>> From Times Square, in the heart of New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering IMAGINE 2018. Brought to you by Automation Anywhere. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in Manhattan, New York City, at Automation Anywhere's IMAGINE 2018. We've never been to this show. Pretty interesting, about 1,100 people talking about Bots, but it's really more than Bots. It's really how do we use digital employees, digital programs, to help people be more efficient, and take advantage of a lot of the opportunities as well as the challenges that we're facing as we keep innovating, I'm really excited to have our next guest. Jeffrey Immelt, the former chairman and CEO of GE, great to see you Jeff. >> Good to see you. >> Absolutely, last I saw you I think, was at Minds and Machines, and we're huge fans, >> A couple years ago, yep. >> Beth Comstock, I loved Bill Ruh, so you know, what a fantastic team. >> A great team. >> But here you are talking about Bots, and it's interesting because at GE you guys have been involved in big industrial equipment, as well as a huge software business, so you really figured out that you've gotta have software and people to really work with these machines. >> So you know Jeff, I really am a big believer that productivity is the key, and that we, we're seeing a bow wave of technology that's really gonna impact the workplace in a meaningful way. The reason why I like RPA, what we call Bots-- >> Right, RPA. >> Is because it can happen so quickly. It can happen across the organization. It has great productivity associated with it. So I kinda view RPA as being really one of the uh, let's say early wave technologies in terms of how to drive more automation and productivity in the workplace. >> That's funny, because people ask me they're like, what's the deal with some of these stock evaluations, is it real, and think back to the ERP days right, ERP unlocked this huge amount of inefficiency. That was a long, long time ago, and yet we still continue to find these huge buckets of inefficiency over and over. >> I think it's, I mean I think to your point, the early days of IT, really if you look at ERP manufacturing systems, even CRM. They were really more around governance. They were kind of connecting big enterprises. But they really weren't driving the kind of decision support, automation, AI, that companies really need to drive productivity. And I think the next wave of tools will operate inside that envelope. You know, ultimately these will all merge. But I think these are gonna get productivity much quicker than an ERP system or an MES system did. Which are really, at the end of the day, driven by CFOs to drive compliance more than operating people to drive productivity. >> Right, but what's driving this as we've seen over and over, that consumerization of IT, not only in terms of the expected behavior of applications, you know you want everything to act like Amazon, you want everything to act like Google. But also, in terms of expectations of feedback, expectations of performance. Now people can directly connect with the customer, with companies like they never could before, and the customers, and the companies can direct with their customer directly. Where before you had channels, you had a lot of distribution steps in between. Those things are kind of breaking down. >> I think that's for sure. I mean I think that's sure. I would say beyond that is the ability to empower employees more with some of these tools so you know, an employee used to have to go to the CIO with a work ticket, hey here's what I need. You know these Bots grow virally inside organizations. They're easy to implement. They're easy to see an impact very quickly. So I just think the tools are becoming more facile. It's no longer kind of a hierarchical IT-driven technology base. It's more of a grounds-up technology base, and I think it's gonna drive more speed and productivity inside companies. >> Right, so really it's kind of, there's always a discussion of are the machines gonna take our jobs, or are they? But really there's-- >> Jeff, I'm not that smart really I mean-- >> Well, but it's funny because they're not right? I mean, everyone's got requisitions out like crazy, we need the machines to help us do the jobs. >> Nobody has, nobody has easy jobs. The fact of the matter is, nobody has easy jobs. You know, a company like GE would have 300 ERP systems right? Because of acquisitions and things like that. And the METs not a complexity, manual journal entries, things like that. So to a certain extent these, this automation is really helping people do their jobs better. >> Better. >> More than thinking about you know, where does it all go some day. So I think, I think we're much better off as an economy getting these tools out there, getting people experience with them and, and uh, seeing what happens next. >> Right, it's funny they just showed the Bot store in the keynote before we sat down, and when you look closely, a lot of them look like relatively simple processes. But the problem is, they're relatively simple, but they take up a lot of time, and they're not that automated, most of them. >> One of my favorites Jeff, is doing a quote for a gas power plant would take eight weeks. Because now we have Bots, that can draw data from different data sources, you can do it in two and a half days right? So that's not what you naturally think of for an automation technology like this. But the ability to automate from the different data sources is what creates the cycle of time reduction. >> Right, and you're fortunate, you've sat in a position where you can really look down the road at some interesting things coming forward. And we always hear kind of these two views, there's kind of the dark view of where this is all going with the automation, and the robots. And then there's the more positive view that you just touched on you know, these are gonna enable us to do more with less and, and free people up to actually be productive, and not do the mundane. >> I think productivity, productivity enables growth. The world needs more productivity. These tools are gonna be used to drive more productivity. I think many more jobs will be technically enabled, than will be eliminated by technology. Clearly there's gonna be some that are, that are, that are impacted more dramatically than others. But I would actually say, for most people, the ability to have technology to help them do their day-to-day job is gonna have a much higher impact. >> Right. What do you think is the biggest misperception of this of this combining of people and machines to do better? Where do you think people kind of miss the boat? >> Oh look I mean, I think it's that people wanna gravitate towards a macro view. A theoretical view, versus actually watching how people work. If you actually spent time seeing how a Service Engineer works, how a Manufacturing person works, how an Administrative person works, then I think you would applaud the technology. Really, I think we tend to make these pronouncements that are philosophical or, coming from Silicon Valley about the rest of the world versus, if everybody just every day, would actually observe how tasks actually get done, you'd say bring on more technology. Because this is just shitty you know, these are just horrible, you know, these are tough, horrible jobs right? A Field Engineer fixing a turbine out in the, in the middle of Texas right, a wind turbine. If we can arm them with some virtual reality tools, and the ability to use analytics so that they can fix it right the first time, that's liberating for that person. They don't look at that and say, "Oh my God, if I use this they're gonna replace me." >> Right, right. >> They really need me to do all this stuff so, I think not enough people know how people actually work. That's the problem. >> It's a tool right? It's as if you took the guy's truck away, and made him ride out there on a horse I mean-- >> It's just a, it's just a, you know look-- >> It's just another tool. >> I remember sitting in a sales office in the early 80s, when the IT guy came out and installed Microsoft Outlook for the first time. And I remember sitting there saying, who would ever need this? You know, who needs spreadsheets? >> Right, right. >> I could do it all here. >> Yeah, little did you know. >> So I just think it's kind of one of those crazy things really. >> Yeah, little did you know those spreadsheets are still driving 80% of the world's computational demands. >> Exactly. >> Great, well alright I wanna give you a last word again. You're here, it's a very exciting spot. We call 'em Bots, or robotic process automation for those that aren't dialed in to RPA stands for. As you look forward, what are you really excited about? >> Oh look, I mean I always think back to the, to kind of the four A's really, which is uh you know, kind of artificial intelligence, automation, additive manufacturing and analytics. And I think if everybody could just hone in on those four things, it's gonna be immensely disruptive, as it pertains to just how people work, how things get built, how people do their work so, when you think about RPA, I put that in the automation. It's kind of a merger of automation and AI. It's just really exciting what's gonna be available. But this, this bow wave of technology, it's just a great time to be alive, really. >> Yeah, it is. People will forget. They focus on the negative, and don't really look at the track, but you can drop into any city, anywhere in the world, pull up your phone and find the directions to the local museum. Alright, well Jeff, thanks for uh taking a few minutes of your time. >> Great. >> Alright, he's Jeff Immelt and I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from Automation Anywhere IMAGINE 2018. Thanks for watching. (jazz music)

>> Announcer: From downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering RSA North America 2018. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at RSA North America 2018 in San Francisco. 40,000 plus people talking security, enterprise security, cloud security, a lot going on. It just continues to get more and more important. And we're really excited for our next guest who's been playing in the enterprise space for as long as I can remember, which has been a little while. Mike Decesare, he's the CEO and President of ForeScout. Mike, great to see you. >> Started my career off when I was one. (Jeff laughs) So, I've been in this for a long time. >> You have been in it a long time. So you guys now you're all about, right so there's so much stuff going on in security and security is one of these things that I have to look at it as kind of like insurance. You can't put every last nickel in security, but at the same time, you have to protect yourself. The attack surfaces are only growing with IIoT and we were at an autonomous vehicle show, and 5G is just coming around the corner, and all these connected devices and APIs. So you guys have a pretty unique approach to how you top level think about security called visibility. Explain that to us. >> So visibility is the next big thing in the world of cybersecurity and the dynamic is very basic. It's, for 20 plus years, CIOs and CSOs were substantially able to control everything that was on their network. You'd buy your servers and Windows machines and Blackberries for your employees and then there was very little tolerance for other devices being on those organization's networks. And what happened 10 years ago this year, with the birth of the iPhone was that CIOs, those same CIOs now had to deal with allowing things onto their network that don't subscribe to those same philosophies and when you can't buy it and outfit it with security before you put it into the environment. And that's the gap that ForeScout closes for organizations is we have an agentless approach which means we plug into the network infrastructure itself and we give customers visibility into everything that is connected to their network. >> So that begs a question, how do you do that without an agent? I would imagine you would put a little agent on all the various devices. So what's your technique? >> We actually don't. That's the secret sauce of the company is that >> okay >> you know over 10 years ago, we recognized this IoT trend coming because that's, that's the thing in the world of IoT is unlike the first kind o' 20 years of the internet, there was a substantially smaller number of operating systems, most of them open. The different characteristic about the current internet is that many of these use cases are coming online as closed proprietary operating systems. The example I use here is like your home. You know, you get a Nest thermostat and you put in on your network and it monitors, you know, heating and cooling but the device, the operating system, the application is all one consumer device. It doesn't run Windows. You can't install antivirus on you Nest thermostat. So our approach is we plug into the network infrastructure. We integrate to all of the network vendors, the firewall vendors, the wireless controlling vendors and we pull both active and passive techniques for gathering data off those devices and we translate that into a real-time picture of not just everything connected to the network but we know what those devices are without that client having to do anything. >> So you have what you call device cloud or yeah, ForeScout device cloud. So is that, is that a directory of all potential kind of universe of devices that you're querying off of or is that the devices within the realm of control of your of your clients directly? >> It's the second. It's the, so the way that our product works is we plug into the network infrastructure so anything that requests an IP address, whether is wired and wireless in the campus environment, whether it's data center or cloud in the data center environments or even into the OT space, anything that requests an IP address pops onto our radar the second it requests that address. And that cloud that we've built, that we've had for about nine months, we already have three million devices inside, almost three and a half million devices, is a superset of all of the different devices across our entire install base just from the clients that have been willing to share that data with us already. And that gives us optimism because what that becomes is a known set of fingerprints about all known devices so the first time that we discover a Siemens camera that might be a manufacturer, the company might have ten thousand of those in the environment, the first time that we see that device, we have to understand the pattern of traffic off that device, we label that as a security camera and any other customer world-wide that's has that same device connects, we instantaneously know it's a Siemens security camera. So we need the fingerprint of those devices once. >> Right, and so you're almost going to be like the GE Predix of connected devices down the road potentially with this cloud. >> We won't go there on that. >> He won't go there, alright. We've talked to Bill Ruh a lot of times but he does an interesting concept. The nice thing 'cause you can leverage from a single device and knowledge across the other ones which is so, so important on security so you can pick up multiple patterns, repeated patterns et cetera. >> One of the best parts about ForeScout is the fact that we deployed incredibly quickly. We have clients that have almost a million devices that got live in less than three months. And the reason we're able to do that is we plug into the infrastructure, and then our product kind o' does its own thing with very little effort from the client where we compare what we have in this repository against what they have in their environment. We typically get to an 80 or 90% auto-classification meaning that we know 80 or 90% of the time, not just what's on the network but what that device is and then the other 20% is where we have the implementation where we go through and we look at unique devices. It might be a bank has some model of ATM we've never seen before or a healthcare company has beds or machines on a hospital floor that we haven't recognized before. And the first time that we see each of those devices uniquely, we have to go through the process of fingerprinting it which means that we're looking for the unique pattern of traffic that's coming off a, you know, a router, a switch and a firewall and we're ingesting that and we're tagging that device and saying anytime we see that unique pattern of traffic, that's a certain device, a security camera or what have you. >> Right. >> The reason's that useful is then we get to put a policy in place about how those devices are allowed to behave on the network. So if you take something like the Mirai Botnet which hit about a year ago, was the thing that took down a big chunk of the Northeast, you know, utilities and you know, internet, it infected, it was a bot that infected security cameras predominantly. Nobody thought twice about having security cameras in their environment, but they're the same as they are in your house where you know, you put it online, you hit network pair and it's online. >> Right. >> But that bot was simply trying to find devices that had the default password that shipped from the security manufacturer and was able to be successful millions of time. And with our product in place, that couldn't happen because when you set us up, we would know it's a security camera, we'd put a policy in place that says security camera can speak to one server in the data center called the security camera server. And if that device tries to do anything more criminal, if it tries to dial the internet, if it tries to break into your SAP backend, any of those activities, we would give the customer the ability to automatically to take that device offline in real time. >> Right, so you're... >> And that's why our clients find us to be very useful. >> Right, so you're really segregating the devices to the places they're supposed to play, not letting 'em out of the areas they're supposed to be. Which is the >> Absolutely. >> Which is the classic kind of back door way in that the bad guys are coming in. >> Our philosophy is let everything onto the network. We take a look at that traffic. We give you a picture of all those devices and we allow each customer to put an individual policy in place that fences that in. If you take the other extreme like a Windows machine in a corporate environment, our typical policy will be you know, do you have Windows 2009 or later? 'Cause most customers have policies they don't want XP in their environments anymore. But we enforce it. So if an XP device hits the network, we can block that device or we can force a new version down. If you have Symantec, has it got a dat file update? If you've got Tenable, has it had a scan recently? If you've got, you know, any of the other products that are out there that are on those machines, our job is to enforce that the device actually matches the company's policy before that device is allowed in. >> Before you let it. Alright. >> And if at any time that it's on that network, it becomes noncompliant, we would take that device offline. >> You know, with the proliferation of devices and continuation growth of IoT and then industrial IoT, I mean, you guys are really in a good space because everything is getting an IP address and as you said, most of them have proprietary operation systems or they have some other proprietary system that's not going to allow, kind o' classic IT protections to be put into place. You've really got to have something special and it's a pretty neat approach coming at it from the connectivity. >> It's the secret sauce of the company is we recognized many years ago that the the combination of not just there being very few operating systems but they were all open. Windows, Lennox, right? I mean, you can buy a Windows machine and you can install any product you want on it. But we saw this trend coming when the next wave of devices was going to be massively heterogeneous and also in many cases, very closed. And you know, you mentioned the example of the OT space and that's one of the other, the third biggest driver for us in our business is the OT space because when you looking a WanaCry or a NotPetya and you see companies like Maersk and FedEx and others that are, that are publicly talking about the impact of these breaches on their earnings calls. What those companies are waking up and realizing is they've got 25 year old systems that have run, you know, an old version of Microsoft that's been end-of-life decades ago and the bad actors have proven very adept at trying to find any entry point into an organization, right, and the great news for ForeScout is that really lends itself very much towards our age-endless approach. I mean, many of these OT companies that we're in, devices that are in their manufacturing facilities don't even have an API. There were built so long ago so there's no concept of interacting with that machine. >> Right >> So for us, allowing that device to hit the Belden switches and then be able to interrogate the traffic coming off those switches let's us do the same thing that we do in the campus world over in the OT world as well. >> Good spot to be. So RSA 2018, what are ya looking forward to for this week? >> This is just massive in size. It's like speed dating. From a customer's perspective too, I mean, I meet so many customer's that come here and able to meet with 30 or 40 vendors in a single week and it's no different, you know, for the providers themselves so. You know, we've got some really, kind o' really high profile big wins, you know, it's very coming for us to be doing deals at this point that get up over a million devices so they're very high profile so it's a great chance to reconnect with customers. You know, one of the things I didn't mention to you is that kind o' the, the whole thing that we do of identifying devices and then understanding what they are and allowing those policies to get put in places, that's fundamentally done with our own IP, and the connections into the switch and firewall vendors. But we've built this whole other ecosystem of applications in the world of orchestration that set on top of our products. We integrate the firewall vendors, the vulnerability management vendors, the EDR vendors, the AV vendors, so it's a great chance for us to reconnect with you know, those vendors as well. In fact, we're doing a dinner tonight with CrowdStrike. They're one of our newer partners. Very excited about this week. It brings a lot of optimism. >> Well, great story Mike and excited to watch it to continue to unfold. >> We appreciate you giving us some time. >> Alright, thanks for stopping by. That's Mike Decesare. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from RSA North America 2018. Thanks for watchin'. Catch you next time. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Washington DC, it's the Cube, covering .NEXT Conference. Brought to you by Nutanix. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to .NEXT everybody. This is the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. My name is Dave Vellante, and I'm with my cohost, Stu Miniman. This is day two of .NEXT. Dr. John Bates is here. He's the CEO of TestPlant, and author of Thingalytics. Sir, welcome to the Cube. >> Thanks. >> Nice to have you on. >> Nice to be here. >> Thingalytics, everybody's talking about things. >> This thing, that thing, the refrigerator, the iode things. What's Thingalytics? >> Well, things, i.e. connected devices, sensors and so on. They're not very interesting unless you actually do something with them. So you search through all that data that's coming out for the opportunities and threats to your business, for example, and then you act on it, while you've got time and perhaps, beat your competitor. So, Thingalytics is about smart, big data analytics, and the internet of things coming together. >> Okay, and what's the premise of the book? >> Well the premise of the book is, you know, everybody thinks, I mean if it's one message from it, it's IoT is not so hard to get into. So get started. You know, start small, and here's some lessons of how you can do it. And here's some stories from different industries of how thought leaders, you know, like Coca Cola, or GE, or many different companies, Medtronic, in different industries have actually got started and really been extremely disruptive in what they've done. >> And is this getting started, is this all for companies, or are you seeing individuals that can also participate? >> You know, I do have a chapter in there about the Smarthome. So, obviously that's the aspect where the individual is going to come. But you know, I think it's really the real winner in this will be the industrial and the enterprise, Internet of Things. I guess that the key message is for business leaders. >> Do you think that given that there's, the internet of things requires things, and there's so many things that are installed by these big, industrial companies that the whole IoT thing will be maybe less of a disruption than it will be an evolution of companies like GE, and Siemens and Hitachi, and guys like that. Is that a reasonable premise, or will we see a whole new wave of companies? Certainly we'll see startups come in, but will they attack these big industrial giants, that have been around for a hundred years? >> You know, this is a really great question, and I think that, at the moment, the opportunity is in the hands of the big buyer. You know, keynoting at .NEXT, Bill McDermott coming in to do his presentation. I sold my IoT platform company to SAP. And why, for example has SAP got an amazing opportunity? Because they've got all these applications, they've done an amazing job of taking ERP and adding a whole load of applications: financial planning, supply chain, business networks. But those applications model the real world. But they're not connected to the real world. So what happens when you take a model of a financial model about the value of a factory or a mine, and connect it to the real world. Suddenly, it's not theoretical. It actually is calculating in real time, the value of those assets. The supply chain is really about that. So, SAP is an unbelievable opportunity. IBM has an unbelievable opportunity. GE has an unbelievable opportunity. But it's going to be how they execute, and is someone going to come in, and do something unbelievably disruptive we haven't even thought about. So, those guys need to make all the running right now to really protect themselves. >> I wonder if you could comment on this. I see some of the execution risks as what Jeffrey Immelt said, "I went to bed an industrial giant," "and woke up a software company." >> John: (laughs) Yes. >> Wow, it's hard to be a successful software company. So, is that one of the many execution risks? Are there others? >> I think you're absolutely right. I mean, if you take GE for example, my friend, Bill Ruh. He's the chief digital officer, the CDO of GE Digital. >> Dave: We know him, yeah, sure. >> Yeah, he's awesome. Completely new business, but it's really hard. I think that's taken longer than they expected to build up that Predix platform. And are they going to be the people, it depends what business you're in. If you're the business of buying aircraft engines, then rather than buying an aircraft engine, you want to buy engine as a service. So that's the kind of the thing that maybe you'll buy from GE, or maybe it's one of GE's partners and GE provides the infrastructure. But I think they've learned that's really much harder than they thought. And I think everybody's sort of discovering that. It's not so much the thingalytics, I've realized, it's the thingonomics, the economics of the internet things. That's the really important thing to get right. >> We actually worked with GE when they were coming out with the Industrial Internet, and we did a lot of interviews. There's some of these barriers that we're going to hit along the way. As a matter of fact, at Wikibon, our team that works on it, they call it the Internet of Things and People because there's so much that needs to happen to be able to move forward. Some of them are just old industrial things, some of them are regulations, some of them are the mindsets. How do you see some of these, what do you see as some of the major barriers, and how do we knock them down to be able to accelerate this even more? >> Absolutely. Well, first, you're absolutely right. One of the key barriers is a cultural barrier, or a, oh, that's just too hard, getting back to why did I write Thingalytics. And I think it's a question of people have just got to get started, not try and boil the ocean, and try and get some successful projects going. But definitely there's a cultural thing, and you just have to get those people together that think differently. And there's a reason why this new role of the Chief Digital Officer was created, but you can have many Chief Digital Officers throughout your company, just sort of get them together with that thought. One of the other things I can bring up that is really, really hard and why I went from being in the core of the IoT platform world into a company that's a software testing company, when you're going to launch this stuff, how do you, de-risk it, how do you make sure, in this world where there's all these sensors at the edge, all these strange mobile devices on the front end, and the cloud in the middle, how do you make sure you test that? It's a really complicated distributed architecture, that requires completely new technology. You don't even own the code, so how do you test that? So there's a whole load of issues there, but I think you have to put at the heart of it, think differently, think digitally. >> So what's the company you sold to SAP? Tell us about that. >> So the company's called Plat.One, and it was one of the leaders in platforms, software platforms, to enable Internet of Things application. So the idea is that you're going to build an Internet of Things application. You could start and hardwire, start writing some code and hardwire against all these devices and sensors, but then you start shipping your applications. What about if you made the wrong decisions? What about if you spent years just writing all the integrations to your factory floor, or your logistics networks? So, there's a whole load of common protocols out there, in machine to machine, and they call it a new Internet of Things protocols. Plat.One, new and could talk to all these protocols and make machines talk to each other. It could virtualize that, so that you disconnect those protocols from the application you write. So you're modeling things like, in a Smart city, truck and streetlamps, rather than bits and bytes. So then when you change the implementation from one city to another, you're future-proofed. And then graphical tools to model and plug them together, and a platform that manages microservices at the edge and the cloud. So you're managing an adaptive platform that you can place logic, depending on what it is. And that enabled SAP to rapidly roll out ITOs. >> And your company had customers? >> Yeah, a lot of customers, people like, you know, a great customer, Pirelli. Pirelli, obviously a tire manufacturer as you know them, but what they can do, if they plug sensors into their tires and have telematics boxes on tops of trucks or vehicles, suddenly they can go to the fleet management markets and sell them big data analytics because they know where the trucks are, they know how they're being driven, and what's more, rather than selling you a tire, they could lease you a tire as a service because they can track it, they know how much use you've got out of it. Unbelievable new thingonomic models. So, that's an example, flextronics, T-Systems, we had a whole lot of interesting smart cities using it, logistics, manufacturers. So yeah, it was a great, but early stage company, and you have to ask yourself the question, can you, as a small company, win, or would you be better off partnering with an SAP with that unbelievable reach? >> One of the things, I've got a networking background, we hear all these new protocols and the maturity there, there's the security risk there. I hear the fleet of trucks that was like, oh wait, I might turn off these sensors or do something malicious. The surface area has just grown by orders of magnitude. How do we address this as the industry? What is some of the advice you're giving for this? >> You're absolutely right, 'cause when we were talking about the issues earlier, that's a corker, isn't it, you know, the security of it. And as a Tesla owner, it was great when hackers tried to hack into the Tesla and they couldn't. All they could do was make the horn go beep. Which you can do from your app on your phone, anything that was publicly there, but couldn't take control of the car. That was great, that was nice. But with all this highly distributed model, you've got to be able to have end-to-end security. So in Plat.One for example, we had the ability to have role-based, end-to-end security right from the application to the device. And that was part of the platform, so you got that for free. But you've got to make sure that's the case in your applications. >> What's the opportunity for jobs in the growing IoT economy? >> You know, IoT giveth and IoT taketh away. (Dave laughs) We're all thinking let's bring more jobs back to America, which is a political thing at the moment. But are these jobs are going to be replaced by robots? I mean, is there a global issue, which is, are these jobs going to be replaced by robots, and by algorithims? The answer is yes, but on the other hand, are more jobs going to be created? Are people going to become much more productive? So I think humans are going to become more productive, for sure, for things like smart factories, smart cities, and life's going to get better in smart cities, but yeah, we're also going to lose jobs. I draw an analogy to trading, financial markets trading, where we used to have traders in the pits waving pieces of paper, then it went to Bloomburg terminals where people entered their trades automatically, then it went to algorithmic trading and high frequency trading where algorithms run it. Still humans involved, but less and less. But the humans are more productive and more coordinated. >> Hey, what if we put a 30% tax on all IoT-related initiatives, that would help preserve jobs. (John laughs) So tell-- >> Wouldn't slow down innovation or corporate profit or anything like that. >> Hey, here's an idea for you, Since we're in Washington I thought I'd throw out some good ideas. >> (laughs) Yes, exactly, very topical. >> So, tell us about your software testing company, TestPlant. >> So, the reason I was really excited to join TestPlant is there's this new world, you put IoT together with the mobile world and the cloud world, and you have the world of digital. How do you make sure that in this new digital enterprise that everybody's going to compete in, that you're, how do you make sure you're doing well, and how do you make sure your stuff works, and how do you make sure you're beating your competitors? So, TestPlant's all about end-to-end testing of the digital experience. It's taking testing to a new level, 'cause if you think about testing, it used to be about, does your code work? Now, it's about, are you offering up an unbelievable, delightful digital experience to your customers, because testing now has become a profit center. It's the differentiator between you doing an amazing job of launching an app and getting five stars in the app store, or crashing and burning because something's gone down, or there's a usability issue or there's a problem. So that's what we do, we test applications using artificial intelligence through the eye of the user, we actually, our algorithms actually use the applications and connect to the APIs and can take control and automate the testing process and discover these business metrics and show customers what good really is. >> So John, you were the founder of Plat.One, is that right? >> So I was an early joiner of Plat.One, I was the CEO, I wasn't the founder, we have two amazing founders. >> Okay, but you helped do the initial raise? >> Yes, exactly, and I took it from an early interesting technology to the company that got bought by SAP >> Made it viable, and sellable, you're an investor, I heard you say. >> John: Yes. Okay, now you're an author, you're CEO now of an more established company, right? >> John: Yes. >> Jack-of-all-trades here, well, maybe that's not a fair term, but you do a lot of different things. What are your thoughts on which things you enjoy the most, where do you see all of this headed? >> Well-- >> Polymath is the word I was looking for. (John laughs) >> Well, I started off actually as a professor, a university professor, and I took some of my research and started my first company. I loved building a start-up from scratch, and taking that as a first streaming analytics or real-time analytics company, and I then spent over a decade as a C-level executive in public software companies. But I haven't had so much fun as what I'm doing right now. It's beautiful, it's sort of mid-sized, really great private equity, backers, the Carlyle group, so I love what I'm doing right now, it's definitely my favorite gig, so far, I think that's the nice sweet spot for me. >> That's great, well, John, we love having big brains in the Cube, Stu and I, and it rubs off a little bit, at least we think it does, so thanks very much for coming on. >> John: Thank you gentlemen. >> You're welcome, alright, keep it right there, buddy. We'll be back with our next guest. We're live from Nutanix NEXTconf, this is the Cube.