>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from the cube and ETR. This is breaking analysis with Dave Vellante >>UI path has always been an unconventional company. You know, it started with humble beginnings. It was essentially a software development shop. And then it caught lightning in a bottle with its computer vision technology. And it's really it's simplification mantra. And it created a very easy to deploy software robot system for bespoke departments. So they could automate mundane tasks. You know, you know, the story, the company grew rapidly was able to go public early this year. Now consistent with its out of the ordinary approach. While other firms are shutting down travel and physical events, UI path is moving ahead with forward for its annual user conference next week with a live audience there at the Bellagio in Las Vegas, it's also fast-forwarding as a company determined to lead the charge beyond RPA and execute on a more all encompassing enterprise automation agenda. Hello everyone. And welcome to this week's Wiki bond Cuban sites powered by ETR in this breaking analysis and a head of forward four we'll update you in the RPA market. >>The progress that UI path has made since its IPO and bringing some ETR customer survey data to contextualize the company's position in the overall market and relative to the competition. Here's a quick rundown of today's agenda. First, I want to tell you the cube is going to be at forward for, at the Bellagio next week, UI paths. This is their big customer event. It's live. It's a physical event. It's primarily outdoors. You have to be vaccinated to attend. Now it's not completely out of the ordinary John furrier and the cube. We're at AWS public sector this past week. And we were at mobile world Congress and one of the first big hybrid events of the year at Barcelona. And we thought that event would kick off the fall event season live event in earnest, but the COVID crisis has caused many tech firms. Most tech firms actually to hit the pause button, not UI path. >>They're moving ahead, they're going forward. And we see a growing trend for smaller VIP events with a virtual component topic, maybe for another day. Now we've talked extensively about the productivity challenges and the automation mandate. The pandemic has thrust upon us. Now we've seen pretty dramatic productivity improvements as remote work kicked in, but it's brought new stresses. For example, according to Qualtrics, 32% of working moms said their mental health has declined since the pandemic hit. 15% of working dads said the same by the way. So one has to question the sustainability of this perpetual Workday, and we're seeing a continuum of automation solutions emerging. And we'll talk about that today. We're seeing tons of MNA, M and a as well, but now in that continuum on the left side of the spectrum, there's Microsoft who in some ways they stand alone and that Azure is becoming ubiquitous as a SAS cloud collaboration and productivity platform. >>Microsoft is everywhere and in virtually every market with their video conferencing security database, cloud CRM, analytics, you name it, Microsoft is pretty much there. And RPA is no different with the acquisition of soft emotive. Last year, Microsoft entered the RTA market in earnest and is penetrating very deeply into the space, particularly as it pertains to personal approach, personal productivity building on its software state. Now in the middle of that spectrum, if you will, we're seeing more M and a, and that's defined really by the big software giants. Think of this domain as integrated software plays SAP, they acquired contexture, uh, uh, they also acquired a company called process insight service now acquired Intella bought Salesforce service trace. We see in for entering the fray. And I, I would put even Pega Pega systems in this camp, software companies focused on integrating RPA into their broader workflows into their software platforms. >>And this is important because these platforms are entrenched. They're walled gardens of sorts and complicated with lots of touchpoints and integration points. And frankly, they're much harder to automate because of their entrenched legacy. Now on the far side of that, spectrum are the horizontal automation players and that's being led by UI path with automate automation anywhere as the number two player in this domain. And I didn't even put blue prism prism in there more M and a recently announced, uh, that Vista is going to acquire them. Vista also owns TIBCO. They're going to merge those two companies, you know, tip goes kind of an integration play. And so again, I'm, I might, I would put them in that, you know, horizontal piece of the spectrum. So with that as background, we're going to look at how UI path has performed since we last covered them at IPO. >>And then we'll bring in some ETR survey data to get the spending view from customers. And then we'll wrap up now just to emphasize the importance of, of automation and the automation mandate mandate. We talk about it all the time in this program, we use this ETR chart. It's a two dimensional view with net score, which is a measure of spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share, which is a proxy for pervasiveness in the dataset. That's on the horizontal axis. Now note that red dotted line at signifies companies with an elevated position on the net score, vertical axis, anything over that is considered pretty good, very good. Now this shows every spending segment within the ETR taxonomy and the four spending categories with the greatest velocity are AI cloud containers and RPA. And they've topped the charts for quite a while. Now they're the only four categories which have sustained above that 40% line consistently throughout the pandemic. >>And even before now, the impressive thing about cloud of course, is it has a spending has both spending momentum on the vertical axis at a very large share of the, of the market share of presence in the dataset. The point is RPA is nascent still. It has an affinity with AI as a means of more intelligently identifying and streamlining process improvements. And so we expect those to, to remain elevated and grow to the right together, UI path pegs it's Tam, total available market at 60 billion. And the reality is that could be understated. Okay. As we reported from the UI path S one analysis, we did pre IPO. The company at that time had an AR annual recurring revenue of $580 million and was growing at 65% annually at nearly 8,000 customers at the time, a thousand of which had an ARR in excess of a hundred K and a net revenue retention, the company had with 145%. >>So let's take a look at the picture six months forward. We mentioned the $60 billion Tam ARR now up over 725 million on its way to a billion ARR holding pretty steady at 60% growth as is an RR net revenue retention, and more than a thousand new customers in 200 more with over a hundred thousand in ARR and a small operating profit, which by the way, exceeded the consensus pretty substantially. Profitability is not shown here and no one seems to care anyway, these days it's all about growing into that Tam. Well, that's a pretty good looking picture. Isn't it? The company had a beat and a raise for the quarter early this month. So looking good, right? Well, you ask how come the stock's not doing better. That's an interesting question. So let's first look at the stocks performance on a relative basis. Here, we show you I pass performance against Pega systems and blue prism. >>The other two publicly traded automation, pure plays, you know, sort of in the case of Pega. So UI path outperformed post its IPO, but since the early summer Pega has been the big winner. Well, UI path slowly decelerated, you see blue prism was the laggard until it was announced. It was in an acquisition talks with a couple of PE firms and the prospects of a bidding war sent that yellow line up. As you can see UI path, as you can see on the inset has a much higher valuation than Pega and way higher than blue prison. Pega. Interestingly is growing revenues nicely at around 40%. And I think what's happening is the street simply wants more, even though UI path beat and raised wall street, still getting comfortable with which is new to the public market game. And the company just needs to demonstrate a track record and build trust. >>There's also some education around billings and multi-year contracts that the company addressed on its last earnings call, but the street was concerned about ARR from new logos. It appears to be slowing down sequentially in a notable decline in billings momentum, which UI pass CEO, CFO addressed on the earnings call saying, look, they don't need to trade margin for prepaid multi-year deals, given the strong cash position while I give anything up. And even though I said, nobody cares about profitability. Well, I guess that's true until you guide for an operating loss. When you've been showing a small profit in recent recent quarters, which you AIPAC did, then all of a sudden people care. So UI path, isn't a bit of an unknown territory to the street and it has a valuation that's pretty rich, very rich, actually at 30 times, a revenue multiple greater than 30 times revenue, multiple. >>So that's why in, in my view, investors are being cautious, but I want to address a dynamic that we've seen with these high growth rocket ship companies, something we talked about with snowflake. And I think you're seeing some of that here with UI paths, different model in the sense that snowflake is pure cloud, but I'm talking about concerns around ARR from new logos and in that growth on a sequential basis. And here's what's happening in my view with UI path, you have a company that started within departments with a small average contract size in ACV, maybe 25,000, maybe 50,000, but not deep six figure deals that wasn't UI paths play it because the company focused so heavily on simplicity and made it really easy to adopt customer saw really fast ROI. I mean breakeven in months. So you very quickly saw expansion into other departments. >>So when ACV started to rise and installations expanded within each customer UI path realized it had to move beyond being a point product. And it started thinking about a platform and making acquisitions like process gold and others, and this marked a much deeper expansion into the customer base. And you can see that here in this UI path, a chart that they shared at their investor deck customers that bought in 2016 and 2017 expanded their they've expanded their spend 15, 13, 15, 18 20 X. So the LTV, the lifetime value of the customer is growing dramatically. And because UI path has focused on simplicity, it has a very facile freemium model, much easier to try before you buy than its competitors. It's CAC, it's customer acquisition costs are likely much lower than some of its peers. And that's a key dynamic. So don't get freaked out by some of those concerns that we raised earlier, because just like snowflake what's happening is the company for sure is gaining new customers. >>Maybe just not at the same rate, but don't miss the forest through the trees. I E they're getting more money from their existing customers, which means retention, loyalty and growth. Speaking of forests, this chart is the dynamic I'm talking about. It's an ETR graphic that shows the components of net score or against spending momentum net score breaks down into five areas that lime green at the top is new additions. Okay? So that's only 11% of the customer mentions by the way, we're talking about more than 125 responses for UI path. So it's meaningful. It's, it's actually larger in this survey, uh, or certainly comparable to Microsoft. So that says something right there. The next bar is the forest green forest. Green is where I want you to focus. That's customer spending 6% or more in the second half of the year, relative to the first half. >>The gray is flat spending, which is quite large, the pink or light red that's spending customer spending 6% or worse. That's a 4% number, but look at the bottom bar. There is no bar that's churn. 0% of the respondents in the survey are churning and churn is the silent killer of SAS companies, 0% defections. So you've got 46% spending, more nobody leaving. That's the dynamic that is powering UI path right now. And I would take this picture any day over a larger lime green and a smaller forest green and a bigger churn number. Okay. So it's pretty good. It's not snowflake good, but it's solid. So how does this picture compare to UI pass peers? Well, let's take a look at that. So this is ETR data, same data showing the granularity net score for Microsoft power, automate UI path automation, anywhere blue prism and Pega. >>So as we said before, Microsoft is ubiquitous. What can we say about that? But UI path is right there with a more robust platform, not to overlook Microsoft. You can't, but UI path, it'll tell you that they don't compete head to head for enterprise automation deals with Microsoft. Now, maybe they will over time. They do however, compete head to head with automation anywhere. And their picture is quite strong. As you can see here, it has this blue Prism's picture and even Pega, although blue prism, automation, anywhere UI path and power automate all have net scores on this chart. As you can see the table in the upper right over 40% Pega does not. But again, we don't see Pega as a pure play RPA vendor. It's a little bit of sort of apples and oranges there, but they do sell RPA and ETR captures in their taxonomy. >>So why not include them also note that UI path has, as I said before, more mentions in the survey than power automate, which is actually quite interesting, given the ubiquity of Microsoft. Now, one other notable notable note is the bright red that's defections and only UI path is showing zero defections. Everybody else has at least even of the slim, some defections. Okay. So take that as you will, but it's another data 0.1. That's powerful, not only for UI path, but really for the entire sector. Now, the last ETR data point that we want to share is our famous two dimensional view. Like the sector chart we showed earlier, this graphic shows net score on the vertical axis. That's against spending velocity and market share or pervasiveness on the horizontal axis. So as we said earlier, UI path actually has greater presence in the survey than the ever-present Microsoft. >>Remember, this is the July survey. We don't have full results from the September, October survey yet. And we can't release them until ETR is out of its quiet period. But I expect the entire sector, like everything is going to be slightly down because as we reported last week, tech spending is moderated slightly in the second half of this year, but we don't expect the picture to change dramatically. UI path and power automate, we think are going to lead and market presence in those two plus automation anywhere are going to show strength and spending momentum as well. Most of the sector. And we'll see who comes in above the 40% line. Okay. What to watch at forward four. So in summary, I'll be looking for a few things. One UI path has hinted toward a big platform announcement that will deepen its capabilities to go beyond being an RPA point tool into much more of an enterprise automation platform rewriting a lot of the code Linux cloud, better automation of the UI. >>You're going to hear all kinds of new product announcements that are coming. So I'll be listening for those details. I want to hear more from customers to further confirm what I've been hearing from them over the last couple of years and get more data, especially on that ROI on that land and expand. I want to understand that dynamic and that true enterprise automation. It's going to be good to get an update face to face and test some of our assumptions here and see where the gaps are and where UI path can improve. Third. I want to talk to ecosystem players to see where they are in participating in the value chain here. What kind of partner has UI path become since it's IPO? Are they investing more in the ecosystem? How to partners fit into that flywheel fourth, I want to hear from UI path management, Daniel DNAs, and other UI path leaders, they're exiting toddler Ville and coming into an adolescent phase or early adulthood. >>And what does that progression look like? How does it feel? What's the vibe at the show. And finally, I'm very excited to participate in a live in-person event to see what's working, see how a hybrid events are evolving. We got a good glimpse at mobile world Congress and this week, and, uh, in DC and public sector summit, here's, you know, the cube has been doing hybrid events for years, and we intend to continue to lead in this regard and bring you the best, real time information as possible. Okay. That's it for today. Remember, these episodes are all available as podcasts, wherever you listen. All you do is search braking analysis podcast. We publish each week on Wiki bond.com and siliconangle.com. And you can always connect on twitter@devolanteoremailmeatdaviddotvolanteatsiliconangle.com. Appreciate the comments on LinkedIn. And don't forget to check out E T r.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Volante for the cube insights powered by ETR be well, and we'll see you next time.

>> From The Cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from The Cube and ETR, this is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> UiPath has always been an unconventional company. You know it started with humble beginnings. It's essentially a software development shop. Then it caught lightning in a bottle with its computer vision technology. It's really, it's simplification mantra and it created a very easy to deploy software robot system for bespoke departments so they could automate mundane tasks. You know the story. The company grew rapidly, was able to go public early this year. Now consistent with its out-of-the-ordinary approach, while other firms are shutting down travel and physical events, UiPath is moving ahead with Forward IV, it's annual user conference next week with a live audience there at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. It's also fast forwarding as a company, determined to lead the charge beyond RPA and execute on a more all-encompassing Enterprise automation agenda. Hello everyone and welcome to this week's Wikibond Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this breaking analysis and ahead of Forward IV, we'll update you in the RPA market the progress that UiPath has made since its IPO and bringing some ETR customer survey data that's contextualized the company's position in the overall market and relative to the competition. Here's a quick rundown of today's agenda. First I want to tell you theCube is going to be at Forward IV at the Bellagio next week. UiPath, this is their big customer event. It's live, it's a physical event. It's primarily outdoors. You have to be vaccinated to attend. Now, this not completely out of the ordinary. John Furrier and theCube were at AWS Public Sector this past week and we were at Mobile World Congress in one of the first big hybrid events of the year at Barcelona. We thought that event would kick of the fall event season, live event in earnest but the COVID crisis has caused many tech firms, most tech firms actually, to hit pause button. Not UiPath, they're moving ahead. They're going forward and we see a growing trend for smaller VIP events with a virtual component, topic maybe for another day. Now we've talked extensively about the productivity challenges and the automation mandate the pandemic has thrust upon us. Now, we've seen pretty dramatic productivity improvements as remote work kicked in but its brought new stresses. For example, according to Qualtrics, 32% of working moms said their mental health has declined since the pandemic hit. 15% of working dads said the same by the way. So, one has to question the sustainability of this perpetual workday. And we're seeing a continuum of automation solutions emerging and we'll talk about that today. We're seeing tons of M&A as well but now, in that continuum, on the left-side of the spectrum, there's Microsoft who in some ways, they stand alone and their Azure is becoming ubiquitous as a SaaS-Cloud collaboration and productivity platform. Microsoft is everywhere and in virtually every market, whether video conferencing, security, database, cloud, CRM, analytics, you name it. Microsoft is pretty much there and RPA is no different. With the acquisition of Softomotive last year, Microsoft entered the RTA market in earnest and is penetrating very deeply into the space, particularly as it pertains to personal productivity building on its software stake. Now in the middle of that spectrum if you will, we're seeing more M&A and that's defined really by the big software giants. Think of this domain as integrated software place. SAP, they acquired Contextere. They also acquired a company called Process Insights, Service now acquired Inttellebot. Salesforce acquired Servicetrace, we see Infor entering the frame and I would put even Pega, Pega systems in this camp. Software companies focused on integrating RPA into their broader workflows, into their software platforms and this is important because these platforms are entrenched Their well guardants of thoughts and complicated with lots of touchpoints and integration points and frankly they are much harder to automate because of their entrenched legacy. Now, on the far side of that spectrum, are the horizontal automation players and that's been let by UiPath with automation anywhere as the number two player in this domain. And I even put a blue prism in there more M&A recently announced that Vista is going to acquire them Vista also owns Tibco, they are going to merge those two companies. You know Tibco is come up with the integration play. So again I would put them in that you know, horizontal piece of the spectrum. So with that as background, we're going to look at how UiPath has performed since we last covered them and IPO and I'm going to bring in some ETR survey data to get the spending view from customers and we'll wrap up. Now, just to emphasize the importance of automation and the automation mandate, we talk about it all the time in this program. We use this ETR chart. It's a two dimensional view with net score which is the measure of spending momentum on the vertical axis and market share which is a proxy for pervasiveness in the data set that's on the horizontal axis. Now note that red dotted line, it signifies companies within elevated position on the net score vertical axis anything over that is considered pretty good. Very good. Now this shows every spending segment within the ETR taxonomy. And the four spending categories with the greatest velocity are AI, cloud, containers and RPA. And they have topped the charts for quite a while now. They are the only 4 categories which have sustained above that 40% line consistently throughout the pandemic and even before. Now the impressive thing about cloud of course is it has both spending momentum on the vertical axis and a very large market share or presence in the data set. The point is RPA is nascent still. It has an affinity with AI as a means of more intelligently identifying and streamlining process improvements. And so we expect those two to remain elevated and grow to the right together. UiPath pegs its TAM, total available market at 60 billion. And the reality is that could be understated. Okay, as we reported from the UiPath S1 analysis we did pre IPO, the company at that time had an ARR annual recurring revenue of $580 million and it was growing at 65% annually. And nearly 8000 customers at the time, a 1000 of which had an ARR in excess of a 100k. And the net revenue retention the company had was over 145%. So let's take a look at the pictures 6 months forward. We mentioned the $60 billion TAM, ARR now up over $726.5 million on its way to a billion ARR holding pretty steady at 60% growth as is NRR, net revenue retention and more then a 1000 new customers and 200 more with over a 100000 in ARR and a small operating profit which by the way exceeded the consensuses pretty substantially. Profitability is not shown here and no one seems to care anyway these days. It's all about growing into that TAM. Well that's a pretty good looking picture, isn't it? The company had a beat and a raise for the quarter earlier this month, so looking good right. Well you ask how come the stock is not doing better. That's an interesting question. So let's first look at the stocks performance on a relative basis. Here we show UiPath performance against Pega systems and blue prism, the other two publicly traded automation. Pure plays sort of in the case of Pega. So UiPath outperformed post its IPO but since the early summer Pega is been the big winner while UiPath slowly decelerated. You see Blue prism was at the lag until it was announced that it was in an acquisition talks with a couple of PE firms and the prospects of a bidding war sent that yellow line up as you can see. UiPath as you can see on the inset, has a much higher valuation than Pega and way higher than blue Prism. Pega interestingly is growing revenues nicely at around 40%. And I think what's happening is that the street simply wants more. Even though UiPath beat and raised, Wallstreet is still getting comfortable with management which is new to the public market game and the company just needs to demonstrate a track record and build trust. There's also some education around billings and multi-year contracts that the company addressed on its last earnings call. But the street was concerned about ARR for new logos. It appears to be slowing down sequentially and a notable decline in billings momentum which UiPath CFO addressed on the earnings call saying look they don't need the trade margin for prepaid multi year deals, given the strong cash position. Why give anything up. And even though I said nobody cares about profitability well, I guess that's true until you guide for an operating loss when you've been showing small profit in recent quarters what UiPath did. Then, obviously people start to care. So UiPath is in bit of an unknown territory to the street and it has a valuation, it's pretty rich. Very rich actually at 30 times revenue multiple or greater than 30 times revenue multiple. So that's why in my view, investors are being cautious. But I want to address a dynamic that we have seen with this high growth rocket chip companies. Something we talked about Snowflake and I think you are seeing some of that here with UiPath. Different model in the sense that Snowflake is pure cloud but I'm talking about concerns around ARR and from new logos and that growth in a sequential basis. And here's what's happening in my view with UiPath. You have a company that started within departments with a smaller average contract size, ACV maybe 25000, may be 50000 but not deep six figure deals. That wasn't UiPath's play. And because the company focused so heavily on simplicity and made it really easy to adapt, customers saw really fast ROI. I mean break-even in months. So we very quickly saw expansion into other departments. So when ACV started to rise and installations expanded within each customer, UiPath realized it had to move beyond a point product and it started thing about a platform and making acquisitions like Processgold and others and this marked a much deeper expansion into the customer base. And you can see that here in this UiPath chart that they shared at their investor deck, customers that bought in 2016 and 2017 expanded their spend 13, 15, 18, 20x So the LTV, life time value of the customer is growing dramatically and because UiPath is focused on simplicity, and has a very facile premium model much easier to try before you buy than its competitors it's CAC, Customer acquisition cost are likely much lower than some of its peers. And that's a key dynamic. So don't get freaked out by some of those concerns that we raised earlier because just like Snowflake what's happening is that the company for sure is gaining new customers, may be just not at the same rate but don't miss the forest through the trees I.e getting more money from their existing customers which means retention, loyalty and growth. Now speaking of forest, this chart is the dynamic I'm talking about, its an ETR graphic that shows the components of net score against spending momentum. Net score breaks down into 5 areas. That lime green at the top is new additions. Okay, so that's only 11% of the customer mentions. By the way we are talking about more than a 125 responses for UiPath. So it's meaningful, it's actually larger in this survey or certainly comparable to Microsoft. So that's just something right there. The next bar is the forest green. Forest green is what I want you to focus. That's customer spending 6% or more in the second half of the year relative to the first half. The gray is flat spending which is quite large. The pink or light red, that's spending customers spending 6% or worse, that's a 4% number. But look at the bottom bar. There is no bar, that's churn. 0% of the responders in the survey are churning. And Churn is the silent killer of SaaS companies. 0% defections. So you've got 46% spending more, nobody leaving. That's the dynamic powering UiPath right now and I would take this picture any day over a larger lime green and a smaller forest green and a bigger churn number. Okay, it's pretty good, not Snowflake good but it's solid. So how does this picture compare to UiPath's peers. Let's take a look at that. So this is ETR data, same data showing the granularity net score for Microsoft power automate, UiPath automation anywhere, Blue Prism and Pega. So as we said before, Microsoft is ubiquitous. What can we say about that. But UiPath is right there with a more robust platform. Not to overlook Microsoft, you can't but UiPath will you that the don't compete head to head for enterprise automation deals with Microsoft and may be they will over time. They do however compete head to head with automation anywhere. And their picture is quite strong as you can see here. You know as is Blue Prism's picture and even Pega. Although Blue Prism automation anywhere UiPtah and power automate all have net scores on this chart as you can see the tables in the upper right over 40%, Pega does not. But you can see Pega as a pure play RPA vendor it's a little bit of sort of apples and oranges there but they do sell RPA and ETR captures in their taxonomy so why not include them. Also note that UiPath has as I said before more mentions in the survey than power automate which is actually quite interesting given the ubiquity of Microsoft. Now, one other notable note is the bright red that's defections and only UiPath is showing zero defections Everybody else has at least little of the slims on defections. Okay, so take that as you will but its another data point, the one that is powerful nit only for UiPath but really for the entire sector. Now the last ETR data point that we want to share is the famous two dimensional view. Like the sector chart we showed earlier, this graphic shows the net score on the vertical axis that's against spending velocity and market share or pervasiveness on the horizontal axis. So as we said earlier, UiPath actually has a greater presence in the survey than the ever present Microsoft. Remember, this is the July survey. We don't have full results from the September-October survey yet and we can't release them until ETR is out of its quiet period but I expect the entire sector, like everything is going to be slightly down because as reported last week tech spending is moderated slightly in the second half of this year. But we don't expect the picture to change dramatically UiPath and power automate we think are going to lead in market presence and those two plus automation anywhere is going to show the strength in spending momentum as will most of the sector. We'll see who comes in above the 40% line. Okay, what to watch at Forward IV. So in summary I'll be looking for a few things. One, UiPath has hinted toward a big platform announcement that will deepen its capabilities to beyond being an RPA point tool into much more of an enterprise automation platform, rewriting a lot of the code Linux, cloud, better automation of the UI, you are going to hear all kind of new product announcements that are coming so I'll be listening for those details. I want to hear more from customers that further confirm what I've been hearing from them over the last couple of years and get more data especially on their ROI, on their land and expand, I want to understand that dynamic and that true enterprise automation. It's going to be good to get an update face to face and test some of our assumptions here and see where the gaps are and where UiPath can improve. Third, I want to talk to ecosystem players to see where they are in participating in the value chain here. What kind of partner has UiPath become since its IPO, are they investing more in the ecosystem, how do partners fit into that flywheel. Fourth, I want to hear from UiPath management Daniel Dines and other UiPath leaders, their exiting toddler wheel and coming into an adolescence phase or early adulthood. And what does that progression look like, how does it feel, what's the vibe at the show. And finally I'm very excited to participate in a live in-person event to see what's working, to see how hybrid events are evolving, we got to good glimpse at Mobile congress and this week in DC at public sector summit. As you know theCube is doing hybrid events for years and we intend to continue to lead in this regard and bring you the best real time information as possible. Okay, that's it for today. Remember these episodes are all available as podcasts wherever you listen, all you do is search breaking analysis podcast. We publish each week on Wikibound.com and Siliconangle.com and you can always connect on twitter @dvellante or email me at David.vellante@siliconangle.com Appreciate the comments on LinkedIn and don't forget to check out ETR.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for theCube insights powered by ETR. Be well and will see you next time. (upbeat music)

>>Welcome to this cube conversation. I'm Lisa Martin. Joining me next is bran Kirschner, the vice president of strategy at DataStax Brian. Welcome to the program. Thank you. Glad to be here. Excited to unpack this survey that DataStax recently did. This is with 500 or so it executives, technology practitioners talking about data strategy. Talk to me, first of all, about the state of the data, racist, the name of the survey. Why did data sect students? What was the impetus behind that? >>Yeah. Great question. Thank you. So, you know, um, we are in a race for our company. Every organization is in a race to find ways to use data in new ways to move the business forward, satisfy your customers and so on. Um, it's okay to have a strategy to be a leader. It's probably okay to have a strategy, to be a fast follower. It might even be okay to say we stayed in touch with best practices and once they're proven we adopt them, but what's not okay, is one to lose track of where you need to be relative to how the market's moving most important than your competitors. But in general, customer expectations, your employee partner expectations are going to be set by companies potentially in different industries. So you need to be at the right spot in your journey. So that's why we do a lot of benchmarking, but as important is as your particular company's context and history and situation and technical architecture, um, kind of comes in contact with a strategy that looks great on paper, you have to understand is something slowing us down that we didn't expect because of our culture or unspoken incentives or, you know, what is our next best step for us? >>So in this, in this dataset, we really look to identify the leaders who are having the most success and then work back from the patterns and practices we saw with them to how different, different types of companies at different stages of their journey can find their next best step to make the right progress. >>So the showed that a lot of companies have a data strategy. The execution piece is a, is a different story. Talk to me about how this survey defines a data leader. What is it, what are some of the key characteristics? Yes, >>There are quite a few. Um, in fact, what we've done over the last year that we fed into the survey was, you know, in the course of my work and my colleagues work, we talked with lots of CEOs, hands-on techno practitioners, CTOs, and so on. And we put all that conversation and qualitative insight together into, uh, about 70 measures. Um, and so that was all in the survey. And once we got the data back, uh, we did a cluster analysis, bringing some data science, the data strategy, if you will. Um, and that's surface these segments. Um, and for example, how much revenue you were generating from data was not part of the, so then we mapped these segments and these practices against that, and we say, oh, the leaders generating the most revenue from data. So that gave us some confidence in using these patterns and practices to bucketize folks. >>And you found that the data, those companies in the data leadership category were able to attribute more than 20% of their data of two gives me 20% of their revenue to data and analytics. Talk to me about that 20% benchmark is that considered where a lot of organizations need to aim to be because there's still a lot of money on the table. Yeah, >>That's right. That's right. So, you know, in common industry parlance as a standard, you know, materiality on the balance sheet is 10%. Um, and we've seen a pretty significant number of companies hit that mark. Um, what we saw, which is interesting in our data was, you know, that's kind of a comfortable benchmark to pick it's an industry standard data's material, Hey, congratulations. Uh, but you're actually drill down further and you look at that 20% mark and you say, well, 10% is probably not aiming nearly high enough because a significant proportion of these leaders have already gotten to that 20% mark. Um, and so it's in part, you know, again about that benchmarking where you are, where's your destination, your destination, probably isn't we're on the board, your destination probably isn't its material. Your destination is probably, you know, it's big and it keeps getting bigger. >>And where are these data leaders with respect to deploying a hybrid data strategy? What is it about how they're organized and structurally what they're doing that is positioning them to actually really drive incremental revenue from data? >>Yes. Yeah. What stands out about the leaders, um, is, and, you know, we see this in our data, you can see this in any number of analysts, firms and other data sources hybrid cloud strategy is, you know, the dominant strategy for large enterprises, right? It's about preserving your flexibility to operate in multiple clouds. And on-prem, so that's pretty well understood. What we saw in this data was overwhelmingly almost a hundred percent of the data leaders also say they're pursuing a hybrid data strategy. So they're already doing that kind of same level of thoughtfulness and planning about how can we get and deploy apps and compute everywhere to how can we store and deploy and redeploy data everywhere. And there's a real steep curve to the extent where the folks who are just starting out, who may have a strategy, but have taken very little action. None of them strongly agree that they have that type of hybrid data strategy. Um, and so the pattern qualitative pattern we see is companies go down this hybrid cloud compute strategy for good reasons, and it pays off, starts to pay off. And then they realize, oh, we should be doing the same thing for data. Um, and that's giving these leaders, you know, a lot of agility control, flexibility, um, and opportunities. >>One of the things I found interesting in the report from a statistics perspective is that those data leaders that you talked about that are able to, or able to attribute more than 20% of their revenue to data and analytics twice as many of those are two. And they're two X likely to be using a robust open source data stack talking about that as it plays into the computing strategy and the ability to convert data into revenue. >>That's right. So they're, they're, they're almost a hundred percent comparable to the hybrid data strategy. Almost a hundred percent are also increasing their use of open source software. And I kind of think about this from, from two dimensions, right? The, the hybrid cloud and hybrid data strategy gives you agility, optionality flexibility for your infrastructure, for your compute, for your storage and so on. Um, then it's about really making sure you're using the best of breed tools for the job of creating value with data. Um, and if you look backwards, um, you know, the track record of open source technologies, Apache Cassandra Kafka spark at some of just like, you know, the applications and experiences that are, you know, have, have, you know, validated the massive impact data can have on a business. Um, the track record of open source is strong and you look at the cycle of innovation and you see, you know, Kafka having emerged and now pulse are emerging as sort of a, a newer, more cloud friendly version of Kafka and flank kind of emerging as potentially a successor to spark that cycle of innovation, arguably is accelerating. >>Um, and so as you think about what's, you know, what's unique to us as a company, um, it's the data you have, right? No one has the customer interactions. You have, nobody has a business processes you have. So what you want to do is take those best of breed tools and have flexibility about the infrastructure services to support them and focus your people on doing great things with the data. So don't try to solve a problem that the open source ecosystem has already solved, right? If you're, if you're writing that code, instead of focusing on what differentiates your business, that's a miss. Um, so when you see the leaders leaning hard into, um, open source, you know, it's because they've got the clarity about, we differentiate by using these best of breed tools on our data, not reinventing the wheel, >>Are these companies, you mentioned culture a minute ago, and that's always something that I find intriguing because it's very hard to change. We've been in the last 16, 18 months in an, in a very fast pace of change, as we know, but are you seeing these data leaders that are companies that are reorienting towards a data culture where data is part of everyone's job? >>Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So they, so it's interesting. Um, a majority of all companies said that reacting to the COVID crisis did increase their pace of innovation, but again, it's almost universal among, among those leaders. Um, and one of the patterns that stands out is indeed, when you say making it everyone's job, I'll put finer point on it. It's saying accountability for creating value, generating revenue with data is the line of business is accountability. I'm in conversations. I've literally had CEOs say, it's not my problem anymore. It's my problem to help them execute on the ideas, right? And that can even raise the bar because now they're coming up with bolder, bigger ideas, but it's not about it being the custodians of the data, trying to go to the business and say, Hey, could you use some data it's business, general managers, VPs now accountable for how have you used data to drive revenue? >>How can it change the way you sell or the way you service customers? Um, and so on. And, and that, um, in part, what we heard from some folks was in organizations with progressive CEOs, chief data officers, they have been going to the side to the business side of things and saying, Hey, I think we've got ways to do business better, but there wasn't pressure on the business. They're like our business is going fine. Uh, but once COVID hit, it was okay. We need to take out costs. We need to find new ways to grow. Um, and there's sort of that that drove and organic embrace of, ah, I see, I want to pick up the reins and, you know, work with my technology partners to make it happen, but now I see we should be driving it on the business side. >>And have you seen in the COVID era data strategy become really a board level initiative and, and to your point, one of the things that you've found is, is it's not just the culture of data being core to everyone's job, it's the accountability level at the line of business level. But I imagine that that data strategy is indeed a board level initiative. >>That's right. That's the biggest, when you mentioned culture, the biggest of the segments is a group whose biggest challenge is cultural change about almost a third of, of all organizations. Um, and you see there, there's this big drop, you know, compared to the leaders of whether the data strategy is a board level discussion, right. And you see this big drop in other metrics where, you know, do you have a data strategy, mild agreement like, oh yeah, we talk about data of everybody talks about data. Um, but it's really about getting that top down. This is a true corporate priority, which kind of circles back to our initial conversation, you know, if the goal is 20% or more of your revenue from data, it better be a board level conversation. Right. And, and, you know, if you have an effective board, you want the board to be helping to drive toward that. Um, so it really closes the loop on, you know, again, calibrating, what's our aspiration, um, what's at stake. And if we believe in the data, you know, we shouldn't be hesitating to elevate this to the board level and get their attention on >>It. Right. Give me an example of a, of a customer that's doing that. That's a data leader that's doing this really well. And one that pivoted to be able to, to use data and extract value and revenue from it during the last year and a half, >>I would say it's a little bit less of a pivot and more of an amazing success story. Um, uh, because of you look backwards a few years ago, um, home Depot made a significant board level, you know, top-down, company-wide commitment to a very bold digital and data strategy. And so, you know, by 2019, um, for one example, you know, Forester ranked them as a top retail app, um, uh, for customers, um, and all that work, which is already paying off, right. They're making big investments, but they're getting big payoffs. Um, when COVID hits home, Depot is able to deploy curbside delivery as a service. They did not have a feature they did not have in weeks at scale, um, which drove even more outsized returns during COVID. Um, and so it's, it's a little, uh, you know, it's a less of a pivot, but more about the value of making that commitment. >>Um, because you know, they, weren't planning on deploying curbside delivery to the app in weeks, but when COVID hit, they were able to, because they already had the cultural change, the infrastructure, the metrics, the technologies in place. Um, and so, you know, it's really a message about don't wait, right? If you are going to fast follow, if you are going to be away for proven best practices, you don't want to start off the blocks at zero. When something disruptive happens, you want to have some success stories, some practice at it under your belt. So, you know, even if you're, if you're, if you're fortunate enough not to have been pushed into radical action because of COVID, don't, don't let that stop you from seizing the day and actually starting to move. >>I now I've, I think I'll never have the same opinion of, of home Depot. Again, I will always go on there looking for light bulbs and batteries and flashlights thinking of them as a data company, but as a company, that, to your point, committed to it and push that accountability out into those lines of business. How does, what did the survey show in terms of those data leaders embracing, uh, open source, embracing a hybrid data strategy? How does that facilitate that, driving that accountability into the lines of business so that that revenue that's sitting on the table from data can be unpacked. >>Yeah, it's, it's almost, I think, you know, if I look at it from the technology side, um, imagine, you know, in the past, you're the custodian of data, you know, as a CIO and your job is to kind of make, make, make, you know, data's not lost. We comply with regulations, you know, for the kind of way we run the business yesterday and today doesn't break tomorrow. And so if I think about the shifts to where the lines of business are now accountable for finding new ways to use data, what are the, to come up with? Like, you know, if you think about like, you know, innovating in business, um, taking data under the wing, right? Your job now, as a manager is innovate, innovate your business model, deliver something we never delivered before deliver something. No one in our industry delivers. So on the tech side, you know, it should be exciting, but it also means you may be on the hook for delivering some capability that your company had never thought about. >>Um, so that really gets back to this idea of like, do you have access to, you know, the best infrastructure services through hybrid cloud and data strategy? Are you set up to use best of breed tools, even if, you know, last year we didn't have a scenario that uses best of breed tools. Well, now that the businesses, I think it really hard on how we differentiate with data. They're probably going to come up with some big bold ideas, um, again, which should be exciting, but you gotta be ready to invest in change and something new as opposed to keeping the lights on. >>Right. I think that pace of innovation, I don't know, maybe it's permanently altered because of the scenario was one that nobody ever expected to be in. As we saw so much transformation in the last year and a half, and the pace of innovation change and, and the, you know, the places that are like the home Depot being able to radically change so quickly. And so we saw a lot of other businesses that could not do that. What are some of the market trends that you're seeing as we're now coming around the corner into the second half of 2021? >>I mean, the acceleration is a great point because when you're using data to deliver value to customers or create value for your business, things actually build on them on each other. Right. So, you know, data doesn't get used up until the, the amazing things about digital data. It can be used and reuse and recombined. So if you saw, for example, you know, leaders are well on the way before COVID, do you have real time inventory we'll share. Uh, but then once COVID hit, do you have real time inventory? And can you make a recommendation for somebody that's out of stock became like, wow, we should get that done ASAP. So then as you see folks do some necessary things, um, you start to see, well, if we've got real-time inventory and we can make recommendations, why are we getting a 360 degree view of the customer from that data plus marketing data, right? >>And now the value gets unlocked. Whereas if you said, you know, two years ago, how can we justify creating a 360 degree view of the customer, some organizations might've been like, well, we can, you know, it's hard to do. We can't see the value. Whereas once you're doing a couple of these use cases, it becomes obvious that they'd be better together. Right. And so, um, if you see, you know, the home Depot, I think you're going to see, um, you know, essentially every retailer that wants to stay competitive is going to follow in that path. >>Do you think that those companies that become data leaders or are on the path to become data leaders that have the hybrid data strategy that are embracing OpenStack? Is that mentality in your opinion, going to separate the winners and the losers going forward in the next year plus? >>Yeah, I mean, I think, I think in a sense it has to, uh, because again, as I think, you know, there was a trend already in place for all of us as consumers, right. We love, for example, delightful recommendations, you know, uh, companies and applications that know us and just make our lives better because they're smart, like Netflix and Spotify, right. The classic examples. Um, but now you think about for anything. So Cengage is an education platform company, and they talk about being the Netflix of education. Um, and you know, retailers like home Depot, like target have gotten super smart about things like recommendations. Um, and you know, in the case of home Depot, like connecting me with the data that explains how to do DIY projects and use the tools I'm trying to buy. So, you know, the bar just keeps getting raised to the point where, you know, you look at, you know, you look at a, the e-commerce site of the past, we just sort of a dumb e-commerce site where it's, I can pick things, put them in a cart and buy, you know, that's not acceptable by any stretch of the imagination today, right. >>Are there user reviews? Are there, you know, recommendations? We expect all of this. Um, and I think you'll see it, you know, obviously retail's heavily disrupted by COVID pointing into the sphere, so to speak, but I mean, telehealth is another example where, you know, I think the writing is on the wall. If you can't do telehealth as a health system or a hospital, you know, very soon you're going to have a big problem. >>Yeah. The consumer demand is incredible for, I want whatever it is, if it's I'm shopping on Amazon or if it's going to be, but I want them to know what to recommend to me next, based on what I just thought we have that expectation that the Netflix is and the Spotify is to your point have set. And we also have that expectation in our business life. So when folks are buying it, interacting with software, they want the same thing, right. It's not just limited to healthcare retailers. That's >>Right. And I that's that there's a virtuous cycle, right? If you think about companies, you know, making that cultural change, leaning into using data to make things better, it's not just for customers, it's for your employees, it's for your partners, it's for your business processes. Right. And how are you going to be able to hire people who are super excited about making things better for customers, if you're also not, you know, internally making things better for your employees, right. There's just a real disconnect in terms of, you know, culture and personnel. There. >>That's a great point. Those are in my opinion, inextricably linked, Brian, it's been great to have you on the program. Thank you for sharing with us. The state of the data raised very interesting sort of that you guys have done. Folks can get their hands on that lot of opportunity and a lot of money on the table for organizations in any industry. Thanks so much for joining me today, brand thank you for Brian Kirschner. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching a cube conversation.

>>Kirk focuses on the approach to modern data quality and how it can enable the continuous delivery of trusted data. Take it away. Kirk >>Trusted data has been a focus of mine for the last several years. Most particularly in the area of machine learning. Uh, I spent much of my career on wall street, writing models and trying to create a healthy data program, sort of the run the bank and protect the franchise and how to do that at scale for larger organizations. Uh, I'm excited to have the opportunity today sitting with me as Victor to have a fireside chat. He is an award-winning and best-selling author of delete big data and most currently framers. He's also a professor of governance at Oxford. So Victor, my question for you today is in an era of data that is always on and always flowing. How does CDOs get comfortable? You know, the, I can sleep at night factor when data is coming in from more angles, it's being stored in different formats and varieties and probably just in larger quantities than ever before. In my opinion, just laws of large numbers with that much data. Is there really just that much more risk of having bad data or inaccuracy in your business? >>Well, thank you Kirk, for having me on. Yes, you're absolutely right. That the real problem, if I were to simplify it down to one statement is that incorrect data and it can lead to wrong decisions that can be incredibly costly and incredibly costly for trust for the brand, for the franchise incredibly costly, because they can lead to decisions that are fundamentally flawed, uh, and therefore lead the business in the wrong direction. And so the, the, the real question is, you know, how can you avoid, uh, incorrect data to produce incorrect insights? And that depends on how you view trust and how you view, uh, data and correctness in the first place. >>Yeah, that's interesting, you know, in my background, we were constantly writing models, you know, we're trying to make the models smarter all the time, and we always wanted to get that accuracy level from 89% to 90%, you know, whatever we could be, but there's this popular theme where over time the models can diminish an accuracy. And the only button we really had at our disposal was to retrain the model, uh, oftentime I'm focused on, should we be stress testing the data, it almost like a patient health exam. Uh, and how do we do that? Where we could get more comfortable thinking about the quality of the data before we're running our models and our analytics. >>Yeah, absolutely. When we look at the machine learning landscape, even the big data landscape, what we see is that a lot of focus is now put on getting the models, right, getting it worked out, getting the kinks worked out, but getting sort of the ethics, right. The value, right. That is in the model. Um, uh, and what is really not looked at what is not focused enough that, um, is the data. Now, if you're looking at it from a compliance viewpoint, maybe it's okay if you just look at the model, maybe not. But if you understand that actually using the right data with the right model gives you a competitive advantage that your competitors don't have, then it is far more than compliance. And if it is far more compliance, then actually the aperture for strategy opens up and you should not just look at models. You should actually look at the data and the quality and correctness of the data as a huge way by which you can push forward your competitive advantage. >>Well, I haven't even trickier one for you. I think, you know, there's so much coming in and there's so much that we know we can measure and there's so much we could replay and do what if analysis on and kind of back tests, but, you know, do you see organizations doing things to look around the corner? And maybe an interesting analogy would be something like with Tesla is doing whether it's sensors or LIDAR, and they're trying to bounce off every object they know, and they can make a lot of measurements, but the advancements in computer vision are saying, I might be able to predict what's around the corner. I might be able to be out ahead of the data error. I'm about to see tomorrow. Um, you know, do you see any organizations trying to take that futuristic step to sort of know the unknown and be more predictive versus reactive? >>Absolutely. Tesla is doing a bit Lincoln, uh, but so are others in that space and not autonomous driving space, um, uh, Waymo, the, uh, the, the, uh, Google company that is, uh, doing autonomous driving for a long period of time where they have been doing is collecting training data, uh, through their cars and then running a machine learning on the training data. Now they hit a wall a couple of years ago because the training data wasn't diverse enough. It didn't have that sort of Moore's law of insight anymore, even though it was more and more training data. Um, and so the, the Delta, the additional learning was just limited. So what they then decided to do was to build a virtual reality called car crafting, which were actually cars would drive around and create, uh, uh, predictive training data. Now, what is really interesting about that is that that is isn't a model. It is a model that creates predictive data. And this predictive is the actual value that is added to the equation here. And with this extra predictive data, they were able to improve their autonomous driving quite significantly. Uh, five years ago, their disengagement was, uh, raped was every, uh, 2000 miles on average. And, uh, last year, uh, five years later, it was every 30,000 miles on average, that's a 15 K improvement. And that wasn't driven by a mysterious model. It was driven by predictive data. >>Right, right. You know, that's interesting. I, I'm also a fan of trying to use data points that don't exist in the data sets. So it sounds like they were using more data data that was derived from other sources. And maybe the most simple format that I usually get started with was, you know, what, if I was looking at data from Glassdoor and I wanted to know if it was valid, if it was accurate, but of course there's going to be numbers in the age, field and salary and years of experience in different things. But what if the years of experience and age and academic level of someone no longer correlates to the salary yet that correlation component is not a piece of data that even lives in the column, the row, the cell. So I do think that there's a huge area for improvement and just advancement in the role data that we see in collect, but also the data science metrics, something like lift and correlation between the data points that really helped me certify and feel comfortable that this data makes sense. Otherwise it could just be numbers in the field >>Indeed. And, and this challenge of, of finding the data and focusing on the right subset of the data and manipulating it, uh, in the right, in a qualitatively right way is really something that has been with us for quite a number of years. There's a fabulous, uh, case, um, a few years back, uh, when, um, in Japan, when there was the suspicion that in Sumo wrestling, there was match fixing going on massive max fiction. Um, and, and so investigators came in and they took the data from the championship bouts and analyzed them and, uh, didn't find anything. And, uh, what was, what was really interesting is then later researchers came in and read the rules and regulations of Sumo wrestling and understood that it's not just the championship bouts that matter, but it's also sometimes the relegation matches that matter. And so then they started looking at those secondary matches that nobody looked at before and that subset of data, and they discovered there's massive match fixing going on. It's just, nobody looked at it because nobody just, as you said, that connection, uh, between th those various data sources or the sort of causal connectivity there. And so it's, it's, it's really crucial to understand, uh, that, uh, driving insight out of data, isn't a black box thing where you feed the data in and get it out. It really requires deep thinking about how to wire it up from the very beginning. >>No, that's an interesting story. I kind of wonder if the model in that case is almost the, the wrestlers themselves or the output, but definitely the, the data that goes into it. Um, yeah. So, I mean, do you see a path where organizations will achieve a hundred percent confidence? Because we all know there's a, I can't sleep at night factor, but there's also a case of what do I do today. It's, I'm probably not living in a perfect world. I might be sailing a boat across an ocean that already has a hole in it. So, you know, we can't turn everything off. We have to sort of patch the boat and sail it at the same time. Um, what do you think the, a good approaches for a large organization to improve their posture? >>You know, if you focus on perfection, you never, you never achieved that perfection a hundred percent perfection or so is never achievable. And if you want some radical change, then that that's admirable. But a lot of times it's very risky. It's a very risky proposition. So rather than doing that, there is a lot of low hanging fruit than that incremental, pragmatic step-by-step approach. If I can use an analogy from history, uh, we, we, we talk a lot about, um, the data revolution and before that, the industrial revolution, and when we think about the industrial revolution, we think about the steam engine, but the reality is that the steam engine, wasn't just one radical invention. In fact, there were a myriad of small incremental invade innovations over the course of a century that today we call the industrial revolution. And I think it's the various same thing when the data revolution where we don't have this one silver bullet that radically puts us into data Nirvana, but it is this incremental, pragmatic step-by-step change. It will get us closer. Um, pragmatic, can you speak in closer to where we want to be, even though there was always more work for us left? >>Yeah, that's interesting. Um, you know, that one hits home for me because we ultimately at Collibra take an incremental approach. We don't think there's a stop the world event. There's, you know, a way to learn from the past trends of our data to become incrementally smarter each day. And this kind of stops us from being in a binary project mode, right. Where we have to wait right. Something for six months and then reassess it and hope, you know, we kind of wonder if you're at 70% accuracy today is being at 71% better tomorrow, right? At least there's a measurable amount of improvement there. Uh, and it's a sort of a philosophical difference. And it reminds me of my banking days. When you say, uh, you know, past performance is no guarantee of future results. And, um, it's a nice disclaimer, you can put in everything, but I actually find it to be more true in data. >>We have all of these large data assets, whether it's terabytes or petabytes, or even if it's just gigabytes sitting there on all the datasets to learn from. And what I find in data is that the past historical values actually do tell us a lot about the future and we can learn from that to become incrementally smarter tomorrow. And there's really a lot of value sitting there in the historical data. And it tells me at least a lot about how to forecast the future. You know, one that's been sitting on the top of my mind recently, especially with COVID and the housing market a long time back, I competed with automation, valuation modeling, which basically means how well can you predict the price of a house? And, you know, that's always a fun one to do. And there's some big name brands out there that do that pretty well. >>Back then when I built those models, I would look at things like the size of the yard, the undulation of the land, uh, you know, whether a pool would award you more or less money for your house. And a lot of those factors were different than they are now. So those models ultimately have already changed. And now that we've seen post COVID people look for different things in housing and the prices have gone up. So we've seen a decline and then a dramatic increase. And then we've also seen things like land and pools become more valuable than they were in the housing model before, you know, what are you seeing here with models and data and how that's going to come together? And it's just, is it always going to change where you're going to have to constantly recalibrate both, you know, our understanding of the data and the models themselves? >>Well, indeed the, the problem of course is almost eternal. Um, oftentimes we have developed beautiful models that work really well. And then we're so wedded to this model or this particular kind of model. And we can fathom to give them up. I mean, if I think of my students, sometimes, you know, they, they, they, they have a model, they collect the data, then they run the analysis and, uh, it basically, uh, tells them that their model was wrong. They go out and they collect more data and more data and more data just to make sure that it isn't there, that, that, that their model is right. But the data tells them what the truth is that the model isn't right anymore that has context and goals and circumstances change the model needs to adapt. And we have seen it over and over again, not just in the housing market, but post COVID and in the COVID crisis, you know, a lot of the epidemiologists looked at life expectancy of people, but when you, when you look at people, uh, in the intensive care unit, uh, with long COVID, uh, suffering, uh, and in ICU and so on, you also need to realize, and many have that rather than life expectancy. >>You also need to look at life quality as a mother, uh, kind of dimension. And that means your model needs to change because you can't just have a model that optimizes on life expectancy anymore. And so what we need to do is to understand that the data and the changes in the data that they NAMIC of the data really is a thorn in our thigh of revisiting the model and thinking very critically about what we can do in order to adjust the model to the present situation. >>But with that, Victor, uh, I've really enjoyed our chat today. And, uh, do you have any final thoughts, comments, questions for me? >>Uh, you know, Kirk, I enjoyed it tremendously as well. Uh, I do think that, uh, that what is important, uh, to understand with data is that as there is no, uh, uh, no silver bullet, uh, and there is only incremental steps forward, this is not actually something to despair, but to give and be the source of great hope, because it means that not just tomorrow, but even the day after tomorrow and the day after the day after tomorrow, we still can make headway can make improvement and get better. >>Absolutely. I like the hopeful message I live every day to, uh, to make data a better place. And it is exciting as we see the advancements in what's possible on what's kind of on the forefront. Um, well with that, I really appreciate the chat and I would encourage anyone. Who's interested in this topic to attend a session later today on modern data quality, where I go through maybe five key flaws of the past and some of the pitfalls, and explain a little bit more about how we're using unsupervised learning to solve for future problems. Thanks Victor. Thank you, Kurt. >>Thanks, Kirk. And Victor, how incredible was that?

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Mark Foster, Senior Vice President of IBM Services and IBM's Global Business Services. It's a global landscape, the world's changing, it's going hybrid. Mark, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to see you, John, good to be with you. >> You know, the theme this year is all about hybrid cloud. Global transformation is the innovation at scale. That's the discussion, that's the way I see it. The question I have for you to start right away is how has the last year in particular changed businesses as they're leveraging the tech? You know, they want to solve their critical problems and transform themselves, the pandemic has forced them to look at this. How has this last year changed the way businesses are leveraging tech? >> Well, there's definitely been an acceleration in the digital transformations across all of our clients around the world. They have been compelled to leverage technology to connect with their customers in these unique times. They've been forced to use technology tools to allow their teams to connect and operate around the world. And all of this has reinforced also the opportunity to leverage things like extreme automation, AI, and the leverage of things like the cloud to deal with the virtual and more remote nature of working around the world. >> How much of the change last year do you think's going to to be temporary or long lasting. What's not going to be given up? (laughs) What are people realizing? Is it temporary or is it long lasting? What's your take? >> Well, I think we have to recognize that we are moving into a genuinely hybrid world, well, hybrid insofar as I think that some of the lessons we've learned over this past period are going to durably change the way we work, but we're also going to have a certain amount of back to the future, as well, as we try and put back some of the aspects of physical interaction, the ways of actually bringing empathy, creativity together through being together in groups. But I do think also we're going to take a number of these areas of acceleration and they're going to be extrapolated out to genuinely lead to an acceleration of what might've taken place over over five years taking place over a lot shorter period. >> You know, I think that group dynamic is really a big deal. I think that's going to be something that, to me, jumps out at this transformation. People want to work together. They want to be part of something, totally right on. With that, I got to ask you, now that we have this kind of new virtual experience, we're remote, we're not in person, wish we were, but even when we are in personal, it'll still be hybrid virtual experience events means we're still going to act as a group. This kind of brings up the idea of a virtual enterprise. You kind of mentioned that. What you mean and how do you define a virtual enterprise? >> Well, I think a virtual enterprise for us is an extension of the thought process we've had before around how technology is transforming the way all businesses operate. If you do apply, you know, the power of technology to build new business platforms and think about new ways of applying technology to transform your business processes, you think about the way that all of us are reinventing the relationship between people and technology in our organizations, the virtual enterprise just takes that to the next level. It recognizes that if you are able to take a location out of the equation, if you're able to leverage ecosystems more completely through connecting through networks of organizations, all of this extends the vision that we have of how the cognitive enterprise of the past comes to life. And we create this even more connected, even more expansive vision of business which is of course able to leverage technology within its own four walls. It's able to leverage it powerfully with its business partners. But then finally, it's about how you create the platforms upon which you create new ecosystems for competition and new markets that can be created in that way. >> That's really compelling insight right there. I think that's right on the money. I have to ask you, what do you think the differentiating characteristics are for this enterprise? What's going to be the differentiator, what's going to make it work? What do you need- >> I think what's going to make it work first of all, I think we think there's going to be a sort of a golden thread of what you might call an extended intelligent workflow that runs through the enterprise and its partners. And the power of that sort of thread of core processes and core differentiation to be brought to life by the mutual leverage of technology through partnerships is going to be a hugely powerful. So therefore all the partners' ability to embrace those technologies to embrace the vision for how those workflows come together is going to be very important. I think it's going to be very important that actually the ecosystem and its success becomes the strategy of the of the participants as opposed to being something that they happened to be going along with. So it becomes the strategy of the organization. And I think finally, there's a huge amount around here around how you leverage and think about the power of your people, the culture that you create to be inclusive and expansive in terms of applying new talent, building new talent, to allow this virtual enterprise to thrive. >> That's actually brilliant. You know, ecosystem is part of it, not an afterthought or a marketing gimmick. It's got to be part of it, that's awesome. Let's bring that to the next level. The role of the ecosystems are taking a bigger role for you, as you said, what specifically can you point to that has a change that's made in the ecosystem that you can point to, says that's an impactful change, this is a table stake, this is a guaranteed continuing practice. Can you give an example? >> Well, I think what we can see around the world in terms of how the world has solved for something like you're getting vaccines created and distributed on the back of the COVID crisis, that's taken an ecosystem coming together to work in completely different ways in an accelerated way to deliver on very big outcomes. Well, we can also see, you know, clients who are developing their strategies to try and connect the dots across different players to position their business as a platform upon which others bring their parts, their organizations to bear. And I think that we can see therefore that this idea of ecosystems is being used to solve really big problems, but it's also potentially a model that can be used to actually define really big market opportunities as well. And when you can connect the dots and you can expand your market footprint by combining with other key players at scale and also create a way that smaller organizations can come and sit upon the platforms that you create and leverage those capabilities, then the opportunity to actually use that to really expand your horizons of where your business can go are very real. >> You know, that's a really interesting, mind blowing concept. You think about the idea of a network effect or ecosystems, and integration, and collective intelligence. These are paradigms that have been around for awhile, at least past 10 years. It was the Holy Grail, let's hope we get to that. It seems like that's happening right now. And I think more than ever, it can be harnessed. And so I think you starting to see that with the hybrid cloud and it's not just tech, it's societal impact, it's impacting people, their jobs, and their ability to contribute and work. So this is a huge concept. So really excited this conversation. I guess the next question I have for you, Mark, is how do you bring clients this value? How do they create value? And how do they take this and transform their business with it? What's the playbook? >> Well, I think for clients, the first thing for them to recognize is to understand that this is the world that they are operating in. And I think that from a playbook point of view, the first thing I would say is you do need to think about which ecosystems do I want to play in? How do I think I could win by being a part of, or shaping an ecosystem? I think, secondly, there's the opportunity to think about how you use all the data that's out there in the world to be a stronger source of innovation across an ecosystem, to think about how your products and services could be modernized to succeed in that world. How you build those innovations into this new vision of an extended workflow or process view that binds the players of your ecosystem together. And you're really thinking about how to reinvent the way work gets done. Apply automation, apply AI, apply blockchain, apply IoT to transform those workflows is a massive, massive opportunity. To recognize that actually by the power of that, you're able to have significantly more impact than before. So make sure you're setting your ambitions high enough around the impact the change you're trying to drive can bring, and then I think also just making sure you're thinking all the time about what this means for the culture of your organizations, the workforce you want to connect with, how you want to access talent and bring it to bear across this new extended value chain? You know, who do you need to employ, versus who do you need to contract with, versus who do you need to make sure are participating in the processes that you're driving? And then finally, how do you make sure that you have the infrastructure, and the systems, and the applications that are open enough to allow you to really bring this vision to life? So the underlying hybrid cloud, hybrid architectures that you have and the networks you have that bind you together become fundamental. >> That's awesome. Great insight there. I guess my final question is how has your personal outlook changed in the past year when everyone is working from home? And now we're starting to see the pandemic, you know, light at the end of the tunnel from this pandemic, once we emerge out of it, people want to have a growth strategy, want to get back to real life. Any words of advice for our viewers on your personal outlook and as we come out of the pandemic and they can participate- >> Well, I think the first thing to recognize is we all have a collective wish around the world, probably for the first time for a long time, I think pretty much most people in humanity are sharing a shared view about a desire to have a more expansive horizon than the one that's outside the window of their kitchen, which I'm looking out of right now, and being able to get out and about, and engage in some more aspects that of normal life. And I do think that we're all looking forward to that opportunity. I think we're going to have to recognize that we're probably all going to also adapt our behaviors, going forward, but there's almost an enormous amount of exciting things that we've all got pent up we want to go and do, and I think, you know, the critical thing for us all is to hopefully approach that world safely. But at the same time, recognize that there is hope, we are working our way through this as a world. And as long as we try and make sure we do that in a way that is actually equitable, and that we do make sure that all boats are lifted as we return here, then I think that's a really positive view of how the future will be for all of us. So we should all look forward to that. >> Mark, it's great to have you on theCUBE. I love the insight, I love your message. It's right on, it's relevant, and super cool because that's what people want. They want to collaborate and be with people. I guess with the final minute we have left, share an observation from the past year and a half. Something that surprised you that happened in the industry, something that you didn't expect or something that you did expect that's positive that we can look to and say, "That's a good thing, we want to double down on that." >> Well, I think the positive thing that I think we can double down on is that we have all actually learned to be perhaps more open to interacting with people who we wouldn't otherwise have interacted with through this medium, that actually I have found that I've broadened my network of people that I've been engaging with through the fact that it has been actually relatively easy to connect even at high levels with people, but all the people have been able to connect in a strange way with a bigger group of connections than you would have done through the normal physical constraints of flying somewhere, seeing someone, meeting someone, and how you use your time to do that. So I would say one of the positive things is actually how open people have been to start new relationships over this virtual medium. Of course, the trick is going to be, can we build on those virtual relationships we've created and make them more sustainable once we're back to a more normal life and they become, you know, the new friendships, the new business relationships and networks that we can thrive on for the future? >> That's genius, love it. I agree. CUBE Virtual's here doing it. We're trying content, community, collaboration, connection, friendships, new things, touch someone with a click and engage. Mark Foster here, clicking into our CUBE Virtual for IBM Think. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music) ♪ Dah, deeah ♪ ♪ Dah, dee ♪ (chimes ringing)

♪ Dah, deeah ♪ ♪ Dah, dee ♪ (chimes ringing) >> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here with Mark Foster, Senior Vice President of IBM Services and IBM's Global Business Services. It's a global landscape, the world's changing, it's going hybrid. Mark, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to see you, John, good to be with you. >> You know, the theme this year is all about hybrid cloud. Global transformation is the innovation at scale. That's the discussion, that's the way I see it. The question I have for you to start right away is how has the last year in particular changed businesses as they're leveraging the tech? You know, they want to solve their critical problems and transform themselves, the pandemic has forced them to look at this. How has this last year changed the way businesses are leveraging tech? >> Well, there's definitely been an acceleration in the digital transformations across all of our clients around the world. They have been compelled to leverage technology to connect with their customers in these unique times. They've been forced to use technology tools to allow their teams to connect and operate around the world. And all of this has reinforced also the opportunity to leverage things like extreme automation, AI, and the leverage of things like the cloud to deal with the virtual and more remote nature of working around the world. >> How much of the change last year do you think's going to to be temporary or long lasting. What's not going to be given up? (laughs) What are people realizing? Is it temporary or is it long lasting? What's your take? >> Well, I think we have to recognize that we are moving into a genuinely hybrid world, well, hybrid insofar as I think that some of the lessons we've learned over this past period are going to durably change the way we work, but we're also going to have a certain amount of back to the future, as well, as we try and put back some of the aspects of physical interaction, the ways of actually bringing empathy, creativity together through being together in groups. But I do think also we're going to take a number of these areas of acceleration and they're going to be extrapolated out to genuinely lead to an acceleration of what might've taken place over over five years taking place over a lot shorter period. >> You know, I think that group dynamic is really a big deal. I think that's going to be something that, to me, jumps out at this transformation. People want to work together. They want to be part of something, totally right on. With that, I got to ask you, now that we have this kind of new virtual experience, we're remote, we're not in person, wish we were, but even when we are in personal, it'll still be hybrid virtual experience events means we're still going to act as a group. This kind of brings up the idea of a virtual enterprise. You kind of mentioned that. What you mean and how do you define a virtual enterprise? >> Well, I think a virtual enterprise for us is an extension of the thought process we've had before around how technology is transforming the way all businesses operate. If you do apply, you know, the power of technology to build new business platforms and think about new ways of applying technology to transform your business processes, you think about the way that all of us are reinventing the relationship between people and technology in our organizations, the virtual enterprise just takes that to the next level. It recognizes that if you are able to take a location out of the equation, if you're able to leverage ecosystems more completely through connecting through networks of organizations, all of this extends the vision that we have of how the cognitive enterprise of the past comes to life. And we create this even more connected, even more expansive vision of business which is of course able to leverage technology within its own four walls. It's able to leverage it powerfully with its business partners. But then finally, it's about how you create the platforms upon which you create new ecosystems for competition and new markets that can be created in that way. >> That's really compelling insight right there. I think that's right on the money. I have to ask you, what do you think the differentiating characteristics are for this enterprise? What's going to be the differentiator, what's going to make it work? What do you need- >> I think what's going to make it work first of all, I think we think there's going to be a sort of a golden thread of what you might call an extended intelligent workflow that runs through the enterprise and its partners. And the power of that sort of thread of core processes and core differentiation to be brought to life by the mutual leverage of technology through partnerships is going to be a hugely powerful. So therefore all the partners' ability to embrace those technologies to embrace the vision for how those workflows come together is going to be very important. I think it's going to be very important that actually the ecosystem and its success becomes the strategy of the of the participants as opposed to being something that they happened to be going along with. So it becomes the strategy of the organization. And I think finally, there's a huge amount around here around how you leverage and think about the power of your people, the culture that you create to be inclusive and expansive in terms of applying new talent, building new talent, to allow this virtual enterprise to thrive. >> That's actually brilliant. You know, ecosystem is part of it, not an afterthought or a marketing gimmick. It's got to be part of it, that's awesome. Let's bring that to the next level. The role of the ecosystems are taking a bigger role for you, as you said, what specifically can you point to that has a change that's made in the ecosystem that you can point to, says that's an impactful change, this is a table stake, this is a guaranteed continuing practice. Can you give an example? >> Well, I think what we can see around the world in terms of how the world has solved for something like you're getting vaccines created and distributed on the back of the COVID crisis, that's taken an ecosystem coming together to work in completely different ways in an accelerated way to deliver on very big outcomes. Well, we can also see, you know, clients who are developing their strategies to try and connect the dots across different players to position their business as a platform upon which others bring their parts, their organizations to bear. And I think that we can see therefore that this idea of ecosystems is being used to solve really big problems, but it's also potentially a model that can be used to actually define really big market opportunities as well. And when you can connect the dots and you can expand your market footprint by combining with other key players at scale and also create a way that smaller organizations can come and sit upon the platforms that you create and leverage those capabilities, then the opportunity to actually use that to really expand your horizons of where your business can go are very real. >> You know, that's a really interesting, mind blowing concept. You think about the idea of a network effect or ecosystems, and integration, and collective intelligence. These are paradigms that have been around for awhile, at least past 10 years. It was the Holy Grail, let's hope we get to that. It seems like that's happening right now. And I think more than ever, it can be harnessed. And so I think you starting to see that with the hybrid cloud and it's not just tech, it's societal impact, it's impacting people, their jobs, and their ability to contribute and work. So this is a huge concept. So really excited this conversation. I guess the next question I have for you, Mark, is how do you bring clients this value? How do they create value? And how do they take this and transform their business with it? What's the playbook? >> Well, I think for clients, the first thing for them to recognize is to understand that this is the world that they are operating in. And I think that from a playbook point of view, the first thing I would say is you do need to think about which ecosystems do I want to play in? How do I think I could win by being a part of, or shaping an ecosystem? I think, secondly, there's the opportunity to think about how you use all the data that's out there in the world to be a stronger source of innovation across an ecosystem, to think about how your products and services could be modernized to succeed in that world. How you build those innovations into this new vision of an extended workflow or process view that binds the players of your ecosystem together. And you're really thinking about how to reinvent the way work gets done. Apply automation, apply AI, apply blockchain, apply IoT to transform those workflows is a massive, massive opportunity. To recognize that actually by the power of that, you're able to have significantly more impact than before. So make sure you're setting your ambitions high enough around the impact the change you're trying to drive can bring, and then I think also just making sure you're thinking all the time about what this means for the culture of your organizations, the workforce you want to connect with, how you want to access talent and bring it to bear across this new extended value chain? You know, who do you need to employ, versus who do you need to contract with, versus who do you need to make sure are participating in the processes that you're driving? And then finally, how do you make sure that you have the infrastructure, and the systems, and the applications that are open enough to allow you to really bring this vision to life? So the underlying hybrid cloud, hybrid architectures that you have and the networks you have that bind you together become fundamental. >> That's awesome. Great insight there. I guess my final question is how has your personal outlook changed in the past year when everyone is working from home? And now we're starting to see the pandemic, you know, light at the end of the tunnel from this pandemic, once we emerge out of it, people want to have a growth strategy, want to get back to real life. Any words of advice for our viewers on your personal outlook and as we come out of the pandemic and they can participate- >> Well, I think the first thing to recognize is we all have a collective wish around the world, probably for the first time for a long time, I think pretty much most people in humanity are sharing a shared view about a desire to have a more expansive horizon than the one that's outside the window of their kitchen, which I'm looking out of right now, and being able to get out and about, and engage in some more aspects that of normal life. And I do think that we're all looking forward to that opportunity. I think we're going to have to recognize that we're probably all going to also adapt our behaviors, going forward, but there's almost an enormous amount of exciting things that we've all got pent up we want to go and do, and I think, you know, the critical thing for us all is to hopefully approach that world safely. But at the same time, recognize that there is hope, we are working our way through this as a world. And as long as we try and make sure we do that in a way that is actually equitable, and that we do make sure that all boats are lifted as we return here, then I think that's a really positive view of how the future will be for all of us. So we should all look forward to that. >> Mark, it's great to have you on theCUBE. I love the insight, I love your message. It's right on, it's relevant, and super cool because that's what people want. They want to collaborate and be with people. I guess with the final minute we have left, share an observation from the past year and a half. Something that surprised you that happened in the industry, something that you didn't expect or something that you did expect that's positive that we can look to and say, "That's a good thing, we want to double down on that." >> Well, I think the positive thing that I think we can double down on is that we have all actually learned to be perhaps more open to interacting with people who we wouldn't otherwise have interacted with through this medium, that actually I have found that I've broadened my network of people that I've been engaging with through the fact that it has been actually relatively easy to connect even at high levels with people, but all the people have been able to connect in a strange way with a bigger group of connections than you would have done through the normal physical constraints of flying somewhere, seeing someone, meeting someone, and how you use your time to do that. So I would say one of the positive things is actually how open people have been to start new relationships over this virtual medium. Of course, the trick is going to be, can we build on those virtual relationships we've created and make them more sustainable once we're back to a more normal life and they become, you know, the new friendships, the new business relationships and networks that we can thrive on for the future? >> That's genius, love it. I agree. CUBE Virtual's here doing it. We're trying content, community, collaboration, connection, friendships, new things, touch someone with a click and engage. Mark Foster here, clicking into our CUBE Virtual for IBM Think. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music) ♪ Dah, deeah ♪ ♪ Dah, dee ♪ (chimes ringing)

>>From around the globe. If the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 20, 20 special coverage sponsored by AWS worldwide public sector. >>Okay. Welcome back everyone. To the cubes, virtual coverage of AWS reinvent 2020, this is the cube virtual. I'm your host John farrier with the cube. The cube normally is there in person this year. It's all virtual. This is the cube virtual. We're doing the remote interviews and we're bringing in commentary and discussion around the themes of re-invent. And this today is public sector, worldwide public sector day. And the theme from Teresa Carlson, who heads up the entire team is to think big and look at the data. And I wanted to bring in a special cube alumni and special guests. Alan Cohen. Who's a partner at data collective venture capital or DCVC, um, which we've known for many, many years, founders, Matt OCO and Zachary Bogue, who started the firm, um, to over at about 10 years ago. We're on the really the big data wave and have grown into a really big firm thought big data, data, collective big ideas. That's the whole purpose of your firm. Alan. You're now a partner retired, retired, I mean a venture capitalist over at being a collective. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Great to see you as well. John, thanks for being so honest this morning. >>I love to joke about being retired because the VC game, it's not, um, a retirement for you. You guys made, you made some investments. Data collective has a unique, um, philosophy because you guys invest in essentially moonshots or big ideas, hard problems. And if I look at what's going on with Amazon, specifically in the public sector, genome sequencing now available in what they call the open data registry. You've got healthcare expanding, huge, you got huge demand and education, real societal benefits, uh, cybersecurity contested in space, more contention and congestion and space. Um, there's a lot of really hard science problems that are going on at the cloud. And AI are enabling, you're investing in entrepreneurs that are trying to solve these problems. What's your view of the big ideas? What are people missing? >>Well, I don't know if they're missing, but I think what I'd say, John, is that we're starting to see a shift. So if you look at the last, I don't know, forever 40, 50 years in the it and the tech industry, we took a lot of atoms. We built networks and data warehouses and server farms, and we, we kind of created software with it. So we took Adam's and we turned them into bets. Now we're seeing things move in the other direction where we're targeting bits, software, artificial intelligence, massive amount of compute power, which you can get from companies like, like AWS. And now we're creating better atoms. That means better met medicines and vaccines we're investor, um, and a company called abs Celera, which is the therapeutic treatment that J and J has, um, taken to market. Uh, people are actually spaces, a commercial business. >>If it's not a science fiction, novel we're investors in planet labs and rocket labs and compel a space so people can see right out. So you're sitting on your terrorists of your backyard from a satellite that was launched by a private company without any government money. Um, you talked about gene sequencing, uh, folding of proteins. Um, so I think the big ideas are we can look at some of the world's most intractable issues and problems, and we can go after them and turn them into commercial opportunities. Uh, and we would have been able to do that before, without the advent of big data and obviously the processing capabilities and on now artificial intelligence that are available from things like AWS. So, um, it's kind of, it's kind of payback from the physical world to the physical world, from the virtual world. Okay. >>Pella space was featured in the keynote by Teresa Carlson. Um, great to tie that in great tie in there, but this is the kind of hard problems. And I want to get your take because entrepreneurs, you know, it reminds me of the old days where, you know, when you didn't go back to the.com, when that bubble was going on, and then you got the different cycles and the different waves, um, the consumer always got the best kind of valuations and got the most attention. And now B to B's hot, you got the enterprise is super hot, mainly because of Amazon >>Sure. Into the Jordash IPO. Obviously this morning, >>Jordache IPO, I didn't get a phone call for friends and family and one of their top customers. They started in Palo Alto. We know them since the carton Jordache, these are companies that are getting massive, uh, zoom. Um, the post pandemic is coming. It's going to be a hybrid world. I think there's clear recognition that this some economic values are digital being digitally enabled and using cloud and AI for efficiencies and philosophy of new things. But it's going to get back to the real world. What's your, it's still hard problems out there. I mean, all the valuations, >>Well, there's always hard problems, but what's different now. And from a perspective of venture and, and investors is that you can go after really hard problems with venture scale level of investments. Uh, traditionally you think about these things as like a division of a company like J and J or general electric or some very massive global corporation, and because of the capabilities that are available, um, in the computing world, um, as well as kind of great scientific research and we fund more PhDs probably than any other, uh, any other type of background, uh, for, for founders, they can go after these things, they can create. Uh, we, uh, we have a company called pivot bio, uh, and I think I've spoken to you about them in the past, Sean, they have created a series of microbes that actually do a process called nitrogen fixation. Um, so it attaches the nitrogen to the roots of corn, sorghum and wheat. >>So you don't have to use chemical fertilizer. Well, those microbes were all created through an enormous amount of machine learning. And where did that machine learning come from? So what does that mean? That means climate change. That means more profitable farmers. Uh, that means water and air management, all major issues in our society where if we didn't have the computing capabilities we have today, we wouldn't have been able to do that. We clearly would have not been able to do that, um, as a venture level of investments to get it started. So I think what's missing for a lot of people is a paucity of imagination. And you have to actually, you know, you actually have to take these intractable problems and say, how can I solve them and then tear it apart to its actual molecules, just the little inside joke, right? And, and then move that through. >>And, you know, this means that you have to be able to invest in work on things. You know, these companies don't happen in two or three years or five years. They take sometimes seven, 10, 15 years. So it's life work for people. Um, but though, but we're seeing that, uh, you know, that everywhere, I mean, rocket lab, a company of ours out of New Zealand and now out of DC, which we actually launched the last couple of space, um, satellites, they print their rocket engines with a 3d printer, a metal printer. So think about that. How did all that, that come to bear? Um, and it started as a dangerous scale style of investments. So, you know, Peter Beck, the founder of that company had a dream to basically launch a rocket, you know, once a year, once a month, once a week, and eventually to once a day. So he's effectively creating a huge, um, huge upswing in the ability of people to commercialize space. And then what does space do? It gives you better observability on the planet from a, not just from a security point of view, but from a weather and a commerce point of view. So all kinds of other things that looked like they were very difficult to go after it now starts to become enabled. Yeah. >>I love the, uh, your investment in Capella space because I think that speaks volumes. And one of the things that the founder was talking about was getting the data down is the hard part. He he's up, he's up there now. He can see everything, but now I've got to get the data down because say, say the wildfires in California, or whether, um, things happening around the globe now that you have the, uh, the observation space, you got to get the data down there. This is the huge scale challenge. >>Well, let me, let me, let me give you something. That's also, so w you know, we are in a fairly difficult time in this country, right? Because of the covert virus, uh, we are going to maybe as quickly as next week, start to deliver, even though not as many as we'd like vaccines and therapeutics into this virus situation, literally in a year, how did all these things, I mean, obviously one of the worst public health crisis of our lifetimes, and maybe, you know, uh, of the past century, uh, how did that happen? How did it all day? Well, you know, some, I mean, the ability to use, um, computing power in, in assistance, in laboratory, in, in, uh, in, um, development of, of pharmaceutical and therapeutics is a huge change. So something that is an intractable problem, because the traditional methods of creating vaccines that take anywhere from three to seven years, we would have a much worse public health crisis. I'm not saying that this one is over, right. We're in a really difficult situation, but our ability to start to address it, the worst public health crisis in our lifetime is being addressed because of the ability of people to apply technology and to accelerate the ability to create vaccines. So great points, absolutely amazing. >>Let's just, let's just pause that let's double down on that and just unpack that, think about that for a second. If you didn't, and then the Amazon highlight is on Andy Jesse's keynote carrier, which makes air conditioning. They also do refrigeration and transport. So one IOT application leveraging their cloud is they may call it cold chain managing the value chain of the transport, making sure food. And in this case vaccine, they saw huge value to reduce carbon emissions because of it does the waste involved in food alone was a problem, but the vaccine, they had the cold, the cold, cold, cold chain. Can you hear me? >>Maybe this year, the cold chain is more valuable than the blockchain. Yeah. >>Cold don't think he was cold chain. Sounds like a band called play. Um, um, I had to get that in and Linda loves Coldplay. Um, but if you think about like where we are to your point, imagine if this hit 15 years ago or 20 years ago, um, you know, YouTube was just hitting the scene 20 years ago, 15 years ago, you know, so, you know, that kind of culture, we didn't have zoom education would be where we would be Skyping. Um, there's no bandwidth. So, I mean, you, you know, the, the bandwidth Wars you would live through those and your career, you had no bandwidth. You had no video conferencing, no real IOT, no real supply chain management and therapeutics would have taken what years. What's your reaction to, to that and compare and contrast that to what's on full display in the real world stage right now on digital enablement, digital transformation. >>Well, look, I mean, ultimately I'm an optimist because of what this technology allows you to do. I'm a realist that, you know, you know, we're gonna lose a lot of people because of this virus, but we're also going to be able to reduce a lot of, um, uh, pain for people and potentially death because of the ability to accelerate, um, these abilities to react. I think the biggest and the, the thing that I look for and I hope for, so when Theresa says, how do you think big, the biggest lesson I think we're going to we've learned in the last year is how to build resilience. So all kinds of parts of our economy, our healthcare systems, our personal lives, our education, our children, even our leisure time have been tested from a resilience point of view and the ability of technology to step in and become an enabler for that of resilience. >>Like there isn't like people don't love zoom school, but without zoom school, what we're going to do, there is no school, right? So, which is why zoom has become an indispensable utility of our lives, whether you're on a too much, or you've got zoom fatigue, does it really matter the concept? What we're going to do, call into a conference call and listen to your teacher, um, right in, you know, so how are you going to, you're going to do that, the ability to repurpose, um, our supply chain and, you know, uh, we, we, we see this, we're going to see a lot of change in the, in the global supply chain. You're going to see, uh, whether it's re domestication of manufacturing or tightening of that up, uh, because we're never going to go without PPE again, and other vital elements. We've seen entire industries repurposed from B2B to B to C and their ability to package, deliver and service customers. That is, those are forms of resilience. >>And, and, and, and taking that to the next level. If you think about what's actually happening on full display, and again, on my one-on-one with Andy Jassy prior to the event, and he laid this out on stage, he kind of talks about this, every vertical being disrupted, and then Dr. Matt wood, who's the machine learning lead there in Swami says, Hey, you know, cloud compute with chips now, and with AI and machine learning, every industry, vertical global industry is going to be disrupted. And so, you know, I get that. We've been saying that in the queue for a long time, that that's just going to happen. So we've been kind of on this wave of horizontal, scalability and vertical specialization with data and modern applications with machine learning, making customization really high-fidelity decisions. Or as you say, down to the molecule level or atomic level, but this is clear what, what I found interesting. And I want to get your thoughts because you have one been there, done that through many ways of innovation and now investor leading investor >>Investor, and you made up a word. I like it. Okay. >>Jesse talks about leadership to invent and reinvent. Can't fight gravity. You've got to get talent hungry for invention, solve real-world problems. Speed. Don't complexify. That's his message. I said to him, in my interview, you need a wartime conciliary cause he's a big movie buff. I quote the godfather. Yeah. Don't you don't want to be the Tom Hagen. You don't want to be that guy, right? You're not a wartime. Conciliary this is a time there's times in companies' histories where there's peace and there's wartime, wartime being the startup, trying to find its way. And then they get product market fit and you're growing and scaling. You're operating, you're hiring people to operate. Then you get into a pivot or a competitive situation. And then you got to get out there and, and, and get dirty and reinvent or re-imagine. And then you're back to peace. Having the right personnel is critical. So one of the themes this year is if you're in the way, get out of the way, you know, and some people don't want to hold on to hold onto the past. That's the way we did it before I built this system. Therefore it has to work this way. Otherwise the new ways, terrible, the mainframe, we've got to keep the mainframe. So you have a kind of a, um, an accelerated leadership, uh, thin man mantra happening. What is your take on this? Because, >>Sorry. So if you're going to have your F R R, if you're going to, if you are going to use, um, mob related better for is I'll share one with you from the final season of the Soprano's, where Tony's Prado is being hit over the head with a bunch of nostalgia from one of his associates. And he goes, remember, when is the lowest form of conversation and which is iconic. I think what you're talking about and what Andy is talking about is that the thing that makes great leadership, and what I look for is that when you invest in somebody or you put somebody in a leadership position to build something, 50% of their experience is really important. And 50% of it is not applicable in the new situation. And the hard leadership initiative has to understand which 50 matters in which 50 doesn't matter. >>So I think the issue is that, yeah, I think it is, you know, lead follow or get out of the way, but it's also, what am I doing? Am I following a pattern for a, for a, for an, a, for a technology, a market, a customer base, or a set of people are managing that doesn't really exist anymore, that the world has moved on. And I think that we're going to be kind of permanent war time on some level we're going to, we're going to be co we're because I think the economy is going to shift. We're going to have other shocks to the economy and we don't get back to a traditional normal any time soon. Yep. So I, I think that is the part that leadership in, in technology really has to, would adopt. And it's like, I mean, uh, you know, the first great CEO of Intel reminded us, right. Then only the paranoid survive. Right. Is that it's you, some things work and some things don't work and that's, that's the hard part on how you parse it. So I always like to say that you always have to have a crisis, and if there is no crisis, you create the crisis. Yeah. And, you know, >>Sam said, don't let a good crisis go to waste. You know? Um, as a manager, you take advantage of the crisis. >>Yeah. I mean, look, it wouldn't have been bad to be in the Peloton business this year. Right, too. Right. Which is like, when people stayed home and like that, you know, you know, th that will fade. People will get back on their bikes and go outside. I'm a cyclist, but you know, a lot more people are going to look at that as an alternative way to exercise or exercising, then when it's dark or when the weather is inclement. So what I think is that you see these things, they go in waves, they crest, they come back, but they never come back all the way to where they were. And as a manager, and then as a builder in the technology industry, you may not get like, like, like, okay, maybe we will not spend as much time on zoom, um, in a year from now, but we're going to still spend a lot of time on zoom and it's going to still be very important. >>Um, what I, what I would say, for example, and I, and looking at the COVID crisis and from my own personal investments, when I look at one thing is clear, we're going to get our arms around this virus. But if you look at the history of airborne illnesses, they are accelerating and they're coming every couple of years. So being able to be in that position to, to more react, more rapidly, create vaccines, the ability to foster trials more quickly to be able to use that information, to make decisions. And so the duration when people are not covered by therapeutics or vaccines, um, short, and this, that is going to be really important. So that form of resilience and that kind of speed is going to happen again and again, in healthcare, right. There's going to be in, you know, in increasing pressure across that in part of the segment food supply, right. I mean, the biggest problem in our food supply today is actually the lack of labor. Um, and so you have far, I mean, you know, farmers have had a repurpose, they don't sell to their traditional, like, so you're going to see increased amount of optimization automation and mechanization. >>Lauren was on the, um, keynote today talking about how their marketplaces collected as a collective, you know, um, people were working together, um, given that, given the big ideas. Well, let's, let's just, as we end the segment here, let's connect big ideas. And the democratization of, I mean, you know, the old expression Silicon Valley go big or go home. Well, I think now we're at a time where you can actually go big and stay and, and, and be big and get to be big at your own pace because the, the mantra has been thinking big in years, execute plan in months and execute weekly and month daily, you know, you can plan around, there's a management technique potentially to leverage cloud and AI to really think about bit the big idea. Uh, if I'm a manager, whether I'm in public sector or commercial or any vertical industry, I can still have that big idea that North star and then work backwards and figure that out. >>That sounds to the Amazon way. What's your take on how people should be. What's the right way to think about executing down that path so that someone who's say trying to re-imagine education. And I know a, some people that I've talked to here in California are looking at it and saying, Hey, I don't need to have silos students, faculty, alumni, and community. I can unify them together. That's an idea. I mean, execution of that is, you know, move all these events. So they've been supplying siloed systems to them. Um, I mean, cause people want to interact online. The Peloton is a great example of health and fitness. So there's, there's everyone is out there waiting for this playbook. >>Yeah. Unfortunately I, I had the playbook. I'd mail it to you. Uh, but you know, I think there's a couple of things that are really important to do. Maybe good to help the bed is one where is there structural change in an industry or a segment or something like that. And sorry to just people I'm home today, right? It's, everybody's running out of the door. Um, and you know, so I talked about this structural change and you, we talked about the structural change in healthcare. We talked about kind of maybe some of the structural change that's coming to agriculture. There's a change in people's expectations and how they're willing to work and what they're willing to do. Um, you, as you pointed out the traditional silos, right, since we have so much information at our fingertips, um, you know, people's responsibility as opposed to having products and services to deliver them, what they're willing to do on their own is really changed. >>Um, I think the other thing is that, uh, leadership is ultimately the most important aspect. And we have built a lot of companies in the industry based on forms of structural relations industry, um, background, I'm a product manager, I'm a sales person, I'm a CEO, I'm a finance person. And what we're starting to see is more whole thinking. Um, uh, particularly in early stage investors where they think less functionally about what people's jobs are and more about what the company is trying to get done, what the market is like. And it's infusing a lot more, how people do that. So ultimately most of this comes down to leadership. Um, uh, and, and that's what people have to do. They have to see themselves as a leader in their company, in their, in the business. They're trying to build, um, not just in their function, but in the market they're trying to win, which means you go out and you talk to a lot more people. >>You do a lot, you take a lot fewer things for granted. Um, you read less textbooks on how to build companies and you spend more time talking to your customers and your engineers, and you start to look at enabling. So the, we have made between machine learning, computer vision, and the amount of processing power that's available from things like AWS, including the services that you could just click box in places like the Amazon store. You actually have to be much more expansive in how you think about what you can get done without having to build a lot of things. Cause it's actually right there at your fingertips. Hopefully that kind of gets a little bit to what you were asking. >>Well, Alan, it's always great to have you on and great insight and, uh, always a pleasure to talk candidly. Um, normally we're a little bit more boisterous, but given how terrible the situation is with COVID while working at home, I'm usually in person, but you've been great. Take a minute to give a plug for the data collective venture capital firm. DCVC you guys have a really unique investment thesis you're in applied AI, computational biology, um, computational care, um, enterprise enablement. Geospatial is about space and Capella, which was featured carbon health, smart agriculture transportation. These are kind of like not on these are off the beaten path of like traditional herd mentality of venture capital. You guys are going after big problems. Give us an update on the firm. I know that firm has gotten bigger lately. You guys have >>No, I mean the further firm has gotten bigger, I guess since Matt, Zach started about a decade ago. So we have about $2.3 billion under management. We also have bio fund, uh, kind of a sister fund. That's part of that. I mean, obviously we are, uh, traditionally an early stage investor, but we have gone much longer now with these additional, um, um, investment funds and, and the confidence of our LPs. Uh, we are looking for bears. You said John, really large intractable, um, industry problems and transitions. Uh, we tend to back very technical founders and work with them very early in the creation of their business. Um, and we have a huge network of some of the leading people in our industry who work with us. Uh, we, uh, it's a little bit of our secret weapon. We call it our equity partner network. Many of them have been on the cube. >>Um, and these are people that work with us in the create, uh, you know, the creation of this. Uh, we've never been more excited because there's never been more opportunity. And you'll start to see, you know, you're starting to hear more and more about them, uh, will probably be a couple of years of report. We're a household name. Um, but you know, we've, we we're, we're washing deal flow. And the good news is I think more people want to invest in and build the things that we've. So we're less than itchy where people want to do what we're doing. And I think some of the large exits that starting to come our way or we'll attract more, more great entrepreneurs in that space. >>I really saw the data models, data, data trend early, you saw a Realty impacted, and I'll say that's front and center on Amazon web services reinvent this year. You guys were early super important firm. I'm really glad you guys exist. And you guys will be soon a household name if not already. Thanks for coming on. Right, >>Alan. Thanks. Thank you. Appreciate >>It. Take care. I'm John ferry with the cube. You're watching a reinvent coverage. This is the cube live portion of the coverage. Three weeks wall to wall. Check out the cube.net. Also go to the queue page on the Amazon event page, there's a little click through the bottom and the metadata is Mainstage tons of video on demand and live programming there too. Thanks for watching.

(soft music) >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE on Cloud, where we're talking to CEOs, CIOs, Chief Technology Officers, and investors on the future of Cloud, with me is Dave Humphrey. Who's the Managing Director, and co-head of private equity in North America at Bain Capital. Dave, welcome to theCUBE first time, I think. >> First time, yeah, Dave, thanks very much for having me. >> So, let's get right into it, as an investor, how are you thinking about the evolution of cloud, when you look back at the last decade? It's not going to be the same, in this coming decade it's ironic 2020 is thrown us into, the accelerated digital transformation and cloud. How do you look at the evolution of cloud, from an investment perspective? What's your thesis? >> That's a great question, David for us we're focused on investing, in technology and really across the economy. And I'd say ,the cloud is the overarching trend, and dynamic in the technology markets. It really affect two reasons. One is a major shift ,of course that's going on. But the second and frankly even more interesting one, just as all the growth, that the cloud is creating, in the technology marketplace. The shift, think is been well covered, but five years ago in 2015, by our analysis, 2/3 of all computing workloads were done on premises. And only five years later, that's that's split. So, 2/3 of all computing workloads now done in the cloud and of course that shift, there's a lot of ramifications, as an investor. But even more interesting to us, is the growth in technology and the usage of technology, that the cloud is creating. So, over that same period of time, the total number of computing workloads run has increased, by 2.6 times, in just a five-year period of time which is really a dramatic thing and it makes sense when you think about, all the new software applications that could be created, all the data that can be used by new users and new segments, and the real-time insight that can be gleaned from there cause that growth, that really were focused on investing behind, as investors in technology. >> It's interesting you share those numbers, and you hear a lot of numbers. I actually think you're even being conservative. Ginni Rometty, used to talk about 80% of workloads, are still on-prem. Andy Jassy at re:Invent said that, 96% of the spending is still on premises. So, that was kind of an interesting stat. And I guess the other thing that I would note is it's not just a share shift, it is, it's not just, the cloud eating away on-prem. We've clearly seen that. But there's also incremental opportunity as well. If you look at Snowflake, for example adding value across multiple clouds and creating new markets. So there's that one-two punch, of stealing share from on-prem (clears throat). Also incremental growth, which is probably accelerated as a result, of this compressed digital transformation. So when you look at the big three Cloud players. I mean, roughly speaking, there probably account for $80 billion in total revenue. Which I guess, is a small portion of the overall IT market. So, it has a long way to go, but what's the best way to get good returns, from an investment standpoint, without getting clobbered, by their tendency to sometimes co-opt some of the best ideas and put them on their primary services. >> Yeah, absolutely, well, for us, it really comes back to the same fundamental principles, we look for in any investment. Which is finding, a business that solves, a really important problem for its customers, and does so in a way that's really advantage, versus competition and can do something, that other competitors just can't do. Whether those be the hyperscalers that you're describing, or other specialized and focused competitors. And then finding a way ,that we can partner with those companies to help them to accelerate their growth. So, surely the growth of the likes of AWS and Microsoft and Google, as you were describing has been a profound, competitive shift, along with the cloud shift, that we've all talked about. And those companies of course can offer, and do things that you asked, purveyors of computing couldn't. But, fundamentally they're selling an infrastructure layer, and there is room for all sorts of new competitors, and new applications that can do something better than anybody else can. So, any company that we're looking at, we're asking ourselves the question, why are they the best ones, to do what they're doing? How can they solve the most problems, for their customers and do that, in a way that's resilient? And we see lots of those opportunities. >> And I want to pick your brain, about the Nutanix investment, but before we get there. I wonder if you could just talk, about Bain Capital their history of investment in both cloud and infrastructure software and how do those investments, how would they perform and how do they inform your current thesis? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, Bain Capital was started in the mid 80s, 1984. Actually, as a spin out Bain Company Consulting. And the basic premise was that, if we're good at advising and supporting businesses. We should partner with them and invest behind them and if they do well, we'll do well. And as I said, focusing on these businesses but do something really valuable for their customers in a real advantage way with some discontinuous growth opportunity. That's led us to grow a lot. We started out actually in the venture business, and grew into the private equity business, but now we invest across all life stages of company all over the world. So we're $105 billion in assets that we manage, across 10 lines of business and we're truly global. So I think we have about 470 investment professionals and 210 of those, at this point are located outside the US. One of the really interesting things for us in investing in technology broadly and in infrastructure and the Cloud more specifically is that we're able to do that all over the world and we're able to do that across all the different life stages of a company. So we have a thrive in venture capital business, that really we've been in, since the origins of Bain Capital has invested across countless cloud and security and infrastructure businesses, taken successful companies public like SolarWinds sold companies to strategic and grown businesses in really thriving ways. We have a growth mid-market growth technology business, that we launched last year, called our Technology Opportunities Fund. They've made a really interesting, cloud-based investment in a company called the Cloud Gurus, Cloud Guru, excuse me. That trains, the next generation of IT professionals to be successful in the cloud. And then of course in our private equity business where I spend my time. We are highly focused on technologist sector. And the impacts of the cloud in that sector broadly, we have invested in many infrastructure businesses, scale businesses like, BMC Software and Rocket Software, security businesses like, Blue Coat Systems and Symantec. And of course, for those big businesses they've got both on premises solutions. They've got cloud solutions and often we're focused on helping them continue to grow and innovate and take their solutions to the cloud. And then, this taken us to our most recent investment in Nutanix that we're very excited about it. We think it's truly a growth business in a large market that has an opportunity to capitalize, on these trends we're talking about. >> I wonder if you could comment on some of the changes that have occurred, you guys have been in the private equity business, for a long time. And if you look at kind of the early days of private equity, it was all, EBITDA suck as much cash out of the company as possible and whatever's left over we'll figure out what to do with it. And it's, it seems like investors have realized, wow, we can actually, if we put a little investment in and do some engineering, and some go to market we can actually, get better multiples. And so you've got the kind of rule of 30, 35 and 40 where EBITDA plus growth is kind of the metric. How do you think about that and look at that evolution? >> Yeah, it's interesting because in many ways Bain Capital was started as the antithesis to what you're describing. >> Great. >> So we started again as, with a strategic lens and a focus on growth and a focus on, if we got the longterm and the lasting impact of our businesses right, that the returns would follow and you're right that the market has evolved in that way. I mean, I think some of the dynamics that we've seen, has been certainly growth of the private equity business. It's become a much larger piece of the capital markets than it was certainly 10 years ago and 20 years ago. Also with that growth comes the globalization of that business all over the world and the specialization. So you certainly see technology focused firms and technology focused funds in a way that you didn't see 10 years ago or certainly 20 years ago. Actually Bain Capital interestingly enough, we had a technology focused fund in 1989 called Bain Information Partners. So we've been focused on the sector for a very long time. But you certainly see a lot more technology investors, than you did in your 10 to 20 years ago. >> How are you thinking about valuations these days? I mean, it's good to be in tech, it's even better to be in the cloud, software, cloud, if you're looking at, some of the companies, especially the work from home pivot. But a lot of that appears to be, many people believe it's going to be permanent. How are you feeling about the both public market and private market valuations in that dynamic? >> Yeah, well, it's amazing, right? I don't think any of us in March when the COVID crisis was just emerging, would've anticipated that come November, the markets and certainly the technology markets, would be even more robust and stronger than they were say in January, February. But I think it's a testament to the resilience of the technology and just how intricate and intertwined technology has become with our daily lives. And how much companies depend on its use. And frankly, it's been, the COVID environment has been an accelerant, for many of the ways in which we depend on technology. So witness this interview, of course, through the cloud, and you're seeing the way that we operate our business day-to-day, the way companies are accessing their data and information it has only further, accelerated the need for technology, and the importance of that technology to how businesses operate. So I think you're seeing that, you're reflected in the market values out there, but for us we're focused on businesses, that still have that catalytic opportunity ahead that can, do more to compensate for the price of entry. >> Let's talk about ,this massive investment you guys made in Nutanix, $750 million. I guess it's a small piece of your 105 billion, but still massive investment. How did that opportunity come to you? What was your thinking behind that investment and what are you looking for in terms of the go-forward plan and growth plan for 2021 and really important beyond? >> Yeah, absolutely, we're thrilled to be partnered with and invested in Nutanix. We think is a terrific company and our most recent technology investment are private equity business. It really came about through a proactive efforts that we had in the spring. We've got a team focused on the technology sector, focused across infrastructure and applications and internet and digital media businesses and financial technology. And through those efforts, we were looking for businesses, that we felt had faced some dislocation in their market values, associated with the COVID environment that we're facing. But that we thought were really attractive businesses, well positioned have leading solutions, and had substantial and discontinuous growth opportunities. And as we look through that effort, we really felt that Nutanix stood out just as a core leader and in fact, really the innovator and the inventor of the market, in which it competes with a substantial market share and position, solving a really important problem for its customers, with a big growth opportunity ahead. But, the stock price had come down, because the business has been undergoing a transition. And we didn't think that was fully understood, by the market. And so, we saw an opportunity to partner with Nutanix, to invest money into the business, to help to fund its transition and its growth, and to be partners along for all the value of the business we'll continue to create, we think it's a terrific company and we're excited to be invested. >> Well, you and I have talked about this, that transition from a traditional license model, to one that's an annual recurring revenue model which many companies have gone through. Adobe certainly has done it, Tableau successfully did it. Splunk is kind of in the middle of that transition right now, and maybe not well understood. You've got companies like, Datadog and Snowflake again to doing consumption-based pricing. So there's a lot of confusion in the marketplace. And I wonder if you could talk about, that transition and why it was attractive to you, to actually place that bet now. >> Yeah, absolutely and as you say, number of companies at this point have been through, various forms of of this shift from selling their technology upfront to selling it over time. And we find that the model of selling the technology over time, is one that can be powerful. It can be aligning for customers, as well as for the vendor of the software solutions. And in Nutanix in particular, again, we saw all the ingredients that we think, make this an opportunity for the business. Again, market-leading technology that customers love that is solving a really important problem that technology because Nutanix had been grown, and bootstrapped under the leadership Dheeraj when it was built and founded. Had been selling its software together within appliance. Often in a upfront sale. And has been undergoing under their own initiative, transitioned from selling that software with an appliance to a software based model to one that's more rattle over time. And we thought that there was the opportunity to continue that transition and by doing that. To be able to offer more growth, and more innovation that we can bring to our customers to continue to fund their shifts. So, something that frankly was well underway before we invested. As the business makes this transition, from collecting upfront to more evenly over time. We saw a potential use for our capital, to help to fund that growth. And we're just focused on being a good partner, to help the company keep investing and innovating, as it continues to do that. >> As I was talking to somebody other day, Dave and I told him, I was interviewing you. And I was mentioning the Nutanix investment. And I said, I'm definitely going to cover that. As part of this Cube on Cloud program and they said, well, then Nutanix, that's not cloud. I'm like, well, wait a minute, what's cloud? So, we heard Andy Jassy at re:Invent, talking all lot about hybrid. Antonio Neri ,right after HPE, made its earning last earnings announcement. He came on and said that, well we heard the big cloud player talk about hybrid. And so the definition is changing. But so how are you looking at the market? Certainly, there's this hyper converged infrastructure, but there's also this software play, there's this cloud play. Help us squint through, how you see that. >> Absolutely, so, Nutanix as you alluded to pioneer the market for hyper converged infrastructure, for bringing compute and storage and networking together. Often in private Cloud environments, in a way that was really powerful for your customers and they can of course continue to be the leaders in that marketplace. But they've continued to innovate and invest in ways that can, solve problems for customers and related problems across the hybrid cloud. So, combining both the public cloud with that private cloud and across multiple public clouds, with things like clusters and lots of innovation, that the business is doing, in partnership with the likes of Amazon and Microsoft and others. And so we think that Nutanix has a powerful role to play, in that hybrid cloud world, in a multi-cloud world. And we're excited to back them in. >> Well, I think too, what maybe people don't understand, is that not only is Nutanix, compatible with AWS and compatible with Azure and GCP, but it's actually trying, to create an abstraction layer across those, those clouds. Now, there's two sides of that debate. Some will say, well, that has latency issues or yes it reduces complexity, but at the same time it doesn't give you, that fine-grained access that's kind of the AWS narrative customers, want simplicity and we're seeing the uptake across clouds. I have a multi-part question for you, Dave. So, obviously Bain very strong in strategy. I'm curious ,as to how much you get involved, in the operational details. I mean, obviously $750 million you've got a stake there. But what are the two or three major strategic considerations for not just even just Nutanix, but Cloud and software infrastructure companies? And how much focus do you put on the operational and what are the priorities there? >> Absolutely, well, we pride ourselves in being good partners to our businesses and in helping them to grow, not just with our capital, which I think is of course important, but also with our sweat equity and our human capital, and our partnership and we can do that in lots of ways. It's fundamentally about supporting our businesses, however, is needed to help them to grow. We've been investing in the technology sector, as I described over, over 30 years. And so, we've built up a set of capabilities around things like, helping to a partner with the Salesforce of a company is helping them to think about the ways in which they allocate their research and development and their innovation ways in which they, continue to do acquisitions, to further that pipeline. We support our businesses in lots of ways. But we're not engineers, we're not developers. Of course, we're looking for businesses that are fundamentally great. They've got great technology. They solve problems for customers in a way, we could never replicate. That's, what's all amazing about a business like Nutanix and just over a 10 year period of time, it literally has customer satisfaction levels, that we haven't seen from any other infrastructure software company that we've had the pleasure of diligencing over the last several years. So, what we're focused on, is how can we take those great products and offerings that Nutanix has, and continue to support them, through the further growth and expansion of areas like, the further Salesforce investment, to expand into these new areas like clusters, that we were talking about and thinking about, things that they can do, to further expand the strategic hold. And so, we have a large team of Bain Capital as I mentioned, 260 investment professionals, in our private equity business alone. About a third of those are just available to our companies to help support them, with various initiatives and efforts after we invest. And we'll certainly, of course make all of those available to Nutanix as well. >> Somebody was asking me the other day, what's hyper-converged infrastructure? How did that come about? And I was explaining, back in the day you had, you'd buy some servers and some storage, and you'd have a network. And you sort of have different teams. And you'd put applicant, you figure it out all out and put the applications on top, test it and make sure it all works and then the guys at VCE and VMware and Cisco and EMC, they got together and said, okay, we're going to bolt together a bunch of different components and pretest it here you go, here's a, here's a skew. And then, what Nutanix did was actually, really transformational and said, okay. Look, we can do this through software. And now that was what late 2000? Now, we're sort of entering this new era, this next generation of cloud, cross clouds. So, I wonder how you think about, based on what you were just talking about the whole notion of MA versus organic. There's a lot of organic development that needs to be done but perhaps you could buy in or inorganically through MA to actually get there faster. How do you think about that balance? >> Look I think that was an articulate by the way explanation of I think that the origins of a hyperconverged infrastructure, so I enjoyed that very much. But I think that with any of our businesses and with Nutanix we're of course looking at where are we trying to get to in several years and what are the best ways to support the business to get there? Of course, they'll primarily that will be through continuing organic investment in the company and all the innovation in the product, that they've been doing. Will the company contemplate acquisitions, to further achieve the development goals and the objectives for solving paying points for customers, to get to the strategic places they're trying to get to of course, but it all, is a part of the package of what's a good fit for the company and its growth objective. >> I mean, with the size of your portfolio, I mean, you're a full stack investor, I would say. Is there any part of the so-called tech stack that you won't touch that you would actually not walk, but run away from? (laughs) >> Well, I wouldn't say that we're running away from anything, but the questions that we're asking ourselves are, is the technology that we're investing endurable? Is it advantaged and does have a growing role in the world? And if we think that those things are true, we're absolutely, thrilled to invest behind those things. If there are things that we feel like, that's not the case. then we would tend to shy away from those investments. We've certainly found opportunities in businesses that people perceived as one, but we believe to be another. >> Well, so, let me ask you specifically about Nutanix. I mean, clearly they achieved escape velocity. One of the few companies actually, from last decade, it was Nutanix pure, not a whole lot of others that actually were able to maintain independence as a public company. What do you see as their durability? They're, moat if you will. >> Yeah, absolutely, well clearly we think that it's a very durable and very advantaged business. Yeah, thus the investment. Look, we think that Nutanix has been able to offer the best hyperconverged infrastructure product in the market bar none. One that is got the best ease of use is the most nimble and flexible for customers. And you just see that resulting customer feedback. And also that plays across very heterogeneous architectures in a way that it's really powerful. Because of that we think that they're best positioned to be able to leverage that technology as they have been, to continue to play across both public and private hybrid cloud environments. And so we're excited to back them in that journey. It really starts from solving an acute customer paying point, better than anybody else can. And we're looking to back them to continue to expand that vision. >> Yeah, well, I've talked to a lot of Nutanix customers, over the years and that is the fundamental value proposition it's really simple, very high, customer satisfaction. So, that makes a lot of sense. Well, Dave, thanks very much for coming on theCUBE and participating in theCUBE on Cloud. Really appreciate your perspectives, wish you best of luck. And hopefully we can do this again in the future. Maybe face to face >> Yeah, face to face maybe someday. Dave, I really appreciate it. It's been a pleasure and good luck with the rest of your interviews. >> All right, thank you. Well keep it right there, everybody for more Cube on Cloud. This is Dave Vellante, we'll be right back. (soft music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent executive summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >>Welcome to cube three 60 fives coverage of the Accenture executive summit. Part of AWS reinvent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Today we are joined by a cube alum, Karthik, Lorraine. He is Accenture senior managing director and lead Accenture cloud. First, welcome back to the show Karthik. >>Thank you. Thanks for having me here. >>Always a pleasure. So I want to talk to you. You are an industry veteran, you've been in Silicon Valley for decades. Um, I want to hear from your perspective what the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has been, what are you hearing from clients? What are they struggling with? What are their challenges that they're facing day to day? >>I think, um, COVID-19 is being a eye-opener from, you know, various facets, you know, um, first and foremost, it's a, it's a hell, um, situation that everybody's facing, which is not just, uh, highest economic bearings to it. It has enterprise, um, an organization with bedding to it. And most importantly, it's very personal to people, um, because they themselves and their friends, family near and dear ones are going through this challenge, uh, from various different dimension. But putting that aside, when you come to it from an organization enterprise standpoint, it has changed everything well, the behavior of organizations coming together, working in their campuses, working with each other as friends, family, and, uh, um, near and dear colleagues, all of them are operating differently. So that's what big change to get things done in a completely different way, from how they used to get things done. >>Number two, a lot of things that were planned for normal scenarios, like their global supply chain, how they interact with their client customers, how they go innovate with their partners on how that employees contribute to the success of an organization at all changed. And there are no data models that give them a hint of something like this for them to be prepared for this. So we are seeing organizations, um, that have adapted to this reasonably okay, and are, you know, launching to innovate faster in this. And there are organizations that have started with struggling, but are continuing to struggle. And the gap between the leaders and legs are widening. So this is creating opportunities in a different way for the leaders, um, with a lot of pivot their business, but it's also creating significant challenge for the lag guides, uh, as we defined in our future systems research that we did a year ago, uh, and those organizations are struggling further. So the gap is actually widening. >>So you just talked about the widening gap. I've talked about the tremendous uncertainty that so many companies, even the ones who have adapted reasonably well, uh, in this, in this time, talk a little bit about Accenture cloud first and why, why now? >>I think it's a great question. Um, we believe that for many of our clients COVID-19 has turned, uh, cloud from an experimentation aspiration to an origin mandate. What I mean by that is everybody has been doing something on the other end cloud. There's no company that says we don't believe in cloud are, we don't want to do cloud. It was how much they did in cloud. And they were experimenting. They were doing the new things in cloud, but they were operating a lot of their core business outside the cloud or not in the cloud. Those organizations have struggled to operate in this new normal, in a remote fashion, as well as, uh, their ability to pivot to all the changes the pandemic has brought to them. But on the other hand, the organizations that had a solid foundation in cloud were able to collect faster and not actually gone into the stage of innovating faster and driving a new behavior in the market, new behavior within their organization. >>So we are seeing that spend to make is actually fast-forwarded something that we always believed was going to happen. This, uh, uh, moving to cloud over the next decade is fast forward it to happen in the next three to five years. And it's created this moment where it's a once in an era, really replatforming of businesses in the cloud that we are going to see. And we see this moment as a cloud first moment where organizations will use cloud as the, the, the canvas and the foundation with which they're going to reimagine their business after they were born in the cloud. Uh, and this requires a whole new strategy. Uh, and as Accenture, we are getting a lot in cloud, but we thought that this is the moment where we bring all of that, gave him a piece together because we need a strategy for addressing, moving to cloud are embracing cloud in a holistic fashion. And that's what Accenture cloud first brings together a holistic strategy, a team that's 70,000 plus people that's coming together with rich cloud skills, but investing to tie in all the various capabilities of cloud to Delaware, that holistic strategy to our clients. So I want you to >>Delve into a little bit more about what this strategy actually entails. I mean, it's clearly about embracing change and being willing to experiment and having capabilities to innovate. Can you tell us a little bit more about what this strategy entails? >>Yeah. The reason why we say that as a need for strategy is like I said, cloud is not new. There's almost every customer client is doing something with the cloud, but all of them have taken different approaches to cloud and different boundaries to cloud. Some organizations say, I just need to consolidate my multiple data centers to a small data center footprint and move the nest to cloud. Certain other organizations say that well, I'm going to move certain workloads to cloud. Certain other organizations said, well, I'm going to build this Greenfield application or workload in cloud. Certain other said, um, I'm going to use the power of AI ML in the cloud to analyze my data and drive insights. But a cloud first strategy is all of this tied with the corporate strategy of the organization with an industry specific cloud journey to say, if in this current industry, if I were to be reborn in the cloud, would I do it in the exact same passion that I did in the past, which means that the products and services that they offer need to be the matching, how they interact with that customers and partners need to be revisited, how they bird and operate their IP systems need to be the, imagine how they unearthed the data from all of the systems under which they attract need to be liberated so that you could drive insights of cloud. >>First strategy hands is a corporate wide strategy, and it's a C-suite responsibility. It doesn't take the ownership away from the CIO or CIO, but the CIO is, and CDI was felt that it was just their problem and they were to solve it. And everyone as being a customer, now, the center of gravity is elevated to it becoming a C-suite agenda on everybody's agenda, where probably the CDI is the instrument to execute that that's a holistic cloud-first strategy >>And it, and it's a strategy, but the way you're describing it, it sounds like it's also a mindset and an approach, as you were saying, this idea of being reborn in the cloud. So now how do I think about things? How do I communicate? How do I collaborate? How do I get done? What I need to get done. Talk a little bit about how this has changed, the way you support your clients and how Accenture cloud first is changing your approach to cloud services. >>Wonderful. Um, you know, I did not color one very important aspect in my previous question, but that's exactly what you just asked me now, which is to do all of this. I talked about all of the variables, uh, an organization or an enterprise is going to go through, but the good part is they have one constant. And what is that? That is their employees, uh, because you do, the employees are able to embrace this change. If they are able to, uh, change them, says, pivot them says retool and train themselves to be able to operate in this new cloud. First one, the ability to reimagine every function of the business would be happening at speed. And cloud first approach is to do all of this at speed, because innovation is deadly proposed there, do the rate of probability on experimentation. You need to experiment a lot for any kind of experimentation. >>There's a probability of success. Organizations need to have an ability and a mechanism for them to be able to innovate faster for which they need to experiment a lot, the more the experiment and the lower cost at which they experiment is going to help them experiment a lot. And they experiment demic speed, fail fast, succeed more. And hence, they're going to be able to operate this at speed. So the cloud-first mindset is all about speed. I'm helping the clients fast track that innovation journey, and this is going to happen. Like I said, across the enterprise and every function across every department, I'm the agent of this change is going to be the employees or weapon, race, this change through new skills and new grueling and new mindset that they need to adapt to. >>So Karthik what you're describing it, it sounds so exciting. And yet for a pandemic wary workforce, that's been working remotely that may be dealing with uncertainty if for their kid's school and for so many other aspects of their life, it sounds hard. So how are you helping your clients, employees get onboard with this? And because the change management is, is often the hardest part. >>Yeah, I think it's, again, a great question. A bottle has only so much capacity. Something got to come off for something else to go in. That's what you're saying is absolutely right. And that is again, the power of cloud. The reason why cloud is such a fundamental breakthrough technology and capability for us to succeed in this era, because it helps in various forms. What we talked so far is the power of innovation that can create, but cloud can also simplify the life of the employees in an enterprise. There are several activities and tasks that people do in managing that complex infrastructure, complex ID landscape. They used to do certain jobs and activities in a very difficult underground about with cloud has simplified. And democratised a lot of these activities. So that things which had to be done in the past, like managing the complexity of the infrastructure, keeping them up all the time, managing the, um, the obsolescence of the capabilities and technologies and infrastructure, all of that could be offloaded to the cloud. >>So that the time that is available for all of these employees can be used to further innovate. Every organization is going to spend almost the same amount of money, but rather than spending activities, by looking at the rear view mirror on keeping the lights on, they're going to spend more money, more time, more energy, and spend their skills on things that are going to add value to their organization. Because you, every innovation that an enterprise can give to their end customer need not come from that enterprise. The word of platform economy is about democratising innovation. And the power of cloud is to get all of these capabilities from outside the four walls of the enterprise, >>It will add value to the organization, but I would imagine also add value to that employee's life because that employee, the employee will be more engaged in his or her job and therefore bring more excitement and energy into her, his or her day-to-day activities too. >>Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is, this is a normal evolution we would have seen everybody would have seen in their lives, that they keep moving up the value chain of what activities that, uh, gets performed buying by those individuals. And this is, um, you know, no more true than how the United States, uh, as an economy has operated where, um, this is the power of a powerhouse of innovation, where the work that's done inside the country keeps moving up to value chain. And, um, us leverage is the global economy for a lot of things that is required to power the United States and that global economic, uh, phenomenon is very proof for an enterprise as well. There are things that an enterprise needs to do them soon. There are things an employee needs to do themselves. Um, but there are things that they could leverage from the external innovation and the power of innovation that is coming from technologies like cloud. >>So at Accenture, you have long, long, deep Stan, sorry, you have deep and long-standing relationships with many cloud service providers, including AWS. How does the Accenture cloud first strategy, how does it affect your relationships with those providers? >>Yeah, we have great relationships with cloud providers like AWS. And in fact, in the cloud world, it was one of the first, um, capability that we started about years ago, uh, when we started developing these capabilities. But five years ago, we hit a very important milestone where the two organizations came together and said that we are forging a pharma partnership with joint investments to build this partnership. And we named that as a Accenture, AWS business group ABG, uh, where we co-invest and brought skills together and develop solutions. And we will continue to do that. And through that investment, we've also made several acquisitions that you would have seen in the recent times, like, uh, an invoice and gecko that we made acquisitions in in Europe. But now we're taking this to the next level. What we are saying is two cloud first and the $3 billion investment that we are bringing in, uh, through cloud-first. >>We are going to make specific investment to create unique joint solution and landing zones foundation, um, cloud packs with which clients can accelerate their innovation or their journey to cloud first. And one great example is what we are doing with Takeda, uh, billable, pharmaceutical giant, um, between we've signed a five-year partnership. And it was out in the media just a month ago or so, where we are, the two organizations are coming together. We have created a partnership as a power of three partnership, where the three organizations are jointly hoarding hats and taking responsibility for the innovation and the leadership position that Takeda wants to get to with this. We are going to simplify their operating model and organization by providing and flexibility. We're going to provide a lot more insights. Tequila has a 230 year old organization. Imagine the amount of trapped data and intelligence that is there. >>How about bringing all of that together with the power of AWS and Accenture and Takeda to drive more customer insights, um, come up with breakthrough R and D uh, accelerate clinical trials and improve the patient experience using AI ML and edge technologies. So all of these things that we will do through this partnership with joined investment from Accenture cloud first, as well as partner like AWS, so that Takeda can realize their gain. And, uh, their senior actually made a statement that five years from now, every ticket an employee will have an AI assistant. That's going to make that beginner employee move up the value chain on how they contribute and add value to the future of tequila with the AI assistant, making them even more equipped and smarter than what they could be otherwise. >>So, one last question to close this out here. What is your future vision for, for Accenture cloud first? What are we going to be talking about at next year's Accenture executive summit? Yeah, the future >>Is going to be, um, evolving, but the part that is exciting to me, and this is, uh, uh, a fundamental belief that we are entering a new era of industrial revolution from industry first, second, and third industry. The third happened probably 20 years ago with the advent of Silicon and computers and all of that stuff that happened here in the Silicon Valley. I think the fourth industrial revolution is going to be in the cross section of, uh, physical, digital and biological boundaries. And there's a great article, um, in one economic forum that people, uh, your audience can Google and read about it. Uh, but the reason why this is very, very important is we are seeing a disturbing phenomenon that over the last 10 years are seeing a Blackwing of the, um, labor productivity and innovation, which has dropped to about 2.1%. When you see that kind of phenomenon over that longer period of time, there has to be breakthrough innovation that needs to happen to come out of this barrier and get to the next, you know, base camp, as I would call it to further this productivity, um, lack that we are seeing, and that is going to happen in the intersection of the physical, digital and biological boundaries. >>And I think cloud is going to be the connective tissue between all of these three, to be able to provide that where it's the edge, especially is good to come closer to the human lives. It's going to come from cloud. Yeah. Pick totally in your mind, you can think about cloud as central, either in a private cloud, in a data center or in a public cloud, you know, everywhere. But when you think about edge, it's going to be far reaching and coming close to where we live and maybe work and very, um, get entertained and so on and so forth. And there's good to be, uh, intervention in a positive way in the field of medicine, in the field of entertainment, in the field of, um, manufacturing in the field of, um, you know, mobility. When I say mobility, human mobility, people, transportation, and so on and so forth with all of this stuff, cloud is going to be the connective tissue and the vision of cloud first is going to be, uh, you know, blowing through this big change that is going to happen. And the evolution that is going to happen where, you know, the human grace of mankind, um, our person kind of being very gender neutral in today's world. Um, go first needs to be that beacon of, uh, creating the next generation vision for enterprises to take advantage of that kind of an exciting future. And that's why it, Accenture, are we saying that there'll be change as our, as our purpose? >>I genuinely believe that cloud first is going to be the forefront of that change agenda, both for Accenture as well as for the rest of the work. >>Excellent. Let there be changed. Indeed. Thank you so much for joining us Karthik. A pleasure I'm Rebecca Knight stay tuned for more of Q3 60 fives coverage of the Accenture executive summit >>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent executive summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >>Welcome everyone to the cube virtual and our coverage of the Accenture executive summit. Part of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Today, we are talking about the power of three. And what happens when you bring together the scientific, how of a global bias biopharmaceutical powerhouse in Takeda, a leading cloud services provider in AWS, and Accenture's ability to innovate, execute, and deliver innovation. Joining me to talk about these things. We have Aaron, sorry. Arjan Beatty. He is the senior managing director and chairman of Accenture's diamonds leadership council. Welcome Arjun. Thank you, Karl hick. He is the chief digital and information officer at Takeda. >>What is your bigger, thank you, Rebecca >>And Brian Beau Han global director and head of the Accenture AWS business group at Amazon web services. Thanks so much for coming on. Thank you. So, as I said, we're talking today about this relationship between, uh, your three organizations. Carl, I want to talk with you. I know you're at the beginning of your cloud journey. What was the compelling reason? Why w why, why move to the cloud and why now? >>Yeah, no, thank you for the question. So, you know, as a biopharmaceutical leader, we're committed to bringing better health and a brighter future to our patients. We're doing that by translating science into some really innovative and life transporting therapies, but throughout, you know, we believe that there's a responsible use of technology, of data and of innovation. And those three ingredients are really key to helping us deliver on that promise. And so, you know, while I think a I'll call it, this cloud journey is already always been a part of our strategy. Um, and we've made some pretty steady progress over the last years with a number of I'll call it diverse approaches to the digital and AI. We just weren't seeing the impact at scale that we wanted to see. Um, and I think that, you know, there's a, there's a need ultimately to, you know, accelerate and broaden that shift. >>And, you know, we were commenting on this earlier, but there's, you know, it's been highlighted by a number of factors. One of those has been certainly a number of the acquisitions we've made Shire, uh, being the most pressing example, uh, but also the global pandemic, both of those highlight the need for us to move faster, um, at the speed of cloud, ultimately. Uh, and so we started thinking outside of the box because it was taking us too long and we decided to leverage the strategic partner model. Uh, and it's giving us a chance to think about our challenges very differently. We call this the power of three, uh, and ultimately our focus is singularly on our patients. I mean, they're waiting for us. We need to get there faster. It can take years. And so I think that there is a focus on innovation at a rapid speed, so we can move ultimately from treating conditions to keeping people healthy. >>So as you are embarking on this journey, what are some of the insights you want to share about, about what you're seeing so far? >>Yeah, no, it's a great question. So, I mean, look, maybe right before I highlight some of the key insights, uh, I would say that, you know, with cloud now as the, as a launchpad for innovation, you know, our vision all along has been that in less than 10 years, we want every single to kid, uh, the associate or employee to be empowered by an AI assistant. And I think that, you know, that's going to help us make faster, better decisions. That'll help us, uh, fundamentally deliver transformative therapies and better experiences to, to that ecosystem, to our patients, to physicians, to payers, et cetera, much faster than we previously thought possible. Um, and I think that technologies like cloud and edge computing together with a very powerful I'll call it data fabric is going to help us to create this, this real-time, uh, I'll call it the digital ecosystem. >>The data has to flow ultimately seamlessly between our patients and providers or partners or researchers, et cetera. Uh, and so we've been thinking about this, uh, I'll call it weekly, call up sort of this pyramid, um, that helps us describe our vision. Uh, and a lot of it has to do with ultimately modernizing the foundation, modernizing and rearchitecting, the platforms that drive the company, uh, heightening our focus on data, which means that there's an accelerated shift towards, uh, enterprise data platforms and digital products. And then ultimately, uh, uh, uh, you know, really an engine for innovation sitting at the very top. Um, and so I think with that, you know, there's a few different, I'll call it insights that, you know, are quickly kind of come zooming into focus. I would say one is this need to collaborate very differently. Um, you know, not only internally, but you know, how do we define ultimately, and build a connected digital ecosystem with the right partners and technologies externally? >>I think the second component that maybe people don't think as much about, but, you know, I find critically important is for us to find ways of really transforming our culture. We have to unlock talent and shift the culture certainly as a large biopharmaceutical very differently. And then lastly, you've touched on it already, which is, you know, innovation at the speed of cloud. How do we re-imagine that? You know, how do ideas go from getting tested in months to kind of getting tested in days? You know, how do we collaborate very differently? Uh, and so I think those are three, uh, perhaps of the larger I'll call it, uh, insights that, you know, the three of us are spending a lot of time thinking about right now. >>So Arjun, I want to bring you into this conversation a little bit. Let's, let's delve into those a bit. Talk first about the collaboration, uh, that Carl was referencing there. How, how have you seen that? It is enabling, uh, colleagues and teams to communicate differently and interact in new and different ways? Uh, both internally and externally, as Carl said, >>No, thank you for that. And, um, I've got to give call a lot of credit because as we started to think about this journey, it was clear. It was a bold ambition was, uh, something that, you know, we had all to do differently. And so the concept of the power of three that Carl has constructed has become a label for us as a way to think about what are we going to do to collectively drive this journey forward. And to me, the unique ways of collaboration means three things. The first one is that, um, what is expected is that the three parties are going to come together and it's more than just the sum of our resources. And by that, I mean that we have to bring all of ourselves, all of our collective capabilities, as an example, Amazon has amazing supply chain capabilities. They're one of the best at supply chain. >>So in addition to resources, when we have supply chain innovations, uh, that's something that they're bringing in addition to just, uh, talent and assets, similarly for Accenture, right? We do a lot, uh, in the talent space. So how do we bring our thinking as to how we apply best practices for talent to this partnership? So, um, as we think about this, so that's, that's the first one, the second one is about shared success very early on in this partnership, we started to build some foundations and actually develop seven principles that all of us would look at as the basis for this success shared success model. And we continue to hold that sort of in the forefront, as we think about this collaboration. And maybe the third thing I would say is this one team mindset. So whether it's the three of our CEOs that get together every couple of months to think about, uh, this partnership, or it is the governance model that Carl has put together, which has all three parties in the governance and every level of leadership, we always think about this as a collective group so that we can keep that front and center. >>And what I think ultimately has enabled us to do is it's allowed us to move at speed, be more flexible. And ultimately all we're looking at the target the same way, the North side, the same way, >>Brian, about you, what have you observed and what are you thinking about in terms of how this is helping teams collaborate differently? Yeah, >>Absolutely. And RJ made some, some great points there. And I think if you really think about what he's talking about, it's that, that diversity of talent, diversity of skill and viewpoint and even culture, right? And so we see that in the power of three. And then I think if we drill down into what we see at Takeda and frankly Takeda was, was really, I think, pretty visionary and on their way here, right. And taking this kind of cross-functional approach and applying it to how they operate day to day. So moving from a more functional view of the world to more of a product oriented view of the world, right? So when you think about we're going to be organized around a product or a service or a capability that we're going to provide to our customers or our patients or donors in this case, it implies a different structure all to altogether and a different way of thinking, right? >>Because now you've got technical people and business experts and marketing experts all working together in this is sort of cross collaboration. And what's great about that is it's really the only way to succeed with cloud, right? Because the old ways of thinking where you've got application people and infrastructure, people in business, people is suboptimal, right? Because we can all access this tool as these capabilities and the best way to do that. Isn't across kind of a cross collaborative way. And so this is product oriented mindset. It's a keto was already on. I think it's allowed us to move faster. >>Carl, I want to go back to this idea of unlocking talent and culture. And this is something that both Brian and Arjun have talked about too. People are an essential part of their, at the heart of your organization. How will their experience of work change and how are you helping re-imagine and reinforce a strong organizational culture, particularly at this time when so many people are working remotely. >>Yeah. It's a great question. And it's something that, you know, I think we all have to think a lot about, I mean, I think, um, you know, driving this, this color, this, this digital and data kind of capability building, uh, it takes a lot of, a lot of thinking. So, I mean, there's a few different elements in terms of how we're tackling this one is we're recognizing, and it's not just for the technology organization or for those actors that, that we're innovating with, but it's really across all of the Qaeda where we're working through ways of raising what I'll call the overall digital leaders literacy of the organization, you know, what are the, you know, what are the skills that are needed almost at a baseline level, even for a global bio-pharmaceutical company and how do we deploy, I'll call it those learning resources very broadly. >>And then secondly, I think that, you know, we're, we're very clear that there's a number of areas where there are very specialized skills that are needed. Uh, my organization is one of those. And so, you know, we're fostering ways in which, you know, we're very kind of quickly kind of creating, uh, avenues excitement for, for associates in that space. So one example specifically, as we use, you know, during these, uh, very much sort of remote, uh, sort of days, we, we use what we call global it meet days, and we set a day aside every single month and this last Friday, um, you know, we, we create during that time, it's time for personal development. Um, and we provide active seminars and training on things like, you know, robotic process automation, data analytics cloud, uh, in this last month we've been doing this for months and months now, but in his last month, more than 50% of my organization participated, and there's this huge positive shift, both in terms of access and excitement about really harnessing those new skills and being able to apply them. >>Uh, and so I think that that's, you know, one, one element that can be considered. And then thirdly, um, of course every organization has to work on how do you prioritize talent, acquisition and management and competencies that you can't rescale? I mean, there are just some new capabilities that we don't have. And so there's a large focus that I have with our executive team and our CEO and thinking through those critical roles that we need to activate in order to kind of, to, to build on this, uh, this business led cloud transformation. And lastly, probably the hardest one, but the one that I'm most jazzed about is really this focus on changing the mindsets and behaviors. Um, and I think there, you know, this is where the power of three is, is really, uh, kind of coming together nicely. I mean, we're working on things like, you know, how do we create this patient obsessed curiosity, um, and really kind of unlock innovation with a real, kind of a growth mindset. >>Uh, and the level of curiosity that's needed, not to just continue to do the same things, but to really challenge the status quo. So that's one big area of focus we're having the agility to act just faster. I mean, to worry less, I guess I would say about kind of the standard chain of command, but how do you make more speedy, more courageous decisions? And this is places where we can emulate the way that a partner like AWS works, or how do we collaborate across the number of boundaries, you know, and I think, uh, Arjun spoke eloquently to a number of partnerships that we can build. So we can break down some of these barriers and use these networks, um, whether it's within our own internal ecosystem or externally to help, to create value faster. So a lot of energy around ways of working and we'll have to check back in, but I mean, we're early in on this mindset and behavioral shift, um, but a lot of good early momentum. >>Carl you've given me a good segue to talk to Brian about innovation, because you said a lot of the things that I was the customer obsession and this idea of innovating much more quickly. Obviously now the world has its eyes on drug development, and we've all learned a lot about it, uh, in the past few months and accelerating drug development is all, uh, is of great interest to all of us. Brian, how does a transformation like this help a company's ability to become more agile and more innovative and at a quicker speed to, >>Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think some of the things that Carl talked about just now are critical to that, right? I think where sometimes folks fall short is they think, you know, we're going to roll out the technology and the is going to be the silver bullet where in fact it is the culture, it is, is the talent. And it's the focus on that. That's going to be, you know, the determinant of success. And I will say, you know, in this power of three arrangement and Carl talked a little bit about the pyramid, um, talent and culture and that change, and that kind of thinking about that has been a first-class citizen since the very beginning, right. That absolutely is critical for, for being there. Um, and so that's been, that's been key. And so we think about innovation at Amazon and AWS and Chrome mentioned some of the things that, you know, a partner like AWS brings to the table is we talk a lot about builders, right? >>So we're kind of obsessive about builders. Um, and, and we meet what we mean by that is we, we, at Amazon, we hire for builders, we cultivate builders and we like to talk to our customers about it as well. And it also implies a different mindset, right? When you're a builder, you have that, that curiosity, you have that ownership, you have that stake and whatever I'm creating, I'm going to be a co-owner of this product or this service, right. Getting back to that kind of product oriented mindset. And it's not just the technical people or the it people who are builders. It is also the business people as, as Carl talked about. Right. So when we start thinking about, um, innovation again, where we see folks kind of get into a little bit of, uh, innovation, pilot paralysis, is that you can focus on the technology, but if you're not focusing on the talent and the culture and the processes and the mechanisms, you're going to be putting out technology, but you're not going to have an organization that's ready to take it and scale it and accelerate it. >>Right. And so that's, that's been absolutely critical. So just a couple of things we've been doing with, with the Qaeda and Decatur has really been leading the way is, think about a mechanism and a process. And it's really been working backward from the customer, right? In this case, again, the patient and the donor. And that was an easy one because the key value of Decatur is to be a patient focused bio-pharmaceutical right. So that was embedded in their DNA. So that working back from that, that patient, that donor was a key part of that process. And that's really deep in our DNA as well and Accentures. And so we were able to bring that together. The other one is, is, is getting used to experimenting and even perhaps failing, right. And being able to iterate and fail fast and experiment and understanding that, you know, some decisions, what we call it at Amazon are two two-way doors, meaning you can go through that door, not like what you see and turn around and go back. And cloud really helps there because the costs of experimenting and the cost of failure is so much lower than it's ever been. You can do it much faster and the implications are so much less. So just a couple of things that we've been really driving, uh, with Decatur around innovation, that's been really critical. >>Carl, where are you already seeing signs of success? Yeah, no, it's a great question. And so we chose, you know, uh, with our focus on, on innovation to try to unleash maybe the power of data digital in, uh, in focusing on what I call sort of a nave. And so we chose our, our, our plasma derived therapy business, um, and you know, the plasma-derived therapy business unit, it develops critical life-saving therapies for patients with rare and complex diseases. Um, but what we're doing is by bringing kind of our energy together, we're focusing on creating, I'll call it state of the art digitally connected donation centers. And we're really modernizing, you know, the, the, the donor experience right now, we're trying to, uh, improve also I'll call it the overall plasma collection process. And so we've, uh, selected a number of alcohol at a very high-speed pilots that we're working through right now, specifically in this, in this area. And we're seeing really great results already. Um, and so that's, that's one specific area of focus >>Arjun. I want you to close this out here. Any ideas, any best practices advice you would have for other pharmaceutical companies that are, that are at the early stage of their cloud journey for me? Yes. >>Yeah, no, I was breaking up a bit. No, I think they, um, the key is what's sort of been great for me to see is that when people think about cloud, you know, you always think about infrastructure technology. The reality is that the cloud is really the true enabler for innovation and innovating at scale. And, and if you think about that, right, in all the components that you need, that ultimately that's where the value is for the company, right? Because yes, you're going to get some cost synergies and that's great, but the true value is in how do we transform the organization in the case of the Qaeda and the life sciences clients, right. We're trying to take a 14 year process of research and development that takes billions of dollars and compress that, right. Tremendous amounts of innovation opportunity. You think about the commercial aspect, lots of innovation can come there. The plasma derived therapy is a great example of how we're going to really innovate to change the trajectory of that business. So I think innovation is at the heart of what most organizations need to do. And the formula, the cocktail that the Qaeda has constructed with this Fuji program really has all the ingredients, um, that are required for that success. >>Great. Well, thank you so much. Arjun, Brian and Carl was really an enlightening conversation. >>Yeah, it's been fun. Thanks Rebecca. >>Thank you for tuning into the cube virtuals coverage of the Accenture executive summit from around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent executive summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. Welcome everyone to the cubes of Accenture >>Executive summit here at AWS reinvent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight for this segment? We have two guests. First. We have Helen Davis. She is the senior director of cloud platform services, assistant director for it and digital for the West Midlands police. Thanks so much for coming on the show, Helen, And we also have Matthew lb. He is Accenture health and public service associate director and West Midlands police account lead. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Matthew, thank you for having us. So we are going to be talking about delivering data-driven insights to the West Midlands police force. Helen, I want to start with you. Can you tell us a little bit about the West Midlands police force? How big is the force and also what were some of the challenges that you were grappling with prior to this initiative? >>Yes, certainly. So Westerners police is the second largest police force in the UK, outside of the metropolitan police in London. Um, we have an excessive, um, 11,000 people work at Westminster police serving communities, um, through, across the Midlands region. So geographically, we're quite a big area as well, as well as, um, being population, um, density, having that as a, at a high level. Um, so the reason we sort of embarked on the data-driven insights platform and it, which was a huge change for us was for a number of reasons. Um, namely we had a lot of disparate data, um, which was spread across a range of legacy systems that were many, many years old, um, with some duplication of, um, what was being captured and no single view for offices or, um, support staff. Um, some of the access was limited. You have to be in a, in an actual police building on a desktop computer to access it. Um, other information could only reach officers on the frontline through a telephone call back to one of our enabling services where they would do a manual checkup, um, look at the information, then call the offices back, um, and tell them what they needed to know. So it was a very long laborious process and not very efficient. Um, and we certainly weren't exploiting the data that we had in a very productive way. >>So it sounds like as you're describing and an old clunky system that needed a technological, uh, reimagination, so what was the main motivation for, for doing, for making this shift? >>It was really, um, about making us more efficient and more effective in how we do how we do business. So, um, you know, certainly as a, as an it leader and sort of my operational colleagues, we recognize the benefits, um, that data analytics could bring in, uh, in a policing environment, not something that was, um, really done in the UK at time. You know, we have a lot of data, so we're very data rich and the information that we have, but we needed to turn it into information that was actionable. So that's where we started looking for, um, technology partners and, um, suppliers to help us and sort of help us really with what's the art of the possible, you know, this hasn't been done before. So what could we do in this space that's appropriate for policing >>Helen? I love that idea. What is the art of the possible, can you tell us a little bit about why you chose AWS? >>I think really, you know, as with all things and when we're procuring a partner in the public sector that, you know, there are many rules and regulations quite rightly as you would expect that to be because we're spending public money. So we have to be very, very careful and, um, it's, it's a long process and we have to be open to public scrutiny. So, um, we sort of look to everything, everything that was available as part of that process, but we recognize the benefits that tide would provide in this space because, you know, without moving to a cloud environment, we would literally be replacing something that was legacy with something that was a bit more modern. Um, that's not what we wanted to do. Our ambition was far greater than that. So I think, um, in terms of AWS, really, it was around scalability, interoperability, you know, disaster things like the disaster recovery service, the fact that we can scale up and down quickly, we call it dialing up and dialing back. Um, you know, it's it's page go. So it just sort of ticked all the boxes for us. And then we went through the full procurement process, fortunately, um, it came out on top for us. So we were, we were able to move forward, but it just sort of had everything that we were looking for in that space. >>Matthew, I want to bring you into the conversation a little bit here. How are you working with the wet with the West Midlands police, sorry, and helping them implement this cloud first journey? >>Yeah, so I guess, um, by January the West Midlands police started, um, pay for five years ago now. So, um, we set up a partnership with the force I, and you to operate operation the way that was very different to a traditional supplier relationship. Um, secretary that the data difference insights program is, is one of many that we've been working with less neutral on, um, over the last five years. Um, as having said already, um, cloud gave a number of, uh, advantages certainly from a big data perspective and the things that that enabled us today, um, I'm from an Accenture perspective that allowed us to bring in a number of the different themes that we have say cloud themes, security teams, um, interacted from a design perspective, as well as more traditional services that people would associate with the country. >>So much of this is about embracing comprehensive change to experiment, innovate, and try different things. Matthew, how, how do you help an entity like West Midlands police think differently when they are, there are these ways of doing things that people are used to, how do you help them think about what is the art of the possible, as Helen said, >>There's a few things for that, you know, what's being critical is trying to co-create solutions together. Yeah. There's no point just turning up with, um, what we think is the right answer, try and say, um, collectively work through, um, the issues that the forest are seeing the outcomes they're looking to achieve rather than simply focusing on the long list of requirements I think was critical and then being really open to working together to create the right solution. Um, rather than just, you know, trying to pick something off the shelf that maybe doesn't fit the forces requirements in the way that it should to, right. It's not always a one size fits all. Obviously, you know, today what we thought was critical is making sure that we're creating something that met the forces needs, um, in terms of the outcomes they're looking to achieve the financial envelopes that were available, um, and how we can deliver those in a, uh, iterative agile way, um, rather than spending years and years, um, working towards an outcome, um, that is going to outdate before you even get that. >>How, how are things different? What kinds of business functions and processes have been re-imagined in, in light of this change and this shift >>It's, it's actually unrecognizable now, um, in certain areas of the business as it was before. So to give you a little bit of context, when we, um, started working with essentially century AWS on the data driven insights program, it was very much around providing, um, what was called locally, a wizzy tool for our intelligence analysts to interrogate data, look at data, you know, decide whether they could do anything predictive with it. And it was very much sort of a back office function to sort of tidy things up for us and make us a bit better in that, in that area or a lot better in that area. And it was rolled out to a number of offices, a small number on the front line. Um, I'm really, it was, um, in line with a mobility strategy that we, hardware officers were getting new smartphones for the first time, um, to do sort of a lot of things on, on, um, policing apps and things like that to again, to avoid them, having to keep driving back to police stations, et cetera. >>And the pilot was so successful. Every officer now has access to this data, um, on their mobile devices. So it literally went from a handful of people in an office somewhere using it to do sort of clever whizzbang things to, um, every officer in the force, being able to access that level of data at their fingertips literally. So what they would touch we've done before is if they needed to check and address or check, uh, details of an individual, um, just as one example, they would either have to, in many cases, go back to a police station to look it up themselves on a desktop computer. Well, they would have to make a call back to, um, a centralized function and speak to an operator, relay the questions either, wait for the answer or wait for a call back with the answer when those people are doing the data interrogation manually. >>So the biggest change for us is the self-service nature of the data we now have available. So officers can do it themselves on their phone, wherever they might be. So the efficiency savings, um, from that point of view are immense. And I think just parallel to that is the quality of our data because we had a lot of data, but just because you've got a lot of data and a lot of information doesn't mean it's big data and it's valuable necessarily. Um, so again, it was having the single source of truth as we, as we call it. So you know, that when you are completing those safe searches and getting the responses back, that it is the most accurate information we hold. And also you're getting it back within minutes as opposed to, you know, half an hour, an hour or a drive back to the station. So it's making officers more efficient and it's also making them safer. The more efficient they are, the more time they have to spend, um, out with the public doing what they, you know, we all should be doing. >>And have you seen that kind of return on investment because what you were just describing with all the steps that we'd needed to be taken in prior to this to verify and address say, and those are precious seconds when someone's life is on the line in, in sort of in the course of everyday police work. >>Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. It's difficult to put a price on it. It's difficult to quantify. Um, but all the, you know, the minutes here and that certainly add up to a significant amount of efficiency savings, and we've certainly been able to demonstrate the officers are spending less time up police stations as a result and more time out on the front line. Also they're safer because they can get information about what may or may not be and address what may or may not have occurred in an area before very, very quickly without having to wait. >>Matthew, I want to hear your observations of working so closely with this West Midlands police. Have you noticed anything about changes in its culture and its operating model in how police officers interact with one another? Have you seen any changes since this technology change, >>Um, unique about the West new misplaces, the buy-in from the top, it depend on the chief and his exact team. And Helen is the leader from an IOT perspective. Um, the entire force is bought in. So what is a significant change program? Uh, uh, not trickles three. Um, everyone in the organization, um, change is difficult. Um, and there's a lot of time effort. That's been put into bake, the technical delivery and the business change and adoption aspects around each of the projects. Um, but you can see the step change that it's making in each aspect to the organization, uh, and where that's putting West Midlands police as a leader in, um, technology I'm policing in the UK. And I think globally, >>And this is a question for both of you because Matthew, as you said, change is difficult and there is always a certain intransigence in workplaces about this is just the way we've always done things and we're used to this and don't try to get us, don't try to get us to do anything new here. It works. How do you get the buy-in that you need to, to do this kind of digital transformation? >>I think it, it would be wrong to say it was easy. Um, um, we also have to bear in mind that this was one program in a five year program. So there was a lot of change going on, um, both internally for some of our back office functions, as well as front tie, uh, frontline offices. So with DDI in particular, I think the stat change occurred when people could see what it could do for them. You know, we had lots of workshops and seminars where we all talk about, you know, big data and it's going to be great and it's data analytics and it's transformational, you know, and quite rightly people that are very busy doing a day job that not necessarily technologists in the main and, you know, are particularly interested quite rightly so in what we are not dealing with the cloud, you know? >>And it was like, yeah, okay. It's one more thing. And then when they started to see on that, on their phones and what teams could do, that's when it started to sell itself. And I think that's when we started to see, you know, to see the stack change, you know, and, and if we, if we have any issues now it's literally, you know, our help desks in meltdown. Cause everyone's like, well, we call it manage without this anymore. And I think that speaks for itself. So it doesn't happen overnight. It's sort of incremental changes and then that's a step change in attitude. And when they see it working and they see the benefits, they want to use it more. And that's how it's become fundamental to our policing by itself, really without much selling >>Matthew, Helen just made a compelling case for how to get buy in. Have you discovered any other best practices when you are trying to get everyone on board for this kind of thing? >>So we've, um, we've used a lot of the traditional techniques, things around comms and engagement. We've also used things like, um, the 30 day challenge and nudge theory around how can we gradually encourage people to use things? Um, I think there's a point where all of this around, how do we just keep it simple and keep it user centric from an end user perspective? I think DDI is a great example of where the, the technology is incredibly complex. The solution itself is, um, you know, extremely large and, um, has been very difficult to, um, get delivered. But at the heart of it is a very simple front end for the user to encourage it and take that complexity away from them. Uh, I think that's been critical through the whole piece of video. >>One final word from Helen. I want to hear, where do you go from here? What is the longterm vision? I know that this made productivity, >>Um, productivity savings equivalent to 154 full-time officers. Uh, what's next, I think really it's around, um, exploiting what we've got. Um, I use the phrase quite a lot, dialing it up, which drives my technical architects crazy, but because it's apparently not that simple, but, um, you know, we've, we've been through significant change in the last five years and we are still continuing to batch all of those changes into everyday, um, operational policing. But what we need to see now is we need to exploit and build on the investments that we've made, um, in terms of data and claims specifically, the next step really is about expanding our pool of data and our functions. Um, so that, you know, we keep getting better and better, um, at this, um, the more we do, the more data we have, the more refined we can be, the more precise we are with all of our actions. >>Um, you know, we're always being expected to, again, look after the public purse and do more for less. And I think this is certainly an and our cloud journey and cloud first by design, which is where we are now, um, is helping us to be future-proofed. So for us, it's very much an investment. And I see now that we have good at embedded in operational policing for me, this is the start of our journey, not the end. So it's really exciting to see where we can go from here. Exciting times. Indeed. Thank you so much. And Matthew for joining us, I really appreciate it. And you are watching the cube stay tuned for more of the cubes coverage of the AWS reinvent Accenture executive summit. I'm Rebecca Knight from around the globe with digital coverage, >>AWS reinvent executive summit, 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. Everyone. Welcome to the cube virtual coverage of the executive summit at AWS reinvent 2020 virtual. This is the cube virtual. We can't be there in person like we are every year we have to be remote. This executive summit is with special programming supported by Accenture where the cube virtual I'm your host John for a year, we had a great panel here called uncloud first digital transformation from some experts, Stuart driver, the director of it and infrastructure and operates at lion Australia, Douglas Regan, managing director, client account lead at lion for Accenture as a deep Islam associate director application development lead for Accenture gentlemen, thanks for coming on the cube virtual that's a mouthful, all that digital, but the bottom line it's cloud transformation. This is a journey that you guys have been on together for over 10 years to be really a digital company. Now, some things have happened in the past year that kind of brings all this together. This is about the next generation organization. So I want to ask Stuart you first, if you can talk about this transformation at lion has undertaken some of the challenges and opportunities and how this year in particular has brought it together because you, you know, COVID has been the accelerant of digital transformation. Well, if you're 10 years in, I'm sure you're there. You're in the, uh, uh, on that wave right now. Take a minute to explain this transformation journey. >>Yeah, sure. So number of years back, we, we looked at kind of our infrastructure and our landscape. I'm trying to figure out where we wanted to go next. And we were very analog based, um, and stuck in the old it groove of, you know, capital refresh, um, struggling to transform, struggling to get to a digital platform and we needed to change it up so that we could, uh, become very different business to the one that we were back then. Um, obviously cloud is an accelerant to that and we had a number of initiatives that needed a platform to build on. And a cloud infrastructure was the way that we started to do that. So we went through a number of transformation programs that we didn't want to do that in the old world. We wanted to do it in a new world. So for us, it was partnering up with a, you know, great organizations that can take you on the journey and, uh, you know, start to deliver a bit by bit incremental progress, uh, to get to the, uh, I guess the promise land. >>Um, we're not, uh, not all the way there, but to where we're a long way along. And then when you get to some of the challenges like we've had this year, um, it makes all of the hard work worthwhile because you can actually change pretty quickly, um, provide capacity and, uh, and increase your environments and, you know, do the things that you need to do in a much more dynamic way than we would have been able to previously where we might've been waiting for the hardware vendors, et cetera, to deliver capacity for us this year, it's been a pretty strong year from an it perspective and delivering for the business needs, >>Forget the Douglas. I want to just real quick and redirect to you and say, you know, for all the people who said, Oh yeah, you got to jump on cloud, get in early, you know, a lot of naysayers like, well, wait till to mature a little bit. Really, if you got in early and you paying your dues, if you will taking that medicine with the cloud, you're really kind of peaking at the right time. Is that true? Is that one of the benefits that comes out of this getting in the cloud, >>John, this has been an unprecedented year, right. And, um, you know, Australia, we had to live through Bush fires and then we had covert and, and then we actually had to deliver a, um, a project I'm very know transformational product project, completely remote. And then we also had had some, some cyber challenges, which is public as well. And I don't think if we weren't moved into and enabled through the cloud would have been able to achieve that this year. It would have been much different. It would have been very difficult to do the fact that we were able to work and partner with Amazon through this year, which is unprecedented and actually come out the other end and we've delivered a brand new digital capability across the entire business. Um, it wouldn't >>Have been impossible if we could, I guess, stayed in the old world. The fact that we moved into the new Naval by the Navy allowed us to work in this unprecedented gear >>Just quick. What's your personal view on this? Because I've been saying on the Cuban reporting, necessity's the mother of all invention and the word agility has been kicked around as kind of a cliche, Oh, it'd be agile. You know, we're gonna get to Sydney. You get a minute on specifically, but from your perspective, uh, Douglas, what does that mean to you? Because there is benefits there for being agile. And >>I mean, I think as Stuart mentioned writing, and a lot of these things we try to do and, you know, typically, you know, hardware capabilities of the last to be told and, and always the only critical path to be done. You know, we really didn't have that in this case, what we were doing with our projects in our deployments, right. We were able to move quickly able to make decisions in line with the business and really get things going, right. So you, a lot of times in a traditional world, you have these inhibitors, you have these critical path, it takes weeks and months to get things done as opposed to hours and days. And it truly allowed us to, we had to VJ things, move things. And, you know, we were able to do that in this environment with AWS to support and the fact that we can kind of turn things off and on as quickly as we need it. Yeah. >>Cloud-scale is great for speed. So DECA got, Gardez get your thoughts on this cloud first mission, you know, it, you know, the dev ops worlds, they saw this early, that jumping in there, they saw the, the, the agility. Now the theme this year is modern applications with the COVID pandemic pressure, there's real business pressure to make that happen. How did you guys learn to get there fast? And what specifically did you guys do at Accenture and how did it all come together? Can you take us inside kind of how it played out? >>All right. So we started off with us and we work with lions experts and, uh, the lost knowledge that allowed reconstructive being had. Um, we then applied our journey group cloud strategy basically revolves around the seven Oz and, and, uh, you know, the deep peaking steps from our perspective, uh, assessing the current bottom, setting up the new cloud in modern. And as we go modernizing and, and migrating these applications to the cloud now, you know, one of the things that, uh, no we did not along this journey was that, you know, you can have the best plans, but bottom of that, we were dealing with, we often than not have to make changes. Uh, what a lot of agility and also work with a lot of collaboration with the, uh, Lyon team, as well as, uh, uh, AWS. I think the key thing for me was being able to really bring it all together. It's not just, uh, you know, essentially mobilize all of us. >>What were some of the learnings real quick, your journey there? >>So I think perspective the key learnings around that, you know, uh, you know, what, when we look back at, uh, the, the infrastructure that was that we were trying to migrate over to the cloud, a lot of the documentation, et cetera, was not, uh, available. We were having to, uh, figure out a lot of things on the fly. Now that really required us to have, uh, uh, people with deep expertise who could go into those environments and, and work out, uh, you know, the best ways to, to migrate the workloads to the cloud. Uh, I think, you know, the, the biggest thing for me was making Jovi had on that real SMEs across the board globally, that we could leverage across various technologies, uh, uh, and, and, and, you know, that would really work in our collaborative and agile environment would line >>Just do what I got to ask you. How did you address your approach to the cloud and what was your experience? >>Yeah, for me, it's around getting the foundations right. To start with and then building on them. Um, so, you know, you've got to have your, your process and you're going to have your, your kind of your infrastructure there and your blueprints ready. Um, AWS do a great job of that, right. Getting the foundations right. And then building upon it, and then, you know, partnering with Accenture allows you to do that very successfully. Um, I think, um, you know, the one thing that was probably surprising to us when we started down this journey and kind of, after we got a long way down, the track of looking backwards is actually how much you can just turn off. Right? So a lot of stuff that you, uh, you get left with a legacy in your environment, and when you start to work through it with the types of people that civic just mentioned, you know, the technical expertise working with the business, um, you can really rationalize your environment and, uh, um, you know, cloud is a good opportunity to do that, to drive that legacy out. >>Um, so you know, a few things there, the other thing is, um, you've got to try and figure out the benefits that you're going to get out of moving here. So there's no point just taking something that is not delivering a huge amount of value in the traditional world, moving it into the cloud, and guess what it's going to deliver the same limited amount of value. So you've got to transform it, and you've got to make sure that you build it for the future and understand exactly what you're trying to gain out of it. So again, you need a strong collaboration. You need a good partners to work with, and you need good engagement from the business as well, because the kind of, uh, you know, digital transformation, cloud transformation, isn't really an it project, I guess, fundamentally it is at the core, but it's a business project that you've got to get the whole business aligned on. You've got to make sure that your investment streams are appropriate and that you're able to understand the benefits and the value that you're going to drive back towards the business. >>Let's do it. If you don't mind me asking what was some of the obstacles encountered or learnings, um, that might've differed from the expectation we all been there, Hey, you know, we're going to change the world. Here's the sales pitch, here's the outcome. And then obviously things happen, you know, you learn legacy, okay. Let's put some containerization around that cloud native, um, all that rational. You're talking about what are, and you're going to have obstacles. That's how you learn. That's how perfection has developed. How, what obstacles did you come up with and how are they different from your expectations going in? >>Yeah, they're probably no different from other people that have gone down the same journey. If I'm totally honest, the, you know, 70 or 80% of what you do is relative music, because they're a known quantity, it's relatively modern architectures and infrastructures, and you can, you know, upgrade, migrate, move them into the cloud, whatever it is, rehost, replatform, rearchitect, whatever it is you want to do, it's the other stuff, right? It's the stuff that always gets left behind. And that's the challenge. It's, it's getting that last bit over the line and making sure that you haven't invested in the future while still carrying all of your legacy costs and complexity within your environment. So, um, to be quite honest, that's probably taken longer and, and has been more of a challenge than we thought it would be. Um, the other piece I touched on earlier on in terms of what was surprising was actually how much of your environment is actually not needed anymore. >>When you start to put a critical eye across it and understand, um, uh, ask the tough questions and start to understand exactly what, what it is you're trying to achieve. So if you ask a part of a business, do they still need this application or this service a hundred percent of the time, they'll say yes, until you start to lay out to them, okay, now I'm going to cost you this to migrate it or this, to run it in the future. And, you know, here's your ongoing costs and, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And then, uh, for a significant amount of those answers, you get a different response when you start to layer on the true value of it. So you start to flush out those hidden costs within the business, and you start to make some critical decisions as a company based on, uh, based on that. So that was a little tougher than we first thought and probably broader than we thought there was more of that than we anticipated, which actually resulted in a much cleaner environment post and post migration. Yeah. >>Well, expression, if it moves automated, you know, it's kind of a joke on government, how they want to tax everything, you know, you want to automate, that's a key thing in cloud, and you've got to discover those opportunities to create value, uh, Stuart and Siddique. Mainly if you can weigh in on this love to know the percentage of total cloud that you have now, versus when you started, because as you start to uncover whether it's by design for purpose, or you discover opportunities to innovate, like you guys have, I'm sure it kind of, you took on some territory inside Lyon, what percentage of cloud now versus >>Yeah. At the start, it was minimal, right. You know, close to zero, right. Single and single digits. Right. It was mainly SAS environments that we had, uh, sitting in cloud when we, uh, when we started, um, Doug mentioned earlier a really significant transformation project that we've undertaken recently gone live on a multi-year one. Um, you know, that's all stood up on AWS and is a significant portion of our environment, um, in terms of what we can move to cloud. Uh, we're probably at about 80 or 90% now. And the balanced bit is, um, legacy infrastructure that is just gonna retire as we go through the cycle rather than migrate to the cloud. Um, so we are significantly cloud-based and, uh, you know, we're reaping the benefits of it in a year, like 2020, and makes you glad that you did all of the hard yards in the previous years when you start business challenges, trying out as, >>So do you get any common reaction to the cloud percentage penetration? >>Sorry, I didn't, I didn't catch that, but I, all I was going to say was, I think it's like the typical 80 20 rule, right? We, we, we worked really hard in the, you know, I think 2018, 19 to get 80% off the, uh, application onto the cloud. And over the last year is the 20% that we have been migrating. And Stuart said, right. A lot of it is also, that's going to be your diet. And I think our next big step is going to be obviously, you know, the icing on the cake, which is to decommission all of these apps as well. Right. So, you know, to get the real benefits out of, uh, out of the whole conservation program from a, uh, from a reduction of CapEx, OPEX perspective, >>Douglas and Stuart, can you guys talk about the decision around the clouds because you guys have had success with AWS? Why AWS how's that decision made? Can you guys give some insight into some of those things? >>I can, I can start, start off. I think back when the decision was made and it was, it was a while back, um, you know, there was some clear advantages of moving relay, Ws, a lot of alignment with some of the significant projects and, uh, the trend, that particular one big transformation project that we've alluded to as well. Um, you know, we needed some, um, some very robust and, um, just future proof and, and proven technology. And AWS gave that to us. We needed a lot of those blueprints to help us move down the path. We didn't want to reinvent everything. So, um, you know, having a lot of that legwork done for us and AWS gives you that, right. And particularly when you partner up with, uh, with a company like Accenture as well, you get combinations of technology and the, the skills and the knowledge to, to move you forward in that direction side. Um, you know, for us, it was a, uh, uh, it was a decision based on, you know, best of breed, um, you know, looking forward and, and trying to predict the future needs and, and, and kind of the environmental that we might need. Um, and, you know, partnering up with organizations that can then take you on the journey >>Just to build on that. So obviously, you know, lines like an antivirus, but, you know, we knew it was a very good choice given the, um, >>Uh, skills and the capability that we had, as well as the assets and tools we had to get the most out of an AWS. And obviously our CEO globally just made an announcement about a huge investment that we're making in cloud. Um, but you know, we've, we've worked very well with AWS. We've done some joint workshops and joint investments, um, some joint POC. So yeah, w we have a very good working relationship, AWS, and I think, um, one incident to reflect upon whether it's cyber it's and again, where we actually jointly, you know, dove in with, um, with Amazon and some of their security experts and our experts. And we're able to actually work through that with mine quite successful. So, um, you know, really good behaviors as an organization, but also really good capabilities. >>Yeah. As you guys, your essential cloud outcomes, research shown, it's the cycle of innovation with the cloud, that's creating a lot of benefits, knowing what you guys know now, looking back certainly COVID has impacted a lot of people kind of going through the same process, knowing what you guys know now, would you advocate people to jump on this transformation journey? If so, how, and what tweaks they make, which changes, what would you advise? >>I might take that one to start with. Um, I hate to think where we would have been when, uh, COVID kicked off here in Australia and, you know, we were all sent home, literally were at work on the Friday, and then over the weekend. And then Monday, we were told not to come back into the office and all of a sudden, um, our capacity in terms of remote access and I quadrupled, or more four, five X, what we had on the Friday we needed on the Monday. And we were able to stand that up during the day Monday into Tuesday, because we were cloud-based and, uh, you know, we just spun up your instances and, uh, you know, sort of our licensing, et cetera. And, and we had all of our people working remotely, um, within, uh, you know, effectively one business day. Um, I know peers of mine in other organizations and industries that are relying on kind of a traditional wise and getting hardware, et cetera, that were weeks and months before they could get the right hardware to be able to deliver to their user base. >>So, um, you know, one example where you're able to scale and, uh, uh, get, uh, get value out of this platform beyond probably what was anticipated at the time you talk about, um, you know, less this, the, and all of these kinds of things. And you can also think of a few scenarios, but real world ones where you're getting your business back up and running in that period of time is, is just phenomenal. There's other stuff, right? There's these programs that we've rolled out, you do your sizing, um, and in the traditional world, you would just go out and buy more servers than you need. And, you know, probably never realize the full value of those, you know, the capability of those servers over the life cycle of them. Whereas, you know, in a cloud world, you put in what you think is right. And if it's not right, you pump it up a little bit when, when all of your metrics and so on telling you that you need to bump it up and conversely Scarlett down at the same rate. So for us with the types of challenges and programs and, uh, uh, and just business need, that's come at as this year, uh, we wouldn't have been able to do it without a strong cloud base, uh, to, uh, to move forward with >>Yeah, Douglas, one of the things that I talked to, a lot of people on the right side of history who have been on the right wave with cloud, with the pandemic, and they're happy, they're like, and they're humble. Like, well, we're just lucky, you know, luck is preparation meets opportunity. And this is really about you guys getting in early and being prepared and readiness. This is kind of important as people realize, then you gotta be ready. I mean, it's not just, you don't get lucky by being in the right place, the right time. And there were a lot of companies were on the wrong side of history here who might get washed away. This is a second >>I think, to echo and kind of build on what Stewart said. I think that the reason that we've had success and I guess the momentum is we, we didn't just do it in isolation within it and technology. It was actually linked to broader business changes, you know, creating basically a digital platform for the entire business, moving the business, where are they going to be able to come back stronger after COVID, when they're actually set up for growth, um, and actually allows, you know, a line new achievements, growth objectives, and also its ambitions as far as what he wants to do, uh, with growth in whatever they may do as acquiring other companies and moving into different markets and launching new product. So we've actually done it in a way that there's, you know, real and direct business benefit, uh, that actually enables line to grow >>General. I really appreciate you coming. I have one final question. If you can wrap up here, uh, Stuart and Douglas, you don't mind waiting, and what's the priorities for the future. What's next for lion and a century >>Christmas holidays, I'll start Christmas holidays. And I spent a third year and then a, and then a reset, obviously, right? So, um, you know, it's, it's figuring out, uh, transform what we've already transformed, if that makes sense. So God, a huge proportion of our services sitting in the cloud. Um, but we know we're not done even with the stuff that is in there. We need to take those next steps. We need more and more automation and orchestration. We need to, um, our environment, there's more future growth. We need to be able to work with the business and understand what's coming at them so that we can, um, you know, build that into, into our environment. So again, it's really transformation on top of transformation is the way that I'll describe it. And it's really an open book, right? Once you get it in and you've got the capabilities and the evolving tool sets that AWS continue to bring to the market base, um, you know, working with the partners to, to figure out how we unlock that value, um, you know, drive our costs down our efficiency, uh, all of those kind of, you know, standard metrics. >>Um, but you know, we're looking for the next things to transform and show value back out to our customer base, um, that, uh, that we continue to, you know, sell our products to and work with and understand how we can better meet their needs. Yeah, I think just to echo that, I think it's really leveraging this and then digital capability they have and getting the most out of that investment. And then I think it's also moving to, >>Uh, and adopting more new ways of working as far as, you know, the state of the business. Um, it's getting up the speed of the market is changing. So being able to launch and do things quickly and also, um, competitive and efficient operating costs, uh, now that they're in the cloud, right. So I think it's really leveraging the most out of a platform and then, you know, being efficient in launching things. So putting the, with the business, >>Cedric, any word from you on your priorities by UC this year and folding. >>Yeah. So, uh, just going to say like e-learning squares, right for me were around, you know, just journey. This is a journey to the cloud, right. And, uh, you know, as well dug into sort of Saturday, it's getting all, you know, different parts of the organization along the journey business to ID to your, uh, product windows, et cetera. Right. And it takes time with this stuff, but, uh, uh, you know, you gotta get started on it and, you know, once we, once we finish off, uh, it's the realization of the benefits now that, you know, I'm looking forward? I think for, from Alliance perspective, it's, it is, uh, you know, once we migrate all the workloads to the cloud, it is leveraging, uh, all stack drive. And as I think Stewart said earlier, uh, with, uh, you know, the latest and greatest stuff that AWS it's basically working to see how we can really, uh, achieve more better operational excellence, uh, from a, uh, from a cloud perspective. >>Well, Stewart, thanks for coming on with a century and sharing your environment and what's going on and your journey you're on the right wave. Did the work you were in that it's all coming together with faster, congratulations for your success, and really appreciate Douglas with Steve for coming on as well from Accenture. Thank you for coming on. Thanks, John. Okay. Just the cubes coverage of executive summit at AWS reinvent. This is where all the thought leaders share their best practices, their journeys, and of course, special programming with the center and the cube. I'm Sean ferry, your host, thanks for watching From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent executive summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >>Welcome everyone to the cube virtuals coverage of the Accenture executive summit. Part of AWS reinvent 2020. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. We are talking today about reinventing the energy data platform. We have two guests joining us. First. We have Johan Krebbers. He is the GM digital emerging technologies and VP of it. Innovation at shell. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Johan you're welcome. And next we have Liz Dennett. She is the lead solution architect for O S D U on AWS. Thank you so much, Liz. You'll be. So I want to start our conversation by talking about OSD. You like so many great innovations. It started with a problem Johan. What was the problem you were trying to solve at shell? >>Yeah, the ethical back a couple of years, we started summer 2017, where we had a meeting with the deg, the gas exploration in shell, and the main problem they had. Of course, they got lots of lots of data, but are unable to find the right data. They need to work from once the day, this was scattered in is scattered my boss kind of Emirates all over the place and turned them into real, probably tried to solve is how that person working exploration could find their proper date, not just a day of loss of date. You really needed that we did probably talked about is summer 2017. We said, okay. The only way ABC is moving forward is to start pulling that data into a single data platform. And that, that was at the time that we called it as the, you, the subsurface data universe in there was about the shell name was so in, in January, 2018, we started a project with Amazon to start grating a freaking that building, that Stu environment that the, that universe, so that single data level to put all your exploration and Wells data into that single environment that was intent and every cent, um, already in March of that same year, we said, well, from Michele point of view, we will be far better off if we could make this an industry solution and not just a shelf solution, because Shelby, Shelby, if you can make this industry solution, but people are developing applications for it. >>It also is far better than for shell to say we haven't shell special solution because we don't make money out of how we start a day that we can make money out of, if you have access to the data, we can explore the data. So storing the data we should do as efficiently possibly can. So in March, we reached out to about eight or nine other large, uh, I gas operators, like the economics, like the totals, like the chefs of this world and say, Hey, we inshallah doing this. Do you want to join this effort? And to our surprise, they all said, yes. And then in September, 2018, we had our kickoff meeting with your open group where we said, we said, okay, if you want to work together, lots of other companies, we also need to look at, okay, how, how we organize that, or is that if you started working with lots of large companies, you need to have some legal framework around some framework around it. So that's why we went to the open group and said, okay, let's, let's form the ODU forum as we call it the time. So it's September, 2080, where I did a Galleria in Houston, but the kick off meeting for the OT four with about 10 members at the time. So there's just over two years ago, we started an exercise for me called ODU, kicked it off. Uh, and so that's really then we'll be coming from and how we got there. Also >>The origin story. Um, well, so what digging a little deeper there? What were some of the things you were trying to achieve with the OSD? >>Well, a couple of things we've tried to achieve with OSU, um, first is really separating data from applications. And what is the, what is the biggest problem we have in the subsurface space that the data and applications are all interlinked or tied together. And if you have them and a new company coming along and say, I have this new application and has access to the data that is not possible because the data often interlinked with the application. So the first thing we did is really breaking the link between the application, the data as those levels, the first thing we did, secondly, put all the data to a single data platform, take the silos out what was happening in the subsurface space. And they got all the data in what we call silos in small little islands out there. So we're trying to do is first break the link to great, great. >>They put the data in a single data bathroom, and a third part who does standard layer. On top of that, it's an API layer on top of the, a platform. So we could create an ecosystem out of companies to start developing soft applications on top of dev data platform across you might have a data platform, but you're only successful. If you have a rich ecosystem of people start developing applications on top of that. And then you can explore today, like small companies, last company, university, you name it, we're getting after create an ecosystem out here. So the three things, whereas was first break the link between application data, just break it and put data at the center and also make sure that data, this data structure would not be managed by one company. It would only be met. It will be managed the data structures by the OT forum. Secondly, then the data of single data platform certainly has an API layer on top and then create an ecosystem. Really go for people, say, please start developing applications because now you have access to the data. I've got the data no longer linked to somebody whose application was all freely available for an API layer. That was, that was all September, 2018, more or less. >>And to bring you in here a little bit, can you talk a little bit about some of the imperatives from the AWS standpoint in terms of what you were trying to achieve with this? Yeah, absolutely. And this whole thing is Johan said started with a challenge that was really brought out at shell. The challenges that geo-scientists spend up to 70% of their time looking for data, I'm a geologist I've spent more than 70% of my time trying to find data in these silos. And from there, instead of just figuring out how we could address that one problem, we worked together to really understand the root cause of these challenges and working backwards from that use case OSU and OSU on AWS has really enabled customers to create solutions that span, not just this in particular problem, but can really scale to be inclusive of the entire energy chain and deliver value from these use cases to the energy industry and beyond. Thank you, Lee, uh, Johann. So talk a little bit about Accenture's cloud first approach and how it has, uh, helped shell work faster and better with speed. >>Well, of course, access a cloud first approach only works together in an Amazon environment, AWS environment. So we really look at, at, at, at Accenture and others altogether helping shell in this space. Now the combination of the two is what we're really looking at, uh, where access of course can be, this is not a student who that environment operates, support knowledge to an environment. And of course, Amazon would be doing that to today's environment that underpinning, uh, services, et cetera. So, uh, we would expect a combination, a lot of goods when we started rolling out and put in production, the old you are three and bubble because we are anus. Then when the release feed comes to the market in Q1 next year of ODU, when he started going to Audi production inside shell, but as the first release, which is ready for prime time production across an enterprise will be released one just before Christmas, last year when he's still in may of this year. But release three is the first release we want to use for full scale production deployment inside shell, and also all the operators around the world. And there is what Amazon, sorry. Um, extensive can play a role in the ongoing, in the, in deployment building up, but also support environment. >>So one of the other things that we talk a lot about here on the cube is sustainability. And this is a big imperative at so many organizations around the world in particular energy companies. How does this move to OSD you, uh, help organizations become, how is this a greener solution for companies? >>Well, firstly make it, it's a great solution because you start making a much more efficient use of your resources, which is, which is already an important one. The second thing they're doing is also, we started with ODU in the oil and gas space with the expert development space. We've grown, uh OTU but in our strategy of growth, OSU now also do an alternative energy sociology. We'll all start supporting next year. Things like solar farms, wind farms, uh, the, the dermatomal environment hydration. So it becomes an and, and an open energy data platform, not just for the, for the, I want to get into steam that's for new industry, any type of energy industry. So our focus is to create, bring that data of all those various energy data sources together into a single data platform. You're going to use AI and other technology on top of that to exploit the data, to meet again in a single data platform. >>Liz, I want to ask you about security because security is, is, is such a big concern when it comes to how secure is the data on OSD you, um, actually, can I talk, can I do a follow up on the sustainability talking? Oh, absolutely. By all means. I mean, I want to interject though security is absolutely our top priority. I don't mean to move away from that, but with sustainability, in addition to the benefits of the OSU data platform, when a company moves from on-prem to the cloud, they're also able to leverage the benefits of scale. Now, AWS is committed to running our business in the most environmentally friendly way possible. And our scale allows us to achieve higher resource utilization and energy efficiency than a typical on-prem data center. Now, a recent study by four 51 research found that AWS is infrastructure is 3.6 times more energy efficient than the median of surveyed enterprise data centers. Two thirds of that advantage is due to higher server utilization and a more energy efficient server population. But when you factor in the carbon intensity of consumed electricity and renewable energy purchases, four 51 found that AWS performs the same task with an 88% lower carbon footprint. Now that's just another way that AWS and OSU are working to support our customers is they seek to better understand their workflows and make their legacy businesses less carbon intensive. >>That's that's those are those statistics are incredible. Do you want to talk a little bit now about security? Absolutely. And security will always be AWS is top priority. In fact, AWS has been architected to be the most flexible and secure cloud computing environment available today. Our core infrastructure is built to satisfy. There are the security requirements for the military global banks and other high sensitivity organizations. And in fact, AWS uses the same secure hardware and software to build and operate each of our regions. So that customers benefit from the only commercial cloud that's had hits service offerings and associated supply chain vetted and deemed secure enough for top secret workloads. That's backed by a deep set of cloud security tools with more than 200 security compliance and governmental service and key features as well as an ecosystem of partners like Accenture, that can really help our customers to make sure that their environments for their data meet and or exceed their security requirements. Johann, I want you to talk a little bit about how OSD you can be used today. Does it only handle subsurface data >>And today it's hundreds of servers or Wells data. We got to add to that production around the middle of next year. That means that the whole upstate business. So we've got, if you look at MC, obviously this goes from exploration all the way to production. You've been at the into to a single data platform. So production will be added the round Q3 of next year. Then it principal, we have a difficult, the elder data that single environment, and we want to extended them to other data sources or energy sources like solar farms, wheat farms, uh, hydrogen hydro at San Francisco. We want to add a whore or a list of other day. >>And he saw a student and B all the data together into a single data club. So we move from an fallen guest, a data platform to an energy data platform. That's really what our objective is because the whole industry we've looked at, I've looked at our company companies all moving in that same direction of quantity, of course are very strong at all, I guess, but also increase the, got into all the other energy sources like, like solar, like wind, like, like the hydrogen, et cetera. So we, we move exactly the same method that, that, that the whole OSU can really support at home. And as a spectrum of energy sources, of course, >>And Liz and Johan. I want you to close us out here by just giving us a look into your crystal balls and talking about the five and 10 year plan for OSD. You we'll start with you, Liz. What do you, what do you see as the future holding for this platform? Um, honestly, the incredibly cool thing about working at AWS is you never know where the innovation and the journey is going to take you. I personally am looking forward to work with our customers, wherever their OSU journeys, take them, whether it's enabling new energy solutions or continuing to expand, to support use cases throughout the energy value chain and beyond, but really looking forward to continuing to partner as we innovate to slay tomorrow's challenges. >>Yeah. First, nobody can look that far ahead, any more nowadays, especially 10 years mean now, who knows what happens in 10 years, but if you look what our whole objective is that really in the next five years owes you will become the key backbone for energy companies for storing your data. You are efficient intelligence and optimize the whole supply energy supply chain in this world out there. >>Rubbers Liz Dennett. Thank you so much for coming on the cube virtual, >>Thank you, >>Rebecca nights, stay tuned for more of our coverage of the Accenture executive summit >>Around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent executive summit 2020, sponsored by Accenture and AWS. >>Welcome everyone to the cubes coverage of the Accenture executive summit. Part of AWS reinvent. I'm your host Rebecca Knight today we're welcoming back to Kubila. We have Kishor Dirk. He is the Accenture senior managing director cloud first global services lead. Welcome back to the show >>Kishore. Thank you very much. >>Nice to meet again. And, uh, Tristin moral horse set. He is the managing director, Accenture cloud first North American growth. Welcome back to YouTube. >>Great to be back in. Great to see you again, Rebecca. >>Exactly. Even in this virtual format, it is good to see your faces. Um, today we're going to be talking about my nav and green cloud advisor >>Capability. Kishor I want to start with you. So my NAB is a platform that is really celebrating its first year in existence. Uh, November, 2019 is when Accenture introduced it. Uh, but it's, it has new relevance in light of this global pandemic that we are all enduring and suffering through. Tell us a little bit about the miner platform, what it is. >>Sure, Rebecca, you know, we lost it and now 2019 and, uh, you know, it is a cloud platform to help our clients navigate the complexity of cloud and cloud decisions and to make it faster and obviously innovate in the cloud, uh, you know, with the increased relevance and all the, especially over the last few months with the impact of COVID crisis and exhibition of digital transformation, you know, we are seeing the transformation of the acceleration to cloud much faster. This platform that you're talking about has enabled hundred and 40 clients globally across different industries. You identify the right cloud solution, navigate the complexity, provide a cloud specific solution simulate for our clients to meet the strategy business needs and the clients are loving it. >>I want to go to you now trust and tell us a little bit about how my nav works and how it helps companies make good cloud choices. >>Yeah. So Rebecca we've talked about cloud is, is more than just infrastructure and that's what mine app tries to solve for. It really looks at a variety of variables, including infrastructure operating model and fundamentally what clients business outcomes, um, uh, our clients are, are looking for and, and identify as the optimal solution for what they need. And we design this to accelerate and we mentioned the pandemic. One of the big focus now is to accelerate. And so we worked through a three-step process. The first is scanning and assessing our client's infrastructure, their data landscape, their application. Second, we use our automated artificial intelligence engine to interact with. We have a wide variety and library of, uh, collective plot expertise. And we look to recommend what is the enterprise architecture and solution. And then third, before we aligned with our clients, we look to simulate and test this scaled up model. And the simulation gives our clients a wait to see what cloud is going to look like, feel like and how it's going to transform their business before they go there. >>Tell us a little bit about that in real life. Now as a company, so many of people are working remotely having to collaborate, uh, not in real life. How is that helping them right now? >>So, um, the, the pandemic has put a tremendous strain on systems, uh, because of the demand on those systems. And so we talk about resiliency. We also now need to collaborate across data across people. Um, I think all of us are calling from a variety of different places where our last year we were all at the cube itself. Um, and, and cloud technologies such as teams, zoom that we're we're leveraging now has fundamentally accelerated and clients are looking to onboard this for their capabilities. They're trying to accelerate their journey. They realize that now the cloud is what is going to become important for them to differentiate. Once we come out of the pandemic and the ability to collaborate with their employees, their partners, and their clients through these systems is becoming a true business differentiator for our clients. >>Sure. I want to talk with you now about my NABS multiple capabilities, um, and helping clients design and navigate their cloud journeys. Tell us a little bit about the green cloud advisor capability and its significance, particularly as so many companies are thinking more deeply and thoughtfully about sustainability. >>Yes. So since the launch of my NAB, we continue to enhance capabilities for our clients. One of the significant, uh, capabilities that we have enabled is the brain trust advisor today. You know, Rebecca, a lot of the businesses are more environmentally aware and are expanding efforts to decrease power consumption, uh, and obviously carbon emissions and, uh, and run a sustainable operations across every aspect of the enterprise. Uh, as a result, you're seeing an increasing trend in adoption of energy, efficient infrastructure in the global market. And one of the things that we did, a lot of research we found out is that there's an ability to influence our client's carbon footprint through a better cloud solution. And that's what we entered by brings to us, uh, in, in terms of a lot of the client connotation that you're seeing in Europe, North America and others, lot of our clients are accelerating to a green cloud strategy to unlock beta financial, societal and environmental benefit, uh, through obviously cloud-based circular, operational and sustainable products and services. That is something that, uh, we are enhancing my now and we are having active client discussions at this point of time. >>So Tristan, tell us a little bit about how this capability helps clients make greener. >>Yeah. Um, well, let's start about the investments from the cloud providers in renewable and sustainable energy. Um, they have most of the hyperscalers today, um, have been investing significantly on data centers that are run or renewable energy, some incredibly creative constructs on the how to do that. And sustainability is therefore a key, um, key item of importance for the hyperscalers and also for our clients who now are looking for sustainable energy. And it turns out this marriage is now possible. I can, we marry the, the green capabilities of the cloud providers with a sustainability agenda of our clients. And so what we look into way the mine EF works is it looks at industry benchmarks and evaluates our current clients, um, capabilities and carpet footprint leveraging their existing data centers. We then look to model from an end-to-end perspective, how the, their journey to the cloud leveraging sustainable and, um, and data centers with renewable energy. We look at how their solution will look like and, and quantify carbon tax credits, um, improve a green index score and provide quantifiable, um, green cloud capabilities and measurable outcomes to our clients, shareholders, stakeholders, clients, and customers, um, and our green plot advisors, sustainability solutions already been implemented at three clients. And in many cases in two cases has helped them reduce the carbon footprint by up to 400% through migration from their existing data center to green club. Very, very important. Yeah, >>That is remarkable. Now tell us a little bit about the kinds of clients. Is this, is this more interesting to clients in Europe? Would you say that it's catching on in the United States where we're at? What is the breakdown that you're seeing right now? >>Sustainability is becoming such a global agenda and we're seeing our clients, um, uh, tie this and put this at board level, um, uh, agenda and requirements across the globe. Um, Europe has specific constraints around data sovereignty, right, where they need their data in country, but from a green, a sustainability agenda, we see clients across all our markets, North America, Europe, and our growth markets adopt this. And we have seen case studies in all three markets >>Kisha. I want to bring you back into the conversation. Talk a little bit about how mine up ties into Accenture's cloud first strategy, your Accenture's CEO, Julie Sweet has talked about post COVID leadership requiring every business to become a cloud first business. Tell us a little bit about how this ethos is in Accenture and how you're sort of looking outward with it too. >>So Rebecca mine is the launch pad, uh, to a cloud first transformation for our clients. Uh, Accenture, see you, uh, Julie Sweet, uh, shared the Accenture cloud first and our substantial investment demonstrate our commitment and is delivering data value for our clients when they need it the most. And with the district transformation requiring cloud at scale, you know, we're seeing that in the post COVID leadership, it requires that every business should become a cloud business. And my nap helps them get there by evaluating the cloud landscape, navigating the complexity, modeling architecting and simulating an optimal cloud solution for our clients. And as Justin was sharing a greener cloud, Tristan, talk a little >>Bit more about some of the real life use cases in terms of what are we, what are clients seeing? What are the results? >>Yes, thank you, Rebecca. I would say two key things right around my now the first is the iterative process. Clients don't want to wait, um, until they get started, they want to get started and see what their journey is going to look like. And the second is fundamental acceleration, dependent make, as we talked about, has accelerated the need to move to cloud very quickly. And my nav is there to do that. So how do we do that? First is generating the business cases. Clients need to know in many cases that they have a business case by business case, we talk about the financial benefits, as well as the business outcomes, the green green cloud impact sustainability impacts with minus we can build initial recommendations using a basic understanding of their environment and benchmarks in weeks versus months with indicative value savings in the millions of dollars arranges. >>So for example, very recently, we worked with a global oil and gas company, and in only two weeks, we're able to provide an indicative savings for $27 million over five years. This enabled the client to get started, knowing that there is a business case benefit and then iterate on it. And this iteration is, I would say the second point that is particularly important with my nav that we've seen in bank, the clients, which is, um, any journey starts with an understanding of what is the application landscape and what are we trying to do with those, these initial assessments that used to take six to eight weeks are now taking anywhere from two to four weeks. So we're seeing a 40 to 50% reduction in the initial assessment, which gets clients started in their journey. And then finally we've had discussions with all of the hyperscalers to help partner with Accenture and leverage mine after prepared their detailed business case module as they're going to clients. And as they're accelerating the client's journey, so real results, real acceleration. And is there a journey? Do I have a business case and furthermore accelerating the journey once we are by giving the ability to work in an iterative approach, >>It sounds as though that the company that clients and and employees are sort of saying, this is an amazing time savings look at what I can do here in, in so much in a condensed amount of time, but in terms of getting everyone on board, one of the things we talked about last time we met, uh, Tristin was just how much, uh, how one of the obstacles is getting people to sign on and the new technologies and new platforms. Those are often the obstacles and struggles that companies face. Have you found that at all? Or what is sort of the feedback that you're getting from? >>Yeah. Sorry. Yes. We clearly, there are always obstacles to a con journey. If there weren't obstacles, all our clients would be already fully in the cloud. What man I gives the ability is to navigate through those, to start quickly. And then as we identify obstacles, we can simulate what things are going to look like. We can continue with certain parts of the journey while we deal with that obstacle. And it's a fundamental accelerator. Whereas in the past one, obstacle would prevent a class from starting. We can now start to address the obstacles one at a time while continuing and accelerating the contrary. That is the fundamental difference. Kishor I want to give you the final word here. Tell us a little bit about what is next for Accenture might have and what we'll be discussing next year at the Accenture executive summit >>Sort of echo, we are continuously evolving with our client needs and reinventing, reinventing for the future. For my advisor, our plan is to help our clients reduce carbon footprint and again, migrate to a green cloud. Uh, and additionally, we're looking at, you know, two capabilities, uh, which include sovereign cloud advisor, uh, with clients, especially in, in Europe and others are under pressure to meet stringent data norms that Kristen was talking about. And the sovereign cloud advisor health organization to create an architecture cloud architecture that complies with the green. Uh, I would say the data sound-bitey norms that is out there. The other element is around data to cloud. We are seeing massive migration, uh, for, uh, for a lot of the data to cloud. And there's a lot of migration hurdles that come within that. Uh, we have expanded mine app to support assessment capabilities, uh, for, uh, assessing applications, infrastructure, but also covering the entire state, including data and the code level to determine the right cloud solution. So we are, we are pushing the boundaries on what might have can do with mine. And we have created the ability to take the guesswork out of cloud, navigate the complexity. We are rolling risks costs, and we are achieving clients strategy, business objectives, while building a sustainable lots with being cloud, >>Any platform that can take some of the guesswork out of the future. I'm I'm on board with. Thank you so much, Kristin and Kishore. This has been a great conversation. Thank you, Rebecca. Thank you, Rebecca. Stay tuned for more of the cubes coverage of the Accenture executive summit. I'm Rebecca Knight. >>Yeah, Yeah.

>> Welcome everyone to the Cube Virtual. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. With me today is Clint Poole, who is the head of marketing at Onshape for PTC. Clint, welcome to the Cube. >> Well, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Great to be here. >> It is a pleasure to have you. And we are here marking the one-year anniversary of PTCs acquisition of Onshape, which PTC acquired last year for just under five, 500 million dollars. Congratulations. >> Thank you. >> So tell our viewers a little bit about Onshape. It is a true software and service company that helps product developers, by combining computer-aided design and with data management and collaboration tooling. Tell our viewers a little bit more about Onshape and why this space is growing so fast. >> I'm happy to do that. Onshape is the first cloud native, meaning it was built in the cloud for the cloud product development platform. And what that really means is it enables product designers, engineers from across the globe to create and collaborate on the development of any type of product. From mundane, household goods to very complex technology for the automotive industry. And it was founded actually by a group of folks who built the largest player in this market already. Won't be named. And they knew , intimately, the challenges that customers were facing with the old technology, which was the only technology available, when the previous set of products was built. So that was the motivation. It's very centered on the mission of the customers and what they're trying to do. And the way that we see it as is our role is just to give them a better set of tools so they can enable, to enable them to accomplish their mission of creating better products for a better world. >> So in terms of the challenges that customers face in this realm, can you dig in a little deeper there and talk, talk about what customers are trying to accomplish here? >> Well, they were trying to create, in whatever sector they work, the best possible products for their end customers, sets of customers. And the challenges are it's hard enough to ideate and design, but historically they've been restricted in the way that they had to work, because the technology that was available. The second generation of technology that most people are using today, wasn't built for global collaboration and most organizations, even if they're a small business, are collaborating with suppliers outside of the organization who are across the globe, different time zones, different locations. And certainly, for larger companies, you know, you have global design teams and, you know, their ability to work in real time on the set, the same set of models, same set of data is restricted. So we really unlock that challenge for them and just give them the power to work the way that they want to for the modern era. >> Empowering these people to collaborate. And as you said in real time, which is so critical, right now. >> Correct. So we've seen the SaaSification in CRM and also in human resources, in other things. Is this product lifecycle management, is this just a logical extension of those trends, in your mind? >> It is. I mean, again, this is, you know, Onshape itself was founded because this was an industry that hadn't seen much innovation in, really, decades on the product development side. And the team set out to build, you know, the only SaaS native product in the market. And we're seeing an increased adoption of the platform. Really was a natural extension of a macro trend called digital transformation, right? That's something this entire sector has been focused on. Manufacturers and product development teams have been focused on transforming their businesses and in every facet, whether it's, you know, enabling engineers to work from anywhere, if it's bringing additive manufacturing, 3D printing into the supply chain, robotics and factory automation on the factory floor, digitization of the supply chain, et cetera. You know, that macro trend has been going on for some time. And the industry, because it's so complex, has sort of been laggard in the adoption. And some are more mature along that digital transformation curve than others. Or what you saw with the pandemic was an absolute accelerated need to make movement and to become more mature, because you, really, you couldn't even work. You couldn't work the way that you had traditionally for 20 years. And it requires a completely different set of tools to accomplish the same set of goals. And, you know, we were built for the future and the future was accelerated by, you know, external crisis that no one could predict, but it is opening manufacturer's and design teams eyes to what they could accomplish if they work differently. >> So, as you're saying, a lot of companies are under a lot of stress and strain because of the pandemic, but it's also been a time for a lot of innovation and ingenuity and resourcefulness. And you said yourself that the pandemic has been almost a forcing mechanism to make companies make changes that maybe they had planned to make within the next five or 10 years. And they're having to make them now, out of necessity. So what kinds of products are you seeing customers making that's particularly interesting, in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic? >> Yeah. You know, our, again, the vision for us, which is it's a customer centric vision was always to give them something, our customer, a platform to enable them to make better products for a better world. That's our, our joint mission. And so pre-pandemic I described a little bit, you know, there's everything from the mundane to light switches. And lighting to really, really cool tech, you know. You know, battery packs for electric vehicles and even more socially conscious products like farm bots and affordable prosthetics. What has been incredible during the COVID crisis is engineers around the world have really come together and you know, focused on areas where they could help and particularly in the healthcare sector, which has been under siege with patients and was facing a shortage of supplies and in particular personal protective equipment, PPE and ventilators. And we watched these groups of teams, you know, sometimes formally under makeshift non-profits, and sometimes just informally with groups of engineers in their local community. You know, really thinking outside of the box and doing things like retrofitting scuba gear to be a medical grade masks and delivering those to their local hospital care providers. Designing, you know, face shields that could be easily manufactured with 3D printing locally and source and deliver. And folks taking all their equipment and retrofitting it to be ventilators, you know, and again, you know, mass manufacturing them as, as fast as they could in their local communities. It was really at the local level and you're seeing it globally. And it was incredible to watch the power of this customer community and what they can do. It was a living example of what we call innovation for good. >> Well, I definitely want to talk more about innovation for good, but of course, there's that Winston Churchill quote, never let it never let a crisis go to waste. It sounds as though the way you're talking about the way these engineers have come together, it's really inspiring. And it sounds, they got really creative. Do you think that this will be a lasting trend or does it take a crisis situation to have these people come together to solve these really difficult problems? >> No, this is a group of folks who solve problems every day and that's their persona. It's their passion and, you know, our role in their lives is to give them better capabilities to do that. It was just an opportunity for a set of professionals who are uniquely qualified to solve a problem in real time to come together. But it did show that what the modern workforce should look like for the sector. It showed how mint product design teams and manufacturers could collaborate globally, all right? Some of these groups of non-profits, were pulled together globally, overnight. You know, engineers who've never met each other, working across time zones on products. And then also with the advancements in manufacturing, additive manufacturing, 3D printing, you could build things locally, right? So maybe you don't need a global supply chain. It really was an illustration of how the industry needs to rethink how it designs, how it works and how it delivers products. There's ways to do things on a global basis more quickly, there's ways to source things locally and rethink supply chains. So it was really an inflection moment for a group of folks who've been trying to advance really better products for a better world, for some time. >> How do you see this confluence of CAD and PLM workflow affecting society in the coming decades? >> It really comes back to the joint mission that, you know, Onshape has with our customers and everybody in our space has with our customers. Developing better products for a better world. The idea of bringing those technologies together was integrating CAD with the management capabilities and a SaaS platform was all about enabling product teams to more easily collaborate on designs with colleagues or external vendors in real time, across locations, across time zones and not being inhibited by legacy technology. And this means that they can spend more time iterating on actual ideas and actually doing designing and focused on innovation and, and less time on the menial tasks that the former technology required of them. You know, administrative tasks, always tasks in every sector, inhibit innovation and good work. And, you know, because that's been removed what you're going to see as a better outcome at the end of the product development process. And that benefits everyone because as we've, as I said, they're working a lot of these folks are working on socially conscious products. They're all working on products that make our daily lives better as consumers, as patients and as customers. >> And making things better for society too. And importantly, they're enjoying their jobs more, which leads to bet better engagement and better productivity too. >> Correct. No employee likes to show up and have headaches with the way that you're supposed to work. And it's never been a driver of employee engagement. And for types of employees like this, who have this intellectual curiosity, you know, for the ability to expand that the scope of the team that they'd work on to give them more access to other intellectuals and professionals like themselves, and other times zones across the globe, you know, all brought together in a singular technology platform and empowered by it. You know, it is really a new way of thinking in a new way of working. Which yes, it drives our employee engagement, because this is, it suits their their persona and it suits how they want to work here. And that's a good thing for everybody because when employees are showing up fully engaged and fully empowered to do their best work, you have a better outcome. >> And excited to solve these important problems. You know, we talk a lot on the Cube about tech for good, and this is the theme innovation for good, which has been a theme of our conversation here today. And it's also an event that the Cube is co-hosting with you next month. The event is December 9th. What can people look forward to at the innovation for good event? Who should attend? What's in it for them? Give us the lowdown. >> Yeah. I mean, everybody who's involved in the product development and manufacturing sector, anyone who's involved in the development and the design and the development and manufacturing of products will benefit from the content that they'll see. And it's educators, it's professionals. You're going to hear from actual customers who are doing this, who are doing the actual work. You know, everything we do in Onshape is about the customer. You know, we enable the great work of other people, just to be very clear. And so you're going to hear from technology companies, aerospace companies, defense companies and academia. What they're doing to solve these challenges, what they're doing to leverage technology, to drive innovation for good. And you're going to walk away with insights of what you can do differently inside your workforce. >> So it will be actual news you can use and bring back to your company and apply the lessons that you're learning at the event. >> Correct. >> Excellent. Well, Clint Poole, a really, a pleasure to talk to you. By all means, join us on December 9th for Onshape's innovation for good event. We'll put the link in the description of this video. So please register and add the event to your calendar. We hope to see you there. Clint, again, thank you so much for coming on the Cube. Real pleasure talking to you. >> My pleasure. Hope it really joins us. >> Indeed. >> I'm Rebecca Knight. Stay tuned for more of the Cube Virtual.

>> Announcer: From around the globe, It's theCUBE with digital coverage of Accenture Executive Summit brought to you by Accenture. >> Welcome everyone to theCUBEs coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit part of AWS reinvent, I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Today we're welcoming back two CUBE alum, We have Kishore Durg, he is the Accenture Senior Managing Director, Cloud First Global Services Lead. Welcome back to the show Kishore. >> Thank you very much Rebecca, nice to meet again. >> Nice to meet you again, and Tristan Morel L'Horset, he is the Managing Director Accenture Cloud First North American Crows, welcome back to you Tristan. >> Great to be back and great to see you again, Rebecca. >> Exactly, even in this virtual format, it is good to see your faces. Today we're going to be talking about myNav and Green Cloud Advisor Capability. Kishore I want to start with you. So myNav is a platform that is really celebrating its first year in existence, November, 2019 is when Accenture introduced it, but it has new relevance in light of this global pandemic that we are all enduring and suffering through. Tell us a little bit about the myNav platform, what it is? >> Sure, Rebecca, we lost it and now what, 2019 and its a does that cloud platform to help our clients navigate the complexity of cloud and cloud decisions and to make it faster and obviously innovating the cloud. With the increased relevance and all the especially over the last few months with the impact of COVID crisis and exhibition of digital transformation, we are seeing the transformation or the acceleration to cloud much faster. This platform that we're talking about has enabled 140 clients globally across different industries to identify the right cloud solution, navigate the complexity, provide a cloud specific solution, simulate what our clients to meet the strategy business needs, and the plant are loving it. >> I want to go to you now Tristan, tell us a little bit about how myNav works and how it helps companies make good cloud choices. >> Yeah, so Rebecca, we've talked about cloud is more than just infrastructure and that's what myNav tries to solve for it. It really looks at a variety of variables, including infrastructure, operating model and fundamentally what clients' business outcomes our clients are looking for, and identify as the optimal solution for what they need and we designed this to accelerate, and we mentioned the pandemic, one of the big focus now is to accelerate. And so we worked through a three-step process. The first is scanning and assessing our client's infrastructure, their data landscape, their application. Second, we use our automated artificial intelligence engine to interact with... We have a wide variety and library of collective plan expertise, and we look to recommend what is the enterprise architecture and solution. And then third, before we aligned with our clients, we look to simulate and test this scaled up model, and this simulation gives our clients a way to see what cloud is going to look like, feel like and how it's going to transform their business before they go there. >> So tell us a little bit about that in real life now as a company so many of people are working remotely having to collaborate not in real life, How is that helping them right now, Tristan? >> So the pandemic has put a tremendous strain on systems because of the demand on those systems and so we talk about resiliency, we also now need to collaborate across data across people, I think all of us are calling from a variety of different places where last year we were all at theCUBE itself, and cloud technologies such as teams, Zoom that we're leveraging now has fundamentally accelerated and clients are looking to on board this for their capabilities, they're trying to accelerate their journey, they realize that now the cloud is what is going to become important for them to differentiate once we come out of the pandemic and the ability to collaborate with their employees, their partners, and their clients through these systems is becoming a true business differentiator for our clients. >> Kishore, I want to talk with you now about myNav multiple capabilities and helping clients design and navigate their cloud journeys. Tell us a little bit about the green cloud advisor capability and its significance particularly as so many companies are thinking more deeply and thoughtfully about sustainability. >> Yes, so since the launch of myNav, we continue to enhance capabilities for our clients. One of the significant capabilities that we have enabled is the lead cloud advisor. Today Rebecca a lot of the businesses are more environmentally aware and are expanding efforts to decrease power consumption and obviously carbon emissions and run a sustainable operations across every aspect of the enterprise. As a result, you're seeing an increasing trend in adoption of energy efficient infrastructure in the global market. And one of the things that we did a lot of research we found out is that there's an ability to influence our client's carbon footprint through a better cloud solution and that's what being green cloud advisor brings to us. In terms of a lot of the client connotation that we're seeing in Europe, North America and others, lot of our clients are accelerating to a green cloud strategy to unlock greater financial, societal and environmental benefit through obviously cloud-based circular operational and sustainable products and services. That is something that we are enhancing myNav and we're having active client discussions at these point of tome. >> So Tristan, tell us a little bit about how this capability helps clients make greener decisions? >> Yeah, well, let's start about the investments from the cloud providers in renewable and sustainable energy. They have... Most of the hyperscalers today, have been investing significantly on data centers that are run on renewable energy, some incredibly creative constructs on how to do that. And sustainability is there for a key item of importance for the hyperscalers and also for our clients who now are looking for sustainable energy. And it turns out this marriage is now possible, I can we re-marry the green capabilities of the cloud providers with a sustainability agenda of our clients. And so what we look into way the myNav works is it looks at industry benchmarks and evaluates our current clients capabilities and carbon footprint leveraging their existing data centers. We then look to model from an end-to-end perspective, how their journey to the cloud leveraging sustainable and data centers with renewable energy, we look at how their solution will look like and quantify carbon tax credits improve a green index score and provide quantifiable green cloud capabilities and measurable outcomes to our clients shareholders, stakeholders, clients, and customers. And our green plot advisor's sustainability solutions already been implemented at three clients, and in many cases in two cases has helped them reduce the carbon footprint by up to 400% to migration from their existing data center to a green cloud, very, very important item. >> That is remarkable. Now tell us a little bit about the kinds of clients, is this more interesting to clients in Europe? Would you say that it's catching on in the United States? what is the breakdown that you're seeing right now? >> Sustainability has becoming such a global agenda and we're seeing our clients tie this and put this at board level agenda and requirements across the globe. Europe has specific constraints around data sovereignty, where they need their data in country, but from a green a sustainability agenda we see clients across all our markets, North America, Europe, and our growth markets adopt this and we have seen case studies in all three markets. >> Kishore, I want to bring you back into the conversation, talk a little bit about how myNav ties into Accenture's cloud first strategy, your Accenture's CEO, Julie Sweet has talked about post COVID leadership requiring every business to become a cloud first business. Tell us a little bit about how this ethos is in Accenture and how you're sort of looking outward with it too? >> So Rebecca myNav is the launch pad to a cloud first transformation for our clients. Accenture, CEO Julie Sweet shared the Accenture cloud first and our substantial investment demonstrate our commitment and is delivering data value for our clients when they need it the most. And with the digital transformation requiring cloud at scale we're seeing that in the post COVID leadership it requires that every business should become a cloud business, and myNav helps them get there by evaluating the cloud landscape, navigating the complexity, modeling architecting and simulating an optimal cloud solution for our clients and as Tristan was sharing a greener cloud. >> So Tristan talk a little bit more about some of the real life use cases in terms of what are clients seeing? What are the results that they're having? >> Yes, thank you Rebecca. I would say two key things around myNav. the first is the iterative process, clients don't want to wait until they get started, they want to get started and see what their journey is going to look like. And the second is fundamental acceleration, the pandemic as we talked about has accelerated the need to move to cloud very quickly and myNav is there to do that. So how do we do that? First is generating the business cases. Clients need to know in many cases that they have a business case, and by business case we talk about the financial benefits as well as the business outcomes, the green cloud of impact sustainability on the impact. With myNav we can build initial recommendations using a basic understanding of their environment and benchmarks in weeks versus months with indicative value savings and the millions of dollars arranges. So for example very recently we worked with a global oil and gas company, and in only two weeks, we're able to provide an indicative savings worth $27 million over five years. This enabled the client to get started, knowing that there is a business case benefit and then iterate on it. And this iteration is, I would say the second point that is particularly important with myNav that we've seen in Bangalore clients, which is any journey starts with an understanding of what is the application landscape and what are we trying to do with those. These initial assessments that used to take six to eight weeks are now taking anywhere from two to four weeks. So we're seeing a 40 to 50% reduction in the initial assessment, which gets clients started in their journey. And then finally we've had discussions with all of the hyperscalers to help partner with Accenture and leverage myNav to prepared their detailed business case module as they're going to clients and as they're accelerating the client's journey. So real results, real acceleration and is there a journey? Do I have a business case? And furthermore accelerating the journey once we are by giving the ability to work in an iterative approach. >> I mean, it sounds as though the company that clients and employees are sort of saying, this is an amazing time savings look at what I can do here in a condensed amount of time, but in terms of getting everyone on board, one of the things we talked about last time we met Tristan was just how much... One of the obstacles is getting people to sign on and the new technologies and new platforms, those are often the obstacles and struggles that companies face. Have you found that at all? Or what is sort of the feedback that you're getting from employees? >> Yes, clearly there are always obstacles to a cloud journey. If there were an obstacles all our clients would be already fully in the cloud. Well, myNav gives the ability is to navigate through those to start quickly, and then as we identify obstacles we can simulate what things are going to look like, we can continue with certain parts of the journey while we deal with that obstacle, and it's a fundamental accelerator, whereas in the past one obstacle would prevent a client from starting, we can now start to address the obstacles one at a time while continuing and accelerating the client journey, that is the fundamental difference. >> Kishore, I want to give you the final word here, tell us a little bit about what is next for Accenture myNav and what we'll be discussing next year at the Accenture Executive Summit >> Sort of echo, we are continuously evolving with our client needs and reinventing for the future. For myNav SaaS green cloud advisor our plan is to help our clients reduce carbon footprint and again migrate to our greener cloud. And additionally, we're looking at two capabilities which includes sovereign cloud advisor with clients especially in Europe and others are under pressure to meet stringent data norms that Kristan was talking about, and the sovereignty advisor health organization to create an cloud architecture that complies with the green, I would say the data sovereignty norms that is out there. The other element is around data to cloud, we are seeing massive migration for a lot of the data to cloud, and there's a lot of migration hurdles that come within that, we have expanded myNav to support assessment capabilities for assessing applications, infrastructure, but also covering the entire estate, including data and the code level to determine the right cloud solution. So we are pushing the boundaries on what myNav can do, with myNav we have created the ability to take the guesswork out of cloud, navigate the complexity, we are lowering risks costs, and we are achieving client's strategic business objectives while building a sustainable lots with green cloud. >> Any platform that can take some of the guesswork out of the future I'm on board with. Thank you so much, Kristan and Kishore, this has been a great conference. >> Thank you Rebecca. >> Thank you Rebecca. >> Stay tuned for more of theCUBEs coverage of the Accenture Executive Summit, I'm Rebecca ca Knight. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From theCUBE's studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everyone, this is Dave Vellante. Welcome to this CUBE conversation. We got a really cool company that we're going to introduce you to, and Anthony Brooks Williams is here. He's the CEO of that company, HVR. Anthony, good to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Hey Dave, good to see you again, appreciate it. >> Yeah cheers, so tell us a little bit about HVR. Give us the background of the company, we'll get into a little bit of the history. >> Yeah sure, so at HVR we are changing the way companies routes and access their data. And as we know, data really is the lifeblood of organizations today, and if that stops moving, or stop circulating, well, there's a problem. And people want to make decisions on the freshest data. And so what we do is we move critical business data around these organizations, the most predominant place today is to the cloud, into platforms such as Snowflake, where we've seen massive traction. >> Yeah boy, have we ever. I mean, of course, last week, we saw the Snowflake IPO. The industry is abuzz with that, but so tell us a little bit more about the history of the company. What's the background of you guys? Where did you all come from? >> Sure, the company originated out of the Netherlands, at Amsterdam, founded in 2012, helping solve the issue that customer's was having moving data efficiently at scale across all across a wide area network. And obviously, the cloud is one of those endpoint. And therefore a company, such as the Dutch Postal Service personnel, where today we now move the data to Azure and AWS. But it was really around how you can efficiently move data at scale across these networks. And I have a bit of a background in this, dating back from early 2000s, when I founded a company that did auditing recovery, or SQL Server databases. And we did that through reading the logs. And so then sold that company to Golden Gate, and had that sort of foundation there, in those early days. So, I mean again, Azure haven't been moving data efficiently as we can across these organizations with it, with the key aim of allowing customers to make decisions on the freshest data. Which today's really, table stakes. >> Yeah, so, okay, so we should think about you, as I want to invoke Einstein here, move as much data as you need to, but no more, right? 'Cause it's hard to move data. So your high speeds kind of data mover, efficiency at scale. Is that how we should think about you? >> Absolutely, I mean, at our core, we are CDC trades that capture moving incremental workloads of data, moving the updates across the network, you mean, combined with the distributed architecture that's highly flexible and extensible. And these days, just that one point, customers want to make decisions on us as much as they can get. We have companies that we're doing this for, a large apparel company that's taking some of their not only their core sales data, but some of that IoT data that they get, and sort of blending that together. And given the ability to have a full view of the organization, so they can make better decisions. So it's moving as much data as they can, but also, you need to do that in a very efficient way. >> Yeah, I mean, you mentioned Snowflake, so what I'd like to do is take my old data warehouse, and whatever, let it do what it does, reporting and compliance, stuff like that, but then bring as much data as I need into my Snowflake, or whatever modern cloud database I'm using, and then apply whatever machine intelligence, and really analyze it. So really that is kind of the problem that you're solving, is getting all that data to a place where it actually can be acted on, and turned into insights, is that right? >> Absolutely, I mean, part of what we need to do is there's a whole story around multi-cloud, and that's obviously where Snowflake fit in as well. But from our point of views of supporting over 30 different platforms. I mean data is generated, data is created in a number of different source systems. And so our ability to support each of those in this very efficient way, using these techniques such as CDCs, is going to capture the data at source, and then weaving it together into some consolidated platform where they can do the type of analysis they need to do on that. And obviously, the cloud is the predominant target system of choice with something like a Snowflake there in either these clouds. I mean, we support a number of different technologies in there. But yeah, it's about getting all that data together so they can make decisions on all areas of the business. So I'd love to get into the secret sauce a little bit. I mean we've heard luminaries like Andy Jassie stand up at last year at Reinvent, he talked about Nitro, and the big pipes, and how hard it is to move data at scale. So what's the secret sauce that you guys have that allow you to be so effective at this? >> Absolutely, I mean, it starts with  how you going to acquire data? And you want to do that in the least obtrusive way to the database. So we'll actually go in, and we read the transaction logs of each of these databases. They all generate logs. And we go read the logs systems, all these different source systems, and then put it through our webs and secret sauce, and how we how we move the data, and how we compress that data as well. So, I mean, if you want to move data across a wide area network, I mean, the technique that a few companies use, such as ourselves, is change data capture. And you're moving incremental updates, incremental workloads, the change data across a network. But then combine that with the ability that we have around some of the compression techniques that we use, and, and then just into very distributed architecture, that was one of the things that made me join HVR after my previous experiences, and seeing that how that really fits in today's world of real time and cloud. I mean, those are table stakes things. >> Okay, so it's that change data capture? >> Yeah. >> Now, of course, you've got to initially seed the target. And so you do that, if I understand you use data reduction techniques, so that you're minimizing the amount of data. And then what? Do you use asynchronous methodologies, dial it down, dial it up, off hours, how does that work? >> Absolutely, exactly what you've said they mean. So we're going to we're, initially, there's an initial association, or an initial concept, where you take a copy of all of that data that sits in that source system, and replicating that over to the target system, you turn on that CDC mechanism, which is then weaving that change data. At the same time, you're compressing it, you're encrypting it, you're making sure it's highly secure, and loading that in the most efficient way into their target systems. And so we either do a lot of that, or we also work with, if there's a ETL vendor involved, that's doing some level of transformations, and they take over the transformation capabilities, or loading. We obviously do a fair amount of that ourselves as well. But it depends on what is the architecture that's in there for the customer as well. The key thing is that what we also have is, we have this compare and repair ability that's built into the product. So we will move data across, and we make sure that data that gets moved from A to B is absolutely accurate. I mean people want to know that their data can move faster, they want it to be efficient, but they also want it to be secure. They want to know that they have a peace of mind to make decisions on accurate data. And that's some stuff that we have built into the products as well, supported across all the different platforms as well. So something else that just sets us apart in that as well. >> So I want to understand the business case, if you will. I mean, is it as simple as, "Hey, we can move way more data faster. "We can do it at a lower cost." What's the business case for you guys, and the business impact? >> Absolutely, so I mean, the key thing is the business case is moving that data as efficiently as we can across this, so they can make these decisions. So our biggest online retailer in the US uses us, on the biggest busiest system. They have some standard vendors in there, but they use us, because of the scalability that we can achieve there, of making decisions on their financial data, and all the transactions that happen between the main E-commerce site, and all the third party vendors. That's us moving that data across there as efficiently as they can. And first we look at it as pretty much it's subscription based, and it's all connection based type pricing as well. >> Okay, I want to ask you about pricing. >> Yeah. >> Pricing transparency is a big topic in the industry today, but how do you how do you price? Let's start there. >> Yeah, we charge a simple per connection price. So what are the number of source systems, a connection is a source system or a target system. And we try to very simply, we try and keep it as simple as possible, and charge them on the connections. So they will buy a packet of five connections, they have source systems, two target systems. And it's pretty much as simple as that. >> You mentioned security before. So you're encrypting the data. So your data in motion's encrypted. What else do we need to know about security? >> Yeah, you mean, that we have this concept and how we handle, and we have this wallet concept, and how we integrate with the standard security systems that those customers have already, in the in this architecture. So it's something that we're constantly doing. I mean, there's there's a data encryption at rest. And initially, the whole aim is to make sure that the customer feels safe, that the data that is moving is highly secure. >> Let's talk a little bit about cloud, and maybe the architecture. Are you running in the cloud, are you running on prem, both, across clouds. How does that work? >> Yeah, all of the above. So I mean, what we see today is majority of the data is still generated on prem. And then the majority of the talks we see are in the cloud, and this is not a one time thing, this is continuous. I mean, they've moved their analytical workload into the cloud. You mean they have these large events a few times a year, and they want the ability to scale up and scale down. So we typically see you mean, right now, you need analytics, data warehouses, that type of workload is sitting in the cloud, because of the elasticity, and the scalability, and the reasons the cloud was brought on. So absolutely, we can support the cloud to cloud, we can support on prem to cloud, I think you mean, a lot of companies adopting this hybrid strategy that we've seen certainly for the foreseeable next five years. But yeah, absolutely. The source of target systems considered on prem or in the cloud. >> And where's the point of control? Is it wherever I want it to be? >> Absolutely. >> Is it in one of the clouds on prem? >> Yeah absolutely, you can put that point of control where you want it to be. We have a concept of agents, these agents search on the source and target systems. And then we have the, it's at the edge of your brain, the hub that is controlling what is happening. This data movement that can be sitting with a source system, separately, or on target system. So it's highly extensible and flexible architecture there as well. >> So if something goes wrong, it's the HVR brain that helps me recover, right? And make sure that I don't have all kinds of data corruption. Maybe you could explain that a little bit, what happens when something goes wrong? >> Yeah absolutely, I mean, we have things that are built into the product that help us highlight what has gone wrong, and how we can correct those. And then there's alerts that get sent back to us to the to the end customer. And there's been a whole bunch of training, and stuff that's taken place for then what actions they can take, but there's a lot of it is controlled through HVR core system that handles that. So we are working next step. So as we move as a service into more of an autonomous data integration model ourselves, whichever, a bunch of exciting things coming up, that just takes that off to the next levels. >> Right, well Golden Gate Heritage just sold that to Oracle, they're pretty hardcore about things like recovery. Anthony, how do you think about the market? The total available market? Can you take us through your opportunity broadly? >> Yeah absolutely, you mean, there's the core opportunity in the space that we play, as where customers want to move data, they don't want to do data integration, they want to move data from A to B. There's those that are then branching out more to moving a lot of their business workloads to the cloud on a continuous basis. And then where we're seeing a lot of traction around this particular data that resides in these critical business systems such as SAP, that is something you're asking earlier about, what are some core things on our product. We have the ability to unpack, to unlock that data that sits in some of these SAP environments. So we can go, and then decode this data that sits between these cluster pool tables, combine that with our CDC techniques, and move their data across a network. And so particularly, sort of bringing it back a little bit, what we're seeing today, people are adopting the cloud, the massive adoption of Snowflake. I mean, as we see their growth, a lot of that is driven through consumption, why? It's these big, large enterprises that are now ready to consume more. We've seen that tail wind from our perspective, as well as taking these workloads such as SAP, and moving that into something like these cloud platforms, such as a Snowflake. And so that's where we see the immediate opportunity for us. And then and then branching out from there further, but I mean, that is the core immediate area of focus right now. >> Okay, so we've talked about Snowflake a couple of times, and other platforms, they're not the only one, but they're the hot one right now. When you think about what organizations are doing, they're trying to really streamline their data pipeline to get to turn raw data into insights. So you're seeing that emerging organizations, that data pipeline, we've been talking about it for quite some time. I mean, Snowflake, obviously, is one piece of that. Where's your value in that pipeline? Is it all about getting the data into that stream? >> Yeah, you just mentioned something there that we have an issue internally that's called raw data to ready data. And that's about capturing this data, moving that across. And that's where we building value on that data as well, particularly around some of our SAP type initiatives, and solutions related to that, that we're bringing out as well. So one it's absolutely going in acquiring that data. It's then moving it as efficiently as we can at scale, which a lot of people talk about, we truly operate at scale, the biggest companies in the world use us to do that, across there and giving them that ability to make decisions on the freshest data. Therein lies the value of them being able to make decisions on data that is a few seconds, few minutes old, versus some other technology they may be using that takes hours days. You mean that is it, keeping large companies that we work with today. I mean keeping toner paper on shelves, I mean one thing that happened after COVID. I mean one of our big customers was making them out their former process, and making the shelves are full. Another healthcare provider being able to do analysis on what was happening on supplies from the hospital, and the other providers during this COVID crisis. So that's where it's a lot of that value, helping them reinvent their businesses, drive down that digital transformation strategy, is the key areas there. No data, they can't make those type of decisions. >> Yeah, so I mean, your vision really, I mean, you're betting on data. I always say don't bet against the data. But really, that's kind of the premise here. Is the data is going to continue to grow. And data, I often say data is plentiful insights aren't. And we use the Broma you said before. So really, maybe, good to summarize the vision for us, where you want to take this thing? Yeah, absolutely so we're going to continue building on what we have, making it easier to use. Certainly, as we move, as more customers move into the cloud. And then from there, I mean, we have some strategic initiatives of looking at some acquisitions as well, just to build on around offering, and some of the other core areas. But ultimately, it's getting closer to the business user. In today's world, there is many IT tech-savvy people sitting in the business side of organization, as they are in IT, if not more. And so as we go down that flow with our product, it's getting closer to those end users, because they're at the forefront of wanting this data. As we said that the data is the lifeblood of an organization. And so given an ability to drive the actual power that they need to run the data, is a core part of that vision. So we have some some strategic initiatives around some acquisitions, as well, but also continue to build on the product. I mean, there's, as I say, I mean sources and targets come and go, there's new ones that are created each week, and new adoptions, and so we've got to support those. That's our table stakes, and then continue to make it easier to use, scale even quicker, more autonomous, those type of things. >> And you're working with a lot of big companies, the company's well funded if Crunchbase is up to date, over $50 million in funding. Give us up right there. >> Yeah absolutely, I mean a company is well funded, we're on a good footing. Obviously, it's a very hot space to be in. With COVID this year, like everybody, we sat down and looked in sort of everyone said, "Okay well, let's have a look how "this whole thing's going to shake out, "and get good plan A, B and C in action." And we've sort of ended up with Plan A plus, we've done an annual budget for the year. We had our best quarter ever, and Q2, 193% year over year growth. And it's just, the momentum is just there, I think at large. I mean obviously, it sounds cliche, a lot of people say it around digital transformation and COVID. Absolutely, we've been building this engine for a few years now. And it's really clicked into gear. And I think projects due to COVID and things that would have taken nine, 12 months to happen, they're sort of taking a month or two now. It's been getting driven down from the top. So all of that's come together for us very fortunately, the timing has been ideal. And then tie in something like a Snowflake traction, as you said, we support many other platforms. But all of that together, it just set up really nicely for us, fortunately. >> That's amazing, I mean, with all the turmoil that's going on in the world right now. And all the pain in many businesses. I tell you, I interview people all day every day, and the technology business is really humming. So that's awesome to hear that you guys. I mean, especially if you're in the right place, and data is the place to be. Anthony, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and summarizing your thoughts, and give us the update on HVR, really interesting. >> Absolutely, I appreciate the time and opportunity. >> Alright, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From the CUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody Jeffrey Frick with theCUBE. We are getting through the COVID crisis. It continues and impacting the summer. I can't believe the summer's almost over, but there's a whole lot of things going on in terms of privacy and contact tracing and this kind of this feeling that there's this conflict between kind of personal identification and your personal privacy versus the public good around things like contact tracing. And I was in a session last week with two really fantastic experts. I wanted to bring them on the show and we're really excited to have back for I don't even know how many times Michelle has been on Michelle Dennedy, She is the former chief privacy officer at Cisco and now she's running the CEO of Identity, Michelle great to see you. >> Good to see you always Jeff >> Yeah and for the first time Dr. Ann Cavoukian and she is the executive director Global Privacy & Security By Design Center. Joining us from Toronto, worked with the government and is not short on opinions about privacy. (laughing) Ann good to see you. >> Hi Jeff thank you >> Yes, so let's jump into it cause I think one of the fundamental issues that we keep hearing is this zero-sum game. And I know and it's a big topic for you that there seems to be this trade off this either or and specifically let's just go to contact tracing. Cause that's a hot topic right now with COVID. I hear that it's like you're telling everybody where I'm going and you're sharing that with all these other people. How is this even a conversation and where do I get to choose whether I want to participate or not? >> You can't have people traced and tracked and surveil. You simply can't have it and it can't be an either or win lose model. You have to get rid of that data. Zero-sum game where only one person can win and the other one loses and it sums to a total of zero. Get rid of that, that's so yesterday. You have to have both groups winning positive sum. Meaning yes, you need public health and public safety and you need privacy. It's not one versus the other. We can do both and that's what we insist upon. So the contact term tracing app that was developed in Canada was based on the Apple Google framework, which is actually called exposure notification. It's totally privacy protective individuals choose to voluntarily download this app. And no personal information is collected whatsoever. No names, no geolocation data, nothing. It's simply notifies you. If you've been exposed to someone who is COVID-19 positive, and then you can decide on what action you wish to take. Do you want to go get tested? Do you want to go to your family doctor, whatever the decision lies with you, you have total control and that's what privacy is all about. >> Jeffrey: But what about the person who was sick? Who's feeding the top into that process and is the sick person that you're no notifying they obviously their personal information is part of that transaction. >> what the COVID alerts that we developed based on the Apple Google framework. It builds on manual contact tracing, which also take place the two to compliment each other. So the manual contact tracing is when individuals go get to get tested and they're tested as positive. So healthcare nurses will speak to that individual and say, please tell us who you've been in contact with recently, family, friends, et cetera. So the two work together and by working together, we will combat this in a much more effective manner. >> Jeffrey: So shifting over to you Michelle, you know, there's PIN and a lot of conversations all the time about personal identifiable information but right. But then medical has this whole nother class of kind of privacy restrictions and level of care. And I find it really interesting that on one hand, you know, we were trying to do the contract tracing on another hand if you know, my wife works in a public school. If they find out that one of the kids in this class has been exposed to COVID somehow they can't necessarily tell the teacher because of HIPAA restriction. So I wonder if you could share your thoughts on this kind of crossover between privacy and health information when it gets into this kind of public crisis and this inherent conflict for the public right to know and should the teacher be able to be told and it's not a really clean line with a simple answer, I don't think. >> No and Jeff, and you're also layering, you know, when you're talking about student data, you layering another layer of legal restriction. And I think what you're putting your thumb on is something that's really critical. When you talk about privacy engineering, privacy by design and ethics engineering. You can't simply start with the legal premise. So is it lawful to share HIPAA covered data. A child telling mommy I don't feel well not HIPAA covered. A child seeing a doctor for medical services and finding some sort of infection or illness covered, right? So figuring out the origin of the exact same zero one. Am I ill or not, all depends on context. So you have to first figure out, first of all let's tackle the moral issues. Have we decided that it is a moral imperative to expose certain types of data. And I separate that from ethics intentionally and with apologies to true ethicists. The moral imperative is sort of the things we find are so wrong. We don't want a list of kids who are sick or conversely once the tipping point goes the list of kids who are well. So then they are called out that's the moral choice. The ethical choice is just because you can should you, and that's a much longer conversation. Then you get to the legal imperative. Are you allowed to based on the past mistakes that we made. That's what every piece of litigation or legislation is particularly in a common law construct in the US. It's very important to understand that civil law countries like the European theater. They try to prospectively legislate for things that might go wrong. The construct is thinner in a common law economy where you do, you use test cases in the courts of law. That's why we are such a litigious society has its own baggage. But you have to now look at is that legal structure attempting to cover past harms that are so bad that we've decided as a society to punish them, is this a preventative law? And then you finally get to what I say is stage four for every evaluation is isn't viable, are the protections that you have to put on top of these restrictions. So dire that they either cannot be maintained because of culture process or cash or it just doesn't make sense anymore. So does it, is it better to just feel someone's forehead for illness rather than giving a blood assay, having it sent away for three weeks and then maybe blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. >> Right. >> You have to look at this as a system problem solving issue. >> So I want to look at it in the context of, again kind of this increased level of politicization and or, you know, kind of exposure outside of what's pretty closed. And I want to bring up AIDS and the porn industry very frankly right? Where people behaving in the behavior of the business risk a life threatening disease of which I still don't think it as a virus. So you know why, cause suddenly, you know, we can track for that and that's okay to track for that. And there's a legitimate reason to versus all of the other potential medical conditions that I may or may not have that are not necessarily brought to bear within coming to work. And we might be seeing this very soon. As you said, if people are wanting our temperatures, as we come in the door to check for symptoms. How does that play with privacy and healthcare? It's still fascinates me that certain things is kind of pop out into their own little bucket of regulation. I'm wondering if you could share your thoughts on that Ann. >> You know, whenever you make it privacy versus fill in the blank, especially in the context of healthcare. You end up turning it to a lose lose as opposed to even a win lose. Because you will have fewer people wanting to allow themselves to be tested, to be brought forward for fear of where that information may land. If it lands in the hands of your employer for example or your whoever owns your house if you're in renting, et cetera. It creates enormous problems. So regardless of what you may think of the benefits of that model. History has shown that it doesn't work well that people end up shying away from being tested or seeking treatment or any of those things. Even now with the contact tracing apps that have been developed. If you look globally the contact tracing apps for COVID-19. They have failed the ones that identify individuals in the UK, in Australia, in Western Canada that's how it started out. And they've completely dropped them because they don't work. People shy away from them. They don't use them. So they've gotten rid of that. They've replaced it with the, an app based on the Apple Google framework, which is the one that protects privacy and will encourage people to come forward and seek to be tested. If there's a problem in Germany. Germany is one of the largest privacy data protection countries in the world. Their privacy people are highly trusted in Germany. Germany based their app on the Apple Google framework. About a month ago they released it. And within 24 hours they had 6.5 million people download the app. >> Right. >> Because there is such trust there unlike the rest of the world where there's very little trust and we have to be very careful of the trust deficit. Because we want to encourage people to seek out these apps so they can attempt to be tested if there's a problem, but they're not going to use them. They're just going to shy away from them. If there is such a problem. And in fact I'll never forget. I did an interview about a month ago, three weeks ago in the US on a major major radio station that has like 54 million people followers. And I was telling them about the COVID alert the Canadian contact tracing app, actually it's called exposure notification app, which was built on the Apple Google framework. And people in hoard said they wouldn't trust anyone with it in the US. They just wouldn't trust it. So you see there's such a trust deficit. That's what we have to be careful to avoid. >> So I want to hold on the trust for just a second, but I want to go back to you Michelle and talk about the lessons that we can learn post 9/11. So the other thing right and keep going back to this over and over. It's not a zero-sum game. It's not a zero-sum game and yet that's the way it's often positioned as a way to break down existing barriers. So if you go back to 9/11 probably the highest profile thing being the Patriot Act, you know, where laws are put in place to protect us from terrorism that are going to do things that were not normally allowed to be done. I bet without checking real exhaustively that most of those things are still in place. You know, cause a lot of times laws are written. They don't go away for a long time. What can we learn from what happened after 9/11 and the Patriot Act and what should be really scared of, or careful of or wary of using that as a framework for what's happening now around COVID and privacy. >> It's a perfect, it's not even an analogy because we're feeling the shadows of the Patriot Act. Even now today, we had an agreement from the United States with the European community until recently called the Privacy Shield. And it was basically if companies and organizations that were, that fell under the Federal Trade Commissions jurisdiction, there's a bit of layering legal process here. But if they did and they agreed to supply enough protection to data about people who were present in the European Union to the same or better level than the Europeans would. Then that information could pass through this Privacy Shield unencumbered to and from the United States. That was challenged and taken down. I don't know if it's a month ago or if it's still March it's COVID time, but very recently on basis that the US government can overly and some would say indifferent nations, improperly look at European data based on some of these Patriot Act, FISA courts and other intrusive mechanisms that absolutely do apply if we were under the jurisdiction of the United States. So now companies and private actors are in the position of having to somehow prove that they will mechanize their systems and their processes to be immune from their own government intrusion before they can do digital trade with other parts of the world. We haven't yet seen the commercial disruption that will take place. So the unintended consequence of saying rather than owning the answers or the observations and the intelligence that we got out of the actual 9/11 report, which said we had the information we needed. We did not share enough between the agencies and we didn't have the decision making activity and will to take action in that particular instance. Rather than sticking to that knowledge. Instead we stuck to the Patriot Act, which was all but I believe to Congress people. When I mean, you see the hot mess. That is the US right now. When everyone but two people in the room vote for something on the quick. There's probably some sort of a psychological gun to your head. That's probably well thought out thing. We fight each other. That's part of being an American dammit. So I think having these laws that say, you've got to have this one solution because the boogeyman is coming or COVID is coming or terrorists or child pornographers are coming. There's not one solution. So you really have to break this down into an engineering problem and I don't mean technology when I say engineering. I mean looking at the culture, how much trust do you have? Who is the trusted entity? Do we trust Microsoft more than we trust the US government right now? Maybe that might be your contact. How you're going to build people, process and technology not to avoid a bad thing, but to achieve a positive objective because if you're not achieving that positive objective of understanding that safe to move about without masks on, for example, stop, just stop. >> Right, right. My favorite analogy Jeff, and I think I've said this to you in the past is we don't sit around and debate the merits of viscosity of water to protect concrete holes. We have to make sure that when you lead them to the concrete hole, there's enough water in the hole. No, you're building a swimming pool. What kind of a swimming pool do you want? Is it commercial, Is it toddlers? Is it (indistinct), then you build in correlation, protection and da da da da. But if you start looking at every problem as how to avoid hitting a concrete hole. You're really going to miss the opportunity to build and solve the problem that you want and avoid the risk that you do not want. >> Right right, and I want to go back to you on the trust thing. You got an interesting competent in that other show, talking about working for the government and not working directly for the people are voted in power, but for the kind of the larger bureaucracy and agency. I mean, the Edelman Trust Barometer is really interesting. They come out every year. I think it's their 20th year. And they break down kind of like media, government and business. And who do you trust and who do you not trust? What what's so fascinating about the time we're in today is even within the government, the direction that's coming out is completely diametrically opposed oftentimes between the Fed, the state and the local. So what does kind of this breakdown of trust when you're getting two different opinions from the same basic kind of authority due to people's ability or desire to want to participate and actually share the stuff that maybe or maybe not might get reshared. >> It leaves you with no confidence. Basically, you can't take confidence in any of this. And when I was privacy commissioner. I served for three terms, each term that was a different government, different political power in place. And before they had become the government, they were all for privacy and data protection believed in and all that. And then once they became the government all that changed and all of a sudden they wanted to control everyone's information and they wanted to be in power. No, I don't trust government. You know, people often point to the private sector as being the group you should distrust in terms of privacy. I say no, not at all. To me far worse is actually the government because everyone thinks they're there to do good job and trust them. You can't trust. You have to always look under the hood. I always say trust but verify. So unfortunately we have to be vigilant in terms of the protections we seek for privacy both with private sector and with the government, especially with the government and different levels of government. We need to ensure that people's privacy remains intact. It's preserved now and well into the future. You can't give up on it because there's some emergency a pandemic, a terrorist incident whatever of course we have to address those issues. But you have to insist upon people's privacy being preserved. Privacy forms the foundation of our freedom. You cannot have free and open societies without a solid foundation of privacy. So I'm just encouraging everyone. Don't take anything at face value, just because the government tells you something. It doesn't mean it's so always look under the hood and let us ensure the privacy is strongly protected. See emergencies come and go. The pandemic will end. What cannot end is our privacy and our freedom. >> So this is a little dark in here, but we're going to lighten it up a little bit because there's, as Michelle said, you know, if you think about building a pool versus putting up filling a hole, you know, you can take proactive steps. And there's a lot of conversation about proactive steps and I pulled Ann your thing Privacy by Design, The 7 Foundational Principles. I have the guys pull up a slide. But I think what's really interesting here is, is you're very, very specific prescriptive, proactive, right? Proactive, not reactive. Privacy is the default setting. You know, don't have to read the ULAs and I'm not going to read the, all the words we'll share it. People can find it. But what I wanted to focus on is there is an opportunity to get ahead of the curve, but you just have to be a little bit more thoughtful. >> That's right, and Privacy By Design it's a model of prevention, much like a medical model of prevention where you try to prevent the harms from arising, not just deal with them after the facts through regulatory compliance. Of course we have privacy laws and that's very important, but they usually kick in after there's been a data breach or privacy infraction. So when I was privacy commissioner obviously those laws were intact and we had to follow them, but I wanted something better. I wanted to prevent the privacy harms from arising, just like a medical model of prevention. So that's a Privacy By Design is intended to do is instantiate, embed much needed privacy protective measures into your policies, into your procedures bake it into the code so that it has a constant presence and can prevent the harms from arising. >> Jeffrey: Right right. One of the things I know you love to talk about Michelle is compliance, right? And is compliance enough. I know you like to talk about the law. And I think one of the topics that came up on your guys' prior conversation is, you know, will there be a national law, right? GDPR went through on the European side last year, the California Protection Act. A lot of people think that might become the model for more of a national type of rule. But I tell you, when you watch some of the hearings in DC, you know, I'm sure 90% of these people still print their emails and have their staff hand them to them. I mean, it's really scary that said, you know, regulation always does kind of lag probably when it needs to be put in place because people maybe abuse or go places they shouldn't go. So I wonder if you could share your thoughts on where you think legislation is going to going and how should people kind of see that kind of playing out over the next several years, I guess. >> Yeah, it's such a good question Jeff. And it's like, you know, I think even the guys in Vegas are having trouble with setting the high laws on this. Cameron said in I think it was December of 2019, which was like 15 years ago now that in the first quarter of 2020, we would see a federal law. And I participated in a hearing at the Senate banking committee, again, November, October and in the before times. I'm talking about the same thing and here we are. Will we have a comprehensive, reasonable, privacy law in the United States before the end of this president's term. No, we will not. I can say that with just such faith and fidelity. (laughing) But what does that mean? And I think Katie Porter who I'm starting to just love, she's the Congresswoman who's famous for pulling on her white board and just saying, stop fudging the numbers. Let's talk about the numbers. There's about a, what she calls the 20% legislative flip phone a caucus. So there are 20% or more on both sides of the aisle of people in the US who are in the position of writing our laws. who are still on flip phones and aren't using smart phones and other kinds of technologies. There's a generation gap. And as much as I can kind of chuckle at that a little bit and wink, wink, nudge, nudge, isn't that cute. Because you know, my dad, as you know, is very very technical and he's a senior citizen. This is hard. I hope he doesn't see that but... (laughing) But then it's not old versus young. It's not let's get a whole new group and crop and start over again. What it is instead and this is, you know, as my constant tome sort of anti compliance. I'm not anti compliance. You got to put your underwear on before your pants or it's just really hard. (laughing) And I would love to see anyone who is capable of putting their underwater on afterwards. After you've made the decision of following the process. That is so basic. It comes down to, do you want the data that describes or is donated or observed about human beings. Whether it's performance of your employees. People you would love to entice onto your show to be a guest. People you'd like to listen and consume your content. People you want to meet. People you want to marry. Private data as Ann says, does the form the foundation of our freedom, but it also forms the foundation of our commerce. So that compliance, if you have stacked the deck proactively with an ethics that people can understand and agree with and have a choice about and feel like they have some integrity. Then you will start to see the acceleration factor of privacy being something that belongs on your balance sheet. What kind of data is high quality, high nutrition in the right context. And once you've got that, you're in good shape. >> I'm laughing at privacy on the balance sheet. We just had a big conversation about data on the balance sheets. It's a whole, that's a whole another topic. So we can go for days. I have Pages and pages of notes here. But unfortunately I know we've got some time restrictions. And so, and I want to give you the last word as you look forward. You've been in this for a while. You've been in it from the private side, as well as the government side. And you mentioned lots of other scary things, kind of on the horizon. Like the kick of surveillance creep, which there's all kinds of interesting stuff. You know, what advice do you give to citizens. What advice do you give to leaders in the public sector about framing the privacy conversation >> I always want to start by telling them don't frame privacy as a negative. It's not a negative. It's something that can build so much. If you're a business, you can gain a competitive advantage by strongly protecting your customer's privacy because then it will build such loyalty and you'll gain a competitive advantage. You make it work for you. As a government you want your citizens to have faith in the government. You want to encourage them to understand that as a government you respect their privacy. Privacy is highly contextual. It's only the individual who can make determinations relating to the disclosure of his or her personal information. So make sure you build that trust both as a government and as a business, private sector entity and gain from that. It's not a negative at all, make it work for you, make it work for your citizens, for your customers, make it a plus a win win that will give you the best returns. >> Isn't it nice when doing the right thing actually provides better business outcomes too. It's like diversity of opinion and women on boards. And kind of things- >> I love that. we cover these days. >> Well ladies, thank you very very much for your time. I know you've got a hard stop, so I'm going to cut you loose or else we would go for probably another hour and a half, but thank you so much for your time. Thank you for continuing to beat the drum out there and look forward to our next conversation. Hopefully in the not too distant future. >> My pleasure Jeff. Thank you so much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you too. >> All right She's Michelle. >> She's Ann. I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi everyone. Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE here in the CUBEs, Palo Alto studios during the COVID crisis. We're quarantine with our crew, but we got the remote interviews. Got two great guests here from Fortinet FortiGuard Labs, Derek Mankey, Chief Security Insights and global threat alliances at Fortinet FortiGuard Labs. And Aamir Lakhani who's the Lead Researcher for the FortiGuard Labs. You guys is great to see you. Derek, good to see you again, Aamir, good to meet you too. >> It's been a while and it happens so fast. >> It just seems was just the other day, Derek, we've done a couple of interviews in between a lot of flow coming out of Fortinet FortiGuard, a lot of action, certainly with COVID everyone's pulled back home, the bad actors taking advantage of the situation. The surface areas increased really is the perfect storm for security in terms of action, bad actors are at an all time high, new threats. Here's going on, take us through what you guys are doing. What's your team makeup look like? What are some of the roles and you guys are seeing on your team and how does that transcend to the market? >> Yeah, sure, absolutely. So you're right. I mean like I was saying earlier that is, this always happens fast and furious. We couldn't do this without a world class team at FortiGuard Labs. So we've grown our team now to over 235 globally. There's different rules within the team. If we look 20 years ago, the rules used to be just very pigeonholed into say antivirus analysis, right? Now we have to account for, when we're looking at threats, we have to look at that growing attack surface. We have to look at where are these threats coming from? How frequently are they hitting? What verticals are they hitting? What regions, what are the particular techniques, tactics, procedures? So we have threat. This is the world of threat intelligence, of course, contextualizing that information and it takes different skill sets on the backend. And a lot of people don't really realize the behind the scenes, what's happening. And there's a lot of magic happening, not only from what we talked about before in our last conversation from artificial intelligence and machine learning that we do at FortiGuard Labs and automation, but the people. And so today we want to focus on the people and talk about how on the backend we approached a particular threat, we're going to talk to the word ransom and ransomware, look at how we dissect threats, how correlate that, how we use tools in terms of threat hunting as an example, and then how we actually take that to that last mile and make it actionable so that customers are protected. I would share that information with keys, right, until sharing partners. But again, it comes down to the people. We never have enough people in the industry, there's a big shortage as we know, but it's a really key critical element. And we've been building these training programs for over a decade with them FortiGuard Labs. So, you know John, this to me is exactly why I always say, and I'm sure Aamir can share this too, that there's never a adult day in the office and all we hear that all the time. But I think today, all of you is really get an idea of why that is because it's very dynamic and on the backend, there's a lot of things that we're doing to get our hands dirty with this. >> You know the old expression startup plan Silicon Valley is if you're in the arena, that's where the action is. And it's different than sitting in the stands, watching the game. You guys are certainly in that arena and you got, we've talked and we cover your, the threat report that comes out frequently. But for the folks that aren't in the weeds on all the nuances of security, can you kind of give the 101 ransomware, what's going on? What's the state of the ransomware situation? Set the stage because that's still continues to be threat. I don't go a week, but I don't read a story about another ransomware. And then at least I hear they paid 10 million in Bitcoin or something like, I mean, this is real, that's a real ongoing threat. What is it? >> The (indistinct) quite a bit. But yeah. So I'll give sort of the 101 and then maybe we can pass it to Aamir who is on the front lines, dealing with this every day. You know if we look at the world of, I mean, first of all, the concept of ransom, obviously you have people that has gone extended way way before cybersecurity in the world of physical crime. So of course, the world's first ransom where a virus is actually called PC Cyborg. This is a 1989 around some payment that was demanded through P.O Box from the voters Panama city at the time, not too effective on floppiness, a very small audience, not a big attack surface. Didn't hear much about it for years. Really, it was around 2010 when we started to see ransomware becoming prolific. And what they did was, what cyber criminals did was shift on success from a fake antivirus software model, which was, popping up a whole bunch of, setting here, your computer's infected with 50 or 60 viruses, PaaS will give you an antivirus solution, which was of course fake. People started catching on, the giggles out people caught on to that. So they, weren't making a lot of money selling this fraudulent software, enter ransomware. And this is where ransomware, it really started to take hold because it wasn't optional to pay for this software. It was mandatory almost for a lot of people because they were losing their data. They couldn't reverse engineer that the encryption, couldn't decrypt it, but any universal tool. Ransomware today is very rigid. We just released our threat report for the first half of 2020. And we saw, we've seen things like master boot record, MVR, ransomware. This is persistent. It sits before your operating system, when you boot up your computer. So it's hard to get rid of it. Very strong public private key cryptography. So each victim is effective with the direct key, as an example, the list goes on and I'll save that for the demo today, but that's basically, it's just very, it's prolific. We're seeing shuts not only just ransomware attacks for data, we're now starting to see ransom for extortion, for targeted around some cases that are going after critical business. Essentially it's like a DoS holding revenue streams go ransom too. So the ransom demands are getting higher because of this as well. So it's complicated. >> Was mentioning Aamir, why don't you weigh in, I mean, 10 million is a lot. And we reported earlier in this month. Garmin was the company that was hacked, IT got completely locked down. They pay 10 million, Garmin makes all those devices. And as we know, this is impact and that's real numbers. I mean, it's not other little ones, but for the most part, it's nuance, it's a pain in the butt to full on business disruption and extortion. Can you explain how it all works before we go to the demo? >> You know, you're absolutely right. It is a big number and a lot of organizations are willing to pay that number, to get their data back. Essentially their organization and their business is at a complete standstill when they don't pay, all their files are inaccessible to them. Ransomware in general, what it does end up from a very basic overview is it basically makes your files not available to you. They're encrypted. They have essentially a passcode on them that you have to have the correct passcode to decode them. A lot of times that's in a form of a program or actually a physical password you have to type in, but you don't get that access to get your files back unless you pay the ransom. A lot of corporations these days, they are not only paying the ransom. They're actually negotiating with the criminals as well. They're trying to say, "Oh, you want 10 million? "How about 4 million?" Sometimes that goes on as well. But it's something that organizations know that if they didn't have the proper backups and the hackers are getting smart, they're trying to go after the backups as well. They're trying to go after your duplicated files. So sometimes you don't have a choice in organizations. Will pay the ransom. >> And it's, they're smart, there's a business. They know the probability of buy versus build or pay versus rebuild. So they kind of know where to attack. They know that the tactics and it's vulnerable. It's not like just some kitty script thing going on. This is real sophisticated stuff it's highly targeted. Can you talk about some use cases there and what goes on with that kind of a attack? >> Absolutely. The cyber criminals are doing reconnaissance and trying to find out as much as they can about their victims. And what happens is they're trying to make sure that they can motivate their victims in the fastest way possible to pay the ransom as well. So there's a lot of attacks going on. We usually, what we're finding now is ransomware is sometimes the last stage of an attack. So an attacker may go into an organization. They may already be taking data out of that organization. They may be stealing customer data, PII, which is personal identifiable information, such as social security numbers, or driver's licenses, or credit card information. Once they've done their entire tap. Once they've gone everything, they can. A lot of times their end stage, their last attack is ransomware. And they encrypt all the files on the system and try and motivate the victim to pay as fast as possible and as much as possible as well. >> I was talking to my buddy of the day. It's like casing the joint there, stay, check it out. They do their recon, reconnaissance. They go in identify what's the best move to make, how to extract the most out of the victim in this case, the target. And it really is, I mean, it's just to go on a tangent, why don't we have the right to bear our own arms? Why can't we fight back? I mean, at the end of the day, Derek, this is like, who's protecting me? I mean, what to protect my, build my own arms, or does the government help us? I mean, at some point I got a right to bear my own arms here. I mean, this is the whole security paradigm. >> Yeah. So, I mean, there's a couple of things. So first of all, this is exactly why we do a lot of, I was mentioning the skill shortage in cyber cybersecurity professionals as an example. This is why we do a lot of the heavy lifting on the backend. Obviously from a defensive standpoint, you obviously have the red team, blue team aspect. How do you first, there's what is to fight back by being defensive as well, too. And also by, in the world of threat intelligence, one of the ways that we're fighting back is not necessarily by going and hacking the bad guys because that's illegal jurisdictions. But how we can actually find out who these people are, hit them where it hurts, freeze assets, go after money laundering networks. If you follow the cash transactions where it's happening, this is where we actually work with key law enforcement partners, such as Interpol as an example, this is the world of threat intelligence. This is why we're doing a lot of that intelligence work on the backend. So there's other ways to actually go on the offense without necessarily weaponizing it per se, right? Like using, bearing your own arms as you said, there there's different forms that people may not be aware of with that. And that actually gets into the world of, if you see attacks happening on your system, how you can use the security tools and collaborate with threat intelligence. >> I think that's the key. I think the key is these new sharing technologies around collective intelligence is going to be a great way to kind of have more of an offensive collective strike. But I think fortifying, the defense is critical. I mean, that's, there's no other way to do that. >> Absolutely, I mean, we say this almost every week, but it's in simplicity. Our goal is always to make it more expensive for the cybercriminal to operate. And there's many ways to do that, right? You can be a pain to them by having a very rigid, hardened defense. That means if it's too much effort on their end, I mean, they have ROIs and in their sense, right? It's too much effort on there and they're going to go knocking somewhere else. There's also, as I said, things like disruption, so ripping infrastructure offline that cripples them, whack-a-mole, they're going to set up somewhere else. But then also going after people themselves, again, the cash networks, these sorts of things. So it's sort of a holistic approach between- >> It's an arms race, better AI, better cloud scale always helps. You know, it's a ratchet game. Aamir, I want to get into this video. It's a ransomware four minute video. I'd like you to take us through as you the Lead Researcher, take us through this video and explain what we're looking at. Let's roll the video. >> All right. Sure. So what we have here is we have the victims that's top over here. We have a couple of things on this victim's desktop. We have a batch file, which is essentially going to run the ransomware. We have the payload, which is the code behind the ransomware. And then we have files in this folder. And this is where you would typically find user files and a real world case. This would be like Microsoft or Microsoft word documents, or your PowerPoint presentations, or we're here we just have a couple of text files that we've set up. We're going to go ahead and run the ransomware. And sometimes attackers, what they do is they disguise this. Like they make it look like an important word document. They make it look like something else. But once you run the ransomware, you usually get a ransom message. And in this case, a ransom message says, your files are encrypted. Please pay this money to this Bitcoin address. That obviously is not a real Bitcoin address. I usually they look a little more complicated, but this is our fake Bitcoin address. But you'll see that the files now are encrypted. You cannot access them. They've been changed. And unless you pay the ransom, you don't get the files. Now, as researchers, we see files like this all the time. We see ransomware all the time. So we use a variety of tools, internal tools, custom tools, as well as open source tools. And what you're seeing here is an open source tool. It's called the Cuckoo Sandbox, and it shows us the behavior of the ransomware. What exactly is ransomware doing. In this case, you can see just clicking on that file, launched a couple of different things that launched basically a command executable, a power shell. They launched our windows shell. And then at, then add things on the file. It would basically, you had registry keys, it had on network connections. It changed the disk. So that's kind of gives us a behind the scenes, look at all the processes that's happening on the ransomware. And just that one file itself, like I said, does multiple different things. Now what we want to do as a researchers, we want to categorize this ransomware into families. We want to try and determine the actors behind that. So we dump everything we know in a ransomware in the central databases. And then we mine these databases. What we're doing here is we're actually using another tool called Maldito and use custom tools as well as commercial and open source tools. But this is a open source and commercial tool. But what we're doing is we're basically taking the ransomware and we're asking Maldito to look through our database and say like, do you see any like files? Or do you see any types of incidences that have similar characteristics? Because what we want to do is we want to see the relationship between this one ransomware and anything else we may have in our system, because that helps us identify maybe where the ransomware is connecting to, where it's going to other processes that I may be doing. In this case, we can see multiple IP addresses that are connected to it. So we can possibly see multiple infections. We can block different external websites that we can identify a command and control system. We can categorize this to a family, and sometimes we can even categorize this to a threat actor as claimed responsibility for it. So it's essentially visualizing all the connections and the relationship between one file and everything else we have in our database. And this example, of course, I'd put this in multiple ways. We can save these as reports, as PDF type reports or usually HTML or other searchable data that we have back in our systems. And then the cool thing about this is this is available to all our products, all our researchers, all our specialty teams. So when we're researching botnets, when we're researching file-based attacks, when we're researching IP reputation, we have a lot of different IOC or indicators of compromise that we can correlate where attacks go through and maybe even detect new types of attacks as well. >> So the bottom line is you got the tools using combination of open source and commercial products to look at the patterns of all ransomware across your observation space. Is that right? >> Exactly. I showed you like a very simple demo. It's not only open source and commercial, but a lot of it is our own custom developed products as well. And when we find something that works, that logic, that technique, we make sure it's built into our own products as well. So our own customers have the ability to detect the same type of threats that we're detecting as well. At FortiGuard Labs, the intelligence that we acquire, that product, that product of intelligence it's consumed directly by our prospects. >> So take me through what what's actually going on, what it means for the customer. So FortiGuard Labs, you're looking at all the ransomware, you seeing the patterns, are you guys proactively looking? Is it, you guys are researching, you look at something pops in the radar. I mean, take us through what goes on and then how does that translate into a customer notification or impact? >> So, yeah, John, if you look at a typical life cycle of these attacks, there's always proactive and reactive. That's just the way it is in the industry, right? So of course we try to be (indistinct) as we look for some of the solutions we talked about before, and if you look at an incoming threat, first of all, you need visibility. You can't protect or analyze anything that you can see. So you got to get your hands on visibility. We call these IOC indicators of compromise. So this is usually something like an actual executable file, like the virus or the malware itself. It could be other things that are related to it, like websites that could be hosting the malware as an example. So once we have that SEED, we call it a SEED. We can do threat hunting from there. So we can analyze that, right? If we have to, it's a piece of malware or a botnet, we can do analysis on that and discover more malicious things that this is doing. Then we go investigate those malicious things. And we really, it's similar to the world of CSI, right? These different dots that they're connecting, we're doing that at hyper-scale. And we use that through these tools that Aamir was talking about. So it's really a lifecycle of getting the malware incoming, seeing it first, analyzing it, and then doing action on that. So it's sort of a three step process. And the action comes down to what Aamir was saying, waterfall and that to our customers, so that they're protected. But then in tandem with that, we're also going further and I'm sharing it if applicable to say law enforcement partners, other threat Intel sharing partners too. And it's not just humans doing that. So the proactive piece, again, this is where it comes to artificial intelligence, machine learning. There's a lot of cases where we're automatically doing that analysis without humans. So we have AI systems that are analyzing and actually creating protection on its own too. So it's quite interesting that way. >> It say's at the end of the day, you want to protect your customers. And so this renders out, if I'm a Fortinet customer across the portfolio, the goal here is protect them from ransomware, right? That's the end game. >> Yeah. And that's a very important thing. When you start talking to these big dollar amounts that were talking earlier, it comes to the damages that are done from that- >> Yeah, I mean, not only is it good insurance, it's just good to have that fortification. So Derek, I going to ask you about the term the last mile, because, we were, before we came on camera, I'm a band with junkie always want more bandwidth. So the last mile, it used to be a term for last mile to the home where there was telephone lines. Now it's fiber and wifi, but what does that mean to you guys in security? Does that mean something specific? >> Yeah, absolutely. The easiest way to describe that is actionable. So one of the challenges in the industry is we live in a very noisy industry when it comes to cybersecurity. What I mean by that is that because of that growing attacks for FIS and you have these different attack factors, you have attacks not only coming in from email, but websites from DoS attacks, there's a lot of volume that's just going to continue to grow is the world that 5G and OT. So what ends up happening is when you look at a lot of security operations centers for customers, as an example, there are, it's very noisy. It's you can guarantee almost every day, you're going to see some sort of probe, some sort of attack activity that's happening. And so what that means is you get a lot of protection events, a lot of logs. And when you have this worldwide shortage of security professionals, you don't have enough people to process those logs and actually start to say, "Hey, this looks like an attack." I'm going to go investigate it and block it. So this is where the last mile comes in, because a lot of the times that, these logs, they light up like Christmas. And I mean, there's a lot of events that are happening. How do you prioritize that? How do you automatically add action? Because the reality is if it's just humans doing it, that last mile is often going back to your bandwidth terms. There's too much latency. So how do you reduce that latency? That's where the automation, the AI machine learning comes in to solve that last mile problem to automatically add that protection. It's especially important 'cause you have to be quicker than the attacker. It's an arms race, like you said earlier. >> I think what you guys do with FortiGuard Labs is super important, not only for the industry, but for society at large, as you have kind of all this, shadow, cloak and dagger kind of attack systems, whether it's national security international, or just for, mafias and racketeering, and the bad guys. Can you guys take a minute and explain the role of FortiGuards specifically and why you guys exist? I mean, obviously there's a commercial reason you built on the Fortinet that trickles down into the products. That's all good for the customers, I get that. But there's more at the FortiGuards. And just that, could you guys talk about this trend and the security business, because it's very clear that there's a collective sharing culture developing rapidly for societal benefit. Can you take a minute to explain that? >> Yeah, sure. I'll give you my thoughts, Aamir will add some to that too. So, from my point of view, I mean, there's various functions. So we've just talked about that last mile problem. That's the commercial aspect. We created a through FortiGuard Labs, FortiGuard services that are dynamic and updated to security products because you need intelligence products to be able to protect against intelligent attacks. That's just a defense again, going back to, how can we take that further? I mean, we're not law enforcement ourselves. We know a lot about the bad guys and the actors because of the intelligence work that we do, but we can't go in and prosecute. We can share knowledge and we can train prosecutors, right? This is a big challenge in the industry. A lot of prosecutors don't know how to take cybersecurity courses to court. And because of that, a lot of these cyber criminals reign free, and that's been a big challenge in the industry. So this has been close my heart over 10 years, I've been building a lot of these key relationships between private public sector, as an example, but also private sector, things like Cyber Threat Alliance. We're a founding member of the Cyber Threat Alliance. We have over 28 members in that Alliance, and it's about sharing intelligence to level that playing field because attackers roam freely. What I mean by that is there's no jurisdictions for them. Cyber crime has no borders. They can do a million things wrong and they don't care. We do a million things right, one thing wrong and it's a challenge. So there's this big collaboration. That's a big part of FortiGuard. Why exists too, as to make the industry better, to work on protocols and automation and really fight this together while remaining competitors. I mean, we have competitors out there, of course. And so it comes down to that last mile problems on is like, we can share intelligence within the industry, but it's only intelligence is just intelligence. How do you make it useful and actionable? That's where it comes down to technology integration. >> Aamir, what's your take on this societal benefit? Because, I would say instance, the Sony hack years ago that, when you have nation States, if they put troops on our soil, the government would respond, but yet virtually they're here and the private sector has to fend for themselves. There's no support. So I think this private public partnership thing is very relevant, I think is ground zero of the future build out of policy because we pay for freedom. Why don't we have cyber freedom if we're going to run a business, where is our help from the government? We pay taxes. So again, if a military showed up, you're not going to see companies fighting the foreign enemy, right? So again, this is a whole new changeover. What's your thought? >> It really is. You have to remember that cyber attacks puts everyone on an even playing field, right? I mean, now don't have to have a country that has invested a lot in weapons development or nuclear weapons or anything like that. Anyone can basically come up to speed on cyber weapons as long as an internet connection. So it evens the playing field, which makes it dangerous, I guess, for our enemies. But absolutely I think a lot of us, from a personal standpoint, a lot of us have seen research does I've seen organizations fail through cyber attacks. We've seen the frustration, we've seen, like besides organization, we've seen people like, just like grandma's lose their pictures of their other loved ones because they kind of, they've been attacked by ransomware. I think we take it very personally when people like innocent people get attacked and we make it our mission to make sure we can do everything we can to protect them. But I will add that at least here in the U.S. the federal government actually has a lot of partnerships and a lot of programs to help organizations with cyber attacks. The US-CERT is always continuously updating, organizations about the latest attacks and regard is another organization run by the FBI and a lot of companies like Fortinet. And even a lot of other security companies participate in these organizations. So everyone can come up to speed and everyone can share information. So we all have a fighting chance. >> It's a whole new wave of paradigm. You guys are on the cutting edge. Derek always great to see you, Aamir great to meet you remotely, looking forward to meeting in person when the world comes back to normal as usual. Thanks for the great insights. Appreciate it. >> Pleasure as always. >> Okay. Keep conversation here. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. Great insightful conversation around security ransomware with a great demo. Check it out from Derek and Aamir from FortiGuard Labs. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.

>>From the cube studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a cute conversation. >>Everyone. Welcome to the cube conversation here from our Palo Alto studios. I'm John furrier, host of the cube. We're here with our remote crew, getting all the interviews, getting all the stories that matter during this time were all sheltering in place during the COVID crisis. We've got a great returning guest, John Madison, EVP of products and chief marketing officer. Fordanet John. Great to see you, uh, looking good with the home studio. They're getting used to it. Yeah, indeed. Good to be here again, John. Thanks for coming. I really appreciate it. We're hearing a lot about sassy, which has a secure access network adjuncts, zero trust network access. Uh, what does that all mean now these days? What does this sassy? Well, there's definitely a lot of hype around the word sassy, which is the security of the age. Uh, for us actually it confirms a strategy that we've had since the beginning of the company. >>And two important concepts. One is, uh, the coming together of, uh, networking and security. We could refer to it as security driven networking, and we've been doing it using ACX and appliances for a long time. Uh, we're now going to expand it to a cloud as well as that's one concept, again, bringing together networking and security or converging them in a way. And then the second concept is more around a platform approach. So if you look at the definition of sassy, it includes, it includes web gateway as a service you a trust Caz B, a wife, et cetera. And so bringing those together in a platform approach, we refer to it as the fabric. So we're actually really happy about those two concepts coming together. Maybe the name itself could be, could be different, but definitely the concepts and the technologies play really well to our strategy. >>Yeah, it's sassy. S a S E not two ways, not like SAS softwares of service. Wait for one noses cloud. Yeah. I tried using the full name and I've reverted back to sassy again. So short and sassy, keep it short and sweet. Um, okay, well this is a super important relevant topic for multiple reasons. One is COVID is kind of accelerated the future for everybody. And you know, we've been kind of riffing on Twitter and throughout the industry I've been calling it the big IOT, uh, experiment because the unforecasted disruption of COVID is forced everyone to work at home. So the notion of work changes workplace is now home workforce, the people, how their interaction with the networks, workloads, workflows, all changing new expectations, new experiences. This is the real deal. And the edge is where the action is. That's the big, new obvious architectural highlight here. >>Yeah, so we talked last time. I think it would just be getting this work from home, uh, element, but, um, we're still here. And I think what it says is that what is forced is that, uh, enterprises and customers need to look at their edges and they're increasing. So we always, the one edge was a new one over the last two years. As we introduced us the, when they had a data center edge, they had an endpoint edge and now you have a home edge. And so you've got to apply security as a cloud edge as well. You've got to apply security to these edges. And the key is the flexibility to apply the security you want and you need against this agent. And so we're seeing some customers right now, look at setting up mini enterprise networks to protect that home age again, in that, in the homes of their executives or developers. >>And we reported with the news. You guys had a couple of months ago around just as such been a feeding frenzy for hackers and bad actors to go after the home environment. Um, as well as the it guys who are working from home, you have the cloud consumption's shifted as well. You're seeing the cloud players doing extremely well because now you have more cloud, you have more vulnerabilities at the edge with the home. This is changing completely increasing the attacks. >>Yeah. The tack factors, you know, predominantly, still actually, you know, a lot of fishing, but then if you're on the network, that attack factor is very important. So for us, and, you know, we did an acquisition last week of opaque networks because that gave us an additional consumption model and different additional form factor. So if somebody going from the home straight into the cloud, or the pairing off a branching off an SD Wang connection straight into the cloud, we can now apply that cloud edge security throughout our sassy capabilities. And so again, the ability to have security at all, these edges has become very important going forward. So for us now we've got appliances, we've got virtual machines, we've got cloud delivery, and this is becoming very important to customers. I'm not saying, and customers are not saying they're going to go to just cloud only going forward. They're going to be hybrid. And so having those options is very important. >>You mentioned opaque networks, we reported that acquisition. Congratulations. What does that mean for Fordanet and where does that technology fit? And you mentioned software. Can you just take a minute to explain the acquisition impact Affordanet and where does the tech fit? >>Well, as I said, we've been driving a lot of this conversion, sassy conversions through our appliances. Um, but it's sometimes makes sense to put that security closer to the cloud during points or wherever. And so opaque, we really liked their model of building out these hyper hearing stations and making sure they got high-speed security there as well as edges. And so, um, we bring, we're going to bring that inside our environment, uh, update it to include some of our technology, uh, but it gives us now great flexibility, uh, of applying that security at the SD wan edge, the data center agent now without edge or longer-term roadmaps will integrate orchestration capabilities. It also includes a zero trust network access capability as well. So really when we looked at our, uh, of sassy framework, uh, we had most of the things in place. This now adds firewall as a service as well as zero trust network access, giving us the most complete sassy framework in the marketplace. >>What is the security component of the work at home? You mentioned earlier, there's more networks and companies are looking to kind of up level the capabilities. Can you give an example and take us through what that like and what companies are thinking about, because it's not just, here's some extra money for your home bandwidth, your people are working there. It's like, it's gotta be industrial strength edge. Now it's not just, um, you know, temporary and their kids are home too. So you got they're gaming, they're watching Netflix, people zooming in and doing WebExes all day long. >>Yeah, it can be as simple as putting a zero trust network access, you know, an agent on there and doing some security locally, and then going back through a proxy in a, we believe actually that it's, it can be even better than that. That can apply many enterprise security in your house through a next gen firewall, give high availability through SD wan, uh, then, you know, expand out their secure access and switching and end points. And we can do that today. I think what's going to be key going forward is as you're dealing as it, uh, teams have to deal with more of a consumer approach remotely in the homes, we're gonna have to simplify the way things get set up, such that you can easily separate out, maybe home usage from corporate enterprise users. So that will be something we'll be working on over the next 18 months. >>I mean, just the provisioning, the hardware, okay, here you go. Plug it in it. Should it be plug and play? And this is kind of back to the future of where SAS is going. I mean, the old days was plug and play was the technology. Now you've hit that concept. It has to be auto configured. You have to provision pretty quickly. What's the future of sassy in your mind. >>Yeah. And so, you know, if you think about, you know, coming back to the home usage, then people have dumbed down those routers and the security is very simplistic. So we, people can just plug and play. If you, it needs to be a bit more sophisticated. Uh, you're going to need to put some tools in place. We believe longterm that the sassy model, once you've got the platforms in place, once you've got SD wan in place, your Cosby or your sassy zero trust and longterm, you're going to need an orchestration system. That's more AI driven. So we've done a lot of work on AI around security and making sure we can see things very quickly. Um, but the longterm goal, I think will be around AI ops, AI network ops, uh, where the system and the big data systems are looking across your network, across these different components to see where there may be an issue. Maybe there's a certain length has gone down across a certain ISP. We need to bring that back up. Maybe there's a certain cure or as to an application in the cloud somewhere. So we need to change the OnRamp. Uh, so once everything's in place and you have that console and policy engine that can look across everything, and then we need to get smarter by looking at the data and the logs, et cetera, and applying some of that AI technology. >>You know, John, we've been following Fordanet as you know, for many, many years and watching the evolution of you guys as a company. And also as the industry, the new waves are coming in. Um, a lot of the stuff you're doing with the fabric and now the secure driven networking has been kind of on the playbook. So I want to get your thoughts before we get into those topics and define them and kind of unpack them. But generally customers are looking at, um, a slew of vendors out there and you have 10 of two approaches. You have a platform, and then you have the we're an application or fully full stack or SAS or something. And this there's trade offs between the two. And how should customers understand the difference? Because there's different value propositions for each platforms, more enabling out of the box, SAS or point solution can solve a particular thing, but it may not have that breadth. How should customers think about a platform approach or fabric and how should they think about the value and how to engage with that longterm? >>Yeah, I'm definitely seeing more customers look towards a platform going forward. They just can't manage all the different point solutions and you don't have to train an individual in that product. You have to have a separate management console, you have to integrate it. And so more and more I'm finding customers wanting to converge, which is the basis of sassy consolidate applications onto a platform of security applications. What's important over that platform is that the consumption model is flexible enough to be an appliance, to be a virtual machine and to be cloud delivery does as a customer's networks move and their orchestration systems move into different, more cloud, or they've got their IP enabling their factories, for example, then they need that security to be flexible. So yes, you need to be a platform as the way forward. Um, but two things. One is you need a flexible consumption model for it. You know, clients, virtual machine and cloud. And also that platform needs to be very open. It needs to have connectors into the main orchestration systems that needs to allow people to build API and automation. So, uh, yes, you, you need a platform, but it needs to be open and it needs to be flexible. >>Great, great insight there. And that's exactly what the marketing, especially with cloud the kind of scale, second follow up question to that is how do you tell the difference between a tool camouflage is a platform. So I have a tool I want to sell you a tool, but no, it's a platform. So a lot of people are peddling tools and saying their platforms. How do you know the difference? >>Well, to me, a platform that has much greater scope across the attack surface festival, they attack factors whether that be email or application the network, the end point. So platforms not just of a specific attack back to go across the complete surface. And then also a platform is Wednesday organically built, allows those products to communicate. So then you can build automation across it. It's very hard to build automation across two or three different vendors. They have different scripts. So been able to build that automation. And then of course, on top of that, to have a single view, single visibility capability, as well as longterm applied that AI ops across it. So platform is very, very different from the, some of the tools I've seen in the marketplace. >>I want to get to your reaction to a comment that your CEO said about security driven, networking, and underscores what we've been saying for years, blah, blah, blah. He goes on in this era of hyperconnectivity and expanding networks with the network edge stretching across the entire digital infrastructure, um, networking and security have to be kind of be their, their convergence. You mentioned describe how you view hyper-connectivity and expanding networks and how the edge stretches across the digital infrastructure. What's what does that look like? Can you share your vision of that? >>Well, when you think about networking, if you go back 20 years, when you have these 10 megabit per second connections, learning, networking, and routing and switching, they haven't really changed that much over the last eight years, 20 years, they've just got a lot faster, gone to now to 400. You give us a second, but the basic functionality is the same. And so it's allowed them to go a lot faster. Um, security is very different, even though it started off with firewalling than VPN, and then next gen firewall, SSL inspection, all these functionalities IPS have been added, making a lot harder for it to keep up in the network. And so one of the fundamental principles of security and networking is bringing these two things together, but accelerating them either using a six and now cloud through our acquisition, uh, to allow those to run in a converged format. >>And that's very important because as I said, there's now more, you can look at it two ways. You can say the perimeter has expanded because it used to be a very narrow perimeter. The data center across these areas, or at the edges have formed as well. There's new edges sitting at the OT environment, sitting at the wan edge, sitting at the home mattress. I talked about seeing the cloud edge. And so the ability to apply that security in very high performance, very high quality security, not just a small sampling of security, a full enterprise stack, but those edges is going to be critical going forward. And the flexibility to apply in different ways is going to be very important. >>I think the convergence piece is totally relevant and honestly it consolidating into a platform is very key point there. Um, while I got you here, I would just like you I'd like you to define what is security driven networking and what does it mean to be security driven? So define security, driven, networking, and give an example of what it means. >>Yeah. And so I think it's, I think the one edge was one of the best examples of it. I mean, actually go before that next gen Fila was where you bought firewalling and then content inspection to go there. But I think the latest one is definitely the one edge or secure SD land where you had a networking function, which was to get the users to the right applications. And so they got this application now steering that goes out through there. Well, you also want to apply security to that because security into the wham, you've also got to protect the land. And so the ability to run a security stack there, whether it be IDs, right, patient control is very important. So getting all those networking functions, working at high speed, getting all the security functions, working at high speed, uh, is that it's the kind of the Genesis of security driven networking, and you can apply it there. We can also apply it in other places at the age, in the cloud. Now the home, uh, it's a very, very important concept, uh, to be able to run networking and security together. But high speed, >>Everyone has their own kind of weird definition of sassy, depending on when you're building your own or different analyst firms. Uh, I noticed you guys have a different take on this. Even Gartner has a different view on this. How do you guys diff differ from that, that definition and what should people be aware of when they hear that? What is the right definition? >>Yeah. You know, it's unfortunate. I mean, I think Ghana does some good work there and that they define it and I've come up with sassy, but this is like acronym soup. And, you know, I want a bit of next gen firewall on my sassy. It's just, it's just so many different terms. It confuses the customer. Then what makes it more confusing is that vendors look at their portfolio and go, Oh, sassy is a hot topic. I've got a sassy as well. And really, it should be very clear what the definition from Gardner is. It is bringing together security and networking. Now their definition is that they, uh, you should do that in the cloud, which we agree with as well, but it can only be in the cloud. The reason it's in the cloud is because not many people have got the ability to run on an appliance very fast. >>So we believe our different stairs that you should be able to run it on an appliance virtual machine in cloud. And then the second kind of differences that they've defined the components of Sassies being Estee, wagon, Cosby, firewalls, a service zero trust. We also think that the land age is very important. So we would add into that definition, that secure access of wifi and Ethan at switching as well. And so we try and point out, you know, the gun definition and we also point out where we differ and I think that's fair to the customer can make a good decision. >>I think it is fair. And I think one of the things I've been saying for years, and I love garden, I love the guys over there and gals. I just don't think that their business model is real time as much, but they ended up kind of getting it right down the road. But you brought up a good point. And again, I've been saying this for years, cloud changes Gartner's model because there's, if you have quadrants, it implies silos and implies categories. And one of the best things about cloud is it does horizontally scale. So some of the best vendors actually have multiple capabilities that might fall on different quadrants that may or may not be judged on a criteria that meets what cloud's doing. So, yeah, for instance, Asics, you mentioned right. That's in there too. You get cloud and ACX is that where they've got two different categories? You add the edge in there. If you do all three, really great as an integrated, converged and consolidated platform, you're technically awesome, but you might not fit in the quadrant. >>Yes. That's a really good point. I have this conversation with them all the time in that traditionally enterprises have a networking teams and security teams, and they've been in silos or I've had a networking team that just does switching or just this routing, just this SD wan. And I have a security team that does web gateway, and then they like to separate them all into different components. When you look inside those Nike quadrants, they're all different, even at the same vendor, the different products. And what we like to do is bring it all together. You a single operating system, a single appliance or cloud virtual machine. Sometimes it's not quite, it doesn't quite fit the model, but in the end, you're trying to do the same thing. Know, and COVID-19 >>One of the real realities that everyone's dealing with is it does expose everything and an expose. And again, it's been a disruption unforecasted, but it's not like an outage or a flood or a hurricane. If it happened and it's happening, it really puts the pressure on looking at the network. It's looking at how you can have continuous operations. How are you working with your people and workloads, workforces apps. You got to have it all there. And if you're not digitally enabled, you're going to be on the wrong side of history. This is what companies are facing every day. And they've got to come back and double down on the right project. So every CXO I talk about, that's the number one challenge I need to come out of the pandemic with a growth strategy and an architecture. That's going to allow me to take advantage of the new realities. Hey, it's really good for people to work at home. That's cool. Some people are going to continue to do that. Maybe that's normal. Maybe that's a new tactic >>And it's going to vary by industry as well. So if I'm a retail outlet, I absolutely need it 100% of the time, but those retail outlets cause people are ordering online and then they're driving up. And so it has changed the dynamics. It's for me working at home, I have to be on all the time. And so the ability to do really good, high quality networking, high availability, high IQ of as, with this integrated security across the different edges is super critical. >>I was talking with a network friend of mine. Again, we were having a few zoom cocktails and do a little social networking online. And we were like, and we've, and we've mentioned it before in the queue, but we keep coming back to the land is the new land. And meaning that it's in the old days, land was everything, everything, the local area network, and you were inside the data center, everything was great on premises. When is the new land? So if you think about it that way you go, okay, when edge I got a, now Atlanta at home, you got to SD wan and your house, of course you worked for Fournette. So it's a little bit beneficial for you, your, your, your, your geek there, but this is the new normal where it's all one network. It's not just a land link, it's a system. Can you react to that? What's your take on that? When is the new land kind of ref, >>First of all, it can't be too picky. He goes on the CMO as well. So there's no talk about the geekiness. Um, but, um, it's just, it just makes as a skip saying, it's, it's, it's making sure that wherever you may be, uh, you know, you're doing less traveling these days, but that may come back at some point or where they are at a branch office or a campus environment or wherever applications, and then moving around in different clouds, in different areas, in terms of consumption of workloads, um, wherever that's happening, you gotta be able to be flexible and applying that security to the different edges, land edge, one edge home edge data center edge. And so the ability to do that, uh, while providing high speed and connectivity, uh, is very important. And then again, as you go forward and you implement that platform approach. So not just the point product now, three or four products working together, uh, being able to apply that policy orchestration and AI ops is going to make sure that they get that user in the end. It's all about the user experience. Do I have a high quality of experience, whatever application I'm using? That's the key measurement in the end? >>You know, one observation I would have, if you look back at the whole virtualization trend, going back to the early days of VMware, that kind of enabled Amazon and kind of having a large scale kind of infrastructure, hyperconvergence really kind of collapsed everything together. And now you seeing things with Amazon, like outposts, you seeing, you know, these non premises devices, which is basically one cloud operations kind of highlights what you're saying here. And I want to get your thoughts on this because the combination of Asics with cloud, it's not a bug, it's a feature for you guys. That's a value proposition and it's kind of consistent with some of the big players like AWS. When you look at what they're doing and apprenticeships, for instance, what they're putting in the servers, having that combination of horsepower Asex with cloud is a guiding principle of the future architecture. Can you share your thoughts was also, you guys are, are announcing that and have that feature. >>Yeah, well, w another reason why I like the opaque acquisition as they were their major appearing pubs into the different cloud service providers that were using hardware and that hardware, uh, we, we can run hardware and with our Asics almost 50, a hundred times faster than equipment CPU. So I've got a firewall application I've gone on appliance. There, I may need a hundred virtual machines and, and CPU they're running the same thing. So again, we're coming back to our definition of security driven, networking in our minds. It can be basic, it can be virtual machine and it can be cloud. Now, imagine if we can take the best benefits of basic and combine that with cloud, uh, that's a great model going forward again, given that flexibility. So when people think cloud something has to run on something, it doesn't run in fresh air. So, you know, the big cloud vendors are putting in some Asex to accelerate some of the AI stuff, and we're going to use the same thing in some of our major, what we call 40 sassy. You know, our naming methodology is 40, whatever it does or going forward to provide us that performance and high availability now. Yeah. So you're always going to need some flexibility of virtual machines in certain areas, but we think the combination of both, it gives us a great advantage. Yeah. >>And there's definitely evidence that, I mean, there's a, there's kind of two schools of thought on hardware. Are you a box mover, you know, commodity general purpose, or are you using the hardware and a system architecture, acceleration has been a huge advantage, whether I've seen companies doing accelerated Kubernetes processing, you know, for clusters and some, you know, see GPS are out there. It's, it's, it's how you use the hardware. Yeah. That's the, really the key it's and again, back to the architecture. So, okay. So wrapping up, if you, if you believe that, and you look at the fabric that you guys are having out there, and as it evolves, what's the, what's the next level for 400. How do you see this going forward? You've got security driven networking, and you got the fabric. What's next? What are you guys working on the product side? >>I know you're public, you can't reveal any future earnings, but give us a taste of kind of the direction on the roadmap. I think, you know, we've got now all the, all the kind of component that underlying components of the platform in terms of the ability to apply appliances, deliver it by appliances or virtual machine or cloud. Um, we've got a very broad portfolio from endpoint, uh, all the way into, to the cloud and the networks, all those things that are in place. Obviously you always need some features here and there as you go forward and nest it when and next gen firewall, et cetera. Um, but I think the longterm, I think a goal for his nine is to, again, to apply a bit more intelligence, uh, both from a security perspective and from a network perspective, such that we can predict things, we can automatically change things. >>We can build automation and react to things much more quickly. So I think the building blocks are in place. Now. I think it's the ability to provide a bit more smarts across it, uh, which of course takes big data and very specific application programming. And I think, uh, definitely our customers are asking us about that. And we look very closely with our customers to build out that, to make sure it meets their needs going forward while it's great to see the platform continue to grow and, and fill in a holistic view of the, of the landscape from edge to throughout the enterprise. So a great strategy and thanks for the update, John Madison, the VP of product and CMR for that. John. Great to have you on. Thanks for coming on extra. Okay. This is the cube conversation here in Palo Alto studios. I'm Chad for a year hosting the cube. Thanks for watching.

>> Narrator: 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 studio, it's still 2020, we're still gettin' through the COVID crisis and we're still reaching out to our community really to talk to leaders who have lead through difficult times, led through transitions, and really go out to the experts and get some advice from people who have been around the block a few times, and I'm really, really excited to have one of my all time favorite business executives joining us, I haven't talked to him in years and years and almost decades, David Pottruck is joining us, he is formerly the CEO of Schwab, how he kind of made his name, now he's an author, he's teaching at the Wharton School, he's a New York Times best selling author and he's also the chairman of Red Eagle Ventures, David, great to see you. >> Thanks, Jeff, it's good to be with you today. >> Absolutely, so before we get in, just to check in, how are you doing, how are you gettin' through 2020, I can't believe we're already on the backside of this crazy year. >> Well, it's been a pretty challenging year as you know, and we've seen companies learn to operate in a virtual world. Zoom has been one of the huge beneficiaries, but technology companies in general, the whole FAANG group of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and such, they've all benefited from people getting more virtual, and one of the non profits I'm involved with sends out videos to schools on social and emotional learning and that's seen a big uptick. So, the world is changing, and changing in very substantial ways, and I don't think we'll ever go back to the way it was in total, we will go back to having face to face meetings, of course, but I do think that operating virtually and doing more things remotely, remote business meetings over zoom are going to be a fixed part of the future, >> Right, right. >> At least in my opinion. >> So, the reason I wanted to reach out to you is you've managed through some crazy transitions and some crazy disruptions back in the day and for a lot of the young people that don't remember, there was a time before we did everything online. There was a time where you had a broker and you called him on the phone and you paid a pretty big price based on a percentage of the transactions. You were at Schwab in the late 90s when this new thing called the internet came along, and these new things called internet only businesses to compete with you, I wonder if you can kind of take us back as you started to see some of these new kinds of threats, coming not necessarily from people that you recognize from up and down the street, but people who are coming over horizons that you've never ever seen before. And how did you start to get a feel for hmm, the landscapes a changin'. >> You know it's really funny to look back that there actually was a day when something called the internet didn't exist. And, there was no connectivity, there was no internet. We were, of course, at that time a telephone based brokerage firm, what used to be called discount brokers. We don't use that phrase very much anymore at Schwab, but, we were a telephone based discount broker, and the internet popped up and started becoming commercialized, and some online only brokerage firms popped up. And these firms didn't have call centers, they didn't have branch offices, if you wanted to do a trade you did it over your computer, online, and the pricing was dramatically less. To give you some idea, to buy 100 shares of IBM, Merrill Lynch would have charged you $250, for that one trade, Schwab would have charged you $80 and E-Trade would have charged you $25. So, we were much cheaper than Merrill Lynch, but E-Trade was much cheaper than us. So, we were, at the time, we were worried about is there enough security on the internet, can we do trades. We have a reputation to protect, a brand new company they don't have a reputation to protect, we have customer security, we have a reputation to protect. Well, we started doing online trades, and the way we did it was we gave all of our customers a 20% discount on our normal pricing, so instead of charging 80-something dollars, you paid something like $60. So, it was a nice discount, customers liked it, they were doing online trades, and we're seeing that is just taking off, it's getting huge, and we're getting great press, the analysts love it, Wall Street loves it, we're a public company and it's going great, but of course at the same time I'm getting, a basket full of letters and emails from our customers saying "why can't you do trades for $25 like E-Trade? Why are they able to do an online trade for $25 and you're charging $65? I thought you stood for value, I thought you guys wanted to be the best value for the money." So, I'm in this dilemma where Wall Street doesn't see these letters, they don't get reported, I see them, and there dozens and then hundreds, and then thousands. >> Wow. >> We had millions of customers, so to get a thousand letters or emails in a month that's very possible. And so I go to Chuck with this and I said you know, I think we need to make a change because no great company was built on the back of unhappy customers. >> Right, right. But you know, it's so funny, not funny, I'm sure it was a huge challenge in the moment, but you know, Clayton Christensen's another one of my favorite business leaders and why I like him so much, and rest in peace he passed earlier this year, is his very simple statement in "The Innovator's Dilemma" that smart people making sound business decisions based on their customer feedback will always miss discontinuous change. You were right in the middle of this thing and you had to get discontinuous change and it's funny, you've mentioned quite a bit in some of your other conversations about looking for faint signals, well this was not a faint signal, this was pretty much, sounds like came up and banged you over the head. So, how do you make and convince the rest of the people of the team that this is kind of a short-term pain but it's a long-term gain, really thinking about this long-term relationship with our customers, even though it's going to cost us on a per transaction basis in the short-term. >> Well, I had our financial staff run some models, and show me what would be the impact if we reduced our pricing from 60 something dollars a trade to $29 a trade, and the assumption of more and more trades moving to the internet. We also had a model into that the fact that people trade a little more when prices go down, costs go down cause I don't have the cost of someone answering the telephone, so there were some benefits, and I had to run the math to understand how long would it take us to go through the trough to get to the other side. A big important part of this is modeling the numbers. You don't just make this decision as a public company and just hope for the best >> Jeff: Right. >> You need to model it out, you need to run math and say how long will it take, what do we have to assume, what do we need to do, what costs do we need to cut, how are we going to protect ourselves as best as we can? And we knew that the math said that our profitability will go down 25% when we make this change of internet pricing, and we expected that Wall Street would be so upset, because they didn't see this coming, no analyst saw this coming cause they don't know about complaint letters I'm getting, so, analysts would be upset and the stock would go down 40%, going to your board and telling them you want approval for a 25% reduction in profits and a 40% reduction in your stock price is not what you want to do as a CEO, you don't want to go to your board with that and when they ask you, well how sure are you that we're going to climb out of this, you say it's going to take 18 months, what if it takes three years, you know, I was, I didn't see the choice we had, honestly, in my heart, you don't build a great company with an increasing number of unhappy customers. I didn't think we had a choice, and Clayton Christensen was one of the consultants that I used to help me think all this through because it was really hard to make this change, Jeff, because we were doing so well. >> Right. >> Ostensibly, we were killing it. >> Right, so it's interesting, I wonder if you could contrast it to what's happening say now with COVID, right, it was this, didn't sneak up on anyone, it was a really kind of a light switch moment in mid-March where suddenly everyone has to work from home, all your digital transformation initiatives are now put on fast forward, but we still have this situation where there's a variety of potential outcomes and timing that's really hard to gauge, so when you're thinking about managing through change within perfect information and you almost have kind of will we go back to normal, will we stay where we are or some spectrum in between, how do you help people think about how they should come up with contingency plans and think about managing through a number of options with imperfect information and really kind of no clear line, you said you had an 18 month ROI that the analytics point to, we're not really sure how long this thing is going to go and what it's going to look like when we get to the other side. >> Well, I think there's two issues there, one of them is how we get through this pandemic period. Until we get to, there's three things we need, we need inexpensive testing that is not done by a professional that we can do at home to see if we're safe. That's number one. Number two, we need a treatment that helps us get through this and get to the other side without dying, we need the fatality rate to even drop further. And number three we need a vaccine. So those are the three things that we need, that the world is working on all three of those, and my guess is that in the first half of 2021 we will have all three of those, we'll have all three of those and this will be a thing, basically, a thing of the past. >> Jeff: Right. >> So, but I don't think the world goes back, to exactly the way it was. People have learned they can have very effective meetings without everybody flying to Chicago, or New York, or Las Angeles, they can do it over Zoom, that doesn't mean meetings go away, but I think they're going to go down in numbers and more online things are going to happen. More people are going to be working from home at least part of the week. It's going to be different. >> Yeah. >> Those CEO's who sit in a somewhat of an ivory tower and get numbers fed to them from their financial staff, and they're not out talking to customers directly, people look at that as anecdotal information, I think it's more important than that, I think you need to see the passion behind the voice and the eyeballs of some of your best customers to understand what's going on with them, and a lot of CEO's don't actually do that. >> Right. You've made a really interesting comment in another interview that you did earlier, and you talked about the high gain questions. And one of the challenges of all CEO's is nobody wants to be the one that tells his CEO bad news, whether that be someone on your staff, whether that be some lower level person who's on the front lines and really knows there's some broken things, or whether it's a good customer as you said and kind of a social setting, how you doin', oh we love you, blah blah blah. But as a CEO you really have stressed that that is really some important hard to find, and hard to filter information up to the executive suite, so what were some of the tips and tricks you used to make sure that people either A. weren't afraid to tell you bad news, and B. that you could kind of go out and sniff it out a little bit more creatively than just kind of waiting for it to come through in the weekly reports. >> Well, obviously, you know, I think all kinds of executives get out and they talk to their customers on a regular basis, they're out and they're talking to them, the problem with those kind of discussions are no one wants to be disrespectful, people want to be nice in those meetings by and large, and you ask questions "how are we doing" "oh you guys are doing great", meanwhile the guy who tells you you're doing great is also looking at some newer technology that might replace you. (laughs) So that kind of question doesn't get you very far. So what we used to do, to be quite specific, is that we used to do a monthly luncheon where I had 12 of my mostly top executives but some people a level or two down, 12 Schwab people with 24 customers. And so they were tables of six, two of us, four customers, and we had a theme that we would talk through and the themes were always around things of, if you had to pick out three things we don't do well, what would they be? Give the customer permission to be comfortable being critical. What are the three things that you've heard about our customers, our competitors doing, that are better than us? What are the things that we need to change to make you even more delighted? You need to ask those kinds of high gain questions where there's no polite answer, the customer is permitted and given the opportunity to answer in a truthful and critical fashion. >> That's a great lesson, as you said give them permission and give them the format and the forum to say some of those things so that you get some of that information. Another great leadership principle that you shared many times, I want to dig into a little bit is kind of motivation verses inspiration. And that those are often confused, but very different concepts in the way that you lead people. I wonder if you can dig in a little bit on your philosophy on those two things. >> Sure, you know it's funny, those terms motivation and inspiration are used almost interchangeably as if they're the same thing. And they're not. Motivation is fundamental in business, and it's the exchange of behaviors for rewards. I was a psychology major in college, this was one of the things we learned about the exchange of behaviors for rewards and that's motivation. Inspiration on the other hand, is the effort to make people want to do something for, not for rewards that are tangible, but to be part of something great. We want you to be part of a movement, we want you to be part of something special, something that's going to change the world for the better and trying to get your employees to buy into this notion that we are on a mission and that mission is to make the world a somewhat better place, it doesn't mean we don't make money, of course we make money, but we're also out for more than a financial bottom line, we're out for a bottom line that's great for customers and maybe pretty great for employees as well. >> So it's interesting, cause you've seen 'em right, you've been in finance for ever, it's always about the shareholders, you've talked about the stock price a number of times in terms of a measure, but it seems more purposed led or purpose forward organizations now are more appealing to the younger generation, I think the search for a little bit more meaning in our day to day job and what that company is all about seems to have elevated over the last several years and taken a higher role in what they used to call triple line accounting, is it not only your shareholders who always are at the top of the list and have been traditionally, but your customers, your employee, and more and more your community and even the environment. Have you seen the swing towards, it's not just about shareholder value? >> Well, not on Wall Street. (laughs) I think, Wall Street is about money, and the people who go to work on Wall Street, and the way Wall Street operates, it's measured in dollars and cents and share price and profits and distributions to private equity partners and so forth, it's a numbers game and it is a profit game on Wall Street, we should be honest about that, it is what it is. >> Jeff: Sure. >> And, I have yet to see the Wall Street firm that is talking about triple bottom lines cause that just doesn't happen very much on Wall Street, it doesn't happen from my perspective, it almost doesn't happen at all. But there are other companies where they do talk about a more triple bottom line, and I think as a leader if you want to be that kind of company and you want to be that kind of leader you have to be comfortable talking about that, and not feel embarrassed by it, not feel that oh, that's too airy fairy, that's too goody two shoes. If you really believe that our goal is to have a triple bottom line, profitability, great for employees, and great for customers and the world at large, then as a leader you need to talk about that. You need to be willing to stand up and have those kinds of conversations and let yourself be challenged by perhaps the press, employees, shareholders, who think that that's not a good strategy. I believe that in many cases that's a great strategy because on a long-term basis you don't want every employee in your company, and all of your senior executives to basically be up for sale, that if a bigger job comes in with a bigger compensation, they're out the door. You're looking for loyalty, you're looking for buy in, for participation, for wanting to give every bit of themselves for the mission of the company. And as the CEO, if you want to take that path, you got to be willing to put yourself out there and talk about it and suffer the slings and arrows from those who don't believe that that's the best path for the company. >> Right, right. Well and that's another thing that you've talked about quite often, is really that the company feeds off the passion of the CEO, and the CEO has to have that passion because they're lookin', they're watchin', they're lookin' at your moves, they're lookin' at what you say, they're lookin' at your body language, they're lookin' at everything that you do. And I think within the context of these transitions and these difficult times, you have another great line that you've used a number of times, which is: "You need to have a perception of momentum." I love that line, so everyone needs to think that we're on the right path, we're not there yet, I feel it, he looks like he feels it, he looks like he's confident, so now I'm confident and I'm going to jump in and help be part of this change process. You've seen that time and time. >> Well, momentum is a tricky thing, you can have momentum and not have the perception of momentum. Because if you're doing a turn around, what often happens is in the early stages of the turn around, the numbers start to change but they're small, and you really haven't seen, it's not as steep. The turn around doesn't go steep, the turn around goes and builds slowly. And, what you need to be measuring in the beginning, are kind of the inputs and behaviors rather than the outputs, sales and profits. Those take longer. But you need to build belief, you need to build buy in, because it can take a long time before things start getting better and you don't want your best people to wonder whether this is the right move, should I be looking for another job, so, you have to build the perception of momentum even as you're building the reality of momentum. >> Right, right. So another thing we cover a lot of tech conferences, obviously, Cloud and AI, machine learning are hot things. But, you know, it always goes back to the big three. It's the technology, okay, but it's also people, and more importantly I think that gets left out is process. So, when you're thinking about, you know you're management is, and again, especially through a transition or a difficult time or some unknown and choppy waters, how do you think about those three, prioritizing those three and organizing those three between people, process and technology? >> Okay, well, you know always looking for technology that can be implemented to give you productivity, better customer service, you need to be monitoring what you're competitors are doing, and be looking out, sometimes at the bleeding edge, where you don't need to implement those kinds of changes right away, but you need to know where you want to go down the road, so you have some sense of that. As far as process goes, your processes are both a strength and a weakness because the strength of how well you run your processes today is also how hard they're going to be to change tomorrow. You know, companies are built for predictability, reliability, risk minimization, and all of your processes are built for those things. But those are also the things that are the opposite of big breakthrough changes. So you need to be thinking about, all right, are we strengthening our processes but also, if we have a change coming that's going to require a change of some of those processes, how is that going to get in our way and how are we going to get past that? >> Jeff: Right. >> I've left people for the last because to me that's the heart and soul of a successful executive. One person never gets everything done, it's all about the quality of your team. You've got to be a recruiter, you've got to be always on the look out for new talent that can help your company, and you've got to be thinking about how you're going to recruit that talent. You have to be a magnet for talent. When I sit on boards and I talk to the CEOs, I ask them, what are you doing to be a magnet for talent? What does that mean? What are you doing for great people to want to work for you? For you, and your company, what are you doing, how are you reinvesting in people, how are you putting time and energy in their professional development, in their growth? How are you getting to know them? How are you understanding their ambitions, their hopes and desires for the future? How much time and effort do you spend on that? And that's all part of having people not leave, everyone, in a way you can look at the world and think everyone is for sale. But you want people that are not for sale, that are committed to you and committed to the mission and in today's world where everything seems so fluid, I know my ideas about this probably seem very old and perhaps out of date, but I still believe in them with all my heart, that you want people that are committed to you and what we are accomplishing together. And you have to be reinforcing that with your words, and even more importantly with your actions. >> Yeah, I think it goes back to your inspiration, people are much more motivated by inspiration than just collecting a paycheck or getting a compensation back for what they're doing, which is a great segue to the last topic I wanted to cover with you, and I remember this, we had dinner, I think it was 1996 at the Wharton's Zweig Series, and you were such a phenomenal speaker, and I remember asking you the question and I remember your answer, and I've repeated it ad nauseam for the last 20 years. I said, "David, you're such a great speaker, why, how?" And you were so matter of fact in that you just said "hey, it's an important part of my job, I treat it as a skill, I hired a coach, I practiced like I would do any other skill", and why that's such a powerful story is you clearly are in a position of power, you could clearly have a crazy ego that got in the way of such a matter of fact accomplishment of these tasks and all the PR people I talk to and they hear this story "oh my gosh, we got to get him talking to my executives" because so many people let ego get in the way of what is really an important task for a CEO and a leader which is communication and you recognize that early on and really went after it to make sure that you were very good at this very important task. >> Well, what happened to me, I got lucky, I got lucky. When I got promoted to be the CEO of Schwab, I knew I was going to have to do a lot more public speaking and I already thought I was pretty good at being a public speaker, but I thought I needed to fine tune my messaging, I needed to get it better. So, I looked around and I got some referrals and I hired a guy that I thought was going to be a speech writer for me, that would help craft the message. And, we had our first meeting, and we're talking about an upcoming speech and he says to me things like, "Well, Dave, I want to know more about your life. Tell me how you grew up, tell me what you're proudest moments were, I want to learn about you." And I said to him, "Terry, I'm not looking for a biographer, I want a speech writer, I need a guy that can help me craft my message." And he said, "Well, Dave, that's not how I do things. I need to know who you are, I need to know what your passions are and where they come from so that we can give a message that has more than just words it has meaning, it has your passion built into it, that's what we need to do." And that's what Terry taught me, was that it's not just the words, it's also the passion, energy, and meaning and connection behind the words. And I want to mention one other thing that I think is very important. When people talk about being really good communicators, they often talk about speaking. They don't focus on listening. And listening is a tremendously important skill. So for example, you give a speech, you're the CEO or Senior Executive, you give a speech, do you stay there and do you do a Q+A session? The Q+A session can even be more important than the speech sometimes, because all the employees know that the speech is something that was pre-arranged, it's not on the cuff, it's something that's been thought about and prepared. But the questions and answers are authentic and in the moment. People are clamoring for authentic leadership. That Q+A session, where you're listening for the question and maybe the question behind the question. So you're not just trying to get through them as fast as you can, but you're trying to really answer and listen for the question and the question behind the question. And then answer those from the heart with passion, and that's how you will score the most points with your audience. >> That's great. And then who knows what comes from it, in getting ready for this I came across your blog post talking about Gopi Kallayil a mutual friend at Wharton who reached out to you after that same dinner, and you were happy enough, or you were kind enough to respond and grow a friendship and a relationship that again is lasted for decades. So that's such an important message to listen, as somebody said right, "God gave you two ears and one mouth should try to use them in that ratio." (laughs) Well David, thank you so much for taking some time, again I think these are really trying times in leadership, I think it's really an opportunity for great leaders to shine and those that don't there's really no place to hide. So I really appreciate you sharing your insight and taking a few minutes with us. >> Thanks, Jeff, I hope all the people that follow you and listen to your broadcasts learn something today and come away with some benefit from this time we've spent together. >> Undoubtedly, undoubtedly. Well, thanks again. All right, he's Dave Pottruck, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE, thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)