(upbeat music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to the theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase. The theme, this showcase is MarTech, the emerging cloud scale customer experiences. Season two of episode three, the ongoing series covering the startups, the hot startups, talking about analytics, data, all things MarTech. I'm your host, John Furrier, here joined by Christian Wiklund, founder and CEO of unitQ here, talk about harnessing the power of user feedback to empower marketing. Thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you so much, John. Happy to be here. >> In these new shifts in the market, when you got cloud scale, open source software is completely changing the software business. We know that. There's no longer a software category. It's cloud, integration, data. That's the new normal. That's the new category, right? So as companies are building their products, and want to do a good job, it used to be, you send out surveys, you try to get the product market fit. And if you were smart, you got it right the third, fourth, 10th time. If you were lucky, like some companies, you get it right the first time. But the holy grail is to get it right the first time. And now, this new data acquisition opportunities that you guys in the middle of that can tap customers or prospects or end users to get data before things are shipped, or built, or to iterate on products. This is the customer feedback loop or data, voice of the customer journey. It's a gold mine. And it's you guys, it's your secret weapon. Take us through what this is about now. I mean, it's not just surveys. What's different? >> So yeah, if we go back to why are we building unitQ? Which is we want to build a quality company. Which is basically, how do we enable other companies to build higher quality experiences by tapping into all of the existing data assets? And the one we are in particularly excited about is user feedback. So me and my co-founder, Nik, and we're doing now the second company together. We spent 14 years. So we're like an old married couple. We accept each other, and we don't fight anymore, which is great. We did a consumer company called Skout, which was sold five years ago. And Skout was kind of early in the whole mobile first. I guess, we were actually mobile first company. And when we launched this one, we immediately had the entire world as our marketplace, right? Like any modern company. We launch a product, we have support for many languages. It's multiple platforms. We have Android, iOS, web, big screens, small screens, and that brings some complexities as it relates to staying on top of the quality of the experience because how do I test everything? >> John: Yeah. >> Pre-production. How do I make sure that our Polish Android users are having a good day? And we found at Skout, personally, like I could discover million dollar bugs by just drinking coffee and reading feedback. And we're like, "Well, there's got to be a better way to actually harness the end user feedback. That they are leaving in so many different places." So, you know what, what unitQ does is that we basically aggregate all different sources of user feedback, which can be app store reviews, Reddit posts, Tweets, comments on your Facebook ads. It can be better Business Bureau Reports. We don't like to get to many of those, of course. But really, anything on the public domain that mentions or refers to your product, we want to ingest that data in this machine, and then all the private sources. So you probably have a support system deployed, a Zendesk, or an Intercom. You might have a chatbot like an Ada, or and so forth. And your end user is going to leave a lot of feedback there as well. So we take all of these channels, plug it into the machine, and then we're able to take this qualitative data. Which and I actually think like, when an end user leaves a piece of feedback, it's an act of love. They took time out of the day, and they're going to tell you, "Hey, this is not working for me," or, "Hey, this is working for me," and they're giving you feedback. But how do we package these very messy, multi-channel, multiple languages, all over the place data? How can we distill it into something that's quantifiable? Because I want to be able to monitor these different signals. So I want to turn user feedback into time series. 'Cause with time series, I can now treat this the same way as Datadog treats machine logs. I want to be able to see anomalies, and I want to know when something breaks. So what we do here is that we break down your data in something called quality monitors, which is basically machine learning models that can aggregate the same type of feedback data in this very fine grained and discrete buckets. And we deploy up to a thousand of these quality monitors per product. And so we can get down to the root cause. Let's say, passive reset link is not working. And it's in that root cause, the granularity that we see that companies take action on the data. And I think historically, there has been like the workflow between marketing and support, and engineering and product has been a bit broken. They've been siloed from a data perspective. They've been siloed from a workflow perspective, where support will get a bunch of tickets around some issue in production. And they're trained to copy and paste some examples, and throw it over the wall, file a Jira ticket, and then they don't know what happens. So what we see with the platform we built is that these teams are able to rally around the single source of troop or like, yes, passive recent link seems to have broken. This is not a user error. It's not a fix later, or I can't reproduce. We're looking at the data, and yes, something broke. We need to fix it. >> I mean, the data silos a huge issue. Different channels, omnichannel. Now, there's more and more channels that people are talking in. So that's huge. I want to get to that. But also, you said that it's a labor of love to leave a comment or a feedback. But also, I remember from my early days, breaking into the business at IBM and Hewlett-Packard, where I worked. People who complain are the most loyal customers, if you service them. So it's complaints. >> Christian: Yeah. >> It's leaving feedback. And then, there's also reading between the lines with app errors or potentially what's going on under the covers that people may not be complaining about, but they're leaving maybe gesture data or some sort of digital trail. >> Yeah. >> So this is the confluence of the multitude of data sources. And then you got the siloed locations. >> Siloed locations. >> It's complicated problem. >> It's very complicated. And when you think about, so I started, I came to Bay Area in 2005. My dream was to be a quant analyst on Wall Street, and I ended up in QA at VMware. So I started at VMware in Palo Alto, and didn't have a driver's license. I had to bike around, which was super exciting. And we were shipping box software, right? This was literally a box with a DVD that's been burned, and if that DVD had bugs in it, guess what it'll be very costly to then have to ship out, and everything. So I love the VMware example because the test cycles were long and brutal. It was like a six month deal to get through all these different cases, and they couldn't be any bugs. But then as the industry moved into the cloud, CI/CD, ship at will. And if you look at the modern company, you'll have at least 20 plus integrations into your product. Analytics, add that's the case, authentication, that's the case, and so forth. And these integrations, they morph, and they break. And you have connectivity issues. Is your product working as well on Caltrain, when you're driving up and down, versus wifi? You have language specific bugs that happen. Android is also quite a fragmented market. The binary may not perform as well on that device, or is that device. So how do we make sure that we test everything before we ship? The answer is, we can't. There's no company today that can test everything before the ship. In particular, in consumer. And the epiphany we had at our last company, Skout, was that, "Hey, wait a minute. The end user, they're testing every configuration." They're sitting on the latest device, the oldest device. They're sitting on Japanese language, on Swedish language. >> John: Yeah. >> They are in different code paths because our product executed differently, depending on if you were a paid user, or a freemium user, or if you were certain demographical data. There's so many ways that you would have to test. And PagerDuty actually had a study they came out with recently, where they said 51% of all end user impacting issues are discovered first by the end user, when they serve with a bunch of customers. And again, like the cool part is, they will tell you what's not working. So now, how do we tap into that? >> Yeah. >> So what I'd like to say is, "Hey, your end user is like your ultimate test group, and unitQ is the layer that converts them into your extended test team." Now, the signals they're producing, it's making it through to the different teams in the organization. >> I think that's the script that you guys are flipping. If I could just interject. Because to me, when I hear you talking, I hear, "Okay, you're letting the customers be an input into the product development process." And there's many different pipelines of that development. And that could be whether you're iterating, or geography, releases, all kinds of different pipelines to get to the market. But in the old days, it was like just customer satisfaction. Complain in a call center. >> Christian: Yeah. >> Or I'm complaining, how do I get support? Nothing made itself into the product improvement, except for slow moving, waterfall-based processes. And then, maybe six months later, a small tweak could be improved. >> Yes. >> Here, you're taking direct input from collective intelligence. Okay. >> Is that have input and on timing is very important here, right? So how do you know if the product is working as it should in all these different flavors and configurations right now? How do you know if it's working well? And how do you know if you're improving or not improving over time? And I think the industry, what can we look at, as far as when it relates to quality? So I can look at star ratings, right? So what's the star rating in the app store? Well, star ratings, that's an average over time. So that's something that you may have a lot of issues in production today, and you're going to get dinged on star ratings over the next few months. And then, it brings down the score. NPS is another one, where we're not going to run NPS surveys every day. We're going to run it once a quarter, maybe once a month, if we're really, really aggressive. That's also a snapshot in time. And we need to have the finger on the pulse of product quality today. I need to know if this release is good or not good. I need to know if anything broke. And I think that real time aspect, what we see as stuff sort of bubbles up the stack, and not into production, we see up to a 50% reduction in time to fix these end user impacting issues. And I think, we also need to appreciate when someone takes time out of the day to write an app review, or email support, or write that Reddit post, it's pretty serious. It's not going to be like, "Oh, I don't like the shade of blue on this button." It's going to be something like, "I got double billed," or "Hey, someone took over my account," or, "I can't reset my password anymore. The CAPTCHA, I'm solving it, but I can't get through to the next phase." And we see a lot of these trajectory impacting bugs and quality issues in these work, these flows in the product that you're not testing every day. So if you work at Snapchat, your employees probably going to use Snapchat every day. Are they going to sign up every day? No. Are they going to do passive reset every day? No. And these things are very hard to instrument, lower in the stack. >> Yeah, I think this is, and again, back to these big problems. It's smoke before fire, and you're essentially seeing it early with your process. Can you give an example of how this new focus or new mindset of user feedback data can help customers increase their experience? Can you give some examples, 'cause folks watching and be like, "Okay, I love this value. Sell me on this idea, I'm sold. Okay, I want to tap into my prospects, and my customers, my end users to help me improve my product." 'Cause again, we can measure everything now with data. >> Yeah. We can measure everything. we can even measure quality these days. So when we started this company, I went out to talk to a bunch of friends, who are entrepreneurs, and VCs, and board members, and I asked them this very simple question. So in your board meetings, or on all hands, how do you talk about quality of the product? Do you have a metric? And everyone said, no. Okay. So are you data driven company? Yes, we're very data driven. >> John: Yeah. Go data driven. >> But you're not really sure if quality, how do you compare against competition? Are you doing as good as them, worse, better? Are you improving over time, and how do you measure it? And they're like, "Well, it's kind of like a blind spot of the company." And then you ask, "Well, do you think quality of experience is important?" And they say, "Yeah." "Well, why?" "Well, top of fund and growth. Higher quality products going to spread faster organically, we're going to make better store ratings. We're going to have the storefronts going to look better." And of course, more importantly, they said the different conversion cycles in the product box itself. That if you have bugs and friction, or an interface that's hard to use, then the inputs, the signups, it's not going to convert as well. So you're going to get dinged on retention, engagement, conversion to paid, and so forth. And that's what we've seen with the companies we work with. It is that poor quality acts as a filter function for the entire business, if you're a product led company. So if you think about product led company, where the product is really the centerpiece. And if it performs really, really well, then it allows you to hire more engineers, you can spend more on marketing. Everything is fed by this product at them in the middle, and then quality can make that thing perform worse or better. And we developed a metric actually called the unitQ Score. So if you go to our website, unitq.com, we have indexed the 5,000 largest apps in the world. And we're able to then, on a daily basis, update the score. Because the score is not something you do once a month or once a quarter. It's something that changes continuously. So now, you can get a score between zero and 100. If you get the score 100, that means that our AI doesn't find any quality issues reported in that data set. And if your score is 90, that means that 10% will be a quality issue. So now you can do a lot of fun stuff. You can start benchmarking against competition. So you can see, "Well, I'm Spotify. How do I rank against Deezer, or SoundCloud, or others in my space?" And what we've seen is that as the score goes up, we see this real big impact on KPI, such as conversion, organic growth, retention, ultimately, revenue, right? And so that was very satisfying for us, when we launched it. quality actually still really, really matters. >> Yeah. >> And I think we all agree at test, but how do we make a science out of it? And that's so what we've done. And when we were very lucky early on to get some incredible brands that we work with. So Pinterest is a big customer of ours. We have Spotify. We just signed new bank, Chime. So like we even signed BetterHelp recently, and the world's largest Bible app. So when you look at the types of businesses that we work with, it's truly a universal, very broad field, where if you have a digital exhaust or feedback, I can guarantee you, there are insights in there that are being neglected. >> John: So Chris, I got to. >> So these manual workflows. Yeah, please go ahead. >> I got to ask you, because this is a really great example of this new shift, right? The new shift of leveraging data, flipping the script. Everything's flipping the script here, right? >> Yeah. >> So you're talking about, what the value proposition is? "Hey, board example's a good one. How do you measure quality? There's no KPI for that." So it's almost category creating in its own way. In that, this net new things, it's okay to be new, it's just new. So the question is, if I'm a customer, I buy it. I can see my product teams engaging with this. I can see how it can changes my marketing, and customer experience teams. How do I operationalize this? Okay. So what do I do? So do I reorganize my marketing team? So take me through the impact to the customer that you're seeing. What are they resonating towards? Obviously, getting that data is key, and that's holy gray, we all know that. But what do I got to do to change my environment? What's my operationalization piece of it? >> Yeah, and that's one of the coolest parts I think, and that is, let's start with your user base. We're not going to ask your users to ask your users to do something differently. They're already producing this data every day. They are tweeting about it. They're putting in app produce. They're emailing support. They're engaging with your support chatbot. They're already doing it. And every day that you're not leveraging that data, the data that was produced today is less valuable tomorrow. And in 30 days, I would argue, it's probably useless. >> John: Unless it's same guy commenting. >> Yeah. (Christian and John laughing) The first, we need to make everyone understand. Well, yeah, the data is there, and we don't need to do anything differently with the end user. And then, what we do is we ask the customer to tell us, "Where should we listen in the public domain? So do you want the Reddit post, the Trustpilot? What channels should we listen to?" And then, our machine basically starts ingesting that data. So we have integration with all these different sites. And then, to get access to private data, it'll be, if you're on Zendesk, you have to issue a Zendesk token, right? So you don't need any engineering hours, except your IT person will have to grant us access to the data source. And then, when we go live. We basically build up this taxonomy with the customers. So we don't we don't want to try and impose our view of the world, of how do you describe the product with these buckets, these quality monitors? So we work with the company to then build out this taxonomy. So it's almost like a bespoke solution that we can bootstrap with previous work we've done, where you don't have these very, very fine buckets of where stuff could go wrong. And then what we do is there are different ways to hook this into the workflow. So one is just to use our products. It's a SaaS product as anything else. So you log in, and you can then get this overview of how is quality trending in different markets, on different platforms, different languages, and what is impacting them? What is driving this unitQ Score that's not good enough? And all of these different signals, we can then hook into Jira for instance. We have a Jira integration. We have a PagerDuty integration. We can wake up engineers if certain things break. We also tag tickets in your support system, which is actually quite cool. Where, let's say, you have 200 people, who wrote into support, saying, "I got double billed on Android." It turns out, there are some bugs that double billed them. Well, now we can tag all of these users in Zendesk, and then the support team can then reach out to that segment of users and say, "Hey, we heard that you had this bug with double billing. We're so sorry. We're working on it." And then when we push fix, we can then email the same group again, and maybe give them a little gift card or something, for the thank you. So you can have, even big companies can have that small company experience. So, so it's groups that use us, like at Pinterest, we have 800 accounts. So it's really through marketing has vested interest because they want to know what is impacting the end user. Because brand and product, the lines are basically gone, right? >> John: Yeah. >> So if the product is not working, then my spend into this machine is going to be less efficient. The reputation of our company is going to be worse. And the challenge for marketers before unitQ was, how do I engage with engineering and product? I'm dealing with anecdotal data, and my own experience of like, "Hey, I've never seen these type of complaints before. I think something is going on." >> John: Yeah. >> And then engineering will be like, "Ah, you know, well, I have 5,000 bugs in Jira. Why does this one matter? When did it start? Is this a growing issue?" >> John: You have to replicate the problem, right? >> Replicate it then. >> And then it goes on and on and on. >> And a lot of times, reproducing bugs, it's really hard because it works on my device. Because you don't sit on that device that it happened on. >> Yup. >> So now, when marketing can come with indisputable data, and say, "Hey, something broke here." And we see the same with support. Product engineering, of course, for them, we talk about, "Hey, listen, you you've invested a lot in observability of your stack, haven't you?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah." "So you have a Datadog in the bottom?" "Absolutely." "And you have an APP D on the client?" "Absolutely." "Well, what about the last mile? How the product manifests itself? Shouldn't you monitor that as well using machines?" They're like, "Yeah, that'd be really cool." (John laughs) And we see this. There's no way to instrument everything, lowering the stack to capture these bugs that leak out. So it resonates really well there. And even for the engineers who's going to fix it. >> Yeah. >> I call it like empathy data. >> Yup. >> Where I get assigned a bug to fix. Well, now, I can read all the feedback. I can actually see, and I can see the feedback coming in. >> Yeah. >> Oh, there's users out there, suffering from this bug. And then when I fix it and I deploy the fix, and I see the trend go down to zero, and then I can celebrate it. So that whole feedback loop is (indistinct). >> And that's real time. It's usually missed too. This is the power of user feedback. You guys got a great product, unitQ. Great to have you on. Founder and CEO, Christian Wiklund. Thanks for coming on and sharing, and showcase. >> Thank you, John. For the last 30 seconds, the minute we have left, put a plug in for the company. What are you guys looking for? Give a quick pitch for the company, real quick, for the folks out there. Looking for more people, funding status, number of employees. Give a quick plug. >> Yes. So we raised our A Round from Google, and then we raised our B from Excel that we closed late last year. So we're not raising money. We are hiring across go-to-markets, engineering. And we love to work with people, who are passionate about quality and data. We're always, of course, looking for customers, who are interested in upping their game. And hey, listen, competing with features is really hard because you can copy features very quickly. Competing with content. Content is commodity. You're going to get the same movies more or less on all these different providers. And competing on price, we're not willing to do. You're going to pay 10 bucks a month for music. So how do you compete today? And if your competitor has a better fine tuned piano than your competitor will have better efficiencies, and they're going to retain customers and users better. And you don't want to lose on quality because it is actually a deterministic and fixable problem. So yeah, come talk to us if you want to up the game there. >> Great stuff. The iteration lean startup model, some say took craft out of building the product. But this is now bringing the craftsmanship into the product cycle, when you can get that data from customers and users. >> Yeah. >> Who are going to be happy that you fixed it, that you're listening. >> Yeah. >> And that the product got better. So it's a flywheel of loyalty, quality, brand, all off you can figure it out. It's the holy grail. >> I think it is. It's a gold mine. And every day you're not leveraging this assets, your use of feedback that's there, is a missed opportunity. >> Christian, thanks so much for coming on. Congratulations to you and your startup. You guys back together. The band is back together, up into the right, doing well. >> Yeah. We we'll check in with you later. Thanks for coming on this showcase. Appreciate it. >> Thank you, John. Appreciate it very much. >> Okay. AWS Startup Showcase. This is season two, episode three, the ongoing series. This one's about MarTech, cloud experiences are scaling. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> From Cambridge, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Covering MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium 2019. Brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. (futuristic music) >> Welcome back to Cambridge, Massachusetts everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and we extract the signal from the noise. This is day two, we're sort of wrapping up the Chief Data Officer event. It's MIT CDOIQ, it started as an information quality event and with the ascendancy of big data the CDO emerged and really took center stage here. And it's interesting to know that it's kind of come full circle back to information quality. People are realizing all this data we have, you know the old saying, garbage in, garbage out. So the information quality worlds and this chief data officer world have really come colliding together. Robert Abate is here, he's the Vice President and CDO of Global IDS and also the co-chair of next year's, the 14th annual MIT CDOIQ. Robert, thanks for coming on. >> Oh, well thank you. >> Now you're a CDO by background, give us a little history of your career. >> Sure, sure. Well I started out with an Electrical Engineering degree and went into applications development. By 2000, I was leading the Ralph Lauren's IT, and I realized when Ralph Lauren hired me, he was getting ready to go public. And his problem was he had hired eight different accounting firms to do eight different divisions. And each of those eight divisions were reporting a number, but the big number didn't add up, so he couldn't go public. So he searched the industry to find somebody who could figure out the problem. Now I was, at the time, working in applications and had built this system called Service Oriented Architectures, a way of integrating applications. And I said, "Well I don't know if I could solve the problem, "but I'll give it a shot." And what I did was, just by taking each silo as it's own problem, which was what EID Accounting Firm had done, I was able to figure out that one of Ralph Lauren's policies was if you buy a garment, you can return it anytime, anywhere, forever, however long you own it. And he didn't think about that, but what that meant is somebody could go to a Bloomingdale's, buy a garment and then go to his outlet store and return it. Well, the cross channels were different systems. So the outlet stores were his own business, retail was a different business, there was a completely different, each one had their own AS/400, their own data. So what I quickly learned was, the problem wasn't the systems, the problem was the data. And it took me about two months to figure it out and he offered me a job, he said well, I was a consultant at the time, he says, "I'm offering you a job, you're going to run my IT." >> Great user experience but hard to count. >> (laughs) Hard to count. So that's when I, probably 1999 was when that happened. I went into data and started researching-- >> Sorry, so how long did it take you to figure that out? You said a couple of months? >> A couple of months, I think it was about two months. >> 'Cause jeez, it took Oracle what, 10 years to build Fusion with SOA? That's pretty good. (laughs) >> This was a little bit of luck. When we started integrating the applications we learned that the messages that we were sending back and forth didn't match, and we said, "Well that's impossible, it can't not match." But what didn't match was it was coming from one channel and being returned in another channel, and the returns showed here didn't balance with the returns on this side. So it was a data problem. >> So a forensics showdown. So what did you do after? >> After that I went into ICICI Bank which was a large bank in India who was trying to integrate their systems, and again, this was a data problem. But they heard me giving a talk at a conference on how SOA had solved the data challenge, and they said, "We're a bank with a wholesale, a retail, "and other divisions, "and we can't integrate the systems, can you?" I said, "Well yeah, I'd build a website "and make them web services and now what'll happen is "each of those'll kind of communicate." And I was at ICICI Bank for about six months in Mumbai, and finished that which was a success, came back and started consulting because now a lot of companies were really interested in this concept of Service Oriented Architectures. Back then when we first published on it, myself, Peter Aiken, and a gentleman named Joseph Burke published on it in 1996. The publisher didn't accept the book, it was a really interesting thing. We wrote the book called, "Services Based Architectures: A Way to Integrate Systems." And the way Wiley & Sons, or most publishers work is, they'll have three industry experts read your book and if they don't think what you're saying has any value, they, forget about it. So one guy said this is brilliant, one guy says, "These guys don't know what they're talking about," and the third guy says, "I don't even think what they're talking about is feasible." So they decided not to publish. Four years later it came back and said, "We want to publish the book," and Peter said, "You know what, they lost their chance." We were ahead of them by four years, they didn't understand the technology. So that was kind of cool. So from there I went into consulting, eventually took a position as the Head of Enterprise and Director of Enterprise Information Architecture with Walmart. And Walmart, as you know, is a huge entity, almost the size of the federal government. So to build an architecture that integrates Walmart would've been a challenge, a behemoth challenge, and I took it on with a phenomenal team. >> And when was this, like what timeframe? >> This was 2010, and by the end of 2010 we had presented an architecture to the CIO and the rest of the organization, and they came back to me about a week later and said, "Look, everybody agrees what you did was brilliant, "but nobody knows how to implement it. "So we're taking you away, "you're no longer Director of Information Architecture, "you're now Director of Enterprise Information Management. "Build it. "Prove that what you say you could do, you could do." So we built something called the Data CAFE, and CAFE was an acronym, it stood for: Collaborative Analytics Facility for the Enterprise. What we did was we took data from one of the divisions, because you didn't want to take on the whole beast, boil the ocean. We picked Sam's Club and we worked with their CFO, and because we had information about customers we were able to build a room with seven 80 inch monitors that surrounded anyone in the room. And in the center was the Cisco telecommunications so you could be a part of a meeting. >> The TelePresence. >> TelePresence. And we built one room in one facility, and one room in another facility, and we labeled the monitors, one red, one blue, one green, and we said, "There's got to be a way where we can build "data science so it's interactive, so somebody, "an executive could walk into the room, "touch the screen, and drill into features. "And in another room "the features would be changing simultaneously." And that's what we built. The room was brought up on Black Friday of 2013, and we were able to see the trends of sales on the East Coast that we quickly, the executives in the room, and these are the CEO of Walmart and the heads of Sam's Club and the like, they were able to change the distribution in the Mountain Time Zone and west time zones because of the sales on the East Coast gave them the idea, well these things are going to sell, and these things aren't. And they saw a tremendous increase in productivity. We received the 2014, my team received the 2014 Walmart Innovation Project of the Year. >> And that's no slouch. Walmart has always been heavily data-oriented. I don't know if it's urban legend or not, but the famous story in the '80s of the beer and the diapers, right? Walmart would position beer next to diapers, why would they do that? Well the father goes in to buy the diapers for the baby, picks up a six pack while he's on the way, so they just move those proximate to each other. (laughs) >> In terms of data, Walmart really learned that there's an advantage to understanding how to place items in places that, a path that you might take in a store, and knowing that path, they actually have a term for it, I believe it's called, I'm sorry, I forgot the name but it's-- >> Selling more stuff. (laughs) >> Yeah, it's selling more stuff. It's the way you position items on a shelf. And Walmart had the brilliance, or at least I thought it was brilliant, that they would make their vendors the data champion. So the vendor, let's say Procter & Gamble's a vendor, and they sell this one product the most. They would then be the champion for that aisle. Oh, it's called planogramming. So the planogramming, the way the shelves were organized, would be set up by Procter & Gamble for that entire area, working with all their other vendors. And so Walmart would give the data to them and say, "You do it." And what I was purporting was, well, we shouldn't just be giving the data away, we should be using that data. And that was the advent of that. From there I moved to Kimberly-Clark, I became Global Director of Enterprise Data Management and Analytics. Their challenge was they had different teams, there were four different instances of SAP around the globe. One for Latin America, one for North America called the Enterprise Edition, one for EMEA, Europe, Middle East, and Africa, and one for Asia-Pacific. Well when you have four different instances of SAP, that means your master data doesn't exist because the same thing that happens in this facility is different here. And every company faces this challenge. If they implement more than one of a system the specialty fields get used by different companies in different ways. >> The gold standard, the gold version. >> The golden version. So I built a team by bringing together all the different international teams, and created one team that was able to integrate best practices and standards around data governance, data quality. Built BI teams for each of the regions, and then a data science and advanced analytics team. >> Wow, so okay, so that makes you uniquely qualified to coach here at the conference. >> Oh, I don't know about that. (laughs) There are some real, there are some geniuses here. >> No but, I say that because these are your peeps. >> Yes, they are, they are. >> And so, you're a practitioner, this conference is all about practitioners talking to practitioners, it's content-heavy, There's not a lot of fluff. Lunches aren't sponsored, there's no lanyard sponsor and it's not like, you know, there's very subtle sponsor desks, you have to have sponsors 'cause otherwise the conference's not enabled, and you've got costs associated with it. But it's a very intimate event and I think you guys want to keep it that way. >> And I really believe you're dead-on. When you go to most industry conferences, the industry conferences, the sponsors, you know, change the format or are heavily into the format. Here you have industry thought leaders from all over the globe. CDOs of major Fortune 500 companies who are working with their peers and exchanging ideas. I've had conversations with a number of CDOs and the thought leadership at this conference, I've never seen this type of thought leadership in any conference. >> Yeah, I mean the percentage of presentations by practitioners, even when there's a vendor name, they have a practitioner, you know, internal practitioner presenting so it's 99.9% which is why people attend. We're moving venues next year, I understand. Just did a little tour of the new venue, so, going to be able to accommodate more attendees, so that's great. >> Yeah it is. >> So what are your objectives in thinking ahead a year from now? >> Well, you know, I'm taking over from my current peer, Dr. Arka Mukherjee, who just did a phenomenal job of finding speakers. People who are in the industry, who are presenting challenges, and allowing others to interact. So I hope could do a similar thing which is, find with my peers people who have real world challenges, bring them to the forum so they can be debated. On top of that, there are some amazing, you know, technology change is just so fast. One of the areas like big data I remember only five years ago the chart of big data vendors maybe had 50 people on it, now you would need the table to put all the vendors. >> Who's not a data vendor, you know? >> Who's not a data vendor? (laughs) So I would think the best thing we could do is, is find, just get all the CDOs and CDO-types into a room, and let us debate and talk about these points and issues. I've seen just some tremendous interactions, great questions, people giving advice to others. I've learned a lot here. >> And how about long term, where do you see this going? How many CDOs are there in the world, do you know? Is that a number that's known? >> That's a really interesting point because, you know, only five years ago there weren't that many CDOs to be called. And then Gartner four years ago or so put out an article saying, "Every company really should have a CDO." Not just for the purpose of advancing your data, and to Doug Laney's point that data is being monetized, there's a need to have someone responsible for information 'cause we're in the Information Age. And a CIO really is focused on infrastructure, making sure I've got my PCs, making sure I've got a LAN, I've got websites. The focus on data has really, because of the Information Age, has turned data into an asset. So organizations realize, if you utilize that asset, let me reverse this, if you don't use data as an asset, you will be out of business. I heard a quote, I don't know if it's true, "Only 10 years ago, 250 of the Fortune 10 no longer exists." >> Yeah, something like that, the turnover's amazing. >> Many of those companies were companies that decided not to make the change to be data-enabled, to make data decision processing. Companies still use data warehouses, they're always going to use them, and a warehouse is a rear-view mirror, it tells you what happened last week, last month, last year. But today's businesses work forward-looking. And just like driving a car, it'd be really hard to drive your car through a rear-view mirror. So what companies are doing today are saying, "Okay, let's start looking at this as forward-looking, "a prescriptive and predictive analytics, "rather than just what happened in the past." I'll give you an example. In a major company that is a supplier of consumer products, they were leading in the industry and their sales started to drop, and they didn't know why. Well, with a data science team, we were able to determine by pulling in data from the CDC, now these are sources that only 20 years ago nobody ever used to bring in data in the enterprise, now 60% of your data is external. So we brought in data from the CDC, we brought in data on maternal births from the national government, we brought in data from the Census Bureau, we brought in data from sources of advertising and targeted marketing towards mothers. Pulled all that data together and said, "Why are diaper sales down?" Well they were targeting the large regions of the country and putting ads in TV stations in New York and California, big population centers. Birth rates in population centers have declined. Birth rates in certain other regions, like the south, and the Bible Belt, if I can call it that, have increased. So by changing the marketing, their product sales went up. >> Advertising to Texas. >> Well, you know, and that brings to one of the points, I heard a lecture today about ethics. We made it a point at Walmart that if you ran a query that reduced a result to less than five people, we wouldn't allow you to see the result. Because, think about it, I could say, "What is my neighbor buying? "What are you buying?" So there's an ethical component to this as well. But that, you know, data is not political. Data is not chauvinistic. It doesn't discriminate, it just gives you facts. It's the interpretation of that that is hard CDOs, because we have to say to someone, "Look, this is the fact, and your 25 years "of experience in the business, "granted, is tremendous and it's needed, "but the facts are saying this, "and that would mean that the business "would have to change its direction." And it's hard for people to do, so it requires that. >> So whether it's called the chief data officer, whatever the data czar rubric is, the head of analytics, there's obviously the data quality component there whatever that is, this is the conference for, as I called them, your peeps, for that role in the organization. People often ask, "Will that role be around?" I think it's clear, it's solidifying. Yes, you see the chief digital officer emerging and there's a lot of tailwinds there, but the information quality component, the data architecture component, it's here to stay. And this is the premiere conference, the premiere event, that I know of anyway. There are a couple of others, perhaps, but it's great to see all the success. When I first came here in 2013 there were probably about 130 folks here. Today, I think there were 500 people registered almost. Next year, I think 600 is kind of the target, and I think it's very reasonable with the new space. So congratulations on all the success, and thank you for stepping up to the co-chair role, I really appreciate it. >> Well, let me tell you I thank you guys. You provide a voice at these IT conferences that we really need, and that is the ability to get the message out. That people do think and care, the industry is not thoughtless and heartless. With all the data breaches and everything going on there's a lot of fear, fear, loathing, and anticipation. But having your voice, kind of like ESPN and a sports show, gives the technology community, which is getting larger and larger by the day, a voice and we need that so, thank you. >> Well thank you, Robert. We appreciate that, it was great to have you on. Appreciate the time. >> Great to be here, thank you. >> All right, and thank you for watching. We'll be right back with out next guest as we wrap up day two of MIT CDOIQ. You're watching theCUBE. (futuristic music)

[Music] when welcome to the special exclusive cube conversation here in Palo Alto in our studios I'm John for your host of the cube we have a very special guest speaking for the first time around some alleged alleged accusations and also innuendo around the Amazon Web Services Jedi contract and his firm c5 capital our guest as Andre Pienaar who's the founder of c5 capital Andre is here for the first time to talk about some of the hard conversations and questions surrounding his role his firm and the story from the BBC Andre thanks for a rat for meeting with me John great to have me thank you so you're at the center of a controversy and just for the folks who know the cube know we interviewed a lot of people I've interviewed you at Amazon web sources summit Teresa Carl's event and last year I met you and bought a rein the work you're doing there so I've met you a few times so I don't know your background but I want to drill into it because I was surprised to see the BBC story come out last week that was basically accusing you of many things including are you a spy are you infiltrating the US government through the Jedi contract through Amazon and knowing c-5 capital I saw no correlation when reading your article I was kind of disturbed but then I saw I said a follow-on stories it just didn't hang together so I wanted to press you on some questions and thanks for coming in and addressing them appreciate it John thanks for having me so first thing I want to ask you is you know it has you at the center this firm c5 capital that you the founder of at the center of what looks like to be the fight for the big ten billion dollar DoD contract which has been put out to multiple vendors so it's not a single source deal we've covered extensively on silicon angle calm and the cube and the government the government Accounting Office has ruled that there are six main benefits of going with a sole provider cloud this seems to be the war so Oracle IBM and others have been been involved we've been covering that so it kind of smells like something's going along with the story and I just didn't believe some of the things I read and I want to especially about you and see five capitals so I want to dig into what the first thing is it's c5 capital involved in the Jedi contract with AWS Sean not at all we have absolutely no involvement in the Jedi contract in any way we're not a bidder and we haven't done any lobbying as has been alleged by some of the people who've been making this allegation c5 has got no involvement in the general contract we're a venture capital firm with a British venture capital firm we have the privilege of investing here in the US as a foreign investor and our focus really is on the growth and the success of the startups that we are invested in so you have no business interest at all in the deal Department of Defense Jedi contract none whatsoever okay so to take a minute to explain c5 firm I read some of the stories there and some of the things were intricate structures of c5 cap made it sound like there was like a cloak-and-dagger situation I want to ask you some hard questions around that because there's a link to a Russian situation but before we get to there I want to ask you explain what is c5 capital your mission what are the things that you're doing c5 is a is a British venture capital firm and we are focused on investing into fast-growing technology companies in three areas cloud computing cyber security and artificial intelligence we have two parts our business c5 capital which invests into late stage companies so these are companies that typically already have revenue visibility and profitability but still very fast-growing and then we also have a very early stage startup platform that look at seed state investment and this we do through two accelerators to social impact accelerators one in Washington and one in Bahrain and it's just size of money involved just sort of order magnitude how many funds do you have how is it structure again just share some insight on that is it is there one firm is there multiple firms how is it knows it work well today the venture capital business has to be very transparent it's required by compliance we are a regulated regulated firm we are regulated in multiple markets we regulated here in the US the sec as a foreign investor in london by the financial conduct authority and in Luxembourg where Afonso based by the regulatory authorities there so in the venture capital industry today you can't afford to be an opaque business you have to be transparent at all levels and money in the Western world have become almost completely transparent so there's a very comprehensive and thorough due diligence when you onboard capital called know your client and the requirements standard requirement now is that whenever you're onboard capital from investor you're gonna take it right up to the level of the ultimate beneficial ownership so who actually owns this money and then every time you invest and you move your money around it gets diligence together different regulators and in terms of disclosure and the same applies often now with clients when our portfolio companies have important or significant clients they also want to know who's behind the products and the services they receive so often our boards our board directors and a shell team also get diligence by by important clients so explain this piece about the due diligence and the cross country vetting that goes on is I think it's important I want to get it out because how long has been operating how many deals have you done you mentioned foreign investor in the United States you're doing deals in the United States I know I've met one of your portfolio companies at an event iron iron on it iron net general Keith Alexander former head of the NSA you know get to just work with him without being vetted I guess so so how long a c5 capital been in business and where have you made your investments you mentioned cross jurisdiction across countries whatever it's called I don't know that so we've been and we've been in existence for about six years now our main focus is investing in Europe so we help European companies grow globally Europe historically has been underserved by venture capital we on an annual basis we invest about twenty seven billion dollars gets invested in venture capital in Europe as opposed to several multiples of that in the US so we have a very important part to play in Europe to how European enterprise software companies grow globally other important markets for us of course are Israel which is a major center of technology innovation and and the Middle East and then the u.s. the u.s. is still the world leader and venture capital both in terms of size but also in terms of the size of the market and of course the face and the excitement of the innovation here I want to get into me early career because again timing is key we're seeing this with you know whether it's a Supreme Court justice or anyone in their career their past comes back to haunt them it appears that has for you before we get there I want to ask you about you know when you look at the kind of scope of fraud and corruption that I've seen in just on the surface of government thing the government bit Beltway bandits in America is you got a nonprofit that feeds a for-profit and then what you know someone else runs a shell corporation so there's this intricate structures and that word was used which it kind of implies shell corporations a variety of backroom kind of smokey deals going on you mentioned transparency I do you have anything to hide John in in in our business we've got absolutely nothing to hide we have to be transparent we have to be open if you look at our social media profile you'll see we are communicating with the market almost on a daily basis every time we make an investment we press release that our website is very clear about who's involved enough who our partners are and the same applies to my own personal website and so in terms of the money movement around in terms of deploying investments we've seen Silicon Valley VCS move to China get their butts handed to them and then kind of adjust their scenes China money move around when you move money around you mentioned disclosure what do you mean there's filings to explain that piece it's just a little bit so every time we make an investment into a into a new portfolio company and we move the money to that market to make the investment we have to disclose who all the investors are who are involved in that investment so we have to disclose the ultimate beneficial ownership of all our limited partners to the law firms that are involved in the transactions and those law firms in turn have applications in terms of they own anti-money laundering laws in the local markets and this happens every time you move money around so I I think that the level of transparency in venture capital is just continue to rise exponentially and it's virtually impossible to conceal the identity of an investor this interesting this BBC article has a theme of national security risk kind of gloom and doom nuclear codes as mentioned it's like you want to scare someone you throw nuclear codes at it you want to get people's attention you play the Russian card I saw an article on the web that that said you know anything these days the me2 movement for governments just play the Russian card and you know instantly can discredit someone's kind of a desperation act so you got confident of interest in the government national security risk seems to be kind of a theme but before we get into the BBC news I noticed that there was a lot of conflated pieces kind of pulling together you know on one hand you know you're c5 you've done some things with your hat your past and then they just make basically associate that with running amazon's jedi project yes which i know is not to be true and you clarified that joan ends a problem joan so as a venture capital firm focused on investing in the space we have to work with all the Tier one cloud providers we are great believers in commercial cloud public cloud we believe that this is absolutely transformative not only for innovation but also for the way in which we do venture capital investment so we work with Amazon Web Services we work with Microsoft who work with Google and we believe that firstly that cloud has been made in America the first 15 companies in the world are all in cloud companies are all American and we believe that cloud like the internet and GPS are two great boons which the US economy the u.s. innovation economy have provided to the rest of the world cloud computing is reducing the cost of computing power with 50 percent every three years opening up innovation and opportunities for Entrepreneurship for health and well-being for the growth of economies on an unprecedented scale cloud computing is as important to the global economy today as the dollar ease as the world's reserve currency so we are great believers in cloud we great believers in American cloud computing companies as far as Amazon is concerned our relationship with Amazon Amazon is very Amazon Web Services is very clear and it's very defined we participate in a public Marcus program called AWS activate through which AWS supports hundreds of accelerators around the world with know-how with mentoring with teaching and with cloud credits to help entrepreneurs and startups grow their businesses and we have a very exciting focus for our two accelerators which is on in Washington we focus on peace technology we focus on taking entrepreneurs from conflict countries like Sudan Nigeria Pakistan to come to Washington to work on campus in the US government building the u.s. Institute for peace to scale these startups to learn all about cloud computing to learn how they can grow their businesses with cloud computing and to go back to their own countries to build peace and stability and prosperity their heaven so we're very proud of this mission in the Middle East and Bahrain our focus is on on female founders and female entrepreneurs we've got a program called nebula through which we empower female founders and female entrepreneurs interesting in the Middle East the statistics are the reverse from what we have in the West the majority of IT graduates in the Middle East are fimo and so there's a tremendous talent pool of of young dynamic female entrepreneurs coming out of not only the Gulf but the whole of the MENA region how about a relation with Amazon websites outside of their normal incubators they have incubators all over the place in the Amazon put out as Amazon Web Services put out a statement that said hey you know we have a lot of relationships with incubators this is normal course of business I know here in Silicon Valley at the startup loft this is this is their market filled market playbook so you fit into that is that correct as I'm I get that that's that's absolutely correct what we what is unusual about a table insists that this is a huge company that's focused on tiny startups a table started with startups it double uses first clients with startups and so here you have a huge business that has a deep understanding of startups and focus on startups and that's enormous the attractor for us and terrific for our accelerators department with them have you at c5 Capitol or individually have any formal or conversation with Amazon employees where you've had outside of giving feedback on products where you've tried to make change on their technology make change with their product management teams engineering you ever had at c5 capital whore have you personally been involved in influencing Amazon's product roadmap outside they're just giving normal feedback in the course of business that's way above my pay grade John firstly we don't have that kind of technical expertise in C 5 C 5 steam consists of a combination of entrepreneurs like myself people understand money really well and leaders we don't have that level of technical expertise and secondly that's what one our relationship with AWS is all about our relationship is entirely limited to the two startups and making sure that the two accelerators in making sure that the startups who pass through those accelerators succeed and make social impact and as a partner network component Amazon it's all put out there yes so in in a Barren accelerator we've we formed part of the Amazon partner network and the reason why we we did that was because we wanted to give some of the young people who come through the accelerator and know mastering cloud skills an opportunity to work on some real projects and real live projects so some of our young golf entrepreneurs female entrepreneurs have been working on building websites on Amazon Cloud and c5 capital has a relationship with former government officials you funded startups and cybersecurity that's kind of normal can you explain that positioning of it of how former government if it's whether it's US and abroad are involved in entrepreneurial activities and why that is may or may not be a problem certainly is a lot of kind of I would say smoke around this conversation around coffin of interest and you can you explain intelligence what that was it so I think the model for venture capital has been evolving and increasingly you get more and more differentiated models one of the key areas in which the venture capital model is changed is the fact that operating partners have become much more important to the success of venture capital firms so operating partners are people who bring real world experience to the investment experience of the investment team and in c-five we have the privilege of having a terrific group of operating partners people with both government and commercial backgrounds and they work very actively enough firm at all levels from our decision-making to the training and the mentoring of our team to helping us understand the way in which the world is exchanging to risk management to helping uh portfolio companies grow and Silicon Valley true with that to injuries in Horowitz two founders mr. friendly they bring in operating people that have entrepreneurial skills this is the new model understand order which has been a great source of inspiration to us for our model and and we built really believe this is a new model and it's really critical for the success of venture capitals to be going forward and the global impact is pretty significant one of things you mentioned I want to get your take on is as you operate a global transaction a lots happened a lot has to happen I mean we look at the ICO market on the cryptocurrency side its kind of you know plummeting obsoletes it's over now the mood security children's regulatory and transparency becomes critical you feel fully confident that you haven't you know from a regulatory standpoint c5 capital everything's out there absolutely risk management and regulated compliance and legal as the workstream have become absolutely critical for the success of venture capital firms and one of the reasons why this becomes so important John is because the venture capital world over the last few years have changed dramatically historically all the people involved in venture capital had very familiar names and came from very familiar places over the last few years with a diversification of global economic growth we've seen it's very significant amounts of money being invest invested in startups in China some people more money will invest in startups this year in China than in the US and we've seen countries like Saudi Arabia becoming a major source of venture capital funding some people say that as much as 70% of funding rounds this year in some way or another originated from the Gulf and we've seen places like Russia beginning to take an interest in technology innovation so the venture capital world is changing and for that reason compliance and regulation have become much more important but if Russians put 200 million dollars in face book and write out the check companies bright before that when the after 2008 we saw the rise of social networking I think global money certainly has something that I think a lot of people start getting used to and I want on trill down into that a little bit we talked about this BBC story that that hit and the the follow-on stories which actually didn't get picked up was mostly doing more regurgitation of the same story but one of the things that that they focus in on and the story was you and the trend now is your past is your enemy these days you know they try to drum up stuff in the past you've had a long career some of the stuff that they've been bringing in to paint you and the light that they did was from your past so I wanted to explore that with you I know you this is the first time you've talked about this and I appreciate you taking the time talk about your early career your background where you went to school because the way I'm reading this it sounds like you're a shady character I like like I interviewed on the queue but I didn't see that but you know I'm going to pressure here for that if you don't mind I'd like to to dig into that John thank you for that so I've had the I've had the privilege of a really amazingly interesting life and at the heart of at the heart of that great adventures been people and the privilege to work with really great people and good people I was born in South Africa I grew up in Africa went to school there qualified as a lawyer and then came to study in Britain when I studied international politics when I finished my studies international politics I got head hunted by a US consulting firm called crow which was a start of a 20 years career as an investigator first in crawl where I was a managing director in the London and then in building my own consulting firm which was called g3 and all of this led me to cybersecurity because as an investigator looking into organized crime looking into corruption looking into asset racing increasingly as the years went on everything became digital and I became very interested in finding evidence on electronic devices but starting my career and CRO was tremendous because Jules Kroll was a incredible mentor he could walk through an office and call everybody by their first name any Kroll office anywhere in the world and he always took a kindly interest in the people who work for him so it was a great school to go to and and I worked on some terrific cases including some very interesting Russian cases and Russian organized crime cases just this bag of Kroll was I've had a core competency in doing investigative work and also due diligence was that kind of focus yes although Kroll was the first company in the world to really have a strong digital practice led by Alan Brugler of New York Alan established the first computer forensics practice which was all focused about finding evidence on devices and everything I know about cyber security today started with me going to school with Alan Brolin crawl and they also focused on corruption uncovering this is from Wikipedia Kroll clients help Kroll helps clients improve operations by uncovering kickbacks fraud another form of corruptions other specialty areas is forensic accounting background screening drug testing electronic investigation data recovery SATA result Omar's McLennan in 2004 for 1.9 billion mark divested Kroll to another company I'll take credit risk management to diligence investigator in Falls Church Virginia over 150 countries call Kroll was the first CRO was the first household brand name in this field of of investigations and today's still is probably one of the strongest brand names and so it was a great firm to work in and was a great privilege to be part of it yeah high-end high-profile deals were there how many employees were in Kroll cuz I'd imagine that the alumni that that came out of Kroll probably have found places in other jobs similar to yes do an investigative work like you know they out them all over the world many many alumni from Kroll and many of them doing really well and doing great work ok great so now the next question want to ask you is when you in Kroll the South Africa connection came up so I got to ask you it says business side that you're a former South African spy are you a former South African spy no John I've never worked for any government agency and in developing my career my my whole focus has been on investigations out of the Kroll London office I did have the opportunity to work in South Africa out of the Kroll London office and this was really a seminal moment in my career when I went to South Africa on a case for a major international credit-card company immediately after the end of apartheid when democracy started to look into the scale and extent of credit card fraud at the request of this guy what year was there - how old were you this was in 1995 1996 I was 25 26 years old and one of the things which this credit card company asked me to do was to assess what was the capability of the new democratic government in South Africa under Nelson Mandela to deal with crime and so I had the privilege of meeting mr. Mandela as the president to discuss this issue with him and it was an extraordinary man the country's history because there was such an openness and a willingness to to address issues of this nature and to grapple with them so he was released from prison at that time I remember those days and he became president that's why he called you and you met with him face to face of a business conversation around working on what the future democracy is and trying to look at from a corruption standpoint or just kind of in general was that what was that conversation can you share so so that so the meeting involved President Mandela and and the relevant cabinet ministers the relevant secretaries and his cabinet - responsible for for these issues and the focus of our conversation really started with well how do you deal with credit card fraud and how do you deal with large-scale fraud that could be driven by organized crime and at the time this was an issue of great concern to the president because there was bombing in Kate of a Planet Hollywood cafe where a number of people got very severely injured and the president believed that this could have been the result of a protection racket in Cape Town and so he wanted to do something about it he was incredibly proactive and forward-leaning and in an extraordinary way he ended the conversation by by asking where the Kroll can help him and so he commissioned Kroll to build the capacity of all the black officers that came out of the ANC and have gone into key government positions on how to manage organized crime investigations it was the challenge at that time honestly I can imagine apartheid I remember you know I was just at a college that's not properly around the same age as you it was a dynamic time to say the least was his issue around lack of training old school techniques because you know that was right down post-cold-war and then did what were the concerns not enough people was it just out of control was it a corrupt I mean just I mean what was the core issue that Nelson wanted to hire Kroll and you could work his core issue was he wanted to ensure the stability of South Africa's democracy that was his core focus and he wanted to make South Africa an attractive place where international companies felt comfortable and confident in investing and that was his focus and he felt that at that time because so many of the key people in the ANC only had training in a cold war context that there wasn't a Nessy skill set to do complex financial or more modern investigations and it was very much focused he was always the innovator he was very much focused on bringing the best practices and the best investigative techniques to the country he was I felt in such a hurry that he doesn't want to do this by going to other governments and asking for the help he wanted to Commission it himself and so he gave he gave a crawl with me as the project leader a contract to do this and my namesake Francois Pienaar has become very well known because of the film Invictus and he's been he had the benefit of Mandela as a mentor and as a supporter and that changed his career the same thing happened to me so what did he actually asked you to do was it to train build a force because there's this talk that and was a despite corruption specifically it was it more both corruption and or stability because they kind of go hand in hand policy and it's a very close link between corruption and instability and and president Ellis instructions were very clear to Crowley said go out and find me the best people in the world the most experienced people in the world who can come to South Africa and train my people how to fight organized crime so I went out and I found some of the best people from the CIA from mi6 the British intelligence service from the Drug Enforcement Agency here in the US form officers from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's detectives from Scotland Yard prosecutors from the US Justice Department and all of them for a number of years traveled to South Africa to train black officers who were newly appointed in key roles in how to combat organized crime and this was you acting as an employee he had crow there's not some operative this is he this was me very much acting as a as an executive and crow I was the project leader Kroll was very well structured and organized and I reported to the chief executive officer in the London office nor Garret who was the former head of the CIA's Near East Division and Nelson Mandela was intimately involved in this with you at Krall President Mandela was the ultimate support of this project and he then designated several ministers to work on it and also senior officials in the stories that had been put out this past week they talked about this to try to make it sound like you're involved on two sides of the equation they bring up scorpions was this the scorpions project that they referred to so it was the scorpions scorpion sounds so dangerous and a movie well there's a movie a movie does feature this so at the end of the training project President Mandela and deputy president Thabo Mbeki who subsequently succeeded him as president put together a ministerial committee to look at what should they do with the capacity that's been built with this investment that they made because for a period of about three years we had all the leading people the most experienced people that have come out of some of the best law enforcement agencies and some of the best intelligence services come and trained in South Africa and this was quite this was quite something John because many of the senior officers in the ANC came from a background where they were trained by the opponents of the people came to treat trained them so so many of them were trained by the Stasi in East Germany some of them were trained by the Russian KGB some of them were trained by the Cubans so we not only had to train them we also had to win their trust and when we started this that's a diverse set of potential dogma and or just habits a theory modernised if you will right is that what the there was there was a question of of learning new skills and there was a question about also about learning management capabilities there was also question of learning the importance of the media for when you do difficult and complex investigations there was a question about using digital resources but there was also fundamentally a question of just building trust and when we started this program none of the black officers wanted to be photographed with all these foreign trainers who were senior foreign intelligence officers when we finished that everyone wanted to be in the photograph and so this was a great South African success story but the President and the deputy president then reflected on what to do with his capacity and they appointed the ministerial task force to do this and we were asked to make recommendations to this Minister ministerial task force and one of the things which we did was we showed them a movie because you referenced the movie and the movie we showed them was the untouchables with Kevin Costner and Sean Connery which is still one of my favorite and and greatest movies and the story The Untouchables is about police corruption in Chicago and how in the Treasury Department a man called Eliot Ness put together a group of officers from which he selected from different places with clean hands to go after corruption during the Probie and this really captured the president's imagination and so he said that's what he want and Ella yeah okay so he said della one of the untouchables he wanted Eliot Ness exactly Al Capone's out there and and how many people were in that goodness so we asked that we we established the government then established decided to establish and this was passed as a law through Parliament the director of special operations the DSO which colloquy became known as the scorpions and it had a scorpion as a symbol for this unit and this became a standalone anti-corruption unit and the brilliant thing about it John was that the first intake of scorpion officers were all young black graduates many of them law graduates and at the time Janet Reno was the US Attorney General played a very crucial role she allowed half of the first intake of young cratchits to go to Quantico and to do the full FBI course in Quantico and this was the first group of foreign students who've ever been admitted to Quantico to do the full Quantico were you involved at what score's at that time yes sir and so you worked with President Mandela yes the set of the scorpions is untouchable skiing for the first time as a new democracy is emerging the landscape is certainly changing there's a transformation happening we all know the history laugh you don't watch Invictus probably great movie to do that you then worked with the Attorney General United States to cross-pollinate the folks in South Africa black officers law degrees Samar's fresh yes this unit with Quantico yes in the United States I had the privilege of attending the the graduation ceremony of the first of South African officers that completed the Quantico course and representing crow they on the day you had us relationships at that time to crawl across pollen I had the privilege of working with some of the best law enforcement officers and best intelligence officers that has come out of the u.s. services and they've been tremendous mentors in my career they've really shaped my thinking they've shaped my values and they've they've shaved my character so you're still under 30 at this time so give us a is that where this where are we in time now just about a 30 so you know around the nine late nineties still 90s yeah so client-server technologies there okay so also the story references Leonard McCarthy and these spy tapes what is this spy tape saga about it says you had a conversation with McCarthy me I'm thinking that a phone tap explain that spy tape saga what does it mean who's Lennon McCarthy explain yourself so so so Leonard McCarthy it's a US citizen today he served two terms as the vice president for institutional integrity at the World Bank which is the world's most important anti-corruption official he started his career as a prosecutor in South Africa many years ago and then became the head of the economic crimes division in the South African Justice Department and eventually became the head of the scorpions and many years after I've left Kroll and were no longer involved in in the work of the scorpions he texted me one evening expressing a concern and an anxiety that I had about the safety of his family and I replied to him with two text messages one was a Bible verse and the other one was a Latin saying and my advice name was follow the rule of law and put the safety of your family first and that was the advice I gave him so this is how I imagined the year I think of it the internet was just there this was him this was roundabout 2000 December 2007 okay so there was I phone just hit so text messaging Nokia phones all those big yeah probably more text message there so you sitting anywhere in London you get a text message from your friend yep later this past late tonight asking for help and advice and I gave him the best advice I can he unfortunately was being wiretapped and those wiretaps were subsequently published and became the subject of much controversy they've now been scrutinized by South Africa's highest court and the court has decided that those wiretaps are of no impact and of importance in the scheme of judicial decision-making and our unknown provenance and on and on unknown reliability they threw it out basically yeah they're basically that's the president he had some scandals priors and corruption but back to the tapes you the only involvement on the spy tapes was friend sending you a text message that says hey I'm running a corruption you know I'm afraid for my life my family what do I do and you give some advice general advice and that's it as there was there any more interactions with us no that's it that's it okay so you weren't like yeah working with it hey here's what we get strategy there was nothing that going on no other interactions just a friendly advice and that's what they put you I gave him my I gave him my best advice when you when you work in when you work as an investigator very much as and it's very similar in venture capital it's all about relationships and you want to preserve relationships for the long term and you develop deep royalties to its people particularly people with whom you've been through difficult situations as I have been with Leonard much earlier on when I was still involved in Kroll and giving advice to South African government on issues related to the scorpius so that that has a lot of holes and I did think that was kind of weird they actually can produce the actual tax I couldn't find that the spy tapes so there's a spy tape scandal out there your name is on out on one little transaction globbed on to you I mean how do you feel about that I mean you must've been pretty pissed when you saw that when you do it when when you do when you do investigative work you see really see everything and all kinds of things and the bigger the issues that you deal with the more frequently you see things that other people might find unusual I are you doing any work right now with c5 at South Africa and none whatsoever so I've I retired from my investigative Korea in 2014 I did terrific 20 years as an investigator during my time as investigator I came to understood the importance of digital and cyber and so at the end of it I saw an opportunity to serve a sector that historically have been underserved with capital which is cyber security and of course there are two areas very closely related to cyber security artificial intelligence and cloud and that's why I created c5 after I sold my investigator firm with five other families who equally believed in the importance of investing private capital to make a difference invest in private capital to help bring about innovation that can bring stability to the digital world and that's the mission of c-5 before I get to the heart news I want to drill in on the BBC stories I think that's really the focal point of you know why we're talking just you know from my standpoint I remember living as a young person in that time breaking into the business you know my 20s and 30s you had Live Aid in 1985 and you had 1995 the internet happened there was so much going on between those that decade 85 to 95 you were there I was an American so I didn't really have a lot exposure I did some work for IBM and Europe in 1980 says it's co-op student but you know I had some peak in the international world it must been pretty dynamic the cross-pollination the melting pot of countries you know the Berlin Wall goes down you had the cold war's ending you had apartheid a lot of things were going on around you yes so in that dynamic because if if the standard is you had links to someone you know talked about why how important it was that this melting pot and how it affected your relationships and how it looks now looking back because now you can almost tie anything to anything yes so I think the 90s was one of the most exciting periods of time because you had the birth of the internet and I started working on Internet related issues yet 20 million users today we have three and a half billion users and ten billion devices unthinkable at the time but in the wake of the internet also came a lot of changes as you say the Berlin Wall came down democracy in South Africa the Oslo peace process in the time that I worked in Kroll some of them made most important and damaging civil wars in Africa came to an end including the great war in the Congo peace came to Sudan and Angola the Ivory Coast so a lot of things happening and if you have a if you had a an international career at that time when globalization was accelerating you got to no a lot of people in different markets and both in crow and in my consulting business a key part of what it but we did was to keep us and Western corporations that were investing in emerging markets safe your credibility has been called in questions with this article and when I get to in a second what I want to ask you straight up is it possible to survive in the international theatre to the level that you're surviving if what they say is true if you if you're out scamming people or you're a bad actor pretty much over the the time as things get more transparent it's hard to survive right I mean talk about that dynamic because I just find it hard to believe that to be successful the way you are it's not a johnny-come-lately firms been multiple years operating vetted by the US government are people getting away in the shadows is it is is it hard because I almost imagine those are a lot of arbitrage I imagine ton of arbitrage that you that are happening there how hard or how easy it is to survive to be that shady and corrupt in this new era because with with with investigated with with intelligence communities with some terrific if you follow the money now Bitcoin that's a whole nother story but that's more today but to survive the eighties and nineties and to be where you are and what they're alleging I just what's your thoughts well to be able to attract capital and investors you have to have very high standards of governance and compliance because ultimately that's what investors are looking for and what investors will diligence when they make an investment with you so to carry the confidence of investors good standards of governance and compliance are of critical importance and raising venture capital and Europe is tough it's not like the US babe there's an abundance of venture capital available it's very hard Europe is under served by capital the venture capital invested in the US market is multiple of what we invest in Europe so you need to be even more focused on governance and compliance in Europe than you would be perhaps on other markets I think the second important point with Gmail John is that technology is brought about a lot of transparency and this is a major area of focus for our piece tech accelerator where we have startups who help to bring transparency to markets which previously did not have transparency for example one of the startups that came through our accelerator has brought complete transparency to the supply chain for subsistence farmers in Africa all the way to to the to the shelf of Walmart or a big grocery retailer in in the US or Europe and so I think technology is bringing a lot more more transparency we also have a global anti-corruption Innovation Challenge called shield in the cloud where we try and find and recognize the most innovative corporations governments and countries in the space so let's talk about the BBC story that hit 12 it says is a US military cloud the DoD Jedi contractor that's coming to award the eleventh hour safe from Russia fears over sensitive data so if this essentially the headline that's bolded says a technology company bidding for a Pentagon contract that's Amazon Web Services to store sensitive data has close partnerships with a firm linked to a sanctioned Russian oligarch the BBC has learned goes on to essentially put fear and tries to hang a story that says the national security of America is at risk because of c5u that's what we're talking about right now so so what's your take on this story I mean did you wake up and get an email said hey check out the BBC you're featured in and they're alleging that you have links to Russia and Amazon what Jon first I have to go I first have to do a disclosure I've worked for the BBC as an investigator when I was in Kroll and in fact I let the litigation support for the BBC in the biggest libel claim in British history which was post 9/11 when the BBC did a broadcast mistakenly accusing a mining company in Africa of laundering money for al-qaeda and so I represented the BBC in this case I was the manager hired you they hired me to delete this case for them and I'm I helped the BBC to reduce a libel claim of 25 million dollars to $750,000 so I'm very familiar with the BBC its integrity its standards and how it does things and I've always held the BBC in the highest regard and believed that the BBC makes a very important contribution to make people better informed about the world so when I heard about the story I was very disappointed because it seemed to me that the BBC have compromised the independence and the independence of the editorial control in broadcasting the story the reason why I say that is because the principal commentator in this story as a gentleman called John Wheeler who's familiar to me as a someone who's been trolling our firm on internet for the last year making all sorts of allegations the BBC did not disclose that mr. Weiler is a former Oracle executive the company that's protesting the Jedi bidding contract and secondly that he runs a lobbying firm with paid clients and that he himself often bid for government contracts in the US government context you're saying that John Wheeler who's sourced in the story has a quote expert and I did check him out I did look at what he was doing I checked out his Twitter he seems to be trying to socialise a story heavily first he needed eyes on LinkedIn he seems to be a consultant firm like a Beltway yes he runs a he runs a phone called in interoperability Clearing House and a related firm called the IT acquisition Advisory Council and these two organizations work very closely together the interoperability Clearing House or IC H is a consulting business where mr. Weiler acts for paying clients including competitors for this bidding contract and none of this was disclosed by the BBC in their program the second part of this program that I found very disappointing was the fact that the BBC in focusing on the Russian technology parks cocuwa did not disclose the list of skok of our partners that are a matter of public record on the Internet if you look at this list very closely you'll see c5 is not on there neither Amazon Web Services but the list of companies that are on there are very familiar names many of them competitors in this bidding process who acted as founding partners of skok about Oracle for example as recently as the 28th of November hosted what was described as the largest cloud computing conference in Russia's history at Skolkovo this is the this is the place which the BBC described as this notorious den of spies and at this event which Oracle hosted they had the Russian presidential administration on a big screen as one of their clients in Russia so some Oracle is doing business in Russia they have like legit real links to Russia well things you're saying if they suddenly have very close links with Skolkovo and so having a great many other Khayyam is there IBM Accenture cisco say Microsoft is saying Oracle is there so Skolkovo has a has a very distinguished roster of partners and if the BBC was fair and even-handed they would have disclosed us and they would have disclosed the fact that neither c5 nor Amazon feature as Corcovado you feel that the BBC has been duped the BBC clearly has been duped the program that they broadcasted is really a parlor game of six degrees of separation which they try to spun into a national security crisis all right so let's tell us John while ago you're saying John Wyler who's quoted in the story as an expert and by the way I read in the story my favorite line that I wanted to ask you on was there seems to be questions being raised but the question is being raised or referring to him so are you saying that he is not an expert but a plant for the story what's what's his role he's saying he works for Oracle or you think do you think he's being paid by Oracle like I can't comment on mr. Wireless motivation what strikes me is the fact that is a former Oracle executive what's striking is that he clearly on his website for the IC H identifies several competitors for the Jedi business clients and that all of this should have been disclosed by the BBC rather than to try and characterize and portray him as an independent expert on this story well AWS put out a press release or a blog post essentially hum this you know you guys had won it we're very clear and this I know it goes to the top because that's how Amazon works nothing goes out until it goes to the top which is Andy chassis and the senior people over there it says here's the relationship with c5 and ATS what school you use are the same page there but also they hinted the old guard manipulation distant I don't think they use the word disinformation campaign they kind of insinuate it and that's what I'm looking into I want to ask you are you part are you a victim of a disinformation campaign do you believe that you're not a victim being targeted with c5 as part of a disinformation campaign put on by a competitor to AWS I think what we've seen over the course of this last here is an enormous amount of disinformation around this contract and around this bidding process and they've a lot of the information that has been disseminated has not only not been factual but in some cases have been patently malicious well I have been covering Amazon for many many years this guy Tom Wyler is in seems to be circulating multiple reports invested in preparing for this interview I checked Vanity Fair he's quoted in Vanity Fair he's quoted in the BBC story and there's no real or original reporting other than those two there's some business side our article which is just regurgitating the Business Insider I mean the BBC story and a few other kind of blog stories but no real original yes no content don't so in every story that that's been written on this subject and as you say most serious publication have thrown this thrown these allegations out but in the in those few instances where they've managed to to publish these allegations and to leverage other people's credibility to their advantage and leverage other people's credibility for their competitive advantage John Wheeler has been the most important and prominent source of the allegations someone who clearly has vested commercial interests someone who clearly works for competitors as disclosed on his own website and none of this has ever been surfaced or addressed I have multiple sources have confirmed to me that there's a dossier that has been created and paid for by a firm or collection of firms to discredit AWS I've seen some of the summary documents of that and that is being peddled around to journalists we have not been approached yet I'm not sure they will because we actually know the cloud what cloud computing is so I'm sure we could debunk it by just looking at it and what they were putting fors was interesting is this an eleventh-hour a desperation attempt because I have the Geo a report here that was issued under Oracle's change it says there are six conditions why we're looking at one sole cloud although it's not a it's a multiple bid it's not an exclusive to amazon but so there's reasons why and they list six service levels highly specialized check more favorable terms and conditions with a single award expected cause of administration of multiple contracts outweighs the benefits of multiple awards the projected orders are so intricately related that only a single contractor can reasonably be perform the work meaning that Amazon has the only cloud that can do that work now I've reported on the cube and it's looking angle that it's true there's things that other clouds just don't have anyone has private they have the secret the secret clouds the total estimated value of the contract is less than the simplified acquisition threshold or multiple awards would not be in the best interest this is from them this is a government report so it seems like there's a conspiracy against Amazon where you are upon and in in this game collect you feel that collateral damage song do you do you believe that to be true collateral damage okay well okay so now the the John Wheeler guys so investigate you've been an investigator so you mean you're not you know you're not a retired into this a retired investigator you're retired investigated worked on things with Nelson Mandela Kroll Janet Reno Attorney General you've vetted by the United States government you have credibility you have relationships with people who have have top-secret clearance all kinds of stuff but I mean do you have where people have top-secret clearance or or former people who had done well we have we have the privilege of of working with a very distinguished group of senior national security leaders as operating partisan c5 and many of them have retained their clearances and have been only been able to do so because c5 had to pass through a very deep vetting process so for you to be smeared like this you've been in an investigative has you work at a lot of people this is pretty obvious to you this is like a oh is it like a deep state conspiracy you feel it's one vendor - what is your take and what does collateral damage mean to you well I recently spoke at the mahkum conference on a session on digital warfare and one of the key points I made there was that there are two things that are absolutely critical for business leaders and technology leaders at this point in time one we have to clearly say that our countries are worth defending we can't walk away from our countries because the innovation that we are able to build and scale we're only able to do because we live in democracies and then free societies that are governed by the rule of law the second thing that I think is absolutely crucial for business leaders in the technology community is to accept that there must be a point where national interest overrides competition it must be a point where we say the benefit and the growth and the success of our country is more important to us than making commercial profits and therefore there's a reason for us either to cooperate or to cease competition or to compete in a different way what might takes a little bit more simple than that's a good explanation is I find these smear campaigns and fake news and I was just talking with Kara Swisher on Twitter just pinging back and forth you know either journalists are chasing Twitter and not really doing the original courting or they're being fed stories if this is truly a smear campaign as being fed by a paid dossier then that hurts people when families and that puts corporate interests over the right thing so I think I a personal issue with that that's fake news that's just disinformation but it's also putting corporate inches over over families and people so I just find that to be kind of really weird when you say collateral damage earlier what did you mean by that just part of the campaign you personally what's what's your view okay I think competition which is not focused on on performance and on innovation and on price points that's competition that's hugely destructive its destructive to the fabric of innovation its destructive of course to the reputation of the people who fall in the line of sight of this kind of competition but it's also hugely destructive to national interest Andrae one of the key stories here with the BBC which has holes in it is that the Amazon link which we just talked about but there's one that they bring up that seems to be core in all this and just the connections to Russia can you talk about your career over the career from whether you when you were younger to now your relationship with Russia why is this Russian angle seems to be why they bring into the Russia angle into it they seem to say that c-5 Cable has connections they call deep links personal links into Russia so to see what that so c5 is a venture capital firm have no links to Russia c5 has had one individual who is originally of Russian origin but it's been a longtime Swiss resident and you national as a co investor into a enterprise software company we invested in in 2015 in Europe we've since sold that company but this individual Vladimir Kuznetsov who's became the focus of the BBC's story was a co investor with us and the way in which we structure our investment structures is that everything is transparent so the investment vehicle for this investment was a London registered company which was on the records of Companies House not an offshore entity and when Vladimir came into this company as a co investor for compliance and regulatory purposes we asked him to make his investment through this vehicle which we controlled and which was subject to our compliance standards and completely transparent and in this way he made this investment now when we take on both investors and Co investors we do that subject to very extensive due diligence and we have a very robust and rigorous due diligence regime which in which our operating partners who are leaders of great experience play an important role in which we use outside due diligence firms to augment our own judgment and to make sure we have all the facts and finally we also compare notes with other financial institutions and peers and having done that with Vladimir Kuznetsov when he made this one investment with us we reached the conclusion that he was acting in his own right as an independent angel investor that his left renova many years ago as a career executive and that he was completely acceptable as an investor so that you think that the BBC is making an inaccurate Association the way they describe your relationship with Russia absolutely the the whole this whole issue of the provenance of capital has become of growing importance to the venture capital industry as you and I discussed earlier with many more different sources of capital coming out of places like China like Russia Saudi Arabia other parts of the world and therefore going back again to you the earlier point we discussed compliance and due diligence our critical success factors and we have every confidence in due diligence conclusions that we reached about vladimir quits net source co-investment with us in 2015 so I did some digging on c5 razor bidco this was the the portion of the company in reference to the article I need to get your your take on this and they want to get you on the record on this because it's you mentioned I've been a law above board with all the compliance no offshore entities this is a personal investment that he made Co investment into an entity you guys set up for the transparency and compliance is that true that's correct no side didn't see didn't discover this would my my children could have found this this this company was in a transparent way on the records in Companies House and and Vladimir's role and investment in it was completely on the on the public record all of this was subject to financial conduct authority regulation and anti money laundering and no your client standards and compliance so there was no great big discovery this was all transparent all out in the open and we felt very confident in our due diligence findings and so you feel very confident Oh issue there at all special purpose none whatsoever is it this is classic this is international finance yes sir so in the venture capital industry creating a special purpose vehicle for a particular investment is a standard practice in c-five we focus on structuring those special-purpose vehicles in the most transparent way possible and that was his money from probably from Russia and you co invested into this for this purpose of doing these kinds of deals with Russia well we just right this is kind of the purpose of that no no no this so in 2015 we invested into a European enterprise software company that's a strategic partner of Microsoft in Scandinavian country and we invested in amount of 16 million pounds about at the time just more than 20 million dollars and subsequent in August of that year that Amir Kuznetsov having retired for nova and some time ago in his own right as an angel investor came in as a minority invest alongside us into this investment but we wanted to be sure that his investment was on our control and subject to our compliance standards so we requested him to make his investment through our special purpose vehicle c5 raised a bit co this investment has since been realized it's been a great success and this business is going on to do great things and serve great clients it c5 taking russian money no see if I was not taking Russian money since since the onset of sanctions onboarding Russian money is just impossible sanctions have introduced complexity and have introduced regulatory risk related to Russian capital and so we've taken a decision that we will not and we can't onboard Russian capital and sanctions have also impacted my investigative career sanctions have also completely changed because what the US have done very effectively is to make sanctions a truly global regime and in which ever country are based it doesn't really matter you have to comply with US sanctions this is not optional for anybody on any sanctions regime including the most recent sanctions on Iran so if there are sanctions in place you can't touch it have you ever managed Russian oligarchs money or interests at any time I've never managed a Russian oligarchs money at any point in time I served for a period of a year honest on the board of a South African mining company in which Renova is a minority invest alongside an Australian company called South 32 and the reason why I did this was because of my support for African entrepreneurship this was one of the first black owned mining companies in South Africa that was established with a British investment in 2004 this business have just grown to be a tremendous success and so for a period of a year I offered to help them on the board and to support them as they as they looked at how they can grow and scale the business I have a couple more questions Gabe so I don't know if you wanna take a break you want to keep let's take a break okay let's take a quick break do a quick break I think that's great that's the meat of it great job by the way fantastic lady here thanks for answering those questions the next section I want to do is compliment

(techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its Ecosystem Partners. >> Welcome to Las Vegas everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm here with Stu Miniman and this is the inaugural Dell Technologies World and Pat Gelsinger's here, he's the- >> Hey, great to be with you today, >> Dave: the CEO of VMware, awesome to see you, >> Oh, thank you. >> Our number one guest of all time, this is our ninth Dell/EMC World and your 900th CUBE interview, But it never gets old Pat. It's really a pleasure to see you. >> Oh it's always fun to be with you guys. Thank you for the chance to spend some time on theCUBE, you've come a long way. >> So, thank you for noticing! So, you were the first, and people are recognizing this, to really sort of call the boom in the data center. We certainly have seen it with cloud, and we saw a little bit with data and big data, and now digital transformation, but well over a year ago, you said, we have tailwinds, it just feels right, so good call. >> Yeah, hey thank you, and you know clearly like the IDCs, Gartners, you know, they began last year, 2% to 3% growth, I said no, I think it's at least 2x that, and we ended of the year almost 6% growth in IT, and everybody's raised their forecast, and I think they're still a little bit conservative, and I think in this period, where technology is becoming more pervasive in everything, every business is becoming a tech business, every area of every business is becoming influenced by tech, and as a result, hey I think we're going to see a long run of tech strength and every company in tech is going to benefit and those that are well-positioned are going to benefit in a big way. >> Yeah, you see, you called it, "tech is breaking out of tech" >> Yep, yep absolutely, right, you know, we're no longer that little IT thing stuck in the back corner making sure your mail runs, it's now everything. You know, back office has become front office, right. You know, every aspect of data becomes mission-critical for the business. As some have called it, you know, data is the new oil, right, in the future. And it really is thrilling to see some of our customers, and Michael had a few on stage this morning doing really pretty cool things. >> Well VMware is on fire. I mean, it's only 10% of Dell's revenue, but it's half, it generates half of its operating cash flow. Obviously we love the software business, of course. Talk about your business, the core is doing really well, you got NSX crankin', vSAN cranking, the cloud now, there's Clarity in cloud, give us the overview of your business and give us the update. >> Sure, and as I say, you know, there's three reasons we're doing well. You know, one is our strategy is resonating with customers, and you know, when you got strategic resonance with customers, you're not in the purchasing department, you're in the business units, the CIO's office. So strategy is resonating well, across what we do for private cloud, what we're doing for public cloud, what we're doing for end user and workforce transformation, our security strategy, every aspect is resonating. You know, second, we're executing well. And I'll say, you know, your good strategy, you're executing it well, and you know, clearly the Dell momentum has helped us. We're ahead of schedules on the synergies that we've laid out, and that's been a powerful accelerant. It was like we're doing well, you know, and you put some turbochargers on, whoa, you know this is going, and then finally as we said, it's a good market, right. And well-positioned tech companies are benefiting from that. So across our product families, you know, NSX, vSAN, and HCI, you know, our cloud management is really performing, the end user computing, you know, all of these seeing, you know 30, 50, 100 percent growth rates. You know, my overall cloud business, you know, VMware is growing in the teens you know, my cloud business is growing in the 30s, and way ahead of the growth rate of the business, so pretty much everything that we've laid out is firing on all cylinders. >> Pat, I think most people understand some of the products of VMware. I think it's, you know, 20 years now, since server virtualization laws You've, you know great momentum with NSX with vSAN, wonder if you could talk a little bit about the digital platform though, you know how does VMware look, you know, for the next five to 10 years, fit into the Vision 2030 like Michael was talking about. >> Yeah, yeah, you know very much, you know, as I say, you know, our objective is to be the essential, ubiquitous, digital infrastructure, right. Where you know, this idea, you know, essential. You know we run this mission critical stuff and increasingly we're seeing businesses put their crown jewels running on VMware. You know, 'cause we ran a lot of the stuff of the past, we'd run your SharePoints, your Outlooks, and so on, but now, they're putting core banking on us, you know, core transactional platform. They just say, you are essential, ubiquitous, our strategy is to move all the way to the edge, and the IOT use cases, into the core networks of our service provider partners, You know, to as I say, build these four clouds, the private cloud, the public cloud, the telco cloud, and the NF or the IOT cloud. All of those on a common infrastructure, that enables applications to build on and leverage all of the above. So you know, we're increasingly ubiquitous, digital infrastructure, meaning that they can build their applications from the past as well as in the future on us. And as we're partnering with Pivotal with our PKS strategy, reaching more to the developer, right, and delivering that infrastructure for the next-generation apps, and of course the dirty secret is, is that almost all of the cool new apps are some ugly combination of new and old. And if we can give a common operational security management and automation environment that transcends their cool new container, and function as a service, but combine it, in a consistent operational and security environment with today's infrastructure, oh, that's like the big easy button for IT. Got it, we could take you to the future, without giving up the past. >> We hear from our, you know, CXOs, in our community, in our audience, they really, they want to get digital right. So my question to you is, what kind of conversations are you having with executives around getting digital right? >> Uh-huh, yeah, and lots of those things are, you know, like just with a big media company, was with a huge Bank, on the phone with a big consumer goods product last week. You know these interactions occurring, you know like you say they want to get it right. And with it we're seeing the conversation shift, because a lot of it used to be, you know best of breed. Oh that looks good, and I'll stitch it together with this, and maybe I'll put it that, and a lot of their bandwidth was being put to putting the pieces together, and we're saying no, right. What you going to do is have robust infrastructure. Increasingly rely on fewer, more strategic vendors. It's my job to put it together, so you can take your investments and put them into the applications and services that really differentiate your business. And this is becoming a sea change in how we work with customers and say, okay, yeah I can't stitch all these pieces together, I can't have a hundred security vendors, I must rely on fewer vendors, in much more strategic ways. And in that, obviously we're benefiting from that enormously and they're expecting us to step up like never before, to be a partner with them, and it really is a thrilling time for us. >> So that simplifies all the complexity on there, and at least in concept. Who's leading this charge? Do you discern any patterns of the guys that are getting it right, versus the guys that are maybe struggling, or maybe complacent, specifically in terms of leadership? >> Yeah, and it's super, super interesting, because I find leaders in every industry, right? You know, you find leaders and laggards in those, I had one customer not a lot, long say, "Hey is that virtualization stuff, can I really rely on it?" It's like, ding dong, you know, you're now the trailing edge of technology, but for every one of those trailers, we're seeing those front end customers, and you saw some of them on stage this morning. Where they're just really going and saying, boy we are now ready to ante in, in a big way. We're seeing that in car companies. We're seeing that in financial services companies. We're seeing that in supply chain companies. And some of those are now really seeing these startups now putting pressure on their business for the first time, and they say no, we got to innovate in a very aggressive way. And for that, you know, the Dell Technologies family, you know all of us coming together, you know with our, each skills and focus areas, but together being able to present that holistic solution that says, that's right, we can lead you on digital transformation, we could change your infrastructure, we can build-in security, we could transform your workplace, we could take you to the multi-cloud future, we got it. >> Pat, there was one of the things that caught my ear, Allison Dew, when she was talking about the Dell Technology Institute, said that, together you're going to become a force for good. I know that's something that's near and dear to your heart, >> Pat: Yeah. >> So, maybe, you talked about the tech, and the security and everything, what about the Dell families as a force for good out there? >> Yeah, and I've described this era, and I've said there's four superpowers. You know, technology superpowers that are bigger than any of us, right. And the four I described, you know, mobile. The ability to reach anyone, over half the planet is now connected. Cloud, the ability to scale as never before. AI, the ability to bring intelligence to everything, and IOT, the ability to bridge to the physical world everywhere. And those four are really reinforcing each other, right? They're accelerating each other, as Michael said, you know, "Today, the fastest day of your life. "Today, the slowest day of the rest of your life, "for tech evolution." And we see them just causing and accelerating each to go, as I mentioned in my talk this week at the Grow Awards in Silicon Valley, in 1986 I was making the 486, a great AI chip, right. It's like, what? 31 years ago? And now it's a success because the superpowers are coming together. The compute is now big enough, the data is now volumous enough, that we can do things never possible before. But with that, technology is neutral. The Gutenberg printing press did the Bible, you know, Luther's Bible, it also prints Playboy. It sort of doesn't care. Technology is neutral. And it's our job as a tech industry to shape technology for good. You know that's our obligation, and increasingly we need to be involved in, and shaping, legislations, policies, laws, to enable tech to be that force for good. >> Pat, you mentioned kind of the speed of change in the industry. You're a public company with you know, a lot of employees, how does, internally, how do you keep up with the pace of change, keep inspiring people, get them working on the next thing? You know, Michael talked about going private was one of the things that would help him restructure and get ready for that, so maybe discuss that dynamic. >> Well, you know and for us, you know, as a software company living in Silicon Valley, we feel it every day, right. I'll tell ya' you know, we see these startups, that are hovering around our people, and our buildings, and they got ideas, you know, so we're synthesizing those ideas. We have our own research effort, our advanced product efforts, we're engaging, you know, and thousands of customer interactions per day. And ultimately, it's my job to create a culture that enables my 8,000 software engineers to go for it every single day, right. Where they are just, you know, they love what we do as a company, they love who we are as a company, our values. And then find ways that we enable our teams to, what I say, innovate in everything. Not just in R and D, but how we sell our products, how we support our customers, you know, how we enable these new use cases. We have to innovate in everything, if we're going to keep pace with this industry, and to some degree, I think it's almost in the water in Silicon Valley, right. You know yeah, you got some crazy master's student coming out of Stanford, and he thinks he's going to start up a company to displace me. It's like, what are you talking about? But we feel that every day, and as we bring those people into our environment, creating that culture that allows everybody to innovate in everything, >> So it's hard to argue that things aren't getting faster, that speed, but speed is an interesting question. When you think about blockchains, and AI, and natural language processing, just digital in general, there's a lot of complexity in terms of adopting those things. So speed versus adoption. What do you see in terms of adoption? >> Yeah, you know in a lot of these things like, you know, you look at a technology like NSX, cool, breakthrough, you know we're five years old now, almost on NSX, right? Since we did the Nicira acquisition as a starting point, 4 1/2 years on NSX, and some of these things need to be sedimented, as I describe it, into the infrastructure. Hardened, you know when you've really proven all of the edge cases. You know, those things don't move every day. >> Dave: Right right, fossilized, Furrier word, >> Yeah, you know there is, you know similarly with vSAN. Boy, these edge use cases, data recovery, pounding on the periphery of failure cases, disk drives, failure modes on flash drives, some of those things need to be sedimented, but as you think about those layers, always it's you know, how do you sediment? How do you standardize? And then expose them as APIs and services to the next layer. And every layer as you go up the stack gets faster and faster right, so as somebody would consume the software-defined data center, they need to be able to do that pretty fast. You know, how can I make, you know VM, we just released 6.7. Which reduced by an order of magnitude the time to launch a VM. You know, increase the, by 20x the amount of V-Center bandwidth, just so I can go faster. Not that I needed to go faster for VMs, I needed to go faster that I can put containers in VMs, and they need much higher speed of operation. So to me, it's this constant standardization, sedimenting, integrating, and then building more and more agile surfaces, as you go higher in the stack, that allows people to build applications where literally they're pushing updates, and seeing their CICD pipeline allow new code releases every day. I'm not changing NSX every day, but I am changing my container environment for that new app literally every day, and the whole stack needs to support that. >> Cloud partnerships, we talked last year at Vmworld, about the clarity that the AWS deal brought, of course you have an arrangement with IBM, you're doing stuff with Kubernetes, so, just talk about your posture with the big cloud players, and how that has affected your business, and where you see it going. >> Yeah, you know, clearly the cloud strategy, the AWS partnership, as I said, more than anything else, when we announced that, people moved their views of VMware. Oh, I get it, VMware isn't part of my private cloud, or part of my past, they're the bridge to the future. And that has been sort of a game-changing perspective where we can truly enable this hybrid cloud experience. Where I could take you and take your existing data centers, I can move them into a range of public cloud partners, AWS, IBM, you know, and be able to operate seamlessly in a truly hybrid way. Oh your data center's getting a little hot, let's move a few workloads out. Oh, it's getting a little bit cool, let's move some workloads back. We can truly do that now, in a seamless, hybrid multi-cloud way, and customers, as they see that, it's not only the most cost-efficient, right, it also allows them to deal with unique business requirements, geo-requirements that they might have, oh, in Europe I have to be on a GDPR cloud in Germany. Okay, we support, we have a right, you know here's our portfolio. Other cases, it's like, oh, I really want to do take advantage of those proprietary services that some of the cloud vendors are doing, you know. You know, maybe in fact that new AI service is something that I could differentiate my business on, but the bulk of my workload, I want to have it on this hybrid platform that truly does give them more freedom and choice over time, while still meeting unique compliance, legal, security, issues, as they've come to know and love from VMware over time. >> So to clarify, is it, are you seeing it as use-case-specific, or is it people wanting to bring that cloud experience on-prem, or is it both? >> It is truly both, because what you've seen, is many people, and if we were talking four years ago, you would've been asking me questions, "oh, you know I just talked to Fred, "and he says everything is going to the cloud" right. And people tried that student body right to the cloud of their existing apps, and it was like, oh crap, right? You know, it's hard to re-platform, to refactor those applications, and when I got there, I got the same app, right. You know, it's like, wow that was a lot of investment to not get much return, right. Now, they look at it and they say, "Oh boy, you know, "I can build some new apps in cool new ways" right, with these cloud native services. I can now have this agile private hybrid cloud environment, and I truly can operationalize across that in a flexible way. And sometimes we have customers that are bringing workloads out of native cloud, and saying, oh that's become too big in my operation role. You know I have different governance requirements. I'm going to bring that one back. Other cases are saying, "Oh, I didn't want to move it to the VMware cloud on Amazon", or you know, IBM, the migration service is really powerful. I want to get out of the data center. Other cases, they look at their cost of capital, and the size and scale they're operating, and says, "Hey, I'm going to keep 80% on-premise forever, "but I never want to be locked in, "that I can't take advantage of that, "should there be a new service." It really is all of the above. And VMware, and our Dell relationship, and our key cloud partners, now 4,100 cloud partners strong, it's really stepping into that, in a pretty unique and powerful way. >> And the key is that operational impact, as Pat is saying. >> So Pat, just one of the challenges we've heard from users we talked to is, if this was supposed to get simpler, virtualizing it, you know, I kept all my old applications. Going the cloud, there's more SKUs of compute in the public cloud than there are, if I was to buy from Dell.com. You know, in management, you know we're making steps, but you know it's heterogeneous, it's always add, nothing ever dies, how do we help customers through this? >> Yeah, and I do think they're, you know we're definitely hearing that from customers. And they're looking to us to make these things simpler. And I think we've now, you know, laid the templates for a truly simpler world. Right, in the security domain, intrinsic security. Build many of the base security capabilities into the platform. Automation, automate across these multiple cloud environments, so you don't care about it, we're taking care of it against your policies. Being able to do that, you know, and have an increasingly autonomous infrastructure that truly is responding and operationalizing those environments, without you having to put personnel and specific investments, right at that fundamental operations level, because it's too big, it's too fast, you can't respond at the pace the business requires. So I feel really good, we have some key innovations, you'll see us announcing. Now, we're going to talk at VMworld right? >> Dave: Oh absolutely. >> Okay, >> I will 100% be there, >> I have some cool announcements in this area, by VMworld as well, specifically, in some of these management automation, we see some of that applying, some new AIML techniques, to be able to help with some of those workload management and policy management areas. So, some really cool things going on to help these problems specifically. >> We've seen, oh we saw blog recently, about you guys working on some blockchain stuff. I know it's early days there, but it's exciting new technology. >> Yeah, and the blockchain stuff is what I'm really, really pretty excited about. We have some algorithmic breakthroughs that right now, you know, blockchain on a log scale basically scales at you know log or super log, right. Which meaning, it's problematic right. Is you get lots of nodes, right, you know the time to resolve those, gets to be exponentially expensive, to be able to resolve. We've come up with some algorithmic breakthroughs that drop that to near linear. And when people look at that, they sort of say, wow, I can make my blockchain environments much larger, much more distributed as a result, so as a result of some of that work we'll be increasingly making blockchain as a primitive. We're not trying to deal with the application level, you know for insurance, for financial, but we can increasingly deliver a primitive infrastructure along with vSphere in the VMware environment, that says yeah, we've taken care of that base issue. We've guaranteed it from a vendor you trusted, and you might remember there was a couple of breaches, of some of the blockchain implementations, so yeah, we hope to take care of some of those hard problems for customers and bring some, a good breakthrough engineering, from VMware to that problem. >> Well, it's great to see companies like VMware and you know enterprise plays, IBM obviously involved, into bringing some credibility to that space, which everybody says "Crypto, oh", they don't walk they run, but there's real potential in the technology. I want to ask you about a Silicon Valley question. >> Pat: Okay. >> Any chance I get, so if I broadly define Silicon Valley, Let's include, you know, Seattle. And we generally don't do that, but that's okay, but I'm going to. >> We'll take this, we'll take 'em in okay. >> it's technology industry, but technology industry seems to have this dual disruption agenda. We've always sort of seen, tech companies own this horizontal stack, you know, and go attack, and cloud, and big data, and disruption, but it seems like, with digital, you're seeing them attack new industries. Whether it's healthcare, or groceries, or media. What do you make of that? Can Silicon Valley, broadly defined, pull off this dual disruption agenda? >> You know I really believe it can, right. In that, I'm, you know, being part of it. I'm a huge optimist on it. I don't think it will be exclusive to Silicon Valley, right. You know, there's a tech community in Boston, that's a bit more focused on healthcare, right. Obviously, the cloud guys coming out of Seattle. You know, Austin, and you know, Texas has increasing, Research Triangle, when you go around the world, you see more places because, you know, in that sense, one of my favorite, you know, cartoons, is a picture of a dog at a terminal. I'm sure it was a Dell terminal, but you know, and the caption reads right, "On the internet, "they don't know you're a dog." Right, you know the point being, hey, when you're on the net, it doesn't matter where you are, right. And it enables innovation, whether that's Afghanistan, whether that's Bangladesh, whether that's Myanmar, you know any of those places, become equal on the net, and it does open up that domain of innovation. So I view it much more as tech is disrupting everything. And that's my theme of, "tech is breaking out of tech". Clearly the hub of that, is Silicon Valley. Right you know, that's the center where you know, every third door is a new startup, as you walk down the street. It really is an incredible experience. But increasingly, you know, that innovative disruptive spirit is breaking out of Silicon Valley, to you know, literally across the world. The Chinese think they might be the number one. You know, Europeans, oh sort of a renaissance in France, you know that we haven't seen for many years, and so on. And I do believe that it will continue to be technology, in this horizontal way you know, but increasingly, and I think you know, Amazon has led the way on this. We're seeing boy, we can disrupt entire industries you know, leveraging that. You know, Tesla in automotive, and Airbnbs. All of these are changing industries in fundamental ways, and I do not see that slowing down at all. You know, I'm thrilled to see like, you know, health care, right. Boy, I have not seen this amount of disruptive technology startups in healthcare, healthcare one of the lowest percentage of spend on IT. Can you imagine that? Right, you know at that level, and boy, we're starting to see that pick up. So industry by industry I think we're just getting started. >> And that's an industry that is really ripe for disruption. >> Pat: Oh my gosh. >> So Pat, we're going to hear about some of this, this afternoon at your keynote, I presume? Maybe show us a little leg there, and we'll wrap. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Dave: Alright, take it home. >> Hey, you know we're, today's keynote, obviously going to talk about the better together aspects, we'll update on vSAN and HCI and our strategy there, some of the cool things we're doing with Dell, and AirWatch Workspace ONE, and the client space. Yeah, we're going to talk about networking. I'm going to lay out our networking strategy, and we're going to give a teaser this afternoon of a broad set of networking announcements that we're doing this week. And hope to really lay out, what we think of, as the virtual cloud network of the future, and how the network is essential to that future. So, we're going to have a little bit of fun there, and you'll see me don the VR headset, right, and hey we're going to go into the virtual, virtual data center today, >> Virtualization inception. >> There we go. >> Well Pat, on a personal note, you've been a great friend of theCUBE, and we really appreciate that, and you've been an awesome guest, we saw you come from Intel with an amazing career, and we just see it going from there. So congratulations on all your personal success, your team success and continued. >> Love you guys, it's always great to be on theCUBE. You guys do a fabulous job, >> Dave: Thank you. >> For live tech coverage, and it really has been a lot of fun, and next year we're going to go party for your 10 year anniversary on theCUBE. >> Dave: That's right. Love it. >> Okay, cool, very good. >> Alright. >> Thank you, thanks so much. >> Good. Thanks. >> Alright, keep it right there everybody. We'll be back with our wall-to-wall coverage of Dell Technologies World. You're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Narrator: From the Computer Museum in Mountain View, California, it's theCUBE, covering ACG Silicon Valley Grow Awards. Brought to you by ACG Silicon Valley. (electronic music) >> Welcome back, everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the ACGSV, it's a mouthful. Association of Corporate Growth Silicon Valley Awards, the 14th annual. We've been coming here for about three years. We're really excited to have tonight's keynote speaker on, many time CUBE alum, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware. Pat, great to see you. >> Great to be here, Jeff, thank you so much. It's always great to be on theCUBE, and so many good friends from theCUBE and great interviews. I really enjoy you guys, thank you. >> We're excited for VMworld later this year, we've got Dell Technology World coming up next week, so... >> Just working on my keynote this morning, so almost ready to go, so. >> But you're going to keynote tonight, so what's your keynote tonight on? >> Well, tonight, it's about tech as a force for good. And I'm going to talk about what I call the four superpowers today. You know in the past, we thought of superpower, like, USSR and the USA. >> Jeff: Right, right. >> Today I believe superpowers are far more powerful, and they're technology superpowers. And the four I talk about are mobile, unlimited reach, cloud, unlimited scale, A.I., unlimited intelligence, an IOT bridging from the digital to the physical world, and how those four superpowers are reinforcing each other today, and literally it's our opportunity to improve the quality of lives for every human on the planet as a result of those superpowers. And really how it's our responsibility as a tech community to shape those superpowers for good. >> It's so good to talk about the "for good" because there's so much bad in the news lately about some of the stuff that's going on, and you know, it's two sides of the same coin always. You can use it for good or you can use it for bad. And unfortunately, the bad has been in the news more than the good, but there's so many exciting things going on in medicine, healthcare, agriculture, energy. The opportunities are almost endless. >> Yeah, it really is, and as I say, technology is neutral. It can be used for good or bad. The Gutenberg Press. The Bible or Playboy, it works for both, and it really is our responsibility as a society, and I'll say even more so today as tech leaders, to be that force shaping those technological superpowers for good. You know, one of the statistics offside of my keynote, is in the last fifty years, we've taken the extreme poverty rate from over forty percent, to less than ten percent on the planet. It's stunning that we've lifted two and a half billion people out of extreme poverty. Healthcare reach, we've increased the length of life by almost twenty years on the planet, over the last fifty years. I mean, these are stunning things, and largely the result of the technological breakthroughs that we're doing, and as I say, today is the fastest day of tech evolution of your life. It's also the slowest day of tech evolution of the rest of your life. >> Of the rest of your life, pretty interesting. And with 5G coming just around the corner, kind of thinking of a world of infinite bandwidth, infinite compute, infinite store. How do you start to design applications and distribution when you can have all that power? And as you said, with cloud really at your disposal. You don't have to build it all yourself, you leverage companies like you guys to put it in place and I as an entrepreneur don't have to build all that stuff anymore. >> That's right, this really is impressive that way, 'cause today we've crossed over half the population of the planet has a persistent connection to the internet over some form of mobile or PC device. Half the population, you can now reach over the internet. I mean, it's just stunning that way. >> Jeff: Yeah. >> You can rent the world's largest super computer for a few thousand bucks. The scale that we're able to now conduct business to be able to develop software to reach customers, and truly to change people's lives. >> Right. You do a lot of work. I follow you on Twitter and you're out in the community, you do a lot of stuff with your faith and outside of work to help people. You see the power that you can bring to this technology. What are some of the inspiring stories that get you up everyday, when you do some of this stuff outside of your day job? >> It really is exciting and one of the charities that my wife and I are very involved in is called Missions of Hope International. They work in the slums of Nairobi primarily, and we help to start schools there that literally today have over fifteen thousand kids in the schools that we helped start. Over the summer, I'm climbing Mount Kilimanjaro, in July, as a fundraise to build the next girls high school for those schools. As the girls get younger, they get pulled back into tribalism. For five camels, they get married off at young ages, and keeping them in school so that they can really advance and become proper members of society versus drug into tribalism, so that's one of my summer projects is doing that. Particularly in Kenya, we've been thrilled, things like M-Pesa, and we work with a company called Node Africa, to deliver farming and agricultural services. You know, the most basic things that give people market access, give people cropped information, and literally are lifting people out of poverty in the country of Kenya today. >> That's great work and like I said, follow Pat on Twitter. You're pretty active on there doing good work. >> Thank you. >> We look forward to your keynote tonight and we'll see you next week in Las Vegas. >> Look forward to it. Thank you so much, Jeff. >> Alright, he's Pat Gelsinger, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from the ACGSV Awards. Thanks for watching. (electronic music)

(bright music) >> Hello everybody, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier here in theCUBE's Palo Alto studio. We're here with Jonathan Nguyen, who's with, formally Verizon, now with Fortinet. What's your title? >> Vice President of Strategy. >> Vice President of Strategy, but you're really, I would say, more of a security guru. You had, notably, with the author of the Verizon Data Breach Investigative Report. Great report, it really has been interesting. Congratulations, it's great to have you here. >> Thanks, it was great, 16 years at Verizon, in the security business. ran the data breach investigations team, so that was a great honor in my career, yeah. >> John: So, you called strategy, 'cause they didn't want you to use the word cyber security on your title on LinkedIn in case they spearfish you, is that right, no? (laughs) >> Jonathan: You know, having started my career as a US foreign service officer, as a victim of the OPM data breach, everything about me is out there. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> I live in a perfect universe about how do you defend your identity when everything about you's been compromised to begin with? >> Some of these stories, I had a CUBE guest talk about LinkedIn, and attackers involved in spearfishing, and the efforts that people go into to attack that critical resources inside the parameter. This is a big problem. This is the problem with cyber warfare and security, and crime. >> Yes. Talk about that dynamic, 'cause this is, we always talk about the cloud change, the perimeter, of course. >> Sure. >> More than ever, this is really critical. >> Jonathan: Fundamentally, as we begin going into digital transformation and notions about where data is today and the nature of computing, everything has changed, and the notion of a traditional perimeter has changed as well. I'm going to borrow a great analogy from my friend, Ed Amoroso, and he said, "Look, let's pretend "this is your traditional enterprise network, "and all your assets are in there. "And we all agree that that perimeter firewall "is being probed everyday by nation state actors, "organized criminal syndicates, hacktivists, anybody. "Everyone's probing that environment." It's also dissolving because we've got staffers inside there using shadow IT, so they're opening up that firewall as well. Then you've got applications and portals that need to be accessed by your stakeholders, your vendors, your customers. And so that traditional wall is gradually eroding, yet, that's where all of our data is, right? And against this environment, you've got this group, this unstoppable force, as Ed calls it. These nation-state actors, these organized crime, these hacktivist groups, all highly sophisticated. And we all agree, that with time and effort, they can all penetrate that traditional perimeter. We know that because that's why we hire pin testers, and red teamers, to demonstrate how to get into that network and how to protect that. So if that's the case, that we have this force, and they're going to break in eventually, why are we still spending all of our time and effort to defend this traditional perimeter that's highly vulnerable? Well, the answer is, of course, that we need to distribute these workloads, into multiple clouds, into multi hybrid cloud solutions. The challenge has been, well, how do you do that with enough control and visibility and detection as you have with a traditional perimeter, because a lot of folks just simply don't trust that type of deployment. >> That's the state of the, I mean, that's the state of our problem. How to deal with the complexity of IT, with digital transformation, as it becomes so complicated, and so important, at the same time. Yet, cloud is also on the horizon, it's here. We see the results of Amazon Web Services, see what Azure is doing, Google, et cetera, et cetera. And some companies are doing their own cloud. So, you have this new model, cloud computing. Data driven applications. And it's complex, but does that change the security paradigm? How does the complexity play into it? >> Jonathan: Absolutely, so, complexity has always been the enemy of security. And at Fortinet, what we essentially do is that we help companies understand and manage complexity to manage risk. So complexity is only going to increase. So digital transformation, the widespread adoption of digital technology is to enable exponential explosive productivity growth. Societal level changes, right? Also, massively expand the inter-connective nature of our society. More and more connections, accelerated cycles across the board, greater levels of complexity. The challenge is going to be not about whether we're moving to the cloud, everyone is going to move into the cloud, that is the basis of computing moving next. So in the Australian government, the US government, all of the agencies have a cloud-first migration initiative. It's not about whether, it's not about, it's really about when. So how you move forward with moving your computing, your workloads into the cloud? In many ways it goes back to fundamentals about risk management. It's about understanding your users and your systems, the criticality, the applications you're associated with. And understanding what can you move into the cloud, and what do you keep on-prem, in a private cloud, as it were? >> I want to ask you more about global, more about cybersecurity, but first, take a step back and set the table. What is the holistic and the general trend, in cybersecurity today? What's going on in the landscape, and what are the core problems people are optimizing for? >> Sure. >> So, across my 20-odd years in cyber, what we've seen consistently has been the acceleration of the volume, the complexity, and the variety of cyber threats. So, 10 years ago, 2007 or so, there were about 500 threat factors; today, we're north of 5000. Back at that point, there were maybe 200 vendors; today, we're north of 5000 vendors. There was less than a billion dollars of cybersecurity spent; today, we're north of 80 billion dollars spent. And yet, the same challenges pervade. And what's happening now, they're only becoming more accelerated. So in the threat environment, the criminal environment, the nation-state threat actors, they're all becoming more sophisticated. They're all sharing information! (laughs) They're sharing TTP, and they're sharing it on a highly effective marketplace: the dark web cyber crime marketplace is an effective mechanism of sharing information, of matching threat actors to targets. So the frequency, the variety, the intelligence of attacks, automated ransomware attacks, is only going to grow. Across the board, all of us on this side of the fence, our challenge is going to be, how do we effectively address security at speed and scale? And that's the key. Because you can affect security very well, in very discreet systems, networks, facilities. But how do you do it from the IOT edge? From the home area network, the vehicle area network, the personal area network? To the enterprise network, to then, to a hybrid cloud. A highly distributed ecosystem. And how do you have visibility and scale across that, when the interval of detection, between the detonation of malware, to the point of irrecoverable damage, is in seconds. >> So, tons of attack vectors, but, also, I would add, to complicate the situation further is, the service area, you mentioned IOT. We've seen examples of IOT increasing more avenues in. Okay, so you've got more surface area, more attack vectors with technology. Malware, we see that in ransomware, certainly, number one. But it's not just financial gain, there's also this terrorism involved. >> Absolutely. It's not just financial services get the cash, and embarrass the company, it's, I want to take down that power plant. So, is there a common thread? I mean, every vertical is going to have their own, kind of situation, contextually. But is there a common thread across the industries, that cybersecurity, is there a baseline, that you guys are attacking, that problems are being solved? Can you talk about that? >> Sure. >> So, at the heart of that is a convergence of operational technologies and information technology. Operational technologies were never designed to be IP enabled, they were air gapped. Never designed to be integrated and interconnected, with information technology systems. The challenge has been, as you said, is that as you go through digital transformation, become more interconnected, how do you understand when a thermostat has gone offline, or a conveyor belt has gone offline, or a furnace is going out of control? How do you understand that the HVAC system for the operating theater, the surgery theater, is operating properly? Now we have this notion of functional safety, and you have to marry that with cybersecurity. So, in many ways, the traditional approaches are still relevant today. Understanding what systems you have, the users that use them, and what's happening, in that. And detect those anomalies and to mitigate that, in a timely fashion? Those same themes are still relevant. It's just that they're much, much larger now. >> John: Let's get back to the perimeter erosion issue because one of the things that we're seeing on theCUBE is digital transformations out there. And that's, I kicked a lot of buzzwords out there, but certainly, it's relevant. >> Yeah. People are transforming to digital business. Peter Burroughs had research, we keep on top of those all of the time. And it's, a lot involves IT. Business process, putting data to work, all that good stuff, transforming the business, drive revenue. But security is more coarse. And sometimes we're seeing it unbundled from IT, and we're reporting directly to the board level, or CEO level. That being said, how do you solve this? I'm a digital transformation candidate, I'm doing it, and I'm mindful of security all the time. How do I solve the security problem, cyber security problem? Just prevention, other things? What's the formula? >> Okay, so at the heart of cybersecurity is risk management. So digital transformation is the use of digital technologies to drive exponential productivity gains across the board. And it's about data driven decision making, versus intuitive led human decision making. So at the heart of digital transformation is making sure that the business leaders have their timely information to make decisions, in a much more timely fashion, so they have better business outcomes and better quality of life. Safety, if you will. And so the challenge is about, how do you actually enable digital transformation, it comes down to trust. And so, again, across the pillars of digital transformation. And they are, first, IOT. These devices that are connected collect, share information, to make decisions. The sheer volume of data, zettabytes of data, that will be generated in the process of these transactions. Then you have ubiquitous access. And you're going to have five G, you have this notion of centralized and distributed computing. How will you enable those decisions to be made, across the board? And then how do you secure all of that? And so, at the heart of this is the ability to have, automated, that's key, automated deep visibility and control across an ecosystem. So you've got to be able to understand, at machine speed, what is happening. >> John: How do I do that, what do I do? Do I buy a box, is it mindset, is it everything? How do I solve, how do I stop cyber attacks? >> You need a framework of automated devices that are integrated. So, a couple of things you're going to need: you're going to need to have the points, across this ecosystem, where you can detect. And so, whether that is a firewall on that IOT edge, or in the home, or that's an internally segmented firewall, across the enterprise network into the hybrid cloud. You're also going to need to have intelligence, and by intelligence, that means, you're going to need a partner who has a global infrastructure of telemetry, to understand what's happening in real time, in the wild. And once you collect that data, you're going to need to have intelligence analysts, researchers, that can put into context what that data means, because data doesn't come into information on its own, you actively have to have someone to analyze that. So you have to have a team, at Fortinet, we have hundreds of people who do just that. And once you have the intelligence, you've got to have a way of utilizing it, right? And so, then you've got to have a way of orchestrating that intelligence into that large framework of integrated devices, so you can act. And in order to do that, effectively, you have to do that at machine speed. And that's what I mean by speed and scale. The big challenge about security is the ability to have deep visibility, and control, at speed, at machine speed. And at scale, from that IOT edge, way across, into the cloud. >> Scale is interesting, so what I want to ask you about Fortinet, how are you guys, at Fortinet, solving this problem for customers? Because you have to, is it, the totality of the offering, is it, some technology here, and again, you have 5000 attack vectors, you mentioned that earlier, and you did the defense report at Verizon, in your former jobs. You kind of know the landscape. What does Fortinet do, what are you guys, how do you solve that problem? >> So, from day one, every CSO has been trying to build a fabric, we didn't call it that. But from my first packet-filtering firewall, to my first stateful firewall, then I employed intrusion detection systems, and all of that generated far more lists I can manage, and I deployed an SEM. And then I went to intrusion prevention. And I had to look at logs, so I went to an SIEM. And when that didn't work, I deployed sandboxing, which was called dynamic malware inspection, back in the day, and then when that didn't work, I had to go to analytics. And then, I had to bring in third party technology, third party intelligence feats, and all along, I hoped I was able to make those firewalls, and defense sensors, that platform, integrated with intelligence, work somehow to detect the attack, and mitigate that in real time. Now, what we essentially do, in the Fortinet security fabric is, we reduce that complexity. We bring that level of-- >> And by the way. >> John: You're Ed Hoff, you're reacting in that mode, you're just, I got to do this, I got to add that to it. So it's almost like sprawling, software sprawl. You're just throwing solutions at the wall. >> Right, and a lot of that time, no one knows if their vices are properly configured, no one has actually done the third party technology integration. No one has actually met the requirements that were deployed three years ago, there are requirements today, there are requirements three years from now. And so, that's a huge level of complexity, and I think, at the heart of that complexity. That's reflected in the fact that, we're missing the basic elements in security today. The reason, the large data attacks, and the data breaches, didn't come because of advanced malware, they didn't happen off nation-state threats. These were known vulnerabilities, the patches existed, they weren't patched! In my experience, 80% of all the attacks could be mitigated through simple to intermediate controls. >> Deploying the patches, doing the job. >> Complexity. Patch management sounds easy, it's hard. Some applications, there is no patch available. You can't take things offline, you have to have virtual patches, there are unintended consequences. And there are a lot of things that don't happen. There's the handoff between the IT team and the security team, and it adds complexity. And if you think about this, if our current teams are so overwhelmed that they cannot mitigate known attacks, exploits against known vulnerabilities. How are they going to be able to grapple with the complexity of managing zettabytes of data, with an ecosystem that spans around the world, and operates in milliseconds, where, now, it's not just digital issues, it's health, safety, physical security. How can we trust a connected vehicle, is it secure or not? >> Jon, talk about the digital transformation for industries. As we talked earlier about the commonalities of the industries, they all have their own unique use cases, contextually, I mean, oil and gas, financial services, healthcare, EDU, they all have different things. What is the digital transformation objective and agenda and challenges and opportunities for financial services, healthcare, education, and the public sector? >> So, digital transformation has some similar themes, across industry verticals. For financial services, it's about omnichannel customer engagement, it's about owning that customer experience, how will a financial service company be able to reach each connected consumer? Highly personalized way, highly customized services, suited for that customer so that they can interact, at any time, that they desire, on any device, any media they desire, across the entire experience? For when that person first becomes employed, and has a first checking account, to the point that they retire, the notion around digital transformation for financial services. How do we go about, as an FS company, to reach that customer, in an omnidirectional, omnichannel way, and maximize that experience? How do we do that with highly personalized, highly customized service, self-service, if you will, all with security, across massive amounts of data? How do you ensure that that's the challenge? And then you have to do that in a very distributed ecosystem, from the ATM, home, from the vehicle, and as we move into digitally enabled societies, from the connected car, all of those places will have transactions, all of that will have to be the purveyance of financial services companies. So the level of complexity that they're going to have to grapple with is going to be immense. >> John: And the app, too, is basically the teller, 'cause the app is driving everything, too. It brings up, essentially, the argument, not argument, our thesis, your thesis, on the obvious, which is, the perimeter is eroding. It's the app on the phone. (laughs) Okay, healthcare. Healthcare is one of those things that is near and dear to my heart because, I remember back in the days, when I was younger, HIPAA compliance, it created all of these databases. Creating complexity, but also, structured things. So, healthcare is being disrupted, and security is obviously concerned. More ransomware in hospitals, you see, everywhere these days, big, big issue. >> Yeah, so, challenges in healthcare are twofold. On the one hand, their targets are ransomware because that's where money is. They have compliance challenges, but in a very interesting way, based off of the research we've seen, is that healthcare is a lot more kin to the intelligence community than any other. Because it has insider threats. Large amounts, 7 out of 10 healthcare data breaches are the result of insider threat. So, like financial services, and the other verticals in digital transformation, again, it comes to the notion of the connected consumer and the connected citizen. How do you make sure that that person can be touched and served, irrespective of whether they're in the home, or in another healthcare facility, and all of their devices that are IP-enabled are safe and secure, and to monitor that. And to keep that secure, across a large distributed ecosystem, and for a long period of time, as well. >> Education, talk about insider threats probably there, too. Education is a huge vertical with a lot of, sure, students, but also the general EDU market is hot too. >> Jon: And it's incredibly challenging, because the environment ranges from kindergarten, preschool, to high school, to higher levels of education, that are government funded, with classified intelligence, and materials, and research labs. And the educational environment, how do you provide security, confidentiality, and availability, in an ecosystem that was designed for the free flow and access of information, and how do you do that across a highly distributed ecosystem? Again, constant themes of complexity, volumes of data, and personalized and customized services. >> John: And you got to be able to turn those services on fast, and turn them off and on. Okay, finally, my favorite area is the federal, or public sector market, of course, that also includes higher ed, whatnot. But really government and federal. Public sector, seeing govcloud booming. What are some of the challenges with digital transformation in federal? >> So the hard part of federal government is the notion of service to the connected citizen. And that connected citizen now wants to be able to access city hall, their members of Congress, the White House, in a digital way, at any time, on any device, so that they can log their opinion. It is a cacophony of demand from across the board. From state, local, to federal, that every citizen now demands access to services, on any digital media, and, at the same time, for everything from potholes, and snow removal, and trash removal, those are the types of services that are needed. So, government, now, needs to provide services in the digital way, and provide security across that. >> John: In respect to those verticals, especially public sector and education, transparency is critical. You can't hide, the government can't hide. They provide citizens connectivity, and services. There's no more excuses, they have to go faster. This is a big dynamic. >> I think that we all have expectations of what it is to grow up in a digital world. My children have only grown up in a digital world. They expect things to happen at digital speed, at machine speed, they expect a high level of customized services, so that when they go, and interact with a government agency or a vendor, that vendor, that service provider, needs to know his or her preference. And will automate that and deliver those services in an incredible fashion. As I said earlier, when my kids talk about, when they learned about Moses, and heard about Moses coming down from the mountain with tablets, they thought that he was an Apple user. You know, there was no notion of other types of tablets. The connected citizen is a digital citizen, with digital demands and expectations. And our job in cyber is to enable the digital transformation so that all of those things can be delivered, and expectations met. >> Talk about the dynamic between machines and humans, because you mentioned patches, this is, you could argue it's a human mistake. But also, you mentioned automation earlier. Balance between automation, and using machines and humans. Because prevention and risk management seem to be the axis of the practice. It used to be all prevention, now it's a lot more risk management. There's still a human component in here. How are you guys talking about that, and how is that rendering itself, as a value proposition for customers? >> Sure, so it's just, humans are the essence. Both the challenge, in so many cases, we have faulty passwords, we have bad hygiene. That's why security awareness training is so critical, right, because humans are part of the problem, on one end. On the other end, within the sock, humans are grappling with huge amounts of data, and trying to understand what is malicious, what needs to be mitigated, and then prioritizing that. For us, it's about helping reduce the complexity of that challenge, and helping automate those areas that should be automated, so that humans can act better and faster, as it were. >> We have Jonathan Nguyen with Fortinet. I wanted to ask you about the ecosystem, you mentioned that earlier, and also the role of CSOs, chief information security officers, and CIOs, essentially, they're the executives in charge of security. So, you have the executives in charge of the risk management, don't get hacked, don't get breached. And also, the ecosystem partners. So you have a very interesting environment right now where people are sharing information, you mentioned that earlier, as well. So you got the ecosystem of sharing, and you have executives in charge of running their businesses effectively, and not have security breaches happen. What's happening, what are they working on, what are they key things that chief security officers are working on with CIOs, what specifics are on their plate? And what's the ecosystem doing around that, too? >> So digital transformation dominates all discussions today. And every CSO has two masters. They have a productivity master, which is always the business side of the house, and they have a security master. Which is ensuring that reasonable level of security, in the advent, and managing risk, right? And that's the challenge, how do you balance that? So, across the board, CSOs are being challenged to make sure that the applications, those digital transformation initiatives are actually occurring. At the same time, in the advent of a data breach, understanding the risk and managing the risk. How do you tell your board of directors, your governments, that you're not only compliant, but that you have handled risk to a reasonable level of assurance? And that means, in my opinion, across my experience, you've got to be able to demonstrate a couple of things. One, you have identified and adopted, with third party implementation, and attestation, of recommended best practices and controls. Second, you have implemented and used best-in-class products and technology, like Fortinet. Products that have gone through clearances, gone through common criteria, where things are properly certified. And that's how you demonstrate a reasonable level, it's really about risk management. Understanding what level of risk you will tolerate, what level of risk you will mitigate, and what level of risk you're going to transfer. And I think that's the discussion at the board level today. >> So, make people feel comfortable. But also have a partner that can actually do the heavy lifting on new things. 'Cause there's always going to be a new attack vector out there. >> Absolutely, so, I think the key to it is understanding what you're really good at. And so one of the questions that I ask every CSO is that, when you look at technology, what is it that your organization is really good at? Is it using technology, operationalizing that experience? Or is it really about ensuring that that firewall is integrated with your sim, that the sim works in trying to create your own threat intelligence. And I think one of the things that we do better than anybody else is that we reduce the level of complexity, of that allowing our clients to really focus on providing security, using best-in-class technologies to do that. >> John: That's awesome. I want to just kind of go off the board, on a question that's a little bit more societal oriented, but it's mostly here in the US. You're seeing cryptocurrencies booming, blockchain, whatnot, and it is really kind of two vectors there, that conversation, it's attacks and regulation. So the regulatory environment in DC, on the hill, looks at tech companies these days, oh my god, the big bad, Google, Apple, Facebook. And that's kind of today's narrative. But in general, technology can be an innovation opportunity. So around cyber, it's a little bit more relevant. As govcloud becomes much more ingrained in public sector, what is the regulatory environment out there? Is it helping, is it hurting? What's your thoughts? >> Jonathan: I think, on the most part, it's helping, because regulatory and compliance environments typically lag behind technology. And that's been consistent across not just cyber, but just every field of human endeavor. And I think in cryptocurrency we're beginning to see the effects as governments around the world begin to grapple with, what does this mean, if they have no visibility, insight, or control, over a currency, and we're seeing that in East Asia today. We're seeing that in China, we're seeing that in South Korea. It will have implications, I mean, the question you have to ask, with regards to cryptocurrencies is, will governments allow a non-controlled currency to operate in their marketplace? And given that we are a more integrated and digital marketplace, unless it's adopted on a global basis, is it really compelling? Now, blockchain technology is compelling; what is going to be powering that is a different question. I think that regu-- >> And also. >> The profiteering mode of hackers, which, we talked before we came on camera, is a central part of the dynamic. So if you have a flourishing ecosystem of cryptocurrency, aka Bitcoin, you have, now, a clearinghouse for payments. And that's where ransomware is mostly paid off, in Bitcoin. >> Absolutely. So this is an interesting dynamic, I'm just trying to get a read from how that plays into some of these cybersecurity dynamics. >> I think cybersecurity is highly dynamic, as you said. It is move and countermove, active threat adversaries, active marketplaces coming up with new challenges. I think, for us, on this side of the fence, it's really about making sure, getting the fundamentals right first. I often tell people, first, do you really have all of the security controls in place? Do you really know what's operating in your system? Do you understand your users? Have you done the vulnerability scans? Where are you in those basic things, first? I mean, if you do the basics, you'll mitigate, eight, nine, out of 10 attacks. >> John: Well the costs are going up, obviously, we talked about it, global, earlier. The global impact is interesting, and that's not to say cloud is global, but you now have different regional aspects of cryptocurrencies as one example. But yeah, data breach is another, look at GEPR, the penalties involved. (laughs) And certain countries in Europe, it's going to be astronomical. So there seems to be a tax involved here. So the motivations are multifold. >> So, the motivations in cyber crime. Always consistent, whether they're monetary gain, social media gain, or some sort of political gain. And I think the way you address that is that you cannot take down the marketplace, you cannot take down the physical criminals themselves. You're going to have to take away the ability to monetize, or make gains from cyber attacks. And the way I look at it is that, if you make it so complex to actually launch a successful attack, and then, to go beyond that, and monetize what you've gained, or compromised, you effectively take away the root motivation for cyber crime. And that's, it's an interesting thought, because no one talks about that, because at an industry level, do you really have the ability to, what I call, affect the trajectory of cyber crime? That's a very different way to look at it. >> John: And it's interesting, in Jeff's position, he's basically saying, make it more complex, that'll be more effective against cybersecurity, yet, digital transformation is supposed to make it easier. With building blocks in cloud, you can almost argue that if you can make it easy to deploy in cloud, it's inherently complex. So, creating a very easy to use, complex environment, or complex system, seems to be the architecture. >> The essence of cyber, I think, moving forward, is managing complexity. If you can manage complexity then you have taken complexity and made it your advantage. Because now the cyber criminal has to figure out, where is the data? Is it in the traditional data center, that enterprise environment? Is it a multi-cloud environment, if so, which node, and if I'm successful at compromising one node, I can't get to the next node, because the security fabric separated it. >> John: Jon, the final question, 2018, what's your outlook for the year, for CSOs, and companies with cyber, right now? >> I think it's going to be an exciting time. I think, is there going to be a focus back on basics? Because before we take this next evolutionary leap, in terms of cyber, and computing, and the digital nature of our society, we've got to get the basics done right. And I think the way Fortinet is going, our ability to use the fabric, to help manage risk, and reduce risk, is going to be the path forward. >> Jonathan Nguyen, with Fortinet, former author of the Data Breach Investigation Report, which I've been a big fan of, been reading it for years. Super document, congratulations, it must have been fun working on that. >> It was the high point of my career, at this point. >> It really was a great doc, it was the Bible of state of the art, state of the union, for cyber security. This is theCUBE, bringing you commentary and coverage of cybersecurity, of course, here, in our Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat electronic music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to this special Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier in the Cube's Palo Alto Studios. My next guest is Dr. Tom Bradicich, he's a friend of the Cube, works at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, heads up the IOT. He's general manager and vice president of servers, converged edge, IOT systems. But we're here to talk about, not so much HPE but really that work that Tom's done in a topic called First Mover, a book that he's writing. It hasn't come out yet, so we'll get an early preview of what it's like to create a category innovation and how to use process to your advantage, not make it your enemy. (chuckles) How to use creativity and how to motivate people and how to sell it through organizations, whether it's venture capitalists or managers. Tom, you've got great experience, thanks for spending time to come into the studio. >> Great to be here, thanks for having me and I'm happy to have this discussion. >> If you go back to the Cube videos, folks watching that know you, seen all the videos at HPE Discover or HP Discover, back in the day, you had a great career. You were an engineer, built the first notebook computer with IBM, you've done a lot of groundbreaking things and I like the topic of your book, First Mover, 'cause it speaks to your mindset. Entrepreneurial, innovative, breaking through walls, you probably got a lot of scar tissue. So, I want to talk about that. Because this is what the opportunity many entrepreneurs have as you know, in the Cube, we really believe that a renaissance in software development is coming. It's so obvious, open source is growing at a extraordinary pace, reuse of code. >> Right. >> You got IOT. >> You're involved in, you got crypto currency, block chain, all these new waves are coming all at once. >> Yes. >> I wish I was 22 again. >> Because this is a great opportunity to innovate. But this improving things, what are some of those things? Let's jump in, what do you see as the playbook? What have you learned and what can you share? >> Well, sure, I've been blessed, I've had a career where I've been able to do a lot of innovation but also, I like to separate the notion of innovation from differentiation. Now see, it's possible to be innovated and not different. Like it's possible for you and I to have the same new suit. It's new, it's innovative, but it's not different. And differentiation is really where one can have a first mover advantage because differentiation by definition is new, is innovation. But it's not always the other way around. So, I always tell my teams and I always focus on, how can we be two things, both different and better. It's possible also to be different and not as good. You can have the highest failure rate in the industry, you're different but that's not good. >> Right? >> Yeah. >> So, the concept here is how do you be different, not just new and innovative but how to be different and how do you be good. And I've actually faced three risks in mostly the big corporate culture that we've had to innovation. And the first risk is, of course, the obvious one, will customers buy it, that's called market risk. Is it something that's good enough to be purchased at a profit? The second risk is, can it be manufactured at quality and at a rate of consumption. The third risk is your own company, does the company have what it takes, actually, to take on the risk of a brand new product category, not just a new product. But a new category of products that, by definition, have never been done before. And when one can do that, when one can figure that out, and I've had some significant experience with this, you can catapult your careers, you can catapult your company and your customers to new levels because you enjoy the benefits of the first mover. That's the name of the book, The First Mover. >> Well, I'm looking forward to seeing it. But I want to ask, this is super important because a lot of people are really good at something and they run hard, they break through a wall but might have missed something. So, you kind of bring up this holistic picture. What are some of the things that folks should focus in on? Say I have a breakthrough idea, I have a prototype I've been running, it's in market, I think it's the best thing since sliced bread, I'm pushing it hard, people are just going to lap this up, this is going to be great, I know it's innovative but no one else knows it. >> Right, right, yeah. >> What do I do? >> What's the process, what do you recommend? >> Well, what I like to do is portion the benefits into two categories. There's supply side benefits that's to your company. Why is this good for your company to do this? And then there are demand side benefits. Meaning, why is it good for the customer? Most people tend to focus mostly on the demand side. Oh, it's solves this problem and the customers will love it and that's important and I would call that a necessary but not a sufficient condition. The other condition is why is this good for your company? And many times, when it's a brand new product category, those inside a company aren't quite in tune with why it's good for the customer. Because, again, it's a new thing, it's a new product category. Why is an automobile better than a horse and buggy, right? Why is a laptop computer better than a desktop computer? These are the ideas where it may be intuitive, it may be instructive to talk about that but when you can get a business model first and start with that, well, the reason is, we can enjoy this margin. The reason is, we can enjoy this particular first mover advantage, the halo effect, the reputation of being the leader. The reason is because we can penetrate a new market. The reason is we can now overcome a falling revenue in a shrinking tam. Now we can accelerate in another tam, perhaps, as well. So, by coming up with both the demand side and the supply side, you have a better case to go forward for support and funding inside a big corporation. >> There's always product market fit, I hear the buzzwords, I got to get the cashflow positive, break even. There's always a motivating force to get something done. How should someone organize the order of their operations to get something done, to the market, if it's an innovative, groundbreaking, differentiating? Because a lot of the big challenge is, some people call it landing span, I heard that buzzword too but you get a champion inside a company and that champion embraces it and most people think, oh man, I got a customer. But then that person has to sell it through and then it has to be operationalized, meaning, people got to get used to it. These are really challenges. >> They are, yes. >> What is your view of how an entrepreneur or a business executive or practitioner to get through that? >> Well, you have to get people on your side and it's really important. Somebody's got to believe in, either, you not even understanding what you're proposing but they'd say, well, you have a track record. For some reason, I believe what you're saying. And then, secondly, getting customers. So, I have personally never done anything major without a customer that I call an inspiration customer. That's a name I just made up. So, a customer, by definition, is an end user that will buy something from you, that's the definition of a customer. And an inspiration customer is one that will help you that is okay with seeing your dirty laundry, okay with mistakes you might make because they see the value in it and they also see the value in them being a first mover. And I like to tell my team, we want to be a first mover and a trendsetter, so our customers can also be trendsetters in their business as well. So therefore, by getting that customer support, and that's in the form of POCs or in trials or in just customer testimony, combine that now with a second dimension called the analyst community, which you're team resides in as well, also saying well, I think this is good as well, brings a lot credibility because there's a saying, a verse in the bible that a prophet is not without honor except in his own home town. Now, if you think about that, a lot of times, you're own company that you reside in has a lower point of view because it's very consumed with, indeed, what is next and doing the right thing, by the way. I have to make this quarter, right. We have to protect the brand. We have to keep the cashflow coming in. These are all important things, so how do you get someone to focus on that? Many times, it's not you anymore, it's outside. And I call that the second C. The first C is internal, the company. The second C is your customers and the community. That also could include, by the way, analysts, the media, other experts, consultants, those type of Cs around there. Now the third C is the competition. This is a little bit controversial. What happens when the idea is now exploited by the competition first; sometimes that is a motivator for a company to jump on it as well and make the market. But, again, if you follow the competition, you're not the first mover, you don't enjoy the benefits of first mover advantage. Higher margin, the halo effect of being the innovators and also, learning, that's an important one. When you're a first mover, you're out there learning so that you can respond to the second generation in a better way. >> I like the notion of differentiation and innovation as two different variables. >> Yes. >> Because it's super important. You can be different and not innovative. You can be innovative and not different. Again, it's all contextual but I want to get back to the pioneering of the first movers. So, statistically speaking, a lot of the best entrepreneurs are first movers and they're often "misunderstood", you hear that all the time. >> Yes. >> Or being a visionary is the difference being 10 years in the future versus an hour, can make the difference between success. (chuckles) We are crazy on one end and you're brilliant on the other because the time to value catches up with that profit, if you will. So the question is that, how does first movers continue to win 'cause I've seen situations where first movers come in, get a position and win and stay, keep the lead. Other times, first movers come in, set the market up, create all the attention and then have arrows on their back. >> And a second mover enjoys the benefit. >> Yeah, so the second mover comes in, bigger scale, so this competition, competitive strategy overlaid on this. Which even complicates it even further. >> Indeed, yes. >> So, your thoughts on that. >> Yes, indeed. Well, one way to look at this is the way to move forward is again, when you can get some momentum that's not you. That's the number one as a... >> John: Market growth, number of subscribers, doing the internet as a trend. >> Yes. >> Mobile users. >> Yes. >> And a third party consultant who's highly respected, a greaser, an analyst. I ran into an analyst recently in a coffee shop who agreed with some of this first mover work we're doing and converged edge systems, which is a new class of products as well. But it's really important that you can't be discouraged, let me point this out. What I tell my team, and I tell students, I lecture at universities and I've been edge professor, those younger in their career, is if you cast and vision and you have an idea and nobody gets it, don't be discouraged, that's a good sign. That's sounds a little funny. Why is it a good sign? Because if everybody gets it right away, it's likely not that novel, it's likely rather ordinary, it's likely been thought of before as well. So, by the very nature and definition that the average person might think it's discouraging. Oh, nobody understands me, nobody gets this idea, should be an encouragement, and a motivation. Now the risk here, is people not getting it is also a sign of a stupid idea. So, usually, when people don't get it, it's either, really not good. >> Or really good. >> Or really amazing that, eventually, they'll come around to it. I had a boss in one of my career opportunities told me to stop working on a product. I don't want to give too much detail, but he literally told me that. And I said, I didn't want to be insubordinate to a boss, we have them and I said, can I please just keep working on it, okay, don't let it interfere with the other stuff. Dah, dah, dah. Today that market is a nine billion dollar market as well. >> Of that product that you-- >> Of that very product that I was told by a very astute person, one of my colleagues, my bosses, that I don't see the future in this, let's not do this, you know, as well. But, being able to have a second thing. So, number one is don't be discouraged by people not getting it. By definition, that's supposed to happen. >> Yeah. >> When you have new-- >> Good point, you want to finish that? >> I just want to get-- >> Get one more thing. >> If I may add a second one. And as you're moving forward with this as well is seek out and find those who do agree with you and stick with them very, very closely. And I have, I can say a couple of names. There's one, we've created this new product class called Converge Edge Systems. Alan Andriole is senior vice president at HP. >> Cube alumni. >> And he's a Cube alumni. >> Super smart. And I'm pointing him out because he has publicly taken on this idea that this product category can really, really work and he's worked-- >> John: Cloud Nine? >> Oh, the converge edge system called Edgeline. >> Okay, got it. >> The Edgeline product brand. >> You know it as well. So therefore, when you find someone who had authority-- >> Eagles fly together, you want to get a good peer group. >> Absolutely. >> Here's a question for you. >> One of my experiences, and I want to just get your reaction and add on to it, your thoughts is, most entrepreneurs or pioneers are misunderstood, so I agree, don't be discouraged, but also, keep validating and be a data seeker, get the data. But a lot of the times, just getting something in the market or getting it going creates movement and inertia to get rolling and sometimes the original idea is actually the big idea turns into it as you get more data. An example is like Air B&B wasn't... What it is, it was basically air mattresses and selling cereal. >> Yes, yes. >> That was the original story, right. And then it turned into, but conceptually, it was the same thing, so you don't have to be 100% right on the semantics. >> It's well known that most startups don't end up being successful with the product they start with. That's well known fact but that's true also in large companies with a product idea as well. So, you have to have this interesting balance. It's very interesting as I've thought about this in study. You have to have deep philosophical and conviction of principles. And here's why: If you don't, you will be swayed by everybody's opinion and you'll never get anything done because oh, well, that's a good idea, maybe I should do this well, that's a good idea, maybe I should do this. Now, I'm not saying that's bad to listen to others but if you don't have a grounding of principles. Example, we established the seven principles of the IOT over two years ago, and we've held on to them and created the success we have based on those principles. Now that's not to say we didn't modify them a little bit but the point is, we were convicted with something and when somebody would come up with a counter to it, we had a way to defend our convictions, if you will, in internal debates and external debates as well. And then, secondly, you got to be also okay with being the sole inhabitant of that field of discourse. Being a visionary can be a very lonely job because of that, right. And, again, it's because you are and your team is, it's not always a lone person right, the team is actually creating something that literally nobody's ever seen before. Nobody understand before. >> What process do you wrap around this? Because Dave Alonzo and I always talk about this on the Cube and after the Cube is that the process has to be your friend, not your enemy. It has to work for you. >> I always say that, yeah. >> Also says that as well on Amazon. But also Charlie Munger, Warren Buffet's partner always says I'm not a big fan of master plans, meaning, because become a slave to the plan rather than the opportunity. >> Yep, yep. >> So these are process kind of things, right. So how does an innovator that's a first mover that wants to create a category, 'cause categories killers or category creators are huge opportunities financially. So they create a lot of value wealth and opportunity. What process is best? Is there a view, is it conditional on certain things? What's your thoughts on... >> Well, let me say, I'm going to give you a big company or a medium size company context, not a startup, I think they're distinctly different. I have limited experience with a startup but I've had significant experience with bigger, medium and large, now, companies as well. You can't try to change the system because now you have two variables. You got this new product that nobody's ever heard of and now you're trying to change the whole system. Now, again, this is just advice for bigger companies. So be careful how many things you want to change, how many things you want to stop. So you want to take this new thing and align it with existing processes and existing core competencies as much as you can, even though it's new, it has to have some alignment; I'll give you an example. When we built the converged edge systems, the Edgeline brand, we aligned it with compute. It's not only compute, but we aligned it with compute, why? Because HPE or HP, at the time, was and is and now, number one in compute when it comes to data center. Compute systems when it comes to high performance computing and mission critical, right. So therefore, that was easy to understand so you're okay, you're familiar with this, but now, let me tell you this new twist on it. And I would assume, and I don't know this for sure, but I would assume Steve Jobs and the Apple team that was thinking of this smartphone concept, the iPhone as well, they had to align it with some level of compute capabilities, right. And if you notice, as it emerged, it also included something that already exists called the iPod which was already aligned with their laptop computers and their desktops, right. Your music would be downloaded as an app to connectivity, but now you can take it with you and by the way, now I'll add a phone to it and so this incrementally built and by the way, you ain't seen nothing yet, I'm going to add a GPS system, I'm going to add a camera, your flashlight, your wallet, I'm going to add all that in. So, I think, by incrementally moving but not upsetting the system, like you said, in a large company really, really helps because you can't change everything too quickly. You got to be okay being alone-- >> Well, I want to interrupt you there for a second. Peter Buress and I talk all the time; I love his quote, Peter Buress, head Cube on research says, the iPhone was a computer that happened to make phone calls. Okay, and that's the smartphone, it's category creator and we know what happened, the rest is history. However, you mentioned talking to customers, having an inspiration customer, I love that concept. Because you need a muse as an innovator. You got to have someone you can trust that knows what you're trying to do that understands the mission. If Steve Jobs went into the marketplace and did market research, he would have probably had the customer feedback to build the best Blackberry. A better Blackberry or another device. Instead, he used is gut, was on his mission and then he understood the inspirational customer, whether it was real or not, he was going down a different road. It takes guts but also some discipline. >> I hear you and I agree with this 100%. When I had the great fortune of leading a team that created the first enterprise blade server or converge system, and today that is pushing about a 10 billion dollar market opportunity, and not one customer asked me for it. Now, that doesn't mean I didn't listen, okay. But I had to bring it to them. So here's the difference, we're not responding to trends, this is a key point, we're creating a trend. And what I tell my team is, you must create trends, not follow them. Many of competitors, are by the way making good money and doing good business, I'm not knocking that, but I'm saying they're not creating a trend, they're actually following one. They're in an exploding tam. >> Pretty lucrative trend. >> It can be. >> Very mature, big market. >> Dave Thomas with Wendy's followed a trend called hamburgers and he did pretty well. He didn't create the hamburger market but he followed one. Now, this is really rather interesting. So when you come in, and then you're saying I want to actually set a trend and create one, it really gives you this opportunity to redefine what is happening. So now, quick story, you may have heard this, maybe your viewers have heard this. A manager of a shoe company sends two guys to an island. He says, I want you to sell shoes on this island. They get to the island, the first guy calls back and says, boss, this is terrible, everybody is barefoot. There's no opportunity to sell shoes. This is terrible, I'm coming home. The second guy calls and says, boss, you're not going to believe this, there's not a shoe on this island and I have a tam that's 100% of the market to sell shoes. I believe, as you pointed out, Steve Jobs didn't go and say well, what apps do you own on your Blackberry. What he did is reversed it and this is what we're doing, we're reversing, we're saying, if you could watch a full length high definition movie in your hand, would you? Well, I can but I can't do it on this device. But if you could, right. So now, in the IOT, I hear this all the time from my competitors and even some colleagues out in the industry, well, we ask them what apps they run at the Edge. We ask them what they do at the Edge. That's good, that's necessary but not sufficient. You have to say, but if you had this product, wouldn't you, for example, run an entire database? Would you compile your machine learning models at the Edge, do it in the cloud now, wouldn't you do that, if you had it? Well, I never thought of that because I don't have that capability, just like, well, I never thought of being able to take pictures and watch full length high definition movies 'cause I never had it. But what if you did, would you do it? So you always got to be setting that trend, not responding to it only. >> That's awesome. >> Dr. Tom Bradicich, writing a book called First Mover really about being innovative. Give you the final word, thanks for coming in, appreciate you sharing the advice. What's going on with HPE and your IOT work? Take a minute to talk about what's happening at HPE. >> Well, thanks, pretty exciting, we've been able to move forward with some really great customer wins. I'm hoping to go public with them. We're in many ways, I know this is an abused term, but we're revolutionizing the industrial IOT in particular and manufacturing floors. We have the large auto-manufacturer that has chosen Edgeline as the standard to produce more and more vehicles per day. That's their goal, how many more vehicles can I get into my customer's hands per day. We have snack company making potato chips. Looking at what we're doing with sulfur, defining operations. We have even, we've talked about this before, space travel, engage with what the space edge is all about. In many ways, we're potato chips to space ships. >> Data centers on Mars. >> Data centers everywhere. >> And then, also, converging OT, just like the smartphone converged the camera and the GPS system, we're converging control systems, data acquisition systems. It's pretty exciting, I've been fortunate to have a company and our new CEO, Antonia Neery, has been very supportive, I was with him this morning and we talked about that new, first-of-a-kind product that we have at this auto-- >> So, is Antonio going to let us come in and do an exclusive interview since he's been a Cube alumni multiple times? >> Yes, I think he should. >> Tell him we said hello. >> I will, I will. >> Tom, great to see you. >> Thanks for having me. >> Tom Bradicich, great thought leader, really around category killers, category creators, being innovative and different, that's the key to success. Thanks for sharing. This is the Cube Conversation here in Palo Alto, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. 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>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (techno music) >> Good morning, welcome to day three of VMworld 2017. This is theCUBE's continuing coverage of this big event in Las Vegas. I am Lisa Martin with my co-host, Stu Miniman, and we're very excited to be joined by a couple of gals in tech. We have Phoummala Schmitt, you are the infrastructure lead for Independence Blue Cross, and Theresa Miller, the founder of the 24x7 IT Connection. Welcome. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> So, Phoummala, let's start with you. You are a very leading female in the technology and software space. Tell us about yourself. What do you do, what inspires you as a female leader in technology? >> I'm currently in infrastructure lead at Independence Blue Cross. I manage unified communications applications, Exchange, Skype for Business. What excites me is the ability to show young women that you can do anything. When I was younger, I was told that I didn't understand math very well, so I couldn't be in IT, well, look at me here. So, it's inspiring. I feel inspired when little girls tell me, I want to do something technical. >> That's awesome, Theresa, what about you? What's your journey been like? >> My journey started over 20 years ago by accident, while I was studying at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater. There was an opportunity to study IT. It made sense to me, and I dropped my accounting major just like that as soon as IT came to the forefront. I've been doing technology ever since, and today, now, I have 24x7 IT Connection. We do writing, we do webinars, and we also do IT consulting. >> So, you guys work together with the 24x7 IT Connection. Tell us a little bit more about that. I know that, Phoummala, you mentioned Microsoft, and here we are at VMworld. Tell us about what kind of topics you cover on that 24x7 IT Connection. >> We cover a broad range of topics. I usually cover the Microsoft, Exchange, Skype world. I actually blog for Theresa, but we do a podcast together, the Current Status, and we talk about all sorts of technology, storage, networking, and just the current trends. And we actually do it on video, through YouTube, and we have a glass of wine. We make it so it's like a casual conversation with your friends, you know, you're just chattin' and talkin' tech, like here at the conference. >> Uh-- >> Just to add to that, so, from the blogging and like the approach we use, it really is about what's relevant to us. So, like she said, we're covering end-user computing, it might be Microsoft, it might be Linux. It just depends. We have several female writers and one male, and it's really about what's relevant, what's going on in their world, because then you know it's going on in someone else's. >> Yeah, Phoummala, you've been in the center of a really interesting transition we've been seeing in the marketplace. You know, I think about my career in tech, you know, deploying servers for email, and that whole push. Microsoft, huge push to get everybody onto Office 365. >> Phoummala: Yes. >> You know, where that lives, we talk about, you know, software's eating the world. You know, so, give us that journey of applications for you. How's that change your role, some of the dynamics? Sounds like you might need a glass of wine after talking through some of these topics, yeah. >> Yeah, I actually started in the server world, server and infrastructure. I was racking and stacking servers, deploying VMs, and then, at the same time, I was also managing Exchange, but as my career progressed, I kind of left that storage and server background and decided, you know what, applications. I wanted to focus a little bit more and really embrace the application world. Since I had that server background, that was my job, it just seems I could actually deploy these applications a lot better, because I understand the underlying foundations behind it, Exchange, and the cloud, so, right now, you know the push is to be in the cloud. Where I work, and a lot of organizations like ourselves, we don't go to the cloud yet. We're just not there. So, there is a very strong push. Eventually, I suspect we'll all be in the cloud. I mean, that's just, it's not if, it's when. >> Yeah, so, but I want to dig down just a tiny bit more, because, you know, most people in the VMware community know Microsoft pretty well. The relationship with Microsoft and their applications with virtualization, and now with cloud, is a really interest dynamic, so you've gone against some of what Microsoft said in the past, kind of do what's best for your organization, why don't you explain some of that to our audience, yeah. >> Yeah, so, Exchange. The preferred architecture for Exchange is, or Exchange 2016, 2013, is to be physical servers, with DAS, direct-attached storage, which is, you know, not what most people are. I mean, it's a virtualized world now. I don't know any company that isn't virtualized. So, I've taken the approach, what is the best situation or deployment for your organization. Yes, there is the preferred architecture, but it's not, I don't look at it as the Holy Grail, or the Bible. I look at what is best for the organization. What are your requirements? So, if the requirement is to reduce data center cost, reduce some rack space, and you can't go to the cloud yet, due to other requirements, let's look at alternative solutions that still follow some of the guidance. So, you know, yes, I break away from it, but it's what's best for your business, because not everybody can deploy physical. >> Yeah, Theresa, I have to imagine you cover a lot of this. You know, what's really happening with customers versus, you know, no offense to our friends on the vendor side, but, you know, they always think its what's right, as opposed to the person doing it, knows what is right for their environment. That's one of the challenges of IT, right? There is no one way to do things, so. >> Every organization is going to take a different path and journey, and that might be to the cloud, that might not be yet. That might be a combination, that could be hybrid IT, I think is another term that we keep hearing where, maybe I have some applications in the cloud, and some that will always remain on prem, but it has to match the culture and the fit of the business, or you won't be successful with any IT project. >> So, ladies, we're at VMworld 2017, given both of your thoughts in terms of, we need to do what's best for the business, Phoummala, let me start with you. What are some of the things that you're hearing, are you hearing other peers of yours echo the same feelings and sentiments? >> Yes, when we're out in the field, you know, I'm talkin' to people, and it's, yeah, it's we're not there yet, we want to go there, yeah, but we can't do it, we don't have the infrastructure, we don't have the resources. And oftentimes, you know, our vendors, they, they forget that budgets, there's constraints, you know, resourcing. So, you know, my word to them is be patient with us. We want to go there, we like your products, but there's so many other factors in play, especially when you work for a large enterprise. You know, there's politics, and large enterprises just take time to do things, especially certain industries, healthcare, financial sectors. You have certain regulations that you have to follow, and in order to get to the cloud, or whatever, you know, the latest trend is, we may have to modify certain policies that are in place and then there's a downward effect, because let's say we want to go to the cloud, then you have to go to, you know, your security department. What regulations or what retention policies do you have to change? And that may, you know, that may take time. So, it's not like it's going to' happen today. >> Theresa, same question, but I guess, maybe, no, maybe a different question. In terms of your podcast, have you heard anything here that's inspired the next conversation that you guys want to have with your glass of wine? >> So, I really think, it's probably going to revolve around cloud again, and in terms of, the other thing I keep seeing is analytics. Everybody's talking about analytics. >> Lisa: Yes. >> And I think that's a really interesting conversation, 'cause it means so many different things. The depth, what are you going to analyze? How do you manage that data? So I could see it being a combination of those topics, and even maybe separate. >> Yeah, yeah, Phoummala, you and I were talking before the interview. Think about this community here. It used to be, you know, it was like hypervisor, virtualizing, we were all in this journey to virtualize. Now, it's a little bit fragmented because there's so many different areas. Analytics, absolutely huge people. Security, lots of people going there. This whole cloud discussion, on all the different apps. What are you seeing in the community? What are the topic areas? Is that, you know, is that a challenge to the community? VMware, the VMworld community was a pretty tight-knit community, and now it feels, you know, while there's great connections and great people, it's broken into a few different pieces. What's your reaction to that? >> I mean, I do feel there's sort of a, not a disconnect, but there's so many different aspects, and I think that's just the evolution of IT. We've evolved to the point where it's beyond IT, it's beyond the technical approaches. It is, um, it's almost like it's, IT's just another business department. We're a business. We provide services to the other business units, and it's just that evolution of, we're service providers, all of us. Whether we are in the data center, or we are an apps develop, we are providing a service to somebody, and we have customers. >> Do you find that that's an advantage? We were talking to some guests earlier this week that, I think it was an analyst from ESG that was saying, you know, you can show that certain problems with storage, certain costs, aren't IT's problem, it's a business problem. Is that an advantage what you just kind of talked about, Phoummala, in terms of getting eyes and ears of the business to provide, okay, this is a business challenge, we need to provide the right expertise, the right funding, to support these services that are needed? >> I definitely think so. I mean, just from my own experience. Understanding what the business wants and needs is huge. And then just puttin' yourself in their shoes. What do they need, what can we do to make their jobs better? So that person, you know, clicking the button of submitting our payroll, or, you know, putting a purchase order in, what can we do to make that better? So, you know, it's one of the things I always do when I'm looking at projects. What value is this going to bring for our business? And, I think, that's just the way IT has evolved to. We're not the programmers in the basement anymore, you know, with the lights turned off and just coding away. We're all business analysts now. Because, at the end of the day, it's our paycheck, too. So, these products that we're hearing about, at the end of the day, it affects us, it affects our business, and the bottom line. >> And what is the website of 24x7 IT Connection that people can see and hear the value that you bring to the community? >> It's 24x7, so that's the 24 by 7, and then itconnection.com. And so, like I said, we share a lot of really great stuff. We have something new every week, so it's definitely worth checking out. >> Well, ladies, thank you so much for joining Stu and myself this morning and sharing your journeys into IT, as well as your insights, what you've learned from the show, what excites you, and where people can go to find more information about the expertise that you bring to the community. We want to thank you for watching again. We are theCUBE live from day three of VMworld 2017. I am Lisa Martin, for my esteemed co-host, Stu Miniman, thanks for watching. We'll be right back. (techno music)