>>Hi everyone. Welcome to this special event, pure Storage, the Path to Sustainable it. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole, welcome to the >>Cube. Thanks for having me, Lisa. >>Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about, and I understand that Pure just announced a report today about sustainability. What can you tell me what nuggets are in this report? >>Well, actually quite a few really interesting nuggets, at least for us. And I, I think probably for you and your viewers as well. So we actually commissioned about a thousand sustainability leaders across the globe to understand, you know, what are their sustainability goals, what are they working on, and what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. You've, I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. And so, you know, there was some thought that perhaps that might play into AMEA being a larger, you know, having sustainability goals that were more significant. But we actually did not find that we found sustainability to be really important no matter where the respondents were located. >>So, very interesting at pure sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set out to make storage really simple, but it turns out really simple, is also really sustainable and the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their, their own carbon footprints. And so, you know, we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space power and cooling costs and, and their footprint. So really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80% while doubling to tripling the performance of their storage systems. So it's really critical for, for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals, to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions. >>Right? Those two teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being of high priority for organizations. You had a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability both together with it. But I'm wondering why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked? What are some of the things that you see despite so many people saying sustainability huge priority? >>Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top roadblock. So getting, I think getting that out of the way. And then we also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? So they're not even looped in. And that, that being said, you know, we know that it has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting a company's sustainability goals. So we, we really want to ensure that these two teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see that 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals, and that it, of those 65%, it is significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that, that for those who did report, the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection. They were twice as likely to be on track with their goals and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing program. Our process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. And so, you know, we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint. >>Definitely has to be cross-functional. So, so strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program development, execution, et cetera, those CO was correlations, were they a surprise? >>Not entirely. You know, when we look at some of the statistics that come from the, you know, places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. So, and that, you know, that's now almost three years ago, digital data only accelerates and by 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. And so we know that that communication and that correlation is gonna be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. And it's, I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for it to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. And, you know, perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective, right? >>Like we are, we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. So I think when you, when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate your own department, it's a really interesting connection that IT and sustainability work together. I would also say, you know, I'll just note that of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do over half of those respondents expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward. >>And that's really a tip the, to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do, but for those two, for sustainability and IT to come together as part of really the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. And it's great to see the data demonstrating that, that those, that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. And wanna dig in a little bit to peers, ESG goals. What can you share with us about >>That? Absolutely. So as I mentioned, peers kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey, but really has been working on the, on the sustainability front for a long time. I would, I, it's funny as we're, as we're doing a lot of this work and, and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past that consumers weren't necessarily interested in then, but are now because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. So that's exciting. So we did a baseline scope one, two, and three analysis and discovered, interestingly enough that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products. So our customers work running our products in their data centers. So we know that we, we've made some ambitious goals around our Scope one and two emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, you know, those, they only account for 6% of our emissions. So we know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. So we've also made a, a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per bed per petabyte by 2030 in our products. So decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. And we've also committed to a science based target initiative and our road mapping how to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris agreement. >>That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us as peer storage to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers' organizations. There lofty goals that pure set, but knowing what I know about Pure, you guys are probably well on track to, to accomplish those goals in record time. >>I hope So. >>Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides it, sustainability, team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both and not just in storage, right in, in your entire IT port portfolio. We know that, you know, we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture. We have to solve new challenges and we have to approach business a little bit differently. So adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient can actually help to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over time. So I think that that's something that we need to, to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of, of energy and, and carbon. And so everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as, again, drive down that climate change. So we, we need to get out of the mindset that data centers are, are about reliability, your cost, et cetera. And really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that, you know, the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation, the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision making. >>So shifting sustainability and it left almost together really shows that the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention, the report shows and the successes that peers had, demonstrate that that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even the cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in, where sustainability is concerned. How can pure help its customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management buy and they understand that the value in it for >>Them? Yeah, so I mean, I think that for me, my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right? And help the management to understand, first of all, the impact right on climate change. So I think that's the kind of hearts piece on the mind piece. I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how to, you know, how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We also, you know, we always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of, of the equipment. And so, you know, especially if you're in a, in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation. Better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand the, again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is gonna be. Often we see, you know, that maybe the, the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the, the electricity bills, right? And so sometimes even those two teams aren't talking. And there's a great opportunity there, I think, to just to just, you know, look at it from a more high level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is. >>That's a great point. Great advice. Nicole. Thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out some really compelling nuggets in there, but really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We so appreciate your insights and your thoughts. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's been great speaking with you. >>Pleasure speaking with you as well. We wanna thank you so much for watching. This is Pure Storage, the path to sustainable it. I'm Lisa Martin, we'll see you next time.

>>In the early part of this century, we're talking about the 2005 to 2007 timeframe. There was a lot of talk about so-called green it. And at that time there was some organizational friction. Like for example, the line was that the CIO never saw the power bill, so he or she didn't care, or that the facilities folks, they rarely talked to the IT department. So it was kind of that split brain. And, and then the oh 7 0 8 financial crisis really created an inflection point in a couple of ways. First, it caused organizations to kind of pump the brakes on it spending, and then they took their eye off the sustainability ball. And the second big trend, of course, was the cloud model, you know, kind of became a benchmark for it. Simplicity and automation and efficiency, the ability to dial down and dial up capacity as needed. >>And the third was by the end of the first decade of the, the two thousands, the technology of virtualization was really hitting its best stride. And then you had innovations like flash storage, which largely eliminated the need for these massive farms of spinning mechanical devices that sucked up a lot of power. And so really these technologies began their march to mainstream adoption. And as we progressed through the 2020s, the effect of climate change really come into focus as a critical component of esg. Environmental, social, and governance. Shareholders have come to demand metrics around sustainability. Employees are often choosing employers based on their ESG posture. And most importantly, companies are finding that savings on power cooling and footprint, it has a bottom line impact on the income statement. Now you add to that the energy challenges around the world, particularly facing Europe right now, the effects of global inflation and even more advanced technologies like machine intelligence. >>And you've got a perfect storm where technology can really provide some relief to organizations. Hello and welcome to the Path to Sustainable It Made Possible by Pure Storage and Collaboration with the Cube. My name is Dave Valante and I'm one of the host of the program, along with my colleague Lisa Martin. Now, today we're gonna hear from three leaders on the sustainability topic. First up, Lisa will talk to Nicole Johnson. She's the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole will talk about the results from a study of around a thousand sustainability leaders worldwide, and she'll share some metrics from that study. And then next, Lisa will speak to AJ Singh. He's the Chief Product Officer at Pure Storage. We've had had him on the cube before, and not only will he share some useful stats in the market, I'll also talk about some of the technology innovations that customers can tap to address their energy consumption, not the least of which is ai, which is is entering every aspect of our lives, including how we deal with energy consumption. And then we'll bring it back to our Boston studio and go north of Italy with Mattia Ballero of Elec Informatica, a services provider with deep expertise on the topic of sustainability. We hope you enjoyed the program today. Thanks for watching. Let's get started >>At Pure Storage, the opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pure's Evergreen Storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, Pure's implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycled and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80%. Today, more than 97% of pure arrays purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three. Emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>Hi everyone, welcome to this special event, pure Storage, the Path to Sustainable it. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. Very pleased to be joined by Nicole Johnson, the head of Social Impact and Sustainability at Pure Storage. Nicole, welcome to the Cube. Thanks >>For having me, Lisa. >>Sustainability is such an important topic to talk about and I understand that Pure just announced a report today about sustainability. What can you tell me what nuggets are in this report? >>Well, actually quite a few really interesting nuggets, at least for us. And I, I think probably for you and your viewers as well. So we actually commissioned about a thousand sustainability leaders across the globe to understand, you know, what are their sustainability goals, what are they working on, and what are the impacts of buying decisions, particularly around infrastructure when it comes to sustainable goals. I think one of the things that was really interesting for us was the fact that around the world we did not see a significant variation in terms of sustainability being a top priority. You've, I'm sure you've heard about the energy crisis that's happening across Europe. And so, you know, there was some thought that perhaps that might play into AMEA being a larger, you know, having sustainability goals that were more significant. But we actually did not find that we found sustainability to be really important no matter where the respondents were located. >>So very interesting at Pure sustainability is really at the heart of what we do and has been since our founding. It's interesting because we set out to make storage really simple, but it turns out really simple is also really sustainable. And the products and services that we bring to our customers have really powerful outcomes when it comes to decreasing their, their own carbon footprints. And so, you know, we often hear from customers that we've actually really helped them to significantly improve their storage performance, but also allow them to save on space power and cooling costs and, and their footprint. So really significant findings. One example of that is a company called Cengage, which is a global education technology company. They recently shared with us that they have actually been able to reduce their overall storage footprint by 80% while doubling to tripling the performance of their storage systems. So it's really critical for, for companies who are thinking about their sustainability goals, to consider the dynamic between their sustainability program and their IT teams who are making these buying decisions, >>Right? Those two teams need to be really inextricably linked these days. You talked about the fact that there was really consistency across the regions in terms of sustainability being of high priority for organizations. You had a great customer story that you shared that showed significant impact can be made there by bringing the sustainability both together with it. But I'm wondering why are we seeing that so much of the vendor selection process still isn't revolving around sustainability or it's overlooked? What are some of the things that you received despite so many people saying sustainability, huge priority? >>Well, in this survey, the most commonly cited challenge was really around the fact that there was a lack of management buy-in. 40% of respondents told us this was the top roadblock. So getting, I think getting that out of the way. And then we also just heard that sustainability teams were not brought into tech purchasing processes until after it's already rolling, right? So they're not even looped in. And that being said, you know, we know that it has been identified as one of the key departments to supporting a company sustainability goals. So we, we really want to ensure that these two teams are talking more to each other. When we look even closer at the data from the respondents, we see some really positive correlations. We see that 65% of respondents reported that they're on track to meet their sustainability goals. And the IT of those 65%, it is significantly engaged with reporting data for those sustainability initiatives. We saw that, that for those who did report, the sustainability is a top priority for vendor selection. They were twice as likely to be on track with their goals and their sustainability directors said that they were getting involved at the beginning of the tech purchasing program. Our process, I'm sorry, rather than towards the end. And so, you know, we know that to curb the impact of climate crisis, we really need to embrace sustainability from a cross-functional viewpoint. >>Definitely has to be cross-functional. So, so strong correlations there in the report that organizations that had closer alignment between the sustainability folks and the IT folks were farther along in their sustainability program development, execution, et cetera, those co was correlations, were they a surprise? >>Not entirely. You know, when we look at some of the statistics that come from the, you know, places like the World Economic Forum, they say that digitization generated 4% of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020. So, and that, you know, that's now almost three years ago, digital data only accelerates, and by 2025, we expect that number could be almost double. And so we know that that communication and that correlation is gonna be really important because data centers are taking up such a huge footprint of when companies are looking at their emissions. And it's, I mean, quite frankly, a really interesting opportunity for it to be a trailblazer in the sustainability journey. And, you know, perhaps people that are in IT haven't thought about how they can make an impact in this area, but there really is some incredible ways to help us work on cutting carbon emissions, both from your company's perspective and from the world's perspective, right? >>Like we are, we're all doing this because it's something that we know we have to do to drive down climate change. So I think when you, when you think about how to be a trailblazer, how to do things differently, how to differentiate your own department, it's a really interesting connection that IT and sustainability work together. I would also say, you know, I'll just note that of the respondents to the survey we were discussing, we do over half of those respondents expect to see closer alignment between the organization's IT and sustainability teams as they move forward. >>And that's really a, a tip a hat to those organizations embracing cultural change. That's always hard to do, but for those two, for sustainability in IT to come together as part of really the overall ethos of an organization, that's huge. And it's great to see the data demonstrating that, that those, that alignment, that close alignment is really on its way to helping organizations across industries make a big impact. I wanna dig in a little bit to here's ESG goals. What can you share with us about >>That? Absolutely. So as I mentioned peers kind of at the beginning of our formal ESG journey, but really has been working on the, on the sustainability front for a long time. I would, it's funny as we're, as we're doing a lot of this work and, and kind of building our own profile around this, we're coming back to some of the things that we have done in the past that consumers weren't necessarily interested in then but are now because the world has changed, becoming more and more invested in. So that's exciting. So we did a baseline scope one, two, and three analysis and discovered, interestingly enough that 70% of our emissions comes from use of sold products. So our customers work running our products in their data centers. So we know that we, we've made some ambitious goals around our Scope one and two emissions, which is our own office, our utilities, you know, those, they only account for 6% of our emissions. So we know that to really address the issue of climate change, we need to work on the use of sold products. So we've also made a, a really ambitious commitment to decrease our carbon emissions by 66% per bed per petabyte by 2030 in our product. So decreasing our own carbon footprint, but also affecting our customers as well. And we've also committed to a science-based target initiative and our road mapping how to achieve the ambitious goals set out in the Paris agreement. >>That's fantastic. It sounds like you really dialed in on where is the biggest opportunity for us as Pure Storage to make the biggest impact across our organization, across our customers organizations. There lofty goals that pure set, but knowing what I know about Pure, you guys are probably well on track to, to accomplish those goals in record time, >>I hope So. >>Talk a little bit about advice that you would give to viewers who might be at the very beginning of their sustainability journey and really wondering what are the core elements besides it, sustainability, team alignment that I need to bring into this program to make it actually successful? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, understanding that you don't have to pick between really powerful technology and sustainable technology. There are opportunities to get both and not just in storage right in, in your entire IT portfolio. We know that, you know, we're in a place in the world where we have to look at things from the bigger picture. We have to solve new challenges and we have to approach business a little bit differently. So adopting solutions and services that are environmentally efficient can actually help to scale and deliver more effective and efficient IT solutions over time. So I think that that's something that we need to, to really remind ourselves, right? We have to go about business a little bit differently and that's okay. We also know that data centers utilize an incredible amount of, of energy and, and carbon. And so everything that we can do to drive that down is going to address the sustainability goals for us individually as well as, again, drive down that climate change. So we, we need to get out of the mindset that data centers are, are about reliability or cost, et cetera, and really think about efficiency and carbon footprint when you're making those business decisions. I'll also say that, you know, the earlier that we can get sustainability teams into the conversation, the more impactful your business decisions are going to be and helping you to guide sustainable decision making. >>So shifting sustainability and IT left almost together really shows that the correlation between those folks getting together in the beginning with intention, the report shows and the successes that peers had demonstrate that that's very impactful for organizations to actually be able to implement even the cultural change that's needed for sustainability programs to be successful. My last question for you goes back to that report. You mentioned in there that the data show a lot of organizations are hampered by management buy-in, where sustainability is concerned. How can pure help its customers navigate around those barriers so that they get that management buy-in and they understand that the value in it for >>Them? Yeah, so I mean, I think that for me, my advice is always to speak to hearts and minds, right? And help the management to understand, first of all, the impact right on climate change. So I think that's the kind of hearts piece on the mind piece. I think it's addressing the sustainability goals that these companies have set for themselves and helping management understand how to, you know, how their IT buying decisions can actually really help them to reach these goals. We also, you know, we always run kind of TCOs for customers to understand what is the actual cost of, of the equipment. And so, you know, especially if you're in a, in a location in which energy costs are rising, I mean, I think we're seeing that around the world right now with inflation. Better understanding your energy costs can really help your management to understand the, again, the bigger picture and what that total cost is gonna be. Often we see, you know, that maybe the I the person who's buying the IT equipment isn't the same person who's purchasing, who's paying the, the electricity bills, right? And so sometimes even those two teams aren't talking. And there's a great opportunity there, I think, to just to just, you know, look at it from a more high level lens to better understand what total cost of ownership is. >>That's a great point. Great advice. Nicole, thank you so much for joining me on the program today, talking about the new report that on sustainability that Pure put out some really compelling nuggets in there, but really also some great successes that you've already achieved internally on your own ESG goals and what you're helping customers to achieve in terms of driving down their carbon footprint and emissions. We so appreciate your insights and your thoughts. >>Thank you, Lisa. It's been great speaking with you. >>AJ Singh joins me, the Chief Product Officer at Peer Storage. Aj, it's great to have you back on the program. >>Great to be back on, Lisa, good morning. >>Good morning. And sustainability is such an important topic to talk about. So we're gonna really unpack what PEER is doing, we're gonna get your viewpoints on what you're seeing and you're gonna leave the audience with some recommendations on how they can get started on their ESG journey. First question, we've been hearing a lot from pure AJ about the role that technology plays in organizations achieving sustainability goals. What's been the biggest environmental impact associated with, with customers achieving that given the massive volumes of data that keep being generated? >>Absolutely, Lisa, you can imagine that the data is only growing and exploding and, and, and, and there's a good reason for it. You know, data is the new currency. Some people call it the new oil. And the opportunity to go process this data gain insights is really helping customers drive an edge in the digital transformation. It's gonna make a difference between them being on the leaderboard a decade from now when the digital transformation kind of pans out versus, you know, being kind of somebody that, you know, quite missed the boat. So data is super critical and and obviously as part of that we see all these big benefits, but it has to be stored and, and, and that means it's gonna consume a lot of resources and, and the, and therefore data center usage has only accelerated, right? You can imagine the amount of data being generated, you know, recent study pointed to roughly by twenty twenty five, a hundred and seventy five zetabytes, which where each zettabyte is a billion terabytes. So just think of that size and scale of data. That's huge. And, and they also say that, you know, pretty soon, today, in fact in the developed world, every person is having an interaction with the data center literally every 18 seconds. So whether it's on Facebook or Twitter or you know, your email, people are constantly interacting with data. So you can imagine this data is only exploding. It has to be stored and it consumes a lot of energy. In fact, >>It, oh, go ahead. Sorry. >>No, I was saying in fact, you know, there's some studies have shown that data center usage literally consumes one to 2% of global energy consumption. So if there's one place we could really help climate change and, and all those aspects, if you can kind of really, you know, tamp down the data center, energy consumption, sorry, you were saying, >>I was just gonna say, it's, it's an incredibly important topic and the, the, the stats on data that you provided and also I, I like how you talked about, you know, every 18 seconds we're interacting with a data center, whether we know it or not, we think about the long term implications, the fact that data is growing massively. As you shared with the stats that you mentioned. If we think about though the responsibility that companies have, every company in today's world needs to be a data company, right? And we consumers expect it. We expect that you are gonna deliver these relevant, personalized experiences whether we're doing a transaction in our personal lives or in business. But what is the, what requirements do technology companies have to really start billing down their carbon footprints? >>No, absolutely. If you can think about it, just to kind of finish up the data story a little bit, the explosion is to the point where, in fact, if you just recently was in the news that Ireland went up and said, sorry, we can't have any more data centers here. We just don't have the power to supply them. That was big in the news and you know, all the hyperscale that was crashing the head. I know they've come around that and figured out a way around it, but it's getting there. Some, some organizations and and areas jurisdictions are saying pretty much no data center the law, you know, we're, we just can't do it. And so as you said, so companies like Pure, I mean, our view is that it has an opportunity here to really do our bit for climate change and be able to, you know, drive a sustainable environment. >>And, and at Pure we believe that, you know, today's data success really ultimately hinges on energy efficiency, you know, so to to really be energy efficient means you are gonna be successful long term with data. Because if you think of classic data infrastructures, the legacy infrastructures, you know, we've got disk infrastructures, hybrid infrastructures, flash infrastructures, low end systems, medium end systems, high end systems. So a lot of silos, you know, a lot of inefficiency across the silos. Cause the data doesn't get used across that. In fact, you know, today a lot of data centers are not really built with kind of the efficiency and environmental mindset. So there's a big opportunity there. >>So aj, talk to me about some of the steps that Pure is implementing as its chief product officer. Would love to get your your thoughts, what steps is it implementing to help Pures customers become more sustainable? >>No, absolutely. So essentially we are all inherently motivated, like pure and, and, and, and everybody else to solve problems for customers and really forward the status quo, right? You know, innovation, you know, that's what we are all about. And while we are doing that, the challenge is to how do you make technology and the data we feed into it faster, smarter, scalable obviously, but more importantly sustainable. And you can do all of that, but if you miss the sustainability bit, you're kind of missing the boat. And I also feel from an ethical perspective, that's really important for us. Not only you do all the other things, but also kind of make it sustainable. In fact, today 80% of the companies, the companies are realizing this, 80% today are in fact report out on sustainability, which is great. In fact, 80% of leadership at companies, you know, CEOs and senior executives say they've been impacted by some climate change event, you know, where it's a fire in the place they had to evacuate or floods or storms or hurricanes, you, you name it, right? >>So mitigating the carbon impact can in fact today be a competitive advantage for companies because that's where the puck is going and everybody's, you know, it's skating, wanting to skate towards the, and it's good, it's good business too to be sustainable and, and, and meet these, you know, customer requirements. In fact, the the recent survey that we released today is saying that more and more organizations are kickstarting, their sustainability initiatives and many take are aiming to make a significant progress against that over the next decade. So that's, that's really, you know, part of the big, the really, so our view is that that IT infrastructure, you know, can really make a big push towards greener it and not just kind of greenwash it, but actually, you know, you know, make things more greener and, and, and really take the, the lead in, in esg. And so it's important that organizations can reach alignment with their IT teams and challenge their IT teams to continue to lead, you know, for the organization, the sustainability aspects. >>I'm curious, aj, when you're in customer conversations, are you seeing that it's really the C-suite plus it coming together and, and how does peer help facilitate that? To your point, it needs to be able to deliver this, but it's, it's a board level objective these days. >>Absolutely. We're seeing increasingly, especially in Europe with the, you know, the war in Ukraine and the energy crisis that, you know, that's, that's, you know, unleashed. We definitely see it's becoming a bigger and bigger board level objective for, for a lot of companies. And we definitely see customers in starting to do that. So, so in particular, I do want to touch briefly on what steps we are taking as a company, you know, to to to make it sustainable. And obviously customers are doing all the things we talked about and, and we're also helping them become smarter with data. But the key difference is, you know, we have a big focus on efficiency, which is really optimizing performance per wat with unmatched storage density. So you can reduce the footprint and dramatically lower the power required. And and how efficient is that? You know, compared to other old flash systems, we tend to be one fifth, we tend to take one fifth the power compared to other flash systems and substantially lower compared to spinning this. >>So you can imagine, you know, cutting your, if data center consumption is a 2% of global consumption, roughly 40% of that tends to be storage cause of all the spinning disc. So you add about, you know, 0.8% to global consumption and if you can cut that by four fifths, you know, you can already start to make an impact. So, so we feel we can do that. And also we're quite a bit more denser, 10 times more denser. So imagine one fifth the power, one 10th the density, but then we take it a step further because okay, you've got the storage system in the data center, but what about the end of life aspect? What about the waste and reclamation? So we also have something called non-disruptive upgrades. We, using our AI technology in pure one, we can start to sense when a particular part is going to fail and just before it goes to failure, we actually replace it in a non-disruptive fashion. So customer's data is not impacted and then we recycle that so you get a full end to end life cycle, you know, from all the way from the time you deploy much lower power, much lower density, but then also at the back end, you know, reduction in e-waste and those kind of things. >>That's a great point you, that you bring up in terms of the reclamation process. It sounds like Pure does that on its own, the customer doesn't have to be involved in that. >>That's right. And we do that, it's a part of our evergreen, you know, service that we offer. A lot of customers sign up for that service and in fact they don't even, we tell them, Hey, you know, that part's about to go, we're gonna come in, we're gonna swap it out and, and then we actually recycle that part, >>The power of ai. Love that. What are some of the, the things that companies can do if they're, if they're early in this journey on sustainability, what are some of the specific steps companies can take to get started and maybe accelerate that journey as it's becoming climate change and things are becoming just more and more of a, of a daily topic on the news? >>No, absolutely. There's a lot of things companies can do. In fact, the four four item that we're gonna highlight, the first one is, you know, they can just start by doing a materiality assessment and a materiality assessment essentially engages all the stakeholders to find out which specific issues are important for the business, right? So you identify your key priorities that intersect with what the stakeholders want, you know, your different groups from sales, customers, partners, you know, different departments in the organization. And for example, for us, when we conducted our materiality assessment, for us, our product we felt was the biggest area of focus that could contribute a lot towards, you know, making an impact in, in, in from a sustainability standpoint. That's number one. I think number two companies can also think about taking an Azure service approach. The beauty of the Azure service approach is that you are buying a, your customer, they're buying outcomes with SLAs and, and when you are starting to buy outcomes with SLAs, you can start small and then grow as you consume more. >>So that way you don't have systems sitting idle waiting for you to consume more, right? And that's the beauty of the as service approach. And so for example, for us, you know, we have something called Evergreen one, which is our as service offer, where essentially customers are able to only use and have systems turned onto as much as they're consuming. So, so that reduces the waste associated with underutilized systems, right? That's number two. Number three is also you can optimize your supply chains end to end, right? Basically by making sure you're moving, recycling, packaging and eliminating waste in that thing so you can recycle it back to your suppliers. And you can also choose a sustainable supplier network that following sort of good practices, you know, you know, across the globe and such supply chains that are responsive and diverse can really help you. Also, the big business benefit benefited. >>You can also handle surges and demand, for example, for us during the pandemic with this global supply chain shortages, you know, whereas most of our competitors, you know, lead times went to 40, 50 weeks, our lead times went from three to six weeks cuz you know, we had this sustainable, you know, supply chain. And so all of these things, you know, the three things important, but the fourth thing I say more cultural and, and the cultural thing is how do you actually begin to have sustainability become a core part of your ethos at the company, you know, across all the departments, you know, and we've at Pure, definitely it's big for us, you know, you know, around sustainability starting with a product design, but all of the areas as well, if you follow those four items, they'll do the great place to start. >>That's great advice, great recommendations. You talk about the, the, the supply chain, sustainable supply chain optimization. We've been having a lot of conversations with businesses and vendors alike about that and how important it is. You bring up a great point too on supplier diversity, if we could have a whole conversation on that. Yes. But I'm also glad that you brought up culture that's huge to, for organizations to adopt an ESG strategy and really drive sustainability in their business. It has to become, to your point, part of their ethos. Yes. It's challenging. Cultural change management is challenging. Although I think with climate change and the things that are so public, it's, it's more on, on the top mindset folks. But it's a great point that the organization really as a whole needs to embrace the sustainability mindset so that it as a, as an organization lives and breathes that. Yes. And last question for you is advice. So you, you outlined the Four Steps organizations can take. I look how you made that quite simple. What advice would you give organizations who are on that journey to adopting those, those actions, as you said, as they look to really build and deploy and execute an ESG strategy? >>No, absolutely. And so obviously, you know, the advice is gonna come from, you know, a company like Pure, you know, our background kind of being a supplier of products. And so, you know, our advice is for companies that have products, usually they tend to be the biggest generator, the products that you sell to your, your customers, especially if they've got hardware components in it. But, you know, the biggest generator of e-waste and, and and, and, and, and kind of from a sustainability standpoint. So it's really important to have an intentional design approach towards your products with sustainability in mind. So it's not something that's, that you can handle at the very back end. You design it front in the product and so that sustainable design becomes very intentional. So for us, for example, doing these non-disruptive upgrades had to be designed up front so that, you know, a, you know, one of our repair person could go into a customer shop and be able to pull out a card and put in a new card without any change in the customer system. >>That non-receptive approach, it has to be designed into the hardware software systems to be able to pull that on. And that intentional design enables you to recover pieces just when they're about to fail and then putting them through a recovery, you know, waste recovery process. So that, that's kind of the one thing I would say that philosophy, again, it comes down to if that is, you know, seeping into the culture, into your core ethos, you will start to do, you know, you know, that type of work. So, so I mean it's important thing, you know, look, this year, you know, with the spike in energy prices, you know, you know, gas prices going up, it's super important that all of us, you know, do our bit in there and start to drive products that are fundamentally sustainable, not just at the initial, you know, install point, but from an end to end full life cycle standpoint. >>Absolutely. And I love that you brought up intention that is everything that peers doing is with, with such thought and intention and really for organizations and any industry to become more sustainable, to develop an ESG strategy. To your point, it all needs to start with intention. And of course that that cultural adoption, aj, it's been so great to have you on the program talking about what PEER is doing to help organizations really navigate that path to sustainable it. We appreciate your insights on your time. >>Thank you, Lisa. Pleasure being on board >>At Pure Storage. The opportunity for change and our commitment to a sustainable future are a direct reflection of the way we've always operated and the values we live by every day. We are making significant and immediate impact worldwide through our environmental sustainability efforts. The milestones of change can be seen everywhere in everything we do. Pures Evergreen storage architecture delivers two key environmental benefits to customers, the reduction of wasted energy and the reduction of e-waste. Additionally, pures implemented a series of product packaging redesigns, promoting recycle and reuse in order to reduce waste that will not only benefit our customers, but also the environment. Pure is committed to doing what is right and leading the way with innovation. That has always been the pure difference, making a difference by enabling our customers to drive out energy usage and their data storage systems by up to 80% today, more than 97% of Pure Array purchased six years ago are still in service. And tomorrow our goal for the future is to reduce Scope three emissions Pure is committing to further reducing our sold products emissions by 66% per petabyte by 2030. All of this means what we said at the beginning, change that is simple and that is what it has always been about. Pure has a vision for the future today, tomorrow, forever. >>We're back talking about the path to sustainable it and now we're gonna get the perspective from Mattia Valerio, who is with Elec Informatica and IT services firm and the beautiful Lombardi region of Italy north of Milano. Mattia, welcome to the Cube. Thanks so much for coming on. >>Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you. >>All right, before we jump in, tell us a little bit more about Elec Informatica. What's your focus, talk about your unique value add to customers. >>Yeah, so basically Alma Informatica is middle company from the north part of Italy and is managed service provider in the IT area. Okay. So the, the main focus area of Al Meca is reach digital transformation innovation to our clients with focus on infrastructure services, workplace services, and also cybersecurity services. Okay. And we try to follow the path of our clients to the digital transformation and the innovation through technology and sustainability. >>Yeah. Obviously very hot topics right now. Sustainability, environmental impact, they're growing areas of focus among leaders across all industries. A particularly acute right now in, in Europe with the, you know, the energy challenges you've talked about things like sustainable business. What does that mean? What does that term Yeah. You know, speak to and, and what can others learn from it? >>Yeah. At at, at our approach to sustainability is grounded in science and, and values and also in customer territory, but also employee centered. I mean, we conduct regular assessments to understand the most significant environment and social issues for our business with, with the goal of prioritizing what we do for a sustainability future. Our service delivery methodology, employee care relationship with the local supplier and local area and institution are a major factor for us to, to build a such a responsibility strategy. Specifically during the past year, we have been particularly focused on define sustainability governance in the company based on stakeholder engagement, defining material issues, establishing quantitative indicators to monitor and setting medium to long-term goals. >>Okay, so you have a lot of data. You can go into a customer, you can do an assessment, you can set a baseline, and then you have other data by which you can compare that and, and understand what's achievable. So what's your vision for sustainable business? You know, that strategy, you know, how has it affected your business in terms of the evolution? Cuz this wasn't, hasn't always been as hot a topic as it is today. And and is it a competitive advantage for you? >>Yeah, yeah. For, for, for all intense and proposed sustainability is a competitive advantage for elec. I mean, it's so, because at the time of profound transformation in the work, in the world of work, CSR issues make a company more attractive when searching for new talent to enter in the workforce of our company. In addition, efforts to ensure people's proper work life balance are a strong retention factor. And regarding our business proposition, ELEX attempts is to meet high standard of sustainability and reliability. Our green data center, you said is a prime example of this approach as at the same time, is there a conditioning activity that is done to give a second life to technology devices that come from back from rental? I mean, our customer inquiries with respect to sustainability are increasingly frequent and in depth and which is why we monitor our performance and invest in certification such as EcoVadis or ISO 14,001. Okay, >>Got it. So in a previous life I actually did some work with, with, with power companies and there were two big factors in it that affected the power consumption. Obviously virtualization was a big one, if you could consolidate servers, you know, that was huge. But the other was the advent of flash storage and that was, we used to actually go in with the, the engineers and the power company put in alligator clips to measure of, of, of an all flash array versus, you know, the spinning disc and it was a big impact. So you, I wanna talk about your, your experience with Pure Storage. You use Flash Array and the Evergreen architecture. Can you talk about what your experience there, why did you make that decision to select Pure Storage? How does that help you meet sustainability and operational requirements? Do those benefits scale as your customers grow? What's your experience been? >>Yeah, it was basically an easy and easy answer to our, to our business needs. Okay. Because you said before that in Elec we, we manage a lot of data, okay? And in the past we, we, we see it, we see that the constraints of managing so many, many data was very, very difficult to manage in terms of power consumption or simply for the, the space of storing the data. And when, when Pure came to us and share our products, their vision to the data management journey for Element Informatica, it was very easy to choose pure why with values and numbers. We, we create a business case and we said that we, we see that our power consumption usage was much less, more than 90% of previous technology that we used in the past. Okay. And so of course you have to manage a grade oil deploy of flash technology storage, but it was a good target. >>So we have tried to monitoring the adoption of flash technology and monitor monitoring also the power consumption and the efficiency that the pure technology bring to our, to our IT systems and of course the IT systems of our clients. And so this is one, the first part, the first good part of our trip with, with Pure. And after that we approach also the sustainability in long term of choosing pure technology storage. You mentioned the Evergreen models of Pure, and of course this was, again, challenge for us because it allows, it allow us to extend the life cycle management of our data centers, but also the, IT allows us to improve the facility of the facilities of using technology from our technical side. Okay. So we are much more efficient than in the past with the choose of Pure storage technologies. Okay. Of course, this easy users, easy usage mode, let me say it, allow us to bring this value to our, to all our clients that put their data in our data centers. >>So you talked about how you've seen a 90% improvement relative to previous technologies. I always, I haven't put you in the spot. Yeah, because I, I, I was on Pure's website and I saw in their ESG report some com, you know, it was a comparison with a generic competitor presuming that competitor was not, you know, a 2010 spinning disc system. But, but, so I'm curious as to the results that you're seeing with Pure in terms of footprint and power usage. You, you're referencing some of that. We heard some metrics from Nicole and AJ earlier in the program. Do you think, again, I'm gonna put you in the spot, do you think that Pure's architecture and the way they've applied, whether it's machine intelligence or the Evergreen model, et cetera, is more competitive than other platforms that you've seen? >>Yeah, of course. Is more competitor improve competitive because basically it allows to service provider to do much more efficient value proposition and offer services that are more, that brings more values to, to the customers. Okay. So the customer is always at the center of a proposition of a service provider and trying to adopt the methodology and also the, the value that pure as inside by design in the technology is, is for us very, very, very important and very, very strategic because, because with like a glass, we can, our self transfer try to transfer the values of pure, pure technologies to our service provider client. >>Okay. Matta, let's wrap and talk about sort of near term 2023 and then longer term it looks like sustainability is a topic that's here to stay. Unlike when we were putting alligator clips on storage arrays, trying to help customers get rebates that just didn't have legs. It was too complicated. Now it's a, a topic that everybody's measuring. What's next for elec in its sustainability journey? What advice would you might have? Sustainability leaders that wanna make a meaningful impact on the environment, but also on the bottom line. >>Okay, so sustainability is fortunately a widely spread concept. And our role in, in this great game is to define a strategy, align with the common and fundamentals goals for the future of planet and capable of expressing our inclination and the, and the particularities and accessibility goals in the near future. I, I say, I can say that are will be basically free one define sustainability plan. Okay? It's fundamentals to define a sustainability plan. Then it's very important to monitor the its emissions and we will calculate our carbon footprint. Okay? And least button list produces certifiable and comprehensive sustainability report with respect to the demands of customers, suppliers, and also partners. Okay. So I can say that this three target will be our direction in the, in the future. Okay. >>Yeah. So I mean, pretty straightforward. Make a plan. You gotta monitor and measure, you can't improve what you can't measure. So you gonna set a baseline, you're gonna report on that. Yep. You're gonna analyze the data and you're gonna make continuous improvement. >>Yep. >>Matea, thanks so much for joining us today in sharing your perspectives from the, the northern part of Italy. Really appreciate it. >>Yeah, thank you for having aboard. Thank you very >>Much. It was really our pleasure. Okay, in a moment, I'm gonna be back to wrap up the program and share some resources that could be valuable in your sustainability journey. Keep it right there. >>Sustainability is becoming increasingly important and is hitting more RFPs than ever before as a critical decision point for customers. Environmental benefits are not the only impetus. Rather bottom line cost savings are proving that sustainability actually means better business. You can make a strong business case around sustainability and you should, many more organizations are setting mid and long-term goals for sustainability and putting forth published metrics for shareholders and customers. Whereas early green IT initiatives at the beginning of this century, were met with skepticism and somewhat disappointing results. Today, vendor r and d is driving innovation in system design, semiconductor advancements, automation in machine intelligence that's really beginning to show tangible results. Thankfully. Now remember, all these videos are available on demand@thecube.net. So check them out at your convenience and don't forget to go to silicon angle.com for all the enterprise tech news of the day. You also want to check out pure storage.com. >>There are a ton of resources there. As an aside, pure is the only company I can recall to allow you to access resources like a Gartner Magic Quadrant without forcing you to fill out a lead gen form. So thank you for that. Pure storage, I love that. There's no squeeze page on that. No friction. It's kind of on brand there for pure well done. But to the topic today, sustainability, there's some really good information on the site around esg, Pure's Environmental, social and Governance mission. So there's more in there than just sustainability. You'll see some transparent statistics on things like gender and ethnic diversity, and of course you'll see that Pure has some work to do there. But kudos for publishing those stats transparently and setting goals so we can track your progress. And there's plenty on the sustainability topic as well, including some competitive benchmarks, which are interesting to look at and may give you some other things to think about. We hope you've enjoyed the path to Sustainable it made possible by Pure Storage produced with the Cube, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech, tech coverage.

(upbeat music) >> We're here theCUBE on Cloud Startup Showcase brought to you by AWS. And right now we're going to explore the next frontier for privacy, you know, security, privacy, and compliance, they're often lumped together and they're often lumped on as an afterthought bolted on to infrastructure, data and applications. But, you know, while they're certainly related they're different disciplines and they require a specific domain knowledge and expertise to really solve the challenges of today. One thing they all share is successful implementations, must be comprehensive and designed in at the start and with me to discuss going beyond compliance and designing privacy protections into products and services. Justin Antonipillai, who is the founder and CEO of WireWheel, Justin awesome having you on the AWS Startup Showcase. Thanks for being here >> Dave, thanks so much for having me. It's a real honor, and I appreciate it. Look forward to the discussion. >> So I always love to ask founders, like, take us back. Why did you start this company? Where did your inspiration come from? >> So Dave, I was very lucky. I had the honor of serving in president Obama's second term as an Acting Under Secretary for Economic Affairs. So I ran the part of the government that includes the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. So core economic statistical bureaus. But I helped lead a lot of the Obama administration's, outreach and negotiations on data privacy around the world. Including on something called the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield. So at the time the two jobs I had really aligned with what our discussion is here today. The first part of it was, I could see that all around the world in the U.S. and around the world, data privacy and protecting privacy, had become a human rights issue. It was a trade issue. You could see it as a national security issue and companies all around the world were just struggling with how to get legal, how to make sure that I do it right, and how I make sure that I'm treating my customer's data, in the right way. But when I was also leading the agency, a lot of what we were trying to do was to help our U.S. citizens, our folks here around the country solve big public problems by ethically and responsibly using government data to do it. And I can talk about what that meant in a little while. So the inspiration behind why WireWheel was, we need better more technically driven ways to help companies get compliance, to show their customers that they're protecting privacy and to put customers, our customers onto a path where they can start using the customer data better, faster and stronger, but most importantly, ethically. And that's really what we try to tackle at WireWheel. >> Right, excellent. Thank you for that. I mean, yeah you know, in the early days of social media, people kind of fluffed it off and oh there is no privacy in the internet, blah, blah, blah. And then wow, it became a huge social issue and public policy really needed to step in but also technology needs this to help solve this problem. So let's try to paint a picture for people as to really dig into the problem that you solve and why it's so complicated. We actually have a graphic. It's a map of the U S that we want to pull up here. Explain this. >> Yeah, I mean, what you're saying here is that every one of your, our viewers today is going to be looking at privacy laws moving across the country Dave but there's a lot of different ones. You know, if you're a company that's launching and building your product, that you might be helping your customers your consumer facing. The law, and you're even let's assume you want to do the right thing. You want to treat that customer data responsibly and protect it. When you look at a map like this and you can see three States have already passed different privacy laws, but look at the number of different States all across the country that are considering their own privacy laws. It really could be overwhelming. And Virginia, as you can see is just about to pass it's next privacy law but there's something like 23,24 States that are moving them through. The other thing Dave, that's really important about this is, these are not just breach laws. You know, I think years ago we were all looking at these kinds of laws spreading across the country and you would be saying, okay, that's just a breach law. These laws are very comprehensive. They have a lot to them. So what we have been really helping companies with is to enable you to get compliant with a lot of these very quickly. And that's really what we've tried to take on. Because if you're trying to do the right thing there should be a way to do it. >> Got it. Yeah, I can't even imagine what the it had been so many permutations and complexities but imagine this, if this were a globe we were looking at it says it gets out of control. Okay, now you guys well you use a term called phrase beyond compliance? What do we mean by that? >> There are a couple of things. So I'd say almost every company taking a product to market right now, whether you're B2C or B2B you want to make sure you can answer the customer question and say, yes, I'm compliant. And usually that means if you're a B2C company it means that your customers can come to your site. Your site is compliant with all of the laws out there. You can take consents and preferences. You can get their data back to them. All of these are legal requirements. If you're a B2B company, you're also looking at making sure you can create some critical compliance records that's it, right? But when we think beyond compliance, we think of a couple of basic things. Number one, do you tell the story about all the trust and protection you put around your data in a way that your customers want to do business with you? I mean Dave, if you went to CES the last couple of years and you were walking into the center or looking at a virtual version of it, on every billboard, the top five, top 10 global companies advertise that they take care of your data and they're onto something, they're onto something. You can actually build a winning strategy by solving a customer's problem and also showing them that you care, and that they're trustworthy. Because there are too many products out there, that aren't. The second thing, I'm sorry, go ahead. >> No, please carry on. >> No, I mean the second thing, and then I think I'd say is going beyond compliance also means that you're thinking about how you can use that data for your customer, to solve all of their problems. And Dave, what I'd say here is imagine a world right now, in which, you know you trusted that the data that you gave to companies or to the government, was protected and that if you changed your mind and you wanted it back that they would delete it or give it back to you. Can you imagine how much more quickly we would have solved getting a COVID vaccine? Can you imagine how much data would have been available to pharmaceutical companies to actually develop a vaccine? Can you imagine how much more quickly we would have opened the economy? The thing is companies can't solve every problem that they could for a customer because customers don't trust that the data is going to be used correctly and companies don't know how to use it in that way and ethically. And that's what we're talking about when we say getting beyond compliance which is we want to enable our customers to use the data in the best way and most ethical way to solve all of their customer's problems. >> Okay, so I ask the elephant in the room question. If you asked most businesses about personal information, where it's stored, you know who has access to it, the fact is that most people can't answer it. And so when they're confronted with these uncomfortable questions. The other documents and policies that maybe check some boxes, why is that not a good idea? I mean, there's an expense to going beyond that but so why is that not just a good idea to check it off? >> Well look, a lot of companies do need to just check it off and what I mean, get it right, make sure you label and the way we've thought about this is that when you're building on a backbone like AWS, it does give you the ability to buy a lot of services quickly and scale with your company. But it also gives us an ability to comply faster by leveraging that infrastructure to get compliant faster. So if you think about it, 20 years ago whenever I wanted to buy storage or if I wanted to buy servers and look we're a company that built in the cloud, Dave it would have been very difficult for us to buy the right storage and the processing we needed, given that we were starting. But I was able to buy very small amounts of it until our customer profile grew. But that also means my data moved out of a single hard drive and out of a single set of servers, into other places that are hosted in the cloud. So the entire tech stack that all of our customers are building on means they're distributing personal data into the cloud, into SAS platforms. And there's been a really big move through integration platforms as a service to allow you to spread the personal data quickly. But that same infrastructure can be used to also get you compliant faster, and that's the differentiation. So we built a platform that enables a company to inventory their systems, to track what they're doing in those systems and to both create a compliance record faster by tracking what they're doing inside the cloud and in SAS systems. And that's the different way we've been thinking about it as we've been going to market. >> So, okay. So what actually do you sell, you sell a service? Is it a subscription? >> Yeah. >> And AWS is underneath that, maybe you could put down a picture for us. >> Sure, we're a cloud hosted software as a service. We have two core offerings. One is the WireWheel Trust Access Consent Solution. So if you go to a number of major brands, and you go to their website, when they tell you here's the data we're collecting about you, when they collect your consents and preferences, when they collect a request for data correction or deletion of the data, all the way from the request to delivery back to the consumer, we have an end to end system that our customers use with their customers, a completely cloud hostable in a subscription. So enables even very small startups, to build that experience into their website and into their products, from the very beginning, at a cost efficient point. So if you want to stand up a compliant website or you want to build into your product that Trust Access Consent Solution, we have a SAS platform, and we have developer tools and our developer portal to let you do it quickly. The second thing we do is we have a privacy operations manager. So this is the most security center but for privacy operations. It helps you inventory your systems, actually create data flow maps and most critically create compliance records that you need to comply with, you know the European law, the Brazilian law, and that whole spectrum of U.S. privacy laws that you showed a few minutes ago. And those are the two core offerings we have. >> I love it. I mean, it's the cloud story, right? One is you don't have to spend a millions of dollars on hardware and software. And the second is, when you launch you enable small companies, not just the biggest companies you give them the same, essentially the same services. And that's a great story. Who do you sell to Justin? What does a typical customer engagement look? >> Yeah, we, in many of our customers and in the AWS say startup environment, you often don't have companies that have like a privacy officer. They often don't even have a general counsel. So we sell a package that will often go to whoever is responsible at the company for privacy compliance. And, you know, interestingly Dave in some startups that might be a marketing officer, it might be a CLO, it might be the CTO. So in startups and sort of growing companies, we've put out a lot of guidance, and our core WireWheel developer portal is meant to give even a startup all they need to stand up that experience and get it going, so that when you get that procurement imagine you're about to go sell your product, and they ask you, are you compliant, then you have that document ready to provide. We also do provide this core infrastructure for enormous enterprises. So think telecoms, think top three global technology companies. So Dave, we get excited about is we've built a core software platform privacy infrastructure that is permanently being used by some of the largest companies in the world. And our goal is to get that infrastructure at the right price point into every company in the world, right? We want to enable any company to spend and stand up the right system, that's leveraging that same privacy infrastructure that the big folks have, so that as they scale, they can continue to do the right thing. >> That's awesome. I mean, you mentioned a number of roles of marketing folks. I can even see a sales, let's say sales lead saying, okay we got this deal on the table. How do we get through the procurement because we didn't check the box, all right. So, let me ask you this. We talked a little bit about designing privacy in a and it's clear you help do that. How do you make it, you know fundamental to customer's workloads? Do they have to be like an AWS customer to take advantage of that concept? Or how did they make it part of their workflow? >> Yeah, so there's a couple of critical things. How do you make it part of the workflow? The first thing is, you go to any company's website right now, they have to be compliant with the California law. So a very straightforward thing we do is we can for both B2B and B2C companies stand up an entire customer experience that matches the scale of the company that enables it to be compliant. That means you have a trust center that shows the right information to your customers, it collects the consents, preferences, and it stands up with a portal to request data. These are basics. And for a company that's standing up the internal operations, we can get them app collecting that core record and create a compliance record very fast. With larger companies, Dave you're right. I mean, when you're talking about understanding your entire infrastructure and understanding where you're storing and processing data it could seem overwhelming, but the truth is, the way we onboard our customers is we get you compliance on your product and website first, right? We focus on your product to get that compliance record done. We focus on your website so that you can sell your product. And then we go through the rest of the major systems where you're handling personal information, your sales, your marketing, you know, it's like a natural process. So larger enterprises we have a pretty straightforward way that we get them up and running, but even small startups we can get them to a point of getting them compliant and starting to think about other things very, very quickly. >> And so Justin, you're a government so you understand big, but how I talk about the secret ingredient that allows you to do this at scale and still handle all that diversity, like what we showed in that graphic, the different locations, different local laws, data sovereignty, et cetera. >> Yeah, there's a couple things on the secret source. One is, we have to think about our customers every day. And we had to understand that companies will use whatever their infrastructure is to build. Like you've seen, even on AWS there are so many different services you can use. So number one, we always think with an engineering point of view in mind. Understand the tools, understand the infrastructure in a way that brings that kind of basic visibility to whoever it is that's handling privacy, that basic understanding. The second is, we focused on core user experience for the non-technical user. It's really easy to get started. It's really easy to stand up your privacy page and your privacy policy. It's really easy to collect that and make that first record. The third is, and you know, this is one of those key things. When I was in the government, I met with folks in the intelligence community at one point day, and this always stuck with me. They were telling me that 20 years ago, you know to do the kind of innovation that you have going on now, you would have had to have had a defense contract. You would have had to have invested an enormous amount of money to buy the processing and the services and the team. But the ability for me as a startup founder, to understand the big picture and understand that companies need to be compliant fast, get their website compliant fast, get their product compliant fast, but build on a cloud infrastructure that allowed me to scale was incredible. Because it allows us to do a lot with our customers that a company like ours would have been really challenged to do without that cloud backbone. >> Love this, the agility and the innovation. Last question, give us the company update Justin, you know where are you? What can you share with us, fundraising, head count, are you generating revenue? Where you are? >> Oh yeah, we're excited as I mentioned, we are already the privacy platform of choice of some of the larger brands in the world, which we're very excited about. And we help them solve both the trust, access consent problem for their customers, and we help with the privacy operations management. We recently announced a new $20 million infusion of capital, led by a terrific venture capital fund, ForgePoint Capital. We've been lucky to have been supported by NEA, Sands Capital, Revolution Capital, Pritzker Capital, PSP. And so we have a terrific group of investors behind us. We are scaling, we've grown the company a lot in the last year. Obviously it's been an interesting and challenging year with COVID, but we are really focused on growing our sales team, our marketing team, and we're going to be offering some pretty exciting solutions here for the rest of the year. >> The timing was unbelievable, you had the cloud at your beck and call, you had the experience in government. You've got your background as a lawyer. And it all came in, and the legal come into the forefront of public policy, just a congratulations on all your progress today. We're really looking forward to seeing you guys rocket in the future. I really appreciate you coming on. >> Dave, thanks so much for having me, really enjoyed it. And I look forward to seeing you soon. >> Great, and thank you for watching everyone is Dave Vellante for theCUBE on cloud startups. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> We're here theCUBE on Cloud Startup Showcase brought to you by AWS. And right now we're going to explore the next frontier for privacy, you know, security, privacy, and compliance, they're often lumped together and they're often lumped on as an afterthought bolted on to infrastructure, data and applications. But, you know, while they're certainly related they're different disciplines and they require a specific domain knowledge and expertise to really solve the challenges of today. One thing they all share is successful implementations, must be comprehensive and designed in at the start and with me to discuss going beyond compliance and designing privacy protections into products and services. Justin Antonipillai, who is the founder and CEO of WireWheel, Justin awesome having you on the AWS Startup Showcase. Thanks for being here >> Dave, thanks so much for having me. It's a real honor, and I appreciate it. Look forward to the discussion. >> So I always love to ask founders, like, take us back. Why did you start this company? Where did your inspiration come from? >> So Dave, I was very lucky. I had the honor of serving in president Obama's second term as an Acting Under Secretary for Economic Affairs. So I ran the part of the government that includes the U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. So core economic statistical bureaus. But I helped lead a lot of the Obama administration's, outreach and negotiations on data privacy around the world. Including on something called the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield. So at the time the two jobs I had really aligned with what our discussion is here today. The first part of it was, I could see that all around the world in the U.S. and around the world, data privacy and protecting privacy, had become a human rights issue. It was a trade issue. You could see it as a national security issue and companies all around the world were just struggling with how to get legal, how to make sure that I do it right, and how I make sure that I'm treating my customer's data, in the right way. But when I was also leading the agency, a lot of what we were trying to do was to help our U.S. citizens, our folks here around the country solve big public problems by ethically and responsibly using government data to do it. And I can talk about what that meant in a little while. So the inspiration behind why WireWheel was, we need better more technically driven ways to help companies get compliance, to show their customers that they're protecting privacy and to put customers, our customers onto a path where they can start using the customer data better, faster and stronger, but most importantly, ethically. And that's really what we try to tackle at WireWheel. >> Right, excellent. Thank you for that. I mean, yeah you know, in the early days of social media, people kind of fluffed it off and oh there is no privacy in the internet, blah, blah, blah. And then wow, it became a huge social issue and public policy really needed to step in but also technology needs this to help solve this problem. So let's try to paint a picture for people as to really dig into the problem that you solve and why it's so complicated. We actually have a graphic. It's a map of the U S that we want to pull up here. Explain this. >> Yeah, I mean, what you're saying here is that every one of your, our viewers today is going to be looking at privacy laws moving across the country Dave but there's a lot of different ones. You know, if you're a company that's launching and building your product, that you might be helping your customers your consumer facing. The law, and you're even let's assume you want to do the right thing. You want to treat that customer data responsibly and protect it. When you look at a map like this and you can see three States have already passed different privacy laws, but look at the number of different States all across the country that are considering their own privacy laws. It really could be overwhelming. And Virginia, as you can see is just about to pass it's next privacy law but there's something like 23,24 States that are moving them through. The other thing Dave, that's really important about this is, these are not just breach laws. You know, I think years ago we were all looking at these kinds of laws spreading across the country and you would be saying, okay, that's just a breach law. These laws are very comprehensive. They have a lot to them. So what we have been really helping companies with is to enable you to get compliant with a lot of these very quickly. And that's really what we've tried to take on. Because if you're trying to do the right thing there should be a way to do it. >> Got it. Yeah, I can't even imagine what the it had been so many permutations and complexities but imagine this, if this were a globe we were looking at it says it gets out of control. Okay, now you guys well you use a term called phrase beyond compliance? What do we mean by that? >> There are a couple of things. So I'd say almost every company taking a product to market right now, whether you're B2C or B2B you want to make sure you can answer the customer question and say, yes, I'm compliant. And usually that means if you're a B2C company it means that your customers can come to your site. Your site is compliant with all of the laws out there. You can take consents and preferences. You can get their data back to them. All of these are legal requirements. If you're a B2B company, you're also looking at making sure you can create some critical compliance records that's it, right? But when we think beyond compliance, we think of a couple of basic things. Number one, do you tell the story about all the trust and protection you put around your data in a way that your customers want to do business with you? I mean Dave, if you went to CES the last couple of years and you were walking into the center or looking at a virtual version of it, on every billboard, the top five, top 10 global companies advertise that they take care of your data and they're onto something, they're onto something. You can actually build a winning strategy by solving a customer's problem and also showing them that you care, and that they're trustworthy. Because there are too many products out there, that aren't. The second thing, I'm sorry, go ahead. >> No, please carry on. >> No, I mean the second thing, and then I think I'd say is going beyond compliance also means that you're thinking about how you can use that data for your customer, to solve all of their problems. And Dave, what I'd say here is imagine a world right now, in which, you know you trusted that the data that you gave to companies or to the government, was protected and that if you changed your mind and you wanted it back that they would delete it or give it back to you. Can you imagine how much more quickly we would have solved getting a COVID vaccine? Can you imagine how much data would have been available to pharmaceutical companies to actually develop a vaccine? Can you imagine how much more quickly we would have opened the economy? The thing is companies can't solve every problem that they could for a customer because customers don't trust that the data is going to be used correctly and companies don't know how to use it in that way and ethically. And that's what we're talking about when we say getting beyond compliance which is we want to enable our customers to use the data in the best way and most ethical way to solve all of their customer's problems. >> Okay, so I ask the elephant in the room question. If you asked most businesses about personal information, where it's stored, you know who has access to it, the fact is that most people can't answer it. And so when they're confronted with these uncomfortable questions. The other documents and policies that maybe check some boxes, why is that not a good idea? I mean, there's an expense to going beyond that but so why is that not just a good idea to check it off? >> Well look, a lot of companies do need to just check it off and what I mean, get it right, make sure you label and the way we've thought about this is that when you're building on a backbone like AWS, it does give you the ability to buy a lot of services quickly and scale with your company. But it also gives us an ability to comply faster by leveraging that infrastructure to get compliant faster. So if you think about it, 20 years ago whenever I wanted to buy storage or if I wanted to buy servers and look we're a company that built in the cloud, Dave it would have been very difficult for us to buy the right storage and the processing we needed, given that we were starting. But I was able to buy very small amounts of it until our customer profile grew. But that also means my data moved out of a single hard drive and out of a single set of servers, into other places that are hosted in the cloud. So the entire tech stack that all of our customers are building on means they're distributing personal data into the cloud, into SAS platforms. And there's been a really big move through integration platforms as a service to allow you to spread the personal data quickly. But that same infrastructure can be used to also get you compliant faster, and that's the differentiation. So we built a platform that enables a company to inventory their systems, to track what they're doing in those systems and to both create a compliance record faster by tracking what they're doing inside the cloud and in SAS systems. And that's the different way we've been thinking about it as we've been going to market. >> So, okay. So what actually do you sell, you sell a service? Is it a subscription? >> Yeah. >> And AWS is underneath that, maybe you could put down a picture for us. >> Sure, we're a cloud hosted software as a service. We have two core offerings. One is the WireWheel Trust Access Consent Solution. So if you go to a number of major brands, and you go to their website, when they tell you here's the data we're collecting about you, when they collect your consents and preferences, when they collect a request for data correction or deletion of the data, all the way from the request to delivery back to the consumer, we have an end to end system that our customers use with their customers, a completely cloud hostable in a subscription. So enables even very small startups, to build that experience into their website and into their products, from the very beginning, at a cost efficient point. So if you want to stand up a compliant website or you want to build into your product that Trust Access Consent Solution, we have a SAS platform, and we have developer tools and our developer portal to let you do it quickly. The second thing we do is we have a privacy operations manager. So this is the most security center but for privacy operations. It helps you inventory your systems, actually create data flow maps and most critically create compliance records that you need to comply with, you know the European law, the Brazilian law, and that whole spectrum of U.S. privacy laws that you showed a few minutes ago. And those are the two core offerings we have. >> I love it. I mean, it's the cloud story, right? One is you don't have to spend a millions of dollars on hardware and software. And the second is, when you launch you enable small companies, not just the biggest companies you give them the same, essentially the same services. And that's a great story. Who do you sell to Justin? What does a typical customer engagement look? >> Yeah, we, in many of our customers and in the AWS say startup environment, you often don't have companies that have like a privacy officer. They often don't even have a general counsel. So we sell a package that will often go to whoever is responsible at the company for privacy compliance. And, you know, interestingly Dave in some startups that might be a marketing officer, it might be a CLO, it might be the CTO. So in startups and sort of growing companies, we've put out a lot of guidance, and our core WireWheel developer portal is meant to give even a startup all they need to stand up that experience and get it going, so that when you get that procurement imagine you're about to go sell your product, and they ask you, are you compliant, then you have that document ready to provide. We also do provide this core infrastructure for enormous enterprises. So think telecoms, think top three global technology companies. So Dave, we get excited about is we've built a core software platform privacy infrastructure that is permanently being used by some of the largest companies in the world. And our goal is to get that infrastructure at the right price point into every company in the world, right? We want to enable any company to spend and stand up the right system, that's leveraging that same privacy infrastructure that the big folks have, so that as they scale, they can continue to do the right thing. >> That's awesome. I mean, you mentioned a number of roles of marketing folks. I can even see a sales, let's say sales lead saying, okay we got this deal on the table. How do we get through the procurement because we didn't check the box, all right. So, let me ask you this. We talked a little bit about designing privacy in a and it's clear you help do that. How do you make it, you know fundamental to customer's workloads? Do they have to be like an AWS customer to take advantage of that concept? Or how did they make it part of their workflow? >> Yeah, so there's a couple of critical things. How do you make it part of the workflow? The first thing is, you go to any company's website right now, they have to be compliant with the California law. So a very straightforward thing we do is we can for both B2B and B2C companies stand up an entire customer experience that matches the scale of the company that enables it to be compliant. That means you have a trust center that shows the right information to your customers, it collects the consents, preferences, and it stands up with a portal to request data. These are basics. And for a company that's standing up the internal operations, we can get them app collecting that core record and create a compliance record very fast. With larger companies, Dave you're right. I mean, when you're talking about understanding your entire infrastructure and understanding where you're storing and processing data it could seem overwhelming, but the truth is, the way we onboard our customers is we get you compliance on your product and website first, right? We focus on your product to get that compliance record done. We focus on your website so that you can sell your product. And then we go through the rest of the major systems where you're handling personal information, your sales, your marketing, you know, it's like a natural process. So larger enterprises we have a pretty straightforward way that we get them up and running, but even small startups we can get them to a point of getting them compliant and starting to think about other things very, very quickly. >> And so Justin, you're a government so you understand big, but how I talk about the secret ingredient that allows you to do this at scale and still handle all that diversity, like what we showed in that graphic, the different locations, different local laws, data sovereignty, et cetera. >> Yeah, there's a couple things on the secret source. One is, we have to think about our customers every day. And we had to understand that companies will use whatever their infrastructure is to build. Like you've seen, even on AWS there are so many different services you can use. So number one, we always think with an engineering point of view in mind. Understand the tools, understand the infrastructure in a way that brings that kind of basic visibility to whoever it is that's handling privacy, that basic understanding. The second is, we focused on core user experience for the non-technical user. It's really easy to get started. It's really easy to stand up your privacy page and your privacy policy. It's really easy to collect that and make that first record. The third is, and you know, this is one of those key things. When I was in the government, I met with folks in the intelligence community at one point day, and this always stuck with me. They were telling me that 20 years ago, you know to do the kind of innovation that you have going on now, you would have had to have had a defense contract. You would have had to have invested an enormous amount of money to buy the processing and the services and the team. But the ability for me as a startup founder, to understand the big picture and understand that companies need to be compliant fast, get their website compliant fast, get their product compliant fast, but build on a cloud infrastructure that allowed me to scale was incredible. Because it allows us to do a lot with our customers that a company like ours would have been really challenged to do without that cloud backbone. >> Love this, the agility and the innovation. Last question, give us the company update Justin, you know where are you? What can you share with us, fundraising, head count, are you generating revenue? Where you are? >> Oh yeah, we're excited as I mentioned, we are already the privacy platform of choice of some of the larger brands in the world, which we're very excited about. And we help them solve both the trust, access consent problem for their customers, and we help with the privacy operations management. We recently announced a new $20 million infusion of capital, led by a terrific venture capital fund, ForgePoint Capital. We've been lucky to have been supported by NEA, Sands Capital, Revolution Capital, Pritzker Capital, PSP. And so we have a terrific group of investors behind us. We are scaling, we've grown the company a lot in the last year. Obviously it's been an interesting and challenging year with COVID, but we are really focused on growing our sales team, our marketing team, and we're going to be offering some pretty exciting solutions here for the rest of the year. >> The timing was unbelievable, you had the cloud at your beck and call, you had the experience in government. You've got your background as a lawyer. And it all came in, and the legal come into the forefront of public policy, just a congratulations on all your progress today. We're really looking forward to seeing you guys rocket in the future. I really appreciate you coming on. >> Dave, thanks so much for having me, really enjoyed it. And I look forward to seeing you soon. >> Great, and thank you for watching everyone is Dave Vellante for theCUBE on cloud startups. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of an AI ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome to the AI ops virtual forum. Finally, some Artan extended to be talking with rich lane now, senior analyst, serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forrester. Rich. It's great to have you today. >>Thank you for having me. I think it's going to be a really fun conversation to have today. >>It is. We're going to be setting the stage for, with Richard, for the it operations challenges and the need for AI ops. That's kind of our objective here in the next 15 minutes. So rich talk to us about some of the problems that enterprise it operations are facing now in this year, that is 2020 that are going to be continuing into the next year. >>Yeah, I mean, I think we've been on this path for a while, but certainly the last eight months has, uh, has accelerated, uh, this problem and, and brought a lot of things to light that, that people were, you know, they were going through the day to day firefighting as their goal way of life. Uh, it's just not sustainable anymore. You a highly distributed environment or in the need for digital services. And, you know, one of them has been building for a while really is in the digital age, you know, we're providing so many, uh, uh, the, the interactions with customers online. Um, we've, we've added these layers of complexity, um, to applications, to infrastructure, you know, or we're in the, in the cloud or a hybrid or multi-cloud, or do you know you name it using cloud native technologies? We're using legacy stuff. We still have mainframe out there. >>Uh, you know, the, just the, the vast amount of things we have to keep track of now and process and look at the data and signals from, it's just, it's a really untenable for, for humans to do that in silos now, uh, in, in, you know, when you add to that, you know, when companies are so heavily invested in gone on the digital transformation path, and it's accelerated so much in the last, uh, year or so that, you know, we're getting so much of our business in revenue derived from these services that they become core to the business. They're not afterthoughts anymore. It's not just about having a website presence. It's, it's about deriving core business value from the services you're providing to your, through your customers. And a lot of cases, customers you're never going to meet or see at that. So it's even more important to be vigilant. >>And on top of the quality of that service that you're giving them. And then when you think about just the staffing issues we have, there's just not enough bodies to go around it in operations anymore. Um, you know, we're not going to be able to hire, you know, like we did 10 years ago, even. Uh, so that's where we need the systems to be able to bring those operational efficiencies to bear. When we say operational efficiencies, we don't mean, you know, uh, lessening head count because we can't do that. That'd be foolish. What we mean is getting the head count. We have back to burping on and higher level things, you know, working on, uh, technology refreshes and project work that that brings better digital services to customers and get them out of doing these sort of, uh, low, uh, complexity, high volume tasks that they're spending at least 20%, if not more on our third day, each day. So I think that the more we can bring intelligence to bear and automation to take those things out of their hands, the better off we are going forward. >>And I'm sure those workers are wanting to be able to have the time to deliver more value, more strategic value to the organization, to their role. And as you're saying, you know, was the demand for digital services is spiking. It's not going to go down and as consumers, if w if we have another option and we're not satisfied, we're going to go somewhere else. So, so it's really about not just surviving this time right now, it's about how do I become a business that's going to thrive going forward and exceeding expectations that are now just growing and growing. So let's talk about AI ops as a facilitator of collaboration, across business folks, it folks developers, operations, how can it facilitate collaboration, which is even more important these days? >>Yeah. So one of the great things about it is now, you know, years ago, have I gone years, as they say, uh, we would buy a tool to fit each situation. And, you know, someone that worked in network and others who will somebody worked in infrastructure from a, you know, Linux standpoint, have their tool, somebody who's from storage would have their tool. And what we found was we would have an incident, a very high impact incident occur. Everybody would get on the phone, 24 people all be looking at their siloed tool, they're siloed pieces of data. And then we'd still have to try to like link point a to B to C together, you know, just to institutional knowledge. And, uh, there was just ended up being a lot of gaps there because we couldn't understand that a certain thing happening over here was related to an advantage over here. >>Um, now when we bring all that data into one umbrella, one data Lake, whatever we want to call it, a lot of smart analytics to that data, uh, and normalize that data in a way we can contextualize it from, you know, point a to point B all the way through the application infrastructure stack. Now, the conversation changes now, the conversation changes to here is the problem, how are we going to fix it? And we're getting there immediately versus three, four or five hours of, uh, you know, hunting and pecking and looking at things and trying to try to extrapolate what we're seeing across disparate systems. Um, and that's really valuable. And in what that does is now we can change the conversation for measuring things. And in server up time and data center, performance metrics as to how are we performing as a business? How are we overall in, in real time, how are businesses being impacted by service disruption? >>We know how much money losing per minute hour, or what have you, uh, and what that translate lights into brand damage and things along those lines, that people are very interested in that. And, you know, what is the effect of making decisions either brief from a product change side? You know, if we're, we're, we're always changing the mobile apps and we're always changing the website, but do we understand what value that brings us or what negative impact that has? We can measure that now and also sales, marketing, um, they run a campaign here's your, you know, coupon for 12% off today only, uh, what does that drive to us with user engagement? We can measure that now in real time, we don't have to wait for those answers anymore. And I think, you know, having all those data and understanding the cause and effect of things increases, it enhances these feedback loops of we're making decisions as a business, as a whole to make, bring better value to our customers. >>You know, how does that tie into ops and dev initiatives? How does everything that we do if I make a change to the underlying architectures that help move the needle forward, does that hinder things, uh, all these things factor into it. In fact, there into the customer experience, which is what we're trying to do at the end of the day, w w whether operations people like it or not, we are all in the customer experience business now. And we have to realize that and work closer than ever with our business and dev partners to make sure we're delivering the highest level of customer experience we can. >>Uh, customer experience is absolutely critical for a number of reasons. I always kind of think it's inextricably linked with employee experience, but let's talk about long-term value because as organizations and every industry has pivoted multiple times this year and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future, for them to be able to get immediate value that let's, let's not just stop the bleeding, but let's allow them to get a competitive advantage and be really become resilient. What are some of the, uh, applications that AI ops can deliver with respect to long-term value for an organization? >>Yeah, and I think that it's, you know, you touched upon this a very important point that there is a set of short term goals you want to achieve, but they're really going to be looking towards 12, 18 months down the road. What is it going to have done for you? And I think this helps framing out for you what's most important because it'd be different for every enterprise. Um, and it also shows the ROI of doing this because there is some, you know, change is going to be involved with things you're gonna have to do. But when you look at the, the, the longer time horizon of what it brings to your business as a whole, uh it's to me, at least it all seems, it seems like a no brainer to not do it. Um, you know, thinking about the basic things, like, you know, faster remediation of, of, uh, client impacting incidents, or maybe, maybe even predictive of sort of detection of these incidents that will affect clients. >>So now you're getting, you know, at scale, you know, it's very hard to do when you have hundreds of thousands of optics of the management that relate to each other, but now you're having letting the machines and the intelligence layer find out where that problem is. You know, it's not the red thing, it's the yellow thing. Go look at that. Um, it's reducing the amount of finger pointing and what have you like resolved between teams now, everybody's looking at the same data, the same sort of, uh, symptoms and like, Oh yeah, okay. This is telling us, you know, here's the root cause you should investigate this huge, huge thing. Um, and, and it's something we never thought we'd get to where, uh, this, this is where we smart enough to tell us these things, but this, again, this is the power of having all the data under one umbrella >>And the smart analytics. >>Um, and I think really, you know, it's a boat. Uh, if you look at where infrastructure and operations people are today, and especially, you know, eight months, nine months, whatever it is into the pandemic, uh, a lot of them are getting really burnt out with doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again. Um, just trying to keep the lights on, you know, we need, we need to extract those things for those people, uh, just because it just makes no sense to do something over and over again, the same remediation step, just we should automate those things. So getting that sort of, uh, you know, drudgery off their hands, if you will, and, and get them into, into all their important things they should be doing, you know, they're really hard to solve problems. That's where the human shine, um, and that's where, you know, having a, you know, really high level engineers, that's what they should be doing, you know, and just being able to do things I >>Think in a much faster, >>In a more efficient manner, when you think about an incident occurring, right. In, in a level, one technician picks that up and he goes and triaged that maybe run some tests. He has a script, >>Uh, or she, uh, and, >>You know, uh, they open a ticket and they enrich the ticket. They call it some log files. They can look up for the servers on it. You're in an hour and a half into an incident before anyone's even looked at it. If we could automate all of that, >>Why wouldn't we, that makes it easier for everyone. Um, >>Yeah. And I really think that's where the future is, is, is, is bringing this intelligent automation to bear, to take, knock down all the little things that consume the really, the most amount of time. When you think about it, if you aggregate it over the course of a quarter or a year, a great deal of your time is spent just doing that minutiae again, why don't we automate that? And we should. So I really think that's, that's where you get to look long-term. I think also the sense of we're going to be able to measure everything in the sense of business KPIs versus just IT-centric KPIs. That's really where we going to get to in the digital age. And I think we waited too long to do that. I think our operations models were all voted. I think, uh, you know, a lot of, a lot of the KPIs we look at today are completely outmoded. They don't really change if you think about it. When we look at the monthly reports over the course of a year, uh, so let's do something different. And now having all this data and the smart analytics, we can do something different. Absolutely. I'm glad >>That you brought up kind of looking at the impact that AI ops can make on, on minutiae and burnout. That's a really huge problem that so many of us are facing in any industry. And we know that there's some amount of this that's going to continue for a while longer. So let's get our let's leverage intelligent automation to your point, because we can to be able to allow our people to not just be more efficient, but to be making a bigger impact. And there's that mental component there that I think is absolutely critical. I do want to ask you what are some of these? So for those folks going, all right, we've got to do this. It makes sense. We see some short-term things that we need. We need short-term value. We need long-term value as you've just walked us through. What are some of the obstacles that you'd say, Hey, be on the lookout for this to wipe it out of the way. >>Yeah. I, I think there's, you know, when you think about the obstacles, I think people don't think about what are big changes for their organization, right? You know, they're, they're going to change process. They're going to change the way teams interact. They're they're going to change a lot of things, but they're all for the better. So what we're traditionally really bad in infrastructure and operations is communication, marketing, a new initiative, right? We don't go out and get our peers agreement to it where the product owner is, you know, and say, okay, this is what it gets you. This is where it changes. People just hear I'm losing something, I'm losing control over something. You're going to get rid of the tools that I have, but I love I've spent years building out perfecting, um, and that's threatening to people and understandably so because people think if I start losing tools, I start losing head count. >>And then, whereas my department at that point, um, but that's not what this is all about. Uh, this, this isn't a replacement for people. This isn't a replacement for teams. This isn't augmentation. This is getting them back to doing the things they should be doing and less of the stuff they shouldn't be doing. And frankly, it's, it's about providing better services. So when in the end, it's counterintuitive to be against it because it's gonna make it operations look better. It's gonna make us show us that we are the thought leaders in delivering digital services that we can, um, constantly be perfecting the way we're doing it. And Oh, by the way, we can help the business be better. Also at the same time. Uh, I think some of the mistakes people really don't make, uh, really do make, uh, is not looking at their processes today, trying to figure out what they're gonna look like tomorrow when we bring in advanced automation and intelligence, uh, but also being prepared for what the future state is, you know, in talking to one company, they were like, yeah, we're so excited for this. >>Uh, we, we got rid of our old 15 year old laundering system and the same day we stepped a new system. Uh, one problem we had though, was we weren't ready for the amount of incidents that had generated on day one. And it wasn't because we did anything wrong or the system was wrong or what have you. It did the right thing actually, almost too. Well, what it did is it uncovered a lot of really small incidents through advanced correlations. We didn't know we had, so there were things lying out there that were always like, huh, that's weird. That system acts strange sometimes, but we can never pin it down. We found all of those things, which is good. It goes, but it kind of made us all kind of sit back and think, and then our readership are these guys doing their job. Right? >>And then we had to go through an evolution of, you know, just explaining we were 15 years behind from a visibility standpoint to our environment, but technologies that we deployed in applications had moved ahead and modernized. So this is like a cautionary tale of falling too far behind from a sort of a monitoring and intelligence and automation standpoint. Um, so I thought that was a really good story for something like, think about as Eagle would deploy these modern systems. But I think if he really, you know, the marketing to people, so they're not threatened, I think thinking about your process and then what's, what's your day one and then look like, and then what's your six and 12 months after that looks like, I think settling all that stuff upfront just sets you up for success. >>All right. Rich, take us home here. Let's summarize. How can clients build a business case for AI ops? What do you recommend? >>Yeah. You know, I actually get that question a lot. It's usually, uh, almost always the number one, uh, question in, in, um, you know, webinars like this and conversations that, that the audience puts in. So I wouldn't be surprised, but if that was true, uh, going forward from this one, um, yeah, people are like, you know, Hey, we're all in. We want to do this. We know this is the way forward, but the guy who writes the checks, the CIO, the VP of ops is like, you know, I I've signed lots of checks over the years for tools wise is different. Um, and when I guide people to do is to sit back and, and start doing some hard math, right. Uh, one of the things that resonates with the leadership is dollars and cents. It's not percentages. So saying, you know, it's, it brings us a 63% reduction and MTTR is not going to resonate. >>Uh, Oh, even though it's a really good number, you know, uh, I think what it is, you have to put it in terms of avoid, if we could avoid that 63%. Right. You know, um, what does that mean for our, our digital services as far as revenue, right. We know that every hour system down, I think, uh, you know, typically in the market, you see is about $500,000 an hour for enterprise. We'll add that up over the course of the year. What are you losing in revenue? Add to that brand damage loss of customers, you know, uh, Forrester puts out a really big, uh, casino, um, uh, customer experience index every year that measures that if you're delivering good Udall services, bad digital services, if you could raise that up, what does that return to you in revenue? And that's a key thing. And then you just look at the, the, uh, hours of lost productivity. >>I call it, I might call it something else, but I think it's a catchy name. Meaning if a core internal system is down say, and you know, you have a customer service desk of a thousand customer service people, and they can't do that look up or fix that problem for clients for an hour. How much money does that lose you? And you multiply it out. You know, average customer service desk person makes X amount an hour times this much time. This many times it happens. Then you start seeing the real, sort of a power of AI ops for this incident avoidance, or at least lowering the impact of these incidents. And people have put out in graphs and spreadsheets and all this, and then I'm doing some research around this actually to, to, to put out something that people can use to say, the project funds itself in six to 12 months, it's paid for itself. And then after that it's returning money to the business. Why would you not do that? And when you start framing the conversation, that way, the little light bulb turn on for the people that sign the checks. For sure. >>That's great advice for folks to be thinking about. I loved how you talked about the 63% reduction in something. I think that's great. What does it impact? How does it impact the revenue for the organization? If we're avoiding costs here, how do we drive up revenue? So having that laser focus on revenue is great advice for folks in any industry, looking to build a business case for AI ops. I think you set the stage for that rich beautifully, and you were right. This was a fun conversation. Thank you for your time. Thank you. And thanks for watching >>From around the globe with digital coverage. >>Welcome back to the Broadcom AI ops, virtual forum, Lisa Martin here talking with Eastman Nasir global product management at Verizon. We spent welcome back. >>Hi. Hello. Uh, what a pleasure. >>So 2020 the year of that needs no explanation, right? The year of massive challenges and wanting to get your take on the challenges that organizations are facing this year as the demand to deliver digital products and services has never been higher. >>Yeah. So I think this is something it's so close to all the far far, right? It's, uh, it's something that's impacted the whole world equally. And I think regardless of which industry you rent, you have been impacted by this in one form or the other, and the ICT industry, the information and communication technology industry, you know, Verizon being really massive player in that whole arena. It has just been sort of struck with this massive consummation we have talked about for a long time, we have talked about these remote surgery capabilities whereby you've got patients in Kenya who are being treated by an expert sitting in London or New York, and also this whole consciousness about, you know, our carbon footprint and being environmentally conscious. This pandemic has taught us all of that and brought us to the forefront of organization priorities, right? The demand. I think that's, that's a very natural consequence of everybody sitting at home. >>And the only thing that can keep things still going is this data communication, right? But I wouldn't just say that that is, what's kind of at the heart of all of this. Just imagine if we are to realize any of these targets of the world is what leadership is setting for themselves. Hey, we have to be carbon neutral by X year as a country, as a geography, et cetera, et cetera. You know, all of these things require you to have this remote working capabilities, this remote interaction, not just between humans, but machine to machine interactions. And this there's a unique value chain, which is now getting created that you've got people who are communicating with other people or communicating with other machines, but the communication is much more. I wouldn't even use the term real time because we've used real time for voice and video, et cetera. >>We're talking low latency, microsecond decision-making that can either cut somebody's, you know, um, our trees or that could actually go and remove the tumor, that kind of stuff. So that has become a reality. Everybody's asking for it, remote learning, being an extremely massive requirement where, you know, we've had to enable these, uh, these virtual classrooms ensuring the type of connectivity, ensuring the type of type of privacy, which is just so, so critical. You can't just have everybody in a go on the internet and access a data source. You have to be concerned about the integrity and security of that data as the foremost. So I think all of these things, yes, we have not been caught off guard. We were pretty forward-looking in our plans and our evolution, but yes, it's fast track the journey that we would probably believe we would have taken in three years. It has brought that down to two quarters where we've had to execute them. >>Right. Massive acceleration. All right. So you articulated the challenges really well. And a lot of the realities that many of our viewers are facing. Let's talk now about motivations, AI ops as a tool, as a catalyst for helping organizations overcome those challenges. >>So yeah. Now on that I said, you can imagine, you know, it requires microsecond decision-making which human being on this planet can do microsecond decision-making on complex network infrastructure, which is impacting end user applications, which have multitudes of effect. You know, in real life, I use the example of a remote surgeon. Just imagine that, you know, even because of you just use your signal on the quality of that communication for that microsecond, it could be the difference between killing somebody in saving somebody's life. And it's not predictable. We talk about autonomous vehicles. Uh, we talk about this transition to electric vehicles, smart motorways, et cetera, et cetera, in federal environment, how is all of that going to work? You have so many different components coming in. You don't just have a network and security anymore. You have software defined networking. That's coming, becoming a part of that. >>You have mobile edge computing that is rented for the technologies. 5g enables we're talking augmented reality. We're talking virtual reality. All of these things require that resources and why being carbon conscious. We told them we just want to build a billion data centers on this planet, right? We, we have to make sure that resources are given on demand and the best way of resources can be given on demand and could be most efficient is that the thing is being made at million microsecond and those resources are accordingly being distributed, right? If you're relying on people, sipping their coffees, having teas, talking to somebody else, you know, just being away on holiday. I don't think we're going to be able to handle that one that we have already stepped into. Verizon's 5g has already started businesses on that transformational journey where they're talking about end user experience personalization. >>You're going to have events where people are going to go, and it's going to be three-dimensional experiences that are purely customized for you. How, how does that all happen without this intelligence sitting there and a network with all of these multiple layers? So spectrum, it doesn't just need to be intuitive. Hey, this is my private IP traffic. This is public traffic. You know, it has to not be in two, or this is an application that I have to prioritize over another task to be intuitive to the criticality and the context of those transactions. Again, that's surgeons. So be it's much more important than postman setting and playing a video game. >>I'm glad that you think that that's excellent. Let's go into some specific use cases. What are some of the examples that you gave? Let's kind of dig deeper into some of the, what you think are the lowest hanging fruit for organizations kind of pan industry to go after. >>Excellent. Brian, and I think this, this like different ways to look at the lowest hanging fruit, like for somebody like revising who is a managed services provider, you know, very comprehensive medicines, but we obviously have food timing, much lower potentially for some of our customers who want to go on that journey. Right? So for them to just go and try and harness the power of the foods might be a bit higher hanging, but for somebody like us, the immediate ones would be to reduce the number of alarms that are being generated by these overlay services. You've got your basic network, then you've got your whole software defined networking on top of that, you have your hybrid clouds, you have your edge computing coming on top of that. You know? So all of that means if there's an outage on one device on the network, I want to make this very real for everybody, right? >>It's like device and network does not stop all of those multiple applications or monitoring tools from raising and raising thousands of alarm and everyone, one capacity. If people are attending to those thousands of alarms, it's like you having a police force and there's a burglary in one time and the alarm goes off and 50 bags. How, how are you kind of make the best use of your police force? You're going to go investigate 50 bags or do you want to investigate where the problem is? So it's as real as that, I think that's the first wins where people can save so much cost, which is coming from being wasted and resources running around, trying to figure stuff out immediately. I'm tied this with network and security network and security is something which has you did even the most, you know, I mean single screens in our engineering, well, we took it to have network experts, separate people, security experts, separate people to look for different things, but there are security events that can impact the performance of a network. >>And then just drop the case on the side of et cetera, which could be falsely attributed to the metric. And then if you've got multiple parties, which are then the chapter clear stakeholders, you can imagine the blame game that goes on finding fingers, taking names, not taking responsibility that don't has all this happened. This is the only way to bring it all together to say, okay, this is what takes priority. If there's an event that has happened, what is its correlation to the other downstream systems, devices, components, and these are applications. And then subsequently, you know, like isolating it to the right cost where you can most effectively resolve that problem. Thirdly, I would say on demand, virtualized resource, virtualized resources, the heart and soul, the spirit of status that you can have them on demand. So you can automate the allocation of these resources based on customer's consumption their peaks, their cramps, all of that comes in. >>You see, Hey, typically on a Wednesday, the traffic was up significantly for this particular application, you know, going to this particular data center, you could have this automated system, uh, which is just providing those resources, you know, on demand. And so it is to have a much better commercial engagement with customers and just a much better service assurance model. And then one more thing on top of that, which is very critical is that as I was saying, giving that intelligence to the networks to start having context of the criticality of a transaction, that doesn't make sense to them. You can't have that because for that, you need to have this, you know, monkey their data. You need to have multi-cam system, which are monitoring and controlling different aspects of your overall end user application value chain to be communicating with each other. And, you know, that's the only way to sort of achieve that goal. And that only happens with AI. It's not possible >>So it was when you clearly articulated some obvious, low hanging fruit and use cases that organizations can go after. Let's talk now about some of the considerations, you talked about the importance of a network and AI ops, the approach I assume, needs to be modular support needs to be heterogeneous. Talk to us about some of those key considerations that you would recommend. >>Absolutely. So again, basically starting with the network, because if there's, if the metrics sitting at the middle of all of this is not working, then things can communicate with each other, right? And the cloud doesn't work, nothing metal. That's the hardest part of this, but that's the frequency. When you talk about machine to machine communication or IOT, it's just the biggest transformation of the span of every company is going for IOT now to drive those costs, efficiencies, and had, something's got some experience, the integrity of the topic karma, right? The security, integrity of that. How do you maintain integrity of your data beyond just a secure network components? That is true, right? That's where you're getting to the whole arena blockchain technologies, where you have to use digital signatures or barcodes that machine then, and then an intelligence system is automatically able to validate and verify the integrity of the data and the commands that are being executed by those end-user told them what I need to tell them that. >>So it's IOT machines, right? That is paramount. And if anybody is not keeping that into their equation, that in its own self is any system that is therefore maintaining the integrity of your commands and your hold that sits on those, those machines. Right? Second, you have your network. You need to have any else platform, which is able to restless all the fast network information, et cetera. And coupled with that data integrity piece, because for the management, ultimately they need to have a coherent view of the analytics, et cetera, et cetera. They need to know where the problems are again, right? So let's say if there's a problem with the integrity of the commands that are being executed by the machine, that's a much bigger problem than not being able to communicate with that machine and the best thing, because you'd rather not talk to the machine or have to do anything if it's going to start doing wrong things. >>So I think that's where it is. It's very intuitive. It's not true. You have to have subsequently if you have some kind of faith and let me use that use case self autonomous vehicles. Again, I think we're going to see in the next five years, because he's smart with the rates, et cetera, it won't separate autonomous cars. It's much more efficient, it's much more space, et cetera, et cetera. So within that equation, you're going to have systems which will be specialists in looking at aspects and transactions related to those systems. For example, in autonomous moving vehicles, brakes are much more important than the Vipers, right? So this kind of intelligence, it will be multiple systems who have to sit, N nobody has to, one person has to go in one of these systems. I think these systems should be open source enough that they, if you were able to integrate them, right, if something's sitting in the cloud, you were able to integrate for that with obviously the regard of the security and integrity of your data that has to traverse from one system to the other extremely important. >>So I'm going to borrow that integrity theme for a second, as we go into our last question, and that is this kind of take a macro look at the overall business impact that AI ops can help customers make. I'm thinking of, you know, the integrity of teams aligning business in it, which we probably can't talk about enough. We're helping organizations really effectively measure KPIs that deliver that digital experience that all of us demanding consumers expect. What's the overall impact. What would you say in summary fashion? >>So I think the overall impact is a lot of costs. That's customized and businesses gives the time to the time of enterprises. Defense was inevitable. It's something that for the first time, it will come to life. And it's something that is going to, you know, start driving cost efficiencies and consciousness and awareness within their own business, which is obviously going to have, you know, it domino kind of an effect. So one example being that, you know, you have problem isolation. I talked about network security, this multi-layers architecture, which enables this new world of 5g, um, at the heart of all of it, it has to identify the problem to the source, right? Not be bogged down by 15 different things that are going wrong. What is causing those 15 things to go wrong, right? That speed to isolation in its own sense can make millions and millions of dollars to organizations after we organize it. Next one is obviously overall impacted customer experience. Uh, 5g was given out of your customers, expecting experiences from you, even if you're not expecting to deliver them in 2021, 2022, it would have customers asking for those experience or walking away, if you do not provide those experience. So it's almost like a business can do nothing every year. They don't have to reinvest if they just want to die on the line, businesses want remain relevant. >>Businesses want to adopt the latest and greatest in technology, which enables them to, you know, have that superiority and continue it. So from that perspective that continue it, he will read that they write intelligence systems that tank rationalizing information and making decisions supervised by people, of course were previously making some of those. >>That was a great summary because you're right, you know, with how demanding consumers are. We don't get what we want quickly. We churn, right? We go somewhere else and we could find somebody that can meet those expectations. So it has been thanks for doing a great job of clarifying the impact and the value that AI ops can bring to organizations that sounds really now is we're in this even higher demand for digital products and services, which is not going away. It's probably going to only increase it's table stakes for any organization. Thank you so much for joining me today and giving us your thoughts. >>Pleasure. Thank you. We'll be right back with our next segment. >>Digital applications and services are more critical to a positive customer and employee experience than ever before. But the underlying infrastructure that supports these apps and services has become increasingly complex and expanding use of multiple clouds, mobile and microservices, along with modern and legacy infrastructure can make it difficult to pinpoint the root cause when problems occur, it can be even more difficult to determine the business impact your problems that occur and resolve them efficiently. AI ops from Broadcom can help first by providing 360 degree visibility, whether you have hybrid cloud or a cloud native AI ops from Broadcom provides a clear line of sight, including apt to infrastructure and network visibility across hybrid environments. Second, the solution gives you actionable insights by correlating an aggregating data and applying AI and machine learning to identify root causes and even predict problems before users are impacted. Third AI ops from Broadcom provides intelligent automation that identifies potential solutions when problems occur applied to the best one and learns from the effectiveness to improve response in case the problem occurs. Again, finally, the solution enables organizations to achieve digit with jelly by providing feedback loops across development and operations to allow for continuous improvements and innovation through these four capabilities. AI ops from Broadcom can help you reduce service outages, boost, operational efficiency, and effectiveness and improve customer and employee experience. To learn more about AI ops from Broadcom, go to broadcom.com/ai ops from around the globe. >>It's the cube with digital coverage of AI ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome back to the AI ops virtual forum, Lisa Martin here with Srinivasan, Roger Rajagopal, the head of product and strategy at Broadcom. Raj, welcome here, Lisa. I'm excited for our conversation. So I wanted to dive right into a term that we hear all the time, operational excellence, right? We hear it everywhere in marketing, et cetera, but why is it so important to organizations as they head into 2021? And tell us how AI ops as a platform can help. >>Yeah. Well, thank you. First off. I wanna, uh, I want to welcome our viewers back and, uh, I'm very excited to, uh, to share, um, uh, more info on this topic. You know, uh, here's what we believe as we work with large organizations, we see all our organizations are poised to get out of the, uh, the pandemic and look for a brood for their own business and helping customers get through this tough time. So fiscal year 2021, we believe is going to be a combination of, uh, you know, resiliency and agility at the, at the same time. So operational excellence is critical because the business has become more digital, right? There are going to be three things that are going to be more sticky. Uh, you know, remote work is going to be more sticky, um, cost savings and efficiency is going to be an imperative for organizations and the continued acceleration of digital transformation of enterprises at scale is going to be in reality. So when you put all these three things together as a, as a team that is, uh, you know, that's working behind the scenes to help the businesses succeed, operational excellence is going to be, make or break for organizations, >>Right with that said, if we kind of strip it down to the key capabilities, what are those key capabilities that companies need to be looking for in an AI ops solution? >>Yeah, you know, so first and foremost, AI ops means many things to many, many folks. So let's take a moment to simply define it. The way we define AI ops is it's a system of intelligence, human augmented system that brings together full visibility across app infra and network elements that brings together disparate data sources and provides actionable intelligence and uniquely offers intelligent automation. Now, the, the analogy many folks draw is the self-driving car. I mean, we are in the world of Teslas, uh, but you know, uh, but self-driving data center is it's too far away, right? Autonomous systems are still far away. However, uh, you know, application of AI ML techniques to help deal with volume velocity, veracity of information, uh, is, is critical. So that's how we look at AI ops and some of the key capabilities that we, uh, that we, uh, that we work with our customers to help them on our own for eight years. >>Right? First one is eyes and ears. What we call full stack observability. If you do not know what is happening in your systems, uh, you know, that that serve up your business services. It's going to be pretty hard to do anything, uh, in terms of responsiveness, right? So from stack observability, the second piece is what we call actionable insights. So when you have disparate data sources, tools, sprawls data coming at you from, uh, you know, uh, from a database systems, it systems customer management systems, ticketing systems. How do you find the needle from the haystack? And how do you respond rapidly from a myriad of problems as CEO of red? The third area is what we call intelligent automation. Well, identifying the problem to act on is important, and then acting on automating that and creating, uh, a recommendation system where, uh, you know, you can be proactive about it is even more important. And finally, all of this focuses on efficiency. What about effectiveness? Effectiveness comes when you create a feedback loop, when what happens in production is related to your support systems and your developers so that they can respond rapidly. So we call that continuous feedback. So these are the four key capabilities that, uh, you know, uh, you should look for in an AI ops system. And that's what we offer as well. >>Russia, there's four key capabilities that businesses need to be looking for. I'm wondering how those help to align business. And it it's, again like operational excellence. It's something that we talk about a lot is the alignment of business. And it a lot more challenging, easier said than done, right. But I want you to explain how can AI ops help with that alignment and align it outputs to business outcomes? >>Yeah. So, you know, one of the things, uh, I'm going to say something that is, uh, that is, uh, that is simple, but, but, but this harder, but alignment is not on systems alignment is with people, right? So when people align, when organizations align, when cultures align, uh, dramatic things can happen. So in the context of AI ops VC, when, when SRE is aligned with the DevOps engineers and information architects and, uh, uh, you know, it operators, uh, you know, they enable organizations to reduce the gap between intent and outcome or output and outcome that said, uh, you know, these personas need mechanisms to help them better align, right. Help them better visualize, see the, you know, what we call single source of truth, right? So there are four key things that I want to call out. When we work with large enterprises, we find that customer journey alignment with the, you know, what we call it systems is critical. >>So how do you understand your business imperatives and your customer journey goals, whether it is car to a purchase or whether it is, uh, you know, bill shock scenarios and Swan alignment on customer journey to your it systems is one area that you can reduce the gap. The second area is how do you create a scenario where your teams can find problems before your customers do right outage scenarios and so on. So that's the second area of alignment. The third area of alignment is how can you measure business impact driven services? Right? There are several services that an organization offers versus an it system. Some services are more critical to the business than others, and these change in a dynamic environment. So how do you, how do you understand that? How do you measure that and how, how do you find the gaps there? So that's the third area of alignment that we, that we help and last but not least there are, there are things like NPS scores and others that, that help us understand alignment, but those are more long-term. But in the, in the context of, uh, you know, operating digitally, uh, you want to use customer experience and business, uh, you know, a single business outcome, uh, as a, as a key alignment factor, and then work with your systems of engagement and systems of interaction, along with your key personas to create that alignment. It's a people process technology challenge. >>So, whereas one of the things that you said there is that it's imperative for the business to find a problem before a customer does, and you talked about outages there, that's always a goal for businesses, right. To prevent those outages, how can AI ops help with that? Yeah, >>So, you know, outages, uh, talk, you know, go to resiliency of a system, right? And they also go to, uh, uh, agility of the same system, you know, if you're a customer and if you're whipping up your mobile app and it takes more than three milliseconds, uh, you know, you're probably losing that customer, right. So outages mean different things, you know, and there's an interesting website called down detector.com that actually tracks all the old pages of publicly available services, whether it's your bank or your, uh, you know, tele telecom service or a mobile service and so on and so forth. In fact, the key question around outages for, from, uh, from, uh, you know, executives are the question of, are you ready? Right? Are you ready to respond to the needs of your customers and your business? Are you ready to rapidly resolve an issue that is impacting customer experience and therefore satisfaction? >>Are you creating a digital trust system where customers can be, you know, um, uh, you know, customers can feel that their information is secure when they transact with you, all of these, getting into the notion of resiliency and outages. Now, you know, one of the things that, uh, that I, I often, uh, you know, work with customers around, you know, would that be find as the radius of impact is important when you deal with outages? What I mean by that is problems occur, right? How do you respond? How quickly do you take two seconds, two minutes, 20 minutes, two hours, 20 hours, right? To resolve the problem that radius of impact is important. That's where, you know, you have to bring a gain people, process technology together to solve that. And the key thing is you need a system of intelligence that can aid your teams, you know, look at the same set of parameters so that you can respond faster. That's the key here. >>We look at digital transformation at scale. Raj, how does AI ops help influence that? >>You know, um, I'm going to take a slightly long-winded way to answer this question. See when it comes to digital transformation at scale, the focus on business purpose and business outcome becomes extremely critical. And then the alignment of that to your digital supply chain, right, are the, are the, are the key factors that differentiate winners in the, in their digital transformation game? Really, what we have seen, uh, with, with winners is they operate very differently. Like for example, uh, you know, Nike matures, its digital business outcomes by shoes per second, right? Uh, Apple by I-phones per minute, Tesla by model threes per month, are you getting this, getting it right? I mean, you want to have a clear business outcome, which is a measure of your business, uh, in effect, I mean, ENC, right? Which, which, uh, um, my daughter use and I use very well. >>Right. Uh, you know, uh, they measure by revenue per hour, right? I mean, so these are key measures. And when you have a key business outcome measure like that, you can everything else, because you know what these measures, uh, you know, uh, for a bank, it may be deposits per month, right now, when you move money from checking account to savings account, or when you do direct deposits, those are, you know, banks need liquidity and so on and so forth. But, you know, the, the key thing is that single business outcome has a Starburst effect inside the it organization that touches a single money moment from checking a call to savings account can touch about 75 disparate systems internally. Right? So those think about it, right? I mean, all, all we're doing is moving money from checking account a savings account. Now that goats into a it production system, there are several applications. >>There is a database, there is, there are infrastructures, there are load balancers that are webs. You know, you know, the web server components, which then touches your, your middleware component, which is a queuing system, right. Which then touches your transactional system. Uh, and, uh, you know, which may be on your main frames, what we call mobile to mainframe scenario, right? And we are not done yet. Then you have a security and regulatory compliance system that you have to touch a fraud prevention system that you have to touch, right? A state department regulation that you may have to meet and on and on and on, right? This is the chat that it operations teams face. And when you have millions of customers transacting, right, suddenly this challenge cannot be managed by human beings alone. So therefore you need a system of intelligence that augments human intelligence and acts as your, you know, your, your eyes and ears in a way to, to point pinpoint where problems are. >>Right. So digital transformation at scale really requires a very well thought out AI ops system, a platform, an open extensible platform that, uh, you know, uh, that is heterogeneous in nature because there's tools, products in organizations. There is a lot of databases in systems. There are millions of, uh, uh, you know, customers and hundreds of partners and vendors, you know, making up that digital supply chain. So, you know, AI ops is at the center of an enabling an organization achieve digital op you know, transformation at scale last but not least. You need continuous feedback loop. Continuous feedback loop is the ability for a production system to inform your dev ops teams, your finance teams, your customer experience teams, your cost modeling teams about what is going on so that they can so that they can reduce the intent, come gap. >>All of this need to come together, what we call BizOps. >>That was a great example of how you talked about the Starburst effect. I actually never thought about it in that way, when you give the banking example, but what you should is the magnitude of systems. The fact that people alone really need help with that, and why intelligent automation and AI ops can be transformative and enable that scale. Raj, it's always a pleasure to talk with you. Thanks for joining me today. And we'll be right back with our next segment. Welcome back to the AI ops virtual forum. We've heard from our guests about the value of AI ops and why and how organizations are adopting AI ops platforms. But now let's see AI ops inaction and get a practical view of AI ops to deep Dante. The head of AI ops at Broadcom is now going to take you through a quick demo. >>Hello. So they've gotta head off AI ops and automation here. What I'm going to do today is talk through some of the key capabilities and differentiators of Broadcom's CII ops solution in this solution, which can be delivered on cloud or on-prem. We bring a variety of metric alarm log and applauded data from multiple sources, EPM, NetApps, and infrastructure monitoring tools to provide a single point of observability and control. Let me start where our users mostly stock key enterprises like FSI, telcos retailers, et cetera, do not manage infrastructure or applications without having a business context. At the end of the day, they offer business services governed by SLS service level objectives and SLI service level indicators are service analytics, which can scale to a few thousand services, lets our customers create and monitor the services as per their preference. They can create a hierarchy of services based on their business practice. >>For example, here, the sub services are created based on functional subsistence for certain enterprises. It could be based on location. Users can import these services from their favorite CMDB. What's important to note that not all services are born equal. If you are a modern bank, you may want to prioritize tickets coming from digital banking, for example, and this application lets you rank them as per the KPI of your choice. We can source the availability, not merely from the state of the infrastructure, whether they're running or not. But from the SLS that represent the state of the application, when it comes to triaging issues related to the service, it is important to have a complete view of the topology. The typology can show both east-west elements from mobile to mainframe or not South elements in a network flow. This is particularly relevant for a large enterprise who could be running the systems of engagement on the cloud and system of records on mainframe inside the firewall here, you can see that the issue is related to the mainframe kick server. >>You can expand to see the actual alarm, which is sourced from the mainframe operational intelligence. Similarly, clicking on network will give the hub and spoke view of the network devices, the Cisco switches and routers. I can click on the effected router and see all the details Broadcom's solution stores, the ontological model of the typology in the form of a journal graph where one can not only view the current state of the typology, but the past as well, talking of underlying data sources, the solution uses best of the pre data stores for structured and unstructured data. We have not only leveraged the power of open source, but have actively contributed back to the community. One of the key innovations is evident in our dashboarding framework because we have enhanced the open source Grafana technology to support these diverse data sources here. You can see a single dashboard representing applications to infrastructure, to mainframe again, sourcing a variety of data from these sources. >>When we talk to customers, one of the biggest challenges that they face today is related to alarms because of a proliferation of tools. They are currently drowning in an ocean of hundreds and thousands of alarms. This increases the Elmont support cost to tens of dollars per ticket, and also affects LTO efficiency leading to an average of five to six hours of meantime to resolution here is where we have the state of the art innovation utilizing the power of machine learning and ontology to arrive at the root cause we not only clusterize alarms based on text, but employ the technique of 41st. We look at the topology then at the time window duplicate text based on NLP. And lastly learn from continuous training of the model to deduce what we call situations. This is an example of a situation. As you can see, we provide a time-based evidence of how things unfolded and arrive at a root cause. >>Lastly, the solution provides a three 60 degree closed loop remediation either through a ticketing system or by direct invocation of automation actions instead of firing hard-coded automation runbooks for certain conditions, the tool leverage is machine learning to rank automation actions based on past heuristics. That's why we call it intelligent automation to summarize AI ops from Broadcom helps you achieve operational excellence through full stack observability, coupled with AIML that applies across modern hybrid cloud environments, as well as legacy ones uniquely. It ties these insights with intelligent automation to improve customer experience. Thank you for watching from around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AI ops virtual forum brought to you by Broadcom. >>Welcome to our final segment today. So we've discussed today. The value that AI ops will bring to organizations in 2021, we'll discuss that through three different perspectives. And so now we want to bring those perspectives together and see if we can get a consensus on where AI ops needs to go for folks to be successful with it in the future. So bringing back some folks Richland is back with us. Senior analysts, serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forrester smartness here is also back in global product management at Verizon and Srinivasan, Reggie Gopaul head of product and strategy at Broadcom guys. Great to have you back. So let's jump in and rich, we're going to, we're going to start with you, but we are going to get all three of you, a chance to answer the questions. So we've talked about why organizations should adopt AI ops, but what happens if they choose not to what challenges would they face? Basically what's the cost of organizations doing nothing >>Good question, because I think in operations for a number of years, we've kind of stand stood, Pat, where we are, where we're afraid change things sometimes, or we just don't think about a tooling as often. The last thing to change because we're spending so much time doing project work and modernization and fighting fires on a daily basis. >>Problem is going to get worse. If we do nothing, >>You know, we're building new architectures like containers and microservices, which means more things to mind and keep running. Um, we're building highly distributed systems. We're moving more and more into this hybrid world, a multi-cloud world, uh, it's become over-complicate and I'll give a short anecdote. I think, eliminate this. Um, when I go to conferences and give speeches, it's all infrastructure operations people. And I say, you know, how many people have three X, five X, you know, uh, things to monitor them. They had, you know, three years ago, two years ago, and everyone's saying how many people have hired more staff in that time period, zero hands go up. That's the gap we have to fill. And we have to fill that through better automation, more intelligent systems. It's the only way we're going to be able to fill back out. >>What's your perspective, uh, if organizations choose not to adopt AI ops. Yeah. So I'll do that. Yeah. So I think it's, I would just relate it to a couple of things that probably everybody >>Tired off lately and everybody can relate to. And this would resonate that we have 5g, which is all set to transform the world. As we know it, I don't have a lot of communication with these smart cities, smart communities, IOT, which is going to make us pivotal to the success of businesses. And as you've seen with this call with, you know, transformation of the world, that there's a, there's a much bigger cost consciousness out there. People are trying to become much more, forward-looking much more sustainable. And I think at the heart of all of this, that the necessity that you have intelligent systems, which are bastardizing more than enough information that previously could've been overlooked because if you don't measure engagement, not going right. People not being on the same page of this using two examples or hundreds of things, you know, that play a part in things, but not coming together in the best possible way. So I think it has an absolute necessity to drive those cost efficiencies rather than, you know, left right and center laying off people who are like 10 Mattel to your business and have a great tribal knowledge of your business. So to speak, you can drive these efficiencies through automating a lot of those tasks that previously were being very manually intensive or resource intensive. And you could allocate those resources towards doing much better things, which let's be very honest going into 20, 21 after what we've seen with 2020, it's going to be mandate treat. >>And so Raj, I saw you shaking your head there when he was mom was sharing his thoughts. What are your thoughts about that sounds like you agree. Yeah. I mean, uh, you know, uh, to put things in perspective, right? I mean we're firmly in the digital economy, right? Digital economy, according to the Bureau of economic analysis is 9% of the U S GDP. Just, you know, think about it in, in, in, in, in the context of the GDP, right? It's only ranked lower, slightly lower than manufacturing, which is at 11.3% GDP and slightly about finance and insurance, which is about seven and a half percent GDP. So the digital economy is firmly in our lives, right. And as Huisman was talking about it, you know, software eats the world and digital, operational excellence is critical for customers, uh, to, uh, you know, to, uh, to drive profitability and growth, uh, in the digital economy. >>It's almost, you know, the key is digital at scale. So when, uh, when rich talks about some of the challenges and when Huseman highlights 5g as an example, those are the things that, that, that come to mind. So to me, what is the cost or perils of doing nothing? You know, uh, it's not an option. I think, you know, more often than not, uh, you know, C-level execs are asking head of it and they are key influencers, a single question, are you ready? Are you ready in the context of addressing spikes in networks because of the pandemic scenario, are you ready in the context of automating away toil? Are you ready to respond rapidly to the needs of the digital business? I think AI ops is critical. >>That's a great point. Roger, where does stick with you? So we got kind of consensus there, as you said, wrapping it up. This is basically a, not an option. This is a must to go forward for organizations to be successful. So let's talk about some quick wins, or as you talked about, you know, organizations and sea levels asking, are you ready? What are some quick wins that that organizations can achieve when they're adopting AI? >>You know, um, immediate value. I think I would start with a question. How often do your customers find problems in your digital experience before you do think about that? Right. You know, if you, if you, you know, there's an interesting web, uh, website, um, uh, you know, down detector.com, right? I think, uh, in, in Europe there is an equal amount of that as well. It ha you know, people post their digital services that are down, whether it's a bank that, uh, you know, customers are trying to move money from checking account, the savings account and the digital services are down and so on and so forth. So some and many times customers tend to find problems before it operations teams do. So a quick win is to be proactive and immediate value is visibility. If you do not know what is happening in your complex systems that make up your digital supply chain, it's going to be hard to be responsive. So I would start there >>Visibility this same question over to you from Verizon's perspective, quick wins. >>Yeah. So I think first of all, there's a need to ingest this multi-care spectrum data, which I don't think is humanly possible. You don't have people having expertise, you know, all the seven layers of the OSI model and then across network and security and at the application level. So I think you need systems which are now able to get that data. It shouldn't just be wasted reports that you're paying for on a monthly basis. It's about time that you started making the most of those in the form of identifying what are the efficiencies within your ecosystem. First of all, what are the things, you know, which could be better utilized subsequently you have the >>Opportunity to reduce the noise of a trouble tickets handling. It sounds pretty trivial, but >>An average you can imagine every trouble tickets has the cost in dollars, right? >>So, and there's so many tickets and there's art >>That get created on a network and across an end user application value, >>We're talking thousands, you know, across and end user >>Application value chain could be million in >>A year. So, and so many of those are not really, >>He, you know, a cause of concern because the problem is something. >>So I think that whole triage is an immediate cost saving and the bigger your network, the bigger >>There's a cost of things, whether you're a provider, whether you're, you know, the end customer at the end of the day, not having to deal with problems, which nobody can resolve, which are not meant to be dealt with. There's so many of those situations, right, where service has just been adopted, >>Which is just coordinate quality, et cetera, et cetera. So many reasons. So those are the, >>So there's some of the immediate cost saving them. They are really, really significant. >>Secondly, I would say Raj mentioned something about, you know, the user, >>Your application value chain, and an understanding of that, especially with this hybrid cloud environment, >>Et cetera, et cetera, right? The time it takes to identify a problem in an end user application value chain across the seven layers that I mentioned with the OSI reference model across network and security and the application environment. It's something that >>In its own self has massive cost to business, >>Right? That could be >>No sale transactions that could be obstructed because of this. There could be, and I'm going to use a really interesting example. >>We talk about IOT. The integrity of the IOT machine is exciting. >>Family is pivotal in this new world that we're stepping into. >>You could be running commands, >>Super efficient. He has, everything is being told to the machine really fast with sending yeah. >>Everything there. What if it's hacked? And if that's okay, >>Robotic arm starts to involve the things you don't want it to do. >>So there's so much of that. That becomes a part of this naturally. And I believe, yes, this is not just like from a cost >>standpoint, but anything going wrong with that code base, et cetera, et cetera. These are massive costs to the business in the form of the revenue. They have lost the perception in the market as a result, the fed, >>You know, all that stuff. So >>These are a couple of very immediate problems, but then you also have the whole player virtualized resources where you can automate the allocation, you know, the quantification of an orchestration of those virtualized resources, rather than a person having to, you know, see something and then say, Oh yeah, I need to increase capacity over here, because then it's going to have this particular application. You have systems doing this stuff and to, you know, Roger's point your customer should not be identifying your problems before you, because this digital is where it's all about perception. >>Absolutely. We definitely don't want the customers finding it before. So rich, let's wrap this particular question up with you from that senior analyst perspective, how can companies use make big impact quickly with AI ops? Yeah, >>Yeah, I think, you know, and it was been really summed up some really great use cases there. I think with the, uh, you know, one of the biggest struggles we've always had in operations is isn't, you know, the mean time to resolve. We're pretty good at resolving the things. We just have to find the thing we have to resolve. That's always been the problem and using these advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms now across all machine and application data, our tendency is humans is to look at the console and say, what's flashing red. That must be what we have to fix, but it could be something that's yellow, somewhere else, six services away. And we have made things so complicated. And I think this is what it was when I was saying that we can't get there anymore on our own. We need help to get there in all of this stuff that the outline. >>So, so well builds up to a higher level thing of what is the customer experience about what is the customer journey? And we've struggled for years in the digital world and measuring that a day-to-day thing. We know an online retail. If you're having a bad experience at one retailer, you just want your thing. You're going to go to another retailer, brand loyalty. Isn't one of like it, wasn't a brick and mortal world where you had a department store near you. So you were loyal to that because it was in your neighborhood, um, online that doesn't exist anymore. So we need to be able to understand the customer from that first moment, they touch a digital service all the way from their, their journey through that digital service, the lowest layer, whether it be a database or the network, what have you, and then back to them again, and we're not understanding, is that a good experience? >>We gave them. How does that compare to last week's experience? What should we be doing to improve that next week? Uh, and I think companies are starting and then the pandemic certainly, you know, push this timeline. If you listened to the, the, the CEO of Microsoft, he's like, you know, 10 years of digital transformation written down. And the first several months of this, um, in banks and in financial institutions, I talked to insurance companies, aren't slowing down. They're trying to speed up. In fact, what they've discovered is that they're, you know, obviously when we were on lockdown or what have you, they use of digital servers is spiked very high. What they've learned is they're never going to go back down. They're never going to return to pretend endemic levels. So now they're stuck with this new reality. Well, how do we service those customers and how do we make sure we keep them loyal to our brand? >>Uh, so, you know, they're looking for modernization opportunities. A lot of that that's things have been exposed. And I think Raj touched upon this very early in the conversation is visibility gaps. Now that we're on the outside, looking in at the data center, we know we architect things in a very way. Uh, we better ways of making these correlations across the Sparrow technologies to understand where the problems lies. We can give better services to our customers. And I think that's really what we're going to see a lot of the innovation and the people really clamoring for these new ways of doing things that starting, you know, now, I mean, I've seen it in customers, but I think really the push through the end of this year to next year when, you know, economy and things like that straightened out a little bit more, I think it really, people are gonna take a hard look of where they are and is, you know, AI ops the way forward for them. And I think they'll find it. The answer is yes, for sure. >>So we've, we've come to a consensus that, of what the parallels are of organizations, basically the cost of doing nothing. You guys have given some great advice on where some of those quick wins are. Let's talk about something Raj touched on earlier is organizations, are they really ready for truly automated AI? Raj, I want to start with you readiness factor. What are your thoughts? >>Uh, you know, uh, I think so, you know, we place our, her lives on automated systems all the time, right? In our, in our day-to-day lives, in the, in the digital world. I think, uh, you know, our, uh, at least the customers that I talk to our customers are, uh, are, uh, you know, uh, have a sophisticated systems. Like for example, advanced automation is a reality. If you look at social media, AI and ML and automation are used to automate away, uh, misinformation, right? If you look at financial institutions, AI and ML are used to automate away a fraud, right? So I want to ask our customers why can't we automate await oil in it, operation systems, right? And that's where our customers are. Then the, you know, uh, I'm a glass half full, uh, cleanup person, right? Uh, this pandemic has been harder on many of our customers, but I think what we have learned from our customers is they've Rose to the occasion. >>They've used digital as a key needs, right? At scale. That's what we see with, you know, when, when Huseman and his team talk about, uh, you know, network operational intelligence, right. That's what it means to us. So I think they are ready, the intersection of customer experience it and OT, operational technology is ripe for automation. Uh, and, uh, you know, I, I wanna, I wanna sort of give a shout out to three key personas in this mix. It's about people, right? One is the SRE persona, you know, site, reliability engineer. The other is the information security persona. And the third one is the it operator automation engineer persona. These folks in organizations are building a system of intelligence that can respond rapidly to the needs of their digital business. We at Broadcom, we are in the business of helping them construct a system of intelligence that will create a human augmented solution for them. Right. So when I see, when I interact with large enterprise customers, I think they, they, you know, they, they want to achieve what I would call advanced automation and AI ML solutions. And that's squarely, very I ops is, you know, is going as it, you know, when I talk to rich and what, everything that rich says, you know, that's where it's going and that's what we want to help our customers to. So, which about your perspective of organizations being ready for truly automated AI? >>I think, you know, the conversation has shifted a lot in the last, in, in pre pandemic. Uh, I'd say at the end of last year, we're, you know, two years ago, people I'd go to conferences and people come up and ask me like, this is all smoke and mirrors, right? These systems can't do this because it is such a leap forward for them, for where they are today. Right. We we've sort of, you know, in software and other systems, we iterate and we move forward slowly. So it's not a big shock. And this is for a lot of organizations that big, big leap forward where they're, they're running their operations teams today. Um, but now they've come around and say, you know what? We want to do this. We want all the automations. We want my staff not doing the low complexity, repetitive tasks over and over again. >>Um, you know, and we have a lot of those kinds of legacy systems. We're not going to rebuild. Um, but they need certain care and feeding. So why are we having operations? People do those tasks? Why aren't we automating those out? I think the other piece is, and I'll, I'll, I'll send this out to any of the operations teams that are thinking about going down this path is that you have to understand that the operations models that we're operating under in, in INO and have been for the last 25 years are super outdated and they're fundamentally broken for the digital age. We have to start thinking about different ways of doing things and how do we do that? Well, it's, it's people, organization, people are going to work together differently in an AI ops world, um, for the better. Um, but you know, there's going to be the, the age of the 40 person bridge call thing. >>Troubleshooting is going away. It's going to be three, four, five focused engineers that need to be there for that particular incident. Um, a lot of process mailer process we have in our level, one level, two engineering. What have you running of tickets, gathering of artifacts, uh, during an incident is going to be automated. That's a good thing. We should be doing those, those things by hand anymore. So I'd say that the, to people's like start thinking about what this means to your organization. Start thinking about the great things we can do by automating things away from people, having to do them over and over again. And what that means for them, getting them matched to what they want to be doing is high level engineering tasks. They want to be doing monitorization, working with new tools and technologies. Um, these are all good things that help the organization perform better as a whole great advice and great kind of some of the thoughts that you shared rich for what the audience needs to be on the lookout. For one, I want to go over to you, give me your thoughts on what the audience that should be on the lookout for, or put on your agendas in the next 12 months. >>So there's like a couple of ways to answer that question. One thing would be in the form of, you know, what are some of the things they have to be concerned about in terms of implementing this solution or harnessing its power. The other one could be, you know, what are the perhaps advantages they should look to see? So if I was to talk about the first one, let's say that, what are some of the things I have to watch out for like possible pitfalls that everybody has data, right? So yeah, there's one strategy we say, okay, you've got the data, let's see what we can do with them. But then there's the exact opposite side, which has to be considered when you're doing that analysis. What are the use cases that you're looking to drive? Right. But then use cases you have to understand, are you taking a reactive use case approach? >>Are you taking active use cases, right? Or, yeah, that's a very, very important concentration. Then you have to be very cognizant of where does this data that you have, where does it reside? What are the systems and where does it need to go to in order for this AI function to happen and subsequently if there needs to be any backward communication with all of that data in a process manner. So I think these are some of the very critical points because you can have an AI solution, which is sitting in a customer data center. It could be in a managed services provider data center, like, right, right. It could be in a cloud data center, like an AWS or something, or you could have hybrid views, et cetera, all of that stuff. So you have to be very mindful of where you're going to get the data from is going to go to what are the use cases you're trying to get out to do a bit of backward forward. >>Okay, we've got this data thing and I think it's a journey. Nobody can come in and say, Hey, you've built this fantastic thing. It's like Terminator two. I think it's a journey where we built starting with the network. My personal focus always comes down to the network and with 5g so much, so much more right with 5g, you're talking low latency communication. That's like the true power of 5g, right? It's low latency, it's ultra high bandwidth, but what's the point of that low latency. If then subsequently the actions that need to be taken to prevent any problems in application, IOT applications, remote surgeries, uh, self driving vehicles, et cetera, et cetera. What if that's where people are sitting and sipping their coffees and trying to take action that needs to be in low latency as well. Right? So these are, I think some of the fundamental things that you have to know your data, your use cases, that location, where it needs to be exchanged, what are the parameters around that for extending that data? >>And I think from that point at one word, it's all about realizing, you know, sense of business outcomes. Unless AI comes in as a digital labor that shows you, I have, I have reduced your this amount of time and that's a result of big problems or identified problems for anything. Or I have saved you this much resource in a month, in a year or whatever timeline that people want to see it. So I think those are some of the initial starting points, and then it all starts coming together. But the key is it's not one system that can do everything. You have to have a way where, you know, you can share data once you've caught all of that data into one system. Maybe you can send it to another system at make more, take more advantage, right? That system might be an AI and IOT system, which is just looking at all of your street and make it sure that Hey parents. So it's still off just to be more carbon neutral and all that great stuff, et cetera, et cetera, >>Stuff for the audience to can cigarette rush, take us time from here. What are some of the takeaways that you think the audience really needs to be laser focused on as we move forward into the next year? You know, one thing that, uh, I think a key takeaway is, um, uh, you know, as we embark on 2021, closing the gap between intent and outcome and outputs and outcome will become critical, is critical. Uh, you know, especially for, uh, you know, uh, digital transformation at scale for organizations context in the, you know, for customer experience becomes even more critical as who Swan Huseman was talking, uh, you know, being network network aware network availability is, is a necessary condition, but not sufficient condition anymore. Right? The what, what, what customers have to go towards is going from network availability to network agility with high security, uh, what we call app aware networks, right? How do you differentiate between a trade, a million dollar trade that's happening between, uh, you know, London and New York, uh, uh, versus a YouTube video training that an employee is going through? Worse is a YouTube video that millions of customers are, are >>Watching, right? Three different context, three different customer scenarios, right? That is going to be critical. And last but not least feedback loop, uh, you know, responsiveness is all about feedback loop. You cannot predict everything, but you can respond to things faster. I think these are sort of the three, three things that, uh, that, uh, you know, customers aren't going to have to have to really think about. And that's also where I believe AI ops, by the way, AI ops and I I'm. Yeah. You know, one of the points that was smart and shout out to what he was saying was heterogeneity is key, right? There is no homogeneous tool in the world that can solve problems. So you want an open extensible system of intelligence that, that can harness data from disparate data sources provide that visualization, the actionable insight and the human augmented recommendation systems that are so needed for, uh, you know, it operators to be successful. I think that's where it's going. >>Amazing. You guys just provided so much content context recommendations for the audience. I think we accomplished our goal on this. I'll call it power panel of not only getting to a consensus of what, where AI ops needs to go in the future, but great recommendations for what businesses in any industry need to be on the lookout for rich Huisman Raj, thank you for joining me today. We want to thank you for watching. This was such a rich session. You probably want to watch it again. Thanks for your time. Thanks so much for attending and participating in the AI OBS virtual forum. We really appreciate your time and we hope you really clearly understand the value that AI ops platforms can deliver to many types of organizations. I'm Lisa Martin, and I want to thank our speakers today for joining. We have rich lane from Forrester who's fund here from Verizon and Raj from Broadcom. Thanks everyone. Stay safe..

>>From around the globe with digital coverage brought to you by Broadcom. >>So our final segment today, so we've discussed today, the value that AI ops will bring to organizations in 2021, we'll discuss that through three different perspectives. And so now we want to bring those perspectives together and see if we can get a consensus on where AI ops needs to go for folks to be successful with it in the future. So bringing back some folks Richland is back with us. Senior analysts, serving infrastructure and operations professionals at Forester with smartness here is also back global product management at Verizon and Srinivasan, Reggie Gopaul head of product and strategy at Broadcom guys. Great to have you back. So let's jump in and Richard, we're going to, we're going to start with you, but we are going to get all three of you, a chance to answer the questions. So rich, we've talked about why organizations should adopt AI ops, but what happens if they choose not to what challenges would they face? Basically what's the cost of organizations doing nothing. >>Yeah. So it's a really good question because I think in operations for a number of reviews, we've kind of stand, uh, stood Pat, where we are, where we're afraid change things sometimes. Or we just don't think about a tooling is often the last thing to change because we're spending so much time doing project work and modernization and fighting fires on a daily basis. Uh, that problem is going to get worse if we do nothing. Um, you know, we're building new architectures like containers and microservices, which means more things to mind and keep running. Um, we're building highly distributed systems where you got moving more and more into this hybrid world, the multicloud world, uh, it's become over-complicate and I'll give a short anecdote. I think, eliminate this. Um, when I go to conferences and give speeches, it's all infrastructure operations people. And I say, you know, how many people have three X, five X, you know, uh, things to monitor them. They had, you know, three years ago, two years ago, and everyone's hand goes up, say how many people have hired more staff in that time period. Zero hands go up. That's the gap we have to fill. And we have to fill that through better automation, more intelligent systems. It's the only way we're going to be able to feel back out. >>What's your perspective, uh, if organizations choose not to adopt AI ops. >>Yeah. >>That's pretty good. So I'll do that. >>Yeah. So I think it said, I say it's related to a couple of things that probably everybody tired off lately and everybody can relate to. And this would resonate that we'd have 5g, which is old set to transform the one that we know it, of communication with these smart cities, smart communities, IOT, which is going to become pivotal to the success of businesses. And as we seen with this, COVID, you know, transformation of the world that there's a, there's a much bigger cost consciousness out there. People are trying to become much more, forward-looking much more sustainable. And I think at the heart of all of this, that the necessity that you have intelligent systems, which are bastardizing more than enough information that previous equipment overlooked, because if you don't measure engagement, not going right. People love being on the same page of this using two examples for hundreds of things that play a part in things not coming together in the best possible way. So I think it has an absolute necessity to grind those cost efficiencies rather than, you know, left right and center laying off people who are like pit Mattel to your business and have a great tribal knowledge of your business. So to speak, you can drive these efficiencies through automating a lot of those tasks that previously were being very manually intensive or resource intensive. And you could allocate those resources towards doing much better things, which let's be very honest going into 20, 21, after what we've seen with 2020, it's going to be mandate >>Shaking your head there when you, his mom was sharing his thoughts. What are your thoughts about this sounds like you agree. Yeah. I mean, uh, you know, uh, to put things in perspective, right? I mean, we are firmly in the digital economy, right? Digital economy, according to the Bureau of economic analysis is 9% of the us GDP. Just, you know, think about it in, in, in, in, in the context of the GDP, right? It's only ranked lower, slightly lower than manufacturing, which is at 11.3% GDP and slightly about finance and insurance, which is about seven and a half percent GDP. So G the digital economy is firmly in our lives, right? And so someone was talking about it, you know, software eats the world and digital, operational excellence is critical for customers, uh, to, uh, you know, to, uh, to drive profitability and growth, uh, in the digital economy. >>It's almost, you know, the key is digital at scale. So when, uh, when rich talks about some of the challenges and when newsman highlights 5g, as an example, those are the things that, that, that come to mind. So to me, what is the cost or perils of doing nothing? You know, uh, it's not an option. I think, you know, more often than not, uh, you know, C-level execs are asking their head of it and they are key influencers, a single question, are you ready? Are you ready in the context of addressing spikes in networks because of, uh, the pandemic scenario, are you ready in the context of automating away toil? Are you ready to respond rapidly to the needs of the digital business? I think AI ops is critical. >>That's a great point, Roger, where gonna stick with you. So we got kind of consensus there, as you said, wrapping it up. This is basically a, not an option. This is a must to go forward for organizations to be successful. So let's talk about some quick wins. So as you talked about, you know, organizations and C-levels asking, are you ready? What are some quick wins that that organizations can achieve when they're adopting AI? >>You know, um, immediate value. I think I would start with a question. How often do your customers find problems in your digital experience before you think about that? Right. You know, if you, if you, you know, there's an interesting web, uh, website, um, uh, you know, down detector.com, right? I think, uh, in, in Europe, there is an equal amount of that as well. It ha you know, people post their digital services that are down, whether it's a bank that, uh, you know, customers are trying to move money from checking account, the savings account and the digital services are down and so on and so forth. So some and many times customers tend to find problems before it operation teams do. So. A quick win is to be proactive and immediate value is visibility. If you do not know what is happening in your complex systems that make up your digital supply chain, it's going to be hard to be responsive. So I would start there >>Vice visibility. There's some question over to you from Verizon's perspective, quick wins. >>Yeah. So I think first of all, there's a need to ingest this multi-layered monetize spectrum data, which I don't think is humanly possible. You don't have people having expertise, you know, all seven layers of the OSI model and then across network and security and at the application of it. So I think you need systems which are now able to get that data. It shouldn't just be wasted reports that you're paying for on a monthly basis. It's about time that you started making the most of those in the form of identifying what are the efficiencies within your ecosystem. First of all, what are the things, you know, which could be better utilized subsequently you have the opportunity to reduce the noise of a troubled tickets handle. It sounds pretty trivial, but as an average, you can imagine every shop is tickets has the cost in dollars, right? >>So, and there's so many tickets and there's desserts that get on a network and across an end-user application value chain, we're talking thousands, you know, across and end user application value chain could be million in a year. So, and so many of those are not really, you know, cause of concern because the problem is somewhere else. So I think that whole triage is an immediate cost saving and the bigger your network, the bigger the cost of whether you're a provider, whether you're, you know, the end customer at the end of the day, not having to deal with problems, which nobody can resolve, which are not meant to be dealt with. If so many of those situations, right, where service has just been adopted, which is coordinate quality, et cetera, et cetera. So many reasons. So those are the, those are some of the immediate cost savings. >>They are really, really significant. Secondly, I would say Raj mentioned something about, you know, the end user application value chain and an understanding of that, especially with this hybrid cloud environment, et cetera, et cetera, right? The time it takes to identify a problem in an end-user application value chain across the seven layers that I mentioned with the OSI reference model across network and security and the application environment, it's something that in its own self has a massive cost to business, right? They could be point of sale transactions that could be obstructed because of this. There could be, and I'm going to use a very interesting example. When we talk IOT, the integrity of the IOT machine is extremely pivotal in this new world that we're stepping into. You could be running commands, which are super efficient. He has, everything is being told to the machine really fast. >>We're sending everything there. What if it's hacked? And if that robotic arm starts to involve the things you don't want it to do. So there's so much of that. That becomes a part of this naturally. And I believe, yes, this is not just like from a cost saving standpoint, but anything going wrong with that code base, et cetera, et cetera. These are massive costs to the business in the form of the revenue. They have lost the perception in the market as a result, the fed, you know, all that stuff. So these are a couple of very immediate funds, but then you also have the whole player virtualized resources where you can automate the allocation, you know, the quantification of an orchestration of those virtualized resources, rather than a person having to, you know, see something and then say, Oh yeah, I need to increase capacity over here, because then it's going to have this particular application. You have systems doing this stuff to, you know, Roger's point your customer should not be identifying your problems before you, because this digital where it's all about perception. >>Absolutely. We definitely don't want the customers finding it before. So rich, let's wrap this particular question up with you from that analyst perspective, how can companies use make big impact quickly with AI? >>Yeah, I think, you know, and it has been really summed up some really great use cases there. I think with the, uh, you know, one of the biggest struggles we've always had in operations is isn't, you know, the mean time to resolve. We're pretty good at resolving the things. We just have to find the thing we have to resolve. That's always been the problem and using these advanced analytics and machine learning algorithms now across all machine and application data, our tendency as humans is to look at the console and say, what's flashing red. That must be what we have to fix, but it could be something that's yellow, somewhere else, six services away. And we have made things so complicated. And I think this is what it was. One was saying that we can't get there anymore on our own. We need help to get there in all of this stuff that the outline. >>So, so well builds up to a higher level thing of what is the customer experience about what is the customer journey? And we've struggled for years in the digital world and measuring that a day-to-day thing. We know an online retail. If you're having a bad experience at one retailer, you just want your thing. You're going to go to another retailer, brand loyalty. Isn't one of the light. It wasn't the brick and mortal world where you had a department store near you. So you were loyal to that cause it was in your neighborhood, um, online that doesn't exist anymore. So we need to be able to understand the customer from that first moment, they touch a digital service all the way from their, their journey through that digital service, the lowest layer, whether it be a database or the network, what have you, and then back to them again, and we not understand, is that a good experience? >>We gave them. How does that compare to last week's experience? What should we be doing to improve that next week? And I think companies are starting and then the pandemic, certainly you push this timeline. If you listen to the, the, the CEO of Microsoft, he's like, you know, 10 years of digital transformation written down. And the first several months of this, um, in banks and in financial institutions, I talked to insurance companies, aren't slowing. Now they're trying to speed up. In fact, what they've discovered is that there, obviously when we were on lockdown or what have you, the use of digital services spiked very high. What they've learned is they're never going to go back down. They're never going to return to pretend levels. So now they're stuck with this new reality. Well, how do we service those customers and how do we make sure we keep them loyal to our brand? >>Uh, so, you know, they're looking for modernization opportunities. A lot of that, that things have been exposed. And I think Raj touched upon this very early in the conversation is visibility gaps. Now that we're on the outside, looking in at the data center, we know we architect things in a very specific way. Uh, we better ways of making these correlations across the Sparrow technologies to understand where the problems lies. We can give better services to our customers. And I think that's really what we're going to see a lot of the, the innovation and the people really for these new ways of doing things starting, you know, w now, I mean, I think I've seen it in customers, but I think really the push through the end of this year to next year when, you know, economy and things like that, straighten out a little bit more. I think it really, people are going to take a hard look of where they are is, you know, AI ops the way forward for them. And I think they'll find it. The answer is yes, for sure. >>So we've, we've come to a consensus that, of what the parallels are of organizations, basically the cost of doing nothing. You guys have given some great advice on where some of those quick wins are. Let's talk about something Raj touched on earlier, is organizations, are they really ready for truly automated AI? Raj, I want to start with you readiness factor. What are your thoughts? >>Uh, you know, uh, I think so, you know, we place our, her lives on automated systems all the time, right? In our, in our day-to-day lives, in the, in the digital world. I think, uh, you know, our, uh, at least the customers that I talked to our customers are, uh, are, uh, you know, uh, have a sophisticated systems, like for example, advanced automation is a reality. If you look at social media, AI and ML and automation are used to automate away, uh, misinformation, right? If you look at financial institutions, AI and ML are used to automate away a fraud, right? So I want to ask our customers why can't we automate await oil in it, operation systems, right? And that's where our customers are. Then, you know, uh, I'm a glass half full, uh, clinical person, right? Uh, this pandemic has been harder on many of our customers, but I think what we have learned from our customers is they've Rose to the occasion. >>They've used digital as a key moons, right? At scale. That's what we see with, you know, when, when Huseman and his team talk about, uh, you know, network operational intelligence, right. That's what it means to us. So I think they are ready, the intersection of customer experience it and OT, operational technology is ripe for automation. Uh, and, uh, you know, I, I wanna, I wanna sort of give a shout out to three key personas in, in this mix. It's somewhat right. One is the SRE persona, you know, site, reliability engineer. The other is the information security persona. And the third one is the it operator automation engineer persona. These folks in organizations are building a system of intelligence that can respond rapidly to the needs of their digital business. We at Broadcom, we are in the business of helping them construct a system of intelligence that will create a human augmented solution for them. Right. So when I see, when I interact with large enterprise customers, I think they, they, you know, they, they want to achieve what I would call advanced automation and AI ML solutions. And that's squarely, very I ops is, you know, is going as an it, you know, when I talked to rich and what, everything that rich says, you know, that's where it's going. And that's what we want to help our customers to. >>So rich, talk to us about your perspective of organizations being ready for truly automated AI. >>I think, you know, the conversation has shifted a lot in the last, in, in pre pandemic. Uh, I'd say at the end of last year, we're, you know, two years ago, people I'd go to conferences and people come up and ask me like, this is all smoke and mirrors, right? These systems can't do this because it is such a leap forward for them, for where they are today. Right. We we've sort of, you know, in software and other systems, we iterate and we move forward slowly. So it's not a big shock. And this is for a lot of organizations that big, big leap forward in the way that they're running their operations teams today. Um, but now they've come around and say, you know what? We want to do this. We want all the automations. We want my staff not doing the low complexity, repetitive tasks over and over again. >>Um, you know, and we have a lot of those kinds of legacy systems. We're not going to rebuild. Um, but they need certain care and feeding. So why are we having operations? People do those tasks? Why aren't we automating those out? I think the other piece is, and I'll, I'll, I'll send this out to any of the operations teams that are thinking about going down this path is that you have to understand that the operations models that we're operating under in INO and have been for the last 25 years are super outdated and they're fundamentally broken for the digital age. We have to start thinking about different ways of doing things and how do we do that? Well, it's, it's people, organization, people are going to work together differently in an AI ops world, um, for the better, um, but you know, there's going to be the, the age of the 40 person bridge call thing. >>Troubleshooting is going away. It's going to be three, four, five focused engineers that need to be there for that particular incident. Um, a lot of process mailer process we have for now level one level, two engineering. What have you running of tickets, gathering of artifacts, uh, during an incident is going to be automated. That's a good thing. We shouldn't be doing those, those things by hand anymore. So I'd say that the, to people's like start thinking about what this means to your organization. Start thinking about the great things we can do by automating things away from people, having to do them over and over again. And what that means for them, getting them matched to what they want to be doing is high level engineering tasks. They want to be doing monitorization, working with new tools and technologies. Um, these are all good things that help the organization perform better as a whole >>Great advice and great kind of some of the thoughts that you shared rich for what the audience needs to be on the, for going on. I want to go over to you, give me your thoughts on what the audience should be on the lookout for, or put on your agendas in the next 12 months. >>So there's like a couple of ways to answer that question. One thing would be in the form of, you know, what are some of the things they have to be concerned about in terms of implementing this solution or harnessing its power. The other one could be, you know, what are the perhaps advantages they should look to see? So if I was to talk about the first one, let's say that, what are some of the things you have to watch out for like possible pitfalls that everybody has data, right? So yeah, that's one strategy, we'd say, okay, you've got the data, let's see what we can do with them. But then there's the exact opposite side, which has to be considered when you're doing that analysis that, Hey, what are the use cases that you're looking to drive, right? But then use cases you have to understand, are you taking a reactive use case approach? >>Are you taking quite active use cases, right? Or that that's a very, very important consideration. Then you have to be very cognizant of where does this data that you have vision, it reside, what are the systems and where does it need to go to in order for this AI function to happen and subsequently if there needs to be any, you know, backward communication with all of that data in a process better. So I think these are some of the very critical points because you can have an AI solution, which is sitting in a customer data center. It could be in a managed services provider data center, like, right, right. It could be in a cloud data center, like an AWS or something, or you could have hybrid scenarios, et cetera, all of that stuff. So you have to be very mindful of where you're going to get the data from is going to go to what are the use cases you're trying to, you have to do a bit of backward forward. >>Okay. We've got this data cases and I think it's the judgment. Nobody can come in and say, Hey, you've built this fantastic thing. It's like Terminator two. I think it's a journey where we built starting with the network. My personal focus always comes down to the network and with 5g so much, so much more right with 5g, you're talking low latency communication. That's like the two power of 5g, right? It's low latency, it's ultra high bandwidth, but what's the point of that low latency. If then subsequently the actions that need to be taken to prevent any problems in critical applications, IOT applications, remote surgeries, uh, test driving vehicles, et cetera, et cetera. What if that's where people are sitting and sipping their coffees and trying to take action that needs to be in low latency as well. Right? So these are, I think some of the fundamental things that you have to know your data, your use cases and location, where it needs to be exchanged, what are the parameters around that for extending that data? >>And I think from that point onward, it's all about realizing, you know, in terms of business outcomes, unless AI comes in as a digital labor, that shows you, I have, I have reduced your, this amount of, you know, time, and that's a result of big problems or identified problems for anything. Or I have saved you this much resource right in a month, in a year, or whatever, the timeline that people want to see it. So I think those are some of the initial starting points, and then it all starts coming together. But the key is it's not one system that can do everything. You have to have a way where, you know, you can share data once you've got all of that data into one system, maybe you can send it to another system and make more, take more advantage, right? That system might be an AI and IOT system, which is just looking at all of your streetlights and making sure that Hey, parent switched off just to be more carbon neutral and all that great stuff, et cetera, et cetera >>For the audience, you can take her Raj, take us time from here. What are some of the takeaways that you think the audience really needs to be laser focused on as we move forward into the next year? You know, one thing that, uh, I think a key takeaway is, um, uh, you know, as we embark on 2021, closing the gap between intent and outcome and outputs and outcome will become critical, is critical. Uh, you know, especially for, uh, uh, you know, uh, digital transformation at scale for organizations context in the, you know, for customer experience becomes even more critical as Swan Huseman was talking, uh, you know, being network network aware network availability is, is a necessary condition, but not sufficient condition anymore. Right? The what, what, what customers have to go towards is going from network availability to network agility with high security, uh, what we call app aware networks, right? >>How do you differentiate between a trade, a million dollar trade that's happening between, uh, you know, London and New York, uh, versus a YouTube video training that an employee is going through? Worse is a YouTube video that millions of customers are, are watching, right? Three different context, three different customer scenarios, right? That is going to be critical. And last but not least feedback loop, uh, you know, responsiveness is all about feedback loop. You cannot predict everything, but you can respond to things faster. I think these are sort of the three, uh, three things that, uh, that, uh, you know, customers are going to have to, uh, have to really think about. And that's also where I believe AI ops, by the way, AI ops and I I'm. Yeah. You know, one of the points that was smart, shout out to what he was saying was heterogeneity is key, right? There is no homogeneous tool in the world that can solve problems. So you want an open extensible system of intelligence that, that can harness data from disparate data sources provide that visualization, the actionable insight and the human augmented recommendation systems that are so needed for, uh, you know, it operators to be successful. I think that's where it's going. >>Amazing. You guys just provided so much content context recommendations for the audience. I think we accomplished our goal on this. I'll call it power panel of not only getting to a consensus of what, where AI ops needs to go in the future, but great recommendations for what businesses in any industry need to be on the lookout for rich Huisman Raj, thank you for joining me today. >>Pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. >>We want to thank you for watching. This was such a rich session. You probably want to watch it again. Thanks for your time.