>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE. With digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS global partner network. >> Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE virtual coverage of re:Invent 2020 virtual. Normally we're in person, this year because of the pandemic we're doing remote interviews and we've got a great coverage here of the APN, Amazon Partner Network experience. I'm your host John Furrier, we are theCUBE virtual. Got a great guest from Tel Aviv remotely calling in and videoing, Nimrod Vax, who is the chief product officer and co-founder of BigID. This is the beautiful thing about remote, you're in Tel Aviv, I'm in Palo Alto, great to see you. We're not in person but thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. Great to see you as well. >> So you guys have had a lot of success at BigID, I've noticed a lot of awards, startup to watch, company to watch, kind of a good market opportunity data, data at scale, identification, as the web evolves beyond web presence identification, authentication is super important. You guys are called BigID. What's the purpose of the company? Why do you exist? What's the value proposition? >> So first of all, best startup to work at based on Glassdoor worldwide, so that's a big achievement too. So look, four years ago we started BigID when we realized that there is a gap in the market between the new demands from organizations in terms of how to protect their personal and sensitive information that they collect about their customers, their employees. The regulations were becoming more strict but the tools that were out there, to the large extent still are there, were not providing to those requirements and organizations have to deal with some of those challenges in manual processes, right? For example, the right to be forgotten. Organizations need to be able to find and delete a person's data if they want to be deleted. That's based on GDPR and later on even CCPA. And organizations have no way of doing it because the tools that were available could not tell them whose data it is that they found. The tools were very siloed. They were looking at either unstructured data and file shares or windows and so forth, or they were looking at databases, there was nothing for Big Data, there was nothing for cloud business applications. And so we identified that there is a gap here and we addressed it by building BigID basically to address those challenges. >> That's great, great stuff. And I remember four years ago when I was banging on the table and saying, you know regulation can stunt innovation because you had the confluence of massive platform shifts combined with the business pressure from society. That's not stopping and it's continuing today. You seeing it globally, whether it's fake news in journalism, to privacy concerns where modern applications, this is not going away. You guys have a great market opportunity. What is the product? What is smallID? What do you guys got right now? How do customers maintain the success as the ground continues to shift under them as platforms become more prevalent, more tools, more platforms, more everything? >> So, I'll start with BigID. What is BigID? So BigID really helps organizations better manage and protect the data that they own. And it does that by connecting to everything you have around structured databases and unstructured file shares, big data, cloud storage, business applications and then providing very deep insight into that data. Cataloging all the data, so you know what data you have where and classifying it so you know what type of data you have. Plus you're analyzing the data to find similar and duplicate data and then correlating them to an identity. Very strong, very broad solution fit for IT organization. We have some of the largest organizations out there, the biggest retailers, the biggest financial services organizations, manufacturing and et cetera. What we are seeing is that there are, with the adoption of cloud and business success obviously of AWS, that there are a lot of organizations that are not as big, that don't have an IT organization, that have a very well functioning DevOps organization but still have a very big footprint in Amazon and in other kind of cloud services. And they want to get visibility and they want to do it quickly. And the SmallID is really built for that. SmallID is a lightweight version of BigID that is cloud-native built for your AWS environment. And what it means is that you can quickly install it using CloudFormation templates straight from the AWS marketplace. Quickly stand up an environment that can scan, discover your assets in your account automatically and give you immediate visibility into that, your S3 bucket, into your DynamoDB environments, into your EMR clusters, into your Athena databases and immediately building a full catalog of all the data, so you know what files you have where, you know where what tables, what technical metadata, operational metadata, business metadata and also classified data information. So you know where you have sensitive information and you can immediately address that and apply controls to that information. >> So this is data discovery. So the use case is, I'm an Amazon partner, I mean we use theCUBE virtuals on Amazon, but let's just say hypothetically, we're growing like crazy. Got S3 buckets over here secure, encrypted and the rest, all that stuff. Things are happening, we're growing like a weed. Do we just deploy smallIDs and how it works? Is that use cases, SmallID is for AWS and BigID for everything else or? >> You can start small with SmallID, you get the visibility you need, you can leverage the automation of AWS so that you automatically discover those data sources, connect to them and get visibility. And you could grow into BigID using the same deployment inside AWS. You don't have to switch migrate and you use the same container cluster that is running inside your account and automatically scale it up and then connect to other systems or benefit from the more advanced capabilities the BigID can offer such as correlation, by connecting to maybe your Salesforce, CRM system and getting the ability to correlate to your customer data and understand also whose data it is that you're storing. Connecting to your on-premise mainframe, with the same deployment connecting to your Google Drive or office 365. But the point is that with the smallID you can really start quickly, small with a very small team and get that visibility very quickly. >> Nimrod, I want to ask you a question. What is the definition of cloud native data discovery? What does that mean to you? >> So cloud native means that it leverages all the benefits of the cloud. Like it gets all of the automation and visibility that you get in a cloud environment versus any traditional on-prem environment. So one thing is that BigID is installed directly from your marketplace. So you could browse, find its solution on the AWS marketplace and purchase it. It gets deployed using CloudFormation templates very easily and very quickly. It runs on a elastic container service so that once it runs you can automatically scale it up and down to increase the scan and the scale capabilities of the solution. It connects automatically behind the scenes into the security hub of AWS. So you get those alerts, the policy alerts fed into your security hub. It has integration also directly into the native logging capabilities of AWS. So your existing Datadog or whatever you're using for monitoring can plug into it automatically. That's what we mean by cloud native. >> And if you're cloud native you got to be positioned to take advantage of the data and machine learning in particular. Can you expand on the role of machine learning in your solution? Customers are leaning in heavily this year, you're seeing more uptake on machine learning which is basically AI, AI is machine learning, but it's all tied together. ML is big on all the deployments. Can you share your thoughts? >> Yeah, absolutely. So data discovery is a very tough problem and it has been around for 20 years. And the traditional methods of classifying the data or understanding what type of data you have has been, you're looking at the pattern of the data. Typically regular expressions or types of kind of pattern-matching techniques that look at the data. But sometimes in order to know what is personal or what is sensitive it's not enough to look at the pattern of the data. How do you distinguish between a date of birth and any other date. Date of birth is much more sensitive. How do you find country of residency or how do you identify even a first name from the last name? So for that, you need more advanced, more sophisticated capabilities that go beyond just pattern matching. And BigID has a variety of those techniques, we call that discovery-in-depth. What it means is that very similar to security-in-depth where you can not rely on a single security control to protect your environment, you can not rely on a single discovery method to truly classify the data. So yes, we have regular expression, that's the table state basic capability of data classification but if you want to find data that is more contextual like a first name, last name, even a phone number and distinguish between a phone number and just a sequence of numbers, you need more contextual NLP based discovery, name entity recognition. We're using (indistinct) to extract and find data contextually. We also apply deep learning, CNN capable, it's called CNN, which is basically deep learning in order to identify and classify document types. Which is basically being able to distinguish between a resume and a application form. Finding financial records, finding medical records. So RA are advanced NLP classifiers can find that type of data. The more advanced capabilities that go beyond the smallID into BigID also include cluster analysis which is an unsupervised machine learning method of finding duplicate and similar data correlation and other techniques that are more contextual and need to use machine learning for that. >> Yeah, and unsupervised that's a lot harder than supervised. You need to have that ability to get that what you can't see. You got to get the blind spots identified and that's really the key observational data you need. This brings up the kind of operational you heard cluster, I hear governance security you mentioned earlier GDPR, this is an operational impact. Can you talk about how it impacts on specifically on the privacy protection and governance side because certainly I get the clustering side of it, operationally just great. Everyone needs to get that. But now on the business model side, this is where people are spending a lot of time scared and worried actually. What the hell to do? >> One of the things that we realized very early on when we started with BigID is that everybody needs a discovery. You need discovery and we actually started with privacy. You need discovery in route to map your data and apply the privacy controls. You need discovery for security, like we said, right? Find and identify sensitive data and apply controls. And you also need discovery for data enablement. You want to discover the data, you want to enable it, to govern it, to make it accessible to the other parts of your business. So discovery is really a foundation and starting point and that you get there with smallID. How do you operationalize that? So BigID has the concept of an application framework. Think about it like an Apple store for data discovery where you can run applications inside your kind of discovery iPhone in order to run specific (indistinct) use cases. So, how do you operationalize privacy use cases? We have applications for privacy use cases like subject access requests and data rights fulfillment, right? Under the CCPA, you have the right to request your data, what data is being stored about you. BigID can help you find all that data in the catalog that after we scan and find that information we can find any individual data. We have an application also in the privacy space for consent governance right under CCP. And you have the right to opt out. If you opt out, your data cannot be sold, cannot be used. How do you enforce that? How do you make sure that if someone opted out, that person's data is not being pumped into Glue, into some other system for analytics, into Redshift or Snowflake? BigID can identify a specific person's data and make sure that it's not being used for analytics and alert if there is a violation. So that's just an example of how you operationalize this knowledge for privacy. And we have more examples also for data enablement and data management. >> There's so much headroom opportunity to build out new functionality, make it programmable. I really appreciate what you guys are doing, totally needed in the industry. I could just see endless opportunities to make this operationally scalable, more programmable, once you kind of get the foundation out there. So congratulations, Nimrod and the whole team. The question I want to ask you, we're here at re:Invent's virtual, three weeks we're here covering Cube action, check out theCUBE experience zone, the partner experience. What is the difference between BigID and say Amazon's Macy? Let's think about that. So how do you compare and contrast, in Amazon they say we love partnering, but we promote our ecosystem. You guys sure have a similar thing. What's the difference? >> There's a big difference. Yes, there is some overlap because both a smallID and Macy can classify data in S3 buckets. And Macy does a pretty good job at it, right? I'm not arguing about it. But smallID is not only about scanning for sensitive data in S3. It also scans anything else you have in your AWS environment, like DynamoDB, like EMR, like Athena. We're also adding Redshift soon, Glue and other rare data sources as well. And it's not only about identifying and alerting on sensitive data, it's about building full catalog (indistinct) It's about giving you almost like a full registry of your data in AWS, where you can look up any type of data and see where it's found across structured, unstructured big data repositories that you're handling inside your AWS environment. So it's broader than just for security. Apart from the fact that they're used for privacy, I would say the biggest value of it is by building that catalog and making it accessible for data enablement, enabling your data across the board for other use cases, for analytics in Redshift, for Glue, for data integrations, for various other purposes. We have also integration into Kinesis to be able to scan and let you know which topics, use what type of data. So it's really a very, very robust full-blown catalog of the data that across the board that is dynamic. And also like you mentioned, accessible to APIs. Very much like the AWS tradition. >> Yeah, great stuff. I got to ask you a question while you're here. You're the co-founder and again congratulations on your success. Also the chief product officer of BigID, what's your advice to your colleagues and potentially new friends out there that are watching here? And let's take it from the entrepreneurial perspective. I have an application and I start growing and maybe I have funding, maybe I take a more pragmatic approach versus raising billions of dollars. But as you grow the pressure for AppSec reviews, having all the table stakes features, how do you advise developers or entrepreneurs or even business people, small medium-sized enterprises to prepare? Is there a way, is there a playbook to say, rather than looking back saying, oh, I didn't do with all the things I got to go back and retrofit, get BigID. Is there a playbook that you see that will help companies so they don't get killed with AppSec reviews and privacy compliance reviews? Could be a waste of time. What's your thoughts on all this? >> Well, I think that very early on when we started BigID, and that was our perspective is that we knew that we are a security and privacy company. So we had to take that very seriously upfront and be prepared. Security cannot be an afterthought. It's something that needs to be built in. And from day one we have taken all of the steps that were needed in order to make sure that what we're building is robust and secure. And that includes, obviously applying all of the code and CI/CD tools that are available for testing your code, whether it's (indistinct), these type of tools. Applying and providing, penetration testing and working with best in line kind of pen testing companies and white hat hackers that would look at your code. These are kind of the things that, that's what you get funding for, right? >> Yeah. >> And you need to take advantage of that and use them. And then as soon as we got bigger, we also invested in a very, kind of a very strong CSO that comes from the industry that has a lot of expertise and a lot of credibility. We also have kind of CSO group. So, each step of funding we've used extensively also to make RM kind of security poster a lot more robust and invisible. >> Final question for you. When should someone buy BigID? When should they engage? Is it something that people can just download immediately and integrate? Do you have to have, is the go-to-market kind of a new target the VP level or is it the... How does someone know when to buy you and download it and use the software? Take us through the use case of how customers engage with. >> Yeah, so customers directly have those requirements when they start hitting and having to comply with regulations around privacy and security. So very early on, especially organizations that deal with consumer information, get to a point where they need to be accountable for the data that they store about their customers and they want to be able to know their data and provide the privacy controls they need to their consumers. For our BigID product this typically is a kind of a medium size and up company, and with an IT organization. For smallID, this is a good fit for companies that are much smaller, that operate mostly out of their, their IT is basically their DevOps teams. And once they have more than 10, 20 data sources in AWS, that's where they start losing count of the data that they have and they need to get more visibility and be able to control what data is being stored there. Because very quickly you start losing count of data information, even for an organization like BigID, which isn't a bigger organization, right? We have 200 employees. We are at the point where it's hard to keep track and keep control of all the data that is being stored in all of the different data sources, right? In AWS, in Google Drive, in some of our other sources, right? And that's the point where you need to start thinking about having that visibility. >> Yeah, like all growth plan, dream big, start small and get big. And I think that's a nice pathway. So small gets you going and you lead right into the BigID. Great stuff. Final, final question for you while I gatchu here. Why the awards? Someone's like, hey, BigID is this cool company, love the founder, love the team, love the value proposition, makes a lot of sense. Why all the awards? >> Look, I think one of the things that was compelling about BigID from the beginning is that we did things differently. Our whole approach for personal data discovery is unique. And instead of looking at the data, we started by looking at the identities, the people and finally looking at their data, learning how their data looks like and then searching for that information. So that was a very different approach to the traditional approach of data discovery. And we continue to innovate and to look at those problems from a different perspective so we can offer our customers an alternative to what was done in the past. It's not saying that we don't do the basic stuffs. The Reg X is the connectivity that that is needed. But we always took a slightly different approach to diversify, to offer something slightly different and more comprehensive. And I think that was the thing that really attracted us from the beginning with the RSA Innovation Sandbox award that we won in 2018, the Gartner Cool Vendor award that we received. And later on also the other awards. And I think that's the unique aspect of BigID. >> You know you solve big problems than certainly as needed. We saw this early on and again I don't think that the problem is going to go away anytime soon, platforms are emerging, more tools than ever before that converge into platforms and as the logic changes at the top all of that's moving onto the underground. So, congratulations, great insight. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. Thank you for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it Nimrod. Okay, I'm John Furrier. We are theCUBE virtual here for the partner experience APN virtual. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of enterprise data automation, an event Siri's brought to you by Iot. Tahoe Welcome everybody to Enterprise Data Automation. Ah co created digital program on the Cube with support from my hotel. So my name is Dave Volante. And today we're using the hashtag data automated. You know, organizations. They really struggle to get more value out of their data, time to data driven insights that drive cost savings or new revenue opportunities. They simply take too long. So today we're gonna talk about how organizations can streamline their data operations through automation, machine intelligence and really simplifying data migrations to the cloud. We'll be talking to technologists, visionaries, hands on practitioners and experts that are not just talking about streamlining their data pipelines. They're actually doing it. So keep it right there. We'll be back shortly with a J ahora who's the CEO of Iot Tahoe to kick off the program. You're watching the Cube, the leader in digital global coverage. We're right back right after this short break. Innovation impact influence. Welcome to the Cube disruptors. Developers and practitioners learn from the voices of leaders who share their personal insights from the hottest digital events around the globe. Enjoy the best this community has to offer on the Cube, your global leader. High tech digital coverage from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of enterprise, data, automation and event. Siri's brought to you by Iot. Tahoe. Okay, we're back. Welcome back to Data Automated. A J ahora is CEO of I O ta ho, JJ. Good to see how things in London >>Thanks doing well. Things in, well, customers that I speak to on day in, day out that we partner with, um, they're busy adapting their businesses to serve their customers. It's very much a game of ensuring the week and serve our customers to help their customers. Um, you know, the adaptation that's happening here is, um, trying to be more agile. Got to be more flexible. Um, a lot of pressure on data, a lot of demand on data and to deliver more value to the business, too. So that customers, >>as I said, we've been talking about data ops a lot. The idea being Dev Ops applied to the data pipeline, But talk about enterprise data automation. What is it to you. And how is it different from data off >>Dev Ops, you know, has been great for breaking down those silos between different roles functions and bring people together to collaborate. Andi, you know, we definitely see that those tools, those methodologies, those processes, that kind of thinking, um, lending itself to data with data is exciting. We look to do is build on top of that when data automation, it's the it's the nuts and bolts of the the algorithms, the models behind machine learning that the functions. That's where we investors, our r and d on bringing that in to build on top of the the methods, the ways of thinking that break down those silos on injecting that automation into the business processes that are going to drive a business to serve its customers. It's, um, a layer beyond Dev ops data ops. They can get to that point where well, I think about it is is the automation behind new dimension. We've come a long way in the last few years. Boy is, we started out with automating some of those simple, um, to codify, um, I have a high impact on organization across the data a cost effective way house. There's data related tasks that classify data on and a lot of our original pattern certain people value that were built up is is very much around that >>love to get into the tech a little bit in terms of how it works. And I think we have a graphic here that gets into that a little bit. So, guys, if you bring that up, >>sure. I mean right there in the middle that the heart of what we do it is, you know, the intellectual property now that we've built up over time that takes from Hacha genius data sources. Your Oracle Relational database. Short your mainframe. It's a lay and increasingly AP eyes and devices that produce data and that creates the ability to automatically discover that data. Classify that data after it's classified. Them have the ability to form relationships across those different source systems, silos, different lines of business. And once we've automated that that we can start to do some cool things that just puts of contact and meaning around that data. So it's moving it now from bringing data driven on increasingly where we have really smile, right people in our customer organizations you want I do some of those advanced knowledge tasks data scientists and ah, yeah, quants in some of the banks that we work with, the the onus is on, then, putting everything we've done there with automation, pacifying it, relationship, understanding that equality, the policies that you can apply to that data. I'm putting it in context once you've got the ability to power. Okay, a professional is using data, um, to be able to put that data and contacts and search across the entire enterprise estate. Then then they can start to do some exciting things and piece together the the tapestry that fabric across that different system could be crm air P system such as s AP and some of the newer brown databases that we work with. Snowflake is a great well, if I look back maybe five years ago, we had prevalence of daily technologies at the cutting edge. Those are converging to some of the cloud platforms that we work with Google and AWS and I think very much is, as you said it, those manual attempts to try and grasp. But it is such a complex challenges scale quickly runs out of steam because once, once you've got your hat, once you've got your fingers on the details Oh, um, what's what's in your data state? It's changed, You know, you've onboard a new customer. You signed up a new partner. Um, customer has, you know, adopted a new product that you just Lawrence and there that that slew of data keeps coming. So it's keeping pace with that. The only answer really is is some form of automation >>you're working with AWS. You're working with Google, You got red hat. IBM is as partners. What is attracting those folks to your ecosystem and give us your thoughts on the importance of ecosystem? >>That's fundamental. So, I mean, when I caimans where you tell here is the CEO of one of the, um, trends that I wanted us CIO to be part of was being open, having an open architecture allowed one thing that was close to my heart, which is as a CEO, um, a c i o where you go, a budget vision on and you've already made investments into your organization, and some of those are pretty long term bets. They should be going out 5 10 years, sometimes with the CRM system training up your people, getting everybody working together around a common business platform. What I wanted to ensure is that we could openly like it using AP eyes that were available, the love that some investment on the cost that has already gone into managing in organizations I t. But business users to before. So part of the reason why we've been able to be successful with, um, the partners like Google AWS and increasingly, a number of technology players. That red hat mongo DB is another one where we're doing a lot of good work with, um and snowflake here is, um Is those investments have been made by the organizations that are our customers, and we want to make sure we're adding to that. And they're leveraging the value that they've already committed to. >>Yeah, and maybe you could give us some examples of the r A y and the business impact. >>Yeah, I mean, the r a y David is is built upon on three things that I mentioned is a combination off. You're leveraging the existing investment with the existing estate, whether that's on Microsoft Azure or AWS or Google, IBM, and I'm putting that to work because, yeah, the customers that we work with have had made those choices. On top of that, it's, um, is ensuring that we have got the automation that is working right down to the level off data, a column level or the file level we don't do with meta data. It is being very specific to be at the most granular level. So as we've grown our processes and on the automation, gasification tagging, applying policies from across different compliance and regulatory needs that an organization has to the data, everything that then happens downstream from that is ready to serve a business outcome now without hoping out which run those processes within hours of getting started And, um, Bill that picture, visualize that picture and bring it to life. You know, the PR Oh, I that's off the bat with finding data that should have been deleted data that was copies off on and being able to allow the architect whether it's we're working on GCB or a migration to any other clouds such as AWS or a multi cloud landscape right off the map. >>A. J. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube and sharing your insights and your experience is great to have you. >>Thank you, David. Look who is smoking in >>now. We want to bring in the customer perspective. We have a great conversation with Paul Damico, senior vice president data architecture, Webster Bank. So keep it right there. >>Utah Data automated Improve efficiency, Drive down costs and make your enterprise data work for you. Yeah, we're on a mission to enable our customers to automate the management of data to realise maximum strategic and operational benefits. We envisage a world where data users consume accurate, up to date unified data distilled from many silos to deliver transformational outcomes, activate your data and avoid manual processing. Accelerate data projects by enabling non I t resources and data experts to consolidate categorize and master data. Automate your data operations Power digital transformations by automating a significant portion of data management through human guided machine learning. Yeah, get value from the start. Increase the velocity of business outcomes with complete accurate data curated automatically for data, visualization tours and analytic insights. Improve the security and quality of your data. Data automation improves security by reducing the number of individuals who have access to sensitive data, and it can improve quality. Many companies report double digit era reduction in data entry and other repetitive tasks. Trust the way data works for you. Data automation by our Tahoe learns as it works and can ornament business user behavior. It learns from exception handling and scales up or down is needed to prevent system or application overloads or crashes. It also allows for innate knowledge to be socialized rather than individualized. No longer will your companies struggle when the employee who knows how this report is done, retires or takes another job, the work continues on without the need for detailed information transfer. Continue supporting the digital shift. Perhaps most importantly, data automation allows companies to begin making moves towards a broader, more aspirational transformation, but on a small scale but is easy to implement and manage and delivers quick wins. Digital is the buzzword of the day, but many companies recognized that it is a complex strategy requires time and investment. Once you get started with data automation, the digital transformation initiated and leaders and employees alike become more eager to invest time and effort in a broader digital transformational agenda. Yeah, >>everybody, we're back. And this is Dave Volante, and we're covering the whole notion of automating data in the Enterprise. And I'm really excited to have Paul Damico here. She's a senior vice president of enterprise Data Architecture at Webster Bank. Good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Nice to see you too. Yes. >>So let's let's start with Let's start with Webster Bank. You guys are kind of a regional. I think New York, New England, uh, leave headquartered out of Connecticut, but tell us a little bit about the >>bank. Yeah, Webster Bank is regional, Boston. And that again in New York, Um, very focused on in Westchester and Fairfield County. Um, they're a really highly rated bank regional bank for this area. They, um, hold, um, quite a few awards for the area for being supportive for the community. And, um, are really moving forward. Technology lives. Currently, today we have, ah, a small group that is just working toward moving into a more futuristic, more data driven data warehouse. That's our first item. And then the other item is to drive new revenue by anticipating what customers do when they go to the bank or when they log into there to be able to give them the best offer. The only way to do that is you have timely, accurate, complete data on the customer and what's really a great value on off something to offer that >>at the top level, what were some of what are some of the key business drivers there catalyzing your desire for change >>the ability to give the customer what they need at the time when they need it? And what I mean by that is that we have, um, customer interactions and multiple weights, right? And I want to be able for the customer, too. Walk into a bank, um, or online and see the same the same format and being able to have the same feel, the same look and also to be able to offer them the next best offer for them. >>Part of it is really the cycle time, the end end cycle, time that you're pressing. And then there's if I understand it, residual benefits that are pretty substantial from a revenue opportunity >>exactly. It's drive new customers, Teoh new opportunities. It's enhanced the risk, and it's to optimize the banking process and then obviously, to create new business. Um, and the only way we're going to be able to do that is that we have the ability to look at the data right when the customer walks in the door or right when they open up their app. >>Do you see the potential to increase the data sources and hence the quality of the data? Or is that sort of premature? >>Oh, no. Um, exactly. Right. So right now we ingest a lot of flat files and from our mainframe type of runnin system that we've had for quite a few years. But now that we're moving to the cloud and off Prem and on France, you know, moving off Prem into, like, an s three bucket Where that data king, we can process that data and get that data faster by using real time tools to move that data into a place where, like, snowflake Good, um, utilize that data or we can give it out to our market. The data scientists are out in the lines of business right now, which is great, cause I think that's where data science belongs. We should give them on, and that's what we're working towards now is giving them more self service, giving them the ability to access the data in a more robust way. And it's a single source of truth. So they're not pulling the data down into their own like tableau dashboards and then pushing the data back out. I have eight engineers, data architects, they database administrators, right, um, and then data traditional data forwarding people, Um, and because some customers that I have that our business customers lines of business, they want to just subscribe to a report. They don't want to go out and do any data science work. Um, and we still have to provide that. So we still want to provide them some kind of read regiment that they wake up in the morning and they open up their email. And there's the report that they just drive, um, which is great. And it works out really well. And one of the things. This is why we purchase I o waas. I would have the ability to give the lines of business the ability to do search within the data, and we read the data flows and data redundancy and things like that and help me cleanup the data and also, um, to give it to the data. Analysts who say All right, they just asked me. They want this certain report and it used to take Okay, well, we're gonna four weeks, we're going to go. We're gonna look at the data, and then we'll come back and tell you what we dio. But now with Iot Tahoe, they're able to look at the data and then, in one or two days of being able to go back and say, Yes, we have data. This is where it is. This is where we found that this is the data flows that we've found also, which is what I call it is the birth of a column. It's where the calm was created and where it went live as a teenager. And then it went to, you know, die very archive. >>In researching Iot Tahoe, it seems like one of the strengths of their platform is the ability to visualize data the data structure, and actually dig into it. But also see it, um, and that speeds things up and gives everybody additional confidence. And then the other pieces essentially infusing ai or machine intelligence into the data pipeline is really how you're attacking automation, right? >>Exactly. So you're able to let's say that I have I have seven cause lines of business that are asking me questions. And one of the questions I'll ask me is, um, we want to know if this customer is okay to contact, right? And you know, there's different avenues so you can go online to go. Do not contact me. You can go to the bank And you could say, I don't want, um, email, but I'll take tests and I want, you know, phone calls. Um, all that information. So seven different lines of business asked me that question in different ways once said Okay to contact the other one says, You know, just for one to pray all these, you know, um, and each project before I got there used to be siloed. So one customer would be 100 hours for them to do that and analytical work, and then another cut. Another of analysts would do another 100 hours on the other project. Well, now I can do that all at once, and I can do those type of searches and say yes we already have that documentation. Here it is. And this is where you can find where the customer has said, You know, you don't want I don't want to get access from you by email, or I've subscribed to get emails from you. I'm using Iot typos eight automation right now to bring in the data and to start analyzing the data close to make sure that I'm not missing anything and that I'm not bringing over redundant data. Um, the data warehouse that I'm working off is not, um a It's an on prem. It's an oracle database. Um, and it's 15 years old, so it has extra data in it. It has, um, things that we don't need anymore. And Iot. Tahoe's helping me shake out that, um, extra data that does not need to be moved into my S three. So it's saving me money when I'm moving from offering on Prem. >>What's your vision or your your data driven organization? >>Um, I want for the bankers to be able to walk around with on iPad in their hands and be able to access data for that customer really fast and be able to give them the best deal that they can get. I want Webster to be right there on top, with being able to add new customers and to be able to serve our existing customers who had bank accounts. Since you were 12 years old there and now our, you know, multi. Whatever. Um, I want them to be able to have the best experience with our our bankers. >>That's really what I want is a banking customer. I want my bank to know who I am, anticipate my needs and create a great experience for me. And then let me go on with my life. And so that's a great story. Love your experience, your background and your knowledge. Can't thank you enough for coming on the Cube. >>No, thank you very much. And you guys have a great day. >>Next, we'll talk with Lester Waters, who's the CTO of Iot Toe cluster takes us through the key considerations of moving to the cloud. >>Yeah, right. The entire platform Automated data Discovery data Discovery is the first step to knowing your data auto discover data across any application on any infrastructure and identify all unknown data relationships across the entire siloed data landscape. smart data catalog. Know how everything is connected? Understand everything in context, regained ownership and trust in your data and maintain a single source of truth across cloud platforms, SAS applications, reference data and legacy systems and power business users to quickly discover and understand the data that matters to them with a smart data catalog continuously updated ensuring business teams always have access to the most trusted data available. Automated data mapping and linking automate the identification of unknown relationships within and across data silos throughout the organization. Build your business glossary automatically using in house common business terms, vocabulary and definitions. Discovered relationships appears connections or dependencies between data entities such as customer account, address invoice and these data entities have many discovery properties. At a granular level, data signals dashboards. Get up to date feeds on the health of your data for faster improved data management. See trends, view for history. Compare versions and get accurate and timely visual insights from across the organization. Automated data flows automatically captured every data flow to locate all the dependencies across systems. Visualize how they work together collectively and know who within your organization has access to data. Understand the source and destination for all your business data with comprehensive data lineage constructed automatically during with data discovery phase and continuously load results into the smart Data catalog. Active, geeky automated data quality assessments Powered by active geek You ensure data is fit for consumption that meets the needs of enterprise data users. Keep information about the current data quality state readily available faster Improved decision making Data policy. Governor Automate data governance End to end over the entire data lifecycle with automation, instant transparency and control Automate data policy assessments with glossaries, metadata and policies for sensitive data discovery that automatically tag link and annotate with metadata to provide enterprise wide search for all lines of business self service knowledge graph Digitize and search your enterprise knowledge. Turn multiple siloed data sources into machine Understandable knowledge from a single data canvas searching Explore data content across systems including GRP CRM billing systems, social media to fuel data pipelines >>Yeah, yeah, focusing on enterprise data automation. We're gonna talk about the journey to the cloud Remember, the hashtag is data automate and we're here with Leicester Waters. Who's the CTO of Iot Tahoe? Give us a little background CTO, You've got a deep, deep expertise in a lot of different areas. But what do we need to know? >>Well, David, I started my career basically at Microsoft, uh, where I started the information Security Cryptography group. They're the very 1st 1 that the company had, and that led to a career in information, security. And and, of course, as easy as you go along with information security data is the key element to be protected. Eso I always had my hands and data not naturally progressed into a roll out Iot talk was their CTO. >>What's the prescription for that automation journey and simplifying that migration to the cloud? >>Well, I think the first thing is understanding what you've got. So discover and cataloging your data and your applications. You know, I don't know what I have. I can't move it. I can't. I can't improve it. I can't build upon it. And I have to understand there's dependence. And so building that data catalog is the very first step What I got. Okay, >>so So we've done the audit. We know we've got what's what's next? Where do we go >>next? So the next thing is remediating that data you know, where do I have duplicate data? I may have often times in an organization. Uh, data will get duplicated. So somebody will take a snapshot of the data, you know, and then end up building a new application, which suddenly becomes dependent on that data. So it's not uncommon for an organization of 20 master instances of a customer, and you can see where that will go. And trying to keep all that stuff in sync becomes a nightmare all by itself. So you want to sort of understand where all your redundant data is? So when you go to the cloud, maybe you have an opportunity here to do you consolidate that that data, >>then what? You figure out what to get rid of our actually get rid of it. What's what's next? >>Yes, yes, that would be the next step. So figure out what you need. What, you don't need you Often times I've found that there's obsolete columns of data in your databases that you just don't need. Or maybe it's been superseded by another. You've got tables have been superseded by other tables in your database, so you got to kind of understand what's being used and what's not. And then from that, you can decide. I'm gonna leave this stuff behind or I'm gonna I'm gonna archive this stuff because I might need it for data retention where I'm just gonna delete it. You don't need it. All were >>plowing through your steps here. What's next on the >>journey? The next one is is in a nutshell. Preserve your data format. Don't. Don't, Don't. Don't boil the ocean here at music Cliche. You know, you you want to do a certain degree of lift and shift because you've got application dependencies on that data and the data format, the tables in which they sent the columns and the way they're named. So some degree, you are gonna be doing a lift and ship, but it's an intelligent lift and ship. The >>data lives in silos. So how do you kind of deal with that? Problem? Is that is that part of the journey? >>That's that's great pointed because you're right that the data silos happen because, you know, this business unit is start chartered with this task. Another business unit has this task and that's how you get those in stance creations of the same data occurring in multiple places. So you really want to is part of your cloud migration. You really want a plan where there's an opportunity to consolidate your data because that means it will be less to manage. Would be less data to secure, and it will be. It will have a smaller footprint, which means reduce costs. >>But maybe you could address data quality. Where does that fit in on the >>journey? That's that's a very important point, you know. First of all, you don't want to bring your legacy issues with U. S. As the point I made earlier. If you've got data quality issues, this is a good time to find those and and identify and remediate them. But that could be a laborious task, and you could probably accomplish. It will take a lot of work. So the opportunity used tools you and automate that process is really will help you find those outliers that >>what's next? I think we're through. I think I've counted six. What's the What's the lucky seven >>Lucky seven involved your business users. Really, When you think about it, you're your data is in silos, part of part of this migration to cloud as an opportunity to break down the silos. These silence that naturally occurs are the business. You, uh, you've got to break these cultural barriers that sometimes exists between business and say so. For example, I always advise there's an opportunity year to consolidate your sensitive data. Your P I. I personally identifiable information and and three different business units have the same source of truth From that, there's an opportunity to consolidate that into one. >>Well, great advice, Lester. Thanks so much. I mean, it's clear that the Cap Ex investments on data centers they're generally not a good investment for most companies. Lester really appreciate Lester Water CTO of Iot Tahoe. Let's watch this short video and we'll come right back. >>Use cases. Data migration. Accelerate digitization of business by providing automated data migration work flows that save time in achieving project milestones. Eradicate operational risk and minimize labor intensive manual processes that demand costly overhead data quality. You know the data swamp and re establish trust in the data to enable data signs and Data analytics data governance. Ensure that business and technology understand critical data elements and have control over the enterprise data landscape Data Analytics ENABLEMENT Data Discovery to enable data scientists and Data Analytics teams to identify the right data set through self service for business demands or analytical reporting that advanced too complex regulatory compliance. Government mandated data privacy requirements. GDP Our CCP, A, e, p, R HIPPA and Data Lake Management. Identify late contents cleanup manage ongoing activity. Data mapping and knowledge graph Creates BKG models on business enterprise data with automated mapping to a specific ontology enabling semantic search across all sources in the data estate data ops scale as a foundation to automate data management presences. >>Are you interested in test driving the i o ta ho platform Kickstart the benefits of data automation for your business through the Iot Labs program? Ah, flexible, scalable sandbox environment on the cloud of your choice with set up service and support provided by Iot. Top Click on the link and connect with the data engineer to learn more and see Iot Tahoe in action. Everybody, we're back. We're talking about enterprise data automation. The hashtag is data automated and we're going to really dig into data migrations, data migrations. They're risky, they're time consuming and they're expensive. Yousef con is here. He's the head of partnerships and alliances at I o ta ho coming again from London. Hey, good to see you, Seth. Thanks very much. >>Thank you. >>So let's set up the problem a little bit. And then I want to get into some of the data said that migration is a risky, time consuming, expensive. They're they're often times a blocker for organizations to really get value out of data. Why is that? >>I think I mean, all migrations have to start with knowing the facts about your data. Uh, and you can try and do this manually. But when you have an organization that may have been going for decades or longer, they will probably have a pretty large legacy data estate so that I have everything from on premise mainframes. They may have stuff which is probably in the cloud, but they probably have hundreds, if not thousands of applications and potentially hundreds of different data stores. >>So I want to dig into this migration and let's let's pull up graphic. It will talk about We'll talk about what a typical migration project looks like. So what you see, here it is. It's very detailed. I know it's a bit of an eye test, but let me call your attention to some of the key aspects of this, uh and then use if I want you to chime in. So at the top here, you see that area graph that's operational risk for a typical migration project, and you can see the timeline and the the milestones That Blue Bar is the time to test so you can see the second step. Data analysis. It's 24 weeks so very time consuming, and then let's not get dig into the stuff in the middle of the fine print. But there's some real good detail there, but go down the bottom. That's labor intensity in the in the bottom, and you can see hi is that sort of brown and and you could see a number of data analysis data staging data prep, the trial, the implementation post implementation fixtures, the transition to be a Blu, which I think is business as usual. >>The key thing is, when you don't understand your data upfront, it's very difficult to scope to set up a project because you go to business stakeholders and decision makers, and you say Okay, we want to migrate these data stores. We want to put them in the cloud most often, but actually, you probably don't know how much data is there. You don't necessarily know how many applications that relates to, you know, the relationships between the data. You don't know the flow of the basis of the direction in which the data is going between different data stores and tables. So you start from a position where you have pretty high risk and probably the area that risk you could be. Stack your project team of lots and lots of people to do the next phase, which is analysis. And so you set up a project which has got a pretty high cost. The big projects, more people, the heavy of governance, obviously on then there, then in the phase where they're trying to do lots and lots of manual analysis, um, manual processes, as we all know, on the layer of trying to relate data that's in different grocery stores relating individual tables and columns, very time consuming, expensive. If you're hiring in resource from consultants or systems integrators externally, you might need to buy or to use party tools. Aziz said earlier the people who understand some of those systems may have left a while ago. CEO even higher risks quite cost situation from the off on the same things that have developed through the project. Um, what are you doing with Ayatollah? Who is that? We're able to automate a lot of this process from the very beginning because we can do the initial data. Discovery run, for example, automatically you very quickly have an automated validator. A data met on the data flow has been generated automatically, much less time and effort and much less cars stopped. >>Yeah. And now let's bring up the the the same chart. But with a set of an automation injection in here and now. So you now see the sort of Cisco said accelerated by Iot, Tom. Okay, great. And we're gonna talk about this, but look, what happens to the operational risk. A dramatic reduction in that, That that graph and then look at the bars, the bars, those blue bars. You know, data analysis went from 24 weeks down to four weeks and then look at the labor intensity. The it was all these were high data analysis, data staging data prep trialling post implementation fixtures in transition to be a you all those went from high labor intensity. So we've now attacked that and gone to low labor intensity. Explain how that magic happened. >>I think that the example off a data catalog. So every large enterprise wants to have some kind of repository where they put all their understanding about their data in its price States catalog. If you like, imagine trying to do that manually, you need to go into every individual data store. You need a DB, a business analyst, reach data store. They need to do an extract of the data. But it on the table was individually they need to cross reference that with other data school, it stores and schemers and tables you probably with the mother of all Lock Excel spreadsheets. It would be a very, very difficult exercise to do. I mean, in fact, one of our reflections as we automate lots of data lots of these things is, um it accelerates the ability to water may, But in some cases, it also makes it possible for enterprise customers with legacy systems take banks, for example. There quite often end up staying on mainframe systems that they've had in place for decades. I'm not migrating away from them because they're not able to actually do the work of understanding the data, duplicating the data, deleting data isn't relevant and then confidently going forward to migrate. So they stay where they are with all the attendant problems assistance systems that are out of support. You know, you know, the biggest frustration for lots of them and the thing that they spend far too much time doing is trying to work out what the right data is on cleaning data, which really you don't want a highly paid thanks to scientists doing with their time. But if you sort out your data in the first place, get rid of duplication that sounds migrate to cloud store where things are really accessible. It's easy to build connections and to use native machine learning tools. You well, on the way up to the maturity card, you can start to use some of the more advanced applications >>massive opportunities not only for technology companies, but for those organizations that can apply technology for business. Advantage yourself, count. Thanks so much for coming on the Cube. Much appreciated. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation vibrator this is Dave Volante and welcome to this special cube conversation as you know I've been running a CXO series now for several weeks really trying to understand how leaders are dealing and coping with the Cova 19 crisis today we want to switch gears a little bit and talk not only about how leadership has sort of navigated through this crisis but also start to imagine what it's going to look like coming out of it I'm going to introduce you to a company that have been talking about now for the last well six to nine months company called octave as you know from my previous breaking analysis this is a company that not only is in the security business they really kind of made their mark with identification management but also really there's a data angle normally when you think about security you thinking about auto security it means that less user flexibility it means less value from the user standpoint what what octa has done really successfully is bring together both endpoint security as well as that data angle and so the company is about six hundred million dollars in revenue they've got an eighteen billion dollar valuation which you know may sound kind of rich at 30 X a revenue multiple but as I've reported the company is growing very rapidly I've talked about the you know the rule of 40 octa is really a rule of 50 type of company you know by that definition they're with me here to talk about the product side of things as dia jolly who's the chief product officer yeah thanks so much for coming on the cube I hope you're doing okay how are things out in California things are going well good to meet you as well Dave I hope you're doing well as well yeah we're hanging in there you know the studios are rocking the cube you know continues our daily reporting I want to start with your role you're relatively new to octa you've got a really interesting background particularly understanding endpoints you're at Google Google home of Google Nest you spent some time you know worrying about looking after Xbox do you a good understanding of what's going on in the marketplace but talk about your your role and how specifically you're bringing that to enterprise sure so I drove about this I I say that I've done every kind of known product management imaginable the man at this point I'm done both Hardware Don software so dealt a lot with endpoints as you talked about that a lot with sass dealt with consumer dealt with enterprise and all over the place completely different sizes so after really my role as a chief product officer is to be able to understand and what our customers need right and what are the challenges they're facing and not just the challenges they're facing today but also what are the challenges that they'll face tomorrow that they don't even know about and then help build products to be able to overcome that both with our engineering teams as well as with our sales engineering team so that we can take it to market now my background is unique because I've seen so many identity being used in so many different ways across so many different use cases whether it's enterprise or its consumer and that given that we covered both sides spectrum I can bring that to bear yes so what I've reported previously is that that you guys kind of made your mark with with identification management but in terms of both workforce but also customer identification management which has been I think allowed you to be very very successful I want to bring up a chart and share something that I've I've shared a lot of data with our audience previously some guys if you bring that up so this is data from enterprise Technology Research our data partner and for those who follow this program you know we we generally talk in in two metrics a net score which is a measure of spending momentum and and also market share which really isn't real market share but it's it's pervasiveness in the survey and what you can see here is the latest April survey from over 1200 CIOs and IT practitioners and we're isolating on an octa and and we brought it back to July 15 survey you see a couple of points here I want to make one is it something to the right this is pervasiveness or market share so octa in the market is doing very very well it's why the valuation is so high what's driving the growth and then you can see in the green a 55% net net score very very strong it's one of the leaders in security but as I said it's more than than that so dia from a product standpoint what is powering this momentum sure so as you well know the world is working from home what after does is it provides Identity Management that allows you to connect to any technology and by any technology it primarily means technology technology that's not just on premise like your applications on-premise old-school applications or into software that's on premise but it also means technology that's in the clouds of SAS applications application infrastructure that's in the cloud etc and on the other hand it also allows companies to deploy applications where they can connect to their customers online so as more and more of the world moves to work from home you need to be able to securely and seamlessly allow your employees your partners to be able to connect from their home and to be able to do their work and that's the foundation that we provide now if you look at if you we've heard a lot in the press about companies like zoom slack people that provide online collaboration and their usage has gone up we're seeing similar trends across both octa as well as the entire security industry in general right and if you look at information recently since over to started phishing attacks have increased by six hundred and sixty seven percent and what we've seen in response is one of our products which is multi-factor authentication we've experienced in eighty percent growth in usage so really as Corvette has pushed forward there was a trend for people to be able to work remotely for people to be able to access cloud apps and but as ubered has suddenly poured gas on the fire for that we're seeing our customers reaching out to us a lot more needing more support and just the level of awareness and the level of interest raising let's talk about some of the trends that you guys see in the marketplace and like to better understand how that informs your product or you know roadmap and decisions you know obviously this cloud you guys have made a really good mark in the cloud space you know with both your your operating model your pricing model the modern stack the other is a reference that upfront which data talked a lot about digital transformation digital us data course the third is purity related to trust we've talked a lot on the cube about how the perimeter is there is no particular anymore the Queen is left her castle and so what are the big trends that you see the big waves that that you're riding and how does that inform your product directly sure so a few different things I think number one if you think about the way I've phrase this is or the way I think about it is the following any big technological trend you see today right whether it's the move the cloud whether it's mobile whether it's artificial intelligence intelligence you think about the neural nets etc or it's a personalized consumer experience all of that fundamentally depends on identity so the most important the so from a from being an identity provider the most important thing for us is to be able to build something that is flexible enough that is broad enough that it is able to span multiple uses right so we've taken from a product perspective that means we can follow two philosophies we can either the try and go solve each of these pain points one by one or we can actually try to build a platform that is more open that's more extensible and that's more flexible so that we can solve many of these use cases right and not only can we solve it because there's it extensible our customers can customize it they can build on top of it our partners can build on top of it so that's one thing that's one product philosophy that we hold dear and so we have the Octagon cloud which is a platform which provides both workforce identity as well as customer identity using the same underlying components the same multi-factor authentication we use for workforce we package up as an SDK so that our customer identity customers that's number one the second thing is you rightfully mention is data you can't really secure identity without data so we have very we have a lot of data across our customers we know when the users logging in we know what device they're logging in front we know the security posture on the device we know where they're logging in from we know their different behaviors were apps they go into or during wartime of the day etc so being able to harness all this data to say hey and apply ml model squared to say hey is the user secure or not is a very very core foundation of our product so for example we have what we call risk-based authentication you can not only do things like hey this user seems to be logging on from a location they've never logged on from but you could even do things like well you may not want to stop the user they may be traveling so instead of just asking them for a for a password you ask them for a multi-factor right so that's the other piece of it and in many ways data and security and usability are three legs of a triangle the more data you have the more you can allow a user you more security you can provide a user without creating more friction so it's sometimes helpful for the audience to understand a company in a edit Avant act in the landscape so the obvious platform out there is Active Directory now Microsoft with Azure Active Directory you know really you know trying to and and that's really been on their platforms but with api's you know Microsoft has got a thumbs in every pie how does octave differentiate from some of the other traditional platforms that are out there and and what gives you confidence that it and you can continue to do so going forward post kovat that's it that's a fantastic question Dave um so I think we divide if you think about our competitors on the workforce side we've got Microsoft and a couple of other competitors and on the customer Identity side really it's a bill versus buy story right most companies customer identity internally so let's take workforce first Microsoft is the dominant player there they've got Active Directory they've now got Azure Active Directory and from a Microsoft perspective I think Microsoft is always been great at building products or building technology that interconnected run the world is going to more there's more and more technology proliferation in the world and the way we differentiate is by becoming a neutral and independent platform so whether you're on a Microsoft stack whether you're on a Google stack whether you're on an amazon stack we are able to connect with you deeply we connect just as well with all 365 as they connect with Salesforce as we connect with AWS right and that has been our core philosophy and not only is that a philosophy for other when other vendors it's a philosophy for ourselves as well we have multi-factor authentication so do many other providers like duo if you want to use ours great if you don't want to use ours with our platform who use the one that's best for your technology and I think what we've always believed in from a product perspective is this independence this neutrality this ability to plug-and-play any technology you want into a platform to be able to do what you want and the technology that's best for your business's need so what's interesting what you said about the sort of make versus buy that's particularly relevant for the customer identification management because let's say you know I'm buying from Amazon I've got Amazon they know who I am but if I understand it correctly customers now are able to look across brands maybe cohort selling maybe make specific offers analyze the data that's an advantage that you bring that maybe do it yourself doesn't Frank maybe talk about that a little bit sure so really if you think about if you think about a bill versus buying even ten years ago life used to be relatively simple maybe 15 years ago you had a website you as your username your the password you weren't really using you don't have multiple channels you didn't have multiple devices as prevalent you didn't have multiple apps in a lot of cases connected to each other right and in that in that day and age password was fairly secure you weren't doing a lot of personalization with the user data or had a lot of sensitive user data so building a custom identity solution having your customer managing your customers identity yourself was fairly easy now it's becoming more and more hard number one I just talked about the phishing attacks they're an equal number of attacks on the customer identity side right so how do you actually secure this identity how do you actually use things like multi-factor authentication how do you keep up with all the latest in multi-factor authentication touch ID face ID etcetera and that's one the second thing we provide is scale for a number of companies we also provide the ability to scale dramatically which scaling identity and being being able to authenticate someone and keep someone authenticated in real time is actually a very big channel challenge as you get to more and more scale and then the last thing that you mentioned is this ability we provide a single view of the user which is super super powerful because now if you think about one of our customers Albertsons they have multiple different apps there are multiple different digital experiences and he don't have a siloed view of their customer across all these experiences here one identity for your customer that customer uses that one identity to log on to all your digital experiences across all channels and we're able to bring that data back together so if Albertsons wants to say hey somebody shot a in or bought something in one particular app but I know people that buy this particular object like something else that's available in another app they can give a promotion for it or they can give a discomfort that's so that makes a lot of sense I went into the PR platform get our data partner and I looked at which industries are really showing moment so remember this survey focus was run right in the heart of the the Cova 19 pandemic from from mid-march the mid April so it's a good of good current data point and there were four that stood out large companies healthcare and pharma telco which is courses this work-from-home thing and then consumer the example that you just gave from Albertsons is really you know sort of around that consumer there are a lot of industries that obviously been hit airlines restaurants hospitality but but these four really stood out as growth areas despite the kovat 19 pandemic I want to ask you about octane you just got it had your big user conference anything product specific that came out of that that our audience should know about I mean I'm an interested in access gateway I know that wasn't necessarily a new announcement but Cloud Gateway what were the highlights of some of those things from a product stamp yeah of course so we did we did made a very difficult decision to pivot octane virtually and we did this because a number of our customers are given what they're facing with the Kovach pandemic wanted to hear more around news around what our product launches are how they could use this with cetera and really I'd say there are three key product launches that I want to highlight here we had a number of different announcements and it was a very successful conference but the three that are the most relevant here one is we've always talked about being a platform and we've set this for the past four or five years I think and but over the last your and going into the next couple of years we're investing very very heavily in making our platform even more powerful even more extensible even more customizable and so that it can go across the scenarios you described right which is whether you're on Prem with Auto access gateway or you're in the cloud or in some kind of hybrid environment or you using some mix-and-match or work from home people in the office etc so really what we did this year over the last year was deepen our platform footprint and we started releasing the four components available in a platform which we call platform services so we have six components and we were directories that is customizable and and flexible so you can build your own emails except for N equals four users adds information related to them we have an integration platform that we've made available at a deep level where where our customers can use SDKs tools etc to be able to integrate with octa in a platform which we've talked a lot about and then we released three new platform services and one was what we call arc identity engine we had released we talked about this last year and this year we talked about it last year from a customer identity perspective this year we brought her into our workforce identity but also what that does is it allows you a lot more flexibility for situations like we're in right it allows you flexibility to define security policies at the parabola it so you could decide hey for my email I don't want my customers to have to use a multi-factor authentication for but for Salesforce I would definitely want them to use a multi-factor authentication if they're not in the office and it also allows you to have a lot more flexible factor recovery so for example if you forgot your password one of the biggest pain points of co-ed has been the number of helpdesk costs have been rising through the roof the phone calls are ringing nonstop right and one of the biggest reasons for helpdesk are says oh I can't login I got locked out either lost a factor or L forgot my password it helps with that um so that's one set of announcements the second set of announcements was we launched a brand new devices platform and personally this is my personal favorite but really what the devices platform allows you to do is the feature in it that we launched is called Fast Pass and what phosphorous allows you to do is it actually takes phosphorous to the next level it allows you to basically use logging into your device and us understanding the posture of the device and all the user context around you to be able to log you directly dr. then I imagine if you're on a Mac or a iOS device or an Android or a Windows device just being able to face match into your iOS or being able to touch ID into your Windows hello and you're automatically logged into lockdown right that is that and and the way we do that is we have this client on across all these operating systems that can really understand the security posture of the device it can understand of the device is managed if it's safe if it's jailbroken if it's unmanaged it can also connect with multiple signals on the device so if you have an EDR and MDM vendor we can ingest those signals and what they think of the risk we can also ingest signals directly from apps if apps things like um G suite and Salesforce actually track user behavior to determine risk they can pass those signals to us and then we can make a decision on hey we should allow the user to authenticate directly into octa because they've authenticated their device which we can make a decision that says no let's provider let's ask them to step up with a multi-factor authentication or we can say no this is too risky let's deny access and all of this is configurable by the IT admin they can decide the risk levels they're comfortable with they can decide the different risk levels by different apps so that was another major announcement and then and as a product person you rarely ever get the chance to actually increase security and usability at one time which is why it's my favorite you increase both security and usability together now the last one was action was a workflows engine we call it workflows lifecycle management and we it's really we launched a graphical no cord user interface identity is so important so many business processes for our customers there's so many business processes built an identity for example if someone joins her company you usually either have a script that allows them access to the applications they need to or you actually have an IT admin sitting in there trying to manually provide access or when they leave right what workflow lifecycle management or lifecycle management workflows allows you to do is it actually allows you to provide it actually provides you the no core graphical user interface where you can build all these flows so now you don't need someone that knows coding you can even have a business unit so for example I for me in the product for the product org I can have someone say hey building a business process similar it's something you would build in sort of like an iPad and allow everyone that comes in to be able to have access to fig mom because we use pigma a lot right those are the kinds of things you can do and it's super powerful and it takes the ability of our already existing lifecycle management product to the next level well thank you for that that's that summary dear so I want to kind of close with I mean those of you have been following the cube for a while there I think there's some similarities between octa and and and service now that obviously obvious differences but we started following you know ServiceNow pre-ipo is less than a hundred million dollar company and we've seen that company build out as a platform company and that's really what octa is doing here we're talking about a total available market that's yeah probably north of 50 billion so the the question I have he is you know what Frederic and pod started 11 years ago playing on the dynamics coming out of the financial crisis that got us to where we are today now you've got the challenge of you've achieved reached escape velocity now you've got this you know massive growth opportunity in front of you how do you see the product portfolio evolving expanding and I'm also interested in postcode with 19 you know no whiteboards no face-to-face contact not at least not for a while and how you're kind of managing through that but but how can we expect the product portfolio to expand over time what can you share with us so one of the given how pervasive identity has become and given how not just broad but at the same time deep it is there are multiple different places or product portfolio >> and a number of different places were thinking about right so one is you mentioned today we play in workforce identity and customer identity but we haven't even begun to talk about how we might play in consumer right one of the one of the biggest perk matter is consumers and consumers protecting their own identity so often an employee is not using their identity to lock the seals ports and you have an attack on a company and offered an employee actually logging into their Gmail their personal Gmail or their personal or some personal website that bank and they get and their credential get compromised in their fluency impossible so the more protective the more directly consumers the more we indirectly protect both enterprises from work from an employer as well as a customer perspective howdy we're an enterprise company so it doesn't mean that we are going to go direct to consumer there are ways to make employees more secure by what the director calls were so that's one the second thing is managing identities I think we've as the number of applications as the number of technologies are proliferate managing and an employee's life cycle who that governing that the life cycle is not administering etc is also fully stock also becoming very very challenging it was all well and good we'll never can ask and you were on that that's not true anymore an average company uses I think close to 200 applications and then if you broaden back to other resources like infrastructure there's a lot lock more so how do you actually build automated systems that based on the employee status based on their rule based on the project they're on provides them the right access for the right amount of time the third thing you mentioned is and you should pass on this initially but this is the there's this concept of zero security right and the perimeters disappeared how do you provide security so if you look at the industry at large today there are tons of different security vendors trying to provide security at each point if you talk to any see-saw out there it's really really hard to cobble all of this together and one of the things we were trying to do is we're trying to figure out how with our partners we can build a silly end-to-end solution for n - n zero trust for our customers so that's that's another area that the of the product portfolio we're pushing and then finally with the whole digital transformation and customer identity yes more and more companies want their customers to go back online yes more and more customers convenience of being able to interact online with Billy if you think about it the world has changed dramatically over the last three years with privacy laws with things like gdpr CCP etc how do you actually manage your customers obviously you actually manage their content how do you ensure that while you're using all this data from across these apps that we talked about here you and you're using for the first benefit how do you make sure that the minister private is secure and and how do you ensure your customers that's another major area that I think our customers are asking us for helping and so those are areas or so that you should be a big signature the next two to three years some of it will be through partnership that's generally that high-level directions we're headed in wealthy you so much for coming on the key on the key and sharing the product roadmap and some other details about the great company really interested in watching its continued ascendancy good luck in the marketplace and thank you for watching everybody this is Dave Villante you conversations we'll see you next time [Music]

>> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California, theCUBE Studios, I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE, we're here with Reinhardt Quelle who's the principle engineer, Cloud Platforms and solutions Group at Cisco. Reinhardt, thanks for coming in, good to see you. >> Reinhardt: Thanks for having me. >> So, technical conversation around Cloud is something that we love having. We've seen the evolution over the past decade, Cloud 1.0, compute, storage, greenfield, cloud opportunities, great SaaS applications being built, you've built apps for over a decade, SaaS apps. >> That's right, I've been delivering applications, both to data centers and then of course, later into Cloud for a number of years. >> So you got some scar tissue. You have some successes, you've had some struggles, probably with on-prem, but the world's changed a lot and again, we've been covering this a couple years now. We saw public Cloud, all the benefits, no questions, great, you can lift and ship stuff up there, no problem, but the complexity's still there and now the trend is everything's shifting back to on-prem with Cloud. So now the hybrid model has been validated, Amazon Outpost, Anthos in Google, Azure Stack from Microsoft, clearly this mold, all the cloud vendors are telegraphing, they are doing it, this is a reality, this has been validated. >> Yeah, I think that's no surprise to those of us who've been deploying for a number of years. We've always had data centers where we're running our applications in data centers, and yes we started taking that into the Cloud, but there was always components of our infrastructure that continued to run on-prem, whether for historical reasons, for data gravity reasons, policy reasons, any number of reasons, but what we did learn was how to operate our applications differently and so for the last number of years, we've been moving a lot of the advantages of that Cloud back to on-prem. >> So I want to get your thoughts as principle engineer and look at the overall Cisco holistic portfolio of products because Cisco is a standard in the enterprise, every big company has Cisco gear at some level form of another. You've been dealing with networking for years, but now that networking becomes so much more acute issue because you still got to move packets around, another abstraction layer does networking, security, networking, all tie in to the growth area that is now this next generation of Cloud, Cloud 2.0, intelligent edge, data center on-prem, what's the Cisco story? Why Cisco, why now? What's the story? >> Well the amusing thing, of course, is the Cloud doesn't exist without networking. The very first thing when you set up an Amazon-- a compute in Amazon, you set up a virtual private network and you start deploying into that network, so it's always been true that networking is at the core of Cloud. And so the complexity that we're seeing over time is that the workloads are everywhere. The workloads aren't just in my data center and I'm not paying attention to data center networking or just cloud networking, it's connecting them together, securing them, making sure that they're fast and well managed. And so it's always been true that networking's at the core of this and as the edges get blurry, as we move workloads from one place to the other, all of the things that Cisco does are on managed networks, programmable networks, secure networks, all become even more important. >> And everything's amplified, too, in terms of its purpose. You're seeing automation is a big trend that's impacting the infrastructure and app developers. You've deployed SaaS apps within Cisco for over a decade, you've seen your share of successes and its issues but now as the data becomes critical, you got security perimeter issues are gone, and you got Surface here with industrial in IOT it's only getting more complex. So the complexity never went, but it's still complex these are the same problems. What's changed, what's the-- what's going on? >> Well so one of the things that's changed is that we've-- and this is something we can credit the Cloud providers for doing it is we've learned to treat our infrastructure in a different way. I mean the way we deploy and manage everything including networks compute, even applications. Operating the cloud demanded that we automate those things. Demanded the way, when you're managing now, fleets of thousands or tens of thousands of machines at scale in the cloud and when your call provider won't promise you that any machine won't go away at any moment you get good at replacing machines. And now we take those same tools, concepts, ways of operating that we did on the cloud and we apply them on print. Yeah, so a big part of what Cisco has been doing across our entire portfolio is ensuring that every piece of it from networking storage security is programmable and drivable through automation. >> You and I were talking before we came on camera and I wrote this down a phrase you like to use is, referring to Cisco, why Cisco is, We bring cloud innovation on-prem, what do you mean by that? >> Well really it's taking these new way of doing things, these new opportunities. Yeah, when we talk about-- we've had some funny conversations with our security guys, for example, we're historically in security we would have some policy, we would deploy applications against that policy once every six months or twelve months we would audit against that. Well one example of bringing the cloud innovation on-prem is the way you deploy that software, or deploy a new policy is via software. So auditing that is checking your code before you commit it, this says what it's going to do. Running reporting on the things that you've deployed so that you can see. So its taking these advantages of automation, and observability, and things like code review that are just normal practice in software development and apply them to infrastructure. And so, again, what Cisco is doing is making sure that all of our infrastructure can be-- can be programmed in that way, providing tools that allow us to program the things like Network Services Orchestrator or CloudCenter Suite that allow us to deploy applications or networks or whatever else as software entities . >> How about the reality of the person who's been innovating in the cloud and their reaction when they come back on prem they go, okay I've been doing this in the cloud and I turn around and I see all this. Is this the cloud innovation dynamic that you're referring to? Is it the realization that I had some innovation in the cloud, agility, automation and then trying to figure it out, or applying it, or both what's the reality when someone goes wow, I'm on-prem now, what's that innovation layer? >> Well there's several realities, depending on who you are and where you're coming from. One of my first roles at Cisco was, I was working on the Webex operation team and that-- the way we ran that operations was typical of the time it was built. And we did an acquisition that to accompany-- of a company that had been operating in Amazon and when they saw the way we that had to deploy and manage their application and infrastructure they were horrified. It's like, what do you mean I can't deploy a server in five minutes, what do you mean I can't manage the workflow in this way? So for them it was a shock and horror that they didn't have this infrastructure and that's when we deployed our first private cloud and Webex was to support that style of deployment. The flip side of that is the people who are operating those existing data centers with those existing workflows, their world changed, I mean they had to learn new ways of doing things, they had to learn new ways of managing their infrastructure, coding skills were a requirement not something that a few guys did, scripting in the background. So it was like, there's a lot of change to the people and to the way we did things but really it's a matter of bringing those, you know, bringing the cloud, bringing software development to operations, bringing software programmable to, hard programmability, to hardware. >> Yeah, I mean that's a great point. We cover that a lot on theCube, but I think one of the things you pointed out is the realization that, okay, great, new way of doing things, innovation. But as you kind of pointed out, there's a double edged sword there. The command and control of the network, which has been an old style tactic which doesn't go away, you still need to have control of certain things and on-premise, you certainly can control it on-premise, on cloud you think you control it through software, but this is the deep dive on tech conversation I want to have with you because we're talking about app deployment, Kubernetes management and the reality, I have my own gear on-site, as well as I'm maybe serverless into the cloud, this is the new reality. That you have to manage the controls. Take us through the-- those layers. App deployment, Kubernetes, and the reality of managing infrastructure on a future basis. >> Sure so, it's-- when we think about the application deployment it's very easy to kind of think about it in terms of the layers, and the programmable layers that you provide and I'll just touch--we won't go into detail on the products, but ultimately, today for an application-- someone deploying an application increasing that means push an application into Kubernetes, in other words I'm going to package my application's container, I'm going to hand it to Kubernetes through Kubernetes API and I'm going to expect Kubernetes to do the deployment and management of that. Okay, so that just makes the problem for the guy one layer below you, where's Kubernetes come from? It's like who deploys and manages Kubernetes? And so there's a number of different solutions and the public cloud you can use, you know, AKS, or Google's Kubernetes service, or Amazon's, any of these, but on-prem, where's it come from, who's going to manage it for you, who's going to create that? So Cisco's container platform is a product to deploy and manage Kubernetes to offload that from the developer, I mean, from the operations guy or the platform manager. Of course, that deployer of Kubernetes expects programmable infrastructure, how are you going to be able to deploy a VM or manage hardware that runs below that? >> Back to your innovation message. It's the innovation they want >> Well ultimately the guy wants the simple push the button and get the application deployed, that means someone has to get this layer deployed and well to get that layered deployed, what's there? So we continue to support virtualization managers, whether VMWare or our own cVim, Cisco Virtual Infrastructure Manager. All of these products its like, how do I manage this pool of hardware to provide that next layer of service? So, but in every case the programmability of the infrastructure or as far down as you can go becomes paramount, so, you know, when the guy racks a piece of hardware in the data center he doesn't want to think about how does this read card need to get configured, right? He just wants to rack it, plug it in, and then turn it over to software as quickly as possible. >> And that's the cloud innovation on-prem that you're referring to, that's making it cloud-like operations for Agility Automation, provisioning. >> Consistency, reliability, observability, give you an example of that, I mean when we, when we were talking originally when we were starting these cloud deployments and we had this conversation with Infosac about which application lives in which zone and how do you manage that? And we were like, well the zoning processes that's used in the past don't apply anymore. The way we manage that thing is with security groups, and the security groups are created this way. Here's the software, here's the software. When I'm talking software, I'm talking about configuration and scripts in this case, Ansible, Chef, Puppet whatever, that generate those security groups that generate those rules and it's like, it changes the way the security guy interacts with your team. It's no longer, file a ticket to review your app and app deployment and have a new ticket to do a deployment, it's something that they can do in real time. We're talking about moving these processes left, you know, moving that audit to the system all the way back into the software development stage and then giving the tools to verify that afterwards. And their eyes literally popped open, it was like, you mean at any moment at any time I can say show groups and see what the security posture is right now. And it's like, yes! An that's what sold them on letting us behave in this new way, was the ability to audit in realtime. >> Yeah, and this is a major advantage. This brings up the question that comes us all the time, and I want to get your thoughts on this because this shapes into the overall cloud architecture, cloud portfolio, and in this case with Cisco products is workload portability. It used to be, oh the one way trip to the cloud, not anymore, it's not a one way trip to the cloud, it's now bi-directionally on-premise, been validated by LPOST, Anthos, and Azure Stack, this is going to be an operating model to your point about the cloud innovation now workload portability, I think that's been validated so I think we recognize, the industry recognizes that it's not just public cloud everywhere, it's hybrid. This has been validated. You agree. >> Absolutely we-- there were many things that we never did move to the cloud, never would move to the cloud. Whether it's for policy reasons, or the quantity of data that we had, or systems that weren't available on the cloud, for example DevTest Labs, that have soundproof rooms, it's all audio equipment. We sell phones, we have to test those phones, those aren't ever going to be on the cloud, they're going to be in their soundproof rooms so we can test the audio pairing. There's stuff like that that always lives unrolled. There's a myriad of-- >> Compliance resources also requires-- >> Compliance things, whether its a FedRAMP compliance, this data has to be in this country, well US in that case, European privacy things. It could be-- I was talking to one bank a number of years ago now that worked-- we're deploying, we're talking about deploying Kubernetes from, it's like what applications are you deploying? Why do they need to be here, well, they're building-- they've got a mobile first application they want to use all the latest and greatest ways to build and deploy that application. But the data that that application is accessing is in the mainframe. It hasn't moved in ten years, twenty years, it's not going to move anytime soon. So you put the application next to the data that it needs. An IoT, it might be control devices, or video devices, or any number of things that's like, I think there's a trend overall, it's less about workload portability for a lot of people or being able to move workloads, it's saying, where's the best place for this particular workload to run, and so then provide the appropriate infrastructure to run that workload. And that's where we get back to saying, wait a minute I want to use containerization, I want to use orchestration systems, I want to use all these modern tools for doing this, but still put the workload where it needs to be. >> That is a profound statement, I want to just quickly unpack that a little bit because that really is the heart of the issue, cloud innovation. The workloads are going to be defining the requirements it needs, whether it's cloud selection or where it resides on-prem with what resources underneath it. That's not saying a company has to decide that because of that workload that the entire company has to use that 'cause the choices now because of the levels or granularity that cloud brings, the applications can get almost custom built or-- well not custom built but a specific hardware and compute to serve their needs. So if its a-- you're soul sourcing a set of resources for the workload. That's not saying that the infrastructure has to be that for everything, it's just the whole single cloud versus multi cloud dynamic. >> Yeah I mean, in fact, one of the things we're seeing more and more in our customers is, like, they don't have one cloud, they have multiple clouds, for multiple purposes. On-prem there's not one big private cloud that runs everything, there's lots of Kubernetes clusters and one of the things that a product like CCP does is allow you to deploy and manage multiple Kubernetes clusters for multiple purposes. Multiple problem domains, multiple political domains, financial domains, who's paying for this thing? Well, it's easy if you just buy the servers that are appropriate to your department and you run it. You still get to take advantage of all the way you deploy and package and run these applications, which is just hands down better than we ever did before. And that's some of the innovation we have. Now once you start doing this, once you start deploying these applications in multiple places, in multiple-- well, where are your security borders, where are your perimeters, how do you secure any of this, how do you connect all this stuff? How do you visualize all this stuff? And so, as you look at our products from, you know, we talked a little bit about the infrastructure pieces of that, you know the, Kubernetes deploying to an infrastructure manager, deploying ultimately to hardware, every layer of that. You know, UCS and CVIM and CCP, all of those layers are there and programmable. Okay, now we're deploying workloads, now I've got to connect the things together, how do I monitor it, how do I-- and so that's why you see products like Stealthwatch Cloud, and AppD, and the other applications to do monitoring and security across a now fully distributed application. >> You know, sometimes it's hard for me as a cube host to kind of get the story out about certain trends, especially when big players like Cisco, a lot of people know that I'm pretty bullish on Cisco, I've been very vocal about the Cisco opportunity with respect to cloud and critical, by the way in some areas and I think I would probably advise certain things to be certain ways. But one of the things, I think, is a great opportunity that you guys have, and you're kind of getting at, I want to just get your reaction and thoughts on this, is that what you're talking about here is an environment that's going to be constantly dynamic. That's constantly changing. And being complex is not going away, abstracting away the complexity is the game. But Cisco has always been successful in multi environments, different environments because networking has always been about diversity of networks. Campus this, and SD-- so it's not a new concept for Cisco to deal with this concept of multiple environments. Do you agree with that? What's your reaction to that? How would you answer that? Is that something you think Cisco's dominating in? Is that reason why Cisco is serving all these choices? What's your thoughts on that? >> I would have to say that overall the integrating lots of disparate things. Connecting lots of disparate things is in Cisco's DNA, I mean from our original routers and switches at the very beginning it was always multiple things connected to each other often multi-vendor working across standards and across standard things. When we talk about Kubernetes we're not talking about the Cisco Kubernetes we're talking about Kubernetes, the real thing, the actual Kubernetes, we're talking about-- and we're talking about ceiling, we're talking about openstack a standard, we're talking about-- so across all these boards connecting and integrating disparate things, is kind of what Cisco does. >> And so if you're deploying applications you've done that and certainly your customers are, they're never going to have one general purpose situations that's going to be scenarios, right? And certain things will be guiding principles, some will be governors that will then dictate things that might not be classic cloud native. Can you talk about that and give some examples why that's important and the reality of the statement. >> Yeah so, just use one example of an application, Webex teams our enterprise chat application, for example, that is your classic microservices modern cloud native application. There are three ways of deploying applications in that platform that are appropriate for the three different things. We got the services themselves, the media bridges, or the switching engines that runs these containers in a container orchestration fabric. There's the VM base things that are things like media bridges that don't run in containers very well, not because of the problem with the containers, but because of the overlay networks the containers bring with it and the way you route data to those. And we got physical machines. Now when we're actually running certain things on physical machines and so all of these exist in any kind of, even a brand new modern application so even within a single product family there's not one true way of doing things, what's the appropriate way to deploy this application. What's the right deployment target for this thing and how do I connect these things. >> You measure InfoSec so politics might be a driver that have nothing to do with technology, could be a human capital, resource issue, it could be something scalable. >> And the politics or even or can be even these temporal things, it's like, look I can spend, you know, three weeks trying to convince an InfoSec to do things in a particular way or it can just deploy somewhere where it makes them happy and move on, move on to the next problem and then later when they catch up with the way we're doing things, we may move it later. The other thing about timing on all this is the story is changing constantly when we deployed that application, we did not use Docker containers. And everybody says, why aren't you using Docker? Because Docker didn't exist three years ago! It's like the decisions we were making at that time are changing ever more rapidly. And the reality for our enterprise customers is that you don't just forklift one and then replace it with another one, you tend to manage them all in parallel even as you're making transitions, you know, eventually you kind of get rid of the old stuff, maybe, the mainframe still exists >> Mhmm. >> But in general for most of our enterprise customers it's not and or it's not on-prem or on the cloud, it's not containers or visible machines, its and, I'm running all of the above. >> And to your point about the docker not being around when you guys were doing that, that's going to be a concept that's going to be applied down the road, hey that wasn't around when we set the architecture, so as an enterprise, your customers that you talk to, what is the guiding principle? What is the preferred architecture? Again, a lot of choices you guys are trying to make your portfolio fit the bill. What are some of the decisions they have to make? So, to future-proof because they don't want to foreclose an opportunity and or create technical debt for that matter. Why would they do that? So they kind of have to be holistic in their thinking. >> Yeah, future proof is always-- is a funny concept because the reality is, that the... The way you do things will change. You didn't make something that was future proof, you built an environment that allowed you to do this way and that way. So if you take a look at the way we deployed, for example, our infrastructure in general we start with the UCS substrate, we can run Oracle on bare-metal on those things when we need to. We can run virtualization on top of that, and run a layer of vms on top of that. We can run containers, now I've got choices. Common substrate, common way of managing those things but at least three different ways of deploying on those. So ultimately we're looking for standard practices that enables me to have to do the and to where I can run things side by side and can connect things, I can secure things over the top but run all of the above. And it's really a matter of building things that have kind of clean our connectural layers where one thing consumes the other and then be able to mix and match and plug them together Lego style as it were. >> This a great chat, and really reminds me of the conversations that we'll be having here in theCube. We've been doing a series with engineering leaders and you know, you mentioned foreclose in the future, future proofing which is kind of a buzz word. The conversation happening in the technical circles is about technical debt and I think, you know, I've always seen that enterprise you know, cost of ownership, you know, and the shark fin, the iceberg and what you don't see. Certainly that's been a paradigm that's been known but now you're getting into this notion of not just so much future proofing, it's really the balance of technical debt because you know something new is coming. This is a modern concept that takes costs of ownership and future proofing and kind of puts it to reality because you're essentially taking on some sort of technical debting from point A to point B, but you don't want to take on too much that you can't pay it back if new technology comes in. So this is what's been going on in some of the you know, top customers that we've been talking to. A new management concept, this is kind of a modern new management discipline. Your thoughts and reaction to that? >> So there's at least two different vectors that talk about on it. So, one of the things is, how do I take these older applications, these older ways of managing things and incrementally improve them. Because we can actually make it-- it is easier today to deploy a process running on a machine than it ever was before. Five years ago I would have a ticket, some guy would go and then install software manually, today we don't do that, we use configuration management, puppet and chefs, ansible, etc. We improve the way I do those things incrementally rather than just forklift them. I'm not rewriting these applications and saying okay, we're going to make these into cloud native applications and microservices and bla, bla, bla and replatform them. No I incrementally improve the way I operate that thing. Even if its just deploying the hardware more consistently underneath or improving this layer. So I incrementally reduce my debt by applying, again, deploying some of these new cloud... Cloud innovations, they're grown out of the cloud to the existing ways of doing things. But the other point I'll make on a lot of this, is that, certainly for our team, and for a lot of the customers I talk about we don't just arbitrarily go and replatform things, right? It's like if the thing is working, let it continue to work. Don't deploy the new thing alongside it. You know, we're more concerned about delivering new features, new capabilities, new things. And we do that, and we concentrate our efforts and our engineering efforts on that and not constantly rewriting the past. >> A container can certainly help you there too. >> Absolutely. Containers are beautiful tool for that, for encapsulating dependencies around a thing. And so you'll find in many cases we have applications that are not ready to deploy to run in Kubernetes with a schedule that's going to move it around but I can still take advantage of the container packaging and run it on a physical box with a normal Linux operating system and containerize it. So it's usually valuable. >> Reinhardt, I want to get your thoughts on one last talking track, that is relevant to something that we've been covering. Stu Miniman, co-host of theCube with me on many of these events around networking, we both love networking, both networking nerds. Always joke about how networking is where you go to find out about the state of the industry is. Look at what's going on with the network. Because network ultimately tells the truth. Movin' things around, security people go to the network. You start to see, everything's revolving around the network now, more than ever. I mean, still, it's been that way forever. But you made a comment before we went on camera you said, just adding another layer of networking. If you think about what you just said, the networking paradigm is just kind of slowly moving to another layer. So networking is happening, it's just happening differently. So as the dev ops innovations in the cloud happens it's really a network innovation. 'cause security pivots off the network data used applications, instrumentations, on the network data, everything's around networks. >> It's intrinsically tied. In the past we had a machine, a physical machine had a network interface, singular, and a network identity an address. VMs, multiple network interfaces, multiple on every VM. Kubernetes, an IP address per application, right? And it's like the networking space is exploding as we move up. And yes, we now have a network connectivity and management problem that's over of magnitudes more complicated than it was before because now, individual workloads have IP addresses. And by the way I'm deploying workloads in multiples. I don't run a single application, I run a pool of applications, each one has an address. And so yeah networking is-- continues to be intrinsic and it just moves up. >> And it's fascinating too, you know, we always speculate about looking for that new technology, the new protocol, something new, the shiny new toy. But if you think about it, all the science and intellectual property has been built already. It's usually a combination of a couple different things. In network theory, in network management, the concepts are still around. It's being applied differently now. >> Or sliced into smaller, you know, smaller, the bites are smaller that you're dealing with, right? Everything has an IP address, we got thousands of IP addresses now that we're managing. Having IP address management problems, we have other things to manage now. >> The game is still the same. >> The game is still the same, it's still TCP IP networking. >> So final question, bottom line, why Cisco and the cloud networking as it comes together? As this stuff starts to modernize, hybrid is certainly reality hardcore, as people are doing today. Multi cloud is also another reality right around the corner. Why Cisco? Why Cisco's products and portfolios for the cloud? >> Well fundamentally, as we said earlier, the cloud has a networking problem. Networking underpins everything that we do. The networking, from physical networking the compute has to run on something. So networking, compute, orchestration systems for all of that, security that overlays all of that. I think Cisco uniquely has all of the components that it takes to build a modern infrastructure stack, and in fact deploy applications to that. I think, the breath of knowledge and capabilities Cisco has across those is unique. And then, also, I would say, Cisco's experience. We have many-- several of the world's largest SaaS applications in the Cisco family. Things like umbrella, DNS security, or Webex, web conferencing, we also have deep expertise in running applications and that's within the Cisco domain of expertise. >> Certainly in good position, I really I'm really bull-ish on what you guys can do. I think the network is where the trust is, it's where the data is, that's where the action is, and I think that's the cloud 2.0 equation. Thanks for coming in. Thanks for the insight. Reinhardt Quelle, principle engineer, Cloud Platforms of Cisco here sharing his insight on this Cube conversation. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Live from San Diego, California It's the queue covering Sisqo Live US 2019 Tio by Cisco and its ecosystem barkers. >> Welcome back to the cubes Coverage of Day One of Sisqo Live from Sunny San Diego on Lisa Martin, my co hostess, student, a Man and Stewart Air. Pleased to welcome a couple of guests from this Cisco platform in Solutions Group, We've got Barbara Half Li, senior director of Business development Barbeque. Great to Have You Iced Beer and Matt Ferguson, director of product development. Matt, Welcome. >> Thank you. Nice to be here. >> So we appreciate you guys being here right at the start of happy hour here in San Diego. Thank you. Some our drinking water. Right wing quick. Just getting so, Barbara. So here we are at this's the 30th year Cisco's partner and customer, then a lot. A lot happens in 30 years. A lot of change here we are customers in every industry, living in this multi cloud hybrid world for many reasons. >> What are some >> of the things from the business perspective that you're hearing from customers? What are they looking to Sisko to do to help them traverse this new multi cloud world successfully. >> Yeah, well, one of the things that we hear customers tell us often is how doe I manage this landscape. Many people think of the cloud is just Oh, I've got a public cloud or oh, I'm gonna have my cloud on primp. But really, with the explosion of devices and I ot right, people want to know. How do we take that data from the edge from the edge? What do I do with that data? Do I put it up in a public cloud immediately? Do I bring it back to do some kind of analysis on that data? Is it goto a polo? Does it come to the branch doesn't go to the headquarters and that lance games very complex. So you look across that landscape and as customers of either proactively adopted the public cloud or had to adopt multiple clouds because of acquisitions, they've made this lands. Skip just gets incredibly complex very, very quickly. So when people come to Cisco, they basically looking for a couple of things. Number one security. Because putting the security wrapper around all of that right, it becomes paramount. People lose their jobs if they're data isn't protected, so they want help with their security. They also want to know what's the best cost mix, right? How do I have the right options available to me? But the other thing they really want is speed of innovation. I mean, we hear this over and over and over. I talked to a bank the other day. 100 year old bank, right? You think 100 year old bank, um, speed of innovation may not be top of their priority, but absolutely. I walked in and they held up the phone and they said, Our competitors Aire delivering capabilities faster for the mobile user. And every time our competitors releases a new application or a new feature, I lose market share. So it isn't about cost savings anymore. It's about speed of innovation, even for 100 year old bank. When they come to Cisco, they want to know, Can you help secure this landscape? Can you give me speed of innovation? And then, of course, every cloud started the networking layer as well, right? So what innovation Cisco doing on the networking site? So these are some of the things that's customers come to Cisco and they ask us, what can you do for us and the help that they want? It comes back to innovation every time. >> Barbara. Actually, I've talked to some of those homes year old cos they need it more than ever, because that five year old bank doesn't have all the legacy and they're already moving is fast. But it's an interesting point. Matt. You know, we've been tracking community since the early days. This year, it finally feels like it's gotten to a certain maturity level, such that I've talked to a number of customers talking about how that is a lever for their digital transformation, how they're modernizing their application for portfolio and not just, you know, the, you know, making of the sausage of how this, you know, container orchestration, layers going toe, you know, do something that most people won't understand. It's that connection with the business kind of building up. What what? Barber says. They're bring us inside a little bit more. You know the community's piece of that, >> Yeah, it's absolutely been tremendous to see the CNC F and Kume con absolutely just take off on the number of people that are attending. I think humanity's as as a technology is really starting to hit its stride in the mainstream. It's a combination. I think of a number of factors. You have the developer community that's starting to really sort of embrace containers as they sort of re fact to their applications. So you have that going on, and then you have the ops persona or the people that actually have to manage and deploy the Cuban in these clusters that are starting to dive in and go waken. Take this on. We know what it means to actually manage a Cuban aunties cluster. The thing that what we're bringing, I think at Cisco is, ah, a curated staff. The opinionated stack, the ability to manage those clusters ability to actually deploy those clusters, whether it's on prime in the private in the private cloud, or leveraging the AP eyes that eight of us or Google or azure would publicly provide so that you can manage those clusters in the in the actual public's places. Well, so you have a combination of factors that are starting to come together. They're really sort of said, This is the opportunity, and we're starting to see it happen right now, >> how would container ization looking at that example, that Barber gave up 100 year old bank needing to transform quickly. Otherwise, there there's so much competition, but not from your perspective. How what are some of the biggest advantage is that a legacy organization like 100 year old make is going to get by adopting containers. >> Yeah, so containers is one thing. So speed of innovation where they actually have to take their application. Shins. Let's, for example, as a developer, you're have taken your monolithic applications re factor than into micro services. Now you have one piece of code turning into multiple different pieces of code in containers. Now what you have to do is you have to manage those containers, and that's where Cuban aunties comes in to be ableto orchestrate. Those containers in Google has really sort of offered this technology to the community, and that's where I think you know. You have the history of Google's, you know, operational sort of expertise, the open source ability to take uber Netease and then Sisko to sort of wrap around the lifecycle management of those containers so that you can not think about how, like note operating system, the doctor run time, all the pieces that make up that stack and let the developers just focus on their code. And that's really what we're trying to do is enable the developers to focus on their code and not have, you know, on entire team of folks managing the cluster itself. >> So, Barbara, it's an open source community. There's a lot of partners involved. So what leads customers? Teo, turn to Sisko for these type of solutions. What differentiates them >> when you when you look at a company trying to do it on their own, I'm going to go do it is a service I'm gonna offer. Containers is a service right to do it on their own. Could take a year or more. I talked to a entertainment company the other day, and they had been working on trying to just define the requirements to do a container platform for a year. So if they could come to a company like Cisco and they can buy the container platform, we have as a sass offering, have it up and running in a matter of hours, which we have presidents of it running up in a couple of couple of dollars and then delivering containers is a service to their constituents. It makes the team a hero, right when you also look at how much it takes to curate that and then maintain it over time, the ability for us to actually consume the changes from the open source community curate that and release it is very fast. So from a nightie perspective, a nightie administrators perspective, you're able to take that offer it to the community, allow them to do development wherever they want to develop, whether it's in the public cloud, whether it's on from but maintain that, control it within the community, then you've got something right, and I mean, that could talk about that, too. But but then he'll agree. When we go to all the customers what our container pop firm does, how it leverages Cooper Netease. How fast we give the updates out to our customers and at the price point, the r o. Why we're talking about a month, two months. It is a pretty phenomenal opportunity for administrators to get something up and running an offering to their community very, very quickly. >> Yeah, no, you bring up some great points. They remember a couple of years ago. When I talk to most customers, it's like, Well, what's your stack? Well, I pull these 35 different tools and I build all this stuff down like and I'm sorry, Don't you remember when we went to Cloud? It's about getting rid of that undifferentiated heavy lifting. Exactly why is this mission critical for your business to build and maintain this stack? And of course, the interest is for most customers out there. I want to consume it in platforms and from vendors that I trust so that I can focus on what's important in my business and drive the those business drivers. So it was a maturity thing for some of those early customers. So that Ari there, I mean, because Sisko, you've got your Cisco Container platform. You partner with the aid of Lewis's Googles. The world. Yeah, you know, Are we getting that point where customers shouldn't need to even think about that? That there's that communities and service measures and all that stuff in the >> middle of the number one goal is simplicity. And and what I would say with the container platform is that we are leveraging the speed of innovation that's occurring at the public cloud. So we're not taking a a curated stack from Cisco and putting it on the public cloud. We're leveraging the speed of innovation that that the public cloud provides. But at the same time, we're also taking that that cluster and we're putting it on prime into a private cloud. And I say Right now you're the point you're making is spot on, You know you don't necessarily in an ice tea shop with developers managing that entire stack from top to bottom, you know, why would you want to do that? And a recent quote that I heard recently was your either purchase or buy the product or you are the product, and I think that's a fascinating way to look at it because, you know, you could do that, you could curate it. You could absolutely, from top to bond curate the entire stock. But what typically happens that we're seeing from customers is well, organisations move on. They might not necessarily know what was built. They might be code that goes, gets older and expires or, you know, gets out of dates. And so now you get stuck in an environment where your not terrified. But there's a nervousness, trepidation of going. I don't know, Let's not break it. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. And that's a lot of times what happens in these stacks. So I think we're absolutely with The CCP and the public file were starting to actually get to that >> barber last question for you talking about the speed of innovation and when you were describing the massively fast R a y that customers can get by working with you guys from the container solution perspective, it's It's a no brainer because we look at some of the things that we know were coming. The wave of connectivity changes. Five. G. WiFi sex. What excites you about how Cisco's story from a container platform perspective is gonna change? Change as you start building and crisis that continued building technologies for these networks that are primarily wireless and incredibly fast. >> I think that's exciting for me is the way we approach the architecture, er way we're looking at certainly being more open. Everything we do, building it with open AP eyes, uh, and and looking across that Francisco stack knowing that at this moment in time, If you would've asked us five years ago Where are you? In cloud, right? If you would've asked us 10 years ago, what are you going to do in cloud? But at this moment in time to look at how we differentiate ourselves Like I mentioned, every cloud started to the network. You've got to secure the entire infrastructure. You've gotta have connectivity between the clouds. Hence the CCP, the container platform, right. You have to have cloud management. You have to have cloud analytics way. Bring all of that together. So if a company has made investments and Cisco in the past, those those investments are going to come forward in this new multi cloud, multi tool man domain landscape. And they can leverage those investments while they continue to invest with Cisco in innovations. And And that's what That's what really excites me. I think also just the world of a I and ML and big data. And how when excites me is that developers Khun develop anywhere they can use all the great tools that are available. And I love the idea that the control is back in the hands of the I T administrator from a compliance standpoint from a governance stand like we're bringing that control back into developers hands while giving the speed of innovation and the ability to develop anywhere back to the line of business in the developers. That combination is just really exciting at this moment in time. >> Awesome. And here we are in the definite zone. This is a massive community of over nearly 600,000. Strong, definite. So imagine all the innovation going on in this room behind us on day one. We'll we thank you both so much, Barbara, and not for joining stew and me on the kid this afternoon. Lots of exciting things to come. Francisco or just the as I think, Chuck said this morning, were just getting started. >> We are just getting started. >> Absolutely. >> Guys are pleasure. Forced to mint a man, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching The Cube from Cisco Live 2019

(upbeat music) >> Live from Barcelona, Spain, it's theCUBE! Covering Cisco Live! Europe, brought to you by Cisco and it's eco system partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of Cisco Live! 2019 here in Barcelona, Spain. I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for this segment is Dave Vellante. Dave, myself, and John Furrier here, gettin' wall to wall coverage. Happy to welcome to the program, first time guest, Dave Stanford, who's the Customer Experience Cloud Product Management at Cisco, Dave thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me here. >> Alright. So, we've been digging into the whole multi-Cloud piece here, some real big announcements. A lot of their business solutions talking about being anywhere, it's the bridge-to-possible here at the show- >> Exactly. >> So, tell us exactly the customer experience there. Is this, the gooeys, much more than that, do you know? >> It is. >> What's that encompass? >> We really want to put a whole wrapper around all these products and solutions from a service perspective, and that includes everything from advisory, really guiding our customers, how do I get there, we see all these products and sometimes, it's like, well what do I use these for? So, we want to guide them, help them adopt it and then, support it, support's probably the most important piece. With all these multiple solutions, who can the customers call to get support for all of these? >> You know, I mean, I've worked with Cisco, partnered with Cisco my entire career, and the last few years, boy, things are changing so fast. >> Absolutely. >> A year ago kind of opened my eyes, and said, oh Cisco's movin' to be a software company? You really see the movement when I come to the show here, when I talk to people like the Cisco DNA Platform Solutions. >> Exactly. >> And all the things that customers need to change. Bring us inside how you're helping customers with that change, the services, and everything that you're wrapping around there. >> Sure. My role today is to develop the offers and scale them out and enable our other advanced services folks to deliver, but previously I was delivery myself. So, I understand the challenges that the customers have, so I know what they expect, they want the products to go out there and seamlessly work together, now they do. There's APIs, there's connectivity, but we have to actually show them what they can do with them, what are the use-cases. And from our perspective, when a product's released, a CX offer or service package should go out the door with that, too. QuickStarts are the biggest thing we have. >> Yeah and actually one of the keys things we talk about that move to software, with hardware it was inner-operability and how do all these things wire together? >> Exactly. >> Software, right, it needs to be seamless. >> It does. >> It should be platforms. And solutions in there, so give us the critical eye, a look internally, how's Cisco doing, what's the feedback you're hearing from the teams and partners? >> I think we're on the right track. We're well ahead with some of the solutions we're released with Cisco Container Platform, Cisco CloudCenter Suite. The biggest thing we hear from customers, a lot of, especially developers, application users, they don't care, they just want it to be up and running. So, with our integrated solutions, with things like the new HyperFlex 4.0, we build on top of that, they don't have to worry about connectivity to security or to load balancing, name the technology, they can bring it up and we can actually have the software do exactly what it needs to do. >> So, I've observed for decades the evolution and the services' business. >> Yeah. >> When I started in the business, it was all about break-fix. >> Yes. >> Right and then you had large software projects and ERPs. >> Yeah. >> And business process, re-engineering, a lot of consultative selling, internet came in. A lot of e-commerce activity. >> Yeah. >> How has the Cloud changed the service role, the organization, and how you go to market and scale, as you mentioned before. >> I think the biggest change with the Cloud, it's no longer just break-fix, let me go and install it and figure it out. It's, we really need to understand what our requirements are before we move to the Cloud, we hear about speed, cost-performance, but there's a lot more thought that has to go into it. We have to look across the IT infrastructure. So, that advisory upfront, that guidance, that wasn't necessarily always there, that's the biggest change, before we even think about using the product, we need to understand why we purchase this product. >> And so, what do you need from the customer? I mean, you obviously need data and participation and buy-in from the customer, what do you need to be successful there? >> Really from the customer we need to know, what are you trying to accomplish? What are the use-cases, and we have a lot of common use-cases we've seen, security is always a concern. How do I securely connect to the Cloud? How can I leverage Cisco's software to do that? And it's not just about connecting to Cisco's software, but how do we use Cisco's software to do that connectivity? So, it's over and over we see this constant pattern of, I want to build a manager hybrid Cloud securely, multi-Cloud network it and take the complexity out of what we do there. >> As the demographics of your buyer changes- >> Yes. >> How do you service them differently? How do you create a customer experience that's more focused on the way they want to interact with you? Whether it's chat or talk about that a little bit. >> So, you're not really talking to the IT infrastructure person anymore, you're talking to the lines of business or the application developers. So, you have to go in with the understanding of, I'm not going to go in and say, we're going to refresh the hardware, we're going to do this, we're going to give you new switches, new routers. You start the conversation at the application level now. What types of applications do you have? Are they traditional, do we have to re-factor them? Can't we just move them to the Cloud? Then, you go to the next level of, we understand this, now let's get our hardware in place to support this and then our infrastructure. But applications, that's the big shift. That's where the discussion is now. >> Alright, so we've talked about some of the impact of Cloud. >> Yeah. >> We've been hearing about how AI and ML are getting infused- >> Yes. >> Into all the products and that has to have a huge impact on how the customers interact and manage- >> It does. >> And there's got to be a little bit of the retraining that we talked about, too. >> Definitely, I mean, that's probably the biggest challenge, even hiring right now to find the right fit for Cloud or for Dev-Ops, AI, ML, it's a challenge. So, you have to have a plan in place with this background. And, what we've done within CX is we have a five tiered model. So, we start with the pre-requisites, where are you in this scale, we'll give you a rating based on what you have, but you really still have to train the folks, you have to give boot camps, cohorts, then code deliver on different engagements. But you still have to bring in folks with the right background, even if it's network route-switch, you can train them, but you have to have that program in place to be able to ramp them up. >> Yeah, we always said one of the biggest strengths Cisco has, is you've got those army of Cisco certified- >> Yes. >> The CCIEs out there. >> Yes. >> CCNPS and the like out there. Now, a lot of what they have to manage, it's either outside of their control, it's in the public Cloud >> It is, yeah. >> Or, right there's automation. I don't need to just get an alert and go do it, wait I need to make sure that the business rules are in place and- >> Exactly. >> The tooling's going to take care of that. So, help us understand what's the new, what's the new role inside the customers, that's got to change who you're negotiating with and who's involved in the conversations when you're putting this solution together, as well as, kind of the pre as well as the post deployments. >> Sure, sure I think the biggest difference is our customers now have customers. >> Yeah. >> Before we just managed their IT infrastructure. A good example, we have a healthcare comp, a healthcare corporation in Canada, the clinics are basically the clients of the overall organization, they don't care how long it takes to spend, they want speed. They can't go to the IT department and say, give me a VM and then three weeks later, they give it up or they provision it. And then, they'll go and say, well this is too slow. Here's my credit card, I'm going to buy Amazon Web Services and provision it, now we need to bring all of that together so, the route-switch folks need to become multi-Cloud architects. And when I talk about multi-Cloud, they need to know everything up the stack, infrastructure, connectivity with the CSR, security with our Cloud Protect Portfolio, and then the applications, not to mention the vast array of third party solutions, Cooper Netties is everywhere now. It's the defacto standard for containerization. This is really something that's come up over and over. And that's probably one of the biggest challenges is to get our folks to look at the overall stack rather than one piece. >> You challenge. I mean, Cisco and Hallmark, and Cisco has always been partner friendly. >> Yes. >> It's worked with all the different infrastructure that's out there. >> Yup. >> Now, you add in all the different Clouds. >> Exactly. >> And it's not just a cloud. >> It's an entire cloud stack, all the APIs. Your eyes bleed when you look at all the different APIs from Amazon- >> Yup. >> Data services, even. >> Exactly. >> There are dozens and dozens of them and so, so how do you manage (chuckles) that challenge? You can't just throw bodies at it? >> No, so we leverage the tools that we have. Cisco Container Platform's a good example. We use it in-house, but it's the biggest thing we position to our customers in the Cloud story because it's made deploying and managing containers or Cooper Netties simple. Before CCP, my team would deploy open source Cooper Netties which worked great, it was complex to set up, but then you had to look at, I need a tool for monitoring, I need one for logging, for load balancing, you ended up with 10 different applications. You thought you were moving to containers, but hey, there's much more to it. So, now with CCP, it's all packaged, everything's simple to manage. So, that's just the containers. And you mentioned governance before. I think this is a big thing, CloudCenter Suite, we can model our applications in there, deploy to any Cloud endpoint, so we support over 15 Clouds. And what my team does is bring this all together. So, it's not just a service, we want to show you how you can automatically provision those clusters and move it anywhere you want to go. >> Yeah, I wonder if you can put a point on that. The CloudCenter Suite, CloudCenter's been around for awhile. >> It has. >> But there's really been a re-architecture. It's built, Cloud native. >> It is. >> Cooper Netties' in there, but what, as a customer, is going to be like, oh wait, this isn't what I was used to in the past, help us understand what it is for the future. >> Absolutely, I think CloudCenter has been around for awhile, it's an amazing product. I took over this Cloud Portfolio and Services about a year ago and I'd heard all about it, started to ramp up on it, within four hours I couldn't believe this is really gooey-based. This is simple, so I can model the application and it's a simple as clicking deploy, and I can push it to any Cloud environment. And I think that's the biggest challenge, it's always been, how do I migrate my applications from the data center to the cloud or vice-versa. And CloudCenter's made it so simple within two minutes, you can actually migrate an application or deploy it, and they've added so many other features around cost and orchestration that it's everyday, I see customers starting to adopt CloudCenter Suite. >> I want to ask you about Swimlanes. >> Yeah. >> Cisco's a product company. >> Yes. >> You R&D. You build product, you ship products. >> You're not a services company. but you have a large services organization. How do you, what's your swim lane relative to some of the big SIs, what's your relationship with them? How does that work? >> Sure. So, I'm really closely partnered with all of the engineering teams, but at the same time, the partner organization, the systems integrators, they're still partners, especially in the new CX organization, we want to drive the solutions out to our customers, so we're actually taking some of our partners, bringing them on board, ramping them up on our services. And saying, hey you know what, you go deliver it, we'll support you, there's not a competition. I think, with CX now, we've combined everything together, the partners are just as important to us as the products that we sell. >> Will they private label those services or is- >> Yeah, absolutely, so our QuickStarts for example, these smaller packages, to turn up the solution stack quickly and drive adoption, we can hand that off to 'em, they can sell it themselves and label it. >> Yeah, so you're open that. And that drives their brand and their value. Their intimacy with their customers, yeah. >> I mean, we have a big market, but still the partners can reach them different spaces that we wouldn't traditionally be able to get to in professional services. >> Yeah, they have those relationships. Services has always been very local by nature. >> It has. >> The world's not just going to, we've talked about this, not just going to go to three clouds. I mean- >> That's right. >> Services, people want to meet people and they're in the same neighborhood. And there's trust. >> Yup. >> And that just doesn't disappear over night. >> And you have to build that, too. But you have to build the expertise before you get that trust. >> Yeah (chuckles). >> So, Dave, lot of customers here, you've been in meetings, giving presentations all week, give us a little bit of what's the buzz at the show? What are some of the top conversations? People are doing their planning for 2019. >> Yeah. >> You know, big hurdles and big opportunities that people are excited for. >> So, two common themes, security has come up over and over again, customers who haven't moved to Cloud they're concerned, how do I connect? And can I really put this in the Cloud? Or do I have to keep it in the data center? So, we talk about how we can secure and it- >> And I'm sorry, are they concerned about security, compliance, governance- >> They are. >> All of the above. >> One example. Yesterday, a customer said, I have a top secret application. And my company's pushing me towards the Cloud, can I really put this top secret application in a container in a public Cloud environment? So, that's just one conversation. It's the concern of, I don't own this anymore. It's not my data center, so how do I secure the application? How do I make sure there's no type of interference with that app, any type of interjection into damage it, right? And then, the other thing is, I see your stack, I see you have infrastructure, I see all the products, I don't think it's that simple to put together. It's great on a PowerPoint, but show me in the real world how this works together. And, that's what we've been doing, showing these demos, how we can build everything. >> Alright, so once you've shown them, walked through everything, they're feeling answered? >> They're feeling much better, but we go back to the whole CX lifecycle, advisory, implement, support, and that brings it all together. >> Yeah, and the top secret thing, Google, you've been highlighting partnerships with Google, Microsoft, Amazon, they've got specific Clouds, we've been watching this- >> They do. >> 'Specially, all the stuff happening at the government level. >> Yeah. >> And one of the great proof points about public Cloud adoption. >> Yeah, definitely. >> Alright, want to give you the final word as people come away from Cisco Live! 2019, when it comes to customer experience, what do you want them to understand? >> It's all about solutions, putting it together. So, you see all these products, it's not that complex, CX, our partners can help you build it, scale it out, and really adopt it. >> Alright, well Dave Stanford, really appreciate you helping us understand the CX experience here. >> Thank you. >> Definitely lots of opportunities here. Cloud, AI, ML, putting all the solutions together. For Dave Vallente, I'm Stu Miniman, back with more coverage here of Cisco Live! 2019. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (funky upbeat music)

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cue covering Sisqo Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Barcelona. This is Cisco Live. I'm Dave a lot with stew Mina, man. And you're watching the Cube. The leader >> in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Dr. Thomas Shearer's here is the chief architect of tle Indus looks onboard and David Cope is back. He's a senior director of marketing development for the Cisco Cloud Platform and Solutions Group. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Thanks. So you're very welcome. So tell Indus. Tell us about Delinda. >> So Telindus, we are actually an integrator, a cloud operator, and a tech company. And we're partnering over the years with Cisco, with all the products that they have notably, and lately we are moving also into the public cloud. We have private cloud offering, but we see our first appetite coming up with our customers in the public cloud, which are heavily regulated industries. And there we are working notably with the team off Dave to have an offering there that enables them to move into the clouds. >> So these guys are a customer or a partner? >> Well, you know, what's special about them. They're actually both. So they're a big customer of Cisco offerings, Cloud Center and other offerings. The Cisco Container Platform. But they also use those to provide services to their customers. Expect so there are a great sounding board about what the market needs and how our products are working. >> So Thomas telling has been around since. If I saw right. Nineteen seventy nine. So you know, we weren't talking multi cloud back then, but it is a big discussion point here at the show. You said private public, you're using Cloud Center, maybe explain to us what multi cloud means to you and your customers today. >> I would say most customers that we have a large organizations we manage the IT infrastructure. We're also doing integration projects, but those customers they are normally not really technology companies, you know, they are searching to work with us because we deal with the good part off their IT operations. So at these companies they come from a private infrastructure, they have there these days. They're VMWare installation their private clouds and I think also, it will stay like this for for a good amount of time. So there's no good reason to just go into the cloud because it's fancy or because there is something that you cannot have certainly there is. But that's stable progress that they are following. So what we need is actually to catch the low hanging fruits that exist in a public cloud for our customers. But in such a way that it satisfies their day today IT operations and sometimes it's our IT operations who is doing that since we are managing this. So for us, actually, hyper cloud, to say short, is actually the standard, or multicloud. >> So I wonder we're almost two years into GDP, are one year into the owner's finds. How has GDP are affected? You and your customers and What's it like out there these days? >> GDPR is for me not the main reason for public, private, multicloud installations for us and that involves GDPR is the regulation that we are in, so our customers are notably from the financial sector, and they're very strict on conservative security. rules for good because their main business is they're selling trust. There is not much more business where you trust that much than a bank. They know everything about you, and that's something they cannot sacrifice. Now, in Europe, we have the advantage. Data is that strict regulation which puts kind of standards. And that involves obviously also the GDPR thing. But if I look into that standards, that regulation imposes its very technical, they say. For example, please make sure if you move into the clouds then avoid a lock-in, be confident on what will be your exit cost. What will be your transition cost, and don't get married to anyone. And that's where Dave's team comes into the game because that they provide that solution, actually. >> I mean, that's music to your ears, I would think. I mean, I have to be honest. If I were a public cloud provider, I'd say no, don't do multi cloud. We have one cloud, does it all, But no customer speaks like that. >> You're right. And I think to me what I love about Linda's in the way they use the product is they work in such a highly regulated environment, where policies managing common policies across very different environments becomes critical. So how do I manage access control and security profiles and placement policies all across very different multiplied environments? That's hard, and that's been one of the cornerstones that we've focused on in Cloud Centre. >> Yeah, so look, double click on that. We're talking Teo, a guest earlier, and I was asking them, sort of poking it. There's >> a lot of people who want that business because it's a huge >> business opportunity. It's, um, some big, well established companies. Cisco's coming at it from a position of strength, which course? Network, But I'll ask you the same question. What gives you confidence that Cisco is in the best position for customers? Two urn, right? Tio manage their multi cloud data environment? >> I think it's I think it's a great question. I mean, for my perspective and I love our customers perspective. But if you think about Cisco's heritage around the network and security, I think most people would agree. They're very strong there. It's a very natural extension to have Cisco be a leader and multicloud because after all, it's how do I securely connect very diverse environments together. And now a little further. Now, how do I help customers manage workloads, whether they be existing or new cloud native workloads, So we find it's a very natural extension to our core strength and through both development and acquisition Cisco's got a very, very broad and deep portfolio to do that. >>So your thoughts on that? >> Yes, Cisco is coming from a network in history. But if your now look into the components there is, actually, yeah, the Networking Foundation, there is CUCS, which we have, for example, in our infrastructure, there is hyperflex there are then solutions like CCP that you can run a DevOps organization can combine it with Cloud Center to make it hybrid. And just today I learned a new thing, which is Kubeflow. I just recognized Cisco is the first one that is coming up with a platform as a service enabled Private Cloud. So if you go private Cloud usually talk about running VM's. But now with With With a CCP and it's open source projects Kubeflow which I think will be very interesting to see in conjunction with CCPN I heard that it's going to happen. You're actually Cisco is the first one delivering such a solution to the markets. So it's growth that just have >> a thing for the cnc es eso que >> bernetti slow way Don't have to send a cease and desist letter, right? >> CCP that Francisco Container platform Ryan out sad Some while ago on Prim Cooper. Nettie Stack. Right. >> So, Thomas, you know, with the update on Cloud Center suite now containerized, You got micro services. It's built with communities underneath and using cube flow. I'm guessing that's meaningful to you. There's a lot of things in this announcement that it's like, Okay, it sounds good, but in the real world, you know what? What do you super excited for? The container ization? You know, I would think things like the action orchestrator and the cost Optimizer would have value, but, you know, police tell us yourself >> The CloudCenter was already valuable before, you know, we a did investigation about what kind of cloud brokering and cloud orchestrations solutions exist back in those days when it was called CliQr CloudCenter and me and my colleagues know that CliQr team back then as well as now at Cisco we appreciated that they they became one family now. For me, CloudCenter fulfills certain requirements that I simply have to fulfill for our customer. And it's a mandatory effect that I have to feel for them, like being able to ensure and guarantee portability. Implementing policies, segregation of duties were necessary, things like that. I have to say now that it becomes containerized. That's a lot of ease in managing CloudCenter as a solution by itself, and also you have the flexibility to have it better. Also, migratable. It's an important key point that CloudCloud eyes a non cloud centric product that you can run it on-prem that your orchestration that you don't have to log in on the orchestration there and have it on-prem but now can easily move it on things such a GKE because it's it's a container based solution. But I think also there's a SaaS option available so you can just subscribe to it. So you have full range of flexibilities so that a day to day management work flow engine doesn't become a day to day management thing by itself. >> So I wonder if you could paint a picture for us of your environment around since nineteen seventy nine. So you must have a lot of a lot of stuff, a lot of it that you've developed over the years. But you mentioned that you're starting to look a public clouds. You just mentioned your customer base, largely financial services. So they're highly regulated and maybe a little nervous about the cloud. But so paint a picture of your Maybe not for certain workloads. Paint a picture of your environment tunnel where you want to go from. From an architecture and an infrastructure perspective. >> We have our own what we call private managed cloud. That's a product we call U-flex which is  FlexPod reference architecture that's Cisco was networking NetApp storage. Cisco UCS in conjunction with the ember, as a compute. This we use since many years and as I already have said, the regulated market started opening up towards public cloud. So what does it mean? European Banking Authority. So EBA, who's the umbrella organization on European level. They send out a recommendation. Dear countries, please, your financial institution. If they go into the cloud that have to do ABC. The countries I have put in place those regulations they have put in place those controls and for them, they are mostly now in that let's investigate what its influence in the public they come from their private infrastructure. They are in our infrastructure, which is like private infrastructure virtualized and managed by us, mainly VM based. And now the news things on top that they investigate are things like big data, artificial intelligence and things like that which you mostly don't have in private infrastructure. So in that combination is what we have to provide to our customers but their mostly in and investigative mode. >> and okay. And and Cisco is your policy engine management engine across all those clouds, is that right? >> Yes we are able to manage those workloards with CloudCenter. Sometimes it depends also on the operating model. The customer himself is the one using CloudCenter, you know, so it depends, since we are in integrator, cloud operator and also offer our services in the public cloud. It's always the question about who has to manage what. >> One of the things, if I could just add on that we see people providing our products as a service. We're just talking about Kubernetes. Customers today are starting to move Kubernetes just from being like development now into production. And what we're seeing is that these new Kubernetes based applications have non containerized dependencies reach out to another traditional app, reach out to PaaS, a database. And what we try to do is to say, how do you give your customers the ability to get the new and the old working together? Because it'll be that way for quite some time. And that's a part of sort of the new cloud center capabilities also. >> That's that's a valid reason. So you have those legacy services and you don't want just to You cannot just replace them now. Now let's go all in. Let's be cloud native. So you have always thes interoperability things to handle and yeah, that's true. Actually, you can build quite some migration path using containerization. >> Yeah, I mean, you can't customer can't just over rotate to all the new fun buzz words. They got a business to run. Yeah, so this >> And how do I apply security policies and access control and to this very mixed environment now, common policies and that becomes challenging. >> But it's also part of our business. Yes, there have there, for example, financial institution than not a nineteen company. That's where we come in as a for Vita Toe. It's such an industry daddy, via highly value the partnership with Cisco Heavy Cat build new services together. We had that early adopters program, for example, regarding CCP. So Cisco is bringing a service provider into the loop to build what's just right for the customer for them on their behalf. Yes, you describe that is very challenging, is it's In some cases, it's chaos. But that's the opportunity I heard this morning that you guys are going after pretty hard. >> No, it's right. And you've got one set of desires for developers, but now we move into production. Now I t cops gets involved, the sea so gets involved. And how do we have then well thought out integrations into security and network management? Those air all of the things that we're trying to really focus on. >> Well, anywhere the definite zone. So you you were surrounded by infrastructures code. Is there a fits and club? Guys, Thanks so much for coming to Cuba and telling your story. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Enjoyed. Thank you. Alright, Keep it right there, buddy. Stupid him and Dave. Alon. Today we're live from Cisco Live Barcelona. You watching the cube right back?

>> Live from Barcelona, Spain. It's the cue covering Sisqo Live Europe, brought to you by Cisco and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, everybody. Welcome back to Barcelona. This is Cisco Live. I'm Dave a lot with stew Mina, man. And you're watching the Cube. The leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Dr. Thomas Shearer's here is the chief architect of tle Indus looks onboard and David Cope is back. He's a senior director of marketing development for the Cisco Cloud Platform and Solutions Group. Gentlemen, welcome to the Cube. Thank you. Thanks. So you're very welcome. So Telindus. Tell us about Telindus. >>So Telindus we are actually an integrator, a cloud operator, and a tech company. And, uh, we're partnering over the years with Cisco with all the products that they have notably, we are moving also into the public cloud. We have private cloud offering, but we see a first appetite coming up with our customers in the public cloud, which are heavily regulated industries. And there we are working notably with the team of Dave to have an offering there that enables them to move into the clouds. >> So these guys are a customer or a partner? >> Well, you know what's special about them, they're actually both. So they're a big customer of Cisco offerings, cloud center. and other offerings. The Cisco container platform, but they also use those to provide services to their customers. So they are a great sounding board about what the market needs and how our products are working. So Thomas telling has been around since. If I saw right. Nineteen seventy nine. So you know, we weren't talking multi cloud back then, but it is a big discussion point here at the show. You said private public, You're using Cloud Center, maybe explain to us what multi cloud means to you and your customers today. >> I would say most customers that we have a large organizations >> B >> managed dalati infrastructure. We're also doing integration projects. But those customers down, I'm really not really technology companies, you know, date. There are searching to work process because we deal with the good part off their operations. So at this, cos they come from a private infrastructure, they have there these days. They're bm vary installation there, private clouds and and I think also, it will stay like this for for a good amount of time. So there's no good reason to just go into the cloud because it's fancy because there is something that you cannot have certainly days. But that's it, stable progress that they're following. So what we need is actually tow catch the low hanging fruit that exist in a public cloud for our customers. But in such a way that it satisfies their day today I T operations and sometimes it's our operations. Who is doing that since we are managing this? So for us, actually, hyper cloud, to say short, is actually just end up >> so our mighty close. So I wonder we're almost two years into GDP are one year into the owner's finds. How has GPR affect you and your customers? And Ted? What's it like out there these days? >> Gpr. It's for me. Not the main reason for public private mighty cloud installations for us and that involves GDP are it is the regulation that so our customers are notably from the financial sector, and that's they're very strict on conservative security Woods for good because their main business is they are selling trust. There is not much more business where you trust that much. Then a bank I know everything about you, and that's something they cannot sacrifice now. In Europe, we have the advantage. Data is that strict regulation which puts kind of standards and that involves obviously also the GDP arcing. But if I look into that standards, that regulation imposes its very technical, they say. For example, please make sure if you move into the clouds that avoid a locket, be confident on what will be your exit costs. What will be a transition because and don't get married to anyone. And that's where Dave Steam comes into the game because that they provide that solution. Actually, that's >> music to your ears. I would think. I mean, have to be honest. If I were a public cloud provider, I'd say No, don't do multi cloud. We have one cloud, does it all? But no customer speaks like that. No, >> you're right. And I think to me what I love about Linda's in the way they use the product is they work in such a highly regulated environment, where policies managing common policies across very different environments becomes critical. So how do I manage access control and security profiles and placement policies all across very different multiplied environments. That's hard, and that's been one of the cornerstones that we've focused on in Cloud Centre. >> Yeah, so look, double click on that fucking Teo a guest earlier and I was asking them, sort of poking it. There's a lot of people who want that business because it's a huge business opportunity. It's, um, some big, well established companies. Cisco's coming at it from a position of strength, which is course network. But I'll ask you the same question. What gives you confidence that Cisco is in the best position for customers? Two. Urn, The right tio manage their multi cloud data and environment. >> I think it's I think it's a great question. I mean, for my perspective of action, love our customer's perspective. But if you think about Cisco's heritage around the network and security, I think most people would agree. They're very strong there. It's a very natural extension. Tohave Sisko Be a leader and multi cloud because, after all, it's how doe I securely connect very diverse environments together. And now a little further. Now, how do I help customers manage workloads, whether they be existing or new cloud native workloads, So we find It's a very natural extension to our core strengths and through both development and acquisition system has got a very, very broad and deep portfolio to do that. So your >> thoughts on that? Yeah, Yes, sister is coming from a network in history. But if your now leg look into the components days actually, yeah, Networking foundation s U. C s, which we have, for example, in our infrastructure, this hyper flex there are there solutions like CCP that you can run a deaf ops organization, can combine it with Cloud Center to make it high pret. And just today I learned a new thing, which is cute flow. I just recognized Cisco. It's the first one that is coming up with a platform is a service in Able Private Cloud. So if you go private, Cloud usually talk about running the M's. But now, with with With a CCP and it's Open sauce Project cute flow, which I think Ah, bee, very interesting to see in conjunction with C. C. P. And I heard that it's going to happen. You're actually Cisco is to first one delivering such a solution to the markets. So it's It's gross that just have >> a thing for the cnc es eso >> que bernetti Slow way Don't have to send a cease and desist letter, right? >> Ccp that Francisco Container platform. Ryan out sad. Some while ago on Prim Cooper. Nettie Stack. Right. So, Thomas, you know, we were the update on Cloud Center. Sweet. Now it's containerized. You got micro services. It's built with communities underneath and using cube flow. I'm guessing that's meaningful to you. There's a lot of things in this announcement that it's like, Okay, it sounds good, but in the real world, you know what? What do you super excited for? The container ization? You know, I would think things like the action orchestrator and the cost Optimizer would have value. But, you know, police tell us yourself, >> like Cloud Center was already variable before, you know, be a did investigation about what kind of flout brokering cloud orchestrations solutions exist big in those days when it was called Clicker Cloud Center. And I'm me and my colleagues know that click a team back then as well as now as assist. Greatly appreciated that, David, they became one family now for me, cloud center for face, certain requirements that I simply have to fulfill for our customer. And it's a mandatory effect that I have to feel for them, like being able to ensure and guarantee portability. Implementing policies, segregation of duties were necessary, things like that. I have to say now that it becomes containerized, that's a lot off ease and managing Cloud Center as a solution by itself, and also you have the flexibility to have it better. Also, my credible It's an important key point that Cloud Santa eyes a non cloud centric products that you can run it on. Prem that the orchestration that you don't have to log in on the orchestration there and have it on now can easily move it on such a cheeky because it's it's a container by solution. But I think also there's a sass option available so you can just subscribe to it. So you have full range off flexibilities so that day to day management work for engine doesn't become a day to day management things by itself. >> So I wonder if you could paint a picture for us of your environment. Bronson since nineteen seventy nine so You must have a lot of a lot of stuff A lot of you developed over the years, but you mentioned that you're starting to look a public clouds. You just mentioned your customer base, largely financial services, so they're highly regulated and maybe a little nervous about the cloud. But so paint a picture of your Maybe not for certain workloads. Paint a picture of your environment kind of where you want to go from. From an architecture in an infrastructure >> perspective, we haven't own what we call private. Manage cloud. That's a product recall. You flex witches, flex port reference architecture. That's Cisco that working. Get up storage. Cisco, UCS in conjunction with, we embarrass completely. It's the use since many years and as I already have said, the regulated market started opening up towards public law. So what does it mean? European Banking Authority. So Ebba, who's the umbrella organization on European level days, send out a recommendation. Dear countries, place your financial institution if they go into the cloud that have to do a B C. The country's I have put in place those regulations they have put in place those controls and for them. What They're mostly now in that let's investigate what its influence in the public they come from their private infrastructure. They are in our infrastructure, which is like private infrastructure virtualized and managed by us, mainly v m base. And now the news thing on top that they investigate at things like big data, artificial intelligence and things like that which you mostly don't have a private infrastructure. So in that combination is what we have to provide our customers but their most in and investigative >> okay. And okay. And Cisco is your policy engine management engine across all those clouds that the >> yes, we are able to managed our struggles with cloud centre. Sometimes it depends also on the operating modern. The customer himself is the one using cloud center, you know? So so it depends Since we are in integrate icloud operate and also off our services in the public cloud. It's always the question about who has to manage one and one >> of the things that I just had on that we see people providing our products as a service. We're just talking about Cooper Netease. Customers today are starting to move you, Burnett. He's just from being like development now into production. And what we're seeing is that these new communities based applications have non containerized dependencies reach out to another traditional app, reach out to pass a database. And what we try to do is to say, How do you give your customers the ability to get the new and the old working together? Because it'll be that way for quite some time. And that's a part of sort of the new cloud center capabilities. Also, >> that's that's a valid reason. So you have those legislate services and you don't want just do it. You can't just replace them now. Now >> let's go all >> in. Let's be cloud native. So you have always sees interoperability things to handle. And And, yeah, that's true. Actually, you can quite some my creation path using content or ization. I >> mean, you can't customer cancers over rotate to all the new fun buzz words. They've got a business to run. So what? >> This And how do I apply security policies and access control and to this very mixed environment now common policies and that becomes challenging. >> But that's also part of our business. Yes, there have there, for example, financial institution than not a ninety company. That's where we come in as a provida towards such an industry and daddy. Here I highly value the partnership with Cisco Heavy Cat Build new services together. We had that early adopters program, for example, regarding CCP. So Cisco is bringing a service provider into the loop bill. What's just right for the customer For them? >> Yes, you describe that is very challenging, is it's In some cases, it's chaos. But that's the opportunity I heard this morning that you guys are going after pretty hard, right? Oh, >> it's right. And you've got one set of desires for developers, but now we move into production. Now I t cops gets involved, the sea so gets involved. And how do we have then well thought out integrations into security and network management. Those air, all of the things that we're trying to really focus on. >> Well, where's the definite zone? You were surrounded by infrastructures code and it fits and cloud. Well, guys, thanks so much for coming in Cuba and telling your story. Really appreciate it. Thank you. Enjoyed it. Thank you. Alright, Keep it right there, buddy. Stupid and Dave. Alon. Today we're live from Cisco Live Barcelona. You watching the Cuba >> booth?

>> Hello and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE on theCUBE. We're here in Sundance 2018 at the Intel Tech Lounge for a panel discussion with experts on the topic of The New Creative. We believe a new creative renaissance is coming in application development and also artistry. The role of craft and the role of technology and software coming together at the intersection. You're seeing results in the gaming industry. Virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality. A new wave is coming and it's really inspiring, but also there's a few thought leaders at the front end of this big wave setting the trends and they're here with us in this special panel for The New Creative. Here with us is Brooks Browne, Global Director of VR at Starbreeze Studios, a lot to share there, welcome to the panel. Lisa Watt, VR Marketing Strategist at Intel, Intel powering a lot of these VR games here. And Winslow Porter, co-founder and director of The New Reality Company. Many submissions at Sundance. Not this year, but a ton of experience talk about the role of Sundance and artistry. And then we have Gary Radburn who's a director of commercial VR and AR from media within Dell, Dell Technologies. Guys, welcome to this panel. Lisa, I want to start off with you at Intel. Obviously the Tech Lounge here, phenomenal location on Main Street in Sundance. Really drawing a massive crowd. Yesterday it was packed. This is a new generation here and you're seeing a younger demographic. You're seeing savvier consumers. They love tech, but interesting Sundance is turning into kind of an artistry tech show and the game is changing, your thoughts on this new creative. >> Yeah, it's been amazing to watch. I've been here for, this is my third year coming back with VR experiences. And it's really just been incredible to see. Sundance has been on the leading edge of exploring new technologies for a long time and I think this is, I feel like you know this feels like the break out year really. I mean, it's been successful the last few years, but something about this year feels a little bit different. And I think maybe it's the people are getting more familiar with the technology. I think the artists are getting more comfortable with how to push the boundaries. And then we certainly are getting a lot out of seeing what they're doing and how we can improve our products in the future. >> We were talking yesterday, Lisa, about the dynamic at Sundance. And you were mentioning that you see a few trends popping out. What is the most important story this year for the folks who couldn't make it, who might be watching this video that you see at Sundance? Obviously it's a great day today, it's snowing, it's a white day, it's beautiful powder, greatest snow on Earth. But there's some trends that are emerging. We had a march this morning, the Women's March. You're seeing interesting signals. What's your view? >> I think there's a lot less desire to put up with subpar experiences. I mean I think everyone is really starting to push the boundaries, I mean, we saw a lot of 360 video which we love for a linear narrative. But they're really breaking out and really exploring what does it mean to have autonomy especially in the virtual reality experiences, a lot more social is coming to the forefront. And then a lot more exploration of haptics and the new ways of extending into more 4D effects, etc. So I think it's very very exciting. We're really excited to see all the new innovations. >> Winslow, I want to ask you, if you can comment, you've been an active participant in the community with submissions here at Sundance. This year you're kind of chilling out, hanging out. You've been on the front lines, what is your take on the vibe? What's the sentiment out there? Because you're seeing the wave coming, we're feeling it. It feels early. I don't know how early it is, and the impact to people doing great creative work. What's that take? >> Well yeah, it's kind of like VR years are like dog years, you know. Like a lot can happen in a month in the VR space. So I had a piece here in 2014 called Clouds. It was an interactive documentary about Creative Code, but that was back when there was only two other VR pieces. It's interesting to see how the landscape has changed. Because CCP Games had a piece there. An early version of E Valkyrie. And unfortunately in the last three months, they had to close their VR wing. So, and then Chris Milk also had a Lincoln piece with Beck. Which was a multi camera 360, actually it was a flash video that they recorded to the DK1. And so that was, seeing that everyone was, saw the potential. The technology was still pretty rudimentary or crude even, we should say. Before any tracking cameras. But every year people learned from previous Sundances and other festivals. And we're seeing that Sundance kind of raises the bar every year. It's nice that it's in January because then there's all these other festivals that sort of follow through with either similar content, newer versions of content that's here, or people have just sort of learned from what is here. >> So I got to ask you. You know, obviously Sundance is known for pushing the boundaries. You see a lot of creative range. You see a lot of different stuff. And also you mentioned the VR. We've seen some failures, you've seen some successes, but that's growth. This market has to have some failures. Failures create opportunities to folks who are reiterating in that. What are some of the things that you can point to that are a positive? Things that have happened whether they're failures and/or successes, that folks can learn from? >> Well, I think that this year there's a lot more social VR. We're connecting people. Even though they're in the same space, they're able to be in this new virtual world together. There's something amazing about being able to interact with people in real life. But as soon as you have sort of a hyper reality where people are able to be experiencing a Sufi ritual together. Things that you wouldn't normally... That they're not possible in the real world. And also, I think that there's issues with lines too. Obviously every year, but the more that we can have larger experiences with multiple people, the more people we can get through. And then more impact we can make on the audience. It's really... We were in claim jumper last year. And we could only get one person in every 10 minutes. And that makes things pretty tricky. >> And what are you doing at Sundance this year? You've obviously got some stuff going on with some of the work you've done. What's your focus? >> So yeah we have a company called New Reality Company where we produce Giant and Tree. It's part of a trilogy where Breathe is going to be the third part. We're going to be completing that by the end of this year. And right now, I would say the best thing about Sundance is the projects, but also the people. Being able to come here, check in, meet new people, see partners that we've been working with in the past. Also new collaborations, everywhere you turn, there's amazing possibilities abound. >> I want to talk about empathy and social. I mentioned social's interesting in these trends. I want to go to Brooks Brown, who's got some really interesting work with Starbreeze and the Hero project. You know, being a pioneer, you've got to take a few arrows in your back, you've got to blow peoples' minds. You're doing some pretty amazing work. You're in the front lines as well. What's the experience that you're seeing? Talk about your project and its impact. >> Well for us, we set out with our partner's ink stories, Navid Khonsari, a wonderful creative, and his entire team to try to create that intensely personal experience kind of moving the opposite direction of these very much social things. The goal, ultimately being to try to put a person inside of an event rather than a game style situation where you have objective A, B, or C. Or a film that's a very, very hyper linear narrative. What is that sort of middle ground that VR itself has as unique medium? So we built out our entire piece. Deep 4D effects, everything is actually physically built out so you have that tactility as you walk around. Things react to you. We have smell, temperature, air movement, the audio provided by our partners at DTS is exceptional. And the goal is ultimately to see if we put you in a situation... I'm doing my best not to talk about what that situation is. It's pretty important to that. But to watch people react. And the core concept is would you be a hero? All over the world, every day people are going through horrific stuff. We're fortunate because we're the kind of people who, in order to experience, say a tragedy in Syria, we're fortunate that we have to go to Park City, Utah and go in virtual reality to experience something that is tragic, real, and deeply emotional. And so our goal is to put people through that and come out of it changed. Traumatized actually. So that way you have a little bit more empathy into the real world into the actual experiences they went through. >> And what's the goal? This is interesting because most of the some stuff you see, the sizzle out there is look at the beautiful vistas and the beaches and the peaks and you can almost be there. Now you're taking a different approach of putting people in situations that probe some emotional responses. >> Yeah. It's a big deal to us. The way Navid like to put it, and I'm going to steal this from him, is you see a great deal of people prototyping on hardware and all of these things, and it's great cause we need that. We need to be able to stand on the shoulders of those giants to be able to do these things. But you see very few people really prototyping what is the concept of story as per VR? We've been doing, at Starbreeze, we've been doing location based for some time now and I've been getting thousands upon thousands of pitches. And whenever you get a pitch, you can pretty much identify, oh you come from a film background, you come from a games background. There's very few people who come down that middle line and go, well this is what VR is supposed to be. This is that interesting thing that makes it very deeply unique. >> What's the confluence and what's the trend in your mind as this changes? Cause you mentioned that gamers have affinity towards VR. We were talking about that before we came on the panel. You know, pump someone in mainstream USA or around the world who does email, does work, may not be there, you're seeing this confluence. How is that culture shifting? How do you see that? Cause you're bringing a whole nother dimension. >> We're trying to go back to a little bit, something about this Sundance being a little bit different. I think in general in VR, you're seeing this sort of shift from a few years ago it was all potentiality. And I think a lot of us, the projects were great, but a lot of us who work in VR were like oh I see what they're trying to do. And people like my dad would be like I don't. I don't see what they're trying to do. But that is shifting. And you're seeing a larger shift into that actuality where we're not quite there yet where we can talk about the experiences every day Americans are going to have. What is the real ready player one that we're actually going to have existing. We're not there yet, but we're much closer every time. And we're starting to see a lot of these things that are pushing towards that. Final question before I go to some of the speeds and feeds questions I want to get with Intel and Dell on is what is the biggest impact that you're seeing with your project and VR in general that will have the most important consequences for societal impact? >> Well, we were fortunate yesterday we had a number of people come through Hero. And a number of them simply actually couldn't handle it. Had to come out. We had to pull people out. The moment we took the headset off, they were, tears were streaming down their face. There's a level of emotional impact VR is extremely able to cut through. It's not that you're playing a character. It's not that you're in a separate world. You are you inside of that space. And that is a dangerous but very promising ability of VR. >> Winslow, could you take a stab at that, I'd like to get your reaction to that because people are trying to figure out the societal impact in a positive way and potentially negative. >> Yeah I mean, so with that, whenever you traumatize somebody else or have the ability to possibly re-traumatize somebody... In Giant, we made sure that we gave them a trigger warning because yeah these things can be intensely intimate or personal for somebody who already has that sort of baggage with them or could be living in a similar experience. In Giant, we witnessed the last moments of a family. As they're convincing their daughter that the approaching bomb blast is a giant that actually wants to play with her. And so we put haptics in the chair so the audience was also surprised. But we let them know that it was going to be taking place in a conflict zone. So if that was something that they didn't want to participate in, that they could opt out. But again, like we didn't know... We had to go and buy tissues like right off the bat because people were crying in the headset. And that's kind of a... It's an interesting problem to have for the sake of what are sort of the rules around that? But also it makes it more difficult to get people through the experience in a timely fashion as well. But yeah, but we're seeing that as things become more real then there's also a chance to possibly impact people. It's the... >> So it's social for you? You see it as a social impact? >> Well, I mean if everyone's experiencing the same thing that can be social, but again if it's a one on one experience, it's sort of like up to the filmmaker to make sure that they have the scruples that they are playing by the rules. Cause there's right now most every piece of content is being released through Oculus, Steam, or Viveport. But there will be... It's heavily regulated right now, but as soon as there's other means of distributing the content, it could take a different sort of face. >> Certainly some exciting things to grab on, great stuff. I want to get to the commercial angle. Then we're going to talk more about the craft and the role of artistry in the creating side of it. Gary, you're the commercial VR expert at Dell. You're commercializing this. You're making the faster machines. We want faster everything. I mean everyone... Anyone who's in VR knows that all the graphics cards. They know the speeds and feeds. They're totally hardware nerds. What's going on? Where's the action? >> Okay, that's such a large question. I mean we've had some great stuff here that I also want to comment on as well. But inside the commercial side, then yeah everybody wants bigger, stronger, better, faster. And to Winslow's comment about the dog years, that really puts the pressure on us to continue that innovation and working with partners like Intel to get those faster processors in there. Get faster graphics cards in there so that we can get people more emotionally bought in. We can do better textures, we can get more immersion inside the content itself. We're working a lot around VR in terms of opening peoples' eyes for societal impact. So VR for good for instance. Where we're taking people to far flung corners of the Earth. We work with Nat Geo explorer Mike Libecki to show the plight of polar bears in Greenland and how they're gradually becoming extinct for an edutainment and a learning tool. The boundaries are really being pushed in entertainment and film. That's always been the case. Consumer has always really pushed that technology. Commercial's always been a bit of a lagger. They want stability in what's going on. But the creation that's going on here is absolutely fantastic. It's taken what is essentially a prosumer headset and then taking it into that commercial world and lit it up. 360 video, its very inception, people are using it for training inside of their businesses and so that's now going out into businesses now. We're starting to see advances in 360 video with more compute power needed. Where, to the point about immersion and getting people emotionally bought in. Then you can start doing volumetric, getting them in there. And then we're also working with people like Dr. Skip Rizzo who was on our panel yesterday where we're starting to go into, okay, we can treat PTSD. Help people with autism, through the medium of VR. So again, that buys into... >> These are disruptive use cases that are legit? >> Yeah. >> These are big time, market moving, helping people... >> Absolutely. And that where it becomes really, really powerful. Yes, we want our companies to embrace it. Companies are embracing it for training. But when you start seeing the healthcare implications and people crying inside of headsets. That's effecting you deeply, emotionally. If you can make that for good, and change somebody's trigger points inside of PTSD, and the autism side of helping somebody in interview techniques to be able to be more self sufficient, it's absolutely awesome. >> This is the new creative. So what's your take on the new creative? What's your definition? Cause you're talking about a big range of use cases beyond just film making and digital artistry. >> Yeah, absolutely so the new creative is like with all the great work that's here, people are looking at film and entertainment. Now the world really is the oyster for all the creatives out there. People are clamoring out for modelers, artists, story tellers, story experiencers to be able to use that inside their commercial environments to make their businesses more effective. But they're not going to have a 360 video production company inside of their commercial organization. And it's then leveraging all of the creative here and all of the great stuff here. Which is really going to help the whole world a lot. >> Lisa, I want to get your thoughts on this cause you guys at Intel here at the Tech Lounge have a variety of demos, but there's a range of pro and entry level tools that can get someone up and running quickly to pro. And so there's a creative range not only just for digital artistry, but also business we're hearing. So what's the... Cause AI's involved in a lot of this too though. It's not just AI, it's a lot of these things. What's the Intel take on this. >> Well I think it's really an interesting time for us at Intel because one of the things that we have that I think probably nobody else has. We have this amazing slate of products that really cover the end to end process. Both from the creation side of the house all the way to the consumption side. And we talk a lot about our processors. We worked on an amazing project, a couple of huge scenes inside of the Sansar environment. Which is a great tool for really democratizing the creation of spaces. It's a cloud hosted service but it utilizes this amazing client-server architecture. We created four huge spaces in a matter of eight weeks to launch at CES. And some of the technologies that Gary was referring to just in pure processing power like two generations old processors were taking three hours to render just a small portion of a model where our newest generation Core i9s with our opting technology took that time to 15 minutes. So when we think about what we can do now, and those technologies are going to be available in even portable laptop form factors. We've got the piece where we were working here SPHERES. They were able to actually make some corrections and some tweaks basically immediately without having to send them off to some render farm. They were able to do those things. And I know Winslow has talked about that as well. What does it mean to you to be able to react real time. And be able to do your creative craft where you are and then be able to share that so readily. And then you know... I just think that's kind of an amazing equalizer. It's really democratizing the creation process. >> Okay the next question that begs for everyone to address is where are we in this progression? Early? What work needs to get done? Where are we holding back? Is it speeds and feeds? Is it the software? Is it the routines, libraries, art? Where's the bottleneck? Why isn't it going faster? Or is it going faster? >> I would, and I'm sure the team would agree here, I would say that one of the key things is the creator tools themselves, right. They are still somewhat cumbersome. We were talking to another filmmaker. He was like I can't even, I have to play the whole piece from the beginning, I can't just go in and edit, you know change control, being able to collaborate on these pieces with other people. I mean, if you can collaborate in a real world space, you should be able to also collaborate in VR and have change control and all those sorts of things that are necessary to the iteration of a project. So we're trying to work with our software partners. They're all doing a really great job of trying to iterate that, but it's going to take some time. I mean I think that's probably the bigger thing that's holding everything back. We're going to be right there with the processing power and the other technologies that we bring to the table. OEM partners are going to be right there with the best devices. I really think it's something we've all got to push for as far as those tools getting better. >> Brooks, comment on anything? You're in the... >> So for me, the thing that's holding back VR in general is actually the art form itself. One of the great challenges, if you look back, at say the history of film... We're at Sundance, so it's probably fairly apropo. Very early on in the early movies, aside from penny arcade machines that you'd actually stare at, they were 10 minute almost like plays that people would go to almost a playhouse and they'd watch this thing. There were not cuts, there were no angles. It was a single wide shot. Great Train Robbery came around and there was this crazy thing they did called an edit. Where they spliced film together. And if you go back and you read, and they did these dolly shots. People will have no idea what they're watching. There's no way people will be able to follow that. Like people were not happy with it at the time. Now it's stuff that children do on their iMacs at home. They do iMacs all the time, they do it on their iPhones, on their Android devices. These are normal languages of film that we have. VR doesn't have that yet. And there's not a great deal of effort being made in that direction. There's people here doing that. So I'm kind of speaking in the middle of the group, but outside of these people, there's only a handful who are really doing that and it's a significant challenge. When people who are the mainstream consumer put on a VR headset, it needs to be more than just a magic trick where they go oh that's cool. And that tends to be the vast majority of experiences. So what is the thing that is going to make someone go oh I get why we have VR as a medium. And we're not there yet. We're in the direction, but that's >> So you mentioned earlier the point where you can tell if someone's from film or gaming or whatever when you talk to them about VR. Who is the future VR developer? Is it a filmmaker? Is it a gamer? Is it a digital artist? What is this evolving? >> It's a kid in his basement who no one knows and is screwing around with it and is going to do something that everyone thinks is stupid. Like, it's going to be that. Basically every major leap in gaming is kind of the same thing. It's when we understand how ludonarrative dissonance works inside of telling how people move around a space. It's about how we do Dutch angle suddenly in film. And these things get invented. It's going to be some kid who's just screwing around who doesn't have the baggage of the language of film. A lot of the people I know in VR have been fortunate to work in film, in games and interactive or web dev. So you come from a lot of places but someone's going to come along who has none of that baggage. And they're going to be... >> Well you guys are pioneers and you're doing it. So for the first person out there that's in their basement, that inspirational soundbite or comment. How can you guys talk to that person or that group? Because this is the democratization, this is what's happening. It's not the gatekeepers. It's real creatives out there that could come from anywhere. YouTube generation, Twitch generation, gaming. What would you say to that person to motivate them and to give them that passion? >> Well it's only going to get easier, faster, cheaper, all these things are happening. But again, yeah I totally agree with what Brooks said. It's really about the culture and about educating the audience and getting them up to speed. There are some VR experiences that as soon as they put on the headset, like somebody who's never done it before, immediately will take it off cause they'll get nauseated. And then there's people, like kids who are like jet fighters. They've seen everything. You could throw like a 30 frames per second experience at them and that doesn't even phase them. They can be, all of a sudden their worlds are changing and they're like bring it because they're ready for that. So I think it's sort of about raising the bar for what the audience is comfortable with, familiar with, educating the community. There's a lot of tools right now, you know with Unreal and Unity that allow people who have very little... They don't need to know C# or C++, they can get started in a lot of like visual. What you see is what you get. Being able to drag things into a virtual room. And the windows headsets that are out. They refer to them as mixed reality, but just even having the ability to flip up the screen and transition from the virtual world to the real world in milliseconds, it allows you to be able to create things more at the speed of thought instead of coming up with an idea, coding it, and making sure it works, and then eventually putting on the headset. The sooner that we can actually be ideating inside this virtual environment is when things will get really interesting. >> So the next question is to take to the next level is what's the playbook? How does someone get involved? How does someone ingratiate into a community? If I'm an artist, I want to get, and I'm proficient with technology, or maybe not, how do they get involved? Is it community driven? Is it social? You guys mentioned seeing social's a big trend here. How do people get involved? What's the track? >> Well yeah you don't just need to go to a grad school or... There's a lot of programs out there that are popping up. Almost every single major state school has like an interactive art program now. And that wasn't the case like two or three years ago. So we're seeing that that's a big shift in the culture. But again, VR is still... It's expensive and it's you know, like VR, I refer to it's in the stage of it's almost like in the neo geo phase, maybe a little before that. But it's the really expensive thing that your friend's neighbor has. Or his older brother or something. You get to play it a little bit, you're like that's great but there's no way in hell I'm going to... You know, I can't afford that or like that just doesn't really work with my lifestyle right now so it needs to incorporate itself into our everyday, our habits. And it needs to be something that... If we're all doing it then it makes sense for us to do it together not just somebody in their basement doing it by themselves. >> Yeah feel free to comment, this is a good topic. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. So what we're doing is sort of about democratization and accessibility. So for people to get into the then they're going to need a rig, they're going to need a headset and previously it's actually been quite expensive to actually take that first plunge into it. So now by democratizing and bringing price points down, it makes it more accessible. That helps content creators because there's now more of an audience that can now consume that content. And the people that can then play with the medium and consume it now have a better reason to do it. So we're working on that. We're also working on the education pieces like Key. It's actually going out there to schools and actually letting them experience VR and play with VR. Because it is a whole new different medium. We've seen film directors and filmmakers go into the VR space and things that worked in 2D film like fast pans and whatever else so the points have already been made don't really translate into VR without somebody losing their lunch. So it is going to be somebody who's coming up who hasn't got the baggage of previous skill sets inside of 2D doing it inside of VR. So we're going to see that. And in terms of the technology, everybody's wanting things to progress. That shows the level of excitement out there. And everybody wants to get into it. Everybody wants to see it go further. And I'm reminded of the mobile phone. Mobile phone, 30 years ago? Two suitcases for batteries, a large brick on the ear and a car antennae. Okay, so where we are now, if you had a time machine and you went back in time to talk to the inventor of the mobile phone, well, I'd be a lot richer because I know sports results and all, but that aside, but you go back and talk to them and you said do you know in 30 years time, everybody is going to be carrying that device? Everybody's going to be dependent on that device? They're going to get social anxiety and separation anxiety if they lose it. And they will probably laugh in your face. >> Alright so since you brought up the phone analogy, since I love that example, are we in the Blackberry moment of VR and no one yet has built the iPhone? Because the iPhone was the seminal moment for smartphones. And you see what happened there. Is VR needing that kind of break? Or is it there? >> I think we're on the cusp. Where we are at the moment with technology, we've had the headsets, which I say have been more in the consumer space, they've been designed to hit a certain price point. We had CES the other week where we've had advancements now in the resolutions of headset that are now coming out. One of the issues was well I can't see texts, I can't read texts. So from a working environment, if you're actually using tools that you would normally use on a 2D screen, you can now translate that and read that text. However, in terms of the tools that people use, why are we trying to put 2D screens into a VR headset? We've got a whole new way of interacting with data. We've got a whole new way of doing things that are going to be more intuitive than the mouse and keyboard interaction that we're used to. Why just translate that. Let's push that envelope and those are the developments that we're pushing our partners and our ISVs to really embrace. >> So it's an evoution. >> It's absolutely an evolution. >> You guys have any thoughts on that comment. That we have that inflection point, are we hitting that, will we see it soon, is it here? >> Well I think it's a very interesting symbiotic relationship between multiple factors. So you know, we hear the cost factor, we hear the technology factor, then we have the content factor. You know I saw an interesting evolution at CES we had created this virtual booth experience so that you could still come to the CES Intel booth without actually having to be there. And I met a guy in there and I was like hey where are you? He goes I've been in here like all week. (laughter) And I was like oh yeah, where do you live? He goes oh I'm in my basement in Nebraska. But he had just, this was Friday when I met him. He'd been in there all week, but in 2D mode. And he had gone out the night before and bought a headset just so he could come back and go in VR mode. And I think, yes, all these factors have to kind of line up, but I do think that content, those experiences that are going to keep people coming back for more. Like these guys literally kept coming back to our booth. Right, to see... >> Content gain. >> To see who was there. And to them at that point, it wasn't really a barrier of cost. It was like there is something that I want to consume therefore I am going to go get what I need to consume it. And I use the analogy of HDTV, right. When we kind of moved over that hump where there was enough content people didn't really care how much that television cost. >> Sports was great. Sports really highlighted HD. >> Yeah. >> But this is a good point. This is a good question to ask. Brooks, I'd love to get your thoughts. Content drives experiences, amazing experiences, but we're building the scaffolding of everything at the same time. So where are we, what's your opinion? >> So here on the Starbreeze side, we're fortunate because we have our own headset. We have the StarVR headset we've been building with Acer. 5K all of that stuff and we're upgrading it over the next year. Our focus has been, we skipped the consumer market very much. We went straight to location based and enterprise. And the reason we did that is because there's a promise of VR at a basic, I don't want to say technology stand point, but from an experience perspective, when it comes to that resolution, when it comes to that field of view, when it comes to these things people expect. Average consumers who go to a movie and they see these giant screens. They want that translated. They don't have the understanding like we do of well, LED panels are actually a pain in the ass to build and it takes a little bit and they flip at their own speeds. Time to photon is not a thing my dad will ever see in his life. But there's a reality that people have a need for that. And it is extremely expensive. It's again the reason we went straight to LBE. But for us it's about marrying the two and consistently trying to match what's happening. So when we're talking about, as I mentioned earlier the technology and how we're standing on the shoulders of giants very very quickly, someone who's doing technology is going to see what we're doing content wise and go well I can do that better technology wise. And then we're just going to keep leap frogging. And it's very similar to the phone in the same way that we're not at the final stage of the phone. Like we're at our stage of the phone and no doubt in 30 years people will laugh at us for carrying anything. The same way we laugh about the briefcases and the giant batteries in the cars we had to pull with us. So it's one of those things that's continually transitional. And VR's in an odd, amazing place. >> Well you know, it was a lot of waves that we've all seen. You mentioned the mobile phone, that's a good one to point to. It feels like the PC revolution to me because the same culture of entrepreneurs and pioneers come from a bunch of different backgrounds. So I'd like to get Brooks perspective and Winslow's perspective on this because I think there's an entrepreneurial culture out there right now that's just emerging very fast. It's not like your classic entrepreneur software developer. So in this movement, in this wave, the entrepreneur is the filmmaker, it could be the kid in the basement, could be the gamer. Those entrepreneurs are trying to find a path. >> Yeah, it's a weird mix. VR is at this odd point where not only is it the people who are wanting to be cutting edge in terms of content or technology, but also that first mover strategy from the business side of things. And so everyone wants to be those guys who are charging ahead because in reality, if you look at the financials around all of this, VR is one of those things that you don't want to finance. It's not nearly as safe as say Marvel Avengers or the next Call of Duty. >> You've got to be, you've got to hustle. >> Yeah you've got to hustle. You've got to make... >> What's your advice? >> Start doing it. That's really it. It's the same advice I used to give to game makers when people would be like well I want to learn how to make games. It's like go to YouTube, download a thing and go do it. There's literally no reason why you can't. >> Are there meetups or like the Homebrew Computer Club that spawned the Mac. >> There are, there are infinite groups of VR people who are more than happy to give you all the terrible and wonderful opinions that come with that. There's no shortage of people. There's no shortage and it's an amazingly helpful group. Because everyone wants someone else to figure out something so they can steal that and then figure out something else. >> Winslow, your advice to entrepreneurs out there that are young and/or 14 to 50, what should they do? Jump right in obviously is a good one. >> Well yeah, experiment, break things, that's really the only way to learn. I would say watch as much VR as you can because sometimes bad VR is the best VR. Because you can learn don't do that. And if you learn, if you put all that together, you can really... It's like this lexicon that you can really follow. Also, I think we... As people in tech, we kind of get obsessed with things like resolution, frame rate, and these are very important, but it's also good to remember, or at least for me, I watch some of the best experiences from storytelling when I was a kid, eight years old on a 12 inch screen that was 640 by 480. You know, like scan lines on the VHS. But for me the story still resonated and it's important to think of story first, but obviously it's a dance between the story and the technology. They kind of have to both organically work together. And if they don't, one thing in the story that doesn't work because the tech isn't supporting it, can throw you out of the experience. >> Other concern entrepreneurs might have is financing. How do I get someone to help me build it? And then doing relationships. Finding relationships that could... One plus one equals more than two, right. So how do you? >> You have to get really creative when it comes to funding right now. Unless you're doing location based, which also requires a certain amount of investment to get it up to a bar where you want to be showing it to people with all the haptic effects when it's heat, smell, vibration, stuff like that. You know, it's not cheap to develop. But as far as like working with film foundations, we're fortunate enough to be sponsored by Fledgling Fund and Chicken and Egg. But we also were able to get partnerships with people like Intel and NVidia. And also work with people who come from a traditional film background. There's not one way to successfully fund a project. There's a million. And that's why it's interesting that the technology's innovating, but also the market place is as well. >> One of the things I want to ask is as any new industry gets building, is cultures form early. DNA forms in the entrepreneurs, in the pioneers. And one of the big hottest topics in the creative world is inclusion and diversity. So what's the makeup of the culture of this new generation? Because democratization means everyone can participate, everyone's involved. What's the state of the community vis a vis diversity, inclusion, and the role of the actors in the community. >> Well I think it's important to understand that VR has a profound ability to place you in somebody else's shoes. The trick though is to make sure that those feel like they're your shoes. But I think that we're learning a lot more about story telling techniques and we're able to empower people that their voices you know were previously not heard. The tricky thing is being able to yeah, educate all different groups of people how to use the technology, but once they're enabled and empowered to do it, it's amazing what you can experience inside the headset. >> So VR can be an enabler for education, outreach, a variety of things? >> Yes, I mean the term empathy, empathy machine gets thrown around a lot. You could do a drinking game around it. For panels when people are talking about it. But it's important to know there is a truth to that. And it's, yeah the perspective shift from looking at a screen, a 16 by 9 screen where you can look away, then dissolving the screen and becoming that person. Becoming the director, the actor, the camera person, the editor. When you're in the first person perspective, there's so much more... It feels more personal and that's a really interesting angle that we're going to continue to explore. >> So you could walk in someone's shoes, literally? >> Yes, you literally can. You just have to make sure that you got a... The tracking system's proper or else you'll look like there's... It can be come a horror movie pretty quickly if your leg is behind your head. >> Lisa, your thoughts on this, I know it's important to you. >> Yeah, I mean I think it's fascinating because I've been in tech for a really long time. And seen many, many trends. I mean the first job I had at Intel I was a PC tech and as you can imagine as a female, I think there was one other tech female in the department at the time and I would get funny looks when I would show up with my bag. They were like hi can I help you? I'm like I'm not here to deliver coffee, I'm here to fix your computer, you know. So I've seen a lot of trends and it's super exciting to me to see so much diversity cross culture, cross country, I mean we're having... We had guys come in from all over the world. From even war torn, they've escaped their country just several years ago and they're coming and they're bringing all that creativity to the market. We're seeing very, very strong female contingent from the filmmaker perspective so it's this wonderful, wonderful just primordial soup of people that I think are growing their own voice and their own power. They're breaking molds as far as how you actually get content produced. Distribution is kind of crazy right now. I mean, how do you get it distributed? There's like so many different ways. But all of those things are so important to the evolutionary and biological process of this. Yes, we need to let it go and sometimes we're frustrated. We're like where's the standards? Where's the one ring to rule them all? Where there's not going to be one. And it's good for us that there's not right now. It's frustrating from a business perspective sometimes. You're like, I can't peanut butter myself around all of these places, but I think it's just a very unique time where so many people are... The technology is accessible, that means that so many creators can now bring their fresh voice to this space and it's just going to be fascinating to continue to watch. >> That's awesome. Well two more questions and I'll give you some time to think about the last one which is your perspective on Sundance, what's happening this year, your personal view of what you think's happening, what might happen during this year. But the question I have for you now is to go down the line. We'll start with Brooks here, and talk about the coolest thing that you're involved in right now. >> It actually has to be Hero. We're debuting it here at Sundance. We've been working on it and not talking about it for about nine months. And it's been very difficult. Again it's sacrosanct to the experience that you don't know literally what you're getting in to. And the emotional response has been essentially our goal, trying to find out how far can we take that. You actually being in a space, moving around, having that interactivity, doing what you would do. But it being your story and how deeply we can absolutely effect a human being. And again, watching people come out, it's one of those things, I've been doing game development, I've worked on films, I've done all kinds of stuff. And you usually get a chance when someone experiences something you've made, you walk up to them and you go so what'd you think? And that's not at all what we can do with ours. >> How has it impacted you, that reaction? >> Well, I personally suffer significant PTSD and I've had some traumas in my life. And so it's been incredibly powerful to be able to share these things with people. Share this emotion in a deeply profound, yet amazingly personal way. Which I'm amazingly fortunate to be able to be a part of it. >> Alright thanks for sharing. Coolest thing that's going on with you right now here at Sundance. >> Just the fact that I'm here at all. I mean, it's incredible right? Personally was able to be an advisor on the SPHERES project that is premiering here with Eliza McNitt. She's someone who was an Intel Science Fair winner back in high school and kind of came back to us. So just to see the evolution of an artist really from the beginning to the point where they've been able to come here to Sundance. I'm also very passionate about the work that we're doing with Sansar. I kind of consider myself one of the chief storytellers at Intel around Virtual reality and this new move into social where people are like well what's this game. I'm like, it's not a game. It's you are the game, you are the interactivity. You become the person that makes the space interesting. We're just really setting the scene for you. And there's so many... You know there's a lot of different people kind of chasing this be togetherness. But what we've been able to produce there. And just to be able to explore some of my own personal ideas has just been such a gift. Then to be working with guys like these on the panels and see what they're doing and just be in touch is really just an exciting time. >> John: Awesome. >> Probably what, other than the people on the projects, or the projects that are being shown here, we're working on our new project, which we would have loved to premiere here, but we did... Basically when you get in, you have two months to create a piece, so you have a demo and you have to finish it, so we're taking a little bit more time. This one's going to be about a year development cycle. It's called Breathe where we take you from where Giant left off, where, in Giant, the ceiling collapses on a family. They're in front of you. In this experience, we use a breathing apparatus to basically bring yourself back to life. And then you realize you're trapped under rubble and you remove the... We actually want to have physical objects on top of you that are going to be tracked. So you're moving rubble from you and you realize that you're a six year old girl. You're the survivor from Giant. And you get to witness what it's like to be a future refugee sort of in different key moments of her life that use breath. Whether it's a flirtatious moment, blowing a dandelion, seeing your own breath in snow as a drone shows you a message that your parents pre-recorded on your 18th birthday. This is all in the future, obviously, but every time you walk around an object, you actually grow 10 to 15 years older in the experience. As you get older, the world becomes smaller. And then we witness what's like for her last breath. From being six years old to being 90 years old. But it's a profound personal experience. >> John: That sounds cool, cool. Gary, coolest thing that you're involved in right now at Sundance. >> Wow. I could say it's all cool that would be a bit trite. They say if you enjoy what you do, is it really a job? And I'm lucky enough to be in that position. Because working with all these guys here and like people around the place, they're doing such great things that every day I wake up and I'm astounded of where the industry's going. In terms of what we're doing here at Sundance, then we're really starting to push those envelopes as well. I've been lucky enough to be involved with Dunkirk and Spider-Man: Homecoming. Like last year, so some great pieces there. And moving out into this year, we've got some other developments which I can't mention at this point, but we're showing things like AR and VR mashup. So we haven't talked much about augmented reality here. It's an evolutionary, it's not a replacement. Both can be used and we've started to really start to blend those two technologies now. So you can still see the outside world. Just touching on the commercial side, and health care's very big for me. That's where I think the really cool stuff is happening. Entertainment is great and that's really pushing the envelope and allowing us to then take it for the good of human kind. >> It happens everywhere, it's not just entertainment. >> Yeah absolutely. You start looking at MRI scans inside of VR or AR. Talking a patient through it so they can actually see exactly what you're talking about. You're now no longer pointing at flat things on a screen. You're now actually taking them through it. If you're using AR, you can actually judge the responses of the patient as for how they're reacting to the news. And effectively, inside of the VR, and what's really cool for me is seeing people's reaction to that content and to the entertainment content. >> That's awesome. Okay final question. This is a little bit of self serving because I'd like you to help me do my job at SiliconANGLE. If you were a reporter and you were going to report the most important stories happening this year at Sundance or really kind of what's really happening versus what's kind of being billed to be happening here. What's the story? What is the story this year at Sundance 2018 in your personal perspective? We'll go down the line and share your observations. >> Well, mine here, I'm a Sundance newbie. This is my first year of being here. I'm absolutely astounded by the community spirit that's around. I go to a lot of technical trade shows and technical presentations. People coming here with a willingness to learn. Wanting to learn from other people. It's been touched on already. It's the pool of knowledge that's available inside of Sundance that everybody that comes here can actually tap into to create better content, to learn not what to do as well as learn what to do. And I just think that's brilliant because in that community spirit, that's really going to help enable this industry quickly. >> John: Winslow, you've got some experience, what's your thoughts? >> Obviously, this Intel house, just a little plug for you Lisa. (laughter) Tech Lounge. We got that? Okay good. I mean, yeah, the people that's here. Every year we come here and see where the high water mark is. All these people are... Some of these teams first started with two people and then they grew to six and then by the end of it, there's 100 people working around the clock, pulling all-nighters to be able to give the latest and greatest of what's available with these current tools. So it's amazing because the work itself doesn't really mean anything until people get to experience it. So that's nice that they make a big splash. The people here are very attentive to it. It's a very nice audience and this will continue the momentum for future festivals throughout the year, but also will excite people that have never done VR before. People who have never been to Sundance before. We're seeing that there's a lot of new people. And that will continue to influence many years to come. >> John: So you think VR is the top story here being told? >> As far as like just to generalize, I would say last year kind of the big VR year. This is kind of the big AR year. Next year's going to be the AI year. Then after that we're going to start putting them all together. >> John: Great, great feedback. >> I think it's just exciting for Intel just to be back here. I think Intel hasn't been here in quite some time. Dell coming in here probably one of the breakout years for us to come back and really talk to creators what we're doing from the Intel Studios all the way through to the stuff you can take home and do at home. And I think coming in, we're coming back here with a purpose really, not just to be here to be seen. We're really here with real things and want to have real conversations on how tech can enable what people are doing. Not just from a brand perspective, but from a real hands on point of view. >> John: Yeah, some great demos too, phenomenal tech. >> Really just, yeah everything from the AI stuff we have to the social to the great new pieces that have been submitted here like we mentioned with SPHERES. So I think, yeah, it doesn't feel gratuitous to me you know that Dell or Intel is here this year. We've really come with a purpose. >> You guys are moving the needle, it's really awesome. We need more horsepower. >> Brooks, your thoughts on Sundance this year. Observation, the vibe, what would you tell your friend back home when you get back? >> If, for me, I think it's almost the non-story. It's like the opposite of a story. It's just the deep integration of VR into the normal Sundance flow I think has been interesting. Some people have been here for a few years. And back in the day when it was one or two, it was a lot of oh, you do VR? What's that then? Whereas now, you see a lot more people who are crossing over. Going to see documentaries, then they come to see a VR piece and it's just a part of the normal flow. And the team at New Frontier has done exceptional work to kind of make sure that they have this ridiculous high level of broad content for all kinds of people. All kinds of experiences, all high end things. But it's not that VR's here. Oh good, we have a VR section. It's a lot more of an integrated set up. And it's been really encouraging to see. >> Well you guys have been great. It's been very inspirational. Great information. You guys are reimagining the future and building it at the same time so entrepreneurially and also with content and technology. So thanks so much for sharing on this panel The New Creative. This is SiliconANGLE's coverage of Sundance 2018 here at the Intel Tech Lounge at the Sundance Film Festival. I'm John Furrier thanks for watching. (upbeat music)