actual usage and kind of adjusted based off of that, according to that, taking in feedback from faculty members on how they were using the system and tweaking the presentation or tweaking applications on the back end for accommodating those needs. That's the power of the cloud, being able to adjust on the fly. You're not, you don't have to be committed to every single bit there, and being able to change it on the fly is just something that is kind of natural in the cloud these days. >> Excellent. Well, thank you both so much for joining us, Damian, thank you for joining and moving forward, sharing your story, wish you the best of luck going forward. And Mohammad, big congratulations on winning. Super important category, especially here in 2020. Congratulations to you and the team. >> Thank you. >> Yeah, thank you. >> All right, stay tuned for more coverage here from the AWS public sector. It's their partner awards program. I'm Stu Miniman, and thank you for watching theCUBE. (bright music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders >>all around the world. >>This is a cube conversation. Hi, and welcome to a special production of the Cube. We're talking to the Amazon Web services, public sector, their partner awards program. I'm your host stew minimum, and we're digging in on education is one of the sectors. Of course, public sector looks at non profits. It looks at the government sectors. Education, Of course, when we talk about remote learning is such a huge, important topic, especially right now in 2020 with a global pandemic so happy to welcome to the program. We have two guests. First of all, we're representing the award winning company Mohammad. He is the co founder and senior vice president of architecture and engineering with Lumen and joining his one of his customers, Damien Doyle, who is the associate vice president of Enterprise Infrastructure Solutions at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, or UMBC. As it's known, gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >>Thank you. Thanks for having us. >>Alright. First of all, Mohammed, congratulations. As I said in my intro, you know, such an important topic and I have two Children that are, you know, dealing with remote learning have lots of friends that were in higher education and, you know, in the technology space. So your company is the 2020 AWS Public Sector Award winner for best remote learning. I'm sure there is a space that has a lot of competition on. Of course, leveraging public cloud is a great way to be able to ramp this sort of thing up rather fast. Give us a little bit. You know, you are the co founder. So would love to hear a little bit of the origin story, your background and Ellis about what differentiates the looming >>sure loom in we provide ah manage products and services around end user compute with a focus on education for providing access to applications and other technology. Resource is, of course, content course applications in the public cloud, so that users are able to use, you know, whatever device they have wherever they are, um so and have access to those applications that are required for completing that force work they could be in, you know, in at home, in their dorms, at a corner coffee shop on the side of a mountain in the Middle East wherever they may be. But leveling that playing fears playing field so that they could access, um, have access to any of the demanding applications on any device is what we're You know, What our goal is is to make sure that we're not having technology be a barrier to their learning. >>Fantastic. Damien, If if we could turn to you, then atyou NBC, maybe if you could give our audience Ah, thumbnail of you know, the university and I have some idea of the challenge that was put in front of you when you talk about the learning. But maybe you could give us a little bit of the pre cove it and, uh, you know what? What you were faced in and what you were looking at when it came to dealing with the current situation. >>Sure be happy to So where you? NBC is a mid sized public institution. We're sort of suburban, about 14,000 students, and we have undergrad, graduate and doctoral programs, and we have a heavy focus on a lot of the stem disciplines. And so pre cove, it very based in collaborative environments, active learning but but hands on. So a lot of our programs really do have a lot of that. We leverage technology very heavily, even if it's in whether it's an engineering biology, any of those kinds of programs. Uh huh. As you said that the challenge became how do you very quickly pivot into an entirely online model when you sort of scatter shot all of your students and you don't really have a great sense of what they're gonna have access to and, um, and the abilities and connectivity they're gonna have. So this this kind of thing was really critical for us as we made that transition. >>Excellent. Mohammed, Were you working with you, NBC before the current move toe Go, go remote. Give us a little bit about the relationship and how that started. >>I believe, actually that the pandemic was the impetus to kind of drive this forward. Damien and his team reached out to loom in looking for a solution that would allow them to kind of have students access the applications that they normally would have access to in their physical computer labs. But with ah the change and not having to access those labs anymore needed a remote learning solution. A remote access solution for being able to access those high compute high graphics processing or memory intensive applications through the cloud. Taking into account the fact that you know, students won't have you know, that the highest end computer laptop, you know, they probably be working on a chromebook or a lower and machine, but need that compute power on. And then we had to kind of provide a solution pretty quickly because it was, you know, schools were shutting down, essentially physically started shutting down and needing to continue on with their coursework. Coursework? >>Yeah, Dave and I like to understand from your side. Can you share with us a little bit that time frames, you know, how fast did you go from? Oh, my gosh, We need this. We need proposals. We need to roll this out, and we need to have students. Ah, in teachers back up and running. >>Well, you know, I think the one thing from our side we had already known of element and we've been looking at that pre cove it. We knew we needed a product that that provided us this kind of agility and really gave the students some better access to the computing tools that they need it. So once we identify that, the thing that was amazing to me is is we moved from our existing system over to production illumination. It was about 2.5 weeks sort of start to finish and, you know, to get all the images to get all the technology running tested and everything up and running in 2.5 weeks for a full solution for a campus is was pretty amazing. And that was one of the real benefits we saw was going to the cloud. We also looked at this outside of code as something that really provided a major benefit to the students so that they could work from anywhere at any time rather than be sort of tethered to that physical lab. >>Well, I'm glad you raised that. So if you could Damien a little bit, you know, help us understand. How much are you using A cloud before? And it sounds like you believe that, you know, in the you know, I guess if we say postcode world, you would probably have some hybrid model. Would that be fair to say, >>Yeah, I think before we did have a different solution that was still cloud based. It was part of our business continuity. So we still had some semblance of virtual computing solution in the cloud. But it wasn't that extensive. And a lot of our individual programs chemical engineering, geography and others were using physical labs that the students would sort of scheduled times and be able to work in as part of their coursework. Uh, coming out of this, we fully expect if, if we're going on extended period of time where students are able to access these materials and these demanding software packages at any time from any kind of device coming out of cove it they're not gonna want to go back to that model where they're asking, you know, they have to get permission and go in and limited hours into a physical lab and sit there. This is going to be the expectation going forward is that they have this kind of access and this kind of flexibility from now. >>Yeah, this is I mean, they've gotten a taste essentially, and so, you know, they they see how easy it is to complete their coursework without actually having to trek across campus into a lab and kind of fight with the population to find a seat. This basically will become an expectation of an offering. >>Mohammed, what I'd love if you could drill in a little bit for us there, Architecturally speaking, of course, the cloud is built to be able to scale and move fast. So if you need capacity and need to scale up fast, that's great if in the future you still want to leverage the solution. But you can scale down, that should be possible. So maybe give us a little bit of you know how aws arc. It actually supports what you're doing and, you know, just from a pricing solution standpoint, how you'll be able to support the customer in today's environment. And however that path goes down the road, you'll be able to support that, >>right? I mean, so, you know, with the AWS cloud, we're able to, as you said, scale up or down as demand is needed. But we we've taken that even a little bit further where we're scaling based off of, um, students scheduling. So if we've got, of course, that we know that is running from 10 AM to 11 AM Your prior to that core starting will scale the environment up so that it's available for those students. If it's not, you know, more of, ah, in course, lab session, um, and then spin things back down after the course is done so that we don't have that those many, many machines sitting there running and burning the hours and running up the bill. You know, physical environment. You know, once you've installed it, it's there. It's always running. You cannot do that. But with the power of the cloud, we're able to go up and down. We're able to take things. Uh, you know, scale things down off hours. If we look at the patterns for a student usage, you know, off hours overnight take things down because you don't need those machines sitting there running, running all the time. >>And this is one of the biggest differentiators so many times in higher ed. We struggle to have to explain to companies and vendors and providers what our needs are and how we're very. We're very different from corporations and other other verticals with the bloomin solution and the capabilities in AWS. But we're really having this Taylor to our students schedules to the class schedules, and that kind of flexibility makes the product economically viable for us. But it also means that we don't get nearly the kind of push back from the academic side because it is really Taylor to meet their needs versus just something we're kind of shoehorning in. So that makes a huge difference in terms of adoption and the way it's perceived from a marketing, marketing and acceptance standpoint. Yeah, >>Dave and I'm curious. Once you did that initial rollout, how much of an on ramp is there for both the education, the educators side as well as student side? And you talked about having some flexibility as to how and when students use thing. That sounds great, but do you have to change, you know, office hours or the hours that the staff are leveraging that I'm just trying to understand the you know, the ripple effect of what you're doing? >>No, it's It's a fair point. We have done fairly extensive training. The students picked it up very quickly. What we with students? If there is a tool that they can use to do their work more effectively. They're going to use it, whether it's something we provide or something they find through other means. But what we've done is is reached out to all of our faculty that were training, that we're teaching in our physical labs and try to work with them to understand what the solution is, how they can sort of rethink some of their classes. And a couple of our departments have actually taking a approach of rather than said everybody in a virtual lab the same way they would sit people in a physical lab. They're moving some of this team or a synchronous so that the students can serve, work at their own pace and rethink how they structure some of those classes because of the flexibility being provided. But it does take a lot of training from the instructional side and some rethinking off this. But it the end solution is something that reaches the students where they are and the way they want to learn, which is a really powerful thing. We're always trying to do >>excellent, Mohammed. I'm wondering just broadly learnings that you have from what what's been happening Obviously, I'm sure you've been quite busy and responding to things. You know, what's been the impact on your business, how as a ws been as a partner to support the needs of what you're doing. >>Well, as you can imagine, the other things that just really blown up, Um, in terms of demand and being able to again through the plant power of the cloud, just being able to scale up and rapid deployment, you know, as we talk about earlier this deployment was, you know, 2 2.5 weeks from start to finish. Being able to do that, being able to do that with AWS tools have been, um, critical and moving things forward. >>Excellent. Uh, Damien, it's a sit back to you on this. You know, obviously, if you had had, you know, more time be able to plan this out if there might be some things that you would do differently. But what have your learnings been with this? And if you've been talking to your peers, any advice that you would give, uh, you know, as you've moved through this this rapid acceleration of the move to remote >>you Certainly. I think we would have certainly done some things differently. But we have been talking about this move for three or four months ahead of Covitz. So for us it wasn't. It wasn't quite as rushed as the actual deployment wound up being. I think the big thing is having having a vendor and having a partner where you can understand all the options. So the good and bad of the cloud is there's 100 different ways to do almost anything you want to accomplish and taking the time to understand what the different features and the ramifications of how you how you deploy and how you think. Think through that for us. We deployed one way because we could do it very quickly. And then we took the rest of the semester and part of this summer to do some more thorough evaluations to really ask our constituents you like this method or do you like some of the other, possibly some of the other possibilities and see which user experience they liked more? And then we're able to work with illumination, and they've been ableto very nimble in adjusting the services to meet what we've gotten our feedback on. So I think if I had to do it again, I would have done that testing ahead of time. But that's a very minor thing. These air really sort of small tweaks to just make life a little easier. Not fundamental differences in the what we're providing. >>Yeah, I'm Damien. What? One last question if I could, um sorry. Sorry, Mohammed. Just I'm curious from the financial standpoint, you know how much you felt that you understood what costs would be in some of the levers as to what are you using in the impact there? We've seen, you know, great maturation over the last handful of years. As toe. Yeah, you know, transparency and understanding how cloud actually is build. But I'm just curious if you have any final comments on the financial piece things, seeing that, it probably wasn't something that was in your budget for the last quarter. Yeah, >>it wasn't. That's very true. But we also knew that it was essential so that what we realized was we didn't know how often a lot of our physical labs and these classes were being used. So we knew there was going to be some unknowns. We've moved to this would have to see what adoption was but be able to get the reporting out and working with Mohammed and others to really start customizing in the cloud. That's the beauty of it is we recognize we saw some really fascinating patterns where during the week people would use this sort of as you'd expect. But on the weekends it was in the evenings. Nobody, nobody is logging on Saturday or Sunday morning. But boy at eight PM there's a good bit of usage so we could tailor and do some of that off hours work and really slows things down. Having that visibility has made the economic piece much more viable and really being able to tweak the computing power with two different needs of the different classes. So it's actually been fairly easy to understand, but it was a ramp up where we have to sort of guess at first and then understand our own processes. But that's more sort of the If you don't have good data coming in, it's hard to get it. Get it out. Excellent. Mohammad, I >>want you to kind of give your lessons learned. Obviously, it's a technology space. You've been in. Ah, and it's just been an acceleration of some of the things you're working on. So lessons learned advice you would give Teoh, you know, other companies of the universities and education No facilities out there, >>Right? And, you know, this is again speaking to the power of the cloud, right? Some of that one of the biggest lessons learned here is you don't necessarily need to get it right the first time. It's name and saying was saying, You know, we went back kind of analyze what we were staying in after the initial deployment, took a look at the actual usage and kind of adjusted, based based off of that. According to that, taking and feedback from faculty members on how they were using a system in tweaking the presentation or tweaking applications on the back end for accommodating those needs. That's the power of the cloud being able to adjust on the fly. You're not. You don't have to be committed to every single bit there. Uh, and being able to change it on the fly is is just something that is kind of natural in the cloud these days. >>Excellent. Well, thank you both. So much for joining us, Damien. Thank you for joining and moving forward. Sharing your story. I wish you the best of luck going forward. And Mohammed Big. Congratulations on winning. You know, super important category. Especially here in 20. Funny congratulations to you and the team. >>Thank you. >>Yeah, Thank you. Alright, stay tuned for more coverage here from the AWS public sector is their partner awards program. I'm Stew men a man And thank you for watching the Cube. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

from the silicon angle media office in Boston Massachusetts it's the queue now here's your host David on tape hello everyone and welcome to this special presentation we're gonna introduce you to a new kind of company first you might recall we've been reporting extensively on multi cloud and the need to create consistent experiences across cloud at high performance now a key to that outcome is the ability to leave data in place where it belongs not moving it around and bringing a cloud like experience to that data we've talked about kubernetes as a multi cloud enabler but it's an insufficient condition for success latency matters in fact it's critical and the ability to access data at high speeds wherever that data lives well we believe be a fundamental tenet of multi cloud now today I want to introduce you to a company called vicinity V CIN ity the simplest way to think of this company is they turn wide area networks into a global land and with me is Craig Hobart to talk about this he's the VP at vicinity Craig good to see you again thanks a lot thanks Howie middays good to be back so when I first heard about this company I said wow no it can't that breaking the law of physics so first of all tell me a little bit background about the company sure yeah absolutely so about two decades ago this company was formerly known as Bay Microsystems they were they were asked to come up with a solution specific for the United States military and there was a couple of people involved in that that tender fortunately for us Bay Microsystems prevailed and they've had their solution in place with the US military for well over a decade approach in two decades so that is the foundation that is the infrastructure of where we originated so did I get it right it kind of come through what you do can you add some color to that yeah yeah as much as I can right so based on who the the main consumer is so we do some very creative things where we we take the benefits of tcp/ip which is the retransmit the ability to ensure the data arrives there in one piece but we take away all the bad things with it things like dropping packets typically ones are lossy networks and and most people are accustomed to two fiber channel networks which of course which are lossless right and so what we've done is take the beauty of tcp/ip but remove the hindrances to it and that's how we get it to function at the same speeds as Al and overall one so but there's got to be more to it than that I mean it just sounds like magic right so you're able to leave data in place and access it at very low latency very high speeds so you know what's the secret sauce behind that is it is it you know architecture patents I mean yeah absolutely so we have over 30 unique patents that contribute to that we're not just doing those things that I just thought about before is a lot more we're actually shortly in the typical OSI stack the the moving through those layers and using our DMA so a lot of companies users today obviously infinite out uses in between the nodes Dell uses at HP is it's a very ubiquitous technology but typically it has a very short span it's designed for low latency as a 21-foot limitation there's certain things you can do to get around that now so what we did in our earlier iterations is extend that so you could go across the world but utilizing that inside a proprietary sort of l2 a tunneling protocol allows you to reinstate those calls that happened on the local side and bring them up on the other side of the world so presumably that sets up for Rocky it does yeah and rocky to you absolutely so we use that we use it converged Ethernet we can do some magical things where we can go in InfiniBand and potentially come out rocky at the other end there's a lot of really good things that we do obviously if it uh bans expensive converged Ethernet it's a lot more feasible and a lot easier to adapt when we can make sure I understand this so you think InfiniBand you're thinking you know in a data center you know proximate and shocking synchronous distances are you saying that you can extend that we can but extended not extending finna band but you're saying you can you translate it into Ethernet yeah yeah we we translate into we have some proprietary mechanisms obviously that that all the patents on but in essence that's exactly what we're doing yeah we take in the earlier years InfiniBand and extend that to wherever it needed to be over any distance and and now we do it with conversion and infinite in like speeds yeah yeah so obviously you've got that we can't get around physics oh I mean it for instance between our Maryland office and our San Jose office it's a 60 millisecond r/t team we can't get beyond that we can't achieve physics but what we can do is deliver us sometimes a 20x payload inside that same RTT so in essence you could argue that would be due to the speed of light by delivering a higher payload is what's the trade-off I mean there's got to be something here yeah so it's today it's not it's not ideal for every single situation if you were to do a transactional LTP a database at one side of the world to the other it would that would not be great for that something files yeah so so what we actually do I mean some some great examples we have is seismic data we have some companies that are doing seismic exploration and it used to take a lot of time to bring that data back to shore copied to a disk array and then you know copied to multiple disk arrays across the world so people can analyze it in that particularly use case we bring that data back we can even access it via satellite directly from the boats that are doing the the surveys and then we can have multiple people around the world looking at that sample live when we do a demonstration for our customers that shows that so that's one great example of time to market and getting ahead of your competition what's the file system underneath so we have a choice of different file system is a parallel file system we chose spectrum Connect it's a very ubiquitous file system it's well known it has there is no other file system that has the the hours of runtime that that has we off you skate the complexities from the customers we do all of the tuning so it's a custom solution and so they don't see it but we do have some of the hyper scales that want to use lustre and cluster and be GFS and things that we can accommodate those so you have a choice but the preferred is gpfs is a custom one we have you absolutely if somebody wants to use another one we have done that and can certainly have dialogues around it could talk about how this is different from competitors I think of like guys like doing Wayne acceleration sure sure yeah so what acceleration regardless of who you are today with it's predicated upon caching substantial caching and some of the problems with that are obviously once you turn on encryption that compression and those deduplication or data reduction technologies are hampered in that caching based on who our primary customer was we're handed encrypted data from them we encrypted as well so we have double layers of encrypted data and that does not affect our performance so massive underlying technological differences that allow you to adapt to the modern world with encrypted data so we've been talking about I said in the intro a lot about multi cloud can you tell us sooner where do you fit in but first of all how do you see that evolving sure and where do you guys fit in Joe so I actually read to assess very certain dividends I read your article before we had a dialogue last week and there was a good article talking about the complexities around multi cloud and I think you know you look at Google it's got some refactoring involved in it they're all great approaches we think the best way to deal with multi cloud today is to hold your data yourself and bring those services that you want to it and before we came along you couldn't do that so think now a movie studio we have a company in California that needs people working on video editing across the world and typically they would proliferate multiple copies out to storage in India and China and Australia and not only is that costly but it's incredibly time consuming and in one of those instances it opens up security holes and the movies were getting hacked and stolen and of course that's billions of dollars worth of damage to to any movie company so by having one set of security tenants in your in your physical place you can now bring anybody you want to consume that day to bring them all together bid GCP AWS as you for the compute and you maintain your data and that segues well into things like gdpr and things like that where the data isn't moving so you're not affected by those rules and regulations the data stays in one place it's we think it's a huge advantage so has that helped you get some business I mean the fact that you have to move data and you can keep it in you can give us an example yeah it absolutely doesn't mean if you think of companies like pharmaceutical companies that have a lot of data to process whether it's electron microscopy data nano tissue samples they need heavy iron to do that we're talking craze so we can facilitate the ability to rent out supercomputers and the security company of the farmers is happy to do that because it's not leaving the four walls present the data and run it live because we're getting land speeds right we're giving you land speed performance over the wine so it's it's possible we've actually done it for them to do that craze make money by renting the farmers are happy because they can't afford craze it's a great way to accelerate time to marketing in that case they're making drug specific for your genome specific for your body tissue so the efficacy of the drugs is greatly improved as well well as you have been we know the storage business primary storage right now is I've said it's a knife fight yeah and it's a cloud is eating away at it flash was injected and gave people a lot of head rooms and they're not buying spindles for performance anymore but but data protection and backup and and data management is really taking off do you guys fit in there is are there use cases for you you there when you think of companies like cookie City and rubric and and many others that are the cloud seems to be a tailwind for them is it a tailwind for you I think so and I think he just brought up a great point if you look at and again another one of your articles I'm giving you some thanks Rick you know saying I won't forget it is the article you wrote I thought was excellent about how data is changed it's not so much about the primary data now it's about the backup data and what rubric and cohesive tea especially have done is bring value to that data and they've elevated it up the stack for analytics and AI and made available to DevOps and that's brilliant but today that can find it too within the four walls of that company what vicinity can do for those companies has come along and make that data available anywhere in the world at anytime so if they've got different countries that they're trying to sell into that may have diff back up types or different data they can access this and model the data and see how it's relevant to their specific industry right as we say our zeros and ones are different than your zeros and ones so it's a massive expansion it take that richness that they've created and extrapolate that globally and that's what facility brings to the table you know within the days of big data we used to look at high performance computing as an example going more into commercial notes that's clearly happened but mainstream is still VMware is there a VMware play for you guys or opportunity great question great question in q1 of this year so so January end of January 2020 typically in the intro we talked about how we were born on a6 which is incredibly expensive and limited you get one go ahead and then we move to FPGAs we actually wrote a lot of libraries that took the FPGAs into a VMware instance and so what we're doing now with our customers is when we go in and present they say there's no way you can do this and we show them the demo when we actually leave they can log-in download to VMware instances put one in in these case one the west coast or with one of my customers we have now one on the east coast one in London download the VM and see the improvement that we can get over their dedicated lines or even the Internet by using the VM fact we did that in a test with AWS last week and got a 90 percent improvement just using the VM so when you are talking to customers what's the you know what's the the situation that you're looking for the the problem that comes up that you say bone that's vicinity maybe you could show not you do slash call in there so I think a lot of that is people looking to use multi cloud right that aren't sure which way they want to go how they want to do it and for other companies that can't move the data there's a lot of companies that either went to the cloud and came back or cannot go to the cloud because of the sensitivity of the data so and also things like the the seismic exploration right there is no cloud solution that makes that expedient enough to consume it as it's been developed and so anybody that needs movie editing large file transfer dr you know if you're moving a lot of files from one location to another we can't get involved in storage replication but if it's a file share we can do that and one of the great things we do is if you have cysts or NFS shares today we can consume those shares with the with the spectrum scale the gpfs under the cover and make that appear anywhere else in the world and we do that through our proprietary technology of course so now remote offices can collapse a lot of the infrastructure they have and consume the resources from the main data center because we can reach right back here at land space they just become an extension of the land no different than me plug in the laptop into an Ethernet you pay a penalty on first byte we do but it's almost transparent because of the way tcp/ip works very chatty yeah it is so we drop all that and that that's a great question an analogy we use in house is you turn on a garden house and it takes a few seconds for that garden hose to fill but with us that water stream is constant and it's constantly output in water with tcp/ip a bit stop start stop start stop start and if you have to start doing retransmit which is a regular occurrence of tcp/ip and that entire capacity of that garden hose will be dropped and then refilled and this is where our advantage is the ability to keep that full and keep serving data in that what you just described makes people really think twice about multi clouds essentially they want to put the right workload in the right place and kind of leave it there and essentially it's like the old mini computer days they're creating you know silos you're helping sort of bridge those we are that and that is the plot and so you know we have B to B we are B to C I mean if you sit and think about the possibilities I mean it could end up on every one of these right this software you know do we tackle every Wireless point this is this is some of the things that we can do you're an app or do we put vicinity on that to take the the regular tcp/ip and send the communication you know through through our proprietary Network around proprietary configuration so there's a lot of things that we can do we can we can affect everybody and that is that is the goal so divide by hardware from you or software or both that's another great question so if you are in a data center in the analogy I just gave before about being a a big data center you would use a piece of hardware that's got accelerants in it and then the remote office could use a smaller piece of hardware or just the VM with the movie company example I gave you earlier India and Australia is edit in live files on the west coast of the United States of America just using the VM so it depends what we come in as we look at your needs and we don't oversell you we try and sell you the correct solution and that typically is a combination of some hardware in the main data center and some software at the others so I've said you know multi-cloud in many ways creates more problems today than it solves you guys are really in there attacking that multi-cloud is a reality it's it's happening you know I said historically it's been a symptom of multi-vendor but now it's becoming increasingly a strategy and I think frankly I think companies like yours are critical in the ecosystem to really you know drive that transformation for organizations so congratulations thank you thank you we hope so and I'm sure we'll be seeing more of you in the future excellent well thanks for coming in Craig and we'll talk to you soon thank you for watching everybody this is Dave latte for the cube and we'll see you next time

>> from Cambridge, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering M I T. Chief data officer and information quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Welcome back to M I. T. In Cambridge, Massachusetts. Everybody. You're watching the cube. The leader in live tech coverage. This is M I t CDO I Q the chief data officer and information quality conference. Someday Volonte with my co host, Paul Galen. Professor Dr Stewart, Mad Nick is here. Longtime Cube alum. Ah, long time professor at M i. T soon to be retired, but we're really grateful that you're taking your time toe. Come on. The Cube is great to see you again. >> It's great to see you again. It's been a long time. She worked together and I really appreciate the opportunity to share our spirits. Hear our mighty with your audience. Well, it's really been fun >> to watch this conference evolved were full and it's really amazing. We have to move to a new venue >> next year. I >> understand. And data we talk about the date explosion all the time, But one of the areas that you're focused on and you're gonna talk about today is his ethics and privacy and data causes so many concerns in those two areas. But so give us the highlight of what you're gonna discuss with the audience today. We'll get into >> one of things that makes it so challenging. It is. Data has so many implications. Tow it. And that's why the issue of ethics is so hard to get people to reach agreement on it. We're talking people regarding medicine and the idea big data and a I so know, to be able to really identify causes you need mass amounts of data. That means more data has to be made available as long as it's Elsa data, not mine. Well, not my backyard. If he really So you have this issue where on the one hand, people are concerned about sharing the data. On the other hand, there's so many valuable things would gain by sharing data and getting people to reach agreement is a challenge. Well, one of things >> I wanted to explore with you is how things have changed you back in the day very familiar with Paul you as well with Microsoft, Department of Justice, justice, FTC issues regarding Microsoft. And it wasn't so much around data was really around browsers and bundling things today. But today you see Facebook and Google Amazon coming under fire, and it's largely data related. Listen, Liz Warren, last night again break up big tech your thoughts on similarities and differences between sort of the monopolies of yesterday and the data monopolies of today Should they be broken up? What do you thought? So >> let me broaden the issue a little bit more from Maryland, and I don't know how the demographics of the audience. But I often refer to the characteristics that millennials the millennials in general. I ask my students this question here. Now, how many of you have a Facebook account in almost every class? Facebook. You realize you've given away a lot of nation about yourself. It it doesn't really occurred to them. That may be an issue. I was told by someone that in some countries, Facebook is very popular. That's how they cordoned the kidnappings of teenagers from rich families. They track them. They know they're going to go to this basketball game of the soccer match. You know exactly what I'm going after it. That's the perfect spot to kidnap them, so I don't know whether students think about the fact that when they're putting things on Facebook than making so much of their life at risk. On the other hand, it makes their life richer, more enjoyable. And so that's why these things are so challenging now, getting back to the issue of the break up of the big tech companies. One of the big challenges there is that in order to do the great things that big data has been doing and the things that a I promises do you need lots of data. Having organizations that can gather it all together in a relatively systematic and consistent manner is so valuable breaking up the tech companies. And there's some reasons why people want to do that, but also interferes with that benefit. And that's why I think it's gonna be looked at real Kim, please, to see not only what game maybe maybe breaking up also what losses of disadvantages we're creating >> for ourselves so example might be, perhaps it makes United States less competitive. Visa VI China, in the area of machine intelligence, is one example. The flip side of that is, you know Facebook has every incentive to appropriate our data to sell ads. So it's not an easy, you know, equation. >> Well, even ads are a funny situation for some people having a product called to your attention that something actually really want. But you never knew it before could be viewed as a feature, right? So, you know, in some case of the ads, could be viewed as a feature by some people. And, of course, a bit of intrusion by other people. Well, sometimes we use the search. Google, right? Looking >> for the ad on the side. No longer. It's all ads. You know >> it. I wonder if you see public public sentiment changing in this respect. There's a lot of concerns, certainly at the legislative level now about misuse of data. But Facebook user ship is not going down. Instagram membership is not going down. Uh, indication is that that ordinary citizens don't really care. >> I know that. That's been my I don't have all the data. Maybe you may have seen, but just anecdotally and talking to people in the work we're doing, I agree with you. I think most people maybe a bit dramatic, but at a conference once and someone made a comment that there has not been the digital Pearl Harbor yet. No, there's not been some event that was just so onerous. Is so all by the people. Remember the day it happened kind of thing. And so these things happen and maybe a little bit of press coverage and you're back on your Facebook. How their instagram account the next day. Nothing is really dramatic. Individuals may change now and then, but I don't see massive changes. But >> you had the Equifax hack two years ago. 145,000,000 records. Capital one. Just this week. 100,000,000 records. I mean, that seems pretty Pearl Harbor ish to me. >> Well, it's funny way we're talking about that earlier today regarding different parts of the world. I think in Europe, the general, they really seem to care about privacy. United States that kind of care about privacy in China. They know they have no privacy. But even in us where they care about privacy, exactly how much they care about it is really an issue. And in general it's not enough to move the needle. If it does, it moves it a little bit about the time when they show that smart TVs could be broken into smart. See, TV sales did not Dutch an inch. Not much help people even remember that big scandal a year ago. >> Well, now, to your point about expects, I mean, just this week, I think Equifax came out with a website. Well, you could check whether or not your credentials were. >> It's a new product. We're where we're compromised. And enough in what has been >> as head mind, I said, My wife says it's too. So you had a choice, you know, free monitoring or $125. So that way went okay. Now what? You know, life goes >> on. It doesn't seem like anything really changes. And we were talking earlier about your 1972 book about cyber security, that many of the principles and you outlined in that book are still valid today. Why are we not making more progress against cybercriminals? >> Well, two things. One thing is you gotta realize, as I said before, the Cave man had no privacy problems and no break in problems. But I'm not sure any of us want to go back to caveman era because you've got to realize that for all these bad things. There's so many good things that are happening, things you could now do, which a smartphone you couldn't even visualize doing a decade or two ago. So there's so much excitement, so much for momentum, autonomous cars and so on and so on that these minor bumps in the road are easy to ignore in the enthusiasm and excitement. >> Well and now, as we head into 2020 affection it was. It was fake news in 2016. Now we've got deep fakes. Get the ability to really use video in new ways. Do you see a way out of that problem? A lot of people looking a Blockchain You wrote an article recently, and Blockchain you think it's on hackable? Well, think again. >> What are you seeing? I think one of things we always talk about when we talk about improving privacy and security and organizations, the first thing is awareness. Most people are really small moment of time, aware that there's an issue and it quickly pass in the mind. The analogy I use regarding industrial safety. You go into almost any factory. You'll see a sign over the door every day that says 520 days, his last industrial accident and then a sub line. Please do not be the one to reset it this year. And I often say, When's the last time you went to a data center? And so assign is at 50 milliseconds his last cyber data breach. And so it needs to be something that is really front, the mind and people. And we talk about how to make awareness activities over companies and host household. And that's one of our major movements here is trying to be more aware because we're not aware that you're putting things at risk. You're not gonna do anything about it. >> Last year we contacted Silicon Angle, 22 leading security experts best in one simple question. Are we winning or losing the war against cybercriminals? Unanimously, they said, we're losing. What is your opinion of that question? >> I have a great quote I like to use. The good news is the good guys are getting better than a firewall of cryptographic codes. But the bad guys are getting batter faster, and there's a lot of reasons for that well on all of them. But we came out with a nautical talking about the docking Web, and the reason why it's fascinating is if you go to most companies if they've suffered a data breach or a cyber attack, they'll be very reluctant to say much about unless they really compelled to do so on the dock, where they love to Brent and reputation. I'm the one who broke in the Capital One. And so there's much more information sharing that much more organized, a much more disciplined. I mean, the criminal ecosystem is so much more superior than the chaotic mess we have here on the good guys side of the table. >> Do you see any hope for that? There are service's. IBM has one, and there are others in a sort of anonymous eyes. Security data enable organizations to share sensitive information without risk to their company. You see any hope on the collaboration, Front >> said before the good guys are getting better. The trouble is, at first I thought there was an issue that was enough sharing going on. It turns out we identified over 120 sharing organizations. That's the good news. And the bad news is 120. So IBM is one and another 119 more to go. So it's not a very well coordinated sharing. It's going just one example. The challenges Do I see any hope in the future? Well, in the more distant future, because the challenge we have is that there'll be a cyber attack next week of some form or shape that we've never seen before and therefore what? Probably not well prepared for it. At some point, I'll no longer be able to say that, but I think the cyber attackers and creatures and so on are so creative. They've got another decade of more to go before they run out of >> Steve. We've got from hacktivists to organized crime now nation states, and you start thinking about the future of war. I was talking to Robert Gates, aboutthe former defense secretary, and my question was, Why don't we have the best cyber? Can't we go in the oven? It goes, Yeah, but we also have the most to lose our critical infrastructure, and the value of that to our society is much greater than some of our adversaries. So we have to be very careful. It's kind of mind boggling to think autonomous vehicles is another one. I know that you have some visibility on that. And you were saying that technical challenges of actually achieving quality autonomous vehicles are so daunting that security is getting pushed to the back burner. >> And if the irony is, I had a conversation. I was a visiting professor, sir, at the University of Niece about a 12 14 years ago. And that's before time of vehicles are not what they were doing. Big automotive tele metrics. And I realized at that time that security wasn't really our top priority. I happen to visit organization, doing really Thomas vehicles now, 14 years later, and this conversation is almost identical now. The problems we're trying to solve. A hider problem that 40 years ago, much more challenging problems. And as a result, those problems dominate their mindset and security issues kind of, you know, we'll get around him if we can't get the cot a ride correctly. Why worry about security? >> Well, what about the ethics of autonomous vehicles? Way talking about your programming? You know, if you're gonna hit a baby or a woman or kill your passengers and yourself, what do you tell the machine to Dio, that is, it seems like an unsolvable problem. >> Well, I'm an engineer by training, and possibly many people in the audience are, too. I'm the kind of person likes nice, clear, clean answers. Two plus two is four, not 3.94 point one. That's the school up the street. They deal with that. The trouble with ethic issues is they don't tend to have a nice, clean answer. Almost every study we've done that has these kind of issues on it. And we have people vote almost always have spread across the board because you know any one of these is a bad decision. So which the bad decision is least bad. Like, what's an example that you used the example I use in my class, and we've been using that for well over a year now in class, I teach on ethics. Is you out of the design of an autonomous vehicle, so you must program it to do everything and particular case you have is your in the vehicle. It's driving around the mountain and Swiss Alps. You go around a corner and the vehicle, using all of senses, realize that straight ahead on the right? Ian Lane is a woman in a baby carriage pushing on to this onto the left, just entering the garage way a three gentlemen, both sides a road have concrete barriers so you can stay on your path. Hit the woman the baby carriage via to the left. Hit the three men. Take a shop, right or shot left. Hit the concrete wall and kill yourself. And trouble is, every one of those is unappealing. Imagine the headline kills woman and baby. That's not a very good thing. There actually is a theory of ethics called utility theory that says, better to say three people than to one. So definitely doing on Kim on a kill three men, that's the worst. And then the idea of hitting the concrete wall may feel magnanimous. I'm just killing myself. But as a design of the car, shouldn't your number one duty be to protect the owner of the car? And so people basically do. They close their eyes and flip a coin because they don't want anyone. Those hands, >> not an algorithmic >> response, doesn't leave. >> I want to come back for weeks before we close here to the subject of this conference. Exactly. You've been involved with this conference since the very beginning. How have you seen the conversation changed since that time? >> I think I think it's changing to Wei first. As you know, this record breaking a group of people are expecting here. Close to 500 I think have registered s o much Clea grown kind of over the years, but also the extent to which, whether it was called big data or call a I now whatever is something that was kind of not quite on the radar when we started, I think it's all 15 years ago. He first started the conference series so clearly has become something that is not just something We talk about it in the academic world but is becoming main stay business for corporations Maur and Maur. And I think it's just gonna keep increasing. I think so much of our society so much of business is so dependent on the data in any way, shape or form that we use it and have >> it well, it's come full circle. It's policy and I were talking at are open. This conference kind of emerged from the ashes of the back office information quality and you say the big date and now a I guess what? It's all coming back to information. >> Lots of data. That's no good. Or that you don't understand what they do with this. Not very healthy. >> Well, doctor Magic. Thank you so much. It's a >> relief for all these years. Really Wanna thank you. Thank you, guys, for joining us and helping to spread the word. Thank you. Pleasure. All right, keep it right, everybody. Paul and >> I will be back at M I t cdo right after this short break. You're watching the cue.

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering A W s reinforce 2019. Brought to you by Amazon Web service is and its ecosystem partners. >> Well, welcome back. Everyone's Cube Live coverage here in Boston, Massachusetts, for AWS. Reinforce Amazon Web sources. First inaugural conference around security. It's not Osama. It's a branded event. Big time ecosystem developing. We have returning here. Cube Alumni Bill Jeff for VP of strategy and the partnerships that Iron Net Cyber Security Company. Welcome back. Thanks. General Keith Alexander, who was on a week and 1/2 ago. And it was public sector summit. Good to see you. Good >> to see you. Thanks for >> having my back, but I want to get into some of the Iran cyber communities. We had General Qi 1000. He was the original commander of the division. So important discussions that have around that. But don't get your take on the event. You guys, you're building a business. The minute cyber involved in public sector. This is commercial private partnership. Public relations coming together. Yeah. Your models are sharing so bringing public and private together important. >> Now that's exactly right. And it's really great to be here with eight of us were really close partner of AWS is we'll work with them our entire back in today. Runs on AWS really need opportunity. Get into the ecosystem, meet some of the folks that are working that we might work with my partner but to deliver a great product, right? And you're seeing a lot of people move to cloud, right? And so you know some of the big announcement that are happening here today. We're willing. We're looking to partner up with eight of us and be a first time provider for some key new Proactiv elves. AWS is launching in their own platform here today. So that's a really neat thing for us to be partnered up with this thing. Awesome organization. I'm doing some of >> the focus areas around reinforcing your party with Amazon shares for specifics. >> Yes. So I don't know whether they announced this capability where they're doing the announcement yesterday or today. So I forget which one so I'll leave that leave that leave that once pursued peace out. But the main thing is, they're announcing couple of new technology plays way our launch party with them on the civility place. So we're gonna be able to do what we were only wanted to do on Prem. We're gonna be able to do in the cloud with AWS in the cloud formation so that we'll deliver the same kind of guy that would deliver on prime customers inside their own cloud environments and their hybrid environment. So it's a it's a it's a sea change for us. The company, a sea change for a is delivering that new capability to their customers and really be able to defend a cloud network the way you would nonpregnant game changer >> described that value, if you would. >> Well, so you know, one of the key things about about a non pregnant where you could do you could look at all the flows coming past you. You look at all the data, look at in real time and develop behavior. Lana looks over. That's what we're doing our own prime customers today in the cloud with his world who looked a lox, right? And now, with the weight of your capability, we're gonna be able to integrate that and do a lot Maur the way we would in a in a in a normal sort of on Prem environment. So you really did love that. Really? Capability of scale >> Wagon is always killed. The predictive analytics, our visibility and what you could do. And too late. Exactly. Right. You guys solve that with this. What are some of the challenges that you see in cloud security that are different than on premise? Because that's the sea, So conversation we've been hearing. Sure, I know on premise. I didn't do it on premises for awhile. What's the difference between the challenge sets, the challenges and the opportunities they provide? >> Well, the opportunities air really neat, right? Because you've got that even they have a shared responsibility model, which is a little different than you officially have it. When it's on Prem, it's all yours essential. You own that responsibility and it is what it is in the cloud. Its share responsible to cloud provider the data holder. Right? But what's really cool about the cloud is you could deliver some really interesting Is that scale you do patch updates simultaneously, all your all your back end all your clients systems, even if depending how your provisioning cloud service is, you could deliver that update in real time. You have to worry about. I got to go to individual systems and update them, and some are updated. Summer passed. Some aren't right. Your servers are packed simultaneously. You take him down, you're bringing back up and they're ready to go, right? That's a really capability that for a sigh. So you're delivering this thing at scale. It's awesome now, So the challenge is right. It's a new environment so that you haven't dealt with before. A lot of times you feel the hybrid environment governed both an on Prem in sanitation and class sensation. Those have to talkto one another, right? And you might think about Well, how do I secure those those connections right now? And I think about spending money over here when I got all seduced to spend up here in the cloud. And that's gonna be a hard thing precisely to figure out, too. And so there are some challenges, but the great thing is, you got a whole ecosystem. Providers were one of them here in the AWS ecosystem. There are a lot here today, and you've got eight of us as a part of self who wants to make sure that they're super secure, but so are yours. Because if you have a problem in their cloud, that's a challenge. Them to market this other people. You talk about >> your story because your way interviews A couple weeks ago, you made a comment. I'm a recovering lawyer, kind of. You know, we all laughed, but you really start out in law, right? >> How did you end up here? Yeah, well, the truth is, I grew up sort of a technology or myself. My first computer is a trash 80 a trs 80 color computer. RadioShack four k of RAM on board, right. We only >> a true TRS 80. Only when I know what you're saying. That >> it was a beautiful system, right? Way stored with sword programs on cassette tapes. Right? And when we operated from four Keita 16 k way were the talk of the Rainbow Computer Club in Santa Monica, California Game changer. It was a game here for 16. Warning in with 60 give onboard. Ram. I mean, this is this is what you gonna do. And so you know, I went from that and I in >> trouble or something, you got to go to law school like you're right >> I mean, you know, look, I mean, you know it. So my dad, that was a chemist, right? So he loved computers, love science. But he also had an unrequited political boners body. He grew up in East Africa, Tanzania. It was always thought that he might be a minister in government. The Socialist came to power. They they had to leave you at the end of the day. And he came to the states and doing chemistry, which is course studies. But he still loved politics. So he raised at NPR. So when I went to college, I studied political science. But I paid my way through college doing computer support, life sciences department at the last moment. And I ran 10 based. He came on climate through ceilings and pulled network cable do punch down blocks, a little bit of fibrous placing. So, you know, I was still a murderer >> writing software in the scythe. >> One major, major air. And that was when when the web first came out and we had links. Don't you remember? That was a text based browser, right? And I remember looking to see him like this is terrible. Who would use http slash I'm going back to go for gophers. Awesome. Well, turns out I was totally wrong about Mosaic and Netscape. After that, it was It was it was all hands on >> deck. You got a great career. Been involved a lot in the confluence of policy politics and tech, which is actually perfect skill set for the challenge we're dealing. So I gotta ask you, what are some of the most important conversations that should be on the table right now? Because there's been a lot of conversations going on around from this technology. I has been around for many decades. This has been a policy problem. It's been a societal problem. But now this really focus on acute focus on a lot of key things. What are some of the most important things that you think should be on the table for techies? For policymakers, for business people, for lawmakers? >> One. I think we've got to figure out how to get really technology knowledge into the hands of policymakers. Right. You see, you watch the Facebook hearings on Capitol Hill. I mean, it was a joke. It was concerning right? I mean, anybody with a technology background to be concerned about what they saw there, and it's not the lawmakers fault. I mean, you know, we've got to empower them with that. And so we got to take technologist, threw it out, how to get them to talk policy and get them up on the hill and in the administration talking to folks, right? And one of the big outcomes, I think, has to come out of that conversation. What do we do about national level cybersecurity, Right, because we assume today that it's the rule. The private sector provides cyber security for their own companies, but in no other circumstance to expect that when it's a nation state attacker, wait. We don't expect Target or Wal Mart or any other company. J. P. Morgan have surface to air missiles on the roofs of their warehouses or their buildings to Vegas Russian bear bombers. Why, that's the job of the government. But when it comes to cyberspace, we expect Private Cummings defending us everything from a script kiddie in his basement to the criminal hacker in Eastern Europe to the nation state, whether Russia, China, Iran or North Korea and these nation states have virtually a limited resource. Your armies did >> sophisticated RND technology, and it's powerful exactly like a nuclear weaponry kind of impact for digital. >> Exactly. And how can we expect prices comes to defend themselves? It's not. It's not a fair fight. And so the government has to have some role. The questions? What role? How did that consist with our values, our principles, right? And how do we ensure that the Internet remains free and open, while still is sure that the president is not is not hampered in doing its job out there. And I love this top way talk about >> a lot, sometimes the future of warfare. Yeah, and that's really what we're talking about. You go back to Stuxnet, which opened Pandora's box 2016 election hack where you had, you know, the Russians trying to control the mean control, the narrative. As you pointed out, that that one video we did control the belief system you control population without firing a shot. 20 twenties gonna be really interesting. And now you see the U. S. Retaliate to Iran in cyberspace, right? Allegedly. And I was saying that we had a conversation with Robert Gates a couple years ago and I asked him. I said, Should we be Maur taking more of an offensive posture? And he said, Well, we have more to lose than the other guys Glasshouse problem? Yeah, What are your thoughts on? >> Look, certainly we rely intimately, inherently on the cyber infrastructure that that sort of is at the core of our economy at the core of the world economy. Increasingly, today, that being said, because it's so important to us all the more reason why we can't let attacks go Unresponded to write. And so if you're being attacked in cyberspace, you have to respond at some level because if you don't, you'll just keep getting punched. It's like the kid on the playground, right? If the bully keeps punching him and nobody does anything, not not the not the school administration, not the kid himself. Well, then the boy's gonna keep doing what he's doing. And so it's not surprising that were being tested by Iran by North Korea, by Russia by China, and they're getting more more aggressive because when we don't punch back, that's gonna happen. Now we don't have to punch back in cyberspace, right? A common sort of fetish about Cyrus is a >> response to the issue is gonna respond to the bully in this case, your eggs. Exactly. Playground Exactly. We'll talk about the Iran. >> So So if I If I if I can't Yeah, the response could be Hey, we could do this. Let them know you could Yes. And it's a your move >> ate well, And this is the key is that it's not just responding, right. So Bob Gates or told you we can't we talk about what we're doing. And even in the latest series of alleged responses to Iran, the reason we keep saying alleged is the U. S has not publicly acknowledged it, but the word has gotten out. Well, of course, it's not a particularly effective deterrence if you do something, but nobody knows you did it right. You gotta let it out that you did it. And frankly, you gotta own it and say, Hey, look, that guy punch me, I punch it back in the teeth. So you better not come after me, right? We don't do that in part because these cables grew up in the intelligence community at N S. A and the like, and we're very sensitive about that But the truth is, you have to know about your highest and capabilities. You could talk about your abilities. You could say, Here are my red lines. If you cross him, I'm gonna punch you back. If you do that, then by the way, you've gotta punch back. They'll let red lines be crossed and then not respond. And then you're gonna talk about some level of capabilities. It can't all be secret. Can't all be classified. Where >> are we in this debate? Me first. Well, you're referring to the Thursday online attack against the intelligence Iranian intelligence community for the tanker and the drone strike that they got together. Drone take down for an arm in our surveillance drones. >> But where are we >> in this debate of having this conversation where the government should protect and serve its people? And that's the role. Because if a army rolled in fiscal army dropped on the shores of Manhattan, I don't think Citibank would be sending their people out the fight. Right? Right. So, like, this is really happening. >> Where are we >> on this? Like, is it just sitting there on the >> table? What's happening? What's amazing about it? Hi. This was getting it going well, that that's a Q. What's been amazing? It's been happening since 2012 2011 right? We know about the Las Vegas Sands attack right by Iran. We know about North Korea's. We know about all these. They're going on here in the United States against private sector companies, not against the government. And there's largely been no response. Now we've seen Congress get more active. Congress just last year passed to pass legislation that gave Cyber command the authority on the president's surgery defenses orders to take action against Russia, Iran, North Korea and China. If certain cyber has happened, that's a good thing, right to give it. I'll be giving the clear authority right, and it appears the president willing to make some steps in that direction, So that's a positive step. Now, on the back end, though, you talk about what we do to harden ourselves, if that's gonna happen, right, and the government isn't ready today to defend the nation, even though the Constitution is about providing for the common defense, and we know that the part of defense for long. For a long time since Secretary Panetta has said that it is our mission to defend the nation, right? But we know they're not fully doing that. How do they empower private sector defense and one of keys That has got to be Look, if you're the intelligence community or the U. S. Government, you're Clinton. Tremendous sense of Dad about what you're seeing in foreign space about what the enemy is doing, what they're preparing for. You have got to share that in real time at machine speed with industry. And if you're not doing that and you're still count on industry to be the first line defense, well, then you're not empowered. That defense. And if you're on a pair of the defense, how do you spend them to defend themselves against the nation? State threats? That's a real cry. So >> much tighter public private relationship. >> Absolutely, absolutely. And it doesn't have to be the government stand in the front lines of the U. S. Internet is, though, is that you could even determine the boundaries of the U. S. Internet. Right? Nobody wants an essay or something out there doing that, but you do want is if you're gonna put the private sector in the in the line of first defense. We gotta empower that defense if you're not doing that than the government isn't doing its job. And so we gonna talk about this for a long time. I worked on that first piece of information sharing legislation with the House chairman, intelligence Chairman Mike Rogers and Dutch Ruppersberger from Maryland, right congressman from both sides of the aisle, working together to get a fresh your decision done that got done in 2015. But that's just a first step. The government's got to be willing to share classified information, scaled speed. We're still not seeing that. Yeah, How >> do people get involved? I mean, like, I'm not a political person. I'm a moderate in the middle. But >> how do I How do people get involved? How does the technology industry not not the >> policy budgets and the top that goes on the top tech companies, how to tech workers or people who love Tad and our patriots and or want freedom get involved? What's the best approach? >> Well, that's a great question. I think part of is learning how to talk policy. How do we get in front policymakers? Right. And we're I run. I run a think tank on the side at the National Institute at George Mason University's Anton Scalia Law School Way have a program funded by the Hewlett Foundation who were bringing in technologists about 25 of them. Actually. Our next our second event. This Siri's is gonna be in Chicago this weekend. We're trained these technologies, these air data scientists, engineers and, like talk Paul's right. These are people who said We want to be involved. We just don't know how to get involved And so we're training him up. That's a small program. There's a great program called Tech Congress, also funded by the U. A. Foundation that places technologists in policy positions in Congress. That's really cool. There's a lot of work going on, but those are small things, right. We need to do this, its scale. And so you know, what I would say is that their technology out there want to get involved, reach out to us, let us know well with our partners to help you get your information and dad about what's going on. Get your voice heard there. A lot of organizations to that wanna get technologies involved. That's another opportunity to get in. Get in the building is a >> story that we want to help tell on be involved in David. I feel passion about this. Is a date a problem? So there's some real tech goodness in there. Absolutely. People like to solve hard problems, right? I mean, we got a couple days of them. You've got a big heart problems. It's also for all the people out there who are Dev Ops Cloud people who like to work on solving heart problems. >> We got a lot >> of them. Let's do it. So what's going on? Iron? Give us the update Could plug for the company. Keith Alexander found a great guy great guests having on the Cube. That would give the quick thanks >> so much. So, you know, way have done two rounds of funding about 110,000,000. All in so excited. We have partners like Kleiner Perkins Forge point C five all supporting us. And now it's all about We just got a new co CEO in Bill Welshman. See Scaler and duo. So he grew Z scaler. $1,000,000,000 valuation he came in to do Oh, you know, they always had a great great exit. Also, we got him. We got Sean Foster in from from From Industry also. So Bill and Sean came together. We're now making this business move more rapidly. We're moving to the mid market. We're moving to a cloud platform or aggressively and so exciting times and iron it. We're coming toe big and small companies near you. We've got the capability. We're bringing advanced, persistent defense to bear on his heart problems that were threat analytics. I collected defence. That's the key to our operation. We're excited >> to doing it. I call N S A is a service, but that's not politically correct. But this is the Cube, so >> Well, look, if you're not, if you want to defensive scale, right, you want to do that. You know, ECE knows how to do that key down here at the forefront of that when he was in >> the government. Well, you guys are certainly on the cutting edge, riding that wave of common societal change technology impact for good, for defence, for just betterment, not make making a quick buck. Well, you know, look, it's a good business model by the way to be in that business. >> I mean, It's on our business cards. And John Xander means it. Our business. I'd say the Michigan T knows that he really means that, right? Rather private sector. We're looking to help companies to do the right thing and protect the nation, right? You know, I protect themselves >> better. Well, our missions to turn the lights on. Get those voices out there. Thanks for coming on. Sharing the lights. Keep covers here. Day one of two days of coverage. Eight of us reinforce here in Boston. Stay with us for more Day one after this short break.

from the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas it's the queue recovering the Hojo Kahn 2018 to you by Osho hello everyone welcome back to the cubes exclusive coverage here live in Las Vegas for the first ever security conference around blockchains called Osho con it's put on by host show and industry participants small but intimate and the smartest people in in the industry kind of coming together trying to solve and understand the future for security as it relates to blockchain I'm John furrow your host of the cube next guys anneal keelson who's the CEO of encrypt formerly the NSA's variety experience with security across the board from early days many waves of technology innovation had a panel here talking about you know securing the blockchain and the nuclear codes some basically implying that do you know if you had to secure it the nuclear it's welcome to the cube well thanks thanks John it's great to talk to you um that's exactly it right so the blockchain is is meant to really provide high assurance for a lot of really big transactions right so the internet evolved over time to to hold information to to share information who has ever meant to conduct transactions now we do a lot of e-commerce commerce on it but it wasn't meant to be unchanging right but the blockchain is it said that so the idea is is if we lose control of that if we don't secure it in a way that we can protect our most important digital assets and it's not good enough for anything and so that's why I compared it to you know what would it take to secure something like the nuclear launch codes on it clearly we wouldn't you know there's no reason to but some mindset it's my shift shared focus on okay think that level of impact absolutely money right these people are putting you know it doesn't matter whether you're you're 16 and you're putting your only 500 dollars in crypto or whether you're an institutional investor with five hundred million dollars in it right that that's catastrophic if you lose it right and yet we don't always treat it that way we haven't made the systems easy enough to use for the general user right yeah so we talked about adoption right I mean let's let's talk so if you don't mind let's talk about adoption Yeah right that's why we're here is we're trying to figure out what's it gonna take to get to the next billion users and crypto well it has to be easy and we don't make it easy today in a secure enough way it has to be baked in from the beginning can't be like okay I built an app I built some architecture do some blockchain well by the way security is really hard because we have to make it so complex right for users because it's complex in general right if we build the app first and we get it deployed to say even 50,000 people and then we go back and say you know what we need to build this tree it's more expensive right it's harder to do it's a lays deployment and it confuses users because now they're changing the way that they're interactive let's talk about the adoption in context to architecture it's one of the things that we've been covering certainly the cube folks know in our audience cloud computing has changed the architecture of how people deploy IT and technologies get DevOps horizontally scalable you've had a lot experience over the years and generations of computing evolving through the trend lines here the architecture is interesting so if you think about the architecture of security and blotching in general the security paradigm has to be compatible with a new architecture so it's kind of a moving train at multiple levels so what is the preferred architecture what are some of the blockchain architects and or if you're gonna have token economics you have to have certain business model and our workflows that ties into the technology enablement how should people think about an architectural view to make the adoption or user interface or user experience or where the expectation is kind of new has it all come together so I'm challenging people to think about it differently right so so the blockchain in itself is really pretty secure right it creates an immutable ledger a mutable record where we're going to get in trouble and where we do get in trouble is when you start to transact with it right where you start to actually use a device right whether it's your own phone or it's a computer right you're transacting with it and people don't have the security mechanisms built in there you know and it goes back to what we've talked about for the last 20 years whether it was with the trust computing group the global platform right they've designed the standards so you've got probably in this PC you've got the waltz I guess it's a MacBook Cermak yes yes and your phone right in most computers you've got the security primitives that you need to use hardware to secure those transactions but we're not using them yeah we've been waiting for that kind of killer app to use hardware to secure transactions and blockchain might just be that it's talked about the hard work is doesn't that conversation of kids coming up a lot here in the hallways I was the custodial services today these are two kind of the the business conversation that converts them to technology which is okay hardware is actually a good time to actually implement this Google's doing a lot of stuff with their two-factor authentication with a hardware component you hear Stephan spray get rivets talking about a solution he has it is it the time it's like the perfect storm for just a simple hardware solution I think it is and it and you're right it has to be simple right hardware solutions can get complex we can make them too difficult to use but they don't have to be we like I said we have the firm that was built into most these devices I mean in the billions of devices yeah if you thought to Steven you've heard him talking about the number of devices that are there carrying the primitives he needs needs to use for his his hardware um but if we don't make it simple enough then users won't adopt if they won't use it you know have you used a hardware wallet I'm sure you probably have it yet right it's it's not a simple process today because it requires external pieces external components it's it's it's not a workflow that we understand it's not something we can train to and grown up with it's interesting when I was also talking to Steve off-camera because he had the interviews over but we're talking about the supply chain compromise honestly Bloomberg kind of had the story they had the facts wrong but we kind of understand that that's this hack has been out there for a while around modifying and or a rootkit on the boards you have an brach cat Adam demo live demo on stage and 2015 where they actually showed malware that could not be removed from from memory so I mean it's not this is not new right so but the supply chain has always been and you've been the government you got to know where all the components are right so the old days oh hey outsourced manufacture in China build it the cheapest way possible commodity and D Ram was went down this rip path years and years ago and Japan dominated that and it was low commodity low margin or high Kimani low margin and then Pentium comes out so you're starting to see that hardware supply chain changing what's different now what do people got to do to make sure that the hardware is better what's your opinion on that I don't know if it needs to be better but wouldn't what we need to know is is where the hard work came from we need to know that the hardware is what we expected it to be right that's a really unique question you know we all buy Hardware all the time and you just expect it if it came from vendor that it's what you expected and and and let's talk about something even simpler it's not talking about maliciousness most computers you buy are built to order today right you order you order all the different components yet when you get that at home you don't check to make sure you got the actual RAM that you asked for you have no idea none of us do that right and and likely the vendor doesn't really have a great record to know that absolutely they put in there what you specifically wanted now they intend to write but there's no there's a lot of room in that for changes to be made that aren't expected I guess that for good or bad from malicious or non malicious intent so what that means is that we really need to get used to saying you know what I got this new piece of hardware I got to conduct transactions with that are really critical to my financial survival my my personal privacy and we can't trust them until we know we should be able to trust them so that's where hard work comes into play what sort of trans you're seeing in the hallway conversations you had here and your talk I see people grab you after and talk to you two hallways what are some of the hallway conversations that you've been having here at Osho con I you know the most common question has been how do you convince people that security is important I mean that which is a really really basic way and you know right now life just point them to to news after news article you know to say you know you've got the hardware were reported tax yeah you've got the privacy attacks with with a lot of social media and and and internet companies um if summary this today doesn't believe that security is important I don't know you'll have to convince them so then it becomes a question of how do you get them to adopt it and you know getting getting your your family members to adopt two-factor authentication when it's not as as easy as not adopting it yeah it's sometimes a hard place yeah one things I worry about just kind of just because I'm paranoid sometimes is that yeah what is going on in my with my kids I got four kids 16 to 23 you know I got a Wi-Fi in my house they've got a password on it I'm sure it's been hacked but they're downloading music what the movies I don't know what they're doing at gaming mean there's a service area in my house is pretty much who knows what's going on right I don't even know what's going on in my network this is kind of this in my mind will paranoid but that's what average people think about these days it's like okay I got my own home network at these things going on I'm out in the wild is it a device centric security model that we're moving to do you see it where you know hey my phone you know I don't I know when I leave my phone at home and it takes me three seconds to realize I got to turn the car right so yeah and I leave my wallet at the restaurant when I'm done my meal so these are kind of device centric philosophy is that a better direction you think so I don't know that you can yes and no right for the personal devices but now you know if you go to most networks right with IOT you may have 40 or 50 devices on your network yeah things that don't move you know you may have a light bulb that's got a key to it right it's really about making sure that you own it and then you own the keys I mean that's what it okay that's what security all comes down to you right is key ownership so when you take a look at how you do that we need the systems in place that help us understand where those keys are what they're doing and how we how we cut them off if we need to that's awesome well I was I want to get into what your company's doing but I also wanna I talked about trip I had Middle East general Keith Alexander was with us on at with Amazon almost new region I know you worked with him at the NSA and you know one of the things he's doing at his new startup is a crowdsourcing we're hearing some of that in here as well where people are using crowdsourcing as a way of the security mechanism is that something that you think is viable do you think that this crowd sourcing idea is gonna be helpful or it's just a small piece of the puzzle I think it's I think it's a small piece of the puzzle I think it's the opposite end of the spectrum then a device centric hardware component I think it takes both pieces right it's a matter of making sure you you you know what you have and they use only what you trust and that you're able to connect to the network in a way that you're comfortable and then that crowdsource piece comes in to make sure that you're monitoring kind of all those transactions so so you're a big believer I'm assuming based on the conversation that hardware and software combination is gonna be the preferred user interface I think work it has to be I think we've proven that over the last 20 years I mean cell phones are a good example of that yeah right although we do get some spoofing today and that's been a big talker this cost it's not as prevalent as it was in 1994 yeah yeah I mean I like the idea too of we mean hey if we have we want to know what's in my computer I'd love to go look at a blockchain ledger and say here's what's in my Mac right now wouldn't you that's a good use case of blockchain but but what if you didn't even have to go look at it right what if every time you booted it up it checked it against a a record that was on the blockchain that said you know this is what your Mac should look like and it said you know what you can go ahead and connect to the internet go ahead and conduct that transaction that's the great Act go ahead and that's a great use case all right so what encrypt your company what do you guys doing what's the main focus of your opportunity that you're pursuing so we formed it in May of this year to focus on blockchain security when I left the agency I realized there was this really big gap in the conversation people are having around it I think it's a transformational technology as a skills gap technology gap all the above what are you saying it's both right you've got computer science graduates that come out without a good understanding of hardware security you know it's not being taught in most curriculums it's a it's a it's a general understanding of how to apply the hardware against it it's a general under Sun derp standing of what you can trust right yeah we've got generate a generation now that have grown up with with iPhones in their hands they just assume it's it's okay to use it's just thing you mentioned the computer science programs but I would agree interview started in the 80s so we had to learn computer architectures EE class actually right and you know as gates and all that you know the hard core component stuff as well as coding systems a systems kind of programming model now it's a little bit different more diverse it'll ease a lot of you know new opportunities within computer science so it's broad and certainly in a skill gap that's what comes up a lot we hear obviously more cyber security jobs are open and ever before automation is a term that's been coming known in the cloud business where you starting to see that now a security host shows got this automation component that they're adding in for tooling is the tooling and for developers who actually building stuff out there's it early innings how would you put the progress of some of the tooling that that's reliable I mean this is you know you still got people trying to build products and companies I need help what's the status in your mind the ecosystem around platforms and tooling and open source so over the last ten years there's been a great push to to create better tools I'm a lot of it was done in the open source a lot of those done around Linux because it work Windows honestly Microsoft has done a great job in getting secure boot implemented on every on every PC they supply you know Apple does a great job with their boot security but it they're not making available and mobile is probably the worst example right that the TE the trusted execution environment which is the secure space in a mobile phone isn't open for most developers to access right so you know that hardware component isn't there it's not available so yeah I know I always get this updates when I go to China Hey Apple has an update for you it's like the download mmm is this really Apple right I mean no turn off my iPhone right I mean but this is kind of the the interception of you know the the the fraudulent some of the some of malicious things are going on and that that still is concern but I think generally speaking you got entrepreneurs here not noticed at this conference and some of the earlier investor conferences we've been to there's a ton of alpha entrepreneur activity real smart people trying to build durable technology and solutions this is the main focus so it's kind of like and the capital Mars as we know is pretty much in the toilet right now but you know it's still growth and so we're trying to unpack that what's your opinion on entrepreneurship because it every trough is always an OP tick and we'll probably see some growth and those company that survive and thrive will probably be the leaders right what are you seeing what's your opinion of the landscape event ventures out there so so the crypto markets been really interesting it's all been focused on consumer and crypto there's there and even on the floor today there's a big push into the enterprise market for blockchain and deployments you know Simba is a company that's got a great toolset here today you had to help see how big enterprises understand how to deploy smart contracts into a blockchain in the enterprise you know to me the exciting part is the use case is outside of cryptocurrency and tokens the blockchain brings two to the marketplace I think that's where we'll see the next wave entrepreneurship I'm coming to fundraise that on stage at a comments like hey you know when one of the Q&A sessions substance you think your best proposal and substitute database with blockchain if it means the same is probably not Neri absolutely I'm teasing out essentially that the you know the old guard being replaced with the new guard same same models two new faces you know taking over the industries that not only mean changing them so to speak and security kind of hence to the same way where if you're going to have a distributed and decentralized architecture with IOT with all these things connected with digital assets and digital devices this crews gonna be thought differently what's what's your current take on how to tackle that that world I mean is there a certain approach you found so so so there's I'm not sure going to answer your actual question but but there's there's this really interesting debate like you said aundrea said you know if you can replace database with with blockchain is probably not the right fit and a lot of early crypto adopters have made that argument jimmy song says that publicly all the time right there's no place for blockchain in the enterprise essentially right and and you know you can you can swing both ways but the blockchain offers something to to an enterprise that doesn't require the distribution it offers the ability to create immutability right now the inability to change that record which we don't have in most cases today yeah you know and it's fairly simple and easy to deploy and are not for smart contracts so if we go back to the the use case we talked about where every time a machine boots up and it creates a record of that machine and writes it we've never had that capability we've tried we you know when I was at the agency we built a system that sort of did that but it didn't have the same sort of underlying strength of mechanism yeah it would allow us to trust it forensic way almost you know I interviewed Jimmy song and to have consensus event and you know I don't necessarily agree with him on that point it's like I think there's use cases in the enterprise that actually make blockchain very viable and it's almost like the cloud world you have public and private hybrid coming I mean so that's kind of my take on it and because it's interesting me iBM has been advertising heavily and others are looking at supply chain is low-hanging fruit opportunities right let me talk about the computer and supply chain so supply chain is a chain it's with valued change right than value chains now are changing so you can track it in a way that's efficient that's why wouldn't that be a use case so that's kind of mind dude do you agree with that absolutely I mean I think the distributed nature for a crypto makes a lot of sense but the blockchain in a non distributed manner right in a permission to blockchain makes a lot of sense for a lot of different use cases in big organizations I I agree I've talked to different different people that have just tried to replace databases with blockchain because it sounded cool yeah raising money or want to get some attention get some momentum I want to ask you a question on your new venture and Cripps because you talk to a lot of folks out there you certainly you're historic and pedigree is amazing and security and you've seen a lot of things I'm sure what have you learn what's your observation what's the the learnings that you can take away and share from your conversations is there any patterns that you're seeing emerging that's that's that could help people either navigate understand orientate towards something that they might want to use with the what have you learned so I think the biggest thing I've learned is that this community is the most diverse community I've ever worked with in in technology right you've got people from all walks of life and it's absolutely amazing I mean just walking around the show here walking around consensus I mean it just drives diversity like you've never seen before in tech conferences and that diversity is his driven a thirst for knowledge so the people are completely open to to discussions about security that they've never had before in other realms right so when I talked to him about Harbor based security they get excited and want to learn more and and honestly in the PC community over the last 15 years I got a little pushback on that right there's a while we've heard about that we don't want to right it works the way it is people here realize they're building something brand-new yeah and it's time to build it right and that they really want this to succeed for their own reasons right whether it's a corporate enterprise or whether it's a almost a crypto anarchist right they've all got the same sorts of goals and it's and if there's a cultural thing to I think the Bitcoin money aspect of it pretty much anyone on the age of three that I kind of take a straw poll on it's like they all this is gonna change the world like rabbit knows but it's great right oh I actually heard that in the hallway earlier yes and then the phone just traveling somebody that never heard of Bitcoin how does get a revolution coming on I want to ask you a final question five years where are we in your mind shoot the arrow forward what's happening in five years how does this these dots connect in next couple years or so so I think that if we were able to lay in the groundwork today to make user accessibility to the blockchain easy enough and secure enough I think you'll see that it grows in ways that we that we really can't imagine right you know I can't predict the crypto markets but I think you'll see people starting to use tokens in different ways and I think there's some incredible use cases for tokenization for rewards programs things like that I think enterprises in the next five years are gonna start to figure out what use cases make sense I think they're gonna see great efficiency I think they'll see you know much greater scalability and ease of use the use cases really are gonna be driving all this absolutely well I want to final question since just popped in my head I want to get this out there one trend I'm hearing here at this conference and seeing it kind of boil in into this community is the conversation not just about cryptography and and security cyber security on a global scales now come in because of the hacks gives the nation-states because of the geopolitical landscape you know cyber security is a big conversation now but always probably in the wheelhouse a lot of these guys but a lot of these guys are also kind of adjacent involved with cybersecurity your view of the impact the cybersecurity pressure is gonna have on the industry this industry so I think that that you're hearing the conversation because suddenly security became really really important to people personally right in the past if if you lost money with your bank account it was refunded to you now if somebody steals your private key you're out whatever money was attached to that private key recourse right so it's very personal so people have started to think about all the different things that they need to do to really protect those keys I mean it's it's it's almost an organic conversation that we've been trying to drive for you know 40 years in the space yeah and one of things I worry about is the whole regulatory dry aspect is because it can be a driver or an enabler and a driver or it could be dampening innovation and that's always something to watch out for I think there's a Senate discussion today about it I think there's some great work going on in that space both its senior levels in the Congress as well as the regulatory commissions but it's going to take a lot of Education there's a lot of fear around this space well thanks for come on looking forward to having more conversation with you great to have you on the cube and sharing your insight give a quick plug for n Crypt what do you guys doing what's the update status of the company how do people get ahold of you why do they why should they call you what's what's the update well so like I said we formed in May we've we've grown faster than we would have expected to because there's a thirst for the sorts of things that we're doing them we're we're always happy to talk to talk to any enterprise or a consumer about the use cases around the products that they have how did it fit into the blockchain environment and how to do it securely properly so encrypt calm and kr ypt die here in Maryland we're in Maryland DC area so cool great absolutely basic appreciated live from Toshio con us two cubes coverage of the first security conference John for you watching the Q stay with us for more coverage after this short break