>>mhm. Here live in Washington D. C. For two days of wall to wall coverage. I'm john for your host of the cube. Got two great guests here, constant Thompson V. P. Of diversity equity inclusion program at a core american council of renewable energy and Blair Anderson, director of public policy industries at AWS. Thanks for coming on the cube. Thanks for having us. So first of all, big announcement on stage max Peterson, head of public sector announced some big news with a core. Tell us what it >>is. Well we are going to be partnered with amazon to do a supply chain study on how we can best diversify the renewable energy supply chain. So we're actually gonna have baseline data on where we should start to be able to create a program that's going to be a model for the renewable energy industry on how to develop and support the success of black women and bipac owned um firms. So >>this program that you're running accelerate accelerate your programs and membership tell more has it worked? And why the successes having, what is amazon's relationship with it Besides funding? Is there other things you can talk about? >>Yeah. So accelerate wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for people like Shannon Kellogg with a W. S. Um who about a year ago after the George Floyd murders said, you know, what are we doing as a core? He sits on our board um in this area and we had to say nothing. So um Shannon. And a group of leaders got together and workshop this idea. Let's create a membership program for women and minority owned businesses so that they can be successful in renewable energy. Let's pick a cohort and let's do whether it takes to make them successful. Everything from introducing them to business connects, to mentoring them to even legal services for them. >>Well, yeah, this is like an interesting dynamic. Remember Andy Jassy was on stage when he was the ceo of a W S a year ago, I kind of was preaching, you hate that, I said that word, but preaching to the audience build, build, build, there's an entrepreneurship, public sector vibe going on right now, very entrepreneurial across every industry. I mean, this is a real thing that's going on. >>Yeah, so we're super excited about this opportunity, the work that core has done to lead on this program for the last year, especially with Constance coming in, becoming the leader has kind of been able to take this idea that she mentioned that AWS was kind of a founding member at the genesis of it about a year ago. She's taking this idea that many of these folks put on paper And been able to turn it into a really hard substantive efforts to move it forward. So we've been able to have great conversations with many of these 15 companies that have been brought into the program and start building a relationship with them. I think, as you have seen around a WS like we believe strongly in innovation and creativity. the renewable energy industry is very similarly there is a lot of kind of thinking big and innovative spirit that needs to take place in that space and having the diversity at all levels of these companies is kind of an important component to be able to move that entrepreneurship forward. >>You know, cost is one of the things that we've been reporting on until getting on the cube is right in the wheelhouse of what you're doing is a cultural change happening. And that cultural change with amazon and cloud computing is causing structural changes which are opportunities like radical structural changes. So that means old incumbent, the old guard as you guys call it, this can be replaced not because people hate them because they're inadequate. So you start to see this kind of mindset shift, entrepreneurial, impact oriented I can make a change but actually I can level up pretty quick because the people in charge don't know cloud, I mean I hate to put it bluntly like that, but if you're not on that edge, if you're not not on that wave, your driftwood. >>Yeah. You know it's funny you say that I like to call it, our members are making systemic disruptions to the system in a very equitable way, meaning our members are in communities like Chicago Jackson Tennessee there in the north end of texas, they are in um everywhere and they're in the communities, making these systemic disruptions to the way things happen, the way we talk about renewable energy to the way we deploy solar, they're making those kind of changes. So to your point they're doing it, we have to catch up to them because they're already out there, they're moving their entrepreneurial, >>it's like, it's like there's a class of entrepreneurship and evolving and it's like everyone's got the pedigree, this or that knowledge is knowledge and you can apply it in software, you could be shrink wrapped software you put on the shelves called shelf where no successful inventory, give it back cloud computing. If you're not successful. Like right now it's not working. So if you don't have results, no one bought it, it must not work. So it's easy to identify what's working. Yes, so that eliminates a lot of dogma, a lot of weird blocking. It's true, this is a democratization of >>absolutely, I think you're talking about transparency and transparency is one of the tenets of inclusion. If you're truly doing things to be inclusive, transparent and that's where you see the changes, that's exactly what you're talking >>about data driven. That's one thing I love about this data world data is now part of like how apps are built, it's not like a database, then you go fetch a file data is now transparently available. If you know what to look for it if it's available. So the whole old silo mentality, this is one of the amazon strength blair you guys are doing. So I have to ask how is this translating out in the public policy world because you know, when you can make this kind of change quicker, you're gonna have some wins under your belt. Yeah, you gotta double down on those. I >>think, I think there's a lot of transformation we're talking about in this conversation. You take kind of one of the missions we're talking about here, which is around clean energy and the expansion of clean energy, Aws and Amazon. We have procured 10 gigawatts of renewable power and making us the largest corporate procure globally, to kind of put that in maybe a little bit more approachable context, that's the equivalent of powering 2.5 million homes. Um and there's still farther to go to be able to meet that kind of think big that is happening in the industry right now, you have to have a broad, diverse industry to be able to reach all those communities to be, have kind of all types of different leaders in it, because we need everybody at the table both for the industry, but also for the communities that are being served. >>What does sustainability mean to you? Because this is a core focus, I know the energy things huge, but it's not obvious to some people, but it's getting better. What are the what's the core 10ets behind the sustainability strategy? >>Yeah, no, I think there's a lot of different ways you can take a stab at that for us. It's uh probably most uh out there in the public that people talk about is our climate pledge. This is kind of a um goal that we've set to be uh net zero carbon by 2040 which is 10, 10 years ahead of the paris Climate change within that. There are components of that that are related to electric vehicles, clean energy, renewable energy procurement, carbon offset programs around the world. I think throughout all of that is kind of coming back to, as you said, with sustainability and approaching climate change as a as an issue that needs a comprehensive holistic approach to talk >>about some of the stories and the members that you have because is the recruiting strategy climate change? Or is there another like how do you because renewable energy could be a no brainer, but how to get people excited? Like save the world. What's the what's the what's the, what are people aligning with then? What's their reaction? So, >>You know, it's very simply the way we see with our members, most of our members, 87% of them are in the solar area. Many of them when we talk about sustainability, how can people live their lives in a way where they save money on their energy bills? How can communities understand how they can harness their own renewable energy, make a little money from that, but also live their lives in a very peaceful, sustainable, peaceful, sustainable way. Right, so that's part of it as an example, a couple of examples is that we have um 548 capital is a member company. And keep in mind that these are early startup companies. 5 48 capital is in Chicago and their models started off with we want all homes in our communities and these are places in the hood, some of them um son text works with people, it works with spanish speaking customers solely in texas where they explain to them the benefits of renewable energy. They explain the benefits of a sustainability and what it is. I mean that's so that's kind of what we're looking >>at here is just kind of show up and just kind of telling the truth >>exactly and show them the benefits that they've kind of not been leading on. Actually. The other thing is that this is about economics. So this renewable energy movement that we're going through is about economics. It is a it's our next wave of being able to ensure americans are able to live lives in a in a way that's meaningful economic. >>Well you've got visibility on the unit economics event good energy. There's also a community angle. >>Yes, absolutely. >>About some of those stories around the community response to this idea, wow this actually is gettable. Yeah, we >>solar is one of our members and it's owned by the first female community solar own company out of. She's out of Baltimore but she has a solar farm here in D. C. And what she did was was engaged churches in how can you get involved in this renewable energy movement? How can you save money? How can you create a community around around this work? We sold as an example of that um son text, I have to mention them again. They speak with they work with only spanish speaking customers who had no clue about this and who are now making having their lives live better because of it, >>you know, affecting change is hard now you've got a tailwind with structural change in systemic opportunities there. What are the blockers? What are the blockers right now? Is an awareness, is it participation community? >>I'm sorry, it's your show and I've >>interrupted, you know, >>we talk about entrepreneurs in the space, particularly women and those from bipod communities. The first thing that you'll hear is they'll say we don't have access to capital people. The terms around getting capital to start up are tough and their barriers there's so that's one the second is awareness and that's awareness of introducing them to companies that might want to do business with them. So that's something that's a benefit for a core occurs. Members are all people who touch every renewable energy transaction from the finances to the developers to the to the buyers. So this is what makes it unique. So what we're doing with accelerate is breaking down the barriers of access to capital by introducing them to people who can potentially support their work but also introducing them to companies that can help them be a part of their supply chain, which is why the study that max announced is amazing because we're going to be able to have baseline data on what, what are the demographics of the supply chain in the renewable energy and what can we do about it? And we're gonna scale accelerate to be a model for the industry >>and that's the transparency angle. Get the baseline, understand this is classic Amazonian thinking, get the baseline, raise the bar, >>you can see why you get >>so OK, so a lot of great stories, how do people get involved? Obviously amazon is taking the lead leadership role here. What can people do to get involved? >>So if you want to support the program as amazon is a corn dot org accelerate or Thompson at a core dot org. That's my email address. If you'd like to become a member company and accelerate program will be opening up applications towards the latter part of this year november december again a core dot org slash accelerate >>renewable energy. What's the coolest thing you've seen so far in your programme around neutral energy um, could be story, it could be people story could be tech story. What's the coolest thing you've seen spot there? Yeah, you really did. You >>know, I think we have a company called clear look, that's a member there out of Jackson Tennessee and they're actually working with retailers are renewable energy credits to create, to create renewable energy farms in their area. And I, what I think is so cool is that she's disrupting the way that you go about using renewable energy credits. Clear loop dot org. Look them >>up in the new york times. Had a story. I'm just reading California other areas. We have a high density of electric vehicles, it's training the power grid. So this idea of coming in, come back is what it's not sure yet. It's not, this is kind of where it's going. So okay, what's the cool thing you've seen? >>No, for me, I've just enjoyed kind of, I've enjoyed the journey. I think the moment for me where I could see that this was real and this was going to be a impactful program constants organized. It's called a speed dating, a virtual speed dating for us with about eight different companies and it was fascinating to get on, spend some time being able to interact with eight different companies. Um, who we probably would not have ever had kind of introduction to before in the past either. They didn't know how to get in touch with us. We didn't know how to get in touch with them and it kind of opens your eyes to all the different ways. People are approaching this problem and starts the executives who I had in these colors. You can see their wheels spinning the ideas sparking of oh there's some cool ideas here. There's something new that we could do. We should explore further. Nothing I can announce at the moment but lots of lots of good uh I'm >>sure the baseline max got baseline studies. I'm sure there will be a lot of doubling down opportunities on success or not success because you want to have the data, you know what to work on. Its true cause a great mission. I'm really impressed. Congratulations. Thank you announcement and love the programme. Thank you. Take a minute to give a plug anyone or public >>thanks Shannon Kellogg. Shannon was really behind it. He's a member of our board represents a W. S. And was really behind, we gotta do something. It's got to be unique and it's got to be something intentional. And here we are today I want to give a >>great opportunity. Thanks for coming in, appreciate it. Thank you for having more cube coverage here from Washington D. C. Amazon web services, public Sector summit. An event in person where people are face to face. This is great stuff is the cube right back after this short break. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP. Discover Virtual experience Brought to you by HP. >>Welcome to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020 Virtual Experience. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to be joined by two guests from HP longtime partner Tech Data. We have calling Blair the vice president of sales and marketing of I. O. T. And Data Solutions and David Smith, H P E Pre Sales Field Solutions are common. And David, Welcome to the Cube. Thanks, Lisa. Great to see. So let's start with the calling. HP and Technical have been partners for over 40 years, but tell our audience a little bit about tech data before we get into the specifics of what you're doing and some of the cool I o. T. Stuff with HP. I >>think that the Tech data is a Fortune 100 distributor. We continued to evolved to be a solutions aggregator in these next generation technology businesses. As you've mentioned, we've been serving the I T distribution markets globally for for 40 plus years, and we're now moving into next generation technologies like Wild Analytics, I O. T and Security bubble Lifecycle Management services. But to be able todo position ourselves with our customer base and the needs of their clients have. So I'm excited to be here today to talk a little bit about what we're doing in I, O. T. And Analytics with David on the HPC side >>and in addition to the 40 plus years of partnership calling that you mentioned that Detected and HP have you've got over 200 plus hp. Resource is David, you're one of those guys in the field. Talk to us about some of the things that you're working on with Channel Partners Table David to enable them, especially during such crazy times of living and now >>absolutely, absolutely so. What we can do is we can provide strong sales and technical enablement if your team, for example, wants to better understand how to position HP portfolio if they require assistance and architect ing a secure performance i o t. Solution. We can help ensure that you're technical team is fully capable of having that conversation, and it's one that they're able to have of confidence, weaken validate the proposed HP solutions with the customers, technical requirements and proposed use case. We can even exist on a customer calls, if it would, would benefit our partner to kind of extend out to that. We also have a a a deep technical bench that Colin can speak to in the OT space toe lean on as well. For so solution is that kind of span into the space beyond where HP typically operates, which would be edge, compute computing and network. Sic security. >>Excellent call and tell me a little bit about Tech Data's investments in I o. T. When did this start? What are you guys doing today? >>Sure, we started in the cloud space. First tackle this opportunity in data center modernization and hybrid cloud. That was about seven years ago. Shortly thereafter we started investing very materially in the security cyber security space. And then we follow that with Data Analytics and then the Internet of things. Now we've been in those spaces with our long term partners for some time. But now that we're seeing this movement to the intelligent edge and a real focus on business outcomes and specialization, we've kind of tracked with the market, and we feel like we've invested a little bit ahead of where the channel is in terms of supporting our ecosystem of partners in this space. >>So the intelligent edge has been growing for quite some time. Poland in the very unique times that we're living in in 2020 how are you seeing that intelligent edge expand even more? And what are some of the pressing opportunities that tech data and HPC i O T solutions together can address? >>So a couple. So the first is a Xai mentioned earlier just data center modernization. And so, in the middle of code 19 and perhaps postcode 19 we're going to see a lot of clients that are really focused on monetizing the things that they've got. But doing so to drive business outcomes. We believe that increasingly, the predominance of use cases and compute and analytics is going to move to the edge. And HP has got a great portfolio for not just on premise high performance computing but also hybrid cloud computing. And then when we get into the edge with edge line and networking with Aruba and devices that need to be a digitized and sense arised, it's a really great partnership. And then what we're able to do also, Lisa, is we've been investing in vertical markets since 2000 and seven, and I've been a long the ride with that team, most all of that way. So we've got deep specialization and healthcare and industrial manufacturing, retail and then public sector. And then the last thing we've kind of turned on here recently just last month is a strategic partnership in the smarter cities space. So we're able to leverage a lot of those vertical market capabilities. Couple that with our HP organization and really drive specialized repeatable solutions in these vertical markets, where we believe increasingly, customers are going to be more interested in a repeatable solutions that can drive quick proof of value proof of concepts with minimal viable what kinds of products. And that's that's kind of the apartment today with RHB Organization and the HP Corporation >>David. Let's double click into some of those of vertical markets that Colin mentioned some of the things that pop into minor healthcare manufacturing. As we know, supply chains have been very challenged during covered. Give us an insight into what you're hearing from channel partners now virtually, but what are some of the things that are pressing importance? >>So from a pressing and important to Collins exact point, and your exact point as well is really it's all about the edge computing space now from a product perspective Azaz Colin had mentioned earlier. HP has their edge line converged systems, which is kind of taking the functionality of OT and edge T Excuse me of OT and I t and combine it into a single edge processing compute solution. You kind of couple that with the ability to configure components such as Tesla GP, use in specific excellent offerings to offer an aid and things like realtime, video processing and analytics. Uh, and a perfect example of this is, ah so for dissing and covert space. If if I need to be able to analyze a group of people to ensure they're staying as far apart as possible or, you know within self distant guidelines, that is where kind of the real time that's like an aspect of things can be taken advantage of same things with with the leveraging cameras where you could actually take temperature detection as as well, so it's really kind of best to think of Edge Lines Solutions is data center computing at the edge kind of transition into the Aruba space. Uh Rubio says offerings aid in the island Security is such a clear pass device inside, which allows for device discovery of network and monitoring of wired and wireless devices. There's also Aruba asset tracking and real time location of solutions, and that's particularly important in the healthcare space as well. If I have a lot of high value assets, things like wheelchairs, things like ventilation devices, where these things low located within my facilities and how can I keep keep track of them? They also, and by that I mean HP. They also kind of leveraging expanse ecosystem of partners. As an example, they leverage thing works allow their i o t solutions as well, when you kind of tying it all together with HP Point. Next to the end, customers provided with comprehensive loyalty solution. >>So, Colin, how ready? Our channel partners and the end user customers to rapidly pivot and start either deploying more technologies at the edge to be able to deliver some of the capabilities that David talked about in terms of analytics and sensors for social distancing. How ready are the channel partners and customers to be able to understand, adopt and execute this technology. >>So I think on the understanding side, I think the partners are there. We've been talking about digital transformation in the channel for a couple of years now, and I think what's happened through the 19 Pandemic is that it's been a real spotlight on the need for those business outcomes to to solve for very specific problems. And that's one of the values that we serve in the channel. So we've got a solution offering that we call our solution factory. And what we do really says is we leverage a process to look outside the industry. At Gartner, Magic Quadrant Solutions forced a Wave G two crowd. You know, top leaders, visionaries and understand What are those solutions that are in demand in these vertical markets that we talked about? And then we do a lot of work with David and his team internally in the HP organization to be able to do that and then build out that reference architectures so that we know that there's a solution that drives a bill of materials and a reference architecture that's going to work that clients are going to need and then we can do it quickly. You know, Tech data. Everything's about being bold, acting now getting scale. And we've got a large ecosystem partners that already have great relationships. So we pride ourselves on being able to identify what are those solutions that we can take to our partners that they can quickly take to their end users where you know we've We've kind of developed out what we think the 70 or 80% of that solution is going to look like. And then we drive point next and other services capabilities to be able to complete that last mile, if you will, of some of the customization. So we're helping them. For those who aren't ready, we're helping them. For those who already have very specific use cases and a practice that they drive with repeatable solutions were coming alongside them and understanding. What can we do? Using a practice builder approach, which is our consultative approach to understand where our partners are going in the market, who their clients are, what skill sets do they have? What supplier affinities do they want to drive? What brand marketing or demand generation support do they need? And that's where we can take some of these solutions, bring them to bear and engage in that consultative engagement to accelerate being ready as, as you rightly say, >>so tech. It has a lot of partners. You in general. You also have a lot of partners in the i o T space calling What? How do you from a marketing hat perspective? How do you describe the differentiation that Tech data and HP ease Iot solutions delivered to the channel to the end user? >>A couple of different things? I think that's that's differentiation. And that's one of the things that we strive for in the channel is to be specialized and to be competitively differentiated. And so the first part, I say to all of my team, Lisa, is you know, whether it's our solution consultants or our technical consultants, our solutions to the developers or the software development team that works my organization. Our goal is to be specialized in such a way that we're having relevant value added conversations not only our channel partners, but also end users of our partners want to bring us into those conversations, and many do. The next is really education and enablement as you would expect. And so there's a lot of things that are specialized in our technical. We drive education certification programs, roadshows, seminars, one of the things that we're seeing a lot of interest now. Lisa is for a digital marketing, and we're driving. Some really need offerings around digital marketing platforms that not only educate our partners but also allow our partners to bring their end users and tour some of this some of these technologies. So whether it's at our Clearwater office, where we've got an I. O T. Solution center, that we we take our partners and their clients through or we're using our facilities Teoh to do executive briefings and ideation as a service that, you know, kind of understanding the art of the possible. With both our resellers and their clients work, we're using our solution. Our solution catalogs that we've built an interactive pdf that allows our partners to understand over 50 solutions that we've got and then be able to identify. Where would they like to bring in David and his team and then my consultants to do that, that deep planning on business development, uh, that we talked about a little bit earlier. >>So the engagement right now is maybe even more important than it has been in a while because it's all hands off and virtual David. Talk to me about some of the engagement and the enablement piece that call and talked about. How are you able to really keep a channel partner and their end user customers engaged and interested in what you're able to deliver through this from New Virtual World? >>That's a great, great question. And we work in conjunction with our marketing teams to make sure that as new technologies and quite in I O. T space as well as within the HP East base as well that that our channel partners are educated and aware that these solutions exist. I know for a fact that for the majority of them you kind of get this consistent bombardment of new technology. But being able to actually have someone go out and explain it and then being able to correspondingly position it's use case and it's functionality and why it would provide value for your end customer is one of the benefits of tech data ads to kind of build upon that previous statement. The fact that We have such a huge portfolio of partners, so you kind of have HP and the edge compute space. But we have so many different partners in the OT space where it's really just a phone call, an email, a Skype message, a way to have that conversation around interoperability and then provide those responses back to our partners. >>Excellent. One more question before we go. Colin for you, A lot of partners. Why HP fry Mt. >>So a couple of reasons? One of the one of the biggest reasons as HP is just a great partner. And so when you look at evaluating I. O. T solutions that tend to be pretty comprehensive in many cases, Lisa it takes 10 or 12 partners to complete a really i o t solution and address that use case that that's in the field. And so when you have a partner like HP who's investing in these programs, investing in demand generation, investing in the spectrum of technology, whether it's hybrid Cloud Data Center, compute storage or your edge devices and Iot gateways, then to be able to contextualize those into what we call market ready solutions in each one of these vertical markets where there's references and there's use cases. And there were coupling education that specific rest of solutions. You know HP can do all of those things, and that's very important. Because in this new world, no one can go it alone anymore. It takes it takes partnerships, and we're all better together. And HP really does embrace that philosophy. And they've been a great partner for us in the Iot space. >>Excellent. Well, Colin and David, thank you so much for joining me today on the Cube Tech data. H p e i o t better together. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking with you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. Lisa. >>And four Collet and David. I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's virtual coverage of HP Discover 2020. Thanks for watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida It's the Cube covering Enterprise Connect twenty nineteen brought to you by five nine. >> Hi. Welcome back to the Q. We are live at Enterprise Connect. Twenty nineteen. Can you hear the buzz behind Stew, Minutemen and me? It's party time. It's five o'Clock kicking things off, welcoming a couple of guests to our program this afternoon. We've got Blair Pleasant, president and principal analyst at Confusion and co founder of BC Strategies, and Michael Rose, the director brand and corporate communications from five nine. Welcome to the Q. Thank you. >> Good afternoon. >> Welcome to the party. >> I know. With the beer and the wine for us, >> we think it's momentarily momentary. So you have been coming to Enterprise Connect about the last ten years or so. A little bit of an overview about what you're doing at this year's easy. >> Sure, So I'm going to be doing for different sessions here. Esso. On Wednesday, I'm going to be giving a presentation. Well, one is going to be to the Channel partners who are selling, you see, telling them about why they should be selling Contact Center and all the wonders about contact center and customer experience. And I'Ll also be doing a session on unified communications end user adoption, and I'm gonna have a panel of and users who were going to tell about their talk about their adoption programs on Thursday. I'm doing a session on collaboration about team collaboration and how to migrate and things to do there. And then I'm participating in the last note where a bunch of analysts consultants, they're gonna basically wrap up the show and talk about, you know, key findings and key messages, and it's going to really good discussion. >> You have a very busy week ahead. I'm curious as to when I were chatting earlier today about the evolution of this event over the last twenty eight twenty nine years, but also paralleling the massive evolution of communications and collaborations, the rise of the empowered consumers who wants to be able to have a conversation on any channel at any time and have our issues resolved right away. Give us your perspective cause you have a very full week here about some of the turns that you you've seen in the last year that you're looking forward to helping customers understand. You talked about selling, you see, so contact centers of service. Yes. >> So when it comes to unified communications, as I mentioned one thing that I've been really focused on is user adoption because companies will buy technology and they'LL deploy technology. But they don't necessarily. That doesn't mean that uses air actually going to be using it. So that's one thing that they really have to focus on. And then when we turn to the contact center side, it's all about customer experience. And in fact, Michael and I have been doing a lot of work in this area. And so we've been hearing the term customer experience. You know, c X. But what's also important is employees or agent experience and a X, as we're calling it. So getting the agent involved also and making sure that they've got the tools that they need to help them do a really good job. >> Alright, so Michael, you have brand and you did a very nice job bringing us the five nine mugs. Yes, there's water in them, but this customer service index can you bring us inside what you're working on, what we're Blair's been involved and let's get into that. >> It's basically an annual study that we've been doing now for two years, and we plan to continue in the first part of it looks at what the consumers are saying about why they raid a customer experience the way they do want that, what's important to them and, more importantly, what turns them off. And as we found in when we did the analytics with Blair is a bad customer engagement. They're likely to leave you and not to business anymore. We were talking earlier about consumers now have voice and choice. You know, they they've got voice through social media to complain, and they will leave and find another brand to partner with. And so that's sort of a key finding around. What is it the people want? And it's basically a quick response. Know who I am and engage me the way I want to be engaged. >> But what was interesting is they want a quick response. But they're also willing to spend more time on the phone or whatever in an interaction talking to an agent if it means that they're going to get the response that they need and get the information that they need to get their problem solved. So speed is important when it comes to getting an agent on the phone or getting that agent, but then they're willing to take the time if it means I'm going to get my problems solved. Do >> you think that one of the things we chatted about with Ryan can? The CMO of five nine earlier today is is the fact that five nine has five billion recorded customer conversations and we were chatting, I think, also with Jonathan Rosenberg. It's an expectation, right? We call contact Center for whatever product or service or whatnot that we're having an issue with her were enquiring about. And you hear that? So there's an expectation that is going to be reported. How did cos actually glean insight from that data? Because I'm there, I'LL tell you, I never think when I'm on the phone call, I have a problem to resolve. And I don't think that they're recording my conversation to help me and all the customers that probably have the same problem. So I thought that was an interesting sort of way of of looking at it. But it's also interesting that that you found that people are willing to spend more time if the value to them is greater. >> Yep, absolutely. And we're finding that companies are using that data. You know, we hear about Big Data Analytics. So analytics is really the big thing, you know, looking at the the whole picture, getting that holistic view of what's working, what isn't working. And then turning that also into I talked before about the agent experience using this to improve what the agent is doing and how the agent is interacting with the customer. >> And that's that's probably a good build to the next part of the study, which is a business decision maker. And so we survey them to see other, any parallels and what they're thinking compared to the consumer on one of the probably most disappointing findings issue and we're doing a webinar on this next week is the lowest thing they write is employeessatisfaction. So they look ATT, you know, is that the right product we're selling? Do we have the right tools but actually looking after the agent, all the employees that ranks the least on their list of priorities, which is quite distressing and sad. But >> the good news is that they did great customer satisfaction very highly, So when it came when we were looking at what's really important to your business and to growing your revenues. Customer satisfaction was very important. So we're happy about that. >> Which it has to be directly tied to the agent experience like, for example, making sure that an agent has is empowered to make a decision. But they had to have the information. They have to have the content to be delivered through the right channels. So that's interesting finding that you are you expecting to hear on DH talk Claremore this week with companies to say, This is why Employeessatisfaction has got to move up the rights because it is directly tied to customer satisfaction. >> So I've been talking about that for a long time, and it's so important, and I think cos they're starting to get it. And we're also seeing more tools like a I. You know, that's really going to be used to help provide the information to the agents and help them do that. Better job. >> One of things. It's always interesting when you have these annual studies to see what is actually changing over time. You know, I've got background on telecommunications, you know, we talk about Omni Channel today. We talked about, you know, unified messaging twenty years ago, we talked about a today. We talked about intelligence and data decades ago. So what's changing? What? Staying the same. Any insight that you're getting, As as we've been moving with the survey Overtime >> voices still K as in, people want to make a phone call if they need help and believe it or not, that's across all age groups that even tops out number one for Millennials, which surprised you. And I know Blake. You did a little test group at home with that? >> Yeah, I had my twenty somethings. They had some friends over. And I asked him, You know, when you have a problem and you need to call contact customer service, what do you do? It? And the first thing they do is try to do self service, you know, try to figure it out on their own. You know, Google it go to YouTube or whatever, but then, if they can't find the problem, they will pick up the phone and called a contacts and, you know, call customer service and you would think that twentysomethings wouldn't do that. But they know that if it's something important and they need to get that information right away or solve that problem right away. They pick up the phone, and they also do chat and email. But the study found that chat actually went down this year, which were kind of surprised about so the use of email went up. But these of chat went down >> Any thoughts as to why that might be going down? >> I think it's because companies haven't been providing that good experience. So even though they're offering chat, it's it's not optimized. So sometimes you know when you're doing shots, you know you're on a website. You doing chat, you can tell when the agent is talking to like ten other people at the same time. So it's it's really frustrating. So I think companies have the technology, but they're not doing it the right way. >> I mean, I know I've had Sometimes you get a chat and I'm like, I'm not talking to a person. It's a chat, Bott. Oh, is this some outsourced chat that maybe doesn't have the skill level that I need as opposed to? If I pick up the phone, I know most of the time that agent I'm going to get either can answer my question or can escalate to the person that, >> interestingly to the one that's right down near the bottom is social media and it hasn't moved for two years. So we're not saying now that could be a chicken and the egg. Is it because companies are not offering it? So therefore, I don't know. I can use it or don't people want to use it on? We had a theory cause. Social Media's had a bit of a rocky ride in the last year with data and privacy and everything else. So maybe consumers just don't trust it yet. And there are other channels, like email as you said, that we've seen increasing. >> But if customers are unhappy about something, they're going to go on. Social media >> is the first thing I do. When you were saying that it was surprising it was low, because if I at a recent experience with an S B and wasn't getting five minutes with a robot on the phone, couldn't get all I wanted was a tech to come out to my house to fix something, Then I had to have somebody call me back and verify. Have you do the exact same thing I've been through this, so I went to Twitter to escalate that. So that's how I think about that. I appreciate that, they responded, But it's I guess it's a couple of a number of interesting things that you guys have brought up today that surprised you. The X factor being lower millennials actually wanting to talk to human. That's good. But also this the fact that people aren't using social as much as maybe you would've thought, or they may be. They don't release. I can't. Or maybe it's to customers not have appropriate affected social listening programs to respond to the volume. >> So that's the chicken and egg thing Michael was talking about. A lot of companies don't offer social as a channel because they think that customers don't want to use it. The customers aren't using it because they don't realize that companies are offering it. >> So, Claire, while we have you, you've got a good perspective on this space. What's differentiating the leaders in the space from some of the laggards in this space? >> Oh, that's a good question. I think a lot of it has to do with again the Focus on the customer experience, you know? So if you're talking about the vendors, the vendors that are succeeding are the ones that really do. Look at the customer, not just the technology. So so many companies could do technology. The technology is the easy part, its doing it right. It's really making that difference and making things simple, making things unified, making it not complex for customers. Because right now things are just so complex. You have to go no to so many different places. Teo, to make things work. So the more you can make things seamless and simple. I think that's what's really separating. The winners from the losers >> will make Michael Maybe you can elaborate on, you know, delivering a integrated connected on the channel experience. But I think there's still some of maturation curve that it's on, whereby I might have an expectation as a consumer than I'm goingto go through chat or email or another channel. And then if I go through Twitter or social, I'm hoping that this conversation is connected. Where can five nine help customers across industries to really integrate and deliver Omni Channel? >> I think the first thing is the cloud because moving to the cloud enables you to move quickly is a business. And as we were saying today, the software updates all the time and it's easy. It's like your phone, you just downloading away you go. So it's It's the cloud first to get to the data, and we talked about that before, too, and growing. Our CEO calls it the dark data because no one's using it. And you need to mind that data to get the inside, because then the system will start directing the consumer based on what the intelligence is telling them, irrespective of which channel they come through on. Do you really want an experience where I've done tweeting away with a company? And they said, Well, privately email you now because we want to take it off line and then they'LL say, Well, no, now we need to call, but it's it's fluid. All the data and all the information is passed through that communication, So it's seamless for me, the consumer, and it's more rewarding for the agent because they can actually get to the core issue for the customer and resolve it. >> That's a customer there. Maybe Blair, This is a question for you. How does a customer take what's probably traditional silos of customer experiences and culturally evolved as a business to be able to deliver what Michael was talking about? I mentioned that those Silas and that kind of cultural disparity might be kind of a challenge for an organisation to pivot as quickly as they need to when customer lifetime value was on the line. >> Yeah, and it's definitely been a challenge for a lot of companies, but they know that they have to get there. So I think even though some of them might be resistant, they realised that to get the results that they need, they really do have to do that. But it's a cultural change, and you asked before about what's separating some of the winners from losers. I think that's a big part of it is being able to make that change >> player, you know, as I was getting ready for the show, there's general belief that customers are embracing of the cloud. It's no longer we're no longer in the evangelization phases. I've heard five nine, but we're in adoption. I'm curious player. When it comes to a I, though our users ready. Everybody we talk about these technologies are going to be infused with aot. There's some, you know, fear. Sometimes out there is like the robots, or they're going to take my personal data or anything like that. What do you see out there and what should we be aware of and where do we need to go? As an industry, I want to come stay. I So >> as far as consumers, they do need to be worried. You know, they're definitely issues about privacy, and you know what's going to happen with the information. But I think user shouldn't really know that there's a I involved on, and that's also debate we have, like, if you're interacting with the pot, you know, if you're doing a chat, do you know if it's a body or an agent? So some companies, you know, make it clear, you know? Hi. This is, you know, Joe the Bob, But other companies don't. So then you have to say I and I've had these experiences are youa, but no, I am a real person. Okay, prove to me your real person. So it's so it's really interesting. So some companies feel that customers are more open if they're talking to a bomb. And in certain industries, like if it's healthcare or finance, people are going to be more open if it's about because they don't want to share their personal information with a live person. But if it's a computer is like okay, I can share the information. So it were very much in early days, so we don't really I have the experience to drawn yet. So let's talk about this again next year. >> Well, Blair, Michael, thank you so much for joining student. Be on the Cube this afternoon and sharing spending some time since you have such a busy week where we appreciate your insights on the event on enterprise, collaboration and communication. And we appreciate your time. Thank you for soon. Minutemen. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube

(jazzy music) >> From our studios in the heart of Silicone Valley Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier with my cohost Abby Kearns, the Executive Director of The Cloud Foundry Foundation, my cohost. With Blair Hanley Frank, Principal Analyst at ISG Insights. Blair, great to see you, former journalist at Venturebeat. >> Great to see you again. >> Great to have you on theCUBE finally. Yes, likewise. It's good to be here. >> Thanks for coming on. So, I'd love to start to find out what you're working on. You've been covering the tech sector as a journalist now, as an analyst. You've always done good work, I always admired what you've done. I'm sure you're digging into some really good stuff. What are you researching? What are some of the things you're finding around cloud? What the, what's the data tell us? >> Yeah, awesome. So we have a forthcoming cloud study where we talked to 300 enterprise IT decision makers and we asked them what they're doing today what they're looking to do in the future and how they're doing it. And we're taking all of that information and we're putting that together with the information that we have from ISG's advisor and practitioner community. And building an understanding of where the market is and where it should be. And that's what we have going on today. One of the things that we think is really important, is when we look and the data and we look what's going on in the market, what we find really important is that enterprises today are starting to move to the cloud. They have some workloads in SaaS. They have some workloads in a public cloud, IaaS or PaaS. And then they have a lot of stuff that's still on premises. And that exists in a wide variety of workloads. Whether that's on bare metal, whether that's virtualized whether that's some sort of cloud native or containerized application that's still running on prem all the way up until the cloud and what we see is that those different modes of operation are actually going to continue to exist throughout the enterprise. Even as we see more workloads shift into the public cloud. Enterprises aren't realistically going to be able to retire all of their on premises investments for the foreseeable future. >> Nor should they. >> Right And so what they-- >> Amazon confirmed that with Outposts. You saw Azure Stack, I mean that's total. I mean, first the VMware deal, the RDS on premises, and then you've got the Outpost which still hasn't, we haven't heard anything about that. That's validation, Amazon essentially saying, "I'm going to put cloud on premise." >> Yeah. >> Cloud Operations. So certainly that's validated. The question I want to ask you and Abby, get your thoughts too if you want to chime in over the top. But I've always been critical of the cloud market share game, right? Like, I've always been vocal on theCUBE. Because it's always been infrastructure service, platform service and then SAS is the application. Now Amazon has some SAS but most of their SAS is their customers. Google's got G Suite, they've got their own SAS. Microsoft's got Office 365. So when you start bundling SAS revenues into cloud market share and revenue projections. You start to see, you know, sandbagging of the numbers. I mean you can talk to sales forces today in a work day, they have clouds. So what's a cloud? What is cloud technologies? And, you know, Azure as that develops all the sudden has this massive market share. And it didn't really exist a few years ago. Where'd that come from? Is that just a shift of some sandbagging on the revenue side? Or is that actually real cloud? Or is it, so this is the game that the customer has to squint through. Now we in the industry know that okay, a little bit of Office 365. Okay, is that really cloud? >> Yeah, I mean, when you think about financials with cloud vendors. Everybody is playing a slightly different shell game. And generally speaking, you're not really going to get real numbers from anybody. Except possibly Amazon. And the reason why Amazon is able to do that is because the financial results for AWS look great. But everybody else is going to be masking. >> But they don't have a lot of SaaS though. The think about there, their SaaS number is their customer base. So I mean-- >> Yeah, but I would argue cloud is nothing but infrastructure with a SaaS on top of it. I mean, we talk about cloud as if there's some magic kind of thing happening over here. But it's basically a different kind of data center with a different kind of SaaS on top of it. And I think if I'm, if it's me reporting my numbers out. Well, I'm going to make them look as good as I possibly can. >> CUBE Cloud is coming out with great numbers. (laughing) >> I mean, look. You're going to make it look as great as you can. I mean, infrastructure is infrastructure is infrastructure. But now like, when you talk about SAS on top of that. Well, what's cloud? What's not? And it's super, it's a very fungible definition. >> Alright, I'm not disagreeing on that point. I see how that makes sense. The question for people who are making quote, "decisions" on the buyers side. They tend to think of things like "cloud supplier"? Is that really a word? Like what does that mean? So if you're going to say cloud's part of a workload is that actually even relevant. A "cloud supplier", I mean, I guess they're supplying cloud to you. But, so when you start to get into the vendors versus the buyers and the consuming of the technology. We get in that old school game of trying to put things into like market share, revenue. I mean, I see Amazon just kicking ass ten ways from Sunday. And I think Azure's certainly doing some good things there. Google, we're going to see what's going on with Google. They've got great direction. But, it's like apples, oranges and pears. Right, like are they all the same or different? And then throw Salesforce in there. This is where it muddies the water. >> And Alibaba. >> Alibaba! So, I mean, so it's hard to like figure this out. So I'd love to get your thoughts on how you guys see that in the studies. Are customers confused? Do they have some visibility into what they want to do? What's out there in the data on this point. >> So, what I will say directionally speaking, SaaS is where the market is going. So when we asked our survey respondents for where are there applications today and where did they want to go? 90% of those people we surveyed, 90% of the 300 people we surveyed around the world said in 2019 we are primarily in a hybrid mode. Where our applications are on premises and in a public cloud. 5% of them said, the majority of our applications are in SaaS. Now when you look at 2021, 37% say that they expect to be in a hybrid mode. 61% expect that they are going to be majority SaaS for their workloads, in two years. >> So they're in build up mode, they're in shifting mode. >> They're shifting, and they're not just, they're planning to shift to SaaS. They're planning to, they want to get out of the business of running applications. And put some of that burden onto providers to say, "Okay, it's your job to run the application. We'll provide the data. We'll build our business processes but we don't want our job to be running those apps." And what we see is that when you look at total cost of ownership, our respondents found SaaS to be far more predictable in terms of TCO than IaaS and PaaS. And again, for those people who are are really paying attention. If you think about it, that doesn't. Like, that's not a surprise. But on the other hand, that's like, I think that's part of where the driver comes from. Is that when you're consuming a SaaS product, it's very understandable. It's very consumable. When you think about running application in an Iaas, PaaS environment. Maybe not so much. It's going to be, you're more in charge of that application. So-- >> And SaaS has got immediate gratification. >> Exactly. >> I mean, you see the benefits. >> Easy to consume. >> Is there revenue there, is it doing its objective? Why is the IAZ fuzzy? Just because it's a classic back office kind of mindset? Or is it more of maturity? It seems mature to me, I mean, I don't I think IAZ has been more mature than ever before right now. Now we kind of-- >> I think its been around awhile, I mean I'd love to hear your answer. I think it's, there's just, I feel it's a relic of the past. Whereas, it's not something we spend much time thinking about. Like, there's that old joke. You know, "Great job keeping the servers up" said no CEO ever. Right? (laughing) >> That's a good point. But now apart from the servers you've got SageMaker, you've seen what Amazon's moving with the Stack with SageMaker. Machine learning, all of this kind of SASification kind of platform creeping up to the top of the stack. It seems to be what everyone talks about. I'm sure Google next will hear all about AI and how Iot Edge or some focus around that piece. So, again I agree. It's the commoditization is just another distraction layer on top of it. >> Yeah. >> Sure. >> We've seen that movie before. >> We're moving up the stack, we're just moving up the stack at a faster pace than we have in the last two decades. >> So bottom line, Blair. What's the survey, what's the net net telling us? What's coming out of it? >> So the net net here is really that enterprises need to have a strategy and an operating model in place for the long haul. When they think about their cloud strategy overall, this is something where they're not going to be able to snap their fingers and get to cloud-native nirvana overnight. Because that requires technical change, it requires culture change, it requires process change. There's a lot of very heavy lifting that takes place and not all of the applications that exist in an enterprise today really need that heavy lift. And so when you think about what the future holds for enterprises. They really need to build a model for how they are going to make that transition as smooth as possible. Take advantage of the new capabilities that are entering the market as quickly as possible to help advance their business. While at the same time having the opportunity to work across all of those different modes of operation and do so with high reliability, high customer satisfaction, high performance. All of the things that you need to succeed as a business in 2019. >> So I totally agree. This is a heavy lift to go kill the old and bring in the new. And one of the things that I've seen as a trend, and I'd love to get your guys' thoughts on this, as a reaction. Because I've seen the Kubernetes trend really let a lot of air out of that tension. Because it allows people to get in with containers to get in around some workloads and bring kind of baby steps into transitioning stuff. And I've seen people saying, "You know what. I like the idea of going cloud but I got this app that I really don't want to shut it down and have to rebuild it. But I could put some containers around things, run it on some Vms, use Kubernetes to orchestrate it." So I think this has been, I'm not sure if it's actually been deployed in massive production. But I've heard people say that. Is that hype or is that reality? Is it becoming a crutch, is it a short term transitional? >> I got to drag out my soap box for this 'cause I have a soap box for this. >> Okay, let's go. >> I'm not a big believer in lift and shift. I think there are times where it may be opportunistic. When you're like end of life-ing hardware or something like that. But I'm not a big believer that a cloud is a goal. Because cloud should not be your goal. If I'm a business, my goal should not be cloud. My goal should be, how do I write more applications more quickly? And maybe, how do I use infrastructure in better and more efficient ways? But cloud is not my goal. If that's my goal, then I'm going to be really sad at the end of the day. Because that hasn't made my business better. So I think, I feel like we've all over rotated-- >> You're saying it's not the outcome. The outcome is the app that benefits from doing that. >> The outcome, if you're a bank and you tell me your goal is to be on the cloud. Well, then I'm like, you've got the wrong goal. Your goal should be, how am I writing more applications and getting them out into the hands of my customer and changing my business faster? If the cloud gets me to that, great! But that may not be the answer for all of your workloads and you need to really think about that before you say "my goal is cloud". My goal is to write more applications faster. Period. And if that's on the cloud or if that's on prim or if that's on bare metal, what have you. But I need to really think about what my outcome is. And I feel like we've really focused on the cloud as the solution and that's not the solution. And if you're check boxing, you know, I'm done for the year because I moved a bunch of stuff to the cloud. Well you're, the works not done. The work is the culture part and the team part and really figuring out the applications I need to create And how do I iterate on those applications? The cloud is just, it's a bi product of that. >> It should be enabling the outcome they want. >> Right. >> That's a great soap box. Your thoughts on the overall lift and shift soap box rant by my cohost Abby here? >> Yeah, I think that the, the big opportunity is to do what's right for the business. That's ultimately what should be driving any sort of transformation. I had a conversation with a start up once. They were very focused on taking their monolithic application and going to microservices. And they were like, "we're going to go to microservices. That's what we want to do because that's the future. That's what a modern application looks like." And they started decomposing their application what I would call radically decomposing their application. Getting down to the atomic, you know, moment of how small can we make every single piece of this application. What they figured out was that it was a massive headache. And so they actually then, took it and sort of re-composed the application into not microservices but what they called mega-services. Where they-- >> And then they ended up writing a book and being famous and doing a speaking tour. But they didn't achieve the objective. >> And so, and that's exactly it. That they all of the sudden created this host of technical problems by pursuing an ideal that wasn't-- >> And this is the danger, the dogma. Danger of having the dogma of a certain trend. I remember during the big data days when we were covering the Duke movement around 2010, 2011, 2012. I would hear this all the time in side cloud era. "Man, I just set up an 18 note cluster. I'm so pumped!" Well, what are you doing with it? "Well, I just collect data." I'm like well, I get it, I get. And then what happened was, that was their end game. We see a lot of that with clouds, your point where, it's not about, it's what you're using it for. And then they had to make up the term data lake after that. So again, they just kept adding on more but they actually missed the entire boat because it was about making data addressable for apps. >> It used to make things useful. >> So this is the danger of the tech world. >> And making it useful. Yeah, I feel like we follow the shiny penny. As opposed to saying, "Actually is that actually even relevant for me?" You know, when Docker came out in 2014 and every conversation started with, that was the answer for everything. Whatever you wanted. Do you want toast for lunch? Docker? And I feel like that was the answer for everything. And I feel like, why? Like, one, why do you care about a container? And two, like why? >> Containers were pretty cool though. >> Sure, they're cool. But containers have been around since 1969. >> Summer of love. The containers, ya know? >> It was, but I feel like, ya know everyone's like "that's my answer" and you're like "Well, what's the question you're asking?" And I feel like we continue, we went from Docker to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And I feel like we're not pausing to say "actually what are we hoping to gain?" You're point. >> So Kubernetes, what do you think is Kubernetes a shiny penny or shiny new toy? Or does that have any relevance in your mind in your soap box? Where does Kubernetes fit into your, your view. >> I mean I think Kubernetes is an amazing technology that has done a lot for the way think about scheduling and container orchestration. But it is also become victim of the shiny penny and that everyone is like "Kubernetes!" And you know, two years ago everyone is like "Kubernetes!" It's like how many people were using it two years ago? Not that many. And so I think about it in this like, and I often ask, "Why do you care so much about a container orchestrator?" >> FTO sold almost 650 million or whatever the number. >> 515, I know the Vmware. >> Is it 515 was the number? >> 515. >> That's half a billion dollars. That's Kubernetes' ca ching. >> I lived my two years, my last two years wrong. That's what I did. (laughing) But that's a different story about all of my mistakes. >> You could have been the Kubernetes foundation. >> But I think-- >> CNCF is doing pretty well, I mean, that community is rallying. It feels like an Amazon alternative. They feel cloud, it's very cloud native. So I think Kubernetes has been a good rallying cry, for sure. >> It is but I think you're also, you know, what you see even in CNCF which has so many amazing technologies. I do not want to take away from that but you also see the shiny penny effect happening within that community. You know, when I went to CUBECON in December you know, what was the hot topic? It wasn't Kubernetes it was Istio. You heard Istio everywhere. And I've never seen this many people so excited about service mesh in my life. I'm like "Great! This is awesome!" >> We love it on theCUBE, it's great content. Service mesh is great. Who wouldn't want policy staple applications? Come on! >> Well, ultimately the like-- >> Hold on. (inhaling) >> Exactly >> Have some of that staple, I'm saying. Fantasyland. >> I'm excited about it. >> No, stakes hard. >> Well, and this is what I end up telling clients is you want to adopt the parts of the stack that are necessary for you to solve the problems that you have. Right? If you are in the position where you need a service mesh, you know because you are having problems that only a service mesh can solve. And if you aren't in that position then you get to be like the 60% of respondents in our survey who said that they are currently experimenting with a service mesh. Or, the 33% who say that they plan to use it in the future. >> 60% are experimenting with it? >> Yeah, well, probably-- >> That numbers way high. >> Well, it's probably somebody has it running on some VM somewhere. >> It seems really high. >> Well if you look at the success at CUBECON one of the things that, Envoy is a great example, and you talk about some of the challenges-- >> Envoys great. >> The challenges that enterprises have. If you look at the success of all the open source projects, the ones that have been super successful. It's the folks that had to build it for themselves. Envoy had a lift. And I think this is a challenge that I see. I haven't really figured it out in the enterprise yet, how that's going to play out. It generally seems to be that the enterprises don't necessarily want to be like them. But they want the same kind of control. "I want to roll out my own cloud." But they don't want to have an open stack problem. Meaning, they don't want to have something that's not supported. So you have this kind of new changeover vibe going. I really haven't put my finger on it but it's, it has that same vibe. >> Well, enterprises are more in control. And what we've seen in our research is that enterprises actually feel comfortable now. They no longer feel like they're in the fog of war like "I don't know what's goin on!" They're more like "Oh, we actually understand and we're on it." And they're being more thoughtful about the technologies that they use. And they are experimenting more. And they're feeling really confident. But you know, my caution is always, use the technology when it makes sense, as it makes sense. But at the end of the day as a business owner, your fundamental question is, does this serve my outcomes? Does this serve my business outcomes? And if the answer is, I don't know. Then really think about what you're investing in in terms of technology. I mean, I love all of these technologies. But I'm never going to recommend all of them if that's not actually going to be in your best interest. >> That's great stuff. Well, thanks for coming on Blair. Appreciate it. You going to be at Google next? Cloud Foundry in Philly? In April, first week of April? >> Unfortunately, I won't make it to the Cloud Foundry Summit. >> Google Next, next month? >> Sure will. >> Alright, We'll see you there. >> Abby, thanks for co hosting this segment with me. >> Any time, John. >> Sharing the data here with my cohost Abby and John here. Co hosting the first ever CUBE, What we'd call it? Cloud? >> Cloud CUBE. >> Cloud CUBE. >> Rebrand. >> TheCUBE, thanks for watching. (jazzy music)

>>Okay. Okay. We're back at Caesar's Forum. The Snowflake summit 2022. The cubes. Continuous coverage this day to wall to wall coverage. We're so excited to have the analyst panel here, some of my colleagues that we've done a number. You've probably seen some power panels that we've done. David McGregor is here. He's the senior vice president and research director at Ventana Research. To his left is Tony Blair, principal at DB Inside and my in the co host seat. Sanjeev Mohan Sanremo. Guys, thanks so much for coming on. I'm glad we can. Thank you. You're very welcome. I wasn't able to attend the analyst action because I've been doing this all all day, every day. But let me start with you, Dave. What have you seen? That's kind of interested you. Pluses, minuses. Concerns. >>Well, how about if I focus on what I think valuable to the customers of snowflakes and our research shows that the majority of organisations, the majority of people, do not have access to analytics. And so a couple of things they've announced I think address those are helped to address those issues very directly. So Snow Park and support for Python and other languages is a way for organisations to embed analytics into different business processes. And so I think that will be really beneficial to try and get analytics into more people's hands. And I also think that the native applications as part of the marketplace is another way to get applications into people's hands rather than just analytical tools. Because most most people in the organisation or not, analysts, they're doing some line of business function. Their HR managers, their marketing people, their salespeople, their finance people right there, not sitting there mucking around in the data. They're doing a job and they need analytics in that job. So, >>Tony, I thank you. I've heard a lot of data mesh talk this week. It's kind of funny. Can't >>seem to get away from it. You >>can't see. It seems to be gathering momentum, but But what have you seen? That's been interesting. >>What I have noticed. Unfortunately, you know, because the rooms are too small, you just can't get into the data mesh sessions, so there's a lot of interest in it. Um, it's still very I don't think there's very much understanding of it, but I think the idea that you can put all the data in one place which, you know, to me, stuff like it seems to be kind of sort of in a way, it sounds like almost like the Enterprise Data warehouse, you know, Clouded Cloud Native Edition, you know, bring it all in one place again. Um, I think it's providing, sort of, You know, it's I think, for these folks that think this might be kind of like a a linchpin for that. I think there are several other things that actually that really have made a bigger impression on me. Actually, at this event, one is is basically is, um we watch their move with Eunice store. Um, and it's kind of interesting coming, you know, coming from mongo db last week. And I see it's like these two companies seem to be going converging towards the same place at different speeds. I think it's not like it's going to get there faster than Mongo for a number of different reasons, but I see like a number of common threads here. I mean, one is that Mongo was was was a company. It's always been towards developers. They need you know, start cultivating data, people, >>these guys going the other way. >>Exactly. Bingo. And the thing is that but they I think where they're converging is the idea of operational analytics and trying to serve all constituencies. The other thing, which which also in terms of serving, you know, multiple constituencies is how snowflake is laid out Snow Park and what I'm finding like. There's an interesting I economy. On one hand, you have this very ingrained integration of Anaconda, which I think is pretty ingenious. On the other hand, you speak, let's say, like, let's say the data robot folks and say, You know something our folks wanna work data signs us. We want to work in our environment and use snowflake in the background. So I see those kind of some interesting sort of cross cutting trends. >>So, Sandy, I mean, Frank Sullivan, we'll talk about there's definitely benefits into going into the walled garden. Yeah, I don't think we dispute that, but we see them making moves and adding more and more open source capabilities like Apache iceberg. Is that a Is that a move to sort of counteract the narrative that the data breaks is put out there. Is that customer driven? What's your take on that? >>Uh, primarily I think it is to contract this whole notion that once you move data into snowflake, it's a proprietary format. So I think that's how it started. But it's hugely beneficial to the customers to the users, because now, if you have large amounts of data in parquet files, you can leave it on s three. But then you using the the Apache iceberg table format. In a snowflake, you get all the benefits of snowflakes. Optimizer. So, for example, you get the, you know, the micro partitioning. You get the meta data. So, uh, in a single query, you can join. You can do select from a snowflake table union and select from iceberg table, and you can do store procedures, user defined functions. So I think they what they've done is extremely interesting. Uh, iceberg by itself still does not have multi table transactional capabilities. So if I'm running a workload, I might be touching 10 different tables. So if I use Apache iceberg in a raw format, they don't have it. But snowflake does, >>right? There's hence the delta. And maybe that maybe that closes over time. I want to ask you as you look around this I mean the ecosystems pretty vibrant. I mean, it reminds me of, like reinvent in 2013, you know? But then I'm struck by the complexity of the last big data era and a dupe and all the different tools. And is this different, or is it the sort of same wine new new bottle? You guys have any thoughts on that? >>I think it's different and I'll tell you why. I think it's different because it's based around sequel. So if back to Tony's point, these vendors are coming at this from different angles, right? You've got data warehouse vendors and you've got data lake vendors and they're all going to meet in the middle. So in your case, you're taught operational analytical. But the same thing is true with Data Lake and Data Warehouse and Snowflake no longer wants to be known as the Data Warehouse. There a data cloud and our research again. I like to base everything off of that. >>I love what our >>research shows that organisation Two thirds of organisations have sequel skills and one third have big data skills, so >>you >>know they're going to meet in the middle. But it sure is a lot easier to bring along those people who know sequel already to that midpoint than it is to bring big data people to remember. >>Mrr Odula, one of the founders of Cloudera, said to me one time, John Kerry and the Cube, that, uh, sequel is the killer app for a Yeah, >>the difference at this, you know, with with snowflake, is that you don't have to worry about taming the zoo. Animals really have thought out the ease of use, you know? I mean, they thought about I mean, from the get go, they thought of too thin to polls. One is ease of use, and the other is scale. And they've had. And that's basically, you know, I think very much differentiates it. I mean, who do have the scale, but it didn't have the ease of use. But don't I >>still need? Like, if I have, you know, governance from this vendor or, you know, data prep from, you know, don't I still have to have expertise? That's sort of distributed in those those worlds, right? I mean, go ahead. Yeah. >>So the way I see it is snowflake is adding more and more capabilities right into the database. So, for example, they've they've gone ahead and added security and privacy so you can now create policies and do even set level masking, dynamic masking. But most organisations have more than snowflake. So what we are starting to see all around here is that there's a whole series of data catalogue companies, a bunch of companies that are doing dynamic data masking security and governance data observe ability, which is not a space snowflake has gone into. So there's a whole ecosystem of companies that that is mushrooming, although, you know so they're using the native capabilities of snowflake, but they are at a level higher. So if you have a data lake and a cloud data warehouse and you have other, like relational databases, you can run these cross platform capabilities in that layer. So so that way, you know, snowflakes done a great job of enabling that ecosystem about >>the stream lit acquisition. Did you see anything here that indicated there making strong progress there? Are you excited about that? You're sceptical. Go ahead. >>And I think it's like the last mile. Essentially. In other words, it's like, Okay, you have folks that are basically that are very, very comfortable with tableau. But you do have developers who don't want to have to shell out to a separate tool. And so this is where Snowflake is essentially working to address that constituency, um, to San James Point. I think part of it, this kind of plays into it is what makes this different from the ado Pere is the fact that this all these capabilities, you know, a lot of vendors are taking it very seriously to make put this native obviously snowflake acquired stream. Let's so we can expect that's extremely capabilities are going to be native. >>And the other thing, too, about the Hadoop ecosystem is Claudia had to help fund all those different projects and got really, really spread thin. I want to ask you guys about this super cloud we use. Super Cloud is this sort of metaphor for the next wave of cloud. You've got infrastructure aws, azure, Google. It's not multi cloud, but you've got that infrastructure you're building a layer on top of it that hides the underlying complexities of the primitives and the a p I s. And you're adding new value in this case, the data cloud or super data cloud. And now we're seeing now is that snowflake putting forth the notion that they're adding a super path layer. You can now build applications that you can monetise, which to me is kind of exciting. It makes makes this platform even less discretionary. We had a lot of talk on Wall Street about discretionary spending, and that's not discretionary. If you're monetising it, um, what do you guys think about that? Is this something that's that's real? Is it just a figment of my imagination, or do you see a different way of coming any thoughts on that? >>So, in effect, they're trying to become a data operating system, right? And I think that's wonderful. It's ambitious. I think they'll experience some success with that. As I said, applications are important. That's a great way to deliver information. You can monetise them, so you know there's there's a good economic model around it. I think they will still struggle, however, with bringing everything together onto one platform. That's always the challenge. Can you become the platform that's hard, hard to predict? You know, I think this is This is pretty exciting, right? A lot of energy, a lot of large ecosystem. There is a network effect already. Can they succeed in being the only place where data exists? You know, I think that's going to be a challenge. >>I mean, the fact is, I mean, this is a classic best of breed versus the umbrella play. The thing is, this is nothing new. I mean, this is like the you know, the old days with enterprise applications were basically oracle and ASAP vacuumed up all these. You know, all these applications in their in their ecosystem, whereas with snowflake is. And if you look at the cloud, folks, the hyper scale is still building out their own portfolios as well. Some are, You know, some hyper skills are more partner friendly than others. What? What Snowflake is saying is that we're going to give all of you folks who basically are competing against the hyper skills in various areas like data catalogue and pipelines and all that sort of wonderful stuff will make you basically, you know, all equal citizens. You know the burden is on you to basically we will leave. We will lay out the A P. I s Well, we'll allow you to basically, you know, integrate natively to us so you can provide as good experience. But the but the onus is on your back. >>Should the ecosystem be concerned, as they were back to reinvent 2014 that Amazon was going to nibble away at them or or is it different? >>I find what they're doing is different. Uh, for example, data sharing. They were the first ones out the door were data sharing at a large scale. And then everybody has jumped in and said, Oh, we also do data sharing. All the hyper scholars came in. But now what snowflake has done is they've taken it to the next level. Now they're saying it's not just data sharing. It's up sharing and not only up sharing. You can stream the thing you can build, test deploy, and then monetise it. Make it discoverable through, you know, through your marketplace >>you can monetise it. >>Yes. Yeah, so So I I think what they're doing is they are taking it a step further than what hyper scale as they are doing. And because it's like what they said is becoming like the data operating system You log in and you have all of these different functionalities you can do in machine learning. Now you can do data quality. You can do data preparation and you can do Monetisation. Who do you >>think is snowflakes? Biggest competitor? What do you guys think? It's a hard question, isn't it? Because you're like because we all get the we separate computer from storage. We have a cloud data and you go, Okay, that's nice, >>but there's, like, a crack. I think >>there's uniqueness. I >>mean, put it this way. In the old days, it would have been you know, how you know the prime household names. I think today is the hyper scholars and the idea what I mean again, this comes down to the best of breed versus by, you know, get it all from one source. So where is your comfort level? Um, so I think they're kind. They're their co op a Titian the hyper scale. >>Okay, so it's not data bricks, because why they're smaller. >>Well, there is some okay now within the best of breed area. Yes, there is competition. The obvious is data bricks coming in from the data engineering angle. You know, basically the snowflake coming from, you know, from the from the data analyst angle. I think what? Another potential competitor. And I think Snowflake, basically, you know, admitted as such potentially is mongo >>DB. Yeah, >>Exactly. So I mean, yes, there are two different levels of sort >>of a on a longer term collision course. >>Exactly. Exactly. >>Sort of service now and in salesforce >>thing that was that we actually get when I say that a lot of people just laughed. I was like, No, you're kidding. There's no way. I said Excuse me, >>But then you see Mongo last week. We're adding some analytics capabilities and always been developers, as you say, and >>they trashed sequel. But yet they finally have started to write their first real sequel. >>We have M c M Q. Well, now we have a sequel. So what >>were those numbers, >>Dave? Two thirds. One third. >>So the hyper scale is but the hyper scale urz are you going to trust your hyper scale is to do your cross cloud. I mean, maybe Google may be I mean, Microsoft, perhaps aws not there yet. Right? I mean, how important is cross cloud, multi cloud Super cloud Whatever you want to call it What is your data? >>Shows? Cloud is important if I remember correctly. Our research shows that three quarters of organisations are operating in the cloud and 52% are operating across more than one cloud. So, uh, two thirds of the organisations are in the cloud are doing multi cloud, so that's pretty significant. And now they may be operating across clouds for different reasons. Maybe one application runs in one cloud provider. Another application runs another cloud provider. But I do think organisations want that leverage over the hyper scholars right they want they want to be able to tell the hyper scale. I'm gonna move my workloads over here if you don't give us a better rate. Uh, >>I mean, I I think you know, from a database standpoint, I think you're right. I mean, they are competing against some really well funded and you look at big Query barely, you know, solid platform Red shift, for all its faults, has really done an amazing job of moving forward. But to David's point, you know those to me in any way. Those hyper skills aren't going to solve that cross cloud cloud problem, right? >>Right. No, I'm certainly >>not as quickly. No. >>Or with as much zeal, >>right? Yeah, right across cloud. But we're gonna operate better on our >>Exactly. Yes. >>Yes. Even when we talk about multi cloud, the many, many definitions, like, you know, you can mean anything. So the way snowflake does multi cloud and the way mongo db two are very different. So a snowflake says we run on all the hyper scalar, but you have to replicate your data. What Mongo DB is claiming is that one cluster can have notes in multiple different clouds. That is right, you know, quite something. >>Yeah, right. I mean, again, you hit that. We got to go. But, uh, last question, um, snowflake undervalued, overvalued or just about right >>in the stock market or in customers. Yeah. Yeah, well, but, you know, I'm not sure that's the right question. >>That's the question I'm asking. You know, >>I'll say the question is undervalued or overvalued for customers, right? That's really what matters. Um, there's a different audience. Who cares about the investor side? Some of those are watching, but But I believe I believe that the from the customer's perspective, it's probably valued about right, because >>the reason I I ask it, is because it has so hyped. You had $100 billion value. It's the past service now is value, which is crazy for this student Now. It's obviously come back quite a bit below its IPO price. So But you guys are at the financial analyst meeting. Scarpelli laid out 2029 projections signed up for $10 billion.25 percent free time for 20% operating profit. I mean, they better be worth more than they are today. If they do >>that. If I If I see the momentum here this week, I think they are undervalued. But before this week, I probably would have thought there at the right evaluation, >>I would say they're probably more at the right valuation employed because the IPO valuation is just such a false valuation. So hyped >>guys, I could go on for another 45 minutes. Thanks so much. David. Tony Sanjeev. Always great to have you on. We'll have you back for sure. Having us. All right. Thank you. Keep it right there. Were wrapping up Day two and the Cube. Snowflake. Summit 2022. Right back. Mm. Mhm.

>>Around the globe presenting accelerating automation with Deb brought to you by Cisco >>We're back. This is Dave Vellante and TKK Anini is here. He's a distinguished engineer at Cisco TK, my friend. Good to see you again. >>How are you? >>Good. I mean, you and I were in Barcelona in January and, you know, we knew we saw this thing coming, but we didn't see it coming this way. Did we? >>No, that no one did, but yeah, it, uh, that was right before everything happened. >>Well, it's weird. Right? I mean, we were, you know, we, we, it was in the back of our minds in January, we sort of had Barcelona's hasn't really been hit yet. It looked like it was really isolated in China, but, uh, but wow, what a change and I guess, I guess I'd say I'd start with the, we're seeing really a secular change in, in your space and security identity, access management, cloud security, endpoint security. I mean, all of a sudden these things have exploded as the work from home pivot has occurred. Uh, and, and it feels like these changes are permanent or semi-permanent what are you seeing out there? >>Yeah, I don't, I don't think anybody thinks the world's going to go back the way it was. Um, to some degree it's, it's changed forever. Um, you know, I, I, I do a lot of my work remotely. Um, and, and so, you know, being a remote worker, isn't such a big deal for me, but for some, it was a huge impact. And like I said, you know, um, remote work, remote education, you know, everybody's on the opposite side of a computer. And so the digital infrastructure has just become a lot more important to protect. And the integrity of it essentially is almost our own integrity these days. >>Yeah. And when you see that, you know, that work from home pivot, I mean, you know, our estimates are, are along with our partner DTR about 16% of the workforce was at home working from home prior to COVID and now it's, you know, North of 70% plus, and that's going to come down maybe a little bit over the next, next six months. We'll see what happens with the fall surge, but what people essentially accept, expect that to, you know, at least double that 16%, you know, going forward indefinitely. So what does that, what kind of pressure does that put on the security infrastructure and how, how organizations are approaching security? >>Yeah, I just think, uh, from a mindset standpoint, you know, what was optional, uh, maybe, um, last year, uh, is no longer optional and I don't think it's going to go back. Um, I think, I think a lot of people, uh, have changed the way, you know, they live and the way they work. Um, and they're doing it in ways, hopefully that, you know, in some cases, uh, yield more productivity, um, again, um, you know, usually with technology that's severely effective, it doesn't pick sides. So the security slant to it is it frankly works just as well for the bad guys. And so that's, that's the balance we need to keep, which is we need to be extra diligent, uh, on how we go about securing infrastructure, uh, how we go about securing even our social channels, because remember all our social channels now are digital. So that's, that's become the new norm. >>No, you've helped me understand over the years. I remember a line you shared with me in the cube one time is that the adversary is highly capable, is sort of the phrase that you used. And, and essentially the way you describe it, as you know, your job as a security practitioner is to decrease their, the bad guy's return on investment, you know, increase their costs, increase the numerator. But as, as work shifts from home, I'm in my house, you know, my wifi in my, you know, router with my dog's name is the password. You know, it's much, much harder for me to, to increase that denominator at home. So can you help? >>Yeah. I mean, it's, it is, it is truly, um, when you think, when you get into the mind of the adversary and, and, uh, you know, the cyber crime out there, they're honestly just like any other business they're trying to, you know, operate with high margin. And so if you can get there, if you can get in there and erode their margin, they'll frankly go find something else to do. Um, and, and again, you know, you know, the shift we experience day to day is it's not just our kids are online in school and, uh, our work is online, but all the groceries we order, um, you know, this Thanksgiving and holiday season, uh, a lot more online shopping is going to take place. So, you know, everything's gone digital. And so the question is, you know, how, how do we up our game there so that, um, we can go about our business, uh, effectively and make it very expensive for the adversary to operate, uh, and take care of their business. Cause it's nasty stuff. >>I want to ask you about automation, you know, generally, and then specifically how it applies to security. So we, I mean, we certainly saw the ascendancy of the hyperscalers and of course they really attacked the it labor problem. We learned a lot from that and an it organizations have applied much of that thinking. And the it's critical at scale. I mean, you just can't scale humans at the pace, the technology scales today, how does that apply to security and specifically, how is automation affecting a security? >>Yeah, it's, it's, it's the topic these days. Um, you know, businesses, I think, realize that they can't continue to grow at human scale. And so the reason why automation and things like AI and machine learning have a lot of value is because everyone's trying to expand, uh, and operate at machine scale. Now, I mean that for, for businesses, I mean that for, you know, education and everything else now, so are the adversaries, right? So it's expensive for them to operate at Cuban scale and they are going to machine scale, going to machine scale, uh, a necessity is that you're going to have to harness some level of automation, have the machines, uh, work on your behalf, have the machines carry your intent. Um, and when you do that, um, you can do it safely or you could do it dangerously. And that that's really kind of your choice. Um, you know, just because you can automate something doesn't mean you should, um, you, you wanna make sure that frankly, the adversary can't get in there and use that automation on their behalf. So it's, it's a tricky thing because, you know, if when you take the phrase, you know, uh, how do we, how do we automate security? Well, you actually have to take care of, of securing the automation first. >>Yeah. We talked about this in Barcelona, where you were explaining that, you know, the, the bad guys, the adversaries are essentially, you know, weaponizing using your own tooling, which makes them appear safe because it's, they're hiding in plain sight, right? >>Yeah. Well, there's, they're clever, uh, giving them that, um, you know, there's this phrase that they, they always talk about called living off the land. Um, there's no sense in them coming into your network and bringing their tools and, uh, and being detective, you know, if they can use the tools that's already there, then they have, uh, a higher degree of, of evading, uh, your protection. If they can pose as Alice or Bob, who's already been credentialed and move around your network, then they're moving around the network as Alice or Bob. They're not marked as the adversary. So again, you know, having the detection methods available to find their behavioral anomalies and things like that become a paramount, but it also you having the automation to contain them, to eradicate them, to, you know, minimize their effectiveness, um, without it, I mean, ideally without human interaction, cause you, you just, can you move faster, you move quicker. Um, and I see that with an asterisk because, um, if done wrong, frankly, um, you're just making their job more effective. >>I wonder if we could talk about the market a little bit, uh, it's I'm in the security space, cybersecurity 80 plus billion, which by the way, is just a little infant testable component of our GDP. So we're not spending nearly enough to protect that, that massive, uh, GDP, but guys, I wonder if you could bring up the chart because when you talk to CSOs and you ask them, what's your, what's your biggest challenge? They'll say lack of talent. And, and so what this chart shows is from ETR, our, our, our survey partner and on the vertical axis is net score. And that's an indication of spending momentum on the horizontal axis is market share, which is a measure of presence, a pervasiveness, if you will, inside the data sets. And so there's a couple of key points here. I wanted to put forth to our audience and then get your reactions. >>So you can see Cisco, I highlighted in red Cisco's business and security is very, very strong. We see it every quarter. It's a growth area that Chuck Robbins talks about on the, on the conference call. And so you can see on the horizontal axis, you've got a big presence in the data set. I mean, Microsoft is out there, but they're everywhere, but you're right there, uh, in that, in that dataset. And then you've got for such a large presence, you've got a lot of momentum in the marketplace, so that's very impressive. But the other point here is you've got this huge buffet of options. There's just a zillion vendors here. And that just adds to the complexity. This is of course only a subset of what's in the security space. You know, the people who answered for the survey. So my question is how can Cisco help simplify this picture? Is it automation? Is it, you know, you guys have done some really interesting tuck in acquisitions and you're bringing that integration together. Can you talk about that a little bit? >>Yeah. I mean, that's an impressive chart. I mean, when you look to the left there it's, um, I had a customer tell me once that, you know, I, I came to this trade show looking for transportation and these people are trying to sell me car parts. Um, that's the frustration customers have, you know, and I think what Cisco has done really well is to really focus on outcomes. Um, what is the customer outcome? Cause ultimately that's, that is what the customer wants. You know, there might be a few steps to get to that outcome, but the closest you can closer, you can get to delivering outcomes for the customer, the better you are. And I think, I think security in general has just year over year been just written with, um, you need to be an expert. Um, you need to buy all these parts and put it together yourself. And I think, I think those days are behind us, but particularly as, as security becomes more pervasive and we're, you know, we're selling to the business, we're not selling to the, you know, t-shirt wearing hacker anymore. >>Yeah. So, well, well, how does cloud fit in here? Because I think there's a lot of misconceptions about cloud people that God put my data in the cloud I'm safe, but you know, of course we know it's a shared responsibility model. So I'm interested in your, your thoughts on that. Is it really, is it a sense of complacency? A lot of the cloud vendors, by the way, say, Oh, the state of security is great in the cloud. Whereas many of us out there saying, wow, it's, it's not so great. Uh, so what, what are your thoughts on that, that whole narrative and what Cisco's play in cloud? >>I think cloud, um, when you look at the services that are delivered via the cloud, you see that exact pattern, which is you see customers paying for the outcome or as close to the outcome as possible. Um, you know, no data center required, no distract required, you just get storage, you know, it's, it's, it's all of those things that are again, closer to the outcome. I think the thing that interests me about cloud two is it's really been, it's really punctuated the way we go about building systems. Um, again at machine scale. So, you know, before, when I write code and I think about, Oh, what computers are gonna run on or, you know, what servers are going to is you're going to run on those. Those thoughts never crossed my mind anymore. You know, I'm modeling the intent of what the service should do and the machines then figure it out. So, you know, for instance, on Tuesday, if the entire internet shows up, uh, the, the system works without fail. And if on Wednesday, if only North America shows up, you know, so, but, but, but there's no way you could staff that, right. There's just no human scale approach that gets you there. And that's, that's the beauty of all of this cloud stuff is, um, it really is, uh, the next level of how we do computer science. >>So you're talking about infrastructure as code and that applies to security as code. That's what, you know, dev net is really all about. I've said many times, I think Cisco of the, the large established enterprise companies is one of the few, if not the only, that really has figured out, you know, that developer angle, because it's practical, you're not trying to force your way into developers, but, you know, I wonder if you could, you could talk a little bit about that trend and where you see it going. >>Yeah, no, that is, that is truly the trend. Every time I walk into dev net, um, the big halls at Cisco live, it is Cisco as code. Um, everything about Cisco is being presented through an API. It is automation ready. And, and frankly, that is, um, that is the, the love language of cloud. Um, it's, it's machines, it's the machines talking to machines in very effective ways. So, uh, you know, it is the, the, uh, I think, I think necessary, maybe not sufficient but necessary for, um, you know, doing all the machine scale stuff. What what's also necessary, uh, is to, um, to secure if infrastructure is code therefore, um, what, what secure, uh, what security methodologies do we have today that we use to secure code? While we, we have automated testing, we have threat modeling, right? Those things actually have to be now applied to infrastructure. So then when I, when I talk about how do you do, uh, automation securely, you do it the same way you secure your code, you test it, you, you threaten model, you, you, you say, you know, can my adversary, uh, exhibit something here that drives the automation in a way that I didn't intend it to go. Um, so all of those practices apply. It's just, everything is code these days. >>I've often said that security and privacy are sort of two sides of the same coin. And I want to ask you a question and it's really, you know, to me, it's not necessarily Cisco and company like companies like Cisco's responsibility, but I wonder if there's a way in which you can help. And of course, there's this Netflix documentary circling around the social dilemma. I don't know if you have a chance to see it, but basically dramatizes the way in which companies are appropriating our data to sell us ads and, you know, creating our own little set of facts, et cetera. And that comes down to sort of how we think about privacy and admin. It's good from the standpoint of awareness, you know, you may or may not care if you're a social media user. I love tick-tock, I don't care, but, but, but they, they sort of laid out. This is pretty scary scenario with a lot of the inventors of those technologies. You have any thoughts on that and you'll consist go play a role there in terms of protecting our privacy. I mean, beyond GDPR and California, consumer privacy act, um, what do you think? >>Yeah. Um, uh, I'll give you my, you know, my humble opinion is you, you fix social problems with social tools, you fixed technology problems with technology tools. Um, I think there is a social problem, um, uh, that needs to be rectified the, you know, um, we, we, weren't built as human beings to live and interact with an environment that agrees with us all the time. It's just pretty wrong. So yeah, that, that, that, um, that series that really kind of wake up a lot of people it is, is, you know, it's probably every day I hear somebody asked me if I saw it. Um, but I do think it also, you know, with that level of awareness, I think we, we overcome it or we compensate by what number one, just being aware that it's happening. Um, number two, you know, how you go about solving it, I think maybe come down to an individual or even a community's, um, solution and what might be right for one community might be, you know, not the same for the other. So you have to be respectful in that manner. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's almost, I think if I could, you know, play back, what I heard is, is yeah. Technology, you know, maybe got us into this problem, but technology alone is not going to get us out of the problem. It's not like some magic AI bot is going to solve this. It's got to be, you know, society has to really, really take this on as your, your premise. >>When I, when I first started, um, playing online games, I'm going back to the text based adventure stuff, like muds and moves. I did a talk at, at MIT one time and, um, this old curmudgeon in the back of the room, um, we were talking about democracy and we were talking about, you know, the social processes that we had modeled in our game and this and that. And this guy just gave us the SmackDown. He basically walked up to the front of the room and said, you know, all you techies, you judge efficiency by how long it takes. He says, democracy is a completely the opposite, which is you need to sleep on it. In fact, you shouldn't be scared if somebody can decide in a minute, what is good for the community? It is two weeks later, they probably have a better idea of what's good for the community. So it almost has the opposite dynamic. And that was super interesting to me. >>That's really interesting, you know, you read the, like the, the Lincoln historians and he was criticized in the day for having taken so long, you know, to make certain decisions, but, you know, ultimately when he acted acted with, with confidence. Um, so to that point, but, um, so what, what else are you working on these days that, uh, that are, that is interesting that maybe you want to share with our audience? Anything that's really super exciting for you or you, >>Yeah. You know, generally speaking, I'm trying to try and make it a little harder for the bad guys to operate. I guess that's a general theme making it simpler for the common person to use, uh, tools. Um, again, you know, it, all of these security tools, no matter how fancy it is, it's not that we're losing the complexity, it's that we're moving the complexity away from the user so that they can thrive at human scale. And we can do things at machine scale and kind of working those two together is, is sort of the, the magic recipe is, is not easy, but, um, but it is, it is fun. So that's, that's what keeps me engaged. I'm definitely >>Seeing, I wonder if you see it as just sort of a, obviously a heightened organization awareness, but I'm also seeing shifts in the organizational structures. You know, the, you know, it used to be a sec ops team and an Island. Okay, it's your problem? You know, the, the, the CSO cannot report into the, to the CIO because that's like the Fox in the hen house, a lot of those structures are, are, are changing. It seems, and be becoming this responsibility is coming much more ubiquitous across the organization. What are you seeing there and what are you? >>Yeah, no, and it's so familiar to me because, you know, um, I started out as a musician. So, you know, bands bands are a great analogy. You know, you play bass, I big guitar. You know, somebody else plays drums, everybody knows their role and you create something that's larger than, you know, the sum of all parts. And so that, that analogy I think, is coming to, you know, we, we saw it sort of with dev ops where, you know, the developer, doesn't just throw their coat over the wall and it's somebody else's problem. They move together as a band. And, and that's what I think, um, organizations are seeing is that, you know, why, why stop there? Why not include marketing? Why not include sales? Why don't we move together as a business? Not just here's the product and here's the rest of the business. That's, that's, that's pretty awesome. Um, I think, uh, we see a lot of those patterns, uh, particularly for the highly high performance businesses. >>You know, in fact, it's interesting you for great analogy, by the way. And you actually see in that within Cisco, you're seeing sort of a, and I know sometimes you guys don't like to talk about the plumbing, but I think it matters. I mean, you've got a leadership structure now. I I've talked to many of them. They seem to really be more focused on how they're connect, connecting, you know, across organizations. And it's increasingly critical in this world of, you know, of silo busters, isn't it? >>Yeah, no, I mean, you almost, as, as you move further and further away, you know, you can see how ridiculous it was before it would be like acquiring a band and say, okay, all your guitar players go over here. All your bass Blair is over there. I'm like what happened to the band? So that's, that's what I'm talking about is, you know, moving all of those disciplines, moving together, um, and servicing the same backlog and, and, and achieving the same successes together is just so awesome. >>Well, I always, I always feel better after talking to you. You know, I remember I remember art. Coviello used to put out his, his letter every year and I was reading. I'd get depressed. We spend all this money now we're less secure. But when I talked to you TK, I feel like much more optimistic. So I really appreciate the time you spend on the cube. It's, it's awesome to have you as a guest. >>I love these, I love >>Things. Thanks for inviting me and I miss you. I, you know, hopefully, you know, next year we can get together at some of the Cisco shows or other shows, but be well and stay weird. Uh, like the sign says to get Kenny, thanks so much for coming to the queue. We, uh, we really appreciate it. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volante. We break back with our next guest, this short break.

>>from around the globe If the cube with digital coverage of M I t. Chief data officer and Information quality symposium brought to you by Silicon Angle Media >>Hello, everyone. This is Day Volonte and welcome back to our continuing coverage of the M I t. Chief Data Officer CDO I Q event Interpol Bhandari is here. He's a leading voice in the CDO community and a longtime Cubillan Interpol. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on for this. Especially >>program. My pleasure. >>So when you you and I first met, you laid out what I thought was, you know, one of the most cogent frameworks to understand what a CDO is job was where the priority should be. And one of those was really understanding how, how, how data contributes to the monetization of station aligning with lines of business, a number of other things. And that was several years ago. A lot of change since then. You know, we've been doing this conference since probably twenty thirteen and back then, you know, Hadoop was coming on strong. A lot of CEOs didn't want to go near the technology that's beginning to change. CDOs and cto Zehr becoming much more aligned at the hip. The reporting organizations have changed. But I love your perspective on what you've observed as changing in the CDO roll over the last half decade or so. >>Well, did you know that I became chief data officer in two thousand six? December two thousand and six And I have done this job four times four major overnight have created of the organization from scratch each time. Now, in December of two thousand six, when I became chief data officer, there were only four. Chief Data Officer, uh, boom and I was the first in health care, and there were three, three others, you know, one of the Internet one and credit guns one and banking. And I think I'm the only one actually left standing still doing this job. That's a good thing or a bad thing. But like, you know, it certainly has allowed me to love the craft and then also scripted down to the level that, you know, I actually do think of it purely as a craft. That is. I know, going into a mutual what I'm gonna do. They were on the central second. No, the interesting things that have unfolded. Obviously, the professions taken off There are literally thousands off chief data officers now, and there are plenty off changes. I think the main change, but the job is it's, I think, a little less daunting in terms off convincing the senior leadership that it's need it because I think the awareness at the CEO level is much, much, much better than what it waas in two thousand six. Across the world. Now, having said that, I think it is still only awareness and don't think that there's really a deep understanding of those levels. And so there's a lot off infusion, which is why you will. You kind of think this is my period. But you saw all these professions take off with C titles, right? Chief Data officer, chief analytics officer, chief digital officer and chief technology officer. See, I off course is being there for a long time. And but I think these newer see positions. They're all very, very related, and they all kind of went to the same need which had to do with enterprise transformation, digital transformation, that enterprises chief digital officer, that's another and and people were all trying to essentially feel the elephants and they could only see part of it at the senior levels, and they came up with which have a role you know, seemed most meaningful to them. But really, all of us are trying to do the same job, which is to accelerate digital transformation in the enterprise. Your comment about you kind of see that the seat eels and sea deals now, uh, partnering up much more than in the past, and I think that's in available the major driving force full. That is, in my view, anyway. It's is artificial intelligence as people try to infuse artificial intelligence. Well, then it's very technical field. Still, it's not something that you know you can just hand over to somebody who has the business jobs, but not the deep technical chops to pull that off. And so, in the case off chief data officers that do have the technical jobs, you'll see them also pretty much heading up the I effort in total and you know, as I do for the IBM case, will be building the Data and AI Enablement internal platform for for IBM. But I think in other cases you you've got Chief date officers who are coming in from a different angle. You know, they built Marghera but the CTO now, because they have to. Otherwise you cannot get a I infused into the organization. >>So there were a lot of other priorities, obviously certainly digital transformation. We've been talking about it for years, but still in many organisations, there was a sense of, well, not on my watch, maybe a sense of complacency or maybe just other priorities. Cove. It obviously has changed that now one hundred percent of the companies that we talked to are really putting this digital transformation on the front burner. So how has that changed the role of CDO? Has it just been interpolate an acceleration of that reality, or has it also somewhat altered the swim lanes? >>I think I think it's It's It's Bolt actually, so I have a way of looking at this in my mind, the CDO role. But if you look at it from a business perspective, they're looking for three things. The CEO is looking for three things from the CDO. One is you know this person is going to help with the revenue off the company by enabling the production of new products, new products of resulting in new revenue and so forth. That's kind of one aspect of the monetization. Another aspect is the CEO is going to help with the efficiency within the organization by making data a lot more accessible, as well as enabling insights that reduce into and cycle time for major processes. And so that's another way that they have monitor. And the last one is a risk reduction that they're going to reduce the risk, you know, as regulations. And as you have cybersecurity exposure on incidents that you know just keep keep accelerating as well. You're gonna have to also step in and help with that. So every CDO, the way their senior leadership looks at them is some mix off three. And in some cases, one has given more importance than the other, and so far, but that's how they are essentially looking at it now. I think what digital transformation has done is it's managed to accelerate, accelerate all three off these outcomes because you need to attend to all three as you move forward. But I think that the individual balance that's struck for individuals reveals really depends on their ah, their company, their situation, who their peers are, who is actually leading the transformation and so >>forth, you know, in the value pie. A lot of the early activity around CDO sort of emanated from the quality portions of the organization. It was sort of a compliance waited roll, not necessarily when you started your own journey here. Obviously been focused on monetization how data contributes to that. But But you saw that generally, organizations, even if they didn't have a CDO, they had this sort of back office alliance thing that has totally changed the the in the value equation. It's really much more about insights, as you mentioned. So one of the big changes we've seen in the organization is that data pipeline you mentioned and and cycle time. And I'd like to dig into that a little bit because you and I have talked about this. This is one of the ways that a chief data officer and the related organizations can add the most value reduction in that cycle time. That's really where the business value comes from. So I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit and how that the constituents in the stakeholders in that in that life cycle across that data pipeline have changed. >>That's a very good question. Very insightful questions. So if you look at ah, company like idea, you know, my role in totally within IBM is to enable Ibn itself to become an AI enterprise. So infuse a on into all our major business processes. You know, things like our supply chain lead to cash well, process, you know, our finance processes like accounts receivable and procurement that soulful every major process that you can think off is using Watson mouth. So that's the That's the That's the vision that's essentially what we've implemented. And that's how we are using that now as a showcase for clients and customers. One of the things that be realized is the data and Ai enablement spots off business. You know, the work that I do also has processes. Now that's the pipeline you refer to. You know, we're setting up the data pipeline. We're setting up the machine learning pipeline, deep learning blank like we're always setting up these pipelines, And so now you have the opportunity to actually turn the so called EI ladder on its head because the Islander has to do with a first You collected data, then you curated. You make sure that it's high quality, etcetera, etcetera, fit for EI. And then eventually you get to applying, you know, ai and then infusing it into business processes. And so far, But once you recognize that the very first the earliest creases of work with the data those themselves are essentially processes. You can infuse AI into those processes, and that's what's made the cycle time reduction. And although things that I'm talking about possible because it just makes it much, much easier for somebody to then implement ai within a lot enterprise, I mean, AI requires specialized knowledge. There are pieces of a I like deep learning, but there are, you know, typically a company's gonna have, like a handful of people who even understand what that is, how to apply it. You know how models drift when they need to be refreshed, etcetera, etcetera, and so that's difficult. You can't possibly expect every business process, every business area to have that expertise, and so you've then got to rely on some core group which is going to enable them to do so. But that group can't do it manually because I get otherwise. That doesn't scale again. So then you come down to these pipelines and you've got to actually infuse AI into these data and ai enablement processes so that it becomes much, much easier to scale across another. >>Some of the CEOs, maybe they don't have the reporting structure that you do, or or maybe it's more of a far flung organization. Not that IBM is not far flung, but they may not have the ability to sort of inject AI. Maybe they can advocate for it. Do you see that as a challenge for some CEOs? And how do they so to get through that, what's what's the way in which they should be working with their constituents across the organization to successfully infuse ai? >>Yeah, that's it's. In fact, you get a very good point. I mean, when I joined IBM, one of the first observations I made and I in fact made it to a senior leadership, is that I didn't think that from a business standpoint, people really understood what a I met. So when we talked about a cognitive enterprise on the I enterprise a zaydi em. You know, our clients don't really understand what that meant, which is why it became really important to enable IBM itself to be any I enterprise. You know that. That's my data strategy. Your you kind of alluded to the fact that I have this approach. There are these five steps, while the very first step is to come up with the data strategy that enables a business strategy that the company's on. And in my case, it was, Hey, I'm going to enable the company because it wants to become a cloud and cognitive company. I'm going to enable that. And so we essentially are data strategy became one off making IBM. It's something I enterprise, but the reason for doing that the reason why that was so important was because then we could use it as a showcase for clients and customers. And so But I'm talking with our clients and customers. That's my role. I'm really the only role I'm playing is what I call an experiential selling there. I'm saying, Forget about you know, the fact that we're selling this particular product or that particular product that you got GPU servers. We've got you know what's an open scale or whatever? It doesn't really matter. Why don't you come and see what we've done internally at scale? And then we'll also lay out for you all the different pain points that we have to work through using our products so that you can kind of make the same case when you when you when you apply it internally and same common with regard to the benefit, you know the cycle, time reduction, some of the cycle time reductions that we've seen in my process is itself, you know, like this. Think about metadata business metadata generating that is so difficult. And it's again, something that's critical if you want to scale your data because you know you can't really have a good catalogue of data if you don't have good business, meditate. Eso. Anybody looking at what's in your catalog won't understand what it is. They won't be able to use it etcetera. And so we've essentially automated business metadata generation using AI and the cycle time reduction that was like ninety five percent, you know, haven't actually argue. It's more than that, because in the past, most people would not. For many many data sets, the pragmatic approach would be. Don't even bother with the business matter data. Then it becomes just put somewhere in the are, you know, data architecture somewhere in your data leg or whatever, you have data warehouse, and then it becomes the data swamp because nobody understands it now with regard to our experience applying AI, infusing it across all our major business processes are average cycle time reduction is seventy percent, so just a tremendous amount of gains are there. But to your point, unless you're able to point to some application at scale within the enterprise, you know that's meaningful for the enterprise, Which is kind of what the what the role I play in terms of bringing it forward to our clients and customers. It's harder to argue. I'll make a case or investment into A I would then be enterprise without actually being able to point to those types of use cases that have been scaled where you can demonstrate the value. So that's extremely important part of the equation. To make sure that that happens on a regular basis with our clients and customers, I will say that you know your point is vomited a lot off. Our clients and customers come back and say, Tell me when they're having a conversation. I was having a conversation just last week with major major financial service of all nations, and I got the same point saying, If you're coming out of regulation, how do I convince my leadership about the value of a I and you know, I basically responded. He asked me about the scale use cases You can show that. But perhaps the biggest point that you can make as a CDO after the senior readership is can we afford to be left up? That is the I think the biggest, you know, point that the leadership has to appreciate. Can you afford to be left up? >>I want to come back to this notion of seventy percent on average, the cycle time reduction. That's astounding. And I want to make sure people understand the potential impacts. And, I would say suspected many CEOs, if not most understand sort of system thinking. It's obviously something that you're big on but often times within organisations. You might see them trying to optimize one little portion of the data lifecycle and you know having. Okay, hey, celebrate that success. But unless you can take that systems view and reduce that overall cycle time, that's really where the business value is. And I guess my we're real question around. This is Every organization has some kind of Northstar, many about profit, and you can increase revenue are cut costs, and you can do that with data. It might be saving lives, but ultimately to drive this data culture, you've got to get people thinking about getting insights that help you with that North Star, that mission of the company, but then taking a systems view and that's seventy percent cycle time reduction is just the enormous business value that that drives, I think, sometimes gets lost on people. And these air telephone numbers in the business case aren't >>yes, No, absolutely. It's, you know, there's just a tremendous amount of potential on, and it's it's not an easy, easy thing to do by any means. So we've been always very transparent about the Dave. As you know, we put forward this this blueprint right, the cognitive enterprise blueprint, how you get to it, and I kind of have these four major pillars for the blueprint. There's obviously does this data and you're getting the data ready for the consummation that you want to do but also things like training data sets. How do you kind of run hundreds of thousands of experiments on a regular basis, which kind of review to the other pillar, which is techology? But then the last two pillars are business process, change and the culture organizational culture, you know, managing organizational considerations, that culture. If you don't keep all four in lockstep, the transformation is usually not successful at an end to end level, then it becomes much more what you pointed out, which is you have kind of point solutions and the role, you know, the CEO role doesn't make the kind of strategic impact that otherwise it could do so and this also comes back to some of the only appointee of you to do. If you think about how do you keep those four pillars and lock sync? It means you've gotta have the data leader. You also gotta have the technology, and in some cases they might be the same people. Hey, just for the moment, sake of argument, let's say they're all different people and many, many times. They are so the data leader of the technology of you and the operations leaders because the other ones own the business processes as well as the organizational years. You know, they've got it all worked together to make it an effective conservation. And so the organization structure that you talked about that in some cases my peers may not have that. You know, that's that. That is true. If the if the senior leadership is not thinking overall digital transformation, it's going to be difficult for them to them go out that >>you've also seen that culturally, historically, when it comes to data and analytics, a lot of times that the lines of business you know their their first response is to attack the quality of the data because the data may not support their agenda. So there's this idea of a data culture on, and I want to ask you how self serve fits into that. I mean, to the degree that the business feels as though they actually have some kind of ownership in the data, and it's largely, you know, their responsibility as opposed to a lot of the finger pointing that has historically gone on. Whether it's been decision support or enterprise data, warehousing or even, you know, Data Lakes. They've sort of failed toe live up to that. That promise, particularly from a cultural standpoint, it and so I wonder, How have you guys done in that regard? How did you get there? Many Any other observations you could make in that regard? >>Yeah. So, you know, I think culture is probably the hardest nut to crack all of those four pillars that I back up and you've got You've got to address that, Uh, not, you know, not just stop down, but also bottom up as well. As you know, period. Appear I'll give you some some examples based on our experience, that idea. So the way my organization is set up is there is a obviously a technology on the other. People who are doing all the data engineering were kind of laying out the foundational technical elements or the transformation. You know, the the AI enabled one be planning networks, and so so that are those people. And then there is another senior leader who reports directly to me, and his organization is all around adoptions. He's responsible for essentially taking what's available in the technology and then working with the business areas to move forward and make this make and infuse. A. I do the processes that the business and he is looking. It's done in a bottom upwards, deliberately set up, designed it to be bottom up. So what I mean by that is the team on my side is fully empowered to move forward. Why did they find a like minded team on the other side and go ahead and do it? They don't have to come back for funding they don't have, You know, they just go ahead and do it. They're basically empowered to do that. And that particular set up enabled enabled us in a couple of years to have one hundred thousand internal users on our Central data and AI enabled platform. And when I mean hundred thousand users, I mean users who were using it on a monthly basis. We company, you know, So if you haven't used it in a month, we won't come. So there it's over one hundred thousand, even very rapidly to that. That's kind of the enterprise wide storm. That's kind of the bottom up direction. The top down direction Waas the strategic element that I talked with you about what I said, Hey, be our data strategy is going to be to create, make IBM itself into any I enterprise and then use that as a showcase for plants and customers That kind of and be reiterated back. And I worked the senior leadership on that view all the time talking to customers, the central and our senior leaders. And so that's kind of the air cover to do this, you know, that mix gives you, gives you that possibility. I think from a peer to peer standpoint, but you get to these lot scale and to end processes, and that there, a couple of ways I worked that one way is we've kind of looked at our enterprise data and said, Okay, therefore, major pillars off data that we want to go after data, tomato plants, data about our offerings, data about financial data, that s and then our work full student and then within that there are obviously some pillars, like some sales data that comes in and, you know, been workforce. You could have contractors. Was his employees a center But I think for the moment, about these four major pillars off data. And so let me map that to end to end large business processes within the company. You know, the really large ones, like Enterprise Performance Management, into a or lead to cash generation into and risk insides across our full supply chain and to and things like that. And we've kind of tied these four major data pillars to those major into and processes Well, well, yes, that there's a mechanism they're obviously in terms off facilitating, and to some extent one might argue, even forcing some interaction between teams that are the way they talk. But it also brings me and my peers much closer together when you set it up that way. And that means, you know, people from the HR side people from the operation side, the data side technology side, all coming together to really move things forward. So all three tracks being hit very, very hard to move the culture fall. >>Am I also correct that you have, uh, chief data officers that reporting to you whether it's a matrix or direct within the division's? Is that right? >>Yeah, so? So I mean, you know, for in terms off our structure, as you know, way our global company, we're also far flung company. We have many different products in business units and so forth. And so, uh, one of the things that I realized early on waas we are going to need data officers, each of those business units and the business units. There's obviously the enterprise objective. And, you know, you could think of the enterprise objectives in terms of some examples based on what I said in the past, which is so enterprise objective would be We've gotta have a data foundation by essentially making data along these four pillars. I talked about clients offerings, etcetera, you know, very accessible self service. You have mentioned south, so thank you. This is where the South seven speaks. Comes it right. So you can you can get at that data quickly and appropriately, right? You want to make sure that the access control, all that stuff is designed out and you're able to change your policies and you'd swap manual. But, you know, those things got implemented very rapidly and quickly. And so you've got you've got that piece off off the off the puzzle due to go after. And then I think the other aspect off off. This is, though, when you recognize that every business unit also has its own objectives and they are looking at some of those things somewhat differently. So I'll give you an example. We've got data any our product units. Now, those CEOs right there, concern is going to be a lot more around the products themselves And how were monetizing those box and so they're not per se concerned with, You know, how you reduce the enter and cycle time off IBM in total supply chain so that this is my point. So they but they're gonna have substantial considerations and objectives that they want to accomplish. And so I recognize that early on, and we came up with this notion off a data officer council and I helped staff the council s. So this is why that's the Matrix to reporting that we talked about. But I selected some of the key Blair's that we have in those units, and I also made sure they were funded by the unit. So they report into the units because their paycheck is actually determined. Pilot unit and which makes them than aligned with the objectives off the unit, but also obviously part of my central approach so that I can disseminate it out to the organization. It comes in very, very handy when you are trying to do things across the company as well. So when we you know GDP our way, we have to get the company ready for Judy PR, I would say that this mechanism became a key key aspect of what enabled us to move forward and do it rapidly. Trouble them >>be because you had the structure that perhaps the lines of business weren't. Maybe is concerned about GDP are, but you had to be concerned with it overall. And this allowed you to sort of hiding their importance, >>right? Because think of in the case of Jeannie PR, they have to be a company wide policy and implementation, right? And if he did not have that structure already in place, it would have made it that much harder. Do you get that uniformity and consistency across the company, right, You know, So you will have to in the weapon that structure, but we already have it because way said Hey, this is around for data. We're gonna have these types of considerations that they are. And so we have this thing regular. You know, this man network that meat meets regularly every month, actually, and you know, when things like GDP are much more frequently than that, >>right? So that makes sense. We're out of time. But I wonder if we could just close if you could address the M I t CDO audience that probably this is the largest audience, Believe or not, now that it's that's virtual definitely expanded the audience, but it's still a very elite group. And the reason why I was so pleased that you agreed to do this is because you've got one of the more complex organizations out there and you've succeeded. And, ah, a lot of the hard, hard work. So what? What message would you leave the M I t CDO audience Interpol? >>So I would say that you know, it's it's this particular professional. Receiving a profession is, uh, if I have to pick one trait of let me pick two traits, I think what is your A change agent? So you have to be really comfortable with change things are going to change, the organization is going to look to you to make those changes. And so that's what aspect off your job, you know, may or may not be part of me immediately. But the those particular set of skills and characteristics and something that you know, one has to, uh one has to develop or time, And I think the other thing I would say is it's a continuous looming jaw. So you continue sexism and things keep changing around you and changing rapidly. And, you know, if you just even think just in terms off the subject areas, I mean this Syria today you've got to understand technology. Obviously, you've gotta understand data you've got to understand in a I and data science. You've got to understand cybersecurity. You've gotta understand the regulatory framework, and you've got to keep all that in mind, and you've got to distill it down to certain trends. That's that's happening, right? I mean, so this is an example of that is that there's a trend towards more regulation around privacy and also in terms off individual ownership of data, which is very different from what's before the that's kind of weather. Bucket's going and so you've got to be on top off all those things. And so the you know, the characteristic of being a continual learner, I think is a is a key aspect off this job. One other thing I would add. And this is All Star Coleman nineteen, you know, prik over nineteen in terms of those four pillars that we talked about, you know, which had to do with the data technology, business process and organization and culture. From a CDO perspective, the data and technology will obviously from consent, I would say most covert nineteen most the civil unrest. And so far, you know, the other two aspects are going to be critical as we move forward. And so the people aspect of the job has never bean, you know, more important down it's today, right? That's something that I find myself regularly doing the stalking at all levels of the organization, one on a one, which is something that we never really did before. But now we find time to do it so obviously is doable. I don't think it's just it's a change that's here to stay, and it ships >>well to your to your point about change if you were in your comfort zone before twenty twenty two things years certainly taking you out of it into Parliament. All right, thanks so much for coming back in. The Cuban addressing the M I t CDO audience really appreciate it. >>Thank you for having me. That my pleasant >>You're very welcome. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave a lot. They will be right back after this short >>break. You're watching the queue.

>> Live from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE, covering Enterprise Connect 2019. Brought to you by Five9. >> Hello from Orlando, Florida. Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. theCUBE has been here at Enterprise Connect 2019 in the booth of our gracious host, Five9, for the last three days. Stu, this event is our first time being live here on theCUBE. Your first time here, mine as well individually. Massive event that has transformed a lot. 6,500 attendees, their biggest ever. Well, 140 vendors in this expo hall. What an incredible week. We've had the opportunity to talk to so many people. Can't even keep track. But this enterprise communication and collaboration space is really, really, really hot. >> Yeah, Lisa. I'd definitely learned a lot and had a good time. And, really, it's always a pleasure to be hosting with you. I feel I am better educated as a consumer, now after having gone through this, and I wish as a consumer, I actually knew before I was making some choices on some of the brands, whether or not they had some of the technologies behind us that we heard about here, because we've all had some challenging interactions with whether it be chats, websites, emails, or trying to call in and hopefully getting to that live person. I've looked into my career, and the ebb and flow of changes that had happened from the call center to the contact center. I've also had some empathy. I had started out on the call center; my first job out of college. But you know there should be no excuse for a company not to be able to have a good customer experience, if they're leveraging the technologies and the solutions that are available today, especially a lot of those powered by the cloud. >> Absolutely, it's table stakes, I agree with you. I definitely feel reset as a consumer. My perspectives, and even understanding the fact that like Five9 here, they've been talking about the intelligent contact center. They have five billion recorded customer conversations a year. And I've never thought, when I'm calling in, when you hear this is going to be recorded, we just expect that. But how a company, like Five9, can enable them to actually, start to leverage the power of AI and cloud to harness that dark data so that, to your point, the customer experience is ideal. Because, as consumers, we have so much choice. >> Yeah, so we've been talking for a number of years on theCUBE about the companies need to be data-driven. And still, it's early days here in the enterprise communication space. There is a proliferation of everything from the end devices. We just interviewed the CEO of Poly, long history: Plantronics, Polycom. I've got long history, understand a lot of those technologies that they have. Huddle rooms and white boards and tetanization. They're all of these devices. And then the software and the cloud and all those pieces. We use CRM in our business and boy, there's things that I would love to be able to tap in, even for a small company. And I've talked to lots of companies as to how they can use these technologies. And it was really intriguing. And we had a great user discussion today with Carfax. Really enjoyed that. Always good to hear as to what they're doing and the blurring of the lines sometimes between unified computing and the contact center, and where putting that information into their agents' hands, or into the salespeople hands, or we've talked to people on the marketing side, and the marketing cloud to put it into the marketing hands. So, data, we know, is a huge differentiator. And I know an area that you were loving is CX was at the center of everything, and the role of the agent and the customer is something we need to think about. What were your takeaways about that, Lisa? >> About that, great question. Initially, everything that I was reading about this event and the industry was all about everyone is talking about customer experience, CX. And when we had Blair Pleasant on with Michael Rose on Monday, I think it was the customer satisfaction or service index that they did, showed that companies are actually rating employees' satisfaction lower than customers' satisfaction. And I thought, "but if I'm an employee and I'm an agent, "and I'm on the phone or I'm in a chat or whatever channel "dealing with what might be a disgruntled customer, "who probably has a really easy alternative to turn to. "My experience needs to be good. "I need to have the information, "the right content at the right time, "and be empowered to make a decision." So some of the conversations that we had started to show that really, AX, agent experience, and CX are blended together. They have to be because to me, they're mutually exclusive and if that agent doesn't have the information that they need, has to ask a consumer the same question that you've just repeated, the likelihood that consumer will churn is very high. So the agent is one of those ones, I think, at the front lines, that I honestly never really thought about it from that perspective how critical they are to the business. >> Yeah, and when you dig in to say, okay, what is the life of an agent, first of all, if I can give them a simpler interface. And that's something in both the unified communication and the contact center if I can do that and then, where is there automation or the AI to help me do my job to be able to critique myself and go in there, rather than having a manager yelling at you? There's some powerful stories we've heard about that, as to, I can better myself and I'll probably be more engaged and that should translate also into a better customer experience. So we're not getting, love the example someone gave, It's like, "do you ever called there and they're like "my system's a little slow today" or "I can't get into this." It's like, we don't want, as consumers, we never want to hear that. And that's not a good experience. What we heard is there really should be no excuse in today's day and age, that shouldn't be the issue. >> Absolutely. So we've talked about the agent experience, customer experience Some of the other users that we've talked about on the program are, for example, Microsoft team has this really cool demo. We had Jace Morano on the show on Monday. showing this incredible power of internal teams collaboration and communication and how connected companies can be across geographies, cultures, generations. So that internal collaboration is another big piece of the show that the power of cloud, the power of AI, that companies are starting to harness is transformative for a business on every level. >> Yeah, it's really. I've been to when I go to a Microsoft show or a Google show or an Amazon show, oh, look at the real time, things that are happening, global translation, being able to see sentiment by AI of like what the faces. Certain shows you go to you can go up and they're like, happy, sad, confused, things like that. So, Microsoft gave a great demo. Let's see how long it takes for that really to diffuse out and be usable for businesses. We know the power of video. It's core at the center of what we do with CUBE. We understand when it can transcribe and translate that's really powerful things that we're keeping an eye on. And the cloud is definitely driving a lot of innovation. And that's something that we've heard over and over again, is that this show, now in it's 29th year, and it's like, third life with a third different name. Cloud has really infused a lot of energy, many new companies here, and, therefore, there's a nice robust ecosystem with some blurring of the lines and some competition, but for the most part, if it's in the cloud, a lot of times, those integrations are happening behind the scenes and I, as a customer, don't need to put it together where it's baling wire and duct tape and zip ties which kind of felt like we had to do things in the old day. And it was very fragile. It should be much better. We heard lots of them as to how Seram, especially like sales force integrates and from Microsoft and many the other players here, they're saying there's is good commitment. There's good working agreement with many of the companies. And absolutely from our hosts here at Five9. We heard from a lot of their partners, from the device and the software players, as to how they all tie together seamlessly to make sure that their users has a good experience which leads to agent and customer experience ultimately. >> Absolutely, the partnership and the collaboration in this space was very palpable and it was great to have so much access to Five9's partners. I think a couple of tag lines I'll takeaway from this, as a marketer, is that Zoom, we had Harry Moseley, the CIO of Zoom on this morning. And his fireside chat this morning and with us, earlier today he said, "video's the new voice." We've also heard, "voice is sexy again." We've also heard, "it's humans being augmented by machines. "It's relationship based." So a lot of really interesting themes that all come together that I hope sort of dispel some of the concerns that either individuals, or some business users, have about AI taking over. It's this combination of differently tools, but the human component, the empathy, is still absolutely critical. >> Yeah, and we'll see AI will first be something's that's internal to these companies. So Five9's announced this week, it's the Five9, I believe, Genius is the tool in there. It helping make their agents help them ramp up much faster, get the data they need, and it's AI that's going to actually help them infuse them so that they can react faster and they're super agents, give them superpowers. We heard from a number of people that external facing AI, we're still a little bit early. And we'll try to see where some of the early leading use cases will be for that in the future. >> Well, Stu, it's been a great three days co-hosting theCUBE with you at Enterprise Connect '19. I cannot believe how much we've learned and how we both sort of changed our perspective as consumers. Let's see how long that lasts. >> Yeah, absolutely, Lisa. So many of the things that we've been hearing for years about cloud and AI definitely translate here and we love really documenting some of those industry transformations and pleasure as always to work with you on theCUBE. >> Likewise. For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Live from Orlando, Florida It's the Cube covering Enterprise Connect. Twenty nineteen. Brought to you by five nine. >> Yeah, good afternoon. Welcome to Orlando, Florida The Cube is here at Enterprise Connect. Twenty ninety nine. Lisa Martin with my co host to Minuteman Stew and I have been Here's starting on Day two stew. Good afternoon, >> Lisa. Great to see Yeah. Day two of three. Enterprise Connect. >> It's not that sunny >> here in the Sunshine State, but the nice thing about the Gaylord is it's a nice controlled environment. Walk by. I saw the alligator for bid. They've got nice planning. They've got I love in the atrium there. There's great branding of thie E c. Nineteen. Everybody's taken photos of it. I saw some drone footage in the keynote this morning showing some of the setting here. So >> it's a It's a nice >> event way said sixty five hundred intended, which is nice. It's not one of these, you know, twenty thirty thousand. You're just buried by people toe big Expo Hall. But, you know, you could really get to talk to some people and enjoy the size of the show. >> Yeah, I agree. The size is great. It does no pun intended. Facilitate that collaboration and communication. You mentioned a number of attendees about one hundred forty vendors, and you can hear the noise behind soon. MIAs were in the ex ball in the booth of five nine and lots of conversations going on. This is an event that I find very interesting state because we talk about the contact center were all consumers every day. And we talked about this with a lot of our guests yesterday that the customer experience is absolutely table stakes for an organization, that it's essential to deliver an Omni Channel customer experience meeting with the consumer wherever they want to be and also facilitating a connected conversation so that if a shot is initiated and then the consumer goes to social or makes a phone call, that problem resolution is actually moving forward before we get into. Today's key knows a couple of really interesting things that you and I learned yesterday with some of the guests that we had on when we were talking with Blair Pleasant. One of the things that she and five nine uncovered with some research is that an employee's satisfaction was lower on the ratings for a lot of corporate decision makers, which was surprising from a collab and communications perspective that if employees, especially those agents on the front line, are having some challenges, it's going to be directly relating Tio customer Lifetime Value. >> Yeah, it was a little bit surprising, you know, if you think about just in general, you know, often the admin is not the key focus there. It's I need to get business outcomes. I need to get R. A Y. You know what I care about is, you know, how is my customer doing? But at the end of the day, you talk about the contact centers. If I don't have an agent that's engaged, really, how is that conversation going to go with the customer? So they need to think about that, You know? How will the technology help them do their job? Better help them game mastery faster? There were some things that I saw really parallel toe conversation we're having about cloud in general, which is, you know, there's lots of technologies out there, but it's often it's not the technology issue it is, you know, the organization and the people issue in the keynote this morning there was a big customer panel and that was definitely something we heard. I love one of the customers actually said We're going to make all these changes And they had the Don't panic towels, which, of course, harkens back to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy S O. You know, we know things are going to change. There might be some things you need to work through. But don't worry, we're there to help on. We will get through this and at the end, it should be better. >> No, I like that. You brought that up. I love that Tabal. Don't panic because, you know, we were talking yesterday a lot about the customer experience, the expectations of this rising, empowered consumer also the agent experience. But then, of course, there's the internal collaboration that's essential to all of this. And as I think, the gentleman that you're referring to was from Continental G talking about Hey, we don't have all the answers. But adoption of these tools internally is critical, but it's also a cultural sort of stepwise process. I thought that was very cool, that they actually were very transparent with their people. We identify this is not going to be smooth sailing, but it's an essential part of our business growth. >> Yeah, I tell you, it was really interesting. Listen, the panel there was one of the companies up there. They're pretty large and they said, Look, we're going to standardize on a single tool and everybody's going to get on board. And I actually bristled a little bit when I heard that because, you know, the engineering group versus the marketing group versus you know, the Contact Centre. There's certain things that they need to be able to collaborate. But thing like, you know, one tool to rule them all. You know, it sounds a little bit tough out there. Yes, there needs to be some standardization, but, you know, we see that in the cloud world. You know, it turns out customers are using multiple clouds out there because there should be a main one that we focus on. But if I need a best of breed piece for here, or if there's ah, feature functionality, they can't get elsewhere. I need tohave that, and we see that at this show there's just such a diverse ecosystem meant, and there's one hundred forty there's people that make device. There's all these software pieces, there's some big hubs. And then there are all the ancillary things that help plug and enhance and do this because there is some great innovation going on here. Some cool software, things that we're hoping toe, you know, take everything from, you know, White Board and voice two speech and globalization to the next phase. >> Yeah, that was very interesting. Especially the Microsoft teams demo. That Lori writing team this morning, The panel Now that you talked about, there were seven, uh, customers from a variety of industries. Kurtz was their continental. We mentioned, I think, paychecks. I'm curious to get your thoughts on when they were talking about their plans to migrate to cloud, all in some percentage, considering the numbers that we heard yesterday stew in terms of the cloud penetration for the contact center market, what were your thoughts? They're about those things. All in Depends on what makes sense. >> Yeah, It reminds me of what we were talking about in the public loud discussion two years ago. Way No cloud is growing at a very fast pace. Look at our friend here at five. Nine they were growing at a much faster pace, then the contact center. Overall, I believe they're growing somewhere twenty five percent as opposed The industry as a whole is growing at about nine percent. So we understand that cloud is growing faster than the market overall. And it was one of moderated. The panel said that today is about a third, a third, a third on premises hybrid in public and where that kind of steady state will be. I think it's still too early to tell in this industry, just as it is in cloud overall. But absolutely I burst a little bit when it's like, Well, you will never do this one this way. Well, you know, never is not something that we like to say in it because you never know when when that will be possible. You know, my background I worked on virtual ization, started out in test Devon. It reached a point where really there was no technical reasons that it couldn't do it when he rolled. The really large companies will never use cloud for it. Really. Who is better it scaling and updating and making sure you can manage an environment then those hyper scale players. You know, Microsoft got a big present here. You don't ask him. Like her soft customer. Uh oh. You're running off his three sixty five. You're living on Azure. What version of that are you running? And do you have the latest security patch as opposed to? If I have a Windows desktop and I'm not doing up a weight, have I done my patron? If I Donald this stuff and you amplify that by thousands of you know of agents and Contact Center, we know that Cloud has certain speed, agility and being up to get new features and updates in there that I just can't do nearly as well if it is something that I am installing and having to maintain myself or with a service organization, >> right? And so we talked yesterday with the number of guests about what are some of the imperatives to move to cloud in the end, the sum of the non obvious ones cost obviously, is one that we talk about all the time rights to it. Any show that we're at, but also the opportunity for businesses to leverage the burgeoning power of a I. Of course, every show we go Teo Isa Buzzword Machine learning. And of course, the cloud provides the opportunity for there to be more data to train the machines to be better at context and her overall. And, of course, internal communications. >> Right. And something that I like to hear at this show is start talking about a PC compatibility. You talk about the partnerships that are going on, It is not one software stack we're talking about platforms. We're talking about how integrations can happen so that if somebody has the cool new thing that does, you know, a real time engagement better than what I had before. Well, I could probably plug that in, and it's going to work on my platform. You know, everybody here talks about Well, whether you're, you know, a web, acts of Microsoft teams a zoom shop O r. You know any of those various environment, other? Everybody's working across those environments. We've had some standardisation here s O so that whichever one I've chosen, I'm not locked into one environment. And you know, I can help modernized the pieces as a need and take advantage of those new innovations when they come >> Absolutely all right. So, stew, you're a man on the street last night. Tell us some of the interesting things that you heard in some of the folks that you met Way. >> It's interesting. We think we talked about it in our open yesterday. There are a number of companies that have been around for a while And what are they doing today? What is their focus? And couple of companies have done rebranding. So the big party there was a line and I managed to get myself in. Is Polly So Polly has rebranded? Of course it was Polycom and Plantronics coming together. How many times we hear it on the keynote stage that they mentioned that everywhere you go, they're branding is there, So look kudos to their branding and messaging team. We're going to have their CEO on the programme tomorrow, but, you know, you know, the CEO talked about, you know, their new logo. It's like the meaning behind it. Of course, Polly means many, but there's three piece, and if you look at it, it looks like the iconic conference phone. So, you know the room was in there. Everybody is enjoying the appetizers and the open bar. But, you know, there was people, people, no polycom. I'm back in our conference room. We've got one of those speaker phones in there in the nineties. I usedto, you know, sell their conference phones in their video conferencing When I worked for was now a via but was lucid at the time. So there's a lot of intersections. Thie. Other thing I've really found is it feels like everybody here, you know, at one point in their career either work for Cisco or worked for, you know, the Lucent family. You know, of course, T back in the day had the whole telecom space, but it is like many other shows. We go to a rather interconnected community here on DH. You know, we'd guess on It's like, Oh, yeah, Cisco, Skype. And now at five nines. Yeah, it is friendly. You don't see some of the, you know, some of the places we go There's bitter rivalries between, you know, key competitors, and yeah, while you know, all the contact centers don't love, you know that they're there. Brothers and sisters, a two competitors there. Chances are they've worked with half the people there on, you know, Sometimes the future will be working with again. So it's it's a it's a good atmosphere. The people I've talked to really enjoy coming to the show, a Zoe said at the top. >> And this show has evolved over the last night. We were talking about yesterday twenty eight, twenty nine years, starting out as being called PBX and then re branding to Voice Con and then in about twenty eleven to Enterprise Connect. And it was interesting that because the word innovation comes up all the time, as does evolution of communications and collaborations. But when the king it was his kicked off this morning they talked about This is the biggest ever enterprise connect that they've had. So you can feel and you can hear it behind us the momentum, the excitement he talked about. There's a lot of cover artery here. There's a lot of two degrees of separation and tech, but the opportunities for every business, whether yours selling a small particles service on the Amazon marketplace or you're a big a global enterprise, the opportunity to connect and deliver a superior a competitive advantage to your customer experience. This table stakes these days if you don't have that opportunity. Those capabilities. There's going to be something that's going to come and replace you in a heartbeat. >> Yeah, absolutely. At least I have a background in space. But there were places where our walk Drano said, Wow, there's applicability for our business. I mean, we use a number of the collaboration Sweets, You know, I mentioned, I've got I've got maps for, you know, not just the Google sweet, but all the collaboration tools on there's technology that I'm like Gucci. I want to understand that a lot of them are downloaded an app. You can start using them for free. And then there's a Freeman model and and others arm or enterprise licenses on. It's been interesting to watch some of that dynamic as to, you know, it is the pricing. Is Mohr built for the mobile and cloud world than the traditional? You know, I'm going to buy boxes and have a huge capital expense up front. So >> what do you think if you look back to your early days in the call center when you were just a young pup, how much easier your job have been? If you had had some of the capabilities that we're talking about >> now least I wish, you know, back in the nineties, you know, if I just had linked in alone, I could have supercharged s o much of what I did. But all these other tools, right? Putting at my fingertips information. It was like, you know, Lisa tell you date myself in the nineties and taking a call where everybody that works in the call center You knew the area code of every single environment that it didn't tell you where it wass you would be like, Oh, yeah, I, too want to hide in New York. How you doing? You could be whether you're saying good morning or good afternoon based on what part it was like. Oh, wait, I'm talking Arizona. They don't follow daylight savings time. We'd remember all that stuff today. There's too many exchanges. Everybody takes their phone numbers wherever they go. S o it was It was a smaller country back then. But in the other hand, the technology is actually going to give us the opportunity to be ableto imbue that allow humans to focus on the empathy and connectedness that today's digital age sometimes tries to tear away from us. >> Exactly. We need that empathy in that connectedness. So, stew, we have a great program today. Stick around. We've got some folks from Selah Jin we've got. It's now on the programme within communications Fuse. Tetra VX five nine, of course. And there in that little and zoom this afternoon. Yes, thank you. Five O'Clock for student a man. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube.

>> Live, from Orlando, Florida. It's theCUBE! Covering Enterprise Connect 2019. Brought to you by Five9. >> Welcome back to Orlando at Enterprise Connect 2019, I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman. It may sound like we're at a party, this is the buzz of the event, this is day one, and we have had a great day so far of talking with lots of guests. We're welcoming back to theCUBE an alumni, Jim Lundy, see applause for you, Jim, CEO of Aragon Research, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you, great to be here. [Lisa] - That was cute, by the way, so I hope we get some credit for that. >> Yeah, yeah, very cute. >> So Jim, you have been coming to Enterprise Connect since before it was even branded Enterprise Connect, back when it was VoiceCon. Tell us a little bit about your observations about the evolution, not only of the events, but also of all the collaboration and communication tools that consumers now are expecting and demanding of businesses. >> So, I think my first event was called VoiceCon in '07, and then it was all about phones. There was no software here. There was no video. There was no messaging. There was certainly no AI. And there were a lot of the players were not here, they were not in business then. So, if you actually look at some of the bigger players here today, they did not exist in 2007. So you look at the advent of Cloud, that's powered a whole new generation of services and opportunities, and it's great for buyers because there's so much more choice. So, VoiceCon almost died and they rebranded it but they've had to expand their focus. There's still a lot of voice focused stuff, but as you can see it's really shifted, we think it's shifting to communications and collaboration, we think contact center, particularly Cloud, is hot. We've got through overall Tam for communication, collaboration, contact center, by 2024, about 120 billion dollars, which makes it bigger than Enterprise secured. >> Yeah, we just had a great type-in with Blair Pleasant, and said, I'm a new channel, absolutely is where it is, but voice is still the number one preferred channel, when you talk about context center, there's lots of ways you can get in touch, but when something's wrong, I want to pick up my device and talk to a human eventually, so yeah, Cloud, and AI, and everything else, but there's still people in this center of everything going on here. >> Well, I think one of the things for contact center in particular you mentioned is the power of Cloud. So you look at some of the players here like we're in the Five9 booth, they've grown because of their Cloud focus, and Cloud is a lot of what's powering everybody here. And buyers want flexibility, so I think that's one of the big things that's changed, is there's still a lot of On Premise, and hybrid Cloud, but the power and the demand for 'I want to deploy something fast, and maybe I'm not even that big of a shop,' Cloud gives me that flexibility. >> When I look at the market as a whole, there's all those arguments about it's private Cloud, public Cloud, hybrid Cloud, multi Cloud, but if we think of Cloud as an operational model, and not a place, I want speed, I want to be able to update to my latest thing, whether that's for security or the cool new feature, and if I'm not Cloud, or Cloud-like, then I probably install something and what I do now and what I do a few years from now looks pretty close to what I did when I installed it. No? Does that resonate in this phase? >> Yeah, yeah. I think there's a couple things, also there's the operational nature of do I want to be in the server update business? Some people do, because of the nature of their business, but a lot of people don't. So then I can focus on the client experience, providing better journeys, and I think that's up the game. I think there's an awful lot of competition in this market because, really because of Cloud, but On Premise or private Cloud is not a bad word, and like I said, I think the bigger play is to be able to do a combination of things and meet the needs of the customer. The only thing I would say about the show is there's a lot of feature wars at this show and needs to be maybe a little more focused on what the customer needs versus hey, my box is better than your box. >> On that front, in terms of focusing on the customer experience, we talk a lot about that, there's a lot of the messaging and branding around the shows you were just pointing out, but something that is always interesting is where does a company balance the customer experience with the agent experience, because the customer experience is directly related to the agents being in power. >> Oh, totally! Well, you got to really do both and do both well. If the agent can't do their job, then the customer is not going to have a good experience. I do think that overall, there's been a pretty good focus on the agent, because that's where it kind of all started, and if you really look at contact center, it's really a heavy-duty application. You've got to be able to do all those things to service the inbound calls or inbound messages, and you're right, there is a lot of focus on the customer, because in some cases there is so much focus on the agent, well, we took the calls even though a lot of the calls, 10% might've gone to voicemail? Sometimes? Well, we serviced it, so. Little unknown fact is that in a lot of enterprises, marketing and the contact center group never talk. Interesting opportunity. >> Yeah, Jim, it's interesting, you talked about in tech we often get to that feature battle. Battle by power point or by product stack and oh, I've got 147 features and they only have 125 features, when you look at most customers they only know how to use three of the features they've got on there. So what differentiates from a customer standpoint, how do they choose, how do they make sure that they get something that is going to help their overall customer experience, and help their products and their marketing? >> Well, a couple things. First of all, you're right, they don't care as much about 'I've got this feature, you don't', they want to know can the provider take care of me if I buy from them? Are they reputable? Do other people, are they happy with the service? We do a lot of vender evaluations, we call them Aragon research globes and we usually spend six months working on understanding where the vender is this year, and we talk to references and things like that. So I think that sometimes when you, they read a report and they get some insight, they still want to talk to somebody versus just reading a peer review on somebody's consumer website, and really get that insight, so I think that's one lens and I think the other lens is that the smarter players are doing those things where they can provide really high touch support, I'd probably say Five9's pretty good at that, because contact center is really, really complicated, you just don't turn them on sometimes, there's things you have to do to make them work, and I think overall in this space, there are some products you can buy, maybe not contact center where you can spin them up and turn them, configure phones and go, I've actually deployed some of them, and there's some that would be such a nightmare, like who in the world would ever buy this product? So, I think it really varies a gambit and again, sometimes that doesn't always come out with an online review and again, sometimes the buyer, still buyer beware, in a lot of cases, some of the things you read online are not true. >> One of the things we were chatting with a number of the Five9 executs about today is that they have a five billion recorded customer conversations, tremendous potential there to really glean actionable insights about retaining that customer, increasing their CLV, but there's also the concern of data privacy and security in sharing, when you're talking with customers that might have this massive pull of data from which they can really expand their business and become competitive, where is the security and the privacy concerns there? >> It's a good question. There's a lot of focus on GDPR in Europe, there's a lot of focus in California on that, even though there's not been talked about in California. The rest of the US is kind of behind a little bit what Europe has done, but here's the thing. They've got ways to mass sensitive data in a recording like credit card data, that's pretty standard stuff, the big thing is data residency. I want my data in a certain country, Canadians do not want their data resident in the United States, Europeans don't either. Germans don't want their data resident in Belgium, so there's a big sensitivity in Europe about that, and even in fact, Microsoft's even gotten in trouble in Germany over that last year, because they eliminated a relationship with Doy to Telecom, sometimes you can kind of go overboard on that, but however, what I would say though is, some of the big Cloud companies have done this, brought this problem onto themselves, where they have not respected data privacy, there's even a bill now on facial recognition, because of some of the things that have gone on like IBM disclosed, they're doing something, so it is still an issue, it's always going to be an issue, I do think that there needs to be more protect, but here's the question. Who owns your data? Who owns your face, or my face? I don't think that because I upload a photo that I should give my rights away. I think we're going to catch up on that, I do think for the B-to-B though, a lot of these companies, first of all, they are certified, they have Cloud certifications, they definitely do certain things relative to privacy, and so they have to pass a lot of tests that are certified by an auditor, so I think there's a lot of things that most of the B-to-B buyers are not going to have to worry about with a lot of the people here, it's more of the personal side of things, the personal Cloud, Facebook, but usually not the kind of stuff you're dealing with here. >> So, Jim, when I look at the overall contact center market, the Cloud portion of that is still relatively small, if I saw right somewhere, 10, 15%, but it's been growing at a steady clip, where are we in their adoption, is there a plateau that it will hit that, is it take a third of a market, half the market, what do you see happening? >> I would say, we're on a journey and you're right, there is still a small part, which means the large address will market, not that much different than unified communications where it's mainly On Premise, going Cloud. We've got contact center going about 24 billion, and we think a lot of that will be eventually converted to a Cloud, except for maybe the ultra, ultra large call centers, and I think just like email migration 10 years, I've covered that, 10 years ago it was all On Premise. Today it's the opposite. It's like 90-10. So I think that eventually is going to start to happen. >> It's interesting, a lot of that was Microsoft really turned the lever, Microsoft on email, and Microsoft is like, we're going sass, you are going sass if you use Office, you are going Office 365. So I'm curious, is there a lever like that from a licensing standpoint or from a vender standpoint, that would push contact center? >> If you look at the contact center market, we've got it, growth rates around 9% overall, but then you've got people like Five9 that are growing 31%, alright? So if you starting looking at that, why is a Cloud company growing that much when the overall market, well because there's demand. They want the flexibility of Cloud, they don't want to run the servers and upgrade the servers, and I think that they've learned lessons from that, and you're right, Microsoft did do that, but Google forced them to do that. So I think that, are fast growing companies like Five9 forcing some of the bigger players to go more Cloud? And I can say absolutely yes, that a lot of the bigger players are looking over their shoulders saying, and they bought Cloud contact center players so they can keep up with some of the young startups, and Five9's not young, but they would still be considered young in the relative terms of this event. >> I'm curious, Jim, when you're talking with venders and the Aragon research that you do, companies of different sizes, whether they're born in the Cloud or they're legacy companies, where does cultural transformation come into this conversation about evolving a contact center such that an agent is empowered with the right content to deliver it through the right channel, to make a decision that really positively impacts the customer? I can imagine multiple generations, multiple countries, cultural transformation is hard. >> It is a big issue, I think there's more awareness on both the culture of the agent and the culture of the buyer, and I think there's more stuff going on relative to sentiment, sentiment analysis. I do think that's a bigger issue, I think there's more time being spent on training, the better digital companies are investing tons of money in training, so I think there's more awareness relative to cultural differences, cultural nuances, and being more sensitive to maybe things that they would say sorry, can't help you with that, since they've been trained to be maybe more sensitive, they're going to be more understanding when they're actually on a call. >> So, Jim, in your research, where's the white space? Where's the real opportunity for growth and transformation, we've had some discussions here, it's early days in AI's, at AI, or is it not the technology, is it the cultural changes, that Lisa brings up, where are some of impediments and room for growth in the industry? >> So we do think that the enterprise will become more intelligent, and that the providers are going to lead that charge, where instead of you say to AI, we call it intelligent contact center, and we think that there's going to be more of a demand for automation, and that there will be more assistance that might take care of a customer's problem before it ever gets to a human. I do think that we're not going to, that's going to be something that's never going to go away, it's just that they're going to get smarter and more supportive. We have helped clients deploy chat bots for help desk internally for customer facing help desk, I think it's still early here, that people have them, but they're more rules based than AI based. AI's coming in the next two years but there's no doubt that is going to be one of the drivers, and by the way, sometimes people be like, is this the problem we were having, is this the question you have? Yes. Here's this answer, and it's the right answer, the correct answer, that's what people really want, they want the instant gratification, we all kind of grew up, we were used to that with our phones, I need the answer, and I do think that I would probably say the demand for Cloud is going to out-strip everything, so if somebody that's an On Premise provider doesn't have a Cloud option, then I would be worried about them. But I do think AI is not going to go away, we don't think it's going to be an AI or nothing, it's going to be basically intelligent digital assistance, it can answer questions intelligently and have a conversation with you, there's some tools that do that today, but most of them are very basic question and answer, they're not high-end, it can't be like Jarvis on Iron Man, where yes, yes, Mr. Spark, I will do that for you, they're not quite there yet, but the movies glamify that whole thing. Some people expect, well, why doesn't it talk back to me? >> Any last questions, Jim, are there any industries that you see is going to be early adopters to start creating and actually deploying the intelligent contact center? >> Well, let's put it this way. Every client we've talked to in survey work said we wish we had more intelligence in our contact center. I think they're a little scared that they want to make sure they do it right, but if you do it and deploy it and test it, you'd be amazed it's for some of the basic Q&A, how rockstar stuff that is, but sometimes people rush too quickly and deploy it when it's not quite ready. I think a lot of the providers here, including Five9, are going to try to do AI the right way, and not try to rush it, but I would also say this. There's an awful lot of fud about AI, and most of it's not true. >> Lisa, final, final question for Jim here, since John Ferger's not here to ask it, Five9's gone through a lot of changes here, brought in some pretty high-profile executives, any commentary on our host here? >> Look, I knew Rowan and Jonathan Rosenberg at Cisco, they had a rockstar team there, they've even, since they've joined here brought more talent in, and so, the Five9 people I knew have been blown away by the level of talent that has come in, and I think that's just going to help them continue to grow. The question is, when did they declare how big they're going to be? And that's what we're looking for them to do. >> To be continued, Jim, thanks so much for joining Stu and me on theCUBE this afternoon. >> Thank you very much. >> For Stu Miniman, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE. (light beat music)