>>How y'all doing? My name's Savannah Peterson, coming to you from Detroit, Michigan, where the cube is excited to be at Cube Con. Our guest this afternoon is a wonderfully brilliant woman who's been leading in the space for over eight years. Please welcome Gar Kapur. Gar, thanks for being with us. >>Well, thank you for having me to, It's a pleasure. Good >>To see you. So, update what's going on here? Co saw you at VMware Explorer. Yes. Welcome back to the Cube. Yes. What's, what's going on for you guys here? What's the message? What's the story >>Soupcon like I always say, it's our event, it's our audience. So, you know, Minayo, I dunno if you've been keeping track, Mani ha did reach like a billion docker downloads recently. So >>Congratulations. >>This is your tribe right here. Yes, >>It is. It is. Our >>Tribe's native infrastructure. Come on. Yes. >>You know, this audience understands us. We understand them. You know, you were asking when did we start the company? So we started in 2014, and if you see, Kubernetes was born in 2015 in all sorts of ways. So we kind of literally grew up together along with the Kubernetes journey. So all the decisions that we took were just, you know, making sure that we addressed the Kubernetes and the cloud native audiences, the first class citizens when it comes to storage. So I think that has been very instrumental in leading us up to the point where we have reached a billion docker downloads and we are the most loved object storage out >>There. So, So do you like your younger brother Kubernetes? Or not? Is this is It's a family that gets along. >>It does get along. I think in, in Kubernetes space, what we are seeing from customer standpoint as well, right? They're warming up to Kubernetes and you know, they are using Kubernetes as a framework to deploy anything at scale. And especially when you're, you know, offering storage as a service to your, whether it is for your internal audience or to the external audience, Kubernetes becomes extremely instrumental because it makes Multitenancy extremely easy. It makes, you know, access control points extremely easy for different user sets and so on. Yeah. So Kubernetes is definitely the way to go. I think enterprises need to just have little bit more skill set when it comes to Kubernetes overall, because I think there are still little bit areas in which they need to invest in, but I think this is the right direction, This is the right way. If you, if you want multi-tenant, you need Kubernetes for compute, you need Kubernetes for storage. So >>You guys hit an interesting spot here with Kubernetes. You have a product that targets builders. Yes. But also it's a service that's consumed. >>Yes. Yes. >>How do you see those two lanes shaping out as the world starts to grow, the ecosystems growing, You've got products for builders and products for people who are developers consuming services. How do you see that shaking out? Is just, is there intersections there? There is. You seem to be hitting that. >>There is. There is definitely an intersection. And I think it's getting merged because a lot of these users are the ones who dictate what kind of stack they want as part of their application ecosystem overall, right? So that is where, when an application, for example, in the big data workloads, right? They tell their IT or their storage department, this is the S3 compatible storage that they want their applications to run on or sit on. So the bridges definitely like becoming very narrow in that way from builders versus the service consumers overall. And I think, you know, at the end of the day, people need to get their job done from application users perspective. They want to just get in and get out. They don't want to deal with the underlying complexity when it comes to storage or any of the framework, right? So I think what we enable is for the builders to make sure they have extremely easy, simple, high performance software service that they can offer it to their customers, which is as three compatible. So now they can take their applications wherever they need to go, whether it is edge, whether it is on-prem, whether it is any of the public cloud, wherever you need to be, go be with it. With >>Mei, I mean, I wanna get your thoughts on a really big trend that's happening now. That's right. In your area of expertise. That is people are realizing that, hey, I don't necessarily need AWS S3 for storage. I gotta do my own storage or build my own. So there's a cost slash value for commodity storage. Yes. When does a company just dive to what to do there? Do they do their own? You see, CloudFlare, you seeing Wasabi, other companies? Yes. Merging. You guys are here. Yeah, yeah. Common services then there's a differentiator in the cloud. What's the, what's this all about? >>Yeah, so there are a couple of things going on in this space, right? So firstly, I think cloud model is the way to go. And what, what we mean by cloud is not public cloud, it's the cloud operating model overall, right? You need to build the applications the correct way so that they can consume cloud native infrastructure correctly. So I think that is what is going on. And secondly, I think cloud is great for your burst workloads. It's all about productivity. It's all about getting your applications to the market as fast as you can. And that is where of course, MIN IO comes into play when you know you can develop your applications natively on something like mania. And when, when you take it to production, it's very easy no matter where you go. And thirdly, I think when it comes to the cost perspective, you know, what we offer to the customers is predictability of the cost and no surprise in the builds when it comes, which is extremely important to like a CFO of a company because everyone knows that cloud is not the cheapest place to run your sustainable workloads. And there is unpredictability element involved because, you know, people leave their buckets on, people leave their compute nodes on it, it happens all the time. So I think if you take that uncertainty out of it and have more predictability around it, I think that is, that is where the true value lies. >>You're really hitting on a theme that we've been hearing a lot on the cube today, which is standardization, predictability. Yes. We, everyone always wants to move fast, but I think we're actually stepping away from that Mark Zuckerberg parity, move fast and break things and let's move fast, but know how much it's gonna cost and also decrease the complexity. Drugs >>Don't things. >>Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And try, you know, minimize the collateral damage when Yeah. I, I love that you're enabling folks like that. How is, I'm curious because I see that your background, you have a PhD in philosophy, so we don't always see philosophy and DevOps and Kubernetes in the same conversation. Yeah. So how does this translate into your leadership within your team and the, And Min i's culture, >>So it's PhD in financial management and financial economics. So that is where my specialization lies. And I think after that I came to Bay Area. So once you're in Bay Area, you cannot escape technology. It is >>To you, >>It is just the way things are. You cannot escape startups, you cannot escape technology overall. So that's how I got introduced to it. And yeah, that it has been a great journey so far. And from the culture standpoint of view, you know, I always tell like if I can learn technology, anyone can learn technology. So what we look for is the right attitude, the right kind of, you know, passion to learn is what is most important in this world if you want to succeed. And that's what I tell everyone who joins the, who joins win I, two months, three months, you'll be up and going. I, I'm not too worried about it. >>But pet pedigree doesn't always play into it because no, the changing technology you could level up. So for sure you get into those and be contributing. >>I think one of the reasons why we have been successful the way we have been successful with storage is because we've not hired storage experts. Because they come with their own legacy and mindset of how to build things. And we are like, and we always came from a point of view, we are not a storage company. We are a data company and we want to be close to the data. So when you come to that mindset, you build a product directly attacking data, not just like, you know, in traditional appliance world and so on, so forth. So I think those things have been very instrumental in terms of getting the right people on board, making sure that they're very aligned with how we do things and you know, the dnf, the company's, >>That's for passion and that's actually counterintuitive, but it's makes sense. Yes. In new markets it doesn't always seem to take the boiler plate. Yes. Skill set or person. No, we're doing journalism, but we don't hire journalists. No, >>I mean you gotta be, It's adventurers. It is. It's curious. >>Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I, yeah, I think also, you know, for you to disrupt any space, you cannot approach it from how they approach the problem. You need to completely turn the tables upside down as they say, right? You need to disrupt it and have the surprise element. And I think that is what always makes a technology very special. You cannot follow the path that others have followed. You need to come from a different space, different mindset altogether. So that is where it's important that you, like you said, adventurous are the people >>That that is for sure. Talk to us about the company. Are you growing scaling? How do people find out more? >>Oh yeah, for sure. So people can find out more by visiting our website. Min dot i, we are growing. We just closed last year, end of last year we closed our CDC round unicorn valuation and so on, so forth. So >>She says unicorn valuation, so casually, I just wanna point that out, that, that, that, that's funny. Like a true strong female leader. I love that. I >>Love that. Thank you. Yes. So in terms of, you know, in terms of growth and scalability, we are growing the team. We are, you know, onboarding more commercial customers to the platform. So yeah, it's growth all across growth from the community standpoint, growth from commercial number standpoint. So congratulations. Yeah, thank you. >>Yeah, that's very exciting. Grma, thank you so much for being, >>Being with us. Thank you for >>Having me. Always. Thanks for hanging out and to all of you, thank you so much for tuning into the Cube, especially for this exciting edition for all of us here in Detroit, Michigan, where we're coming to you from Cuban. See you back here in a little bit.

(inspirational music) >> The history of high performance computing is unique and storied. You know, it's generally accepted that the first true supercomputer was shipped in the mid 1960s by Controlled Data Corporations, CDC, designed by an engineering team led by Seymour Cray, the father of Supercomputing. He left CDC in the 70's to start his own company, of course, carrying his own name. Now that company Cray, became the market leader in the 70's and the 80's, and then the decade of the 80's saw attempts to bring new designs, such as massively parallel systems, to reach new heights of performance and efficiency. Supercomputing design was one of the most challenging fields, and a number of really brilliant engineers became kind of quasi-famous in their little industry. In addition to Cray himself, Steve Chen, who worked for Cray, then went out to start his own companies. Danny Hillis, of Thinking Machines. Steve Frank of Kendall Square Research. Steve Wallach tried to build a mini supercomputer at Convex. These new entrants, they all failed, for the most part because the market at the time just wasn't really large enough and the economics of these systems really weren't that attractive. Now, the late 80's and the 90's saw big Japanese companies like NEC and Fujitsu entering the fray and governments around the world began to invest heavily in these systems to solve societal problems and make their nations more competitive. And as we entered the 21st century, we saw the coming of petascale computing, with China actually cracking the top 100 list of high performance computing. And today, we're now entering the exascale era, with systems that can complete a billion, billion calculations per second, or 10 to the 18th power. Astounding. And today, the high performance computing market generates north of $30 billion annually and is growing in the high single digits. Supercomputers solve the world's hardest problems in things like simulation, life sciences, weather, energy exploration, aerospace, astronomy, automotive industries, and many other high value examples. And supercomputers are expensive. You know, the highest performing supercomputers used to cost tens of millions of dollars, maybe $30 million. And we've seen that steadily rise to over $200 million. And today we're even seeing systems that cost more than half a billion dollars, even into the low billions when you include all the surrounding data center infrastructure and cooling required. The US, China, Japan, and EU countries, as well as the UK, are all investing heavily to keep their countries competitive, and no price seems to be too high. Now, there are five mega trends going on in HPC today, in addition to this massive rising cost that we just talked about. One, systems are becoming more distributed and less monolithic. The second is the power of these systems is increasing dramatically, both in terms of processor performance and energy consumption. The x86 today dominates processor shipments, it's going to probably continue to do so. Power has some presence, but ARM is growing very rapidly. Nvidia with GPUs is becoming a major player with AI coming in, we'll talk about that in a minute. And both the EU and China are developing their own processors. We're seeing massive densities with hundreds of thousands of cores that are being liquid-cooled with novel phase change technology. The third big trend is AI, which of course is still in the early stages, but it's being combined with ever larger and massive, massive data sets to attack new problems and accelerate research in dozens of industries. Now, the fourth big trend, HPC in the cloud reached critical mass at the end of the last decade. And all of the major hyperscalers are providing HPE, HPC as a service capability. Now finally, quantum computing is often talked about and predicted to become more stable by the end of the decade and crack new dimensions in computing. The EU has even announced a hybrid QC, with the goal of having a stable system in the second half of this decade, most likely around 2027, 2028. Welcome to theCUBE's preview of SC22, the big supercomputing show which takes place the week of November 13th in Dallas. theCUBE is going to be there. Dave Nicholson will be one of the co-hosts and joins me now to talk about trends in HPC and what to look for at the show. Dave, welcome, good to see you. >> Hey, good to see you too, Dave. >> Oh, you heard my narrative up front Dave. You got a technical background, CTO chops, what did I miss? What are the major trends that you're seeing? >> I don't think you really- You didn't miss anything, I think it's just a question of double-clicking on some of the things that you brought up. You know, if you look back historically, supercomputing was sort of relegated to things like weather prediction and nuclear weapons modeling. And these systems would live in places like Lawrence Livermore Labs or Los Alamos. Today, that requirement for cutting edge, leading edge, highest performing supercompute technology is bleeding into the enterprise, driven by AI and ML, artificial intelligence and machine learning. So when we think about the conversations we're going to have and the coverage we're going to do of the SC22 event, a lot of it is going to be looking under the covers and seeing what kind of architectural things contribute to these capabilities moving forward, and asking a whole bunch of questions. >> Yeah, so there's this sort of theory that the world is moving toward this connectivity beyond compute-centricity to connectivity-centric. We've talked about that, you and I, in the past. Is that a factor in the HPC world? How is it impacting, you know, supercomputing design? >> Well, so if you're designing an island that is, you know, tip of this spear, doesn't have to offer any level of interoperability or compatibility with anything else in the compute world, then connectivity is important simply from a speeds and feeds perspective. You know, lowest latency connectivity between nodes and things like that. But as we sort of democratize supercomputing, to a degree, as it moves from solely the purview of academia into truly ubiquitous architecture leverage by enterprises, you start asking the question, "Hey, wouldn't it be kind of cool if we could have this hooked up into our ethernet networks?" And so, that's a whole interesting subject to explore because with things like RDMA over converged ethernet, you now have the ability to have these supercomputing capabilities directly accessible by enterprise computing. So that level of detail, opening up the box of looking at the Nix, or the storage cards that are in the box, is actually critically important. And as an old-school hardware knuckle-dragger myself, I am super excited to see what the cutting edge holds right now. >> Yeah, when you look at the SC22 website, I mean, they're covering all kinds of different areas. They got, you know, parallel clustered systems, AI, storage, you know, servers, system software, application software, security. I mean, wireless HPC is no longer this niche. It really touches virtually every industry, and most industries anyway, and is really driving new advancements in society and research, solving some of the world's hardest problems. So what are some of the topics that you want to cover at SC22? >> Well, I kind of, I touched on some of them. I really want to ask people questions about this idea of HPC moving from just academia into the enterprise. And the question of, does that mean that there are architectural concerns that people have that might not be the same as the concerns that someone in academia or in a lab environment would have? And by the way, just like, little historical context, I can't help it. I just went through the upgrade from iPhone 12 to iPhone 14. This has got one terabyte of storage in it. One terabyte of storage. In 1997, I helped build a one terabyte NAS system that a government defense contractor purchased for almost $2 million. $2 million! This was, I don't even know, it was $9.99 a month extra on my cell phone bill. We had a team of seven people who were going to manage that one terabyte of storage. So, similarly, when we talk about just where are we from a supercompute resource perspective, if you consider it historically, it's absolutely insane. I'm going to be asking people about, of course, what's going on today, but also the near future. You know, what can we expect? What is the sort of singularity that needs to occur where natural language processing across all of the world's languages exists in a perfect way? You know, do we have the compute power now? What's the interface between software and hardware? But really, this is going to be an opportunity that is a little bit unique in terms of the things that we typically cover, because this is a lot about cracking open the box, the server box, and looking at what's inside and carefully considering all of the components. >> You know, Dave, I'm looking at the exhibitor floor. It's like, everybody is here. NASA, Microsoft, IBM, Dell, Intel, HPE, AWS, all the hyperscale guys, Weka IO, Pure Storage, companies I've never heard of. It's just, hundreds and hundreds of exhibitors, Nvidia, Oracle, Penguin Solutions, I mean, just on and on and on. Google, of course, has a presence there, theCUBE has a major presence. We got a 20 x 20 booth. So, it's really, as I say, to your point, HPC is going mainstream. You know, I think a lot of times, we think of HPC supercomputing as this just sort of, off in the eclectic, far off corner, but it really, when you think about big data, when you think about AI, a lot of the advancements that occur in HPC will trickle through and go mainstream in commercial environments. And I suspect that's why there are so many companies here that are really relevant to the commercial market as well. >> Yeah, this is like the Formula 1 of computing. So if you're a Motorsports nerd, you know that F1 is the pinnacle of the sport. SC22, this is where everybody wants to be. Another little historical reference that comes to mind, there was a time in, I think, the early 2000's when Unisys partnered with Intel and Microsoft to come up with, I think it was the ES7000, which was supposed to be the mainframe, the sort of Intel mainframe. It was an early attempt to use... And I don't say this in a derogatory way, commodity resources to create something really, really powerful. Here we are 20 years later, and we are absolutely smack in the middle of that. You mentioned the focus on x86 architecture, but all of the other components that the silicon manufacturers bring to bear, companies like Broadcom, Nvidia, et al, they're all contributing components to this mix in addition to, of course, the microprocessor folks like AMD and Intel and others. So yeah, this is big-time nerd fest. Lots of academics will still be there. The supercomputing.org, this loose affiliation that's been running these SC events for years. They have a major focus, major hooks into academia. They're bringing in legit computer scientists to this event. This is all cutting edge stuff. >> Yeah. So like you said, it's going to be kind of, a lot of techies there, very technical computing, of course, audience. At the same time, we expect that there's going to be a fair amount, as they say, of crossover. And so, I'm excited to see what the coverage looks like. Yourself, John Furrier, Savannah, I think even Paul Gillin is going to attend the show, because I believe we're going to be there three days. So, you know, we're doing a lot of editorial. Dell is an anchor sponsor, so we really appreciate them providing funding so we can have this community event and bring people on. So, if you are interested- >> Dave, Dave, I just have- Just something on that point. I think that's indicative of where this world is moving when you have Dell so directly involved in something like this, it's an indication that this is moving out of just the realm of academia and moving in the direction of enterprise. Because as we know, they tend to ruthlessly drive down the cost of things. And so I think that's an interesting indication right there. >> Yeah, as do the cloud guys. So again, this is mainstream. So if you're interested, if you got something interesting to talk about, if you have market research, you're an analyst, you're an influencer in this community, you've got technical chops, maybe you've got an interesting startup, you can contact David, david.nicholson@siliconangle.com. John Furrier is john@siliconangle.com. david.vellante@siliconangle.com. I'd be happy to listen to your pitch and see if we can fit you onto the program. So, really excited. It's the week of November 13th. I think November 13th is a Sunday, so I believe David will be broadcasting Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Really excited. Give you the last word here, Dave. >> No, I just, I'm not embarrassed to admit that I'm really, really excited about this. It's cutting edge stuff and I'm really going to be exploring this question of where does it fit in the world of AI and ML? I think that's really going to be the center of what I'm really seeking to understand when I'm there. >> All right, Dave Nicholson. Thanks for your time. theCUBE at SC22. Don't miss it. Go to thecube.net, go to siliconangle.com for all the news. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and for Dave Nicholson. Thanks for watching. And we'll see you in Dallas. (inquisitive music)

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is the Cube's live coverage of day. One of snowflake summit 22 fourth annual. We're very happy to be here. A lot of people here, Lisa Martin with Dave Valante, David's always great to be at these events with you, but me. This one is shot out of the cannon from day one, data, data, data, data. That's what you heard of here. First, we have two guests joining us next, please. Welcome Matthew Scalian. Who's an alumni of the cube CEO and founder of Matillion and Jer staying chief data architect and global head of data engineering from Western union. Welcome gentlemen. Thank >>You. Great to be here. >>We're gonna unpack the Western union story in a second. I love that, but Matthew, I wanted to start with you, give the audience who might not be familiar with Matillion an overview, your vision, your differentiators, your joint value statement with snowflake, >>Of course. Well, first of all, thank you for having me on the cube. Again, Matillion S mission is to make the world's data useful, and we do that by providing a technology platform that allows our customers to load transform, synchronize, and orchestrate data on the snowflake data cloud. And on, on the cloud in general, we've been doing that for a number of years. We're co headquartered in the UK and the us, hence my dat accents. And we work with all sorts of companies, commercial scale, large end enterprises, particularly including of course, I'm delighted to say our friends at Western union. So that's why we're here today. >>And we're gonna talk about that in a second, but I wanna understand what's new with the data integration platform from Matillion perspective, lots of stuff coming out, give us an overview. >>Yeah, of course, it's been a really busy year and it's great to be here at snowflake summit to be able to share some of what we've been working on. You know, the Matillion platform is all about making our customers as productive as possible in terms of time to value insight on that analytics, data science, AI projects, like get you to value faster. And so the more technology we can put in the platform and the easier we can make it to use, the better we can achieve that goal. So this year we've, we've shipped a product that we call MDL 2.0, that's enterprise focused, exquisitely, easy to use batch data pipelines. So customers can load data even more simply into the snowflake data cloud, very excitingly we've also launched Matillion CDC. And so this is an industry first cloud native writer, head log based change data capture. >>I haven't come up with a shorter way of saying that, but, and surprise customers need this technology and it's been around for years, but mostly pre-cloud technology. That's been repurposed for the cloud. And so Matillion has rebuilt that concept for the cloud. And we launched that earlier this year. And of course we've continued to build out the core Matillion ETL platform that today over a thousand joint snowflake Matillion customers use, including Western union, of course we've been adding features there such as universal connectivity. And so a challenge that all data integration vendors have is having the right connectors for their source systems. Universal connectivity allows you to connect to any source system without writing code point and click. We shape that as well. So it's been a busy year, >>Was really simple. Sorry. I love that. He said that and it also sounded great with your accent. I didn't wanna >>Thank you. Excellent. Javier, talk about your role at Western union in, in what you've seen in terms of the evolution of the, the data stack. >>So in the last few years, well, a little bit of Western union, a 70 or 170 year old company, pretty much everybody knows what Western union is, right? Driving an interesting synergy from what Matthew says, when data moves money moves, that's what we do when he moves the da, he moves the data. We move the money. That's the synergy between, you know, us and the organization that support us from data move perspective. So what I've seen in the last few years is obviously a shift towards the cloud, but, you know, within the cloud itself, obviously there's a lot of players as well. And we as customers have always been wishing to have a short, smaller footprint of data so that the movement becomes a little lesser. You know, interestingly enough, in this conference, I've heard some very interesting stuff, which kind of helping me to bring that footprint down to a manageable number, to be more governed, to be more, you know, effective in terms of delivering more end results for my customers as well. >>So Matillion has been a great partner for us from our cloud adoption perspective. During the COVID times, we were a re we are a, you know, multi-channel organization. We have retail stores as well, our digital presence, but people just couldn't go to the retail stores. So we had to find ways to accelerate our adoption, make sure our systems are scaling and making sure that we are delivering the same experience to our customers. And that's where, you know, tools like Matillion came in and really, really partnered up with us to kind of bring it up to the level. >>So talk specifically about the stack evolution. Cause I have this sort of theory that everybody talks about injecting data and, and machine intelligence and AI and machine learning into apps. But the application development stack is like totally separate from the, the data analytics and the data pipeline stack. And the database is somewhere over here as well. How is that evolving? Are those worlds coming together? >>Some part of those words are coming together, but where I still see the difference is your heavy lifting will still happen on the data stack. You cannot have that heavy lifting on the app because if once the apps becomes heavy, you'll have trouble communicating with, with, with the organizations. You know, you need to be as lean as possible in the front end and make sure things are curated. Things are available on demand as soon as possible. And that's why you see all these API driven applications are doing really, really well because they're delivering those results back to the, the leaner applications much faster. So I'm a big proponent of, yes, it can be hybrid, but the majority of the heavy lifting still needs to happen down at the data layer, which is where I think snowflake plays a really good role >>In APIs are the connective tissue >>APIs connections. Yes. >>Also I think, you know, in terms of the, the data stack, there's another parallel that you can draw from applications, right? So technology is when they're new, we tend to do things in a granular way. We write a lot of code. We do a lot of sticking of things together with plasters and sticky tape. And it's the purview of high end engineers and people enthusiastic about that to get started. Then the business starts to see the value in this stuff, and we need to move a lot faster. And technology solutions come in and this is what the, the data cloud is all about, right? The technology getting out of the way and allowing people to focus on higher order problems of innovating around analytics, data applications, AI, machine learning, you know, that's also where Matillion sit as well as other companies in this modern enterprise data stack is technology vendors are coming in allowing organizations to move faster and have high levels of productivity. So I think that's a good parallel to application development. >>And's just follow up on that. When you think about data prep and you know, all the focus on data quality, you've got a data team, you know, in the data pipeline, a very specialized, maybe even hyper specialized data engineers, quality engineers, data, quality engineers, data analysts, data scientist, but they, and they serve a lot of different business lines. They don't necessarily have the business, they don't have the business context typically. So it's kind of this back and forth. Do you see that changing in your organization or, or the are the lines of business taking more responsibility for the data and, and addressing that problem? It's, >>It's like you die by thousand paper cuts or you just die. Right? That's the kind >>Of, right, >>Because if I say it's, it's good to be federated, it comes with its own flaws. But if I say, if it's good to be decentralized, then I'm the, the guy to choke, right? And in my role, I'm the guy to choke. So I've selectively tried to be a pseudo federated organization, where do I do have folks reporting into our organization, but they sit close to the line of business because the business understands data better. We are working with them hand in glove. We have dedicated teams that support them. And our problem is we are also regional. We are 200 countries. So the regional needs are very different than our us needs. Majority of the organizations that you probably end up talking to have like very us focused, 50 per more than 50% of our revenue is international. So we do, we are dealing with people who are international, their needs for data, their needs for quality and their needs for the, the delivery of those analytics and the data is completely different. And so we have to be a little bit more closer to the business than traditionally. Some, some organizations feel that they need >>To, is there need for the underlying infrastructure and the operational details that as diverse, or is that something that you bring standardization to the, >>So the best part about this, the cloud that happened to us is exactly that, because at one point of time, I had infrastructure in one country. I had another infrastructure sitting in another country, regional teams, making different different decisions of bringing in different tools. Now I can standardize. I will say, Matillion is our standard for doing ETL work. If this is the use case, but then it gets deployed across the geographies because the cloud helps us or the cloud platform helps us to manage it. Sitting down here. I have three centers around the world, you know, Costa Rica, India, and the us. I can manage 24 7 sitting here. No >>Problem. So the underlying our infrastructure is, is global, but the data needs are dealt with locally. Yep. >>One of the pav question, I was just thinking JVE is super well positioned funds for you, which is around that business domain knowledge versus technical expertise. Cause again, early in technology journeys tend, things tend to be very technical and therefore only high end engineers can do it, but high end engineers are scar. Right? Right. And, and also, I mean, we survey our hundreds of large enterprise customers and they tell us they spend two thirds of their time doing stuff they don't really want to do like reinventing the wheel, basic data movement and the low order staff. And so if you can make those people more productive and allow them to focus on higher value problems, but also bring pseudo technical people into it. Overall, the business can go a lot faster. And the way you do that is by making it easier. That's why Matillion is a low code NOCO platform, but Jer and Western union are doing this right. I >>Mean, I can't compete with AWS and Google to hire people. So I need to find people who are smart to figure the products that we have to make them work. I don't want them to spend time on infrastructure, Adam, I don't want them to spend time on trying to manage platforms. I want them to deliver the data, deliver the results to the business so that they can build and serve their customers better. So it's a little bit of a different approach, different mindset. I used to be in consulting for 17 years. I thought I knew it all, but it changed overnight when I own all of these systems. And I'm like, I need to be a little bit more smarter than this. I need to be more proactive and figure out what my business needs rather than what just from a technology needs. It's more what the business needs and how I can deliver that needs to them. So simple analogy, you know, I can build the best architecture in the world. It's gonna cost me an arm and leg, but I can't drive it because the pipeline is not there. So I can have a Ferrari, but I can't drive it. It's still capped at 80, 80 miles an hour. So rather than spend, rather than building one Ferrari, let me have 10 Toyotas or 10 Fs, which will go further along and do better for my cus my, for my customers. >>So how do you see this whole, we hearing about the data cloud. We hear about the marketplace, data products now, application development inside the data cloud. How do you see that affecting not so much the productivity of the data teams. I don't wanna necessarily say, but the product, the value that, that customers like you can get out >>Data. So data is moving closer to the business. That's the value I see, because you are injecting the business and you're injecting the application much more closer to the data because it, in the past, it was days and days of, you know, churn the data to actually clear results. Now the data has moved much closer. So I have a much faster turnaround time. The business can adapt and actually react much, much faster. It took us like 16 to 30 days to deliver, you know, data for marketing. Now I can turn it down in four hours. If I see something happening, I'll give you an example. The war in Ukraine happened. Let is shut down operations in Russia. Ukraine is cash swamp. There's no cash in Ukraine. We have cash. We roll out campaign, $0 money, transferred to Ukraine within four hours of the world going on. That's the impact that we have >>Massive impact. That's huge, especially with such a macro challenge going on, on the, in, in the world. Thank you so much for sharing the Matillion snowflake partnership story, how it's helping Western union really transform into a data company. We love hearing stories of organizations that are 170 years old that have always really been technology focused, but to see it come to life so quickly is pretty powerful. Guys. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks >>Guys. Thank you, having it. Thank >>You >>For Dave Velante and our guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes live coverage of snowflake summit 22 live from Las Vegas. Stick around. We'll be back after a short break.

>>Good morning live from Las Vegas, Lisa Martin and Dave Lanta here covering snowflake summit 22. Dave, it's great to be here in person. The keynote we just came from was standing room only. In fact, there was overflow. People are excited to be back and to hear from the company in person the first time, since the IPO, >>Lots of stuff, lots of deep technical dives, uh, you know, they took the high end of the pyramid and then dove down deep in the keynotes. It >>Was good. They did. And we've got Doug Hench with us to break this down in the next eight to 10 minutes, VP and principle analyst at constellation research. Doug, welcome to the cube. >>Great to be here. >>All right, so guys, I was telling Dave, as we were walking back from the keynote, this was probably the most technical keynote I've seen in a very long time. Obviously in person let's break down some of the key announcements. What were some of the things Dave that stood out to you and what they announced just in the last hour and a half alone? >>Well, I, you know, we had a leave before they did it, but the unit store piece was really interesting to me cuz you know, the big criticism is, oh, say snowflake, that doesn't do transaction data. It's just a data warehouse. And now they're sort of reaching out. We're seeing the evolution of the ecosystem. Uh, sluman said it was by design. It was one of the questions I had for them. Is this just kind of happen or is it by design? So that's one of many things that, that we can unpack. I mean the security workload, uh, the, the Apache tables, we were just talking about thatt, which not a lot of hands went up when they said, who uses Apache tables, but, but a lot of the things they're doing seem to me anyway, to be trying to counteract the narrative, that snow, I mean that data bricks is put out there about you guys. Aren't open, you're a walled garden and now they're saying, Hey, we're we're as open as anybody, but what are your thoughts, Doug? >>Well, that's the, the iceberg announcement, uh, also, uh, the announcement of, of uni store being able to reach out to, to any source. Uh, you know, I think the big theme here was this, this contrast you constantly see with snowflake between their effort to democratize and simplify and disrupt the market by bringing in a great big tent. And you saw that great big tent here today, 7,000 people, 2,007,000 plus I'm told 2000 just three years ago. So this company is growing hugely quickly, >>Unprecedented everybody. >>Yeah. Uh, fastest company to a billion in revenue is Frank Salman said in his keynote today. Um, you know, and I think that there's, there's that great big tent. And then there's the innovations they're delivering. And a lot of their announcements are way ahead of the J general availability. A lot of the things they talked about today, Python support and some, some other aspects they're just getting into public preview. And many of the things that they're announcing today are in private preview. So it could be six, 12 months be before they're generally available. So they're here educating a lot of these customers. What is iceberg? You know, they're letting them know about, Hey, we're not just the data warehouse. We're not just letting you migrate your old workloads into the cloud. We're helping you innovate with things like the data marketplace. I see the data marketplace is really crucial to a lot of the announcements they're making today. Particularly the native apps, >>You know, what was interesting sluman in his keynote said we don't use the term data mesh, cuz that means has meaning to the people, lady from Geico stood up and said, we're building a data mesh. And when you think about, you know, the, those Gemma Dani's definition of data mesh, Snowflake's actually ticking a lot of boxes. I mean, it's it's is it a decentralized architecture? You could argue that it's sort of their own wall garden, but things like data as product we heard about building data products, uh, uh, self-serve infrastructure, uh, computational governance, automated governance. So those are all principles of Gemma's data mesh. So I there's close as anybody that, that I've seen with the exception of it's all in the data cloud. >>Why do you think he was very particular in saying we're not gonna call it a data mesh? I, >>I think he's respecting the principles that have been put forth by the data mesh community generally and specifically Jamma Dani. Uh, and they don't want to, you know, they don't want to data mesh wash. I mean, I, I, I think that's a good call. >>Yeah, that's it's a little bit out there and, and it, they didn't talk about data mesh so much as Geico, uh, the keynote or mentioned their building one. So again, they have this mix of the great big tent of customers and then very forward looking very sophisticated customers. And that's who they're speaking to with some of these announcements, like the native apps and the uni store to bring transactional data, bring more data in and innovate, create new apps. And the key to the apps is that they're made available through the marketplace. Things like data sharing. That's pretty simple. A lot of, uh, of their competitors are talking about, Hey, we can data share, but they don't have the things that make it easy, like the way to distribute the data, the way to monetize the data. So now they're looking forward monetizing apps, they changed the name from the data marketplace to the, to the snowflake marketplace. So it'll be apps. It will be data. It'll be all sorts of innovative products. >>We talk about Geico, uh, JPMC is speaking at this conference, uh, and the lead technical person of their data mesh initiative. So it's like, they're some of their customers that they're putting forth. So it's kind of interesting. And then Doug, something else that you and I have talked about on the, some of the panels that we've done is you've got an application development stack, you got the database over there and then you have the data analytics stack and we've, I've said, well, those things come together. Then people have said, yeah, they have to. And this is what snowflake seems to be driving towards. >>Well with uni store, they're reaching out and trying to bring transactional data in, right? Hey, don't limit this to analytical information. And there's other ways to do that, like CDC and streaming, but they're very closely tying that again to that marketplace, with the idea of bring your data over here and you can monetize it. Don't just leave it in that transactional database. So a, another reach to a broader play across a big community that they're >>Building different than what we saw last week at Mongo, different than what you know, Oracle does with, with heat wave. A lot of ways to skin a cat. >>That was gonna be my next question to both of you is talk to me about all the announcements that we saw. And, and like we said, we didn't actually get to see the entire keynote had come back here. Where are they from a differentiation perspective in terms of the competitive market? You mentioned Doug, a lot of the announcements in either private preview or soon to be public preview early. Talk to me about your thoughts where they are from a competitive standpoint. >>Again, it's that dichotomy between their very forward looking announcements. They're just coming on with things like Python support. That's just becoming generally available. They're just introducing, uh, uh, machine learning algorithms, like time series built into the database. So in some ways they're catching up while painting this vision of future capabilities and talking about things that are in development or in private preview that won't be here for a year or two, but they're so they're out there, uh, talking about a BLE bleeding edge story yet the reality is the product sometimes are lagging behind. Yeah, >>It's interesting. I mean, they' a lot of companies choose not to announce anything until it's ready to ship. Yeah. Typically that's a technique used by the big whales to try to freeze the market, but I think it's different here. And the strategy is to educate customers on what's possible because snowflake really does have, you know, they're trying to differentiate from, Hey, we're not just a data warehouse. We have a highly differentiatable strategy from whether it's Oracle or certainly, you know, Mongo is more transactional, but, but you know, whether it's couch base or Redis or all the other databases out there, they're saying we're not a database, we're a data cloud. <laugh> right. Right. Okay. What is that? Well, look at all the things that you can do with the data cloud, but to me, the most interesting is you can actually build data products and you can monetize that. And their, the emphasis on ecosystem, you, they look at Salman's previous company would ServiceNow took a long time for them to build an ecosystem. It was a lot of SI in smaller SI and they finally kind of took off, but this is exceeding my expectations and ecosystem is critical because they can't do it all. You know, they're gonna O otherwise they're gonna spread themselves to >>That. That's what I think some competitors just don't get about snowflake. They don't get that. It's all about the community, about their network that they're building and the relationships between these customers. And that they're facilitating that with distribution, with monetization, things that are hard. So you can't just add sharing, or you can share data from one of their, uh, legacy competitors, uh, in, in somebody else's marketplace that doesn't facilitate the transaction that doesn't, you know, build on the community. Well, >>And you know, one of the criticisms too, of the criticism on snowflake goes, they don't, you know, they can't do complex joins. They don't do workload management. And I think their answer to that is, well, we're gonna look to the ecosystem to do that. Or you, you saw some kind of, um, cost governance today in the, in the keynote, we're gonna help you optimize your spend, um, a little different than workload management, but related >>Part of their governance was having a, a, a node, uh, for every workload. So workload isolation in that way, but that led to the cost problems, you know, like too many nodes with not enough optimization. So here too, you saw a lot of, uh, announcements around cost controls, budgets, new features, uh, user groups that you could bring, uh, caps and guardrails around those costs. >>In the last couple minutes, guys talk about their momentum. Franks Lutman showed a slide today that showed over 5,900 customers. I was looking at some stats, uh, in the last couple of days that showed that there is an over 1200% increase in the number of customers with a million plus ARR. Talk about their momentum, what you expect to see here. A lot of people here, people are ready to hear what they're doing in person. >>Well, I think this, the stats say it all, uh, fastest company to a, to a billion in revenue. Uh, you see the land and expand experience that many companies have and in the cost control, uh, announcements they were making, they showed the typical curve like, and he talked about it being a roller coaster, and we wanna help you level that out. Uh, so that's, uh, a matter of maturation. Uh, that's one of the downsides of this rapid growth. You know, you have customers adding new users, adding new clusters, multi clusters, and the costs get outta control. They want to help customers even that out, uh, with reporting with these budget and cost control measures. So, uh, one of the growing pains that comes with, uh, adding so many customers so quickly, and those customers adding so many users and new, uh, workloads quickly, >>I know we gotta break, but last point I'll make about the key. Uh, keynote is SL alluded to the fact that they're not taking the foot off the gas. They don't see any reason to, despite the narrative in the press, they have inherent profitability. If they want to be more profitable, they could be, but they're going for growth >>Going for growth. There is so much to unpack in the next three days. You won't wanna miss it. The Cube's wall to oil coverage, Lisa Martin for Dave Valenti, Doug hen joined us in our keynote analysis. Thanks so much for walking, watching stick around. Our first guest is up in just a few minutes.

(upbeat music) >> Hey, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of the International Women's Showcase for 2022. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm pleased to welcome Nancy Wong, the general manager of Data Protection and Governance at AWS to the program. Nancy, it's great to have you. >> Thanks so much for having me Lisa, and you know, I really hope that this is hopefully the last year that we'll be celebrating International Women's Day all virtually. >> I agree. I agree. Well, we're going in that right direction globally. So let's cross our fingers. Talk to me a little bit about your role at AWS and what you do there. >> Sure. So as a GM of AWS Data Protection and Governance, a lot of, we tackle quite a few problems that our biggest customers face, right? When they think about, "How do I manage my data?" Right. Especially in this digital world. And speaking of the pandemic, how much data has been generated by consumers, by devices, by systems, by servers? How do you protect all of that data? Right. Especially we hear about cyber crime, cyber attacks. Right. Data breaches. It's really important to make sure that all of our customers have a coherent strategy around not just management, right, but also protection and really how you govern your data. Right. And there's just so many awesome conversations that my team and I have had lately with CSOs or chief technology officers on this topic, as it evolves. >> Data protection is so critical. It's one of my favorite topics to talk about, cybersecurity as well. Talk to me about what it means though if we keep this at a bit of a different level to be an operator within the the big ecosystem that is AWS. >> Yeah. And that's actually one of the the favorite aspects of my role. Right. Which is, you know, I get to innovate every day on behalf of my customers. For example, I love having one-on-one dialogues. I love having architecture conversations where we brainstorm. Right. And so those type of conversations help inform how we deliver and develop products. And so in an operator role, right, for the the women in the audience today, is it really gives you that perspective into not just how, what type of products do you want to build that delight your customers but also from an engineering. Right. And a bottom line perspective of, well how do you make this happen? Right. How do you fund this? And how do you plan out your development milestones? >> What are, tell me a little bit about your background and then what makes women in technology such an important initiative for you to stand behind? >> Absolutely. So I'm so proud today to see that the number of women or the percentage of women enrolled at engineering curriculums just continue to rise. Right. And especially as someone who went through an engineering degree in her undergraduate studies, that was not always the case. Right. So oftentimes, you know, I would look around the classroom and be the only woman on the lab bench or only woman in a CS classroom. And so when you have roles in tech, specifically, that require an undergraduate degree in computer science or a degree in engineering, that helps to, or that only serves to really reduce the population of eligible candidates. Right. Who then, if you look at that pool of eligible candidates who then you can invest and accelerate through the career ladder to become leaders in tech, well that's where you may end up with a representation issue. Right. And that's why we have, for example, so few women leaders in tech that we can look up to as role models. And that's really the problem or the gap that I'm very passionate about solving. And also, Lisa, I'm really excited to tell you a little bit more about advancing women in tech, which is a 501c3 nonprofit organization that I started to tackle this exact problem. >> Talk to me about that, cause it's one of the things that you bring up is, you know, we always say when we're having conversations like this, we can't be what we can't see. We need to be able to see those female leaders. To your point, there aren't a ton in comparison to the male leaders. So talk to me about advancing women in technology, why you founded this, and what you guys are accomplishing. >> Absolutely. So it's been such a personal journey as well. Just starting this organization called Advancing Women In Tech because I started it in 2017. Right. So when I really was, you know, just starting out as a product manager, I was at another big tech company at the time. And what I really realized, right, is looking around you know, I had so many, for example, bosses, managers, peer leaders, who were really invested in growing me as a product manager and growing my tech and career. And this is right after I'd made the transition from the federal government into big tech. What that said though, looking around, there weren't that many women tech leaders that I could look up to, or get coffee, or just have a mentoring conversation. And quickly I realized, well, it's not so much that women can't do it. Right. It's the fact that we're not advancing enough women into leadership roles. And so really we have to look at why that is. Right. And we, you know, from a personal perspective, one contribution towards that angle is upskilling. Right. So if you think about what skills one needs as one climbs a career ladder, whether that's your first people management role, or your first manager manager's role, or obviously for bigger leaders when they start managing thousands, tens of thousands of individuals, well all of that requires different skills. And so learning those skills about how to manage people, how to motivate your teams effectively, super, super important. And of course on the other side, and one that I'm, you know, near to dear to me is that of mentorship and executive sponsorship because you can have all the skills in the world, right. And especially with digital learning and AWIT is very involved with Coursera and AWS in producing and making those resources readily available and accessible. Well, if you don't have those opportunities, if you don't have mentors and sponsors who are well to push you or give you a step ladder to those roles, well you're still not going to get there. Right. And so, that's why actually, if you look at the AWIT mission, it's really those two pillars working very closely together to help advance women into leadership roles. >> The idea of mentorship and sponsorship is so critical. And I think a lot of people don't understand the difference between a mentor and a sponsor. How do you define that difference and how do you bring them into the organization so that they can be mentors and sponsors? >> Yeah, absolutely. And there's, you know, these two terms are often used today so interchangeably that I do get a lot of questions around, well, what is the difference? Right. And how does, let's say a mentor become a sponsor? So, maybe just taking a few steps back, right. When you have let's say questions around compensation or, "Hey I have some job offers, which ones do I consider?" And you ask someone a question or advice, well that person's likely your mentor. Right? And typically a mentor is someone who you can ask those questions on a repeated basis. Who's very accessible to you. Well, a sponsor takes that a few steps forward in the sense that they are sponsoring you into a role or into a project or initiative that you on your own may not be able to achieve. And by doing so, I think what really differentiates a sponsor from a mentor is that the sponsor will actually put their own reputation on the line. Right. They're using their own political capital in order to make sure that you get into that role, you get into that room. Right. And that's why it's so key, for example, especially if you have that relationship already with a person who's your mentor, you're able to ask questions or advice from, to convert them into a sponsor so that you can accelerate your career. >> Great definition, description, and great recommendations for converting mentors to sponsors. You know, I only learned the difference about a mentor and a sponsor a few years ago at another women in tech event that I was hosting. And I thought, "It's brilliant. It makes perfect sense." We need more people to understand the difference, the synergies, and how to promote mentors to sponsors. Talk to me now about advancing women in tech plus the power of AWS. How are they helping this nonprofit to really accelerate? >> Sure. So from an organization perspective, right, there's many women, for example, across the the tech companies who are part of Advancing Women In Tech, obviously Amazon of course as an employee has a very large community within who's part of AWIT. But we also have members across the tech industry from startups to VC firms to of course, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix. You name it. With that said, you know, what AWS has done with AWIT is actually very special in the sense that if you go to the Coursera platform, coursera.org/awit you can see our two Coursera specializations. Four courses each that go through the real world product management fundamentals. Or the business side, the technical skills, and even interviewing for mid-career product management roles. And the second specialization, which I'm super excited to share today, is actually geared towards getting folks ramped up and prepared to successfully pass the Cloud Practitioner's Exam, which is one of the industry recognized standards about understanding the AWS Cloud and being functional in the AWS Cloud. This summer, of course, and I'm sharing kind of a sneak peek announcement that I'll be making tomorrow with the University of Pennsylvania, is that we're kicking off a program for the masters of CIS program, or the Computer Information Systems Master students, to actually go through this Coursera specialization, which is produced by AWIT, sponsored by AWS, and AWS Training and Certifications has so generously donated exam vouchers for these students so that they can then go on and be certified in the AWS Cloud. So that's one just really cool collaboration that we are doing between AWS and AWIT to get more qualified folks in the door in tech jobs, and hopefully at jobs in AWS. >> That's a great collaboration. What are some of the goals in terms of metrics, the number of women that you want to get into the program and complete the program? What are some of those on your radar? >> Absolutely. So one of the reasons, of course, that the Master's of CIS Program, the University of Pennsylvania caught my eye, not withstanding, I graduated from there, but also that just the statistics of women enrolled. Right. So what's really notable about this program is it's entirely online, which as a university creating a Master's degree fully online, well, it takes a ton of resources from the university, from the faculty. And what's really special about these students is that they're already full-time adult professionals, which means that they're working a full-time job, they might be taking care of family obligations, and they're still finding time to advance themselves, to acquire a Master's degree in CS. And best of all, 42% of these students are women. Right. And so that's a number that is multiples of what we're finding in engineering curriculums today. And so my theory is, well if you go to a student population that is over 40%, 42 to be exact percent women, and enable these women to be certified in AWS Cloud, to have direct interview prep and mentorship from AWS software development leaders, well, that greatly increases their chances of getting a full-time role, right, at AWS. Right. At which then we can help them advance their careers to further and further roles in software development. >> So is this curriculum also open to women who aren't currently in tech to be able to open the door for them to get into tech and STEM fields? >> Absolutely. And so in my bad and remiss in mentioning, which is students of this Master's in CS Program are actually students not from tech already. So they're not in a tech field. And they did not have a degree in CS or even engineering as part of their undergraduate studies. So it's truly folks who are outside of tech, that are 42% women, that we're getting into the tech industry with this collaboration between AWS, AWIT, and the University of Pennsylvania. >> That's outstanding to get them in from completely different fields into tech. >> Absolutely. >> How do you help women have the confidence to say, "I want to try this." Cause if we think about every company today is a tech company. It's a data company. It has to be to be competitive. You know, the pandemic taught us that everything we're able to do online and digitally, for example, but how do you help women get the confidence to say, "Okay, I'm going to go from a completely different field into tech." >> Absolutely. So if we, you know, define tech of course as big tech or, you know, now the main companies, right, I myself made that transition, which is why it is a topic near and dear to me because I can personally speak to my journey because I didn't start my career out in tech. Right. Yes. I studied engineering. But with that said, my first full-time job out of college was with the federal government because I wanted to go and build healthdata.gov, right, which gave folks a lot of access to the healthcare data, roles, right, that existed within the U.S. government and the CMS, NIH, you know, CDC, so on and so forth. But that was quite a big change from then taking a product management job at Google. Right. And so how did I make that change? Well, a lot of it came from, you know, the mentors that I had. Right. What I call my personal board of directors who gave me that confidence. And sure, I mean even today, I still have imposter syndrome where, you know, I think, "Am I good enough." Right. "Should I be leading this organization," right, "of data protection and governance." But I think what it boils down to is, you know, inner confidence. Right. And goes back to those two pillars of having the right skills and also the right mentors and sponsors who are willing to help sponsor you into those opportunities and help sponsor you to success. >> Absolutely. Great advice and recommendations. Thanks for sharing your background, Nancy, it's outstanding to see where you started to where you are now and also to what you're enabling for so many other females to get into tech with the AWIT program combined with AWS and UPenn. Exciting stuff. Can't wait to talk to you next year to see where you guys go from here. >> Absolutely Lisa. And what I'm really looking forward to sharing with you next year is the personal testimonials of other women who have gone through the AWIT, the AWS, the UPenn Program and have gotten their tech jobs and also promotions. >> That sounds like a great thing to look forward to. I'm looking forward to that. Nancy, thanks so much for your time and the insight that you shared. >> Thanks so much for having me, Lisa. >> My pleasure. For Nancy Wong, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of the International Women's Showcase 2022. (upbeat music)

>>Hi, everyone. Welcome back to the cubes coverage of splunk.com, virtual 2021. I'm John Ford, your host of the cube. We're here with Teresa Carlson, special guests cube alumni. Who's now the president and chief growth officer of Splunk. Teresa, welcome back to the queue. >>So glad you're here with us >>As the president of Splunk. Great to see you. Great to see you. So we've had many conversations in the queue. When you were the chief of public sector of Amazon web services, you grew that business significantly over the years. We've documented on the cube and we've talked about I've written about it. Um, now Splunk, it feels a lot like AWS was back in LA a couple of years ago, where you have this amazing product everyone's using. They don't lose customers. They're getting customers they're in the middle of the security thing, which you know a lot about, and they have this large enterprise base growing. It's just a minute. Grazer leaning in Splunk is, seems to be going to the next level. >>Totally. Well, you nailed it. I would say we're definitely in a scale mode at this point at Splunk. And also to your point, our customers are so loyal to us and we're seeing actually customers with more than a million dollars doubling their spend almost with us. Uh, it's pretty cool. And now we have this cloud portfolio, which is one of my jobs, as you know, I love, I've got my cloud shirt on. I've been believer in cloud. I'm a real believer. You know, I saw the transformational effects of cloud in real time, over 11 years and bringing that here even more to utilize that in our security and observability spaces is quite phenomenal. And then you see again in a much more, uh, set of segmented workloads, how customers take advantage of this. And of course today, like no other John security is just top of mind. It's always been you and I talked earlier about how security kind of evolved over the years and public sector led some of that over time. And then commercial industry say, you know, wow, that today it's, I mean, it's more than top of mind for not just every enterprise organization and government entity, but it's also every board out there. It's something that we think about internal threat, external threat. How do we manage it? How do we get the data around it to understand it? And then how do we take action on it? >>I seen you up on stage as a senior leader here at Splunk, um, at the virtual venue at a great keynote was a lot of news. And we'll get into that in a second, but I want to ask you, knowing you personally and covering you over the years of Amazon web services, you've been a fierce competitor. Okay. But you also have been a great people, person, people loved working for you, Splunk, is it the same? We've been covering them just as long as we cover an ADFS. The culture seemed to fit because Splunk is kind of competitive, but they're kind of quiet, competitive culture. Yeah. Interesting. Tell us about, tell us about your experience. >>Well, and I think we can, yeah, we can do it in our own Spanky way. I'm learning new it's six minutes today that I've been as blind quiches and believable that I've been here this long already, but, uh, Splunk has a very quirky culture, which I led. They have a lot of fan. They have a big following and I'm so sorry that everyone couldn't attend in person, but the virtual social media feeds are off the charts. I mean, I'm just, I'm having so much fencing high already. They come together. It's a real community, but, uh, yeah, on the competition front, here's what reminds me so much about my old world is that I always love that when somebody wakes up and realizes that it's a huge industry and they want to participate. And that's kind of what happened when I was at AWS and now it's blank. >>I'm like, Hey, all these companies are waking up and saying, data's this real thing. It's like a $90 billion plus industry and growing, and then data with security. Hello, are you kidding me? So I feel like really that's kind of what's happened. And Splunk has such a unique set of tools and solutions that just work, they work. And that's what customers, I have heard that statement from customers and partners so much that it just works. And the other thing that's pretty unique about us, I would say John is our ability to navigate between an on-prem world and a cloud world in a unique set of areas like IOT, edge computing. So wherever customer's data is multiple clouds, we're able to take advantage of that for the customer. So they make the choice of where that data comes from and they use the splint tooling then to be able to get those insights and information >>Well, great to have you on the Cuban grid, that's swung to have you, and they're going to be lucky to have you going to do a lot stuff, knowing you and knowing the Splunk community and the team here. A great team. Now talking about the announcements, look at what's going on. Obviously security is still in everything. Yep. A couple of things, rebranding of the partner versus sends a huge message of the ecosystem. You know, that movie you've seen that movie before, um, digital journey for customer success. Again, they have tons of customers that have been with them from beginning and new customers, but they've got to go government action going on here. Whereas you know, a lot about the government logging in monetization program. >>Yeah. Well, as you know, the government, uh, you got 11, but they do continually come up with N fended mandates. And my government customers always have said, oh my gosh, I've got another unfunded mandate. So we're really helping them at that because yes, while it's infested in this budget this year, as it states, they know how important it is. And I do think this initiative is something that is going to have a waterfall effect into the commercial industries. Also just like a lot of these things do and around security, uh, but it's important that we help our government customer made as best as they can. So we've come up with, I think, a very unique offering that they can take advantage of for Splunk and we're going to be out there helping them every way. And, and hopefully John L also helped them learn more about cross governmental, what they're doing and how they can understand from their logs and metrics even more about how to protect. Yes. >>One of the things that we've talked about before in the past, but how cloud-scale, and as creates ecosystems, Amazon VMware, you seeing all these ecosystems that have been thriving for, for decades, Splunk has an ecosystem developing very, very fast. Their partners are, are loyal and they're making money with them. And they're being delivered solutions as data becomes the new enablement. How do you see the role of the partners that growing? How do you see them evolving over time? >>Well, let me just tell you, I'm, I'm a real believer in the partner community. I mean, firsthand over the years, my time at Microsoft at AWS, I saw it as an unbelievable force multiplier to your business. And I mean that, and they do things that you don't even think of. I, you know, I'm always amazed at partners. I'm like, oh, you're using the tool for that. Wow. So while we are broadly good, we're, we're very good at what we do, but we cannot understand every horizontal or vertical industry out there. And the reason it's important to have partners, they can take you to places that you never dreamed. And for us, if you look at the categories, we need our CSP or cloud service providers to be able to really help us make sure that we take advantage of the cloud platforms that are out there and our primary, we AWS, and then Google cloud. >>Uh, and then after that we work, we work with both those a migration. You saw Steve Schmidt today. Good friend of mine love Steve. And the work we're doing. And you saw, we were one of the first migration partners with AWS. You'll see us continue that program. We'll work together to continue to look for security services jointly that we can offer. And we're a customer of theirs. They're a customer of ours. It makes a good partnership. And then additionally, you have, uh, you have your MSPs, right? Your managed service providers. And today we talked about blue buoyant who had multiples, and these are partners out there that have a unique offering for me, generally managed security or observability in the marketplace. They take the Splunk toolkit, they add to it and they have it off, offered out to their customers. Um, and then you have your largest size like Accenture. I'm so excited about that. First of all, led Julie Sweet. She's an amazing CEO and leader. Uh, and w in what they're doing with this, they've been a long-standing partner of ours, but now they've actually made us part of their, one of their 11 business groups. So it's Accenture plus Splunk, and now they'll take us into all of their industries together. So it's huge. And, you know, >>Does that mean cause, cause this is a business deal. This isn't just like a, you know, some sort of deal where you guys saying we're going together. This is a specific division. >>That's right. That's right. So they have a leaven partners that they work with. AWS is one of them. SAP's one of them. Uh, IBM's one of them, Salesforce, I believe is one of them. And they have, they have experts at Accenture that can go into customers to implement tools and services for customers at the enterprise level. And so they have selected. Splunk is one of those business partners that you heard Paul today talk about. We already have 400 customers together and growing, we will expand that, but it's a joint effort of both go-to-market selling and technical resources that will deliver. But for Splunk, again, it's back to that horizontal and vertical slicing where they can take us into security practice that they have chosen. Splunk is one of their security offerings and it's important that we really support them. But also in the splint, a partner verse, we're going to do some new things. >>John, if I just first take and talk about it, we've had a great partner program, but now we're going to Korea's credits, uh, technology, architecture, tooling support, uh, getting in, you know, to certify themselves, to be pro serve ready for those migrations and modernizations. But also really what we heard from a lot of them is they need more training and education remaster to understand our new cloud offerings. And that makes sense. So it's more digital and more cloud oriented with these partners. And then guess what they would love for us to talk about how great they are and we should. So when we get them out there that helps our customers really understand the offerings they have in the marketplace >>At Brooke honeymoon was saying she didn't do a lot more listening and they're working on this next level partner verse. I found that really interesting, all sorts of Katie beyond key. I talked with she's the SVP of customer success, something you're I know you're obsessed about. You always work backwards from the customers as the AWS way. How do you view customer stuff? Because you have a lot of different customers, you have diverse customers. What's important. What are you going to keep Katie's on top of this, but what's your view. >>We ha we do have a lot of different customers. However, we have a concentration of the largest, most important and influential customers in the world. So our customer base is very large enterprise oriented, multiple departments within that enterprise take advantage of Splunk. We work with 90 to the 100 fortune 100 companies, and we've worked with them for a long time. And like I said, we're continuing to see them use more of splice, not less as blank. And the way that that happens is, and I hear from him, I sit and talk to him and they're like, now we're using Splunk in these multiple departments and we need to bring it all together at the enterprise level for the C-suite to look at it. Now, I know it sounds a little strange John, but that's changed a bit over the years. And that is because, you know, if you look at big spenders at an enterprise, he spends a lot of money because they need to at dev, you know, uh, security, right. Security infrastructure, and they need to monitor all that. They need to understand it, but guess what they want, understand it now at the corporate level. And they need it at the CIO, they need at the Cisco level for threat analysis. And then now boards want more and more that information they want to roll up of what's happening. So we're seeing a trend where the C-suite, the senior executives really are much more interested in Splunk. It used to be very departmental. >>I'll throw another wrench in the equation. There is one developers want shifting left. They want real time data security policy in the development, CDC at pipelining. So another problem. Yeah. >>Yeah. And developers lever tools. And again, they're, they're another unique group I should totally talk about. That takes your tools to another level and really fears that ways within their customer set to take advantage of the tooling. >>He's a great to see you. Congratulations on a new opportunity here. And the leadership at Splunk, um, really perfectly poised to take the growth of the cloud. That's. So I have to ask you, what's your mission? What's your mission for the next year as you come on? You're six months in what's the, >>Well, for us, here's blankets, continuing to scale, really listening to our customers and partners. It sounds, I don't want it to sound like a cliche. We really are spending time listening and working back, Sean and I are working. He's their president of technology products and technology. He and I are working very closely to look at features and functionality that we need to be talking about. Uh, it is about taking advantage of the partner community in a way to support them, to help again, get us into new areas of the business. And then lastly, continue to make sure that we have the training and education for customers directly because our tools and technologies are evolving. And if I've learned anything over the last 11 years is cloud is a step change for a lot of customers and they're still hybrid. So it's important that we meet them where they are, but help them get over that bridge so that they have that full digital journey. So that's what you're going to see me focused on. I'm super excited. >>I was talking with Claire, the CMO just before you leave, I want to get your reaction. This event went virtual the last minute. It became a studio here in Silicon valley. You're a media company now Splunk. Yeah. >>It's like it. I mean, it is amazing what we accomplished today. Uh, I, you know, I don't want to pre give numbers, but we had way, way over 20,000 today, online and, uh, growing. So the numbers we're still looking at, but it was unbelievable. And we had, I think we had had like 22,000 registered and we even got more. So people joined in, they stay, they watched the keynote, there were out narrow specialty sessions. And I all agree, like it was pretty cool. It was a step change because we were thinking about doing it in person. We took a pulse and we said, you know, we think we can actually do a better job this year because of COVID steel. If we do it all virtually and it turned out and we have you, so look at this, you're like, we have you here. And I love your cool backdrop here, John. Yeah. >>Well, you guys do a great job. You guys are a media company. Now you're telling your own stories direct. There's a lot of stories to tell. Thank you for coming on the cube. Great to see you >>Again. John's great to see you because the >>Cubes coverage here at.com 2021 virtual I'm John for your host of the cube. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021, brought to you by IBM. >> Oh, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. We've got a great story here. Navigating COVID-19 with Watson advertising and weather channel conversations, Sheri Bachstein, who's the GM of Watson Advertising in the weather company. Sheri, thanks for coming on theCUBE. My favorite part of IBM Think is to talk about the tech and also the weather company innovations. Thanks for coming on. >> Hi, happy to be here John. >> So COVID-19 obviously some impact for people that working at home. Normally you guys have been doing a lot of innovation around weather, weather data, certainly huge part of it. And so lots been changing with AI and the weather company and IBM, so let's first start before we jump in just a little background about what your team has created because a lot of fascinating things here. Go ahead. >> Yeah, so when the pandemic started, we looked at the data that we were seeing and of course in weather accuracy and accurate data is really important trusted data. And so we created a COVID-19 hub on our weather channel app and on weather.com and essentially what it was is an aggregated area where consumers could get the most up-to-date information on COVID cases, deaths in their area, trends see heat maps, information from the CDC. And what was unique about it, it was to a local level, right? So state level information is helpful, but we know that consumers me included. I need information around what's happening around me. And so we were able to bring this down to a County level which we thought was really helpful for consumers >> Sheri's watching sports on TV. And recently a few months ago, the masters was on and you saw people getting back into real life. It's almost like a weather forecast. Now you want to know what's going on in the pandemic. People are sharing that they're getting the vaccine, really interesting. And so I want to understand how this all came together with you guys. Was it something that as a weather data and a bunch of geeks saying, Hey, we should do this for companies but take us to thought process 113. Was it like you saw this as value? How did you get to this? Because this is an interesting user benefit. I want to know the weather. I want to know if it's safe. These are kind of a psychology of a user expectation. How did you guys connect the dots here for this project? >> Well, we certainly do have a very passionate team of people some weather geeks included and you're absolutely right. Watching the masters a few months ago was amazing to see some sense of normality happening here. But we looked at IBM and the weather company like how do we help during this pandemic? And when we thought about it we looked at there's an amazing gap of information. And as the weather channel, what we do is bring together data give people insights and help them make decisions with that. And so it was really part of our mission. It's always been that way to give information to keep people safe. And so all we did is took a different data set and provided the same thing. And so in this case, the COVID data set which we actually had to aggregate from different sources whether it was the CDC, the world health organization, a state governments, our County governments to provide this to consumers. But it was really, really natural for us because we know what consumers want. We all want information around where we live, right? And then we want to see like where our friends live, where our relatives live to make sure that they're okay. And then if that enables people to make the decisions that are right for their family. And so it was really, really natural for us to do that. And then of course we have the technology to be able to scale to hundreds of millions of people, which is really important. >> Yeah, it's not obvious until you actually think about it, then it's so obvious. Congratulations, what a great innovation what were the biggest challenges you guys had to face and how did you overcome it? Because I'm curious, I see you got a lot of large scale data dealing with diversity of data with weather. What was the challenges with COVID and how did you overcome it? >> So again, without a doubt it was the data, because you're looking at one, we wanted that County level data. So you're looking at multiple sources. So how do we aggregate this data? So first finding that trusted source that we could use but then how do you pull it in, in an automated way? And the challenge was it with the state departments, the County departments, that data came in, all kinds of formats. Some counties used maps, some use charts some use PDFs to get that information. So we had to pull all this unstructured data and then that data was updated at different times. So some counties did it twice a day some did it once a day, different time zones. So that really made it challenging. And so then, so what we did is this is where the power of AI really helps, because AI can take all of that data bring it in, organize it, and then we could put it back out to the consumer in a very digestible way. And so we were able to do that. We built an automated pipeline around that so we can make sure that it was updated. It was fresh and timely, which was really important but without a doubt, looking at that structured data and unstructured data and really helping it to make sense to the consumer was the biggest challenge. And I'll, what's interesting about it. Normally it would take us months to do something like that. I challenged the team to say, we don't have months. We have days. They turned that around in eight days which was just an amazing Herculean feat but that's really just the power of as you said, passionate people coming together to do something so meaningful. >> I love the COVID-19 success stories when people rally around their passion and also their expertise, what was the technology did the team use? Because the theme here at IBM Think is, transformation, innovation, scale. How did you move so fast to make that happen? >> So we moved fast by our AI capabilities and then using IBM cloud. And so really there's four key components or like four teams that worked on it. So first there was the weather company team. And because we are a consumer division of IBM we know what consumers want. So we understand the user experience and the design but we also know how the build an API that can scale because you're talking about being able to scale not only in a weather platform. So in the midst of COVID weather still happen. So we still had severe weather record breaking hurricane season. And so those APIs have to scale to that volume. Then the second team was the AI team. So that used the Watson AI team mixed with the weather AI team to again bring in that data to organize that data. And we use Watson NLP. So natural language processing in order to create that automated pipeline. Then we had the collateral infrastructure. So that platform team that built that architecture and that data repository on IBM cloud. And then the last team was our data privacy office. So making sure that that data was trusted that we have permission to use it and just really that data governance. So it was all of that technology and all of those teams coming together to build this hub for consumers. And it worked, I mean we would have about 4 million consumers looking at that hub every single day. And even like a year later, we still have a couple million people that access that information. So it's really kind of become more like the weather checking the weather, that daily habit. >> That's awesome. And I got to imagine that these discoveries and these innovations that was part of this transformation that scale I've helped other ways outside of the pandemic. Can you share how this is connected to other benefits outside the pandemic? >> Yeah, so absolutely, AI for business is part of IBM strategy. And so really helping organizations to help predict, to help take workloads and automate them. So they're high valued employees can work on other work and also to bring that personalization to customers is really AI. When I look at it for my own part of a IBM with the weather company, three things where I'm using this technology. So the first one is around advertising. So the advertising industry is at a really pivotal part right now, a lot of turmoil and challenges because of privacy legislation because big tech companies are getting rid of tracking pixels that we normally use to drive the business. So we've created a suite of AI solutions for publishers, for different players within the ad tech space which is really important because it protects the open web. So like getting COVID information or weather information all of that is free information to the public. We just ask that you underwrite it by saying advertising so we can keep it free. So those products protect the open read. So really, really important. Then on the consumer side of my business within the weather channel we actually use Watson AI to connect health with weather. So we know that there's that connection. Some health issues that people have can be impacted by weather like allergies and flu. So we've actually used Watson AI to build a risk of flu that goes 15 days out. So we can tell people in your local area this one actually goes down to the zip code level the risk of flu in your area or the risk of allergies. So it help to manage your symptoms, take your prescription. So that's a really interesting way we're using AI and of course, weather.com and our apps are an IBM cloud. So we have this strong infrastructure to support that. And then lastly our weather forecasting has always been rooted in AI. You take a hundred different weather models you apply AI to that to get the best and most accurate forecast that you deliver. And so we are using these technologies every day to move our business forward and to provide weather services for people. >> I just love the automation as users have smartphones and more instrumentation on their bodies, whether it's wearables, people will plan their day around the weather and retail shops will have a benefit knowing what to stock or not have on hand and how to adjust that this the classic edge computing paradigm, fascinating impact. You wouldn't think about that, but that's a pretty big deal. People are planning around the weather data and making that available as critical. >> Oh, absolutely. Every business needs a weather strategy because whether it impacts your supply chain, agriculture should I be watering today or not, even around if you think about energy and power lines, the vegetation growth of our power lines can bring power lines down and it's a disruption, to customers and power. So there's just, when you start thinking about it you're like, wow, weather really impacts every business not to say just consumers in general and their daily life. >> Yeah, and there's a lot of cloud scale too, that can help companies whether it's be part of better planet or smarter planet as it's been called and help with, with global warming. I mean, you think about this is all kind of been contextually relevant now more than ever super exciting, great stuff. I want to get your take on outside of the IBM response to the pandemic, more broadly outside of the weather. What are you guys doing to help? Are you guys doing anything else with industry? How could you, talk a little bit more about IBM's response more broadly to the pandemic? >> Yeah, so IBM has been working with government academia industries really from the beginning in several different ways. The first, one of the first things we did is it opened up our intellectual property. So our IP and our technology, our super computing to help researchers, really try to understand COVID-19, some of the treatments and possible cures. So that's been really beneficial as it relates to that. Some other things though that we're doing as well is we created a Chatbot that companies and clients could use. And this Chatbot could either be used to help train teachers because they have to work remotely or help other workers as well. And also the Chatbot was helping as companies started to reenter back to the workforce and getting back to the office. So the Chatbot has been really helpful there. And then one of the things that we've been doing on the advertising side is we actually have helped the ad council with their vaccine campaign. It's up to you as the name of the campaign. And we delivered a ad unit that can dynamically assemble a creative in real time to make sure that the right message was getting out the right time to the right person. So it's really helped to maximize that campaign to reach people. And they encourage them if it's the right thing for them, where the vaccines are available and that they could take those. So a lot of great work that's going on within IBM and actually the most recent thing just actually in the past month is we released the digital health pass in cooperation with the state of New York. And this is a fantastic tool because it is a way for individuals to keep their private information around their vaccines, or some of the COVID tests they've been having on a mobile device that's secure. And we think that this is going to be really important as cities start to reopen to have that information easily accessible. >> Awesome Sheri, great insight, great innovation navigating COVID-19, lots of innovation transformation at IBM and obviously Watson and the weather company using AI. And also, when we come out of COVID post COVID, as real life comes back, we're still going to be impacted. We're going to have new innovations, new expectations, tracking, understanding what's going on not just the weather. So thanks for doing that great work. Awesome, thank you. >> Great, thanks John. Good to see you. >> This is theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think, I'm John Furrier, the host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hello, and welcome to today's event, dealing government emergency responses beyond the pandemic. This is Bob Wooley, senior fellow for the center for digital government and formerly the chief tech clerk for the state of Utah. I'm excited to serve as moderator for today's event. And just want to say, thank you for joining us. I know we're in for an informative session over the next 60 minutes before we begin a couple of brief housekeeping notes or recording of this presentation will be emailed to all registrants within 48 hours. You can use the recording for your reference or feel free to pass it along to colleagues. This webcast is designed to be interactive and you can participate in Q and a with us by asking questions at any time during the presentation, you should see a Q and a box on the bottom left of the presentation panel. >>Please send in your questions as they come out throughout the presentation, our speakers will address as many of these questions as we can during the Q and a portion of the close of our webinar today, if you would like to download the PDF of the slides for this presentation, you can do so by clicking the webinar resources widget at the bottom of the console. Also during today's webinar, you'll be able to connect with your peers by LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Please use the hashtag gov tech live to connect with your peers across the government technology platform, via Twitter. At the close of the webinar, we encourage you to complete a brief survey about the presentation. We would like to hear what you think if you're unable to see with us for the entire webinar, but we're just like to complete the survey. As much as you're able, please click the survey widget at the bottom of the screen to launch the survey. Otherwise it will pop up once the webinar concludes at this time, we recommend that you disable your pop-up blockers, and if you experiencing any media player issues or have any other problems, please visit our webcast help guide by clicking on the help button at the bottom of the console. >>Joining me today to discuss this very timely topic are Karen revolt and Tim Burch, Kim Berge currently serves as the administrator of human services for Clark County Nevada. He's invested over 20 years in improving health and human service systems of care or working in the private public and nonprofit sectors. 18 of those years have been in local government in Clark County, Las Vegas, where you served in a variety of capacities, including executive leadership roles as the director of department of social services, as well as the director for the department of family services. He has also served as CEO for provider of innovative hosted software solutions, as well as chief strategy officer for a boutique public sector consulting firm. Karen real-world is the social program management offering lead for government health and human services with IBM Watson health. Karen focuses delivering exciting new offerings by focusing on market opportunities, determining unmet needs and identifying innovative solutions. >>Much of her career has been in health and human services focused on snap, TANIF, Medicaid, affordable care act, and child welfare prior to joining IBM. Karen was the senior director of product management for a systems integrator. She naturally fell in love with being a project manager. She can take her user requirements and deliver offerings. Professionals would use to make their job easier and more productive. Karen has also found fulfillment in working in health and human services on challenges that could possibly impact the outcome of people's lives. Now, before we begin our discussion of the presentation, I want to one, we'd like to learn a little more about you as an audience. So I'm going to ask you a polling question. Please take a look at this. Give us an idea of what is your organization size. I won't bother to read all these to you, but there are other a range of sizes zero to 250 up to 50,000. Please select the one that is most appropriate and then submit. >>It looks like the vast majority are zero to two 50. Don't have too many over 250,000. So this is a very, very interesting piece of information. Now, just to set up our discussion today, what I want to do is just spend just a moment and talk about the issue that we're dealing with. So when you look the COVID-19 pandemic, it's put immense pressure on States. I've been a digital state judge and had been judging a lot of the responses from States around the country. It's been very interesting to me because they bifurcate really into two principle kinds of reactions to the stress providing services that COVID environment present. One is we're in a world of hurt. We don't have enough money. I think I'm going to go home and engage as little as I have to. Those are relatively uncommon. Thankfully, most of them have taken the COVID-19 pandemic has immense opportunity for them to really do a lot more with telework, to do more with getting people, employees, and citizens involved with government services. >>And I've done some really, really creative things along the way. I find that to be a really good thing, but in many States systems have been overloaded as individuals and families throughout the country submitted just an unprecedented number of benefit applications for social services. At the same time, government agencies have had to contend with social distance and the need for a wholly different approach to engage with citizens. Um, overall most public agencies, regardless of how well they've done with technology have certainly felt some strain. Now, today we have the opportunity to go into a discussion with our speakers, have some wonderful experience in these areas, and I'm going to be directing questions to them. And again, we encourage you as you hear what they have to say. Be sure and submit questions that we can pick up later at the time. So Tim, let's start with you. Given that Las Vegas is a hub for hospitality. An industry hit severely as a result of this pandemic. How's the County doing right now and how are you prioritizing the growing needs of the County? >>Thanks Bob. Thanks for having me. Let me start off by giving just a little, maybe context for Clark County too, to our audience today. So, uh, Clark County is, you know, 85% of the state of Nevada if we serve not just as a regional County by way of service provision, but also direct municipal services. Well, if, uh, the famous Las Vegas strip is actually in unincorporated Clark County, and if we were incorporated, we would be the largest city in the state. So I say all of that to kind of help folks understand that we provide a mix of services, not just regional services, like health and human services, the direct and, and missable, uh, services as well as we work with our other five jurisdiction partners, uh, throughout the area. Uh, we are very much, um, I think during the last recession we were called the Detroit of the West. >>And, uh, that was because we're very much seen as a one industry town. Uh, so most like when the car plants, the coal plants closed back East and in the communities fuel that very rapidly, the same thing happens to us when tourism, uh, it's cut. Uh, so of course, when we went into complete shutdown and March, uh, we felt it very rapidly, not just on, uh, uh, tax receipts and collectibles, but the way in which we could deliver services. So of course our first priority was to, uh, like I think you mentioned mobilized staff. We, we mobilized hundreds of staff overnight with laptops and phones and cars and the things they needed to do to get mobile and still provide the priority services that we're mandated to provide from a safety standpoint. Um, and then we got busy working for our clients and that's really where our partnership with IBM and Watson, uh, came in and began planning that in July. And we're able to open that portal up in October to, to really speed up the way in which we're giving assistance to, to our residents. Um, re focus has been on making sure that people stay housed. We have, uh, an estimated, uh, 2.5 million residents and over 150,000 of those households are anticipated to be facing eviction, uh, as of January one. So we, we've got a, a big task ahead of us. >>All of this sounds kind of expensive. Uh, one of the common threads as you know, runs throughout government is, ah, I don't really have the money for that. I think I'd be able to afford that a diaper too, as well. So what types of funding has been made available for counties, a result of a pandemic, >>Primarily our funding stream that we're utilizing to get these services out the door has been the federal cares act. Uh, now we had some jurisdictions regionally around us and even locally that prioritize those funds in a different way. Um, our board of County commissioners, uh, took, um, a sum total of about $85 million of our 240 million that said, this will go directly to residents in the form of rental assistance and basic needs support. No one should lose their home or go hungry during this pandemic. Uh, so we've really been again working through our community partners and through our IBM tools to make sure that happens. >>So how does, how does, how does the cares act funding then support Clark County? Cause it seems to me that the needs would be complex, diverse >>Pretty much so. So as you, as folks may know him a call there's several tronches of the cares act, the original cares act funding that has come down to us again, our board, uh, identified basic needs or rental assistance and, and gave that the department of social service to go to the tunicate, uh, through the community. We then have the cares act, uh, uh, coronavirus relief funds that have, uh, impacted our CDBG and our emergency solutions grants. We've taken those. And that's what we was going to keep a lot of the programs and services, uh, like our IBM Watson portal open past January one when the cares act dollars expire. Uh, our initial response was a very manual one, uh, because even though we have a great home grown homeless management information system, it does not do financials. Uh, so we had 14 local nonprofits adjudicating, uh, this rental assistance program. >>And so we could get our social service visitor portal up, uh, to allow us to take applications digitally and run that through our program. Uh, and, uh, so those partners were obviously very quickly overwhelmed and were able to stand up our portal, uh, which for the reason we were driving so hard, even from, uh, beginning of the conversations where after going into lockdown into contracting in July and getting the portal open in October, which was an amazing turnaround. Uh, so the kudos that IBM team, uh, for getting us up and out the door so quickly, uh, was a tie in, uh, to our, uh, Curam IBM, uh, case management system that we utilize to adjudicate benefits on daily basis in Clark County for all our local indigent population, uh, and high needs folks. Uh, and then that ties into our SAP IBM platform, which gets the checks out the door. >>So what, what we've been able to do with these dollars is created in Lucian, uh, that has allowed us in the last 60 days to get as much money out the door, as our nonprofits were able go out the door in the first six months pandemic. So it really has helped us. Uh, so I'm really grateful to our board of County commissioners for recognizing the investment in technology to, to not only get our teams mobile, but to create ease of access for our constituents and our local residents to give them the help they need quickly and the way that they need it. >>Just to follow up question to that, Tim, that I'm curious about having done a lot of work like this in government, sometimes getting procurement through in a timely way is a bit challenging. How were you able to work through those issues and getting this up and provision so quickly? >>Uh, yeah, so we, we put together a, what we call a pandemic playbook, which is kind of lessons learned. And what we've seen is the folks who were essential workers in the first 60 days of the, uh, pandemic. We were able to get a lot done quickly because we were taking full advantage of the emergency. Uh, it may sound a little crass to folks not inside the service world, but it was, uh, you know, don't want you to crisis. It was things we've been planning or trying to do for years. We need them yesterday. We should have had them yesterday, but let's get them tomorrow and get it moving very quickly. Uh, this IBM procurement was something we were able to step through very quickly because of our longstanding relationship. Our countywide, uh, system of record for our financials is SAP. Uh, we've worked with Curam, uh, solution, uh, for years. >>So we've got this long standing relationship and trust in the product and the teams, which helped us build the business case of why we did it, no need to go out for competitive procurement that we didn't have time. And we needed something that would integrate very quickly into our existing systems. Uh, so that part was there. Now when the folks who were non essential came back in June and the reopening, it was whiplash, uh, the speed at which we were moving, went back to the pace of normal business, uh, which feels like hitting a wall, doing a hundred miles an hour when you're used to having that, uh, mode of doing business. Uh, so that's certainly been a struggle, uh, for all of those involved, uh, in trying to continue to get things up. Um, but, uh, once again, the teams have been great because we've probably tripled our licensure on this portal since we opened it, uh, because of working with outside vendors, uh, to, uh, literally triple the size of our staff that are processing these applications by bringing on temporary staff, uh, and short-term professionals. Uh, and so we've been able to get those things through, uh, because we'd already built the purchasing vehicle during the early onset of the crisis. >>That's very helpful. Karen, IBM has played a really pivotal role in all of this. Uh, IBM Watson health works with a number of global government agencies, raging from counties like Clark County to federal governments. What are some of the major challenges you've seen with your clients as a result of the pandemic and how is technology supporting them in a time of need and give us some background Watson health too. So we kind of know a little more about it because this is really a fascinating area. >>Yeah. Thank you, Bob. And thanks Tim for the background on Clark County, because I think Clark County is definitely also an example of what federal governments and global governments are doing worldwide today. So, um, Watson health is our division within IBM where we really focus on health and human services. And our goal is to really focus in on, um, the outcomes that we're providing to individuals and families and looking at how we use data and insights to really make that impact and that change. And within that division, we have our government health and human services area, which is the focus of where we are with our clients around social program. But it also allows us to work with, um, different agencies and really look at how we can really move the ball in terms of, um, effecting change and outcomes for, um, really moving the needle of how we can, uh, make an impact on individuals and families. >>So as we look at the globe globally as well, you know, everything that Tim had mentioned about how the pandemic has really changed the way that government agencies operate and how they do services, I think it's amazing that you have that pandemic playbook because a lot of agencies in the same way also had these set of activities that they always wanted to go and take part on, but there was no impetus to really allow for that to happen. And with the pandemic, it allowed that to kind of open and say, okay, we can try this. And unfortunately I'm in a very partial house way to do that. And, um, what Tim has mentioned about the new program that they set up for the housing, some of those programs could take a number of years to really get a program online and get through and allowing, uh, the agencies to be able to do that in a matter of weeks is amazing. >>And I think that's really gonna set a precedent as we go forward and how you can bring on programs such as the housing and capability in Canada with the economic, uh, social, um, uh, development and, and Canada need that the same thing. They actually had a multi benefit delivery system that was designed to deliver benefits for three programs. And as part of the department of fisheries and oceans Canada, the, um, the state had an emergency and they really need to set up on how they could provide benefits to the fishermen who had been at that impacted, um, from that. And they also did set up a digital front-end using IBM citizen engagement to start to allow the applications that benefits, um, and they set it up in a matter of weeks. And as I mentioned, we, uh, Clark County had a backend legacy system where they could connect to and process those applications. And this case, this is a brand new program and the case management system that they brought up was on cloud. And they had to set up a new one, but allow them to set up a, what we used to call straight through processing, I think has been now turned, turned or coined contact less, uh, processing and allowing us to really start to move those benefits and get those capabilities out to the citizens in even a faster way than has been imagined. Uh, pre pandemic. >>Karen, I have one follow-up question. I want to ask you, having had a lot of experience with large projects in government. Sometimes there's a real gap between getting to identified real requirements and then actions. How do you, how do you work with clients to make sure that process time to benefit is shortened? >>So we really focus on the user themselves and we take a human centered design focus and really prioritizing what those needs are. Um, so working with the clients, uh, effectively, and then going through agile iterations of brain, that capability out as, um, in, in a phased approach to, so the idea of getting what we can bring out that provides quality and capability to the users, and then over time starting to really roll out additional functions and, um, other, uh, things that citizens or individuals and families would need >>Very helpful. Tim, this is an interesting partnership. It's always good to see partnerships between private sector and government. Tell us a little bit about how the partnership with IBM Watson health was established and what challenges or they were brought into assist, where they brought into assist with back to requirements. Again, within the requirements definitely shifted on us. You know, we had the con looking at, uh, Watson on our child welfare, uh, side of the house that I'm responsible for and how that we could, uh, increase access to everything from tele-health to, to, uh, foster parent benefit, uh, kinship, placement benefits, all those types of things that, that right now are very manual, uh, on the child welfare side. Uh, and then the pandemic kid. And we very quickly realized that we needed, uh, to stand up a, um, a new program because, uh, a little bit for context, uh, the park County, we don't administer TANIF or Medicaid at the County level. >>It is done at the state level. So we don't have, uh, unemployment systems or Medicaid, 10 of snap benefits systems to be able to augment and enroll out. We provide, uh, the indigent supports the, the homelessness prevention, referee housing continuum of care, long-term care, really deep emergency safety net services for our County, which is a little bit different and how those are done. So that was really our focus, which took a lot of in-person investigation. We're helping people qualify for disability benefits so they can get into permanent supportive housing, uh, things that are very intensive. And yet now we have a pandemic where we need things to happen quickly because the cares act money expires at the end of December. And people were facing eviction and eviction can help spread exposure to, to COVID. Uh, so, uh, be able to get in and very rapidly, think about what is the minimal pelvis to MVP. >>What's the minimum viable product that we can get out the door that will help people, uh, entrance to a system as contactless as possible, which again was a complete one 80 from how we had been doing business. Um, and, uh, so the idea that you could get on and you have this intelligent chat bot that can walk you through questions, help you figure out if you look like you might be eligible, roll you right into an application where you can upload the few documents that we're going to require to help verify your coat would impact and do that from a smartphone and under, you know, 20 minutes. Um, it, it, it is amazing. And the fact that we've stood that up and got it out the door in 90 days, it's just amazing to me, uh, when it shows the, uh, strength of partnership. Um, I think we can, we have some shared language because we had that ongoing partnership, but we were able to actually leverage some system architects that we had that were familiar with our community and our other products. So it really helped expedite, uh, getting this, uh, getting this out to the citizens. >>So, uh, I assume that there are some complexities in doing this. So overall, how has this deployment of citizen engagement with Watson gone and how do you measure success other than you got it out quick? How do you know if it's working? >>Yeah. Right. So it's the adage of, you know, quick, fast and good, right. Um, or fast, good and cheap. So, uh, we measure success in this way. Um, how are we getting access as our number one quality measurement here? So we were able to collect, uh, about 13,000 applications, uh, manual NRC, manually folks had to go onto our website, download a PDF, fill it out, email it, or physically drop it off along with their backup. One of their choice of 14 non-profits in town, whichever is closest to them. Um, and, uh, and then wait for that process. And they were able to get 13,000 of those, uh, process for the last six months. Uh, we have, I think we had about 8,000 applications the first month come into the portal and about an equal amount of folks who could not provide the same documentation that it was needed. >>And self-selected out. If we had not had the, the tool in place, we would have had 16,000 applications, half of which would have been non-eligible would have been jamming up the system, uh, when we don't have the bandwidth to deal to deal with that, we, we need to be able to focus in on, uh, Judy Kenny applications that we believe are like a 95% success rate from the moment our staff gets them, but because we have the complex and he was on already being dependent upon the landlord, having to verify the rent amount and be willing to work with us, um, which is a major hurdle. Um, but, uh, so w we knew we could not do is go, just reinvent the manual process digitally that that would have been an abject failure on our behalf. So, uh, the ideas that, uh, folks had can go on a very, had this very intuitive conversation to the chat bot, answer some questions and find out if they're eligible. >>And then self-select out was critical for us to not only make sure that the citizens got the help they needed, but not so burnt out and overload our workforce, which is already feeling the strain of the COVID pandemic on their own personal lives and in their homes and in the workplace. Um, so that was really critical for us. So it's not just about speed, ease of access was important. Uh, the ability to quickly automate things on the fly, uh, we have since changed, uh, the area median income, a qualifier for the rental assistance, because we were able to reallocate more money, uh, to the program. So we were able to open it up to more people. We were able to make that, uh, change to the system very quickly. Uh, the idea that we can go on the home page and put updates, uh, we recognized that, uh, some of our monolingual Hispanic residents were having difficulty even with some guidance getting through the system. >>So we're able to record a, a Spanish language walkthrough and get done on the home page the next day, right into the fordable, there'll be a fine, so they could literally run the YouTube video while they're walking through their application. Side-by-side so things like that, that those are how we are able to, for us measured success, not just in the raw dollars out the door, not just in the number of applications that have come in, but our ability to be responsive when we hear from our constituents and our elected officials that, Hey, I want, I appreciate the 15,000 applications as you all, a process and record time, I've got three, four, five, six, 10 constituents that having this type of problem and be able to go back and retool our systems to make them more intuitive, to do, be able to keep them responsive for us is definitely a measure of success and all of this, probably more qualitative than here we're looking >>For, but, uh, that's for us, that's important. Actually the qualitative side is what usually gets ignored. Uh, Karen, I've got a question that's a follow up for you on the same topic. How does IBM facilitate reporting within this kind of an environment given the different needs of stakeholders, online managers and citizens? What kinds of things do you, are you able to do >>So with, um, the influx of digitalization? I think it allows us to really take a more data-driven approach to start looking at that. So, as, as Tim was mentioning, you can see where potentially users are spending more time on certain questions, or if they're stuck on a question, you can see where the abandoned rate is. So using a more data-driven approach to go in to identify, you know, how do we actually go and, um, continue to drive that user experience that may not be something that we drive directly from the users. So I would say that analytics is really, uh, I think going to continue to be a driving force as government agencies go forward, because now they are capturing the data. But one thing that they have to be careful of is making sure that the data that they're getting is the right data to give them the information, to make the right next steps and decisions. >>And Tim, you know, use a really good example with, um, the chatbot in terms of, you know, with the influx of everything going on with COVID, the citizens are completely flooded with information and how do they get the right information to actually help them decide, can I apply for this chap program? Or should I, you know, not even try and what Tim mentioned just saved the citizens, you know, the people that may not be eligible a lot of time and going through and applying, and then getting denied by having that upfront, I have questions and I need answers. Um, so again, more data-driven of how do we provide that information? And, you know, we've seen traditionally citizens having to go on multiple website, web pages to get an answer to the question, because they're like, I think I have a question in this area, but I'm not exactly sure. And they, then they're starting to hunt and hunt and hunt and not even potentially get an answer. So the chocolate really like technology-wise helps to drive, you know, more data-driven answers to what, um, whether it's a citizen, whether it's, um, Tim who needs to understand how and where my citizens getting stuck, are they able to complete the application where they are? Can we really get the benefits to, um, this individual family for the housing needs >>Too many comments on the same thing. I know you have to communicate measures of success to County executives and others. How do you do that? I mean, are you, do you have enough information to do it? Yeah, we're able to, we actually have a standup meeting every morning where the first thing I learn is how many new applications came in overnight. How many of those were completed with full documentation? How many will be ported over into our system, assigned the staff to work, where they're waiting >>On landlord verification. So I can see the entire pipeline of applications, which helps us then determine, um, Oh, it's, it's not, you know, maybe urban legend is that folks are having difficulty accessing the system. When I see really the bottleneck there, it got gotten the system fine, the bottlenecks laying with our landlord. So let's do a landlord, a town hall and iterate and reeducate them about what their responsibilities are and how easy it is for them to respond with the form they need to attest to. And so it lets us see in real time where we're having difficulties, uh, because, uh, there's a constant pressure on this system. Not just that, uh, we don't want anyone to lose their home, uh, but these dollars also go away within a December. So we've got this dual pressure of get it right and get it right now. >>Uh, and so th the ability to see these data and these metrics on, on a daily basis is critical for us to, to continue to, uh, ModuLite our response. Um, and, and not just get comfortable are baked into well, that's why we developed the flowchart during requirements, and that's just the way things are gonna stay. Uh, that's not how you respond to a pandemic. Uh, and so having a tool and a partner that helps us, uh, stay flexible, state agile, I guess, to, to, to leverage some terminology, uh, is important. And, and it's, it's paid dividends for our citizens. Karen, again, is another up to the same thing. I'm kind of curious about one of the problems of government from time to time. And Tim, I think attest to this is how do you know when Dunn has been reached? How did you go about defining what done would look like for the initial rollout with this kind of a customer? >>So I think Doug, I guess in this case, um, is, is this, isn't able to get the benefits that they're looking for and how do we, uh, you know, starting from, I think what we were talking about earlier, like in terms of requirements and what is the minimum viable, um, part of that, and then you start to add on the bells and whistles that we're really looking to do. So, um, you know, our team worked with him to really define what are those requirements. I know it's a new program. So some of those policy decisions were still also being worked out as the requirements were being defined as well. So making sure that you are staying on top of, okay, what are the key things and what do we really need to do from a compliance standpoint, from a functionality, and obviously, um, the usability of how, uh, an assistant can come on and apply and, um, have those, uh, requirements, make sure that you can meet that, that version before you start adding on additional scope. >>Very helpful. Jim, what's your comment on this since I know done matters to you? Yeah. And look, I I've lived through a, again, multiple, uh, county-wide it implementations and some department wide initiatives as well. So I think we know that our staff always want more so nothing's ever done, uh, which is a challenge and that's on our side of the customer. Um, but, uh, for this, it really was our, our experience of recognizing the, the time was an essence. We didn't have a chance. We didn't have, uh, the space to get into these endless, uh, conversations, uh, the agile approach, rather than doing the traditional waterfall, where we would have been doing requirements tracking for months before we ever started coding, it was what do we need minimally to get a check in the hands of a landlord on behalf of a client, so they don't get evicted. >>And we kept just re honing on that. That's nice. Let's put that in the parking lot. We'll come back to it because again, we want to leverage this investment long term, uh, because we've got a we, and we've got the emergency solutions and CDBG, and then our, uh, mainstream, uh, services we brought on daily basis, but we will come back to those things speed and time are of the essence. So what do we need, uh, to, to get this? So a chance to really, um, educate our staff about the concepts of agile iteration, um, and say, look, this is not just on the it side. We're gonna roll a policy out today around how you're doing things. And we may figure out through data and metrics that it's not working next week, and we'll have to have that. You want it. And you're going to get the same way. >>You're getting updated guidance from the CDC on what to do and what not to do. Uh, health wise, you're getting the same from us, uh, and really to helping the staff understand that process from the beginning was key. And, uh, so, and, and that's, again, partnering with, with our development team in that way was helpful. Um, because once we gave them that kind of charter as I am project champion, this is what we're saying. They did an equally good job of staying on task and getting to the point of is this necessary or nice. And if it wasn't necessary, we put it in the nice category and we'll come back to it. So I think that's really helpful. My experience having done several hundred sheet applications also suggest the need for MBP matters, future stages really matter and not getting caught. My flying squirrels really matters. So you don't get distracted. So let's move on to, let's do a polling question before we go on to some of our other questions. So for our audience, do you have a digital front ends for your benefit delivery? Yes, no. Or we're planning to a lot of response here yet. There we go. Looks like about half, have one and half note. So that's an interesting question. What's going to one more polling question, learn a little more here. Has COVID-19 >>Accelerated or moved cloud. Yes, no. We already run a majority of applications on cloud. Take a moment and respond if you would, please. So this is interesting. No real acceleration was taken place and in terms of moving to cloud is not what I was expecting, but that's interesting. So let's go onto another question then. And Karen, let me direct this one to you, given that feedback, how do you envision technologies such as citizen engagement and watching the system will be used, respond to emergency situations like the pandemic moving forward? I mean, what should government agencies consider given the challenges? This kind of a pandemic is brought upon government and try to tie this in, if you would, what, what is the role of cloud in all of this for making this happen in a timely way? Karen, take it away. >>Okay. Thanks Bob. So as we started the discussion around the digital expansion, you know, we definitely see additional programs and additional capabilities coming online as we continue on. Um, I think, uh, agencies have really seen a way to connect with their citizens and families and landlords, um, in this case an additional way. And he prepared them like there were, uh, presuppose assumptions that the, um, the citizens or landlords really wanted to interact with agency face-to-face and have that high touch part. And I think, um, through this, the governments have really learned that there is a way to still have an impact on the citizen without having a slow, do a face to face. And so I think that's a big realization for them to now really explore other ways to digitally explain, expand their programs and capabilities. Another area that we touched on was around the AI and chat bot piece. >>So as we start to see capabilities like this, the reason why Clark County was able to bring it up quickly and everything was because it was housed on cloud, we are seeing the push of starting to move some of the workloads. I know from a polling question perspective that it's been, um, lighter in terms of getting, uh, moving to the cloud. But we have seen the surge of really chatbots. I think we've been talking about chatbots for a while now. And, um, agencies hadn't really had the ability to start to implement that and really put it into effect. But with the pandemic, they were able to bring things up and, you know, very short amount of time to solve, um, a big challenge of not having the call center be flooded and have a different way to direct that engagement between the citizen and the government. >>So really building a different type of channel for them to engage rather than having to call or to come into an office, which wasn't really allowed in terms of, um, the pandemic. Um, the other thing I'll touch on is, um, 10 mentioned, you know, the backlog of applications that are coming in and we're starting to see the, um, the increase in automation. How do we automate areas where it's administratively highly burdened, but it's really a way that we can start to automate those processes, to give our workers the ability to focus on more of those complex situations that really need attention. So we're starting to see where the trends of trying to push there of can we automate some of those processes, um, uh, uploading documents and verification documents is another way of like, trying to look at, is there a way that we can make that easier? >>Not only for the applicant that's applying, but also for the caseworker. So there's not having to go through that. Um, does the name match, um, the applicant, uh, information and what we're looking on here, and Bob, you mentioned cloud. So behind the scenes of, you know, why, uh, government agencies are really pushing the cloud is, um, you heard about, I mean, with the pandemic, you see a surge of applicants coming in for those benefits and how do we scale for that kind of demand and how do you do that in an inappropriate way, without the huge pressures that you put on to your data center or your staff who's already trying to help our citizens and applicants, applicants, and families get the benefits they need. And so the cloud, um, you know, proposition of trying, being able to be scalable and elastic is really a key driver that we've seen in terms of, uh, uh, government agencies going to cloud. >>We haven't really seen during a pandemic, the core competencies, some of them moving those to cloud, it's really been around that digital front end, the chat bot area of how do we start to really start with that from a cloud perspective and cloud journey, and then start to work in the other processes and other areas. Um, security is also huge, uh, focus right now with the pandemic and everything going online. And with cloud allows you to be able to make sure that you're secure and be able to apply the right security so that you're always covered in terms of the type of demand and, um, impact, uh, that is coming through >>Very helpful. Tim, I'm going to ask to follow up on this of a practical nature. So you brought this up very quickly. Uh, there's a certain amount of suspicion around state government County government about chatbots. How did you get a chat much and be functional so quickly? And were you able to leverage the cloud in this process? Yeah, so on the trust is important. Uh, and I'll go back to my previous statement about individuals being able to see upfront whether they believe they're eligible or not, because nothing will erode trust more than having someone in hours applying and weeks waiting to find out they were denied because they weren't eligible to begin with, uh, that erodes trust. So being able to let folks know right up front, here's what it looks like to be eligible, actually help us build some of that, uh, cause they don't feel like, uh, someone in the bureaucracy is just putting them through the ringer for no reason. >>Um, now in regard to how do we get the chat bot out? I will say, uh, we have a, uh, dynamic it and leadership, uh, team at the highest level of County government who we have been already having conversations over the last year about what it meant to be smart government, uh, the department of social service and family services that I'm responsible for. We're already, uh, hands up first in line, you know, Guinea pigs volunteering to be on the front end of, uh, certain projects. So w we have primed ourselves for, for some of this readiness in that aspect. Um, but for citizen trust, um, the timeliness of application right now is the biggest element of trust. Uh, so I've applied I've I feel like I put my housing future in your hands. Are you going to deliver and having the ability for us to rapidly scale up? >>Uh, we typically have 120 staff in the department of social service that, that are adjudicating benefits for programs on daily basis. We've doubled that with temporary staff, uh, through some partnerships, uh, we're, we're gonna, as of next week, probably have more temporary per professional staff helping an adjudicator applications. No, do full-time County staff, because again, this rush to get the dollars out, out the door. So having a system where I can easily, uh, ramp on new users and manage them without having to be solely dependent upon an already, uh, overworked it staff who were trying to support 37 other departments in the County, um, around infrastructure needs has been greatly helpful. Sounds to me like a strong outcome focus and one that seems to work. Let's move on now to our audience questions. We're getting close to the end of our time. So let's jump into some questions from the audience. A number of you have been asking about getting copies of today's presentation within the next 48 hours. Government technology will provide all attendees with the link to the recording for your reference, or to share with colleagues. Well, let's go to our first question. So this is an interesting one. And Karen, this is for you did IBM work with other counties and States to provide digital engagement portals. >>We did Bob, uh, we've worked, um, so globally we've provided guidance on this. We work closely with New York city. They've been the integral part of the development also with our citizen engagement offering. Um, we work closely with the States. So we worked with New York city. Um, North Carolina was also another state who, um, improved their, uh, citizen engagement piece, bring up their Medicaid and snap, um, applications along with Medicaid. COVID testing along that. And I mentioned, um, the economic and social development in Canada as well. And we also work with the ministry of social development in Singapore. So a number of our customers had put up, uh, a global, uh, or sorry, a citizen engagement frontend. And during this timeframe, >>Very helpful. I don't know how much did you hear your mom provide you, but how much did it cost for initial deployment and what are the ongoing costs in other words, is this thing going to be sustainable over time? >>Yeah, absolutely. So total, uh, to date, we've spent about a $1.8 million on development implementations and licensure. A big chunk of that again has been the rapid extended of licensure, uh, for this program. Um, I think over a third of that is probably licensing because again, we need to get the dollars out and we need staff to do that and making the short term several hundred thousand dollar investment in a professional support staff and having them be able to work this portal is much cheaper than the long-term investment of bringing on a staff, printing a job, uh, during a financial difficulty that we're facing, uh, the single largest fiscal cliff let's get into that us history. Um, so it's not smart to create jobs that have a 30 year, one way to retirement, uh, inside our in unionized government environment here. So having this, the staff that would come on and do this and get out the door on these federal dollars was critical for us. Um, and there is a $800,000 a year, I believe so ongoing costs associated with licensure and, and the programming support. Uh, but once again, we're going to be moving, um, our traditional services into this digital front end. We'll be continuing this because we're, we're, we're facing, it took us, I think, six and a half, seven years to come back from the previous recession. Undoubtedly, take a little longer to get back >>From this one. Here's another interesting question, I guess really primarily Tim Tim was the solution on primarily on premise or in the cloud. >>So we'll, we've done a mix. Uh, the, and I'm starting a lot of feedbacks. I don't know if you all can hear that or not, but the, uh, I think we went on prem for, uh, some people because of the, uh, bridge into our service case manager system, which is on prem. So we did some management there. I do believe the chat bot piece of it though is in the cloud. So we're bringing it down to, from one system to the other. Uh, and, and part of that was a student negotiations and costs and worrying about what long-term is that we have a very stated goal of moving, uh, our Curam platform, which is on-prem, this is the backend. So how are we? We, we set our IBM Watson, uh, portal up, uh, and moving all of that on cloud, uh, because I mean, we've got, uh, a workforce who, uh, has the ability to retire at a very high rate over the next five years. >>And, uh, having 24 seven support in the cloud is, is as a, someone who would be called to respond to emergency situations like the is, is a much better Cod deal for, for myself and the citizen. So migrating, uh, and, um, our typical on-prem stuff up into the cloud, uh, as we continue on this, uh, evolution of what IBM Watson, uh, and the plug into our Curam, uh, system looks like Karen related question for another user is the portal provided with Clara County and others linked to other third-party backend office apps, or can it be, >>Yeah, the answer is it can be it's interoperable. So through APIs, uh, rest, uh, however, um, assistance that they need to be integrated with can definitely be integrated with, uh, like, uh, Tim mentioned, we, we went to the case management solution, but it can be integrated with other applications as well. >>Tim, did you use some other backend third party apps with yours? Uh, we did not. Uh, again, just for speed of getting, uh, this MVP solution out the door. Uh, now what we do with that on the go forward, it is going to look different and probably will include some, another practical question. Given the cares funding should be expended by December. Can this application even be employed at this late date? And you want to take a cut at that? Yeah, for us, uh, once again, we brought up earlier, um, the emergency solutions grants and the community development block grants, which have a Corona virus, uh, CV traunch, each one of those, and those have two to three year expenditure timeframes on them. Uh, so we were going to leverage those to keep this system and some of these programs going once again, that the housing needs, uh, will outstrip our capacity for years to come. >>I guess probably I should have said upfront Las Vegas has one of the worst affordable housing inventories in the nation. Uh, so we know we're going to be facing a housing issue, um, because of this for, for a long time. So we'll be using those two traunches of dollars, ESE, ESPs, uh, CV CDBG, CB funds, uh, in addition to dollars earmarked through some, uh, recreational marijuana license fees that have been dedicated to our homelessness. And when you consider this housing, uh, stability program was part of that homelessness prevention. That's our funding mix locally. Very helpful. So questions maybe for bolts for you on this one, you can probably also teach respond is the system has been set up helping the small business community. Um, this user's been canvassing and the general feeling is that small businesses have been left behind and they've been unable to access funds. What's your response on that? Karen, do you want to take that first? >>Um, yes. So in terms of, uh, the security and sorry. Um, but, uh, can you repeat the last part of that? I just missed the last part when you >>Behind it, but unable to access funds. >>Uh, yeah, so I think from a funding perspective, there's different types of, I think what Tim mentioned in terms of the cares funding, there was different types of funding that came out from a government perspective. Uh, I think there were also other grants and things that are coming out one, uh, that we're still looking at. And I think as we go into the new year, it'll be interesting to see, you know, what additional funding, um, hopefully is, is provided. Uh, but in terms of creativity, we've seen other creative ways that organizations come together to kind of, uh, help with the different agencies, to provide some, some guidance to the community, um, and helping to, uh, provide efforts and, uh, maybe looking at different ways of, um, providing, uh, some of the capabilities that the, either at the County or at the state level that they're able to leverage. But Tim happy to maybe have you chime in here too. >>Yeah. So I'll first start with my wheelhouse and I'll expand out to, to some of my partners. Uh, so the primary, small business, we knew the idea was a daily basis inside this realm is going to be landlords. Uh, so actually this afternoon, we're doing a town hall with folks to be able to roll out, uh, which they will go to our portal to find a corporate landlord program. Uh, so that I seem a landlord for Camille the application pack and on behalf of a hundred residents, rather than us having to adjudicate a hundred individual applications and melon a hundred checks. Uh, so that is because we were listening to that particular segment of the, uh, the business community. Now I know early on, we were, we were really hoping that the, the paycheck protection program federally would have, uh, been dispersed in a way that helped our local small businesses. >>Uh, more we did a, our economic development team did a round of small business supports through our cares act. Uh, our quarterly unfortunate was not open yet. It was just about 15, 20 days shy. So we use, uh, another traditional grant mechanism that we have in place to dedicate that. Uh, but on a go forward board, willing to Congress passes something over the next 30 days, um, that if there's a round two of cares or some other programs, we absolutely now have a tool that we know we can create a digital opening for individuals to come figure out if they're eligible or not for whatever program it is, the it housing, the it, uh, small business operations supports, uh, and it would apply through that process and in a very lightweight, so we're looking forward to how we can expand our footprint to help all of the needs that are present in our community. This leads to another question which may be our last one, but this is an interesting question. How can agencies use COVID-19 as a proof point providing a low cost configurable solutions that can scale across government. Karen, do you want to respond to that? And then Tim also, >>Thanks, Bob. So I believe like, you know, some of the things that we've said in terms of examples of how we were able to bring up the solution quicker, I definitely see that scaling as you go forward and trying to really, um, focus in on the needs and getting that MVP out the door. Uh, and then Tim alluded to this as well. A lot of the change management processes that went into re-imagining what these processes look like. I definitely see a additional, you know, growth mindset of how do we get better processes in place, or really focusing on the core processes so that we can really move the ball forward and continuing to go that path of delivering on a quicker path, uh, leveraging cloud, as we mentioned of, um, some, some of the capabilities around the chat bot and other things to really start to push, um, uh, the capabilities out to those citizens quicker and really reduce that timeline that we have to take on the backend side, um, that that would be our hope and goal, um, given, you know, sort of what we've been able to accomplish and hoping using that as a proof point of how we can do this for other types of, uh, either programs or other processes. >>Yeah, I think, um, the, you know, the tool has given us capability now there, whether we use local leaders leverage that to the fullest really becomes a coming upon us. So do we take a beat, uh, when we can catch our breath and then, you know, work through our executive leadership to say, look, here's all the ways you can use this tool. You've made an enterprise investment in. Um, and I know for us, uh, at Clark County, we've stood up, uh, enterprise, uh, kind of governance team where we can come and talk through all of our enterprise solutions, uh, encourage our other department head peers, uh, to, to examine how you might be able to use this. Is there a way that, um, you know, parks and rec might use this to better access their scholarship programs to make sure that children get into youth sports leagues and don't get left out, uh, because we know youth suicide on the rise and they need something positive to do when this pandemic is clear, I'm there for them to get out and do those things. >>So the possibilities really are out there. It really becomes, um, how do we mind those internally? And I know that being a part of listservs and, uh, you know, gov tech and all the magazines and things are out there to help us think about how do we better use our solutions, um, as well as our IBM partners who are always eager to say, Hey, have you seen how they're using this? Um, it is important for us to continue to keep our imaginations open, um, so that we continue to iterate through this process. Um, cause I, I would hate to see the culture of, um, iteration go away with this pandemic. >>Okay. We have time for one final question. We've already addressed this in part two, and this one is probably for you and that you've used the cares act to eliminate some of the procurement red tape that's shown up. Well, how do you somehow that's been very positive. How do you see that impacting you going forward? What happens when the red tape all comes back? >>Yeah, so I think I mentioned a little bit, uh, about that when some of the folks who are deemed non essential came back during our reopening phases and they're operating at the speed of prior business and red tape where we had all been on this, these green tape, fast tracks, uh, it, it was a bit of a organizational whiplash. Uh, but it, for us, we've had the conversation with executive management of like, we cannot let this get in the way of what our citizens need. So like keep that pressure on our folks to think differently. Don't and, uh, we've gone so far as to, uh, even, uh, maybe take it a step further and investigate what had been done in, in, in Canada. Some other places around, um, like, like going right from in a 48 hour period, going from a procurement statement through a proof of concept and doing purchasing on the backside, like how can we even get this even more streamlined so that we can get the things we need quickly, uh, because the citizens don't understand, wait, we're doing our best, uh, your number 3000 and queue on the phone line that that's not what they need to hear or want to hear during times of crisis. >>Very helpful. Well, I want to be respectful of our one hour commitment, so we'll have to wrap it up here in closing. I want to thank everyone for joining us for today's event and especially a big, thank you goes to Karen and Tim. You've done a really great job of answering a lot of questions and laying this out for us and a special thanks to our partners at IBM for enabling us to bring this worthwhile discussion to our audience. Thanks once again, and we look forward to seeing you at another government technology event,

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cube conversation. >>Welcome back to the Cube's coverage of AWS Summit 2020. It's virtual online, and we're the Cube virtual here in our Palo Alto studios with our covert 19 crew. We're in place here, getting all the content remotely and also digitally. We're gonna bring that in the virtual. Got a great guest here as part of the program at AWS, but more importantly, part of the community doing its part both on building applications but also around covert 19 Dean, great CEO of Skylab APS ink. And they got an app that's being featured called Do your Part Hashtag Do your part, Dean, Thanks for spending the time to come in and talk with me. >>Excited to be here. >>You got to love this virtual ization going on, and I think you know the sad news around what's going on is really an indication of a New World order that we're seeing a new expectation of virtual izing the world that we live in. Obviously, we've been doing content at events. Now it's virtual or digital, but Still, people are online there. They're converging their lives with digital technologies. You guys are in that business. You have an app that's pretty compelling and relevant for the covert. 19. Take a minute to tell us about yourself and Skylab Appsync and do it. Do your part. Uh huh. >>Sure. Thank you. Thank you for having us on first fall. Well, what we do is kind of acts as we launch rapid response platforms. That entire platform in about a week's worth. The times If you have your on Facebook or INSTAGRAM, we'll be doing for causes tribes organizations or some sort of situation that requires there was something to get it quickly. Where you can shave were warning and track behaviors of that community to hit a certain goal. So since we've been doing this for years with all kinds of communities, we code it. We started hearing all these things on the news about companies coming forward and making face faster hand sanitizers, which were great products. But there's nothing out there that was tracking and helping the people that would be in quarantine. Hi, my little heroes inside all of us. So we knew that every night on the news. We were being told to stay home, but how do we track that stuff? So we just had the ability to do it, and we stepped forward and said Amazon aws But you help us and they said, Absolutely give you credits on servers will handle the server stuff. You have a platform and look for war. All these people at home kids and parents >>talk about the app itself. You guys are doing your part and flattening the curve. Tracing has become a topic that they were digitally connected. Why not use the technology for good? You guys have an effort to flatten the curve and track, and people are opting in its not like its surveillance government surveillance. This is actually an opt in. Do your part, you mentioned heroes. It's a hero journey, if you will. But people are doing Their part here is that we talk about the app. What's it's what's it all about? >>So when you go in that it's a one stop shop to learn about leaks to the CDC information. First of all, you want to know making sure you have real news getting quality information, so resource for education. But the unique thing about it is there's tons of those out there is that you have all the action's listed where you can now. Why should you? Why in your hands reaching out to here saying Thank you for spending time with pets, unplugging all the things that just not psychological but actually coded actions that are saving lives? People voluntarily going there report that they're doing that by clicking on it instantly shows up on the wall like Instagram feed, but it's private, and everyone now can see what people are doing. Their high fiving change each other on their badges, and major companies are jumping on board one wiser or a all kinds of companies outside of Amazon. But only when people are doing these things. We'd love the highlight report that these actions state. >>It's really also, I think it's well, first, it's awesome that you're doing in your agile enough with AWS. I want to get to that in a second. But I think the trend with code 19 that I'd like to get your thoughts on this. I think this has a lot of head room is not so much the feel good nature of it that I'm doing my part. But you're starting to see the user experience. People are tired, tired of sheltering in place. We're pushing now 23 months now into this and is gonna go on for more and more. Universities want to open. People want open up their jobs, and it's almost a new norm developing where the tribes, if you will, or groups of people. My daughter lives in San Francisco. She's got some roommates. They're sheltering in place. They're watching their actions. They also want to socialize. So it's almost like a badge collected license to get into a bar. It's like, Hey, I'm doing my part So it's It's almost a signaling kind of tribal thing that you're seeing. And I think this might be part of a future that we're gonna live in, because if I'm aware of my responsibilities and I'm doing my part, I want to communicate with people who are doing their part, and there >>are people who >>aren't doing their part by the way, that's well documented. And then there's a trust element in all this. >>Bring this >>together for us. What does this all means? That tribalism communalism, norms or developing interactions, and expectations are emerging. New roles and new responsibilities are emerging from this. Your thoughts >>well, you're hitting me on the head. Everything's troubling. That's what Sky was focused around. Is, for example, well, we started to help the cheerleading industry because it was a bunch of young athletes from ages 6 to 22. And we have over 40,000 kids, for example, that are tracking behaviors and wannabe recognized for doing the things that really matter in life, not just taking a selfie be rewarded for >>being cheat. >>So how do you compete with all the concepts of being famous for the wrong reasons? So, for example, let's cheer up. We work people for being better athletes, taking the actions that advanced. They're still being a better human beings doing their homework, getting Obama complement, doing the dishes and then making the world a better place. We were already doing that. Now I'm making the world a better place. Is in addition to stopping a bully. Reaching out don't mean girl. Now we have the corporate actions of making the world a better place. Track it, and what was shocking is they can now show that we've got kids that have had 200 days streaks over the last year, and they were addicted to the positive things, not just being cute anymore, also perfectly for covert actions in there. And people are just loving it. So we've got Bruce. Whether navy seals of whether it's with cheer or whether it's with any type of affinity group is out there. >>It's interesting because, you know, people love to see the lights on their selfies on their posts. This >>is a >>new kind of social signaling, but it's got again social responsibility. Kind of built in with the Gamification is in the right way. That's what you're saying. Is that what's happening? >>Yes, and you're sitting on a white paper they wrote recently. It's called Beyond. Gamification is via rest value reinforcement systems, and it's highly. It's much more addictive and sustained engaging for long term, because Gamification is what's done to you without really knowing via Rest is, you are the organization grabbing the steering wheel of deciding what other behaviors that you should be reinforcing. So the RS is the next evolution of Gamification. >>I think that's a huge point. I'd love to do a follow up segment on that because I think this is exactly what I call the Facebook blowback, which is the users, the product that's been kind of the Silicon Valley kind of vibe, and that's really true. Facebook has been, you know, not exploiting that. Using the free service in exchange for leveraging you and being game. Gamification applied to people here. The script is flipped. The users, they're telegraphing their data into a system that's rewarding them for positive things. And it could be on anything >>well and reward them in. Our system is when you're gonna grow a tribe. If you want to take something and grow bigger, you have to have the basics. Talk to me. Follow me. Here's all the resources of channels. Here's the behaviors I want you to do consistently, and then maybe here's some certification course you go. So it's like five little absent, one that are geared for growing the community because learning something I know is not proving that I am and I am is a huge gap between just know, and so everyone was teaching out there Today needs to start backing up their incredible keynotes with an incredible continuity program to create sustained trip transparent change. And you mentioned the GDP. Our rules the world has written, has wised up, realized. I don't mind telling me what I'm doing is long is I get to see what I'm doing. I'm in volunteering. Data don't go straight behind my back when I've been a part of that. Really, Where? On whether I'm general social media, they feel like they're part of the track and will mission. That's totally different than going to a specific apt to tell you when I do. >>This is innovation. I think this is a great, innovative trend. I think this is going to be around much longer on and have a lot, a lot, a lot of headroom to it, because I mean, every wants to be an influencer and have influence. But what you're getting at is interesting. It's reputation, it's who you are, and your actions are contributing to that. You can control that. That's a really great trend. Awesome stuff, great stuff. >>Well, you said very key work. We call them. Everyone likes to be influencers, but they don't feel they can compete with the beautiful, super powerful influencers on social media, where you've got 10 million followers or a 1,000,000 you have to just be the ultimate look, the ultimate fan. People are now realizing they could be micro influencers, and they're attitude. Will it? As long as you recognize us the same way, we want you to know that we're not just customer, not just a fan. I'm a micro influencers long. You'll recognize me and I'll tear the door down. >>Well, you know what? That's something that's near and dear to our hearts. After the Cube, we have a Cube alumni network. We don't try to monetize it. It's just really smart people we share content with. And no network is too small in our mind. We think that is ultimately where it's gonna go. Really appreciate that with Covert 19 as it evolves, you guys had this rapid app. Amazon's helping out. I'll see they're involved in giving you some credits. What's going on with Amazon? What's the relationship? Free credits? Are you an Amazon customer using Amazon Cloud? What's your relationship with AWS? >>Well, first, we wouldn't be able to do what we do about them. So all of our APs for communities are powered by Amazon in AWS. So in addition to that by the given its Cremins, they didn't just want to do your partner. They have all of the other existing communities rapidly deploy these actions, like the cheerleading young athletes like the ones for personal development. So we suddenly were able to track over a 1,000,000 actions taken in people's households of people have shown funny moments and give these with what they're doing is basically making off color. So Amazon really stepped up and help them not just the general public, but on the existing ones, with their leveraging technology that we run off of, as well as providing credits for all of those people. >>Well, congratulations for being featured on the Amazon Summit Virtual Appliances Cube online here is, well, virtual great stuff. Love to follow the progress quickly get a plug in for the company where you guys are at and share the length of that white paper. I think that's something that's worth promoting the white paper you mentioned. >>So the people get all this information sky dot world, so that's kind of the world that we're basically a platform that people have access to this white label. So you have a community organization that you want to be able to train, track to reward people, own your data, and we allow you own a copy of your of your source code. So we truly are empowered people. If you have a tribe, man, right, get your world. You know, this is where the science of engagement business we like to help you get that sustaining and, you know, what >>are you fast forward of? What's the pricing model? >>Yeah, so we started to set up a VM on a monthly fee unless they end up buying out the code and then typically just face to maintain it. So we were I was a customer, was someone was a young person who had developed a large tribe with decent sized multiple countries, and they realized I sold my company. All my people were on Facebook and Instagram, so I was only valued a certain value. Had I had all that community on a platform that I owned. Oh my gosh, I was like a younger rock star realized >>that you're rolling out the rock star and >>again having social >>graph and having that interest graph really creates a lot of value and congratulations. And I >>think you >>look forward to seeing the success. And thanks for doing your part. Literally, Figuratively with the march, check it out online bringing social responsibility and Gamification in the hands of the users where they can control it. The reputation and thank you for coming on the Cube. Really appreciate it. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching this Cube. Virtual covering AWS Summit Online. Their virtual event as we are in our quarantine crew studio here in Palo Alto doing all the remote interviews. I'm John Ferrier. Thanks for watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston. It's the cube covering the IBM thing brought to you by IBM. We're back and this is Dave Vellante and you're watching the cube and we're covering wall-to-wall the IBM 2020 I think digital experience. Rob Thomas is here. He's the senior vice president of clouds and data. Right. Warm rub. Always a pleasure to see you. I wish you were face to face, but Hey, we're doing the best we can. As you say, doing the best we can. Great to see you Dave. Hope family safe, healthy, happy as best you can be. Yeah. Ditto. You back out your Robin. Congratulations on on the new role, you and the cube. We've been riding this data wave for quite some time now. It's really been incredible. It really is. And last year I talked to you about how clients, we're slowly making progress on data strategy, starting to experiment with AI. >>We've gotten to the point now where I'd say it's game on for AI, which is exciting to see and that's a lot of what the theme of this year's think is about. Yeah, and I definitely want to dig into that, but I want to start by asking you sort of moves that you saw you're in there seeing your clients make with regard to the cobot night covert 19 crisis. Maybe how you guys are helping them in very interested in what you see as sort of longterm and even, you know, quasi permanent as a result of this. I would first say it this way. I don't, I'm not sure the crisis is going to change businesses as much as it's going to be accelerating. What would have happened anyway, regardless of the industry that you're in. We see clients aggressively looking at how do we get the digital faster? >>How do we automate more than we ever have before? There's the obvious things like business resiliency and business continuity, managing the distributed workforce. So to me, what we've seen is really about, and acceleration, not necessarily in a different direction, but an acceleration on. The thing is that that we're already kind of in the back of their minds or in the back of their plans now that as we'll come to the forefront and I'm encouraged because we see clients moving at a rate and pace that we'd never seen before that's ultimately going to be great for them, great for their businesses. And so I'm really happy to see that you guys have used Watson to really try to get, you know, some good high fidelity answers to the citizens. I wonder if you could explain that initiative. Well, we've had this application called Watson assistant for the last few years and we've been supporting banks, airlines, retailers, companies across all industries and helping them better interact with our customers and in some cases, employees. >>We took that same technology and as we saw the whole covert 19 situation coming, we said, Hey, we can evolve Watson assistant to serve citizens. And so it started by, we started training the models, which are intent based models in Watson assistant on all the publicly available data from the CDC as an example. And we've been able to build a really powerful virtual agent to serve really any citizen that has questions about and what they should be doing. And the response has been amazing. I mean, in the last two weeks we've gone live with 20 organizations, many of which are state and local governments. Okay. Also businesses, the city of Austin children's healthcare of Atlanta. Mmm. They local governments in Spain and Greece all over the world. And in some instances these clients have gotten live in less than 24 hours. Meaning they have a virtual agent that can answer any question. >>They can do that in less than 24 hours. It's actually been amazing to see. So proud of the team that built this over time. And it was kind of proof of the power of technology when we're dealing with any type of a challenge. You know, I had a conversation earlier with Jamie Thomas about quantum and was asking her sort of how your clients are using it. The examples that came up were financial institutions, pharmaceutical know battery manufacturers, um, airlines. And so it strikes me when you think about uh, machine intelligence and AI, the type of AI that you're yeah, at IBM is not consumer oriented AI. It's really designed for businesses. And I wonder if you could sort of add some color to that. Yeah, let's distinguish the difference there. Cause I think you've said it well consumer AI is smart speakers things in our home, you know, music recommendations, photo analysis and that's great and it enriches all of our personal lives. >>AI for business is very different. This is about how do you make better predictions, how do you optimize business processes, how do you automate things that maybe your employees don't want to do in the first time? Our focus in IBM as part of, we've been doing with Watson is really anchoring on three aspects of AI language. So understanding language because the whole business world is about communication of language, trust meaning trusted AI. You understand the models, you understand the data. And then third automation and the whole focus of what we're doing here in the virtual think experience. It's focused on AI for automation. Whether that's automating business processes or the new announcement this week, which is around automating AI opera it operations for a CIO. You, you've talked the years about this notion of an AI ladder. You actually, I actually wrote a book on it and uh, but, but it's been hard for customers to operationalize AI. >>Mmm. We talked about this last year. Thanks. What kind of progress, uh, have we made in the last 12 months? There's been a real recognition of this notion that your AI is only as good as your data. And we use the phrase, there's no AI without IAA, meaning information architecture, it's all the same concept, which is that your data, it has to be ready for AI if you want to too get successful outcomes with AI and the steps of those ladders around how you collect data, how you organize data, how you analyze data, how you infuse that into your business processes. seeing major leaps forward in the last nine months where organizations are understanding that connection and then they're using that to really drive initiatives around AI. So let's talk about that a little bit more. This notion of AI ops, I mean it's essentially the take the concept of dev ops and apply it to the data pipeline if you will. >>Everybody, you know, complains, you know, data scientists complained that all, they spent all their time wrangling data, improving data quality, they don't have line of sight across their organization with regard to other data specialists, whether it's data engineers or even developers. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about that announcement and sort of what you're doing in that area. Sure. So right. Let me put a number on it because the numbers are amazing. Every year organizations lose 2016 point $5 billion of revenue because of outages in it system. That is a staggering number when you think about it. And so then you say, okay, so how do you break down and attack that problem? Well, do you have to get better at fixing problems or you have to get better at avoiding problems altogether. And as you may expect, a little bit of both. You, you want to avoid problems obviously, but in an uncertain world, you're always going to deal with unforeseen challenges. >>So the also the question becomes how fast can you respond and there's no better use of AI. And then to do, I hope you like those tasks, which is understanding your environment, understanding what the systems are saying through their data and identifying issues become before they become outages. And once there is an outage, how do you quickly triage data across all your systems to figure out where is the problem and how you can quickly address it. So we are announcing Watson AI ops, which is the nervous system for a CIO, the manager, all of their systems. What we do is we just collect data, log data from every source system and we build a semantic layer on top that. So Watson understands the systems, understands the normal behavior, understands the acceptable ranges, and then anytime something's not going like it should, Watson raises his hand and says, Hey, you should probably look at this before it becomes a problem. >>We've partnered with companies like Slack, so the UI for Watson AI ops, it's actually in Slack so that companies can use and employees can use a common collaboration tool too. Troubleshoot or look at either systems. It's, it's really powerful. So that we're really proud of. Well I just kind of leads me to my next question, which I mean, IBM got the religion 20 years ago on openness. I mean I can trace it back to the investment you made and Lennox way back when. Um, and of course it's a huge investment last year in red hat, but you know, open source company. So you just mentioned Slack. Talk about open ecosystems and how that it fits into your AI and data strategy. Well, if you think about it, if we're going to take on a challenge this grand, which is AI for all of your it by definition you're going to be dealing with full ecosystem of different providers because every organization has a broad set of capabilities we identified early on. >>That means that our ability to provide open ecosystem interoperability was going to be critical. So we're launching this product with Slack. I mentioned with box, we've got integrations into things like PagerDuty service now really all of the tools of modern it architecture where we can understand the data and help clients better manage those environments. So this is all about an open ecosystem and that's how we've been approaching it. Let's start, it's really about data, applying machine intelligence or AI to that data and about cloud for scale. So I wonder what you're seeing just in terms of that sort of innovation engine. I mean obviously it's gotta be secure. It's, it seems like those are the pillars of innovation for the next 10 plus years. I think you're right. And I would say this whole situation that we're dealing with has emphasized the importance of hybrid deployment because companies have it capabilities on public clouds, on private clouds, really everywhere. >>And so being able to operate that as a single architecture, it's becoming very important. You can use AI to automate tasks across that whole infrastructure that makes a big difference. And to your point, I think we're going to see a massive acceleration hybrid cloud deployments using AI. And this will be a catalyst for that. And so that's something we're trying to help clients with all around the world. You know, you wrote in your book that O'Reilly published that AI is the new electricity and you talked about problems. Okay. Not enough data. If your data is you know, on prem and you're only in the cloud, well that's a problem or too much data. How you deal with all that data, data quality. So maybe we could close on some of the things that you know, you, you talked about in that book, you know, maybe how people can get ahold of it or any other, you know, so the actions you think people should take to get smart on this topic. >>Yeah, so look, really, really excited about this. Paul's the capitalists, a friend of mine and a colleague, we've published this book working with a Riley called the a ladder and it's all the concepts we talked about in terms of how companies can climb this ladder to AI. And we go through a lot of different use cases, scenarios, I think. Yeah. Anybody reading this is going to see their company in one of these examples, our whole ambition was to hopefully plant some seeds of ideas for how you can start to accelerate your journey to AI in any industry right now. Well, Rob, it's always great having you on the cube, uh, your insights over the years and you've been a good friend of ours, so really appreciate you coming on and, uh, and best of luck to you, your family or wider community. I really appreciate it. Thanks Dave. Great to be here and again, wish you and the whole cube team the best and to all of our clients out there around the world. We wish you the best as well. All right. You're watching the cubes coverage of IBM think 20, 20 digital, the vent. We'll be right back right after this short break. This is Dave Volante.

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston covering IBM thing brought to you by IBM. >>Hi everybody. We're back and this is Dave Vellante and you're watching the cubes continuous coverage of the IBM think 2020 digital events experience Sriram these monotonous here he is the global managing director for government healthcare and life sciences three. Ron, thanks so much for coming on the cube. >>Great to be with you Dave. I wish we were Darren but it's, it's great to be here digitally indeed >>be good to be face to face and in San Francisco but this certainly will help our audience understand what's happening in these critical sectors. I mean you were at the heart of it. I mean these are three sectors and then there are sub sectors in there. Let's try to understand how you're communicating with your clients, what you've been doing in the near term and then I want to really try to understand, you know, what you see coming out of this, but please tell us what's been going on in your, in your world. >>You're right. I mean these sectors are keeping, keeping the engine running right now in terms of keeping society running, right? So if you look at the federal government, the state government, the local government, you look at providers of healthcare, you look at payers, we're making sure that their members are getting the, getting the advice and the service they need. You look at a life sciences companies or rapidly trying to find a cure for this, uh, for this virus. And then you look at education where, um, you know, the educational establishments are trying to work remotely and make sure that our children get the education they need. So kind of existential industries right front and center of this ninety-five, interestingly, they have 95% of IBM has, have continued to work from home and yet we are able to support the core operations of our clients. So if you look at some of the things that we've been doing over the last eight or nine weeks that we've been under this kind of lockdown, um, IBM, IBM is involved in the engine room. >>I would like to call it the engine room of many of these operations, right? Whether it just to keep a city running or a hospital running. Um, our systems, our software, our services teams are engaged in making sure that the core systems that allow those entities to function are actually operational, um, during these times. So we've had no blips. We've been able to support that. And that's a, that's a key part of it. Now, of course, there are extraordinary things we've done on top. For instance, you know, in the first two weeks after the crisis started, we used, um, a supercomputer with the department of energy that you must've heard about, uh, to narrow down over 8,000 compounds that could potentially be cures for the COBIT 19 virus and narrowed down to 80. That could be applicable, right? Um, so sharpening the time and allowing researchers not to focus on 80 compounds and stuff, 8,000 so that we can get a vaccine to market faster. >>And that's tremendous, right? I mean we've, we formed a, um, uh, you know, collaboration, uh, with, with 27 other, uh, partners, uh, that, who are all co innovating, uh, using modeling techniques, uh, to try and find a cure faster. The other end, um, you look at things like what we're doing with the state of New York, where we work for the government, uh, the duet to get 350,000 tablets with the right security software, with the right educational software so that students can continue to learn while, uh, you know, what they are, uh, when they're remote, but the right connectivity. So, um, extremes. And then of course as a backbone, you know, be using, we are starting to see real use of our AI tools, chat bots to stop it, that we have. Uh, we have allowed, uh, uh, customers to use for free. So they began answer that we can, we can consume the latest CDC advice, the latest advice from the governors and the state, and then, um, allow the technology to answer a lot of queries that are coming through, uh, with, with, uh, with citizens being worried about what, where they stand every single day. >>Yeah. So let's kind of break down some of the sectors that you follow. Um, let's start with, with government. I mean, certainly in the United States it's been all about the fiscal policy, the monetary policy, injecting cash into the system, liquidity, you know, supporting the credit markets. Certainly central banks around the world are facing, you know, similar, but somewhat different depending on their financial situations. Um, and so that's been the near term tactical focus and it actually seems to be working pretty well. Uh, you know, the stock market's any indicator, but going forward, I'm interested in your thoughts. You wrote a blog and you basically, it was a call to action to the government to really kind of reinvent its workforce, bringing in, uh, millennials. Um, and, and so my, my, my question is, how do you think the millennial workforce, you know, when we exit this thing, will embrace the government. What does the government have to do to attract millennials who want the latest and greatest technology? I mean, give us your thoughts on that. >>Well, it's an, it's a really interesting question. A couple of years ago I was talking about, uh, this is the time where governments have to have to really transform. They have to change. If you, if you go back in time compared governments to other industries, uh, governments have embraced technology, but it's been still kind of slow, incremental, right? Lots of systems of record, big massive systems that take 10 years, five years to implement. So we've implemented systems record. We've, we've started using data and analytics to kind of inform policymaking, but they tend to be sequential. And I think, uh, you know, coming back to the, the, the changing workforce, uh, what is it? By 2025, 75% of the workforce are going to be millennials, right? Um, and as they come into the workforce, I think they're going to demand that, uh, that we work in new ways in new, um, more integrated, more digitally savvy pace and uh, strange enough, I think this crisis is going to be a, is a proof point, right? >>Um, many governments are working remotely and yet they're functioning okay. Um, the, the, the world of, um, you know, providing policy seems to be working even if you are, if you are remote. So a lot of the naysayers who said we could not operate digit, operate digitally, um, now are starting to starting to get past that, uh, that bias if you like. And so I think as, as digital natives come into the for what we are going to see is this is a Stressless innovation of why do we do things the same way as we've done them for the last 20, 30 years. Um, granted we need to still have the, um, the, the division of policies, make sure that we are enforcing the policies of government. But at the same time, if you look at workflow, uh, this is the time where you can use automation, intelligent workflows, right? >>This is the time where we can use insights about what our citizens need so that services are tuned, a hyper-local are relevant to what the citizen is going through at that particular time. Uh, contextual and, um, are relevant to what, what that individual needs at that particular time. Uh, rather than us having to go to a portal and, uh, submit an application and submit relevant documents and then be told a few hours or a few minutes later then that you've got, you've got approval for something, right? So I think there's this period of restless innovation coming through that is from a citizen engagement perspective, but behind the scenes in terms of how budgeting works, how approvals work, how uh, uh, you know, the divisions between federal, state, local, how the handoffs between agencies work. All of that is going to be restlessly innovative. And, uh, this is the moment I think this is going to be a trigger point. We believe it's going to be a trigger point for that kind of a transformation? >>No, sure. I'm, I've talked to a number of, of CEOs in, in sort of hard hit industries, um, hospitality, you know, certainly, you know, the restaurant business, airlines and, and you know, they just basically have a dial down spending, um, and really just shift to only mission critical activities. Uh, and in your segments it's, it's mixed, right? I mean, obviously government, you use the engine room, uh, analogy before some of use the war room metaphor, but you think about healthcare, the frontline workers. So it's, it's, it's mixed what our CIO is telling you in, in the industries in which you're focused. >>Well, the CIO is right now. I mean, you're going to go through different phases, right? Phase one is just reactive. It's just coping with the, uh, with the situation today where you suddenly have 95%, a hundred percent of your workforce working remote, providing the ability to, it's providing the leadership, the ability to, to work remotely where possible. Um, and it take IBM for instance, you know, we've got 300,000 people around the world, but 95% of whom are working remotely. Um, but we've been, we've been preparing for moments like this where, uh, you know, we've got the tools, we've got the network bandwidth, we've got the security parameters. Uh, we have been modernizing our applications. Um, so you've been going to a hybrid cloud kind of architecture, but you're able to scale up and scale down, stand up additional capacity when you need it. So I think a lot of the CEOs that we talk to are, uh, you know, phase one was all about how do I keep everything running? >>Phase two is how do I prepare for the new norm where I think more collaborative tools are going to come into, into the work environment. Um, CEO's are going to be much more involved in how do I get design in the center of everything that we do no matter what kind of industry. Alright. So, um, it's, it's going gonna be an interesting change as to the role of the CIO going forward. Dave and I think, uh, again, it's a catalyst to saying why do we have to do things the same way we've been doing? Why do we need so many people in an office building doing things in traditional ways? And why can't we use these digital techniques as the new norm? >>Yeah, there are a lot of learnings going on and I think huge opportunities to, to, to, to save money going forward because we've had to do that in the near term. But, but more importantly, it's like how are we going to invest in the future? And that's, that's something that I think a lot of people are beginning now to think about. They haven't had much time to do anything other than think tactically. But now we're at the point where, okay, we're maybe starting to come out of this a little bit, trying to envision how we come back. And organizations I think are beginning to think about, okay, what is our mid to longer term strategy? It's, we're not just going to go back to 2019. So what do we do going forward? So we're starting to spend more cycles and more energy, you know, on that topic. What do you see? >>Yeah, I mean, take every segment of my, uh, my sector, right? Take the education industry, will you, uh, will you spend 60, $70,000 a year to send a child to university, um, when a lot of the learning is available digitally and when, when we've seen that they can learn as much and probably more, uh, you know, more agile manner and follow their interests. So I think the whole education industry is going to leverage digital in a big way. And I think you're going to see partnerships form, you can see more, uh, you're going to see more choice, uh, for the student and for the parents, uh, in the education industry. And so that industry, which has been kind of falling the same type of pattern, uh, you know, for a hundred years, it's suddenly going to reinvent itself. Take the healthcare industry. Um, you know, it's interesting, a lot of providers are following, uh, following staff because elective, uh, elective treatment as really, you know, uh, fallen tremendously. >>Right? On the one hand you have huge demand for covert 19 related, uh, treatment on the other hand, electives have come down. So cost is a big issue. So I, I believe we're going to see M and a activity, uh, in that sector. And as you see that what's going to happen is people are gonna, uh, restlessly reinvent. So w you know, I think telemedicine is going to, is not going to become a reality. I think, um, if you look at the payer space and if you look at the insurance providers, they're all going to be in the market saying, Harbor, how do I capture more members and retain them and how do I give them more choice? Um, and how do I keep them safe? It's interesting, I was speaking to a colleague in Japan, uh, yesterday and he was saying to me in the automotive industry that, um, I was arguing that, you know, you will see a huge downfall. >>Uh, but his argument back was people are actually so afraid of taking public transport that, uh, they're expecting to see a spike in personal transportation. Right? So I think from a government perspective, the kind of policy implications, um, you know, whether there would be economic stimulus related in the short term, governments are going to introduce inefficiencies to get the economy back to where it needs to be. But over a long term I think we're back to these efficiencies. We are going to look at supply chain, there's going to be a postmortem on how do we get where we got to now. And um, so I think in terms of citizen engagement, in terms of supply chain, in terms of back office operations, in terms of how agencies coordinate, um, do stockpiling command and control, all of that is going to change, right? And it's an exciting time in a way to be at the forefront of these industries shaping, shaping the future. >>I want to ask your thoughts on, on education and excuse me, drill into that a little bit. I've actually got pretty personal visibility in sort of let's, let's break it down. Um, you know, secondary universities, uh, nine through 12 and K through six and then you're seeing some definite differences. Uh, I think actually the universities are pretty well set up. They've been doing online courses for quite some time. They've, they've started, you know, revenue streams in that regard and, and so their technology is pretty good and their processes are pretty good at the other end of the spectrum, sort of the K through six, you know, there's a lot of homeschooling going on and, and parents are at home, they're adjusting pretty well. Whether it's young kids with manipulatives or basic math and vocabulary skills, they're able to support that and you know, adjust their work lives accordingly. >>I find in the, in the high school it's, it's really different. I mean it's new to these folks. I had an interesting conversation with my son last night and he was explaining to me, he spends literally hours a day just trying to figure out what he's got to do because every process is different from every teacher. And so that's that sort of fat middle, if you will, which is a critical time, especially for juniors in high school and so forth where that is so new. And I wonder what you're seeing and maybe those three sectors, is that sort of consistent with what you see and, and what do you see coming out of this? >>I think it's, it's broadly consistent and I have personally experienced, I have one university grade, uh, university senior and I have a high school senior and I see pretty much the same pattern no matter which part of the world they're in. Right? I, I do believe that, um, you know, this notion of choice for students and how they learn and making curriculum customized to get the best out of students is the new reality. How fast we will get there. How do you get there? It's not a linear line. I think what is going to happen is you're going to, you're going to see partnerships between, uh, content providers. You're going to see partnerships between platform providers and you're going to see these educational institutions, uh, less restless. The reinvent to say, okay, this particular student learns in this way and this is, this is how I shape a personalized curriculum, but still achieving a minimum outcome. Right? I think that's going to come, but it's going to take a few years to get there. >>I think it was a really interesting observations. I mean, many children that I observed today are sort of autodidactic and if you give them the tooling to actually set their own learning curriculum, they'll, they'll absorb that and obviously the technology has gotta be there to support it. So it's sort of hitting the escape key. Let's sort of end on that. I mean, in terms of just IBM, how you're positioning in the industries that you're focused on to help people take this new technology journey. As they said, we're not going back to the last decade. It's a whole new world that we're going to going to come out of this post. Coven, how do you see IBM has positioned their Sri round? >>Dave, I think I'd be positioned brilliantly. Um, as you know, we've, Arvind Christianized is our new CEO and, uh, he, he recently talked about this on CNBC. So if you look at the core platforms that we've been building, right? Um, so CA occupies an industry, whether it's, whether it be government, healthcare, life sciences or education are going to look for speed. They're going to look for agility, they're going to look to change processes quickly so they can, they can react to situations like this in the future in a much more agile way, right? In order to do that, their it systems, their applications, their infrastructure needs to scale up and down needs to be, uh, you need to be able to configure things in a way where you can change parameters. You can change policies without having to read a long time, right? And so if you think about things like HyperCloud our investment in, uh, in, in red hat, uh, our, uh, our, uh, position on data and open technologies and, um, you know, our policies around making sure that, that our client's data and insights are their insights and we don't, we don't want to taste that. >>On of those things. Our investments in blockchain are deep, deep, uh, incumbency in services. But there'd our technology services, our consulting services, our deep industry knowledge, allowing all of these technologies to be used at to solve these problems. Um, I think we are really well positioned and, uh, you know, a great example is the New York example, right? So, uh, getting 350,000 students to work in a completely new way in a matter of two weeks. It's not something that every single company can do. It's not just a matter of providing the tech, the tool itself, it's the content, it's the consumption, it's the design must experience. And that's where a company like IBM can bring everything together. And then you have the massive issues of government, like social reform, like mental health, like making sure the stimulus money is going to the people who need it the most, um, in, in the most useful way. And that's where I work between industries, between government and banks and other industries really comes to, comes to fruition. So I think we have the technology but the services depth. And I think we've got the relevance of the industry to make a difference. And I'm excited about the future. >>Well, it's interesting that you mentioned, you know, the basically one of my takeaways is that you've got to be agile. You've gotta be flexible. You, you've been in the consulting business for most of your career and in the early part of your career. And even up until, you know, maybe recently we were automating processes that we knew well, but today the processes are, we so much is unknown. And so you've got to move fast. You've got to be agile, you've got to experiment, uh, and apply that sort of, you know, test, experiment, methodology and iterate and have that continuous improvement. That's a different world than what we've known. Obviously. You know, as I say, you've seen this over the decades. Uh, your final thoughts on, uh, on the future. >>Well, my final thoughts are, um, yeah, you're exactly right. I mean, if I take a simple example, right, that, that, uh, controls how quickly the commerce works. Think about simple things like bill of lading. Uh, the government has to issue a federal government has to prove that a state government has to prove it and local government has to prove it. Why? That's the way we've been doing it for a long time. Right? There are control points, but to your point, imagine if you can shorten that from a seven day cycle to a seven second cycle. The impact on commerce, the impact on GDP, and this is one simple process. This is the time for us to re to, to, to break it all apart and say why not do something differently? And the technology is right. The CA, the AI is getting more and more and more mature and you've got interesting things like quantum to look forward to. So I think the timing is right for, for reinventing, uh, the core of this industry. >>Yeah, I think they really are. I mean, it's difficult as this crisis has been a lot of opportunities going to present coming out of a tree room. Thanks so much for coming on the cube and making this happen. Really appreciate your time. It's great to be here. Thank you for having me. Dave, you're very welcome and thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Volante for the Cuban or continuous coverage of the IBM think 2020 digital event experience. Keep it right there and we right back right after this short break.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a Cube Conversation. >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto Studios today, having a Cube Conversation, you know, with the COVID situation going on we've had to change our business and go pretty much 100% digital. And as part of that process, we wanted to reach out to our community, and talk to some of the leaders out there, because I think leadership in troubling times is even more amplified in it's importance. So we're excited to be joined today by two leaders in our community. First one being John Chambers, a very familiar face from many, many years at Cisco, who's now the founder and CEO of JC2 Ventures. John, great to see you. >> Jeff, it's a pleasure to be with you again. >> Absolutely. And joining him is Umesh Sachdev, he's the co-founder and CEO of Uniphore. First time on theCUBE, Umesh, great to meet you. >> Jeff, thank you for having me, it's great to be with you. >> You as well, and I had one of your great people on the other day, talking about CX, and I think CX is the whole solution. Why did Uber beat cabs, do you want to stand on a corner and raise your hand in the rain? Or do you want to know when the guy's going to come pick you up, in just a couple minutes? So anyway, welcome. So let's jump into it. John, one of your things, that you talked about last time we talked, I think it was in October, wow how the world has changed. >> Yes. >> Is about having a playbook, and really, you know, kind of thinking about what you want to do before it's time to actually do it, and having some type of a script, and some type of direction, and some type of structure, as to how you respond to situations. Well there's nothing like a disaster to really fire off, you know, the need to shift gears, and go to kind of into a playbook mode. So I wonder if you could share with the viewers, kind of what is your playbook, you've been through a couple of these bumps. Not necessarily like COVID-19, but you've seen a couple bumps over your career. >> So it's my pleasure Jeff. What I'll do is kind of outline how I believe you use an innovation playbook on everything from acquisitions, to digitizing a company, to dealing with crisis. Let's focus on the playbook for crisis. You are right, and I'm not talking about my age, (John laughing) but this is my sixth financial crisis, and been through the late 1990s with the Asian financial crisis, came out of it even stronger at Cisco. Like everybody else we got knocked down in the 2001 tech bubble, came back from it even stronger. Then in 2008, 2009, Great Recession. We came through that one very, very strong, and we saw that one coming. It's my fourth major health crisis. Some of them turned out to be pretty small. I was in Mexico when the bird pandemic hit, with the President of Mexico, when we thought it was going to be terrible. We literally had to cancel the meetings that evening. That's why Cisco built the PLAR Presence. I was in Brazil for the issue with the Zika virus, that never really developed much, and the Olympics went on there, and I only saw one mosquito during the event. It bit me. But what I'm sharing with you is I've seen this movie again and again. And then, with supply chain, which not many people were talking about yet, supply chain crisis, like we saw in Japan with the Tsunami. What's happening this time is you're seeing all three at one time, and they're occurring even faster. So the playbook is pretty simple in crisis management, and then it would be fun to put Umesh on the spot and say how closely did you follow it? Did you agree with issues, or did you disagree, et cetera, on it. Now I won't mention, Umesh, that you've got a review coming up shortly from your board, so that should not affect your answer at all. But the first playbook is being realistic, how much was self-inflicted, how much was market. This one's largely market, but if you had problems before, you got to address them at the same time. The second thing is what are the five to seven things that are material, what you're going to do to lead through this crisis. That's everything from expense management, to cash preservation. It's about how do you interface to your employees, and how do you build on culture. It's about how do you interface to your customers as they change from their top priority being growth and innovation, to a top priority being cost savings, and the ability to really keep their current revenue streams from churning and moving. And it's about literally, how do make your big bets for what you want to look like as you move out of this market. Then it's how do you communicate that to your employees, to your shareholders, to your customers, to your partners. Painting the picture of what you look like as you come out. As basic as that sounds, that's what crisis management is all about. Don't hide, be visible, CEOs should take the role on implementing that playbook. Umesh to you, do you agree? And have fun with it a little bit, I like the give and take. >> I want to see the playbook, do you have it there, just below the camera? (Jeff laughing) >> I have it right here by my side. I will tell you, Jeff, in crisis times and difficult times like these, you count all the things that go right for you, you count your blessings. And one of the blessings that I have, as a CEO, is to have John Chambers as my mentor, by my side, sharing not just the learning that he had through the crisis, but talking through this, with me on a regular basis. I've read John's book more than a few times, I bet more than anybody in the world, I've read it over and over. And that, to me, is preparation going into this mode. One of the things that John has always taught me is when times get difficult, you get calmer than usual. It's one thing that when you're cruising on the freeway and you're asked to put the brakes, but it's quite another when you're in rocket ship, and accelerating, which is what my company situation was in the month of January. We were coming out of a year of 300% growth, we were driving towards another 300% growth, hiring tremendously, at a high pace. Winning customers at a high pace, and then this hit us. And so what I had to do, from a playbook perspective, is, you know, take a deep breath, and just for a couple of days, just slow down, and calmly look at the situation. My first few steps were, I reached out to 15 of our top customers, the CEOs, and give them calls, and said let's just talk about what you're seeing, and what we are observing in our business. We get a sense of where they are in their businesses. We had the benefit, my co-founder works out of Singapore, and runs our Asia business. We had the benefit of picking up the sign probably a month before everyone else did it in the U.S. I was with John in Australia, and I was telling John that "John, something unusual is happening, "a couple of our customers in these countries in Asia "are starting to tell us they would do the deal "a quarter later." And it's one thing when one of them says it, it's another when six of them say it together. And John obviously has seen this movie, he could connect the dots early. He told me to prepare, he told the rest of the portfolio companies that are in his investment group to start preparing. We then went to the playbook that John spoke of, being visible. For me, culture and communication take front seat. We have employees in ten different countries, we have offices, and very quickly, even before the governments mandated, we had all of them work, you know, go work from home, and be remote, because employee safety and health was the number one priority. We did our first virtual all-hands meeting on Zoom. We had about 240 people join in from around the world. And my job as CEO, usually our all-hands meeting were different functional leaders, different people in the group talk to the team about their initiatives. This all-hands was almost entirely run by me, addressing the whole company about what's going to be the situation from my lens, what have we learned. Be very factual. At the same time, communicating to the team that because of the fact that we raised our funding the last year, it was a good amount of money, we still have a lot of that in the bank, so we going to be very secure. At the same time, our customers are probably going to need us more than ever. Call centers are in more demand than ever, people can't walk up to a bank branch, they can't go up to a hospital without taking an appointment. So the first thing everyone is doing is trying to reach call centers. There aren't enough people, and anyways the work force that call centers have around the world, are 50% working from home, so the capacity has dropped. So our responsibility almost, is to step up, and have our AI and automation products available to as many call centers as we can. So as we are planning our own business continuity, and making sure every single employee is safe, the message to my team was we also have to be aggressive and making sure we are more out there, and more available, to our customers, that would also mean business growth for us. But first, and foremost is for us to be responsible citizens, and just make it available where it's needed. As we did that, I quickly went back to my leadership team, and again, the learning from John is usually it's more of a consensus driven approach, we go around the table, talk about a topic for a couple of hours, get the consensus, and move out of the room. My leadership meetings, they have become more frequent, we get together once a week, on video call with my executive leaders, and it's largely these days run by me. I broke down the team into five different war rooms, with different objectives. One of them we called it the preservation, we said one leader, supported by others will take the responsibility of making sure every single employee, their families, and our current customers, are addressed, taken care of. So we made somebody lead that group. Another group was made responsible for growth. Business needs to, you know, in a company that's growing at 300%, and we still have the opportunity, because call centers need us more than ever, we wanted to make sure we are responding to growth, and not just hunkering down, and, you know, ignoring the opportunity. So we had a second war room take care of the growth. And a third war room, lead by the head of finance, to look at all the financial scenarios, do the stress tests, and see if we are going to be ready for any eventuality that's going to come. Because, you know, we have a huge amount of people, who work at Uniphore around the world, and we wanted to make sure their well being is taken care of. So from being over communicative, to the team and customers, and being out there personally, to making sure we break down the teams. We have tremendous talent, and we let different people, set of people, run different set of priorities, and report back to me more frequently. And now, as we have settled into this rhythm, Jeff, you know, as we've been in, at least in the Bay area here, we've been shelter in place for about a month now. As we are in the rhythm, we are beginning to do virtual happy hours, every Thursday evening. Right after this call, I get together with my team with a glass of wine, and we get together, we talk every but work, and every employee, it's not divided by functions, or leadership, and we are getting the rhythm back into the organization. So we've gone and adjusted in the crisis, I would say very well. And the business is just humming along, as we had anticipated, going into this crisis. But I would say, if I didn't have John by my side, if I hadn't read his book, the number of times that I have, every plane ride we've done together, every place we've gone together, John has spoken about war stories. About the 2001, about 2008, and until you face the first one of your own, just like I did right now, you don't appreciate when John says leadership is lonely. But having him by our side makes it easier. >> Well I'm sure he's told you the Jack Welch story, right? That you've quoted before, John, where Jack told you that you're not really a good leader, yet, until you've been tested, right. So you go through some tough stuff, it's not that hard to lead on an upward to the right curve, it's when things get a little challenging that the real leadership shines through. >> Completely agree, and Jack said it the best, we were on our way to becoming the most valuable company in the world, he looked me in the eye and said "John, you have a very good company." And I knew he was about to give me a teaching moment, and I said "What does it take to have a great one?" He said a near death experience. And I thought I did that in '97, and some of the other management, and he said, "No, it's when you went through something "like we went through in 2001, "which many of our peers did die in." And we were knocked down really hard. When we came back from it, you get better. But what you see in Umesh is a very humble, young CEO. I have to remember he's only 34 years old, because his maturity is like he's 50, and he's seen it before. As you tell, he's like a sponge on learning, and he doesn't mind challenging. And what what he didn't say, in his humbleness, is they had the best month in March ever. And again, well over 300% versus the same quarter a year ago. So it shows you, if you're in the right spot, i.e. artificial intelligence, i.e. cost savings, i.e. customer relationship with their customers, how you can grow even during the tough times, and perhaps set a bold vision, based upon facts and a execution plan that very few companies will be able to deliver on today. So off to a great start, and you can see why I'm so honored and proud to be his strategic partner, and his coach. >> Well it's interesting, right, the human toll of this crisis is horrible, and there's a lot of people getting sick, and a lot of people are dying, and all the estimations are a lot more are going to die this month, as hopefully we get over the hump of some of these curves. So that aside, you know, we're here talking kind of more about the, kind of, the business of this thing. And it's really interesting kind of what a catalyst COVID has become, in terms of digital transformation. You know, we've been talking about new ways to work for years, and years, and years, and digital transformation, and all these kind of things. You mentioned the Cisco telepresence was out years, and decades ago. I mean I worked in Mitsubishi, we had a phone camera in 1986, I looked it up today, it was ridiculous, didn't work. But now, it's here, right. Now working from home is here. Umesh mentioned, you know, these huge call centers, now everybody's got to go home. Do they have infrastructure to go home? Do they have a place to work at home? Do they have support to go home? Teachers are now being forced, from K-12, and I know it's a hot topic for you, John, to teach from home. Teach on Zoom, with no time to prep, no time to really think it through. It's just like the kids aren't coming back, we got to learn it. You know I think this is such a transformational moment, and to your point, if this goes on for weeks, and weeks, and months, and months, which I think we all are in agreement that it will. I think you said, John, you know, many, many quarters. As people get new habits, and get into this new flow, I don't think they're going to go back back to the old ways. So I think it's a real, you know, kind of forcing function for digital transformation. And it's, you can't, you can't sit on the sidelines, cause your people can't come to the office anymore. >> So you've raised a number of questions, and I'll let Umesh handle the tough part of it. I will answer the easy part, which is I think this is the new normal. And I think it's here now, and the question is are you ready for it. And as you think about what we're really saying is the video sessions will become such an integral part of our daily lives, that we will not go back to having to do 90% of our work physically. Today alone I've done seven major group meetings, on Zoom, and Google Hangouts, and Cisco Webex. I've done six meetings with individuals, or the key CEOs of my portfolio. So that part is here to stay. Now what's going to be fascinating is does that also lead into digitization of our company, or do the companies make the mistake of saying I'm going to use this piece, because it's so obvious, and I get it, in terms of effectiveness, but I'm not going to change the other things in my normal work, in my normal business. This is why, unfortunately, I think you will see, we originally said, Jeff, you remember, 40% maybe as high as 45% of the Fortune 500 wouldn't exist in a decade. And perhaps 70% of the start-ups wouldn't exist in a decade, that are venture capital backed. I now think, unfortunately, you're going to see 20-35% of the start-ups not exist in 2 years, and I think it's going to shock you with the number of Fortune 500 companies that do not make this transition. So where you're leading this, that I completely agree with, is the ability to take this terrible event, with all of the issues, and again thank our healthcare workers for what they've been able to do to help so many people, and deal with the world the way it is. As my parents who are doctors taught me to do, not the way we wish it was. And then get your facts, prepare for the changes, and get ready for the future. The key would be how many companies do this. On the area Umesh has responsibility for, customer experience, I think you're going to see almost all companies focus on that. So it can be an example of perhaps how large companies learn to use the new technology, not just video capability, but AI, assistance for the agents, and then once they get the feel for it, just like we got the feel for these meetings, change their rhythm entirely. It was a dinner in New York, virtually, when we stopped, six weeks ago, traveling, that was supposed to be a bunch of board meetings, customer meetings, that was easy. But we were supposed to have a dinner with Shake Shack's CEO, and we were supposed to have him come out and show how he does cool innovation. We had a bunch of enterprise companies, and a bunch of media, and subject matter expertise, we ended up canceling it, and then we said why not do it virtually? And to your point, we did it in 24 different locations. Half the people, remember six weeks ago, had never even used Zoom. We had milk shakes, and hamburgers, and french fries delivered to their home. And it was one of the best two hour meetings I've seen. The future is this now. It's going to change dramatically, and Umesh, I think, is going to be at the front edge of how enterprise companies understand how their relationship with their customers is going to completely transform, using AI, conversational AI capability, speech recognition, et cetera. >> Yeah, I mean, Umesh, we haven't even really got into Uniphore, or what you guys are all about. But, you know, you're supporting call centers, you're using natural language technology, both on the inbound and all that, give us the overview, but you're playing on so many kind of innovation spaces, you know, the main interaction now with customers, and a brand, is either through the mobile phone, or through a call center, right. And that's becoming more, and increasingly, digitized. The ability to have a voice interaction, with a machine. Fascinating, and really, I think, revolutionary, and kind of taking, you know, getting us away from these stupid qwerty keyboards, which are supposed to slow us down on purpose. It's still the funniest thing ever, that we're still using these qwerty keyboards. So I wonder if you can share with us a little bit about, you know, kind of your vision of natural language, and how that changes the interaction with people, and machines. I think your TED Talk was really powerful, and I couldn't help but think of, you know, kind of mobile versus land lines, in terms of transformation. Transforming telecommunications in rural, and hard to serve areas, and then actually then adding the AI piece, to not only make it better for the front end person, but actually make it for the person servicing the account. >> Absolutely Jeff, so Uniphore, the company that I founded in 2008. We were talking about it's such a coincidence that I founded the company in 2008, the year of the Great Recession, and here we are again, talking in midst of the impact that we all have because of COVID. Uniphore does artificial intelligence and automation products, for the customer service industry. Call centers, as we know it, have fundamentally, for the last 20, 30 years, not have had a major technology disruption. We've seen a couple of ways of business model disruption, where call centers, you know, started to become offshore, in locations in Asia, India, and Mexico. Where our calls started to get routed around the world internationally, but fundamentally, the core technology in call centers, up until very recently, hadn't seen a major shift. With artificial intelligence, with natural language processings, speech recognition, available in over 100 languages. And, you know, in the last year or so, automation, and RPA, sort of adding to that mix, there's a whole new opportunity to re-think what customer service will mean to us, more in the future. As I think about the next five to seven years, with 5G happening, with 15 billion connected devices, you know, my five year old daughter, she the first thing she does when she enters the house from a playground, she goes to talk to her friend called Alexa. She speaks to Alexa. So, you know, these next generation of users, and technology users will grow up with AI, and voice, and NLP, all around us. And so their expectation of customer service and customer experience is going to be quantum times higher than some of us have, from our brands. I mean, today when a microwave or a TV doesn't work in our homes, our instinct could be to either go to the website of the brand, and try to do a chat with the agent, or do an 800 number phone call, and get them to visit the house to fix the TV. With, like I said with 5G, with TV, and microwave, and refrigerator becoming intelligent devices, you know, I could totally see my daughter telling the microwave "Why aren't you working?" And, you know, that question might still get routed to a remote contact center. Now the whole concept of contact center, the word has center in it, which means, in the past, we used to have these physical, massive locations, where people used to come in and put on their headsets to receive calls. Like John said, more than ever, we will see these centers become dispersed, and virtual. The channels with which these queries will come in would no more be just a phone, it would be the microwave, the car, the fridge. And the receivers of these calls would be anywhere in the world, sitting in their home, or sitting on a holiday in the Himalayas, and answering these situations to us. You know, I was reading, just for everyone to realize how drastic this shift has been, for the customer service industry. There are over 14 million workers, who work in contact centers around the world. Like I said, the word center means something here. All of them, right now, are working remote. This industry was never designed to work remote. Enterprises who fundamentally didn't plan for this. To your point Jeff, who thought digitization or automation, was a project they could have picked next year, or they were sitting on the fence, will now know more have a choice to make this adjustment. There's a report by a top analyst firm that said by 2023, up to 30% of customer service representatives would be remote. Well guess what, we just way blew past that number right away. And most of the CEOs that I talked to recently tell me that now that this shift has happened, about 40% of their workers will probably never return back to the office. They will always remain a permanent virtual workforce. Now when the workforce is remote, you need all the tools and technology, and AI, that A, if on any given day, 7-10% of your workforce calls in sick, you need bots, like the Amazon's Alexa, taking over a full conversation. Uniphore has a product called Akira, which does that in call centers. Most often, when these call center workers are talking, we have the experience of being put on hold, because call center workers have to type in something on their keyboard, and take notes. Well guess what, today AI and automation can assist them in doing that, making the call shorter, allowing the call center workers to take a lot more calls in the same time frame. And I don't know your experience, but, you know, a couple of weekends ago, the modem in my house wasn't working. I had a seven hour wait time to my service provider. Seven hour. I started calling at 8:30, it was somewhere around 3-4:00, finally, after call backs, wait, call back, wait, that it finally got resolved. It was just a small thing, I just couldn't get to the representative. So the enterprises are truly struggling, technology can help. They weren't designed to go remote, think about it, some of the unique challenges that I've heard now, from my customers, is that how do I know that my call center representative, who I've trained over years to be so nice, and empathetic, when they take a pee break, or a bio break, they don't get their 10 year old son to attend a call. How do I know that? Because now I can no more physically check in on them. How do I know that if I'm a bank, there's compliance? There's nothing being said that isn't being, is, you know, supposed to be said, because in a center, in an office, a supervisor can listen in. When everyone's remote, you can't do that. So AI, automation, monitoring, supporting, aiding human beings to take calls much better, and drive automation, as well as AI take over parts of a complete call, by the way of being a bot like Alexa, are sort of the things that Uniphore does, and I just feel that this is a permanent shift that we are seeing. While it's happening because of a terrible reason, the virus, that's affecting human beings, but the shift in business and behavior, is going to be permanent in this industry. >> Yeah, I think so, you know it's funny, I had Marten Mickos on, or excuse me, yeah, Marten Mickos, as part of this series. And I asked him, he's been doing distributed companies since he was doing MySQL, before Sun bought them. And he's, he was funny, it's like actually easier to fake it in an office, than when you're at home, because at home all you have to show is your deliverables. You can't look busy, you can't be going to meetings, you can't be doing things at your computer. All you have to show is your output. He said it's actually much more efficient, and it drives people, you know, to manage to the output, manage to what you want. But I want to shift gears a little bit, before we let you go, and really talk a little bit about the role of government. And John, I know you've been very involved with the Indian government, and the French government, trying to help them, in their kind of entrepreneurial pursuits, and Uniphore, I think, was founded in India, right, before you moved over here. You know we've got this huge stimulus package coming from the U.S. government, to try to help, as people, you know, can't pay their mortgage, a lot of people aren't so fortunate to be in digital businesses. It's two trillion dollars, so as kind of a thought experiment, I'm like well how much is two trillion dollars? And I did the cash balance of the FAANG companies. Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Alphabet, just looking at Yahoo Finance, the latest one that was there. It's 333 billion, compared to two trillion. Even when you add Microsoft's 133 billion on top, it's still shy, it's still shy of 500 billion. You know, and really, the federal government is really the only people in a position to make kind of sweeping, these types of investments. But should we be scared? Should we be worried about, you know, kind of this big shift in control? And should, do you think these companies with these big balance sheets, as you said John, priorities change a little bit. Should it be, keep that money to pay the people, so that they can stay employed and pay their mortgage, and go buy groceries, and maybe get take out from their favorite restaurant, versus, you know, kind of what we've seen in the past, where there's a lot more, you know, stock buy backs, and kind of other uses of these cash. As you said, if it's a crisis, and you got to cut to survive, you got to do that. But clearly some of these other companies are not in that position. >> So you, let me break it into two pieces, Jeff, if I may. The first is for the first time in my lifetime I have seen the federal government and federal agencies move very rapidly. And if you would have told me government could move with the speed we've seen over the last three months, I would have said probably not. The fed was ahead of both the initial interest rate cuts, and the fed was ahead in terms of the slowing down, i.e. your 2 trillion discussion, by central banks here, and around the world. But right behind it was the Treasury, which put on 4 trillion on top of that. And only governments can move in this way, but the coordination with government and businesses, and the citizens, has been remarkable. And the citizens being willing to shelter in place. To your question about India, Prime Minister Modi spent the last five years digitizing his country. And he put in place the most bandwidth of any country in the world, and literally did transformation of the currency to a virtual currency, so that people could get paid online, et cetera, within it. He then looked at start-ups and job creation, and he positioned this when an opportunity or problem came along, to be able to perhaps navigate through it in a way that other countries might struggle. I would argue President Macron in France is doing a remarkable job with his innovation economy, but also saying how do you preserve jobs. So you suddenly see government doing something that no business can do, with the scale, and the speed, and a equal approach. But at the same time, may of these companies, and being very candid, that some people might have associated with tech for good, or with tech for challenges, have been unbelievably generous in giving both from the CEOs pockets perspective, and number two and three founders perspective, as well as a company giving to the CDC, and giving to people to help create jobs. So I actually like this opportunity for tech to regain its image of being good for everybody in the world, and leadership within the world. And I think it's a unique opportunity. For my start-ups, I've been so proud, Jeff. I didn't have to tell them to go do the right thing with their employees, I didn't have to tell them that you got to treat people, human lives first, the economy second, but we can do both in parallel. And you saw companies like Sprinklr suddenly say how can I help the World Health Organization anticipate through social media, where the next spread of the virus is going to be? A company, like Bloom Energy, with what KR did there, rebuilding all of the ventilators that were broken here in California, of which about 40% were, out of the stock that they got, because it had been in storage for so long, and doing it for all of California in their manufacturing plant, at cost. A company like Aspire Foods, a cricket company down in Texas, who does 3D capabilities, taking part of their production in 3D, and saying how many thousand masks can I generate, per week, using 3D printers. You watch what Umesh has done, and how he literally is changing peoples lives, and making that experience, instead of being a negative from working at home, perhaps to a positive, and increasing the customer loyalty in the process, as opposed to when you got a seven hour wait time on a line. Not only are you probably not going to order anything else from that company, you're probably going to change it. So what is fascinating to me is I believe companies owe an obligation to be successful, to their employees, and to their shareholders, but also to give back to society. And it's one of the things I'm most proud about the portfolio companies that I'm a part of, and why I'm so proud of what Umesh is doing, in both a economically successful environment, but really giving back and making a difference. >> Yeah, I mean, there's again, there's all the doctor stuff, and the medical stuff, which I'm not qualified to really talk about. Thankfully we have good professionals that have the data, and the knowledge, and know what to do, and got out ahead of the social distancing, et cetera, but on the backside, it really looks like a big data problem in so many ways, right. And now we have massive amounts of compute at places like Amazon, and Google, and we have all types of machine learning and AI to figure out, you know, there's kind of resource allocation, whether that be hospital beds, or ventilators, or doctors, or nurses, and trying to figure out how to sort that all out. But then all of the, you know, genome work, and you know, kind of all that big heavy lifting data crunching, you know, CPU consuming work, that hopefully is accelerating the vaccine. Because I don't know how we get all the way out of this until, it just seems like kind of race to the vaccine, or massive testing, so we know that it's not going to spike up. So it seems like there is a real opportunity, it's not necessarily Kaiser building ships, or Ford building planes, but there is a role for tech to play in trying to combat this thing, and bring it under control. Umesh, I wonder if you could just kind of contrast being from India, and now being in the States for a couple years. Anything kind of jump out to you, in terms of the differences in what you're hearing back home, in the way this has been handled? >> You know, it's been very interesting, Jeff, I'm sure everyone is concerned that India, for many reasons, so far hasn't become a big hot spot yet. And, you know, we can hope and pray that that remains to be the case. There are many things that the government back home has done, I think India took lessons from what they saw in Europe, and the U.S, and China. They went into a countrywide lockdown pretty early, you know, pretty much when they were lower than a two hundred positive tested cases, the country went into lockdown. And remember this is a 1.5 billion people all together going into lockdown. What I've seen in the U.S. is that, you know, California thankfully reacted fast. We've all been sheltered in place, there's cabin fever for all of us, but you know, I'm sure at the end of the day, we're going to be thankful for the steps that are taken. Both by the administration at the state level, at the federal level, and the medical doctors, who are doing everything they can. But India, on the other hand, has taken the more aggressive stance, in terms of doing a country lockdown. We just last evening went live at a University in the city of Chennai, where Uniphore was born. The government came out with the request, much like the U.S., where they're government departments were getting a surge of traffic about information about COVID, the hospitals that are serving, what beds are available, where is the testing? We stood up a voice bot with AI, in less than a week, in three languages. Which even before the government started to advertise, we started to get thousands of calls. And this is AI answering these questions for the citizens, in doing so. So it goes back to your point of there's a real opportunity of using all the technology that the world has today, to be put to good use. And at the same time, it's really partnering meaningfully with government, in India, in Singapore, in Vietnam, and here in the U.S., to make sure that happens on, you know, John's coaching and nudging, I became a part of the U.S.-India Strategic Partnership Forum, which is truly a premier trade and commerce body between U.S. and India. And I, today, co-chaired the start-up program with, you know, the top start-ups between U.S. and India, being part of that program. And I think we got, again, tremendously fortunate, and lucky with the timeline. We started working on this start-up program between U.S. and India, and getting the start-ups together, two quarters ago, and as this new regulation with the government support, and the news about the two trillion dollar packages coming out, and the support for small businesses, we could quickly get some of the questions answered for the start-ups. Had we not created this body, which had the ability to poll the Treasury Department, and say here are questions, can start-ups do A, B, and C? What do you have by way of regulation? And I think as a response to one of our letters, on Monday the Treasury put out an FAQ on their website, which makes it super clear for start-ups and small businesses, to figure out whether they qualify or they don't qualify. So I think there's ton that both from a individual company, and the technology that each one of us have, but also as a community, how do we, all of us, meaningfully get together, as a community, and just drive benefit, both for our people, for the economy, and for our countries. Wherever we have the businesses, like I said in the U.S., or in India, or parts of Asia. >> Yeah, it's interesting. So, this is a great conversation, I could talk to you guys all night long, but I probably would hear about it later, so we'll wrap it, but I just want to kind of close on the following thought, which is really, as you've talked about before John, and as Umesh as you're now living, you know, when we go through these disruptions, things do get changed, and as you said a lot of people, and companies don't get through it. On the other hand many companies are birthed from it, right, people that are kind of on the new trend, and are in a good position to take advantage, and it's not that you're laughing over the people that didn't make it, but it does stir up the pot, and it sounds like, Umesh, you're in a really good position to take advantage of this new kind of virtual world, this new digital transformation, that's just now waiting anymore. I love your stat, they were going to move X% out of the call center over some period of time, and then it's basically snap your fingers, everybody out, without much planning. So just give you the final word, you know, kind of advice for people, as they're looking forward, and Umesh, we'll get you on another time, because I want to go deep diving in natural language, I think that's just a fascinating topic in the way that people are going to interact with machines and get rid of the stupid qwerty keyboard. But let me get kind of your last thoughts as we wrap this segment. Umesh we'll let you go first. >> Umesh, you want to go first? >> I'll go first. My last thoughts are first for the entrepreneurs, everyone who's sort of going through this together. I think in difficult times is when real heroes are born. I read a quote that when it's a sunny day, you can't overtake too many cars, but when it's raining you have a real opportunity. And the other one that I read was when fishermen can't go out fishing, because of the high tide, they come back, and mend their nets, and be ready for the time that they can go out. So I think there's no easy way to say, this is a difficult time for the economy, health wise, I hope that, you know, we can contain the damage that's being done through the virus, but some of us have the opportunity to really take our products and technology out there, more than usual. Uniphore, particularly, has a unique opportunity, the contact center industry just cannot keep up with the traffic that it's seeing. Around the world, across US, across Asia, across India, and the need for AI and automation would never be pronounced more than it is today. As much as it's a great business opportunity, it's more of a responsibility, as I see it. There can be scale up as fast as the demand is coming, and really come out of this with a much stronger business model. John has always told me in final words you always paint the picture of what you want to be, a year or two out. And I see Uniphore being a much stronger AI plus automation company, in the customer service space, really transforming the face of call centers, and customer service. Which have been forced to rethink their core business value in the last few weeks. And, you know, every fence sitter who would think that digitalization and automation was an option that they could think of in the future years, would be forced to make those decisions now. And I'm just making sure that my team, and my company, and I, am ready to gear to that great responsibility and opportunity that's ahead of us. >> John, give you the final word. >> Say Jeff, I don't know if you can still hear me, we went blank there, maybe for me to follow up. >> We gotcha. >> Shimon Peres taught me a lot about life, and dealing with life the way it is, not the way you wish it was. So did my parents, but he also taught me it always looks darkest just before the tide switches, and you move on to victory. I think the challenges in front of us are huge, I think our nation knows how to deal with that, I do believe the government has moved largely pretty effectively, to give us the impetus to move, and then if we continue to flatten the curve on the issues with the pandemic, if we get some therapeutic drugs that dramatically reduce the risk of death, for people that get the challenges the worst, and over time a vaccine, I think you look to the future, America will rebound, it will be rebounding around start-ups, new job creation, using technology in every business. So not only is there a light at the tunnel, at the end of the tunnel, I think we will emerge from this a stronger nation, a stronger start-up community. But it depends on how well we work together as a group, and I just want to say to Umesh, it's an honor to be your coach, and I learn from you as much as I give back. Jeff, as always, you do a great job. Thank you for your time today. >> Thank you both, and I look forward to our next catch up. Stay safe, wash your hands, and thanks for spending some time with us. >> And I just want to say I hope and pray that all of us can get together in Palo Alto real quick, and in person, and doing fist bumps, not shake hands or probably a namaste. Thank you, it's an honor. >> Thank you very much. All right, that was John and Umesh, you're watching theCUBE from our Palo Alto Studios, thanks for tuning in, stay safe, wash your hands, keep away from people that you're not that familiar with, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching. (calm music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE conversation here in the Palo Alto studios for theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, the host. We're here during this time where everyone's sheltering in place during the COVID-19 crisis. We're getting the interviews out and getting the stories that matter for you. It's theCUBE's mission just to share and extract the data from, signal from the noise, and share that with you. Of course the conversation here is about how the data analytics are being used. We have a great friend and CUBE alum, Bruno Kurtic, VP, founding VP of Product and Strategy for Sumo Logic, a leader in analytics. We've been following you guys, kind of going back I think many, many years, around big data, now with AI and machine learning. You guys are an industry leader. Bruno, thanks for spending the time to come on theCUBE, I know you're sheltering in place. Thanks for coming on. >> You're welcome, pleasure. >> Obviously with the crisis, the work at home has really highlighted the at-scale problem, right? We've been having many conversations on theCUBE of cybersecurity at scale, because now the endpoint protection business has been exploding, literally, a lot of pressure of malware. A convenient crime time for those hackers. You're starting to see cloud failure. Google had 18 hours of downtime. Azure's got some downtime. I think Amazon's the only one that haven't had any downtime. But everything is being at scale now, because the new work environment is actually putting pressure on the industry, not only just the financial pressure of people losing their jobs or the hiring freezes, but now the focus is staying in business and getting through this. But the pressure points of scale are starting to show. And working at home is one of them. Analytics has become a big part of it. Can you share your perspective of how people using analytics to get through this, because now the scale of the problem-solving is there with analytics. It's in charts on the virus, exponential curves, people want to know the impact of their business in all this. What's your view on this situation? >> Yeah. The world has changed so quickly. Analytics has always been important. But there are really two aspects of analytics that are important right now. A lot of our enterprises today, obviously, as you said, are switching to this sort of remote workforce. Everybody who was local is now remote, so, people are working from home. That is putting stress on the systems that support that working from home. It's putting stress on infrastructure, things like VPNs and networks and things like that because they're carrying more bits and bytes. It's putting stress on productivity tools, things like cloud provider tools, things like Office 365, and Google Drive, and Salesforce, and other things that are now being leveraged more and more as people are remote. Enterprises are leveraging analytics to optimize and to ensure that they can facilitate course of business, understand where their issues are, understand where their failures are, internal and external, route traffic appropriately to make sure that they can actually do the business they need. But that's only half of the problem. In fact, I think the other half of the problem is maybe even bigger. We as humans are no longer able to go out. We're not supposed to, and able to go shopping and doing things as we normally do, so all of these enterprises are not only working remotely, leveraging productivity tools and quote-unquote "digital technologies" to do work. They're also serving more customers through their digital properties. And so their sites, their apps, their retail stores online, and all of the digital aspects of enterprises today are under more load because consumers and customers are leveraging those channels more. People are getting groceries delivered at home, pharmaceuticals delivered at home. Everything is going through online systems rather than us going to Walgreens and other places to pick things up. Both of those aspects of scale and security are important. Analytics is important in both figuring out how do you serve your customers effectively, and how do you secure those sites. Because now that there's more load, there's more people, and it's a bigger honeypot. And then also, how do you actually do your own business to support that in a digital world? >> Bruno, that's a great point. I just want to reiterate that the role of data in all this is really fundamental and clear, the value that you can get out of the data. Now, you and I, we've had many conversations with you guys over the years. For all of us insiders, we all know this already. Data analytics, everyone's instrumenting their business. But now when you see real-life examples of death and destruction, I mean, I was reporting yesterday that leaked emails from the CDC in the United States showed that in January, they saw that people didn't have fevers with COVID-19. The system was lagging. There was no real-time notifications. This is our world. We've been living in this for this past decade, in the big data world. This is highlighting a global problem, that with notifications, with the right use of data, is a real game-changer. You couldn't get any more clear. I have to ask you, with all this kind of revelations, and I don't mean to be all gloom-and-doom, but that's the reality, highlights the fact that instrumenting and having the data analytics is a must-have. Can you share your reaction to that? >> Yeah, absolutely. You're right. Like you said, we are insiders here, and we've been espousing this world of what we internally in Sumo call the continuous intelligence, which essentially means to us and to our customers, that you collect and process all signals that are available to you as a business, as a government, as a whatever entity that is dealing with critical things. You need to process all of that data as quickly as you can. You need to mine it for insights. You need to, in an agile fashion, just like software development, you need to consume those insights, build them into your processes to improve, to react, to respond quickly, and then deliver better outcomes. The sooner you understand what the data is telling you, the sooner you can actually respond to whatever that data is telling you, and actually avoid bad outcomes, improve good outcomes, and overall, react to whatever is forcing you to react. >> I was just talking with Dave Vellante last week about this, my co-host, and also Jeff Frick, my general manager, who interviewed you in the past on theCUBE, about the transition and transformation that's happening. I want to just get your reaction to what we're seeing, and I wanted to get your thoughts on it. There's transitions and there's transformations. Yeah, we've been kind of in this data transition around analytics. You pointed out, as insiders, we've been pointing this out for years. But I think now there's more of a transformative component to this. I think it's becoming clear to everyone the role of data, and you've laid out some good things there. Now I want to ask you, on this transformation. Do you agree with it, and if you do, how does that change the roles? Because if I'm going to react to this as a business, whether small, medium, and large business, large enterprise or government, I now realize that the old world's over. I need to get to the new way. That means new roles, new responsibilities, new outcomes, new ways to measure. Can you share your thoughts on that? Do you agree with the transformation, and two, what are some of those new role changes? How should a business manager or technologist make that transformation? >> Yeah. If it was ever more clear, getting a switch, or a transformation as you say, from the old way we did business and we did technology to the new way, is only being highlighted by this crisis. If you are an enterprise, and you are trying to do everything yourself, running your own IT stacks and all of that, it is clear today that it is much more difficult to do that than if you were leveraging next generation technologies: clouds, SaaS, PaaS, and other things, because it is hard to get people even to work. I think if we have ever been in a place where this sort of transformation is a must, not a slow choice or an evolution, it is now. Because enterprises who have done that, who have done that already, are now at an advantage. I think this is a critical moment in time for us all as we all wake up to this new reality. It is not to say that enterprises are going to be switched over after this specific crisis, but what's going to happen, I believe, is that, I think the philosophies are going to change, enterprises are going to think of this as the new normal. They're going to think about, "Hey, if I don't have the data "about my business, about my customers, "about my infrastructure, about my systems, "I won't be able to respond to the next one." Because right now there's a lot of plugging the holes in the dam with fingers and toes, but we are going to need to be ready for this, because if you think about what this particular pandemic means, this isn't going to end in April or May. Because without a treatment, or without a vaccination, it's going to continue to resurface. Unless we eradicate the entire population of the virus, any new incident is going to start up like a small flare-up, and that is going to continue to bring us back into the situation. Over this time, we're going to have to continue to respond to this crisis as we are, and we need to plan for the future ones like this. That might not be a pandemic type of crisis. It could be a change in the business. It could be other types of world events, whatever it might be. But I think this is the time when enterprises are going to start adopting these types of procedures and technologies to be able to respond. >> It's interesting, Bruno, you bring up some good points. I think about all the conversations that I've had over the years with pros around "disaster recovery" and continuous operations. This is a different vector of what that means, because when you highlighted earlier, IT, it's not like a hurricane or a power outage. This is a different kind of disruption. We talked about scale. What are some of the things that you're seeing right now that businesses are being faced with, that you guys are seeing in the analytics, or use cases that have emerged from this new normal that is facing today's business with this crisis. What's changed? What is this new challenge? When you think about the business continuity and how continuous operations need to be sustained because, again, it's a different vector. It's not a blackout, it's not a hurricane. It's a different kind of disruption. It's one where the business needs to stay on more than ever. >> Yep. Correct. True. What's really interesting, and there are some relatively straightforward use cases that we're seeing. People are dealing with their authentication, VPN network issues, because everybody is low on bandwidth. Everybody is, all of these systems are at their breaking point because they're carrying more than they ever did. These are use cases that existed all along. The problem with the use cases that existed all along is that they've been slowly picking up and growing. This is the discontinuity right now. What's happened right now, all of a sudden you've got double, triple, quadruple the load, and you need to both scale up your infrastructure, scale up your monitoring, be much more vigilant about that monitoring, speed up your recovery because more is at stake, and all of those things. That's the generic use case that existed all along, but have not been in this disruptive type of operating environment. Second is, enterprises are now learning very quickly what they need to do in terms of scaling and monitoring their production, customer-facing infrastructure, what used to be in the data center, the three-tier world, adding a few notes to an application, to your website over time, worked. Right now everybody is realizing that this whole bent on building our microservices, building for scale, rearchitecting and all that stuff, so that you can respond to an instantaneous burst of traffic on your site. You want to capture that traffic, because it means revenue. If you don't capture it, you miss out on it, and then customers go elsewhere, and never come back, and all that stuff. A lot of the work loads are to ensure that the systems, the mission-critical systems, are up and running. It's all about monitoring real-time telemetry, accelerating root cause analysis across systems that are cloud systems, and so on. >> It's a great point. You actually were leading into my next question I wanted to ask you. You know, the old saying goes, "Preparation meets opportunity. Those are the lucky ones." Luck is never really there. You're prepared, and opportunity. Can you talk about those people that have been prepared, that are doing it right now, or who are actually getting through this? What does preparation look like? What's that opportunity? Who's not prepared? Who's hurting the most? Who's suffering, and what could they do differently? Are you seeing any patterns out there, that people, they did their work, they're cloud native, they're scaled out, or they have auto-scaling. What are some of the things where people were prepared, and could you describe that, and on the other side where people weren't prepared, and they're hurting. Can you describe those two environments? >> Sure. Yeah. You think about the spectrum of companies that are going through digital transformation. There are companies who are on the left side. I don't know whether I'm mirroring or not. Basically, on the left side are people who are just making that transformation and moving to serving customers digitally, and on the right side are the ones that are basically all in, already there, and have been building modern architectures to support that type of transformation. The ones that are already all the way on the right, companies like us, right? We've been in this business forever. We serve customers who are early adopters of digital, so we've had to deal with things like November 6th, primary elections, and all of our media and entertainment customers who were spiking. Or we have to deal with companies that do sporting events like World Cup or Super Bowl and things like that. We knew that our business was going to always demand of us to be able to respond to both scheduled and unscheduled disruptions, and we needed to build systems that can scale to that without many human interactions. And there are many of our customers, and companies who are in that position today, who are actually able to do business and are now thriving, because they are the ones capturing market share at this point in time. The people who are struggling are people who have not yet made it to that full transformation, people who, essentially, assume business as normal, who are maybe beginning that transformation, but don't have the know-how, or the architecture, or the technology yet to support it. Their customers are coming to them through their new digital channels, but those digital channels struggle. You'll see this, more often than not you're going to find these still running in a traditional data center than in the cloud. Sometimes they're running in the cloud where they've done just a regular lift-and-shift instead of rearchitecting and things like that. There's really a spectrum, and it's really funny and amazing how much it maps to the journey in digital transformation, and how this specific thing is essentially, what's happening right now, it looks like the business environment demands everybody to be fully digital, but not everybody is. Effectively, the ones that are not are struggling more than the ones that are. >> Yeah. Certainly, we're seeing with theCUBE, with the digital events happening on our side, all events are canceled, so they've got to move online. You can't just take a physical, old way of doing something, where there's content value, and moving it to digital. It's a whole different ball game. There's different roles, there's different responsibilities. It's a completely different set of things. That's putting pressure on all these teams, and that's just one use case. You're seeing it in IT, you're seeing it happen in marketing and sales, how people are doing business. This is going to be very, very key for these companies. The data will be, ultimately, the key. You guys are doing a great job. I do want to get to the news, and I want to get the plug in for Sumo Logic. I want to say congratulations to you guys. A press release went out today from Sumo Logic. You guys are offering free cloud-based data analytics to support work from home and online classroom environments. That's great news. Can you just share and give a plug for that, PSA? >> Sure! We basically have a lot of customers who, just like us, are now starting to work from home. As soon as this began, we got inbound demands saying, "Oh, could you get, do you have an application for this, "do you have some analytics for that, "things that support our work from home." We thought hey, why don't we just make this as a package, and actually build out-of-the-box solutions that can support people who have common working from home technologies that they used to use for 10% of their workforce, and now work for 100% of their workforce. Let's package those, let's push those out. Let's support educational institutions who are now struggling. I have two kids in here who are learning. Everything is online, right? We had to get another computer for them and all this stuff. They're younger, they're in fourth grade. They are doing this, I can see personally how the schools are struggling, how they're trying to learn this whole new model. They need to have their systems be reliable and resilient, and this is not just elementaries, but middle school, high schools, colleges have all expanded their on-premise teaching. So we said, "Okay. Let's do something to help the community "with what we do best." Which is, we can help them make sure that the things that they do, that they need to do for this remote workforce, remote learning, whatever it might be, is efficient, working, and secure. We packaged several bundles of these solutions and offered those for free for a while, so that both our customers, and non-customers, and educational institutions have something they can go and reach for when they are struggling to keep their systems up and running. >> Yeah, it's also a mindset change, too. They want comfort. They want to have a partner. I think that's great that you guys are doing for the community. Can you just give some color commentary on how this all went down? Did you guys have a huddle in your room, said, "Hey, this is a part of our business. "We could really package this up "and really push it out and help people." Is that how it all came together? Can you share some inside commentary on how this all went down and what happened? >> Yeah. Basically, we had a discussion, literally, I think, the first or the second day when we all were sent home. We got on our online meeting and sat down, and essentially learned about this inbound demand from our customers, and what they were looking to do. We were like, "Okay, why don't we, "why don't we just offer this? "Why don't we package it?" It was a cross-functional team that just sat there. It was a no-brainer. Nobody was agonizing over doing this for free or anything like that. We were just sitting there thinking, "What can we do? "Right now is the time for us to all "pull each other up and help each other. "It'll all sort itself out afterwards." >> You know, during the bubonic plague, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth during that time. You guys are being creative during this time, as the coronavirus, so props to you guys at Sumo Logic. Congratulations, and thanks for taking the time. Can you give some parting thoughts on it, for the folks who are working at home? Just some motivational inspiration from you guys? What's going to come next for you guys? >> Sure. And thank you for having me on this video. I would say that we have been making slow transition towards remote workforce as it is. In a lot of places around the world, it's not that easy to make it to an office. Traffic is getting worse, big centers are getting populated, real estate is getting more expensive, all of this stuff. I think, actually, this is an opportunity for enterprises, for companies, and for people to figure out how this is done. We can actually practice now. We're forced to practice. It might actually have positive impact on all industries. We are going to probably figure out how to travel less, probably figure out how to actually do this more effectively, the cost of doing business is going to go down, ability to actually find new jobs might broaden, because you might be able to actually find jobs at companies who never thought they could do this remotely, and now are willing to hire remote workforces and people. I think this is going to be all good for us in the end. Right now it feels painful, and everybody's scared, and all that stuff, but I think long term, both the transformation into digitally serving our customers and the transformation towards remote workforce is going to be good for business. >> Yeah. It takes a community, and we really appreciate the effort you guys make, making that free for people, the classrooms. Remember, Isaac Newton discovered gravity and calculus while sheltering in place. A lot of interesting, new things are going to happen. I appreciate it. >> Bruno: Absolutely. >> Bruno, thank you for taking the time and sharing your insights from your place, sheltering. I made a visit into the studio to get this interview and a variety of other interviews we're doing digitally here. Thanks for sharing. Appreciate your time. >> Thank you. Appreciate you as well. >> I'm John Furrier with theCUBE here. CUBE conversation with Bruno from Sumo Logic sharing his perspective on the COVID-19. The impact, the disruption and path to the future out of this, and the new normal that is going to change our lives. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco it's theCUBE covering RSA Conference 2020 San Francisco brought to you by SiliconANGLE media. >> Welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are at the RSA 2020, a really special segment. As you can tell it's really quiet here, it's not like normal CUBE action, we are here before the expo hall even opens on Thursday morning with a very special guest, we pulled them away from a crazy busy week if not more, it's Rohit Ghai the president of RSA, Rohit great to see you again. >> Always a pleasure, thanks Jeff. >> Absolutely, so I was really looking forward to this, I was really impressed by the opening keynotes, first it rolled out George Takei, that's a pretty bold move even more bold is to try to follow him up. >> Totally (laughing) >> So congratulations, and you know, that was pretty brave. >> I appreciate it, thank you. That was quite a, you know, quite a hurdle to got to follow George Takei. >> Right, and I just want to get kind of these other things that were kind of bubbling above the surface out of the way you know, a big piece of news, I think a week it came out before the show is that RSA was sold to Symphony I believe? >> Rohit: Symphony Technology Group. >> Right, so give us a little bit of the story there. >> Absolutely, so you know we entered into a definitive agreement, Symphony Technology Group acquiring RSA from Dell Technologies. What this does is this it basically clarifies the swim lanes for Dell Technologies to focus on intrinsic security and RSA can focus on managing digital and cyber risk, and you know, we are excited about the opportunity to become agile and independent and you know, kind of play in a smaller company setting to pursue our future, so we are super excited to be part of Symphony. >> Yeah, that's great, and the other thing that's kind of a pall, I mean just to put it out there is the corona virus thing. And you know, Mobile World Congress, a completely different show but a big show, probably the first big show of our industry this year was canceled. A hundred thousand plus people, so I just am just wondering if you can share kind of what were some of your thoughts and the team's thoughts 'cause we were all curious to see well how is this going to happen, there was a couple of drop outs but I think it's been a very good week. >> It has been a great week, you know what I'll say is it was a demonstration of resilience on part of the attendees, you know when we analyzed the situation what we noted was about 82 plus percent of our attendees are from the Americas right, so there was a core set of attendees that were perhaps not as impacted in terms of travel, et cetera, so we decided to move forward, we've been in close collaboration with the CDC and the mayor's office right here, Major London Breed's office right here is SF to make sure it's going to be a safe event for everyone and you know, the team put together a great kind of set of measures to make sure everyone has hand sanitizer. >> Great, great. >> And you know, we made sure we did what was needed to manage the risk and ensure resilience through this sort of you know very global risk that is playing out, so very proud of the team, and we garnered 40 thousand plus attendees despite you know, despite the coronavirus issue. >> You know, good job I am sure it was touch and go and a real sensitive situation and I can tell you a lot of other people and event organizers you know, were getting ready to head into a very busy event season, it's what we do and so, you know nice kind of lead indicator from you to execute with caution. >> I appreciate it, thank you. >> So let's jump into the fun stuff. So your key note was not really talking that much about bad guys and technology and this and that, you talked about story telling and you got very much into kind of the human element, which is the theme this year, but really the role of stories, the importance of stories, and most importantly for the security industry to take back their story and not let it get away from them. >> You summed it up really well Jeff, and you know what I said is hey if the theme of the conference is the human element, let's explore what intrinsically makes us human and the point, you know you've all know that it is stories that makes us human and I feel we've lost control of the narrative as an industry and as such we need to take that back and make sure we clarify the role of all the human characters in our story because until we do that, until we change our story we have no shot at changing our reality. >> Right, but you're kind of in a weird spot right, it's the classic spy dilemma. You can't necessarily tell people what you know because then they'll know that you know it and you might not be able to get more or better information down the road, so as you said in you keynote you don't necessarily have the ability to celebrate your wins, and a DDoS attack thwarted doesn't make the news. I keep thinking it's like ref in a game or like a offensive lineman in football you only hear about them on that one play when they get the holding call, not the 70 other plays were they did their job. >> Rohit: Totally, totally. >> So it's a unique challenge though >> It is, it is a challenge, it is not an easy problem and you know, there is a couple of recipes that I put out there for us to consider as an industry is you know, recipe one is we can celebrate our successes at a collective level right so, just like we put out breach reports, et cetera, in terms of what the statistics are, where the breaches are animating from we can talk about defensive strategies that are working at a collective level as an industry and share that sort of best practices recipes to win, that would be a fine start. I think another area, another point that I made was that we don't have to win for the hacker to lose. 71% of the breaches were motivated by financial gains, right, and as such if we, despite breaches, which is not a win for us, if we deny financial gain to the hackers we make them lose and they are subject to the same laws of economics, they have a profit and loss statement, they are spending resources for gain and when we deny them gain we make them lose, so those are a couple of ideas on how we can begin to change the narrative. >> Right. So the other piece of the human part is the rise of the bots, right, and the raise of AI and the rise of these increasingly smart and sophisticated machines. I think I saw one of those reports that we talk about on air was you know that people are an increasingly targeted group we hear it all the time, we hear about social engineering. As that gets more complicated, how does the role of people change? 'Cause clearly they can't monitor tens and tens and hundreds of thousands of concurrent attacks all the time. >> Absolutely, so you know the bad guys are using AI you know I cited the example of a deep fake audio clip that actually duped the CEO into initiating a wire transfer so they are using all these sophisticated attacks so to your point, we cannot rely on the end user to discern through these very sophisticates. It's unfair for us to think of them as the first line of defense, we have to on the IT side, we have to bring in technology, make the technology more usable, so you don't have to pay attention to this one millimeter by one millimeter lock at the corner of the browser to realize whether a web interaction is safe or not. We need to make more usable software, we need to do a better job of managing and reducing vulnerabilities to reduce the attack surface so IT has to step up in that regard, and then on the security teams I think they have to step up to use AI to detect bot initiated attacks so we are not leaning on the human to discern what is an anomalous interaction and what could be a phishing or a smishing attack, et cetera, you know we need to bring AI to fight the good fight on our behalf. >> Right. So the other kind of angle on that I thought was really interesting, Wendy's keynote, a couple of keynotes after yours from Cisco talked about, you know, a theme we see over and over in tech which is really kind of the democratization of security and get it out of just the hallowed halls of the super billion CSOCs and technologists that are just security and open it up to everybody so make them part of the solution and not those pesky people that keep clicking on links that they are not supposed to. >> Absolutely. She did a great job of kind of making that point and you know the way I think about it is again we need to move from a culture of elitism to a culture of inclusion. Until we really get the steaming going, not just within the security professionals which we are doing a better job of certainly in the industry, but we have to team with the user, the IT and the business teams in order to have a shot at tipping the balance in our favor. >> Yeah, it's really funny 'cause that kind of democratization theme is something that we see kind of across many levels of technology, whether it's in big data, can get away from the data scientists, in doing your own reports, in having access to your own marketing material and you know, so it's kind of funny that now we are just hearing it here I guess the last bastion of we're the smartest people in the room, no no, you need to use all the brain power. >> All the brain power. I use the phrase let's stop being STEM snobs and let's be more inclusive, and you know garner the entire spectrum of the diverse talent pool that we have available and you know making the point, perhaps a provocative point, that the cyber talent gap, a bit of it might be actually self-inflicted because we have been in this sort of elitism mindset. >> Right, and I think one of the themes that you talked about in you keynote was because of kind of the elite mindset we only want to focus on the elite challenges and in fact it's not the hardest challenges that are necessarily the most dangerous or the ones that are more frequently used, it doesn't have to be the craziest hardest way in. >> It absolutely does not. The point I made was preparing for the worse does not prepare you for the likely and the statistics are overwhelming. 60% of the breaches were on the back of six stolen credentials. That's a pretty table stakes basic issue that ought to be just taken off the table, and if we take care of the basics then we can focus our energy on the corner cases but let's first prepare for the likely before we get to the worst situations. >> Right. So Rohit I'm just curious to get your take as you have been here for the last couple of days, you know you did a whole lot of work getting into that keynote and getting this thing up and off the ground but you've had a couple of days to be here walked around, talked to a lot of customers and clients, partners, I wonder if there is anything that's kind of come up as a theme that you either didn't expect or kind of reinforced some of thoughts that you had coming into this week. >> Absolutely. I think if I would've net it out Jeff what I'm sensing is there is a whole movement to shift security left, which is this whole idea of IT stepping up as the first line of defense, reduce cyber exposure, take care of patching, multi-factor authentication, reduce the attack surface intrinsic security right so DevOps and SecDevOps take care of it right up front before the apps even get built right, then there is another movement to shift things right which is take care of the new aspects of the attack surface right, what the hacker always take advantage of are the areas where they sense we are unprepared and for a long time they've seen us being unprepared in terms of reducing the attack surface and then they go after the new aspects of the attack surface and what are those? IT, IoT, OT, data as an attack surface and the Edge right, so these are areas were there is a lot of activity, a lot of innovation, you know, on the floor here if you walk the corners shifting left shifting right as in all the new aspects of the attack surface. I am seeing a lot of conversations, a lot of innovation is that area. >> Yeah. Well, there's certainly no shortage of innovation in the companies here and in fact I think it's probably one of the biggest challenges that I think of from a virus perspective is to walk this floor and to figure it all out 'cause I don't know how many thousand of vendors there are but there's really big ones and there is lot's of little ones like you said tucked in the corner in kind of the cutting edge of the innovation. What advice do you give to people who is their first time coming to RSA? >> Yes, I think you know, it's a huge challenge for customers, there's 14 of every category. I think the customers what they have to see is they have to think about the recipe rather they have to focus not on the tool but the concept behind the tool, and think about the architecture right and they should seek out vendors that take this platform approach. It is, you know, the market hasn't consolidated that much where they can just go to a few vendors but when they build that architecture they should choose vendors that behave well as a puzzle piece in the jigsaw puzzle that our customers are having to assemble together right, that they are investing in the API integrations on the edges so they can slot in and be part of a broader solution. That's a key, key criteria that customers should utilize in their selection of the vendors. >> Yes, that's good. That's good advice, and they should be listening. So Rohit, thanks again for your time. Congratulations on a week and I hope you get that weekend of absolutely nothing coming up in just a couple of days that you talked about. >> I absolutely do. The joke I made was, you know, the only time I'm okay being labeled as useless is the weekend after RSA conference. So, I fully look forward to being useless over this weekend, it's been a great week and thank you again for having me. >> All right, two more days, 48 hours. All right, thanks again. He's Rohit, I'm Jeff, you're watching theCUBE. We're at RSA 2020, the year we're going to know everything with the benefit of hindsight. We're not quite there yet but we're trying yo get a little closer. Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

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