>> It's been great. >> Robert Herjavec. >> I mean, you guys are excited where you are, no? >> Dancing with the Stars, of course. >> His CUBE alumni. (techno music) Live from Seattle, Washington, it's theCUBE covering KubeCon and CloudNativeCon North America 2018 brought to you by Red Hat, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and its ecosystem partners. (crowd talking) >> And welcome back to our live coverage here in Seattle for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2018. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, here for three days of wall to wall coverage, 8,000 people up from 4,000 last year. Growing Kubernetes and the Cloud Native ecosystem around KubeCon. Next two guests, John Morello, CTO of Twistlock, hot start-up to the news. And Nanda Kumar, who's a Fellow Systems engineer at Verizon's Global Technology Service. Guys, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you. Thanks for having us. >> Congratulations on your news and Kelsey wearing your shirt on theCUBE earlier. (they laugh) >> Thanks for having us. >> So take a minute to explain what you guys do, your story, you guys got to lot of hot things happening. Take a minute to talk about the company's value-- >> Yeah, sure, so we've been around for about four years now or going on four years. We're kind of the first company in this space that's really focused on cloud native cybersecurity. So, the idea is not just to take the existing capabilities that you've had on traditional systems and kind of retrofit them onto this new platform. But really to leverage the way that the cloud native space works, to be able to do security in a different and hopefully a more effective way. Cloud native has this notion of immutability and being able to take the same artifact from development to staging to production. And that enables us to do things in a security fashion that you really haven't been able to do in the past. Like actually be able to enforce security controls at the very beginning of the life cycle of the app. To be able to ensure consistency in your compliance posture all the way through production. And then as we learn things at runtime, to be able to signal that knowledge back to the developer, so they can actually improve the security application in the beginning. We basically have a platform that gives you those capabilities, vulnerability management, compliance, runtime defense, and firewalling across VMs, containers, and serverless across any clouds you have. We're not specific to any one cloud provider-- >> Is like telemetry coming back to the developer in real time? >> Yeah, basically as an example, when you have an application that's deployed, in the old world you as the developer would give the app to an operator, they would deploy it, and maybe weeks later, somebody would scan it, and they'd say you've got these vulnerabilities and then they have to go back and tell somebody to go and fix them. There's a lot of time where you're exposed, there's a lot of cost with that operation. The way that we're able to do it for the vulnerability case is as the developer builds the application, every build they do, Twistlock can scan that and see the vulnerabilities and actually enforce that as a quality gate and say if you've got critical vulnerabilities, you have to fix 'em before you progress. And then as you take that application and move that into test and staging and production, we create this dynamic runtime model that describes basically an implicit allow list of what's normal behaviors. So you don't have to tell us that my web server normally runs in Gen X and listens on port 80, we learn that automatically. We create this reference model where you can understand what's normal and then we automatically prevent anomalies. So unlike that traditional world of security where you had to have a whole bunch of manual rules that try to blacklist every thing that was bad, (John Furrier laughs) we just say, we learn what's good and only allow that. >> It's predictive and prescriptive in one. >> Yeah, exactly. >> What's the role here with Kubernetes, how do you fit into the Kubernetes standardization, momentum? >> For us, we've kind of pre-dated the rise of Kubernetes in some ways, and really supported Kubernetes from the very beginning when the project became popular. Our platform is designed to work as a native cloud native app itself, so when you deploy Twistlock, you run the Twistlock console, our management service and API controller. All that's run just as a cloud native app. You deploy as a replication controller. When you deploy Twistlock defender, our agent effective error, containerized agents to all the nodes where you're writing compute jobs, you run that as a Damon set. So for us, not only do we protect the platform, but we just are a part of the platform. There's nothing abnormal that you have to do. You deploy it and manage it like you would any other Kubernetes application. >> All right, Nanda, let's pull you into the conversation here. >> Sure. Verizon, obviously most people know, explain what your group does, how cloud native fits into what you're doing. >> I'm part of the Global Technology Services organization. Verizon, as you probably know, is a mixed bag of different types of businesses brought together, wireless being the most prominent one that most of you know about it. But we also have other solutions, like our file solutions. And recently with our acquisition of Yahoo, which is gold, and so forth. Verizon is actually on a major transformation journey. Our transformation journey spans around a five year program. We are in year number three of this transformation and cloud native and cloud technology is a very foundational aspect for us as part of this transformation. I was just chatting with John earlier. Opportunity like this doesn't come that often because we are in a perfect intersection of where automation and Verizon is doing a cloud migration and then you have these cloud native technologies that have been made available. Where it's Kubernetes, container, and so forth. So that mesh of the opportunity to migrate. And as you migrate, you're taking advantage of these technologies, and modernizing your application stack is a big win. >> Okay, can you connect for us the intersection of what you were just talking about and 5G, which is you know, really going to be a huge impact on everything happening in telecommunications. >> Yeah, the whole idea about 5G for us is it's not just the next generation of technology. It's all about the human element ability of it. Basically it means we want to make sure that the technology is used to solve real human problems and the technology is capable of doing that. Be it whether it's a life science or be it in transportation and so forth. We really want to make sure that the technology is being used to solve real human problems and to enable the consumption of this technology. We won't take advantage of cloud native services to support it. >> Help boil it down for us because, just in general, you say even domestically, I think it's like 40% of the U.S. population doesn't have access to broadband. Those of us at the conference here understand that wireless isn't always reliable. 5G silver bullet, everybody's going to have infinite bandwidth everywhere, right? >> Absolutely. (Stu laughs) And that's the valued proposition of the technology that it brings to the table. I know the spread of the technology is going to vary depending upon the commercialization of the product, the solution, and so forth. But the reality is in the new world that we live in, it is not just one piece of technology that's going to make it. It's going to be a mesh of the new technologies like 5G with a combination of WiFi and so forth. All of this coming together. It all comes down to fundamentally what are the use cases or what type of solutions are you going to go after and how it's going to make sense. >> How has cloud native in this transformation changed how you guys make investments? Obviously, the security equation's paramount. Central to the that, lot of data. How is the investments and how you guys are building out changed? Obviously you're looking at re-imagining operations, security, et cetera et cetera. How's that going to shape for you guys-- >> One of the things that Nanda and I were talking about earlier that not because of cloud native but it's enabled by cloud native. I think you look at almost all organizations today, and to reuse that phrase that Andreessen quoted about softwaring the world. It really is a true thing. Unlike in the past where IT had been this cost center that most organizations sought to strangle out and reduce as much as possible, I think most, at least modern companies that will be successful in the future, realize that that's part of their competitive advantage. It's not just about providing an app because your competitor has an app, it's about providing a better experience so that you're driving more revenue, having a better relationship, a longer term deeper relationship with that customer. Like we were talking about, in his case, if they build kind of a minimal application or minimal experience for their customers, their customers may choose to go to AT&T or whomever else if they can feel like hey, it's easier for me to work with them. I get better data, I can use my systems more easily. If you have that inflection point where people are having to really invest in building better software, better industry specific software, you need those tools of mass innovation to do that. And that's what cloud native really is. It's about being able to take and innovate and iterate on those innovations much more rapidly than you've been able to do in the past. And so it's really this confluence of those two trends that make this space as big as it is. That's why we have so many people here at KubeCon. >> Oh, you go faster too. The investment in apps, your applications, faster. And your talking about your security solution replaces the old way of hey, is there a problem, we'll patch it. >> It also has to get away from that approach where people took in the past where security was always this friction. It was this impediment, you know, you wanted to deploy something and you had to go through the security review and create all this rules and it was a hassle and slowed things down. If that's your approach to security, you're going to be at a fundamental conflict to this new approach. >> I think you'll be out of business personally, I think that ship has sailed, that's dead. We see the breaches every day, you see on all the dark webs who've been harvesting all that. IoT though is a different kind of animal. How are you guys looking at the IoT equation because that's a good use case for cloud? You can push now compute to the edge, you don't have to move data around. Certainly you guys are in the telecom business, you know what that means, so latency matters. How are you looking at the edge, IoT, and where does security fit into that? >> In terms of IoT, I think as you mentioned, there are going to be use cases where IoT's going to be very critical. There are two paradigms to the concept of the mobile edge compute. One is for the IoT use cases, the other could be even for like AR/VR is a good example. You want the compute to be so fast where you want responses immediately based on the location you are and so forth. So that's a very important foundation that we're working on and making that a reality for our organization to come use it. And of course any solution that we provide, security needs to be baked into it, because that's going to be foundation for how to-- >> Back to your 5G point, that's great back haul too for those devices. That one at least. If they want to send data back or interface with the edge, and power and compute, you need power and connectivity. >> Yep, exactly, very true. >> What's next, I guess? If you look forward, where's this journey going? How does this partnership help solve things? >> I think the key to any successful transformation is you got to take into consideration your current landscape. You certainly can have a broad vision of where the future is and so forth, but if you can't build the bridge between where we are and where we need to go, that's going to be a very challenging space so when you look at the cloud native technologies, we look at making it operational efficiency for us. In terms of how do we do our operations, like the earlier question we talked about, what is changing for us? Our operation's getting better. Our security portion is getting better because we're now shifting more of this to left. Which means as the workloads are being built and so forth. We're taking into consideration how it's going to run, where it's going to run and so forth. So that's going to create the savings and operational efficiency, which then allows us to take that and transform it into how do we focus on more modern technologies and modern solutions and so forth. >> Customer satisfaction. >> And customer satisfaction. >> Those are the top line business for every new model. >> So I got to ask, how is it going with Twistlock? Where's their role in your transformation? It's on the security side? >> Mm-hmm. >> Where do they play into your mix? >> So when we rolled out our solution for our Kubernetes platform, we certainly want to make sure that, to John's earlier point, where we can shift left and really look at security wholistically. And the only way you could do that is you need to capture the essence or integrate security as the project's being built. Because today we do have a security portion, but it's kind of where you have it during the development phase or during operations or doing it on time. You're not able to stitch it together. But with container and Kubernetes, you now have the advantage of really knowing what is end to end. And that is where our partnership with Twistlock has to be able to oversee that and provide that insight on what is running, where it's running, what levels exist, and how do we fix it. >> It kind of makes sense too. We've talked for years, the perimeter is dead. You guys are addressing security upfront at the application level where it's coding. This is working out for you guys well? >> Yep, and that's been a big shift in fact for why they've been successful with this transformation. Because we know have inside steward and everybody in the organization has a line off-site to what's going on, where things are running and so forth. It's been a great partnership. >> John, talk about this dynamic 'cause this is really kind of compelling because we've heard, "Oh, yeah, we're throwing everything "against the wall in security." And everyone always says, "Hey, the perimeter is dead "and you got to start with security in mind from day one." Well, I mean, what is day one? The minute you start coding, right? >> I get your overall point about the perimeter being dead. I would actually rephrase it a bit and say, "The perimeter being dissolved." And I think that's really a more probably accurate way to look at it. What used to be this very tightly defined like, we deploy things in this network or even VPC and it's got this control around it. Whereas a lot of customers today we see choosing an intentional multi-cloud strategy. They want to preserve the ability to have some leverage, not just with Amazon, but with Azure, or with Google, or whomever it may be on-premises. And when you have that model where you've got infrastructure and multiple regions, multiple different providers, you no longer have that very clean separation between what's yours and what's kind of out on the outside. And so one of the things that we really think is important is to be able to bring the perimeter to the application. So the way that we look at protecting the application is around the app itself, regardless of what the underlying compute platform is, the cloud, the region, it's really about protecting the app. You learn how those different microservices normally communicate with each other. You only allow that normal good communication unless you can really constrain a blast radius if you do have some kind of compromise in the future. And the minute you really try to mitigate that compromise is to again find those vulnerabilities as you develop the app, and prevent them in development before they ever get out to production. >> And that's a super smart approach, I love that. I think it's a winner, congratulations. Final question, what's the prediction for multi-cloud in 2019? Since you brought it up, multi-cloud seems to be the hot thing. What's your prediction 2019? It becomes a conversation? It becomes practice? >> I would say at this point, it already is practice in most organizations. And I would say that in 2019, you'll see that become something that's accepted not just as an option but as really the preferred, the better operational model. So you're able to choose technology platforms and operational approaches that are designed to work in a model in which you have multiple providers. Because you have a dependency layer that you can take now with Kubernetes and containers that's universal across those. Theoretically, you could have always taken a VM you put in ager and moved it to AWS, but it was really difficult and painful and hard to do that. If you do that well with Kubernetes, it's really pretty straightforward to deploy an application across multiple providers or multiple regions of the same provider even. And I think you'll see that become a more real thing in 2019 because it gives you as a company, or you as a customer, more leverage to be able to choose the services and negotiate the rates that you want with your provider. >> And if you move security to the app level like you guys are doing, you take away all that extra work around how to send policy and make it dynamic. >> Exactly. Our customers may have one Twistlock environment that manages things in Azure and AWS and GCP and on-premises and that's fine because we care about protecting the app not the interlying infrastructure. >> You agree? >> Absolutely, I think that's going to be the case even from our perspective. You're always going to look for where is the best place around these workloads and in a cost-effective way and secure manner. And as long as you're a single-controlled plane that you can manage it, I think the multi-cloud is going to be the ideal-- >> Make it easier to operate, standard language for developers, lock in security at the front end. >> That's right. >> Good stuff. Guys thanks for coming out. >> Sure. >> Appreciate the insight. Smart commentary here on security, cloud native, Kubernetes, I'll break it down here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, stay with us. More day one coverage of three days of live coverage here in Seattle for KubeCon and CloudNativeCon. We'll be right back. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering Dell EMC World 2017, brought to you by Dell EMC. (electronic music) >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of Dell EMC World here in Las Vegas. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Walls. Today we are talking to Chhandomay Mandal. He is the Senior Consultant Product Marketing here at Dell EMC, as well as Pat Harkins who is the CTO Informatics and Technology Services at Royal Victoria Health Center. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having us. >> Glad to be here. >> So, Pat, I want to start with you. Tell us a little bit about Royal Health. >> Sure. Well, Royal Victoria Regional Health Center in Barrie, Ontario. We're about an hour north of Toronto, Ontario. It's a regional health center, variety of services. We provide oncology, cardiac, child and youth mental health, and what we're doing up there is providing a regional role, regional services for Meditech. We're host Meditech for a number of other hospitals in our area, and we're currently looking to expand that, and increase our volume, but also change platforms as well. >> So tell us about some of the biggest challenges that you see. >> Some of the biggest challenges that we're seeing right now is within Ontario, is the actual funding model, of course. Everything's a little bit tighter. But from a technology perspective, is actually staying with technology, with limited budgets and so forth, and staying with the latest, greatest, providing the best service to our customers, our physicians, our clinicians, which in turn is the best patient care. >> Chhandomay, you look at a client like Pat, who has very specific needs in health care. You've got time issues, you've got privacy issues. How do you deal, or what do you see as far as health care IT fitting in to what you're doing and the services you're providing to somebody like Pat, specifically knowing that these are very unique challenges and critically important challenges? >> Sure. We at Dell EMC look at what the problem is holistically. As Pat was mentioning, in the health care IT, one of the challenges we see is providing consistent high performance with low latency so that the clinicians, physicians can access the patient data in a timely way, quickly, they do not spend more time entering the data or accessing the data, rather spending more time with the patients. Then there is another problem that Pat alluded to. For any EHR, electronic health record systems, it is actually a consolidation of many workloads. You have the EHR workload itself, then you have analytics that needs to be run on it. There are other virtualized applications, and then there is distal partualization, because all the physicians now says they need to access the patient data. So effectively, we need to have platforms, and in this particular case, essentially All-Flash platforms that can offer very high performance, consistently low latency, high storage efficiency in terms of reduced footprint so that Pat and other health providers can consume less rack space, less space in the data center, reduced power and cooling, all those things, and at the end of the day, ensuring the copy data that they have between all the databases, those are efficiently managed and kind of like transforming the health care IT business workflow. That's what we at Dell EMC come with our All-Flash portfolio for health providers like Royal Victoria Health. >> So Pat, on your side of the fence then, from your perspective, limited resources, right? You've got to be very, very protective of what you have, and obviously you have your own challenges. How do you balance all that out in today's environment, where speed matters? Efficiency matters now more than ever. >> And that's, efficiency matters big time with our physicians, and what's happening is we look for partners like Dell EMC to help us with that. One thing that was happening in our experience with efficiency and with timely presentation of data, we weren't getting that with our previous vendor. And when we went to Dell EMC we work with them as a partner and said, "How can we improve on that? "What can we look for?" And we looked at Flash as being that solution, not only providing the performance that we were looking for but also providing built-in security that we were looking for, but also providing even more efficiency, so when the physician, the clinicians were getting that data, they get it in a timely manner, and that means that they're actually spending more time with the patient, they're not searching for the data, they're not searching for reports and so forth. >> Are you hearing any feedback from the patients themselves about how things have changed at the health center? >> Well, for me I'm still stuck in the dungeon. I'm in IT, so we're in the basement, right? so I don't necessarily-- >> John: Glad you could get out for the week. (laughing) >> Exactly. You know, we grow mushrooms in that area. So what's happening with, I don't necessarily talk with the patient, but we're getting the positive feedback from our clinicians and physicians who are then, if they're happy, that means they're providing usually, providing better patient care, and so that means the patients are happy. (audio cuts out) >> Is understanding the true, the point of patient health care from the point they're born to the point that their life ends, and what we're understanding is how getting that data and being able to provide that information to clinicians, see trends, be able to treat, be more proactive instead of a reactive in health care. That's the goal, and with technology and the storage and collecting the data and analytics we'll actually be able to provide that in the future. >> Chhandomay, from your perspective here, what is it about XtremIO you think that makes this a good match? And now you've had X2, right, and sorry Pat. >> Pat: No, it's fine. >> You just deployed, what, six months ago, you said? But now you've got an X2 version to consider, perhaps for your next deployment. What's the fit? Why does it work? >> So you mention Dell EMC XtremIO. So the core premise of XtremIO is we will be able to provide high performance, consistently in low latency no matter what workload you are running, no matter how many workloads you are consolidating on the same array. It is the same high-performance, low-latency, and we have in line all the time, data reduction technologies that are all working on in-memory metadata, which essentially boils down to we are doing all those storage operations at the control plane level without touching the data plane where the data actually lives or exists. So that in turn helps us to consolidate a lot of the copies. You mentioned analytics, right? You have your production database for your patient data, then you need to load those data in an ETL system for running the analytics, then you possibly have your instant development copies, copies for back-up. Now with XtremIO, all the copies, we do not store anything that's not unique, through that entire cluster, and all the metadata is stored in memory, so for us we can create copies that do not take any extra space, and you can run your workloads on the copies themselves with the same performance as in production volume and with all those data reduction and all those technologies that all those data services run. So what that in turn makes Pat's life easier is he can reduce the footprint, he can reduce or consolidate all the workloads on the ATA itself, and his application developers can bring the medical applications online much more faster, he can run his analytics and reports faster, being proactive about the care, and in a nutshell, pretty much taking the storage maintenance, storage planning, storage operations out of the picture so that they can innovate and they can spend time innovating in IT, helping patient care, as opposed to doing routine maintenance and planning. >> So it lets him focus on what he wants to do. You're not spending a majority of your time on mundane tasks, you're actually improving your operations. Give me a real-life example if you can. We talk about more efficiency and better speed, these are all good things and great terms to talk about, but in terms of actually improving patient care, or providing enhanced patient care, what does it mean? How does it translate? >> Well, how it translates is in a lot of cases with the physicians and what we've seen already with them, just with them, they're able to, because we actually improve performance, we're actually able to get more data in analytics, as we say, but then we're able to produce those reports and turn it around in a lot of cases, a lot quicker than what we've been able to do before. An example was, once we moved to XtremIO and our decision support team. Used to take 14 hours to run some of the reports that they were getting. They would start 'em at four o'clock in the evening, they would run to six a.m. in the morning, roughly. When we put the XtremIO in and they ran the same reports they started at 4 o'clock. By six p.m. that night they were completed. They actually called me because they thought they had something wrong. (laughing) It's never been that quick. >> John: Boss, this is too good. >> Exactly. >> John: I messed up. >> And so they actually ran the report three times, and they cued the QA against the report to understand that yeah, it is that efficient now. Now that we've turned that around we actually provide that to the clinicians. We're getting better patient care and they're able to get their information and react quicker to it as well. >> Talking about the massive amounts of data that's being generated that now needs to be analyzed in order to optimize performance, how much do your developers know about data, and are you doing more training for them so that they know what they're doing? >> Well, we always provide training. We're always working on that, but the thing is, we are providing more training and we're providing it to the point that they actually have to be able to mine that data. There's so much data, it's how to manage the data, mine the data. Our analysts at RVH is that we look to Meditech, our EHR vendor as well, to help us on that, but at the same time we're looking to, we're increasing our data warehouses, we're increasing our repositories and registries so that when we do have that data, we can get at it. >> I'm wondering too if using this kind of cutting-edge technology has had an impact on your recruitment. Michael Dell in his keynote mentioned how increasingly, employees are saying the kinds of technologies that's being used is having an impact. >> No, absolutely. I know our vendors, our staff are very excited about the technology. Where we were going before, they weren't, not that they weren't happy, but we were always dealing with mundane tasks. We had some issues that were always repetitive issues that we couldn't seem to get through. Now that we've actually upgraded to the Flash storage and moving through that, they're excited. They love the management, the ease of use, they have a lot of great ideas now it's actually, they're becoming innovative in their thoughts because they know they have the performance and the technology in the back end to do the job for them. >> I hate to ask you what's next because you're six months into your deployment, but this is a constantly evolving landscape, constantly improving. Obviously the pressure is at Dell EMC is responding really well, competitive pressures. What is your road map? If you look two, three years down the road in terms of the kinds of improvements you want to get, the kinds of efficiencies that you can get gains in, and then realistically from a budgetary standpoint, how do you balance all that together? >> Budgetary, there's always the constant discussion with our CFO, and so he's been very supportive, but where we see it going is we want to be able to actually, maybe not even necessarily go to the Cloud but become a private Cloud for our partners and be able to provide a lot of these regional services that we couldn't before with the technology that we had, and be able to expand the services. In Ontario we're seeing some budget constraints, as I mentioned. A lot of these smaller sites, the patients, the customers, as we would say are expecting the service, but with technology and the dollars, they might not be able to do it on their budget, but as we bring stuff back into our data center and be able to provide the technology, we've been able to spread that out, not only from storage, compute side, as well as virtualization, VDI desktops and so forth. That's where I see we're going over the next little while. >> How much learning goes on between your colleagues at CTOs at other health centers, and even health centers and hospitals in the states? Do you talk a lot about-- >> You know what? We do talk a lot. We share stories. Some good, some bad, but we try, we all have the same problems, and why re-create the wheel when you could actually learn from other people? So a lot of the CTOs, we do get together, informally and formally, and understand where we're going and then we also reach out through our vendors and through some of our user groups and so forth to the US and to some of our cohort CTOs down there to understand what they're doing, because they look at it from a different lens at times. >> So speaking of a different lens, from the other side of the fence, Chhandomay if you would, where are you see this headed in terms of your assistance in health care IT, what X2 might be able to do? What kinds of realizations do you think are on the horizon here, and what's possible for a health care provider like RVH? >> So all the organizations, if you look across the industry, they are in the digital transformation journey. Health care providers are no exception, and what we are enabling is the IT transformation part, and Dell XtremIO, and with the XtremIO X2 that we just announced, we are enabling that IT transformation for all of our customers, including health care providers like Royal Victoria Health. Now, with X2, specifically, we continue to improve upon the high performance, the unmatched storage efficiencies that we offer, effectively, again, bringing down the cost of hosting different types of workloads, managing it on a single platform with a much lower total cost of ownership for the health care providers like Pat, so that at the end of the day, they will be able to provide better patient and better care for the patients, be it like a doctor or clinician, trying to access the data from their endpoints or the finance or billing department trying to turn over the bills in a much shorter span as opposed to the typically 45 days turnover that we see. So that's where we see not only just XtremIO X2, but Dell EMC, the All-Flash storage portfolio, helping the customers in their digital transformation journey in health care, and with the IT department, going into the IT transformation journey to help with it. >> Chhandomay, Pat, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you. >> It was great, thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Walls. We will have more from The Cube's coverage of Dell EMC World after this. (electronic music)

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the Cube covering IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit brought to you by IBM. Now, here are your hosts. Day Volante and Stew Minimum. >> Welcome back to Boston, everybody. This is the Cube, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. Stillman and I have pleased to have Jean Kolker on a Cuba lem. Uh, he's IBM vice president and chief data officer of the Global Technology Services division. And Seth Dobrin who's the Director of Digital Strategies. That Monsanto. You may have seen them in the news lately. Gentlemen. Welcome to the Cube, Jean. Welcome back. Good to see you guys again. Thanks. Thank you. So let's start with the customer. Seth, Let's, uh, tell us about what you're doing here, and then we'll get into your role. >> Yes. So, you know, the CDO summit has been going on for a couple of years now, and I've been lucky enoughto be participating for a couple of a year and 1/2 or so, Um, and you know, really, the nice thing about the summit is is the interaction with piers, um, and the interaction and networking with people who are facing similar challenges from a similar perspective. >> Yes, kind of a relatively new Roland topic, one that's evolved, Gene. We talked about this before, but now you've come from industry into, ah, non regulated environment. Now what's happened like >> so I think the deal is that way. We're developing some approaches, and we get in some successes in regulated environment. Right? And now I feel with And we were being client off IBM for years, right? Using their technology's approaches. Right? So and now I feel it's time for me personally to move on something different and tried to serve our power. I mean, IBM clients respected off in this striking from healthcare, but their approaches, you know, and what IBM can do for clients go across the different industries, right? And doing it. That skill that's very beneficial, I think, for >> clients. So Monsanto obviously guys do a lot of stuff in the physical world. Yeah, you're the head of digital strategy. So what does that entail? What is Monte Santo doing for digital? >> Yes, so, you know, for as head of digital strategies for Monsanto, really? My role is to number one. Help Monsanto internally reposition itself so that we behave and act like a digital companies, so leveraging data and analytics and also the cultural shifts associated with being more digital, which is that whole kind like you start out this conversation with the whole customer first approach. So what is the real impact toe? What we're doing to our customers on driving that and then based on on those things, how can we create new business opportunities for us as a company? Um, and how can we even create new adjacent markets or new revenues in adjacent areas based on technologies and things we already have existing within the company? >> It was the scope of analytics, customer engagement of digital experiences, all of the above, so that the scope is >> really looking at our portfolio across the gamut on DH, seeing how we can better serve our customers and society leveraging what we're doing today. So it's really leveraging the re use factor of the whole digital concept. Right? So we have analytics for geospatial, right? Big part of agriculture is geospatial. Are there other adjacent areas that we could apply some of that technology? Some of that learning? Can we monetize those data? We monetize the the outputs of those models based on that, Or is there just a whole new way of doing business as a company? Because we're in this digital era >> this way? Talked about a lot of the companies that have CEOs today are highly regulated. What are you learning from them? What's what's different? Kind of a new organization. You know, it might be an opportunity for you that they don't have. And, you know, do you have a CDO yet or is that something you're planning on having? >> Yes, So we don't have a CDO We do have someone acts as an essential. he's a defacto CEO, he has all of the data organizations on his team. Um, it's very recent for Monsanto, Um, and and so I think, you know, in terms of from the regular, what can we learn from, you know, there there are. It's about half financial people have non financial people, are half heavily regulated industries, and I think, you know, on the surface you would. You would think that, you know, there was not a lot of overlap, but I think the level of rigor that needs to go into governance in a financial institution that same thought process. Khun really be used as a way Teo really enable Maur R and D. Mohr you know, growth centered companies to be able to use data more broadly and so thinking of governance not as as a roadblock or inhibitor, but really thinking about governance is an enabler. How does it enable us to be more agile as it enable us to beam or innovative? Right? If if people in the company there's data that people could get access to by unknown process of known condition, right, good, bad, ugly. As long as people know they can do things more quickly because the data is there, it's available. It's curated. And if they shouldn't have access it under their current situation, what do they need to do to be able to access that data? Right. So if I would need If I'm a data scientist and I want to access data about my customers, what can I can't? What can and can't I do with that data? Number one doesn't have to be DEA Nana Mayes, right? Or if I want to access in, it's current form. What steps do I need to go through? What types of approval do I need to do to do to access that data? So it's really about removing roadblocks through governance instead of putting him in place. >> Gina, I'm curious. You know, we've been digging into you know, IBM has a very multifaceted role here. You know how much of this is platforms? How much of it is? You know, education and services. How much of it is, you know, being part of the data that your your customers you're using? >> Uh so I think actually, that different approaches to this issues. My take is basically we need Teo. I think that with even cognitive here, right and data is new natural resource worldwide, right? So data service, cognitive za za service. I think this is where you know IBM is coming from. And the BM is, you know, tradition. It was not like that, but it's under a lot of transformation as we speak. A lot of new people coming in a lot off innovation happening as we speak along. This line's off new times because cognitive with something, really you right, and it's just getting started. Data's a service is really new. It's just getting started. So there's a lot to do. And I think my role specifically global technology services is you know, ah, largest by having your union that IBM, you're 30 plus 1,000,000,000 answered You okay? And we support a lot of different industries basically going across all different types of industries how to transition from offerings to new business offerings, service, integrated services. I think that's the key for us. >> Just curious, you know? Where's Monsanto with kind of the adoption of cognitive, You know what? Where are you in that journey? >> Um, so we are actually a fairly advanced in the journey In terms of using analytics. I wouldn't say that we're using cognitive per se. Um, we do use a lot of machine learning. We have some applications that on the back end run on a I So some form of artificial or formal artificial intelligence, that machine learning. Um, we haven't really gotten into what, you know, what? IBM defined his cognitive in terms of systems that you can interact with in a natural, normal course of doing voice on DH that you spend a whole lot of time constantly teaching. But we do use like I said, artificial intelligence. >> Jean I'm interested in the organizational aspects. So we have Inderpal on before. He's the global CDO, your divisional CDO you've got a matrix into your leadership within the Global Services division as well as into the chief date officer for all of IBM. Okay, Sounds sounds reasonable. He laid out for us a really excellent sort of set of a framework, if you will. This is interval. Yeah, I understand your data strategy. Identify your data store says, make those data sources trusted. And then those air sequential activities. And in parallel, uh, you have to partner with line of business. And then you got to get into the human resource planning and development piece that has to start right away. So that's the framework. Sensible framework. A lot of thought, I'm sure, went into it and a lot of depth and meaning behind it. How does that framework translate into the division? Is it's sort of a plug and play and or is there their divisional goals that are create dissonance? Can you >> basically, you know, I'm only 100 plus days in my journey with an IBM right? But I can feel that the global technology services is transforming itself into integrated services business. Okay, so it's thiss framework you just described is very applicable to this, right? So basically what we're trying to do, we're trying to become I mean, it was the case before for many industries, for many of our clients. But we I want to transform ourselves into trusted broker. So what they need to do and this framework help is helping tremendously, because again, there's things we can do in concert, you know, one after another, right to control other and things we can do in parallel. So we trying those things to be put on the agenda for our global technology services, okay. And and this is new for them in some respects. But some respects it's kind of what they were doing before, but with new emphasis on data's A service cognitive as a service, you know, major thing for one of the major things for global technology services delivery. So cognitive delivery. That's kind of new type off business offerings which we need to work on how to make it truly, you know, once a sense, you know, automated another sense, you know, cognitive and deliver to our clients some you value and on value compared to what was done up until recently. What >> do you mean by cognitive delivery? Explained that. >> Yeah, so basically in in plain English. So what's right now happening? Usually when you have a large systems  computer IT system, which are basically supporting lot of in this is a lot of organizations corporations, right? You know, it's really done like this. So it's people run technology assistant, okay? And you know what Of decisions off course being made by people, But some of the decisions can be, you know, simple decisions. Right? Decisions, which can be automated, can standardize, normalize can be done now by technology, okay and people going to be used for more complex decisions, right? It's basically you're going toe. It turned from people around technology assisted toa technology to technology around people assisted. OK, that's very different. Very proposition, right? So, again, it's not about eliminating jobs, it's very different. It's taken off, you know, routine and automata ble part off the business right to technology and given options and, you know, basically options to choose for more complex decision making to people. That's kind of I would say approach. >> It's about scale and the scale to, of course, IBM. When when Gerstner made the decision, Tio so organized as a services company, IBM came became a global leader, if not the global leader but a services business. Hard to scale. You could scare with bodies, and the bigger it gets, the more complicated it gets, the more expensive it gets. So you saying, If I understand correctly, the IBM is using cognitive and software essentially to scale its services business where possible, assisted by humans. >> So that's exactly the deal. So and this is very different. Very proposition, toe say, compared what was happening recently or earlier? Always. You know other. You know, players. We're not building your shiny and much more powerful and cognitive, you know, empowered mouse trap. No, we're trying to become trusted broker, OK, and how to do that at scale. That's an open, interesting question, but we think that this transition from you know people around technology assisted Teo technology around people assisted. That's the way to go. >> So what does that mean to you? How does that resonate? >> Yeah, you know, I think it brings up a good point actually, you know, if you think of the whole litany of the scope of of analytics, you have everything from kind of describing what happened in the past All that to cognitive. Um, and I think you need to I understand the power of each of those and what they shouldn't should be used for. A lot of people talk. You talk. People talk a lot about predictive analytics, right? And when you hear predictive analytics, that's really where you start doing things that fully automate processes that really enable you to replace decisions that people make right, I think. But those air mohr transactional type decisions, right? More binary type decisions. As you get into things where you can apply binary or I'm sorry, you can apply cognitive. You're moving away from those mohr binary decisions. There's more transactional decisions, and you're moving mohr towards a situation where, yes, the system, the silicon brain right, is giving you some advice on the types of decisions that you should make, based on the amount of information that it could absorb that you can't even fathom absorbing. But they're still needs really some human judgment involved, right? Some some understanding of the contacts outside of what? The computer, Khun Gay. And I think that's really where something like cognitive comes in. And so you talk about, you know, in this in this move to have, you know, computer run, human assisted right. There's a whole lot of descriptive and predictive and even prescriptive analytics that are going on before you get to that cognitive decision but enables the people to make more value added decisions, right? So really enabling the people to truly add value toe. What the data and the analytics have said instead of thinking about it, is replacing people because you're never going to replace you. Never gonna replace people. You know, I think I've heard people at some of these conferences talking about, Well, no cognitive and a I is going to get rid of data scientist. I don't I don't buy that. I think it's really gonna enable data scientist to do more valuable, more incredible things >> than they could do today way. Talked about this a lot to do. I mean, machines, through the course of history, have always replaced human tasks, right, and it's all about you know, what's next for the human and I mean, you know, with physical labor, you know, driving stakes or whatever it is. You know, we've seen that. But now, for the first time ever, you're seeing cognitive, cognitive assisted, you know, functions come into play and it's it's new. It's a new innovation curve. It's not Moore's law anymore. That's driving innovation. It's how we interact with systems and cognitive systems one >> tonight. And I think, you know, I think you hit on a good point there when you said in driving innovation, you know, I've run, you know, large scale, automated process is where the goal was to reduce the number of people involved. And those were like you said, physical task that people are doing we're talking about here is replacing intellectual tasks, right or not replacing but freeing up the intellectual capacity that is going into solving intellectual tasks to enable that capacity to focus on more innovative things, right? We can teach a computer, Teo, explain ah, an area to us or give us some advice on something. I don't know that in the next 10 years, we're gonna be able to teach a computer to innovate, and we can free up the smart minds today that are focusing on How do we make a decision? Two. How do we be more innovative in leveraging this decision and applying this decision? That's a huge win, and it's not about replacing that person. It's about freeing their time up to do more valuable things. >> Yes, sure. So, for example, from my previous experience writing healthcare So physicians, right now you know, basically, it's basically impossible for human individuals, right to keep up with spaced of changes and innovations happening in health care and and by medical areas. Right? So in a few years it looks like there was some numbers that estimate that in three days you're going to, you know, have much more information for several years produced during three days. What was done by several years prior to that point. So it's basically becomes inhuman to keep up with all these innovations, right? Because of that decision is going to be not, you know, optimal decisions. So what we'd like to be doing right toe empower individuals make this decision more, you know, correctly, it was alternatives, right? That's about empowering people. It's not about just taken, which is can be done through this process is all this information and get in the routine stuff out of their plate, which is completely full. >> There was a stat. I think it was last year at IBM Insight. Exact numbers, but it's something like a physician would have to read 1,500 periodic ALS a week just to keep up with the new data innovations. I mean, that's virtually impossible. That something that you're obviously pointing, pointing Watson that, I mean, But there are mundane examples, right? So you go to the airport now, you don't need a person that the agent to give you. Ah, boarding pass. It's on your phone already. You get there. Okay, so that's that's That's a mundane example we're talking about set significantly more complicated things. And so what's The gate is the gate. Creativity is it is an education, you know, because these are step functions in value creation. >> You know, I think that's ah, what? The gate is a question I haven't really thought too much about. You know, when I approach it, you know the thinking Mohr from you know, not so much. What's the gate? But where? Where can this ad the most value um So maybe maybe I have thought about it. And the gate is value, um, and and its value both in terms of, you know, like the physician example where, you know, physicians, looking at images. And I mean, I don't even know what the error rate is when someone evaluates and memory or something. And I probably don't want Oh, right. So, getting some advice there, the value may not be monetary, but to me, it's a lot more than monetary, right. If I'm a patient on DH, there's a lot of examples like that. And other places, you know, that are in various industries. That I think that's that's the gate >> is why the value you just hit on you because you are a heat seeking value missile inside of your organisation. What? So what skill sets do you have? Where did you come from? That you have this capability? Was your experience, your education, your fortitude, >> While the answer's yes, tell all of them. Um, you know, I'm a scientist by training my backgrounds in statistical genetics. Um, and I've kind of worked through the business. I came up through the RND organization with him on Santo over the last. Almost exactly 10 years now, Andi, I've had lots of opportunities to leverage. Um, you know, Data and analytics have changed how the company operates on. I'm lucky because I'm in a company right now. That is extremely science driven, right? Monsanto is a science based company. And so being in a company like that, you don't face to your question about financial industry. I don't think you face the same barriers and Monsanto about using data and analytics in the same way you may in a financial types that you've got company >> within my experience. 50% of diagnosis being proven incorrect. Okay, so 50% 05 0/2 summation. You go to your physician twice. Once you on average, you get in wrong diagnosis. We don't know which one, by the way. Definitely need some someone. Garrett A cz Individuals as humans, we do need some help. Us cognitive, and it goes across different industries. Right, technologist? So if your server is down, you know you shouldn't worry about it because there is like system, you know, Abbas system enough, right? So think about how you can do that scale, and then, you know start imagined future, which going to be very empowering. >> So I used to get a second opinion, and now the opinion comprises thousands, millions, maybe tens of millions of opinions. Is that right? >> It's a try exactly and scale ofthe data accumulation, which you're going to help us to solve. This problem is enormous. So we need to keep up with that scale, you know, and do it properly exactly for business. Very proposition. >> Let's talk about the role of the CDO and where you see that evolving how it relates to the role of the CIA. We've had this conversation frequently, but is I'm wondering if the narratives changing right? Because it was. It's been fuzzy when we first met a couple years ago that that was still a hot topic. When I first started covering this. This this topic, it was really fuzzy. Has it come in two more clarity lately in terms of the role of the CDO versus the CIA over the CTO, its chief digital officer, we starting to see these roles? Are they more than just sort of buzzwords or grey? You know, areas. >> I think there's some clarity happening already. So, for example, there is much more acceptance for cheap date. Office of Chief Analytics Officer Teo, Chief Digital officer. Right, in addition to CEO. So basically station similar to what was with Serious 20 plus years ago and CEO Row in one sentence from my viewpoint would be How you going using leverage in it. Empower your business. Very proposition with CDO is the same was data how using data leverage and data, your date and your client's data. You, Khun, bring new value to your clients and businesses. That's kind ofthe I would say differential >> last word, you know, And you think you know I'm not a CDO. But if you think about the concept of establishing a role like that, I think I think the name is great because that what it demonstrates is support from leadership, that this is important. And I think even if you don't have the name in the organization like it, like in Monsanto, you know, we still have that executive management level support to the data and analytics, our first class citizens and their important, and we're going to run our business that way. I think that's really what's important is are you able to build the culture that enable you to leverage the maximum capability Data and analytics. That's really what matters. >> All right, We'll leave it there. Seth Gene, thank you very much for coming that you really appreciate your time. Thank you. Alright. Keep it right there, Buddy Stew and I'll be back. This is the IBM Chief Data Officer Summit. We're live from Boston right back.