[Music] welcome to thecube's coverage of pure accelerate 2021 i'm lisa martin pleased to be welcoming back one of our alumni to the cube prakash darjee is here the vp and gm of the digital experience business unit at pure storage prakash it's great to have you back on the program yeah lisa thanks for having me it's been i don't know more than a year since i've seen the cube right pre-covered so it's been a little while recover copa remember those days well thank you for joining us virtually we appreciate that and also excited to hear some of the things that are going to be coming out at accelerate an event that i've covered in person several times so talk to me about this digital experience business unit this is relatively new what does it encompass what are you hoping to deliver from a portfolio perspective to your customers well what's interesting is it's new and it's not right because we've we've been as a company a sas company that happened to ship storage boxes on premise so we've had pure one which was largely used for monitoring and supporting our fleet like a sas company would do and customers had access to that as their single pane of class but as we expanded beyond just observability and monitoring we realized that we could use this observability to do more for customers and we introduced our pure as a service offering about three years ago now which customers just sign up for slas like you know they would on a cloud you sign up i want this performance i want this capacity it's storage so you know why don't you just sign up for what you need and we uh created the dx business unit the digital experience business units to bring those things together because frankly we're using pier one to monitor manage and allow customers to sign up for their slas in a very digital way and i guess the world's changed a little bit because you know previously you would you know call up your sales rep to do things and then it happened and i think a lot of people got a little bit of zoom fatigue um and therefore you know we see a lot of traction right now in terms of people just self-serving and going up and signing up for the slas they need talk to me about some of those slas that customers are signing up for what is it that they know with pure as a service for example in pure one that they can get well you want storage you want storage that's high performing you want storage that supports your applications you know number one thing with storage is you're signing up for capacity and performance right when you think storage you're like oh you know i need to store my videos or i need to store my apps or i need to store something and you know right now we've got customers and uh you know multiple hundreds of petabytes range right like big customers lots of storage um and we got small customers as well you know five to ten terabytes of storage as well so um but across that entire range in storage you're basically want to make sure you don't lose your data it's protected it's safe um the world's becoming a little less secure ransomware and attacks and all of those types of things so we've introduced concepts of ransomware assessment and capabilities like that but the performance of capacity are the two things you want to sign up for so what if you just said i want it this fast and i want this much space and all of the other technology problems you give to pure right because you know what you run out of space we'll ship the box we'll manage it you don't need to call us you don't need to order you don't need to do that so it's more than just a i think when people think about services they think about subscriptions right capex versus opex and sure there's an element to capex versus optics but that's not really what a service is that's just a subscription a service is hey i just want this performance in this capacity who's going to run it and operate it and manage it for me you know when you sign up for a sas service you don't really care when you sign up for salesforce how it runs who's running it etc you just want to manage your crm pipeline and you know we're bringing that same sas experience to storage you do expect that you bring up a good point when you're when you're talking about sas applications one of the things that we saw in the last year is this massive proliferation or acceleration of companies in every industry dependent on so many sas apps just for collaboration alone internally let alone externally brought up ransomware it's something i've been talking a lot about in the last year how that's been on the rise talk to me about you know as enterprise enterprises need storage to do more than just that talk to me about how you're working with customers to ensure that this data across the enterprise is secure well so it's interesting um when i talk to people and they ask me are you secure i'm like well that's kind of a silly question um because you know if you think about security there's always more you could do it's not am i secure it's how secure am i and you want to be the nsa where everything's under a lock and key you can do that and it's just going to be really expensive to do so the what we're the way we're approaching it is we're giving customers levels of ransomware that they can actually implement um for protection level zero right the simplest is make sure that i've got you know an air gap of my data and a copy of it to prevent you from altering it for up to 30 days or some time period which you know is the first level of threat that you know someone can't hold you hostage by encrypting your data those types of things and we've done that for our whole portfolio we provide that and we now even give customers an assessment to tell them you know whether they can go into our digital experience and do an assessment to see how secure are they but that's only the first step hackers are actually getting more sophisticated now on air gap and just saying well what if i do a time delayed encryption thing that overcomes the 30-day thing and you know like the world's evolving so the next level is a physical gap where you take it off the primary system and you actually put it on a secondary system your data well so you know your virtual air gaps one thing your physical distance provides another layer of security because now it's another physical asset with another copy of your data sure it costs more money because you're storing it twice so you have to decide based on the sensitivity of your information how many layers of security you want to build it you can even build in a third layer that says if something happens i don't want to pay the ransomware i just need to be able to recover quickly so let me have a rapid recovery sla and you know we use our flash play to deliver that because it's one of the you know fastest recovery products on the planet based on the performance threshold so you know we've seen a lot of companies now adopt and use flashblade is kind of that level three for rapid recovery in instead of paying for the insurance they're paying for the remediation you know what i mean so it's a different it's interesting how the landscape has evolved right and as the threat actors have access to more and more sophistication obviously that becomes a challenge but you bring up a good point and that is it's sort of it's not a matter of is it going to happen to us it's it's when and it's kind of that tolerance level based on the data but the modern data experience here's been talking about this obviously the modern data experience has changed a lot in the last year talk to us about what that is how does the modern data experience are pure one and pure as a service foundational to that and talk to me about the benefits in it for customers well so when we think about the modern data experience there's really three pillars we talk about in the modern day experience the first one is just innovation leadership pure's got a little bit of a history of redefining storage first of all flash first the unified fast fallen object you know we're on a third generation of qlc technology so we figure if we don't invent the future who else is going to you know we look around the landscape and there's a lot of data technology so we need to invent a future that people have a blueprint to copy like and that's that's our goal of modernizing the landscape you know we don't see a lot of original and innovative thought happening in the industry so we have to create the blueprint of the future right we pride ourselves on that innovation leadership um and evergreen which you know we've introduced is an innovation where you know if people buy a 500 terabytes of storage today they don't have to re-buy it every three to five years that innovation that we introduced is still unmatched in industry after we've been in industry for 10 years because companies haven't figured out how to copy it evergreen is still a differentiator it sounds like the modern data experience what you're looking to do is also define it with and for customers and have that be a unique differentiator for what care delivers 100 um so you know this innovation leadership's big um making sure that you can run your landscape like a cloud you know have a service catalog you know service catalog for developers as containers and you know we we lean very heavily into what we're doing for devops and developers not just storage administrators and you know part of the modern data experience is being cloud ready and container ready and then finally just having the best digital experience which you know pier one and peer piers of services foundational tube uh where customers can go in procure easy support easy and all of it starts with the data like if i was to say hey you're gonna get a get into a tesla right and you're gonna turn on the self-driving mode would you turn it on if you knew that there were zero miles clocked on the odometer right where no like yeah you're the first we haven't really trained this yet right no one would turn that on so for you to be able to offer a digital experience and a service experience to a customer it's all about miles driven and since we've introduced pier one five years ago you know now on a yearly basis we're collecting over 20 petabytes of data tons of signals training the algorithms around giving customers recommendations which we've been doing now customers can get performance recommendations and upgrade recommendations and now we've used the recommendations are such high fidelity that because of our miles driven we're using that internally to run and operate our services on behalf of customers and when companies think about disruptive events let me take my old portfolio and create a new one you're resetting the odometer at zero so without something like evergreen it makes no sense in terms of how do you get to as a service you can get to capex versus opex right and you know we were the first people to do that in storage with peers of service three plus years ago but we've moved beyond a financial offering now to talk about you know how do you run and operate performance and capacity slas well your point is so much more that customers need especially as there's more and more data being generated um you know the edge is exploding iot devices are exploding and there's more challenges that customers have to do but it's also being able to get those fast insights from data to be able to make those data-driven decisions which it sounds like what you're doing from all of the mileage that pure1 and pure as a service have so talk to me about some of the things that are being announced with respect to the digital experience of pure one at accelerate so there's three primary announcements um we've moved beyond observability first to do assessments so you know we can now say you know instead of just monitoring and watching what's going on we can give you a threat level assessment specific to ransomware that's a new capability we're introducing we've also been you know in monitoring monitoring storage and monitoring virtual machines for a while but we've if you take a look at how people deploy on storage they deploy vms and they deploy containers we've seen very little like they also have bare metal right but between those three now you cover how people are using storage from a deployment model and we've brought container monitoring into pier one for end-to-end traceability monitoring for you know both your container landscape as well as your storage landscape underneath with our flash frame flash plate so you know this observability and assessment space has a lot of new capabilities we're bringing the second piece is recommendations so previously we've had this data and customers could go into pure one and use the data they could simulate adding performance they could simulate adding capacity they could simulate moving this workload from here to here but now instead of you doing it we've we've created a recommendation engine where we'll tell you what to do because we actually tracked you know how much time is spent with people trying to figure out what to do there were times when storage admins were in the products like let me try moving it from here to here and see what would happen let me try moving it from here to here if you've got thousands of volumes and hundreds of arrays and that type of thing um you could spend weeks trying to figure out what to do by running permutational combinatorics so instead we've used our ai engine now to simulate taking into account customer preference load capacity previous buying patterns etc to create high fidelity recommendations for performance capacity placing new workloads workflow rebalancing and even for pure as a service which sla should i sign up for when you go to amazon one of the biggest problems on the on the cloud is too much choice there's like 300 items on the service catalog even in storage there's like i don't know 20 30 options of should i pick this storage type or this storage type for that storage type how do you even know um because we've been the miles driven analogy because we now know how customers have been deploying you can choose your workloads and based on what we've seen based on the wisdom of what we've collected across all the other customers we can tell you which service instance type you need so this recommendation approach is big and then the last one is self-service so customers now can control and set their reserved instances expand set their renewals we've even introduced a partner persona where partners can manage things on behalf of a customer and see transparency in billing and order traffic so all of those things that you're used to in kind of a commerce and a cloud experience we've brought that to traditional storage so some pretty big changes there and i like how how here has always been very bold in defining its differentiators using its own data to make better decisions as you you said customers have a ton of choice which is great it's also challenging at the same time for them to be able to understand objectively what is it that my environment needs talk to me a little bit about some of the changes that you saw in the last year as companies shifted almost overnight to a remote working situation can't get into my data center what are some of the ways in which pure has helped organizations with the advancements that you've made in your services portfolio well so the first thing we did and we did this kind of literally i think last february when you know everything immediately went into lockdown we introduced a zero touch provisioning category you don't want people in the data data data center right you like you need to obviously if there's physical stuff you have to rack stack and cable but beyond that everything else should be zero touch and so we've introduced zero patch provisioning capability immediately and some of like the largest uh one of the largest you know video conferencing providers on the planet um happened to call us immediately saying look we can't even get stuff to keep up with the demand and overnight we were able to go ahead and work with them to you know get them the efficiency that they needed so you know if i take a look at our supply chain throughout covid we were able you know to meet most shipments in some four days throughout covid even in a globally disrupted supply chain because of the agility and the flexibility we have in our portfolio and frankly just a phenomenal supply chain team as well so you know that that approach has engendered a ton of trust whenever you do anything like you know in this environment covid pandemic etc people are under stress it creates stress for human beings it even creates stress for families right have two small children it creates stress [Music] what do you how do you get through that stress all the things that are unnecessary are things you just forget about and to get the things that are necessary done you go to the people you trust so that's a great that's a great point you bring up about trust because that is table stakes for an organization to trust its partners or its customers to be able to trust that it's going to deliver what it needs it's no longer a nice to have i think this one of the things that coveted clement has shown us is that it's absolutely essential last question progression i want to get to you is let's talk about ai ops for a second we're seeing more and more organizations turning to ai ops for more intelligent operations what is it what are some of the benefits that pure can deliver in that response well look i have a lot of opinions on aiops but the first one is like saying aaiops now was like saying web 2.0 a few years ago right um it's a hot term everyone likes to talk about it and very few people actually do anything real ai right it's like well let me tell you something so as you think about aiops today you need to first get the data in the miles driven manner the second thing you need to do is you could use that data and create a ton of recommendations that you tell send to customers and you will be the equivalent of facebook ads right like click click click click click some of these are relevant some of these aren't right if all you do is create recommendations you're creating a spam flow to your customers the number one thing to really make it learning based is if someone rejects a recommendation you now have to collect that and train your algorithms to say you know what this person doesn't need that right and maybe the other person accepted that same recommendation and they do so the time isn't just about data collection and miles driven but the amount of recommendations that customers accept and reject can train and personalize how you do your ai operations and i feel like this economy because aiops is hot everyone's just like i have ai ops and it's just so facetious you need to think about how you're going to continually evolve and train and learn and who's going to train the way you train support is support personnel and bug fixes you need to monitor how your support personnel fixes things to be able to replicate and have higher efficiencies and support so even small customers can get the same level of support as the large customers because you know it's not like the big guys get 50 people and the small guys only get one right you need to use software as the great equalizer and the same thing goes in sales when you're approaching customers with offers and recommendations or when customers whether they need performance or capacity the fidelity matters and data and technology will only go so far you need to use the human feedback loop to train your ai if you don't do that you're missing the concept of machine learning agreed to last question since we have about 30 seconds left or so talk to me about how pure is going to continue to utilize ai and to your point not just throw out recommendations but actually have learning going on so that the right relevant offers for example can be delivered to the right customer at the right time well we pride ourselves on simplicity and customer first right our net promoter score is you know one of the top trust scores in the industry and because of that we've got a very vibrant and active customer community that goes into you know pure one on a daily basis to monitor the landscape to see what's going on to create support cases whatever it may be and because of that we're going to continue engaging and learning from our customers and you know i think you can't do it without the trust and you know a large portion of our business is large sas providers so you know you think about you know very very large sas companies we service them because of our evergreen model and now bringing this level of predictability creates a level of efficiency for sas companies um that means they could do more with less and that's what this industry is about well said prakash thank you so much for joining me at your our coverage of accelerate excited to see what's going on with the modern data experience how you're getting in there and working and partnering with customers using the data to learn and tweak and improve uh excited to hear some of the other stuff that comes up but i appreciate you joining me this morning thanks for having me lisa i enjoy the conversation excellent for prakash darjee i'm lisa martin you're watching thecube's coverage of pure accelerate 2021.

(bright upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome to theCUBE's coverage of Pure Accelerate 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, please stay welcoming back one of our alumni Murli Thirumale is here, the VP & GM of the Cloud Native Business Unit at Pure Storage, Murli, welcome back. >> Lisa, it's great to be back at theCUBE, looking forward to discussion. >> Likewise, so it's been about six months or so since the Portworx acquisition by Pure Storage, give us a lay of the land, what's been going on? What are some of the successes, early wins, and some of the lessons that you've learned? >> Yeah, this is my third time being in Cloud, being a serial entrepreneur. So I've seen this movie before, and I have to say that this is really a lot of good anticipation followed by actually a lot of good stuff that has happened since, so it's been really a great ride so far. And when, let me start with the beginning, what the fundamental goal of the acquisition were, right? The couple of major goals, and then I can talk about how that integration is going. Really, I think from our viewpoint, from the Portworx viewpoint, the goal of the acquisition, from our view, was really to help turbocharge in our growth, we had really a very, very good product that was well accepted and established at customers, doing well as far as industry acceptance was concerned. And frankly, we had some great reference customers and some great installs expanding pretty well. Our issue was really how fast can we turbocharge that growth because as everybody knows, for a startup, the expensive part of an expansion is really on the go-to-market and sales side. And frankly, the timing for this was critical for us because the market had moved from the Kubernetes' market, has moved from sort of the innovator stage to the early majority stage. So from the Pure side, I think this made a lot of sense for them, because they have been looking for how they can expand their subscription models, how they can move to add more value from the array based business that there really have been a wonderful disruptor and to add more value up the stack, and that was the premise of the acquisition. One of the things that I paid a lot of attention to, as anybody does in acquisitions, is not just the strategy but really to understand if there was a culture fit between the teams, because a lot of the times acquisitions don't work because of the poor culture fit. So now let me kind of fast forward little bit and say, "Hey, what we know looking back in about six to eight months into it, how has it turning out so far?" And things have been just absolutely wonderful. Let me actually start with the culture fit, because that often is ignored and is one of the most important parts, right? The resonance in the culture between the two companies is just off the charts, right? It actually starts with what I would call a dramatic kind of customer first orientation, it's something we always had at Portworx. I always used to tell our customers with a startup you end up kind of, you buy the product, but you get the team, right? That's what happens with early stage startups, but Pure is sort of the same way, they are very focused on customer. So the customer focus is a very very useful thing that pulls us together. The second thing that's been really heartwarming to see has been really the focus on product excellence. Pure made it's dramatic entry into the market using Flash, and being the best Flash-based solution, and now they've expanded into many, many different areas. And Portworx also had a focus on product excellence, and so that has kind of moved the needle forward for both of us. And then I think the third thing is really a focus on the team winning, and not just an individual, right? And look, in these COVID times, this has been a tough year for everybody, I think it's, to some extent, even as we onboard new people, it's the culture of the team, the ability to bring new people onboard, and buy the culture, and make progress, all of that is really a function of how well the team is, 'we' is greater than 'me' type of a model, and I think that both these three values of customer first, high focus on product excellence, and the value in the team, including the resellers and the customers as part of the team, has really been the cornerstone, I think, of our success in the integration. >> That's outstanding because, like you said, this is not your first rodeo launching, coming out of stealth and launching and getting acquired, but doing so during one of the most challenging times in the last 100 years in our history while aligning cultures, I think that says a lot about the leadership on the Portworx side and the Pure side. >> I have to say, right? This is one of those amazing things, many people now that having been acquired can say this, really, most of the diligence, the transactions, all of that were done over Zoom, right? So, and then of course, everything since then is we're still in Zoom paradise. And so I think it really is a testament to the modern tools and stuff that we have that enable that. Now, let me talk a little bit about the content of what has happened, right? So strategically, I think the three areas that I think we've had huge synergy and seeing the benefits are first and foremost on the product side. A little later, I'd like to talk a little bit about some of the announcements we're making, but essentially, Pure had this outstanding core storage infrastructure product, well-known in the industry, very much Flash-oriented, part of the whole all Flash era now. And Portworx really came in with the idea of driving Kubernetes and Cloud Native workloads, which are really the majority of modern workloads. And what we found since then is that the integration of having really a more complete stack, which is really centered around what used to be an IT infrastructure of purchase, and what is in fact, for Kubernetes, a more DevOps oriented purchase. And that kind of a combination of being able to provide that combo in one package is something that we've been working very hard on in the last six months. And I'll mention some of the announcements, but we have a number of integrations with FlashArray and FlashBlade and other Pure products that we're able to highlight. So product integration for sure has been an area of some focus, but against a lot of progress. The second one is really customer synergy. I kind of described to our team when we got acquired, I said it's, for us, it's, being acquired by Pure is like strapping a rocket ship to ourselves as a small company, because we now have access to a huge customer footprint. Pure has over 8,000 customers, hugely amazingly high, almost unbelievable NPS score with customers, one of the best in the IT industry. And I think we are finding that with the deployment of containers becoming more ubiquitous, right? 80, 90% of customers in the enterprise are adopting Kubernetes and Containers. And therefore these 8,000 customers are a big huge target, they got a big target sign for both of us to be able to leverage. And so we've had a number of things that we're doing to address and use the Pure sales team to get access to them. The Pure channel of course is also part of that, Pure is 100% channel organization, which is great. So I think the synergy on the customer side with being able to have a solution that works for infrastructure and for DevOps has been a big area. In this day and age, Kubernetes is an area, for many of your listeners who are very, very familiar with Kubernetes, customers struggle, not just with day zero, but day one, day two, day three, right? It's how do you put it in production. And support, and integrating, and the use of Kubernetes and containers, putting that stack together is a big area. So support is a big area of pain for customers, and it's an area that, again, for a Portworx viewpoint, now we've expanded our footprint with a great support organization that we can bring to bear 24 by seven around the globe. Portworx is running on a lot of mission critical applications in big industries like finance and retail, and these types of things, really, support is a big area. And then the last thing I will just say is the use cases are usually synergistic, right? And we'll talk a little bit more about use cases as we go along here, but really there's legacy apps, right? In an interesting way, there's 80% of, IT spending is still on legacy apps, if you will, in that stack. However, 80% of all the new applications are being deployed on this modern app stack, right? >> Right. >> With all these open-source type of products and technologies. And most of that stack, most of the modern app stack is containerized. The 80, 85% of those applications really are where customers have chosen containers and Kubernetes as the as the mechanism to deliver those apps. And therefore Pure products like FlashBlade were very, very focused with fast recovery for these kind of modern apps, which are the stack of AI, and personalization, and all the modern digital apps. And I think those things can align well with the Portworx offering. So really around the areas of culture, customers, product synergy, support, and finally use cases, are all kind of been areas of huge progress for us. >> It also seems to me that the Portworx acquisition gives Pure a foray, a new buying center with respect to DevOps, talk to me a little bit about that as an opportunity for Pure. >> Yeah, the modern world is one where the enterprise itself has segmented into whole lot of new areas of spending and infrastructure ownership, right? And in the old days it used to be the network, storage, compute, and apps, sort of the old model of the world. And of course the app model has moved on, and then certainly there's a lot of different ways, web apps, the three tier apps, and the web apps, and so on. But the infrastructure world has morphed really into a bunch of other sub-segments, and some of it is still traditional hardware, but then even that is being cloudified, right? Because a lot of companies like Pure have taken their hardware array offerings and are offering that as a cloud-like offering where you can purchase it as a service, and in fact, Pure is offering a set of solutions called Evergreen that allow you to not even, you're just under subscription, you get your hardware refresh bundled in, very, very innovative. So you have now new buying centers coming in, in addition to the old traditional IT, there is sort of this whole, what used to be in the old ways called middleware, now has kind of morphed into this DevSecOps set of folks, right? Which is DevOps it's ITOps, and even security is a big part of that, the CISO Organization has that kind of segment. And so these buying centers often have new budgets, right? It turns out that, for example, to contrast, the Portworx budget really comes from entirely different budget, right? Our top two budget sources are usually CIO initiatives, they're not from the traditional storage budget, it comes from things like move to cloud or business transformation. And those set of folks, that set of customers, is really born in a different era, so to speak. You know, Lisa, they come, and I come from the old world, so I would say that I'm kind of more of an oldie, hopefully a Goldie, but an oldie. These folks are born in the post-DevOps, post-cloud, post-open-source world, right? They are used to brand new tools, get-ops, the way that everything's run on the cloud, it's on demand. So what we bring to Pure is really the ability to take their initiatives, which were around infrastructure, and cloudifying infrastructure to now adding two layers on top of that, right? So what Portworx adds to Pure is the access to the new automation layer of middleware. Kubernetes is nothing but really an automation of model for containers and for infrastructure now. And then the third layer is on top of us, is what I would call SaaS, the SaaSified layer, and as a service layer. And so we bring the opportunity to get those SaaS-like budgets, the DevOps budgets, and the DevOps and the SaaS kind of buyers, and together the business has very different models to it. In addition to not just a different technologies, the buying behavior is different, it's based on a consumption model, it's a subscription business. So it really is a change for new budgets, new buyers, and new financial models, which is a subscription model, which as you know, is valued much more highly by Wall Street nowadays compared to say some of the older hardware models. >> Well, Murli, when we talk about storage, we talk about data or the modern data experience. The more and more data that's being produced, the more value potentially there is for organizations, I think we saw, we learned several lessons in the last year, and one of them is that being able to glean insights from data in real-time or near real-time is, for many businesses, no longer a nice to have, it's really table stakes, it was for survival of getting through COVID, it is now in terms of identification of new business models, but it elevates the data conversation up to the C-suite, the board going, "Is our data protected? Is it secure? Can we access it?" And, "How do we deliver a modern data experience to our customers and to our internal employees?" So with that modern data experience, and maybe the elevation about conversation lengths, talk to me about some of the things that you're announcing at Accelerate with respect to Portworx. >> Yeah, so there are two sets of announcements. To be honest actually, this is a pretty exciting time for us, we're in theCUBE Cone time and the Accelerate time. And so let me kind of draw a circle around both those sets of announcements, if you will, right? So let's start perhaps with just the sets of things that we are announcing at Accelerate, right? This is kind of the first things that are coming up right now. And I'll tell you, there are some very, very exciting things that we're doing. So the majority of the announcements are centered around a release that we have called 2.8, so Portworx says, "We've been in the market now for well over five years with the product that really has been well deployed in very large global 2K enterprises." So the three or four major announcements, one of them is what I was talking about earlier, the integration of true Kubernetes applications running on Pure Storage. So we have a Cloud Native, a Native implementation of Portworx running on FlashArray and FlashBlade, where essentially when users now provision a container volume to Portworx, the storage volumes are magically created on FlashArray and FlashBlade, right? It's the idea of, without having to interface, so a DevOps engineer can deploy storage as code by provisioning volumes using Kubernetes without having to go issue a trouble ticket or a service ticket for a PureArray. And Portworx essentially access a layer between Kubernetes and the PureArray, and we allow configuration of volumes on the storage volumes of the PureArray directly. So essentially now on FlashArray, these volumes now receive the full suite of Portworx Storage Management features, including Kubernetes DR, backup, security, auto scaling, and migration. So that is a first version of this integration, right? The second one, it's, I am, is a personal favorite of mine, it's very, very exciting, right? When we came into Pure, we discovered that Pure already had this software solution called Pure as a service, it was essentially a Pure1 service that allowed for continuous call home, and log and diagnostic information, really an awesome window for customers to be able to see what their array utilization is like, complete observability, end-to-end on capacity, what's coming up, and allowed for proactive addressing of outages, or issues, or being able to kind of see it before it happen. The good news now is Portworx is integrated with Pure1, and so now customers have a unified observability stack for their Kubernetes applications using Portworx and FlashArray and FlashBlade in the Pure1 portal. So we are in the Pure1 portal now really providing end-to-end troubleshooting of issues and deployment, so very, very exciting, something that I think is a major step forward, right? >> Absolutely, well that single pane of glass is critical for management, so many companies waste a lot of time and resources managing disparate disconnected systems. And again, the last year has taught us so many businesses, there wasn't time, because there's going to be somebody right behind you that's going to be faster and more nimble, and has that single pane of glass unified view to be able to make better decisions. Last question, really, before we wrap here. >> Yeah. >> I can hear your momentum, I can feel your momentum through Zoom here. Talk to me about what's next, 'cause I know that when the acquisition happened about, we said six months or so ago, you said, "This is a small step in the Portworx journey." So what's ahead? >> Lisa, great question. I can state 10 things, but let me kind of step up a little bit at the 10,000 foot level, right? In one sense, I think no company gets to declare victory in this ongoing battle and we're just getting started. But if I had to kind of say, "What are some of the major teams that we have been part of and have been able to make happen in addition to take advantage of?" Pure obviously took advantage of the Flash wave, and they moved to all Flash, that's been a major disruptor with Pure being the lead. For Portworx, it has been really the move to containers and data management in an automated form, right? Kubernetes has become sort of not just a container orchestrator looking North, but looking southbound, is orchestrating infrastructure, we are in the throws of that revolution. But if you think about it, the other thing that's happening is all of this is in the service of, if you're a CIO, you're in the service of lines of businesses asking for a way to run their applications in a multicloud way, run their applications faster. And that is really the, as a service revolution, and it feels a little silly to almost talk about it as a service in that it's this late in the Cloud era, but the reality is that's just beginning, right? As a service revolution dramatically changed the IaaS business, the infrastructure business. But if you look at it, data services as a, data as a service is something that is what our customers are doing, so our customers are taking Pure hardware, Portworx software, and then they are building them into a platform as a service, things like databases as a service. And what we are doing, you will see some announcements from us in the second half of this year, terribly exciting, I just can't wait for it, where we're going to be actually moving forward to allow our customers to more quickly get to data services at the push of a button, so to speak, right? So- >> Excellent. >> The idea of database as a service to offer messaging as a service, search as a service, streaming as a service, and then finally some ML kind of AI as a service, these five categories of data services are what you should be expecting to see from Portworx and Pure going forward in the next half. >> Big potential there to really kick the door wide open on the total adjustable market. Well, Murli, it's been great to have you on the program, I can't wait to have you on next 'cause I know that there's so much more, like I said, I can feel your momentum through our virtual experience here. Thank you so much for joining us and giving us the lay of the land of what's been happening with the Portworx acquisition and all of the momentum and excitement that is about to come, we appreciate your time. >> Thank you, Lisa. Cheers to a great reduced COVID second half of the year. >> Oh, cheers to that. >> Yeah cheers, thanks. >> From Murli Thirumale, I'm Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE's coverage of Pure Accelerate. (bright upbeat music)

>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE Conversation. >> Hi I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, we're here for a special CUBE Conversation. Obviously we're remote, we're in the studio most of the time but on the weekends I get an opportunity to talk to friends and experts. And here I wanted to really dig in with an awesome case study around AWS Cloud in a use case that I think is game changing for local communities, especially in this time of COVID. You have local communities where local journalism is suffering, but also connectedness. And connected experience is what's going to make the difference as we come out of this pandemic as a societal impact. But there's a real tech story here I want to dig into. We're here with Dan Drew who is the vice president of engineering for Clinical Didja, they make an app called Local BTV which basically takes over the air television and streams it to an app in your local area, enabling access to linear TV and on demand as well for local communities. It's a phenomenal project and it's unique. Somewhat misunderstood right now, but I think it's going to be something that's going to be very important. Dan, thank you for coming on and chatting with me. >> Thanks for having me, appreciate it. >> Okay so I'm a big fan, I've been using the app in San Francisco. I know New York's on the docket, it might even be deployed. You guys have a unique infrastructure capability that's powering this new app location, and this is the focus of this conversation in this CUBE Talk. Amazon is a big part of this. Talk about your local BTV that you are protecting, this platform for broadcast television, it has a unique hybrid cloud architecture. Can you tell us about that? >> Yeah certainly, I mean, one of our challenges, as you know, is that we are local television. So unlike a lot of products on the market, you know like your Hulus or other VMPV products, which primarily service sort of national feeds and things like that. We have to be able to receive over-the-air signals in each market. Many channels that serve local content are still over the air. And that is why you don't see a lot of them on those types of services. They tend to get ignored and unavailable to many users. So that's part of our value proposition is to not only allow more people to get access to these stations, but allow the stations themselves to reach more people. So that means that we have to have a local presence in each market in order to receive those signals. So that sort of forces us to have this hybrid model where we have local data centers, but then we also want to be able to effectively manage those in a central way, and we do that in our cloud platform which is hosted on Amazon and using Amazon services. >> All right let me take a breath here. You have a hybrid architecture on Amazon so since you're using a lot of the plumbing, take us through what the architecture of this ram is on using a variety of their services. Can you unpack that? >> Yeah, so obviously it starts with some of the core services like EC2, S3, RDS, which everybody on the planet uses. We're also very focused on using ECS; we're completely containerized which allows us to more effectively deploy our services and scale them. And one of the benefits on that front that Amazon provides is that because their container service is wired into all the other services like cloudwatch metrics, auto-scaling policies, IM policies, things like that. It means it allows us to manage those things in a much more effective way, and use those services to much more effectively make those things reliable and scalable. We also use a lot of their technologies, for example, for collecting metrics. So we use Kinesis and Redshift to collect realtime metrics from all of our markets across the U.S. That allows us to do that reliably and at scale without having to manage complex ETL systems like Kafka and other things. As well as store it in a large data lake like Redshift and Corid for analytics and things like that. We also use technologies like Media Tailor, so for example, one of the big features that most stations do not have access to is realtime targeted advertising. In the broadcast space, many ads are sold and placed weeks in advance, and not personalized obviously for that reason. Whereas one of the big features we can bring to the table using our system and technologies like Media Tailor is we can provide realtime targeted advertising which is a huge win for these stations. >> What are some of the unique capabilities that you guys can offer broadcast station partners 'cause you're basically going in and partnering with broadcast stations as well. But also you're enabling new broadcasters to jump in as well. What are some of the unique capabilities that you're delivering, what is Amazon bringing to the table there and what are you doing that's unique? >> Well again, it allows us, because we can do things centrally as well as the local reception, it allows us to do some interesting things like if we have channels that are allowed to broadcast even outside their market, then we can easily put them in other markets and get them even more viewers that way. We have the ability to even do hyper local or community channels that are not necessarily broadcasting all of the standard antennas, but can get us a feed from whatever zip code in whatever market, and we can give them a way to reach viewers in the entire market, in other markets, or even just in their local area. So consider the case where maybe a high school or a college wants to show games or local content, we provide a platform where they can now do that, and reach more people using our app and our platform very very easily. So that's another area that we want to help expand is not just your typical view of local of what's available in Phoenix, but what's available in a particular city in that area or a local community where they want to reach their community more effectively or even have content that might be interesting to other communities in Phoenix or one of the other markets. >> Now I think, just going on a side tangent here, I talked with your partner, Jim Long, who's the CEO, you guys have an amazing business opportunity. Again, I think it's kind of misunderstood, but it's very clear to me that someone who follows and has huge passion about local journalism, you know you see awesome efforts out there like Charlie Sennott from the Ground Truth Project Report for America, they take a journalism kind of print view, but if you add that Didja business model onto this local journalism, you can enable more video locally. I mean, that's really the killer app, video. And now COVID more than ever, I really want to know things like there's a mural in downtown Palo Alto, Black lives matter, I want to know what's going on with the local summer restaurants, putting people out on the sidewalks. Right now I'm limited to like next door or very laggy media, whether it's the website, so again, I think this is an opportunity for that, plus education. I mean, Amazon educate for instance, you can get a degree on computing by sitting on the couch. So again, this is a paradigm shift from an application standpoint that you're providing essentially linear TV to that. >> Exactly. >> In the local economy. So I just want to give you a shout-out for that because I think it's super important. I think people should get behind this, so congratulations. Okay I'm off on my little rant there. Let's get back down to some of that cloud stuff 'cause I think what's super interesting to me is you guys can stand up infrastructure very quickly, and what you've done here, you've leveraged the benefits of Amazon and the goodness of cloud, you essentially can stand up a metro region pretty quickly and pretty impressive. So I got to ask you, what Amazon services are most important for your business? >> Well like I said, I think for us, it's managing the central services so we sort of talked about managing the software, the APIs, and those are kind of the glue, so for us standing up a new metro is obviously getting the data center contracts and all the other messy stuff you have to deal with, just to have a footprint. But essentially once we have that in place, we can spin up the software in the data center and have it hooked into our central service within hours. And we can be starting channels literally within half a day. So that's the real win for us is having all that central glue and that central management system and the scalability where we can just add another 10, 20, 50, 100 markets and the system is set up to scale centrally where we can start collecting metrics through Cloud watch from those data centers, we're collecting logs and diagnostic information so we can detect health and everything else centrally and monitor and operate all of these things centrally in a way that is sane and not crazy. We don't need a 24/7 knock of a thousand people to do this, you know, and do that in a way that we, as a relatively small company, can still scale and do that in a sensible way, and a cost-effective way, which is obviously very important for us at our size, but at any size, you want to make sure if you're going to go into 200 plus markets that you have a really good cost model and that's one of the things where Amazon has really really helped us is allow us to do some really complex things, and in an efficient, scalable, reliable, and cost-effective way. The cost for us to go into a new metro now is so small relatively speaking that that's really what allows us to do as a business and now we just opened up New York and we're going to keep expanding on that model so that's been a huge win for us is evaluating what Amazon can bring to the table versus other third parties or building our own obviously-- >> So Amazon gives you the knock basically leverage and scale. The data center you're referring to, that's pretty much just to get an origination point in the territory. >> Dan: Exactly, that's right. >> So it's not like it's a super complex data center. You can just go in, making sure that they got all the normal path to recovery and the normal stuff, it's not like a heavy duty buildup. Can you explain that? >> Yeah, so one thing we do do in our data centers is because we are local, we have sort of primary data centers where we do do transcoding and origination of the video so we receive the video locally and then we want to transcode and deliver it locally and that way we're not sending video across the country and back type of thing. So that is sort of the hybrid part of our model. So we stand that up, but then that is all managed by the central service. So we essentially have another container cluster using Kubernetes in this case. But that Kubernetes cluster is essentially told what to do by everything that's running in Amazon. So we essentially stand up the Kubernetes cluster, we wire it up to the central service, and then from then on, we just go into the central service and say stand up these channels and it all pops up. >> Well my final question on the Amazon piece is really about the future capability besides having a CUBE channel which we'd love to have on there, I told my guys we'll get there. But we're just too busy working around the clock as you guys are with COVID-19. (overlapping chatter) I could almost see a slew of new services coming out, just on the Amazon side. If I'm on the Amazon side I'm thinking, okay I'll post this as an opportunity for me. I can see sage making and machine learning coming in and adding value for the user experience. And also enabling their own stuff. They've got a ton of stuff with Prime and moving people around and delivering things. I mean the headroom for Amazon in this thing is off the charts. But that being said, that's Amazon, I could see them winning with this. I know certainly I know you're using Elemental as well, but for you guys on the consumer side, what features and what new things do you see on the roadmap or what you might envision the future looking like? >> Well, I think part of it I think there's two parts. One of it is what are we going to deliver ourselves so we talked about adding community content and continuing to evolve the local BTV product. But we also see ourselves primarily as a local TV platform. For example, you mentioned Prime and a lot of people are now realizing, especially with COVID and what's going on, the importance of local television and so we're in discussions on a lot of fronts with people to see how we can be the provider of that local TV content. And that's really a lot of stations are super excited about that too 'cause you know, again, looking to expand their own footprint and their own reach, we're basically the way that we can join those two things together between the stations, the other video platforms, and distribution mechanisms, and the viewers obviously at the end of the day, we want to make sure local viewers can get more local content and stuff that's interesting to them. Like you said with the news, it is not uncommon that you may have your Bay area stations but the news is still maybe very focused on LA or San Francisco or whatever. And so being able to enable the smaller regional outlets to reach people in that area in a more local fashion is definitely a big way that we can facilitate that from the platform and viewer perspective. So we're hoping to do that in any way we can. Our main focus is make local great and get the broadcast world out there and that's not going anywhere especially with things like HSE3 on the front, and we just want to make sure those people are successful and enrich people and make revenue. >> Yeah, you got a lot of (mumbles) but I think one of the things that's interesting about your project that I find is a classic case of people who focus in on just current market value investing, versus kind of the game-changing shifts is that you guys are horizontally enabling in the sense that there's so many different use cases I was pointing out from my perspective, journalism, and I look at that and I'm like, okay that's a huge opportunity just there, changing the game on societal impact on journalism, huge education opportunity for court cutters. You're talking about a whole nother thing around TV so I got to ask ya, pretend I'm an idiot for a minute. Pretend, let's make it, I am an idiot. I don't understand, isn't this just TV? What are you doing different because it's only local. I can't watch San Francisco if I'm in Chicago and I can't watch Chicago if I'm in San Francisco, I get that. But why is this important? Isn't this just TV? Can't I just get it on YouTube, TikTok, what is this? >> Yes and no. There's TV and then there's TV as you know. If you look at the TV landscape, it's pretty fractured but typically when you're talking about YouTube or Hulu, you're talking about sort of cable TV channels. You know, you're going to get your A&E, you're going to get some of your local through ABC and whatnot, but you're not really getting local content. So for example, in our Los Angeles market, there are about 100 and something over-the-air channels. If you look at the cross section of which of those channels you can get on your other big name products like your Hulus or your YouTube TV, you're talking about maybe half a dozen or a dozen. So we're talking about 90 plus channels that are local to LA that you can only get through an antenna. And those are hitting the type of demographics that, quite frankly, some of these other players just don't see as important. >> Under different minorities or immigrants, the each entrepreneurs of our country. >> Yes exactly, so we might see a lot of Korean channels or Spanish channels or other minority channels that you just won't get over your cable channels or your typical online video providers. So that's, again, why we feel like we've got something that is really unique and that is really under-served as far as on a television standpoint. The other side that we bring to the table is that a lot of these broadcast channels are under served themselves in terms of technology. If you look at ad insertion and a lot of the technical discussions about how to do live TV and how to get live TV out there, it's very focused on the OTT market, so again, going back to the Hulus and the YouTubes. >> OTT, over-the-top you mean. >> Over the top, yeah. And so this broadcast market basically had no real evolution on that front in a while and I sort of mentioned the way ad buying works. It's still sort of the traditional ad buying that happens a couple weeks in front, not a lot of targeted or anything ability. And even when we get to HSE3, you're now relying on having an HES3 TV and you're still tied to an antenna, etc, etc, which is, again, a good move forward, but still not covering the spectrum of what these guys really want to reach and do. So that's where we kind of fill in the gaps using technology and filling in the gap of receiving a signal and bringing these technologies to not only the ad insertion and the stuff we can do for the livestream, but providing analytics and other tools to the stations that they really don't have right now unless you're willing to shell out a lot of money for Nielsen, which a lot of local small stations don't do. So we can provide a lot of analytics on viewership and targeting and things like that that they're really looking forward to and really excited about. >> All right, I got to ask you, put you on the spot here, 'cause I always see Andy Jassy at (mumbles) hopefully I'll see him this year if they do an in-person event. He's really dynamic and you should send him an email; he tends to read his emails a lot, and if you're a customer and I know you are, but I've got to ask you, if you bumped into Andy Jassy on the elevator and he's like, hey why should I pay attention to Didja? Why is it important for Amazon and why is it important for the world? How does it raise the bar on society? >> Well I think part of what Amazon's goal, especially if you get into their work in public sector and education, that's really where we see we're focusing with the community and local television and enabling new types of local television. So I think there's a lot of advantage and I hate the word synergy, but I'm going to use the word synergy. As far as our goals in those areas around really helping, one of the terms flying around now is the double bottom line where it's not just about revenue, it's about how do we help people in communities be better as well? So there's a bottom line in terms of people, benefit, and revenue in that way, not just financial revenue. And that's very important to us as a business as well is that's why we're focused on local TV and we're not just doing another Fubo where it's really easy to get an IP national fee. It's really important to us to enable the local community and the local broadcasters and the local channels and the local viewers to get the content that they're missing out on right now. So I think there's a, I hate it but I'm going to use it, synergy on that front as far as-- >> Synergy and the new normal. >> Synergy and the new normal? I think COVID and some of the other things that have been happening in the news with the Black Lives Matter and a lot of the things going around where local and community has been in the spotlight and getting the word out and having really local things versus I'm just seeing this thing from three counties away which I don't really care about and it's not telling me what's happening down the street like you said. And that's really what we want to help improve and support. >> Yeah it's a great mission, and it's one we care a lot about theCUBE. We've seen the data: content drives community engagement, and community's where the truth is. So in an era when we need more transparency and more truth, you get more cameras on the street, you're going to start to see things. That's what we're seeing a lot of things. And as more data's exposed, as you turn the lights on, so to speak, that kind of data will only help communities grow, heal, and thrive. So to me, big believer in what you guys are doing. Local BTV has a great mission. I wish you guys well and thanks for explaining the infrastructure on Amazon. I think you guys have a really killer use case technically. I mean to me, I think the technical superiority of what you've done give ability to stand up to these kinds of network with massive number of potential reach out of the gate, that's pretty impressive, congratulations. >> Great, thank you very much and thanks for taking the time. (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. >> Hey everybody, this is Dave Vellante and welcome to this episode of "CXO Insights." As you know, we've been grabbing the perspectives of leaders throughout this pandemic and assessing their tips for managing in a crisis and of course, managing in good times as well. But now, as we enter the post-isolation economy, we really want to look at not just how you manage through the crisis but how you manage beyond the crisis. And I'm really excited to have Chris Riley here. He's the newly minted Chief Revenue Officer at Automation Anywhere. Chris, my friend, how you doing? I hope you and the family are well. >> Thank you, David. I wish the same for you. I think getting by as most folks are, it's the new normal, we're all getting used to it but I'm happy to be here and happy to be at Automation Anywhere. >> Yeah, I want to talk about that in detail. Eddie Walsh calls it the new abnormal but so congratulations on the new role. I want to start with your career. I met you in 1987, which ironically was the same year I met Dave Donatelli, the same year I met Michigan I. and Saul Koi, talk about great timing. And then, you came into the industry at a time, really different time. It was, the IBM people don't remember this but IBM was the dominant player and you guys unseated them amazing 12-year career at EMC and then you kind of went to the .com boom. That was amazing. You relive that ride, did a stint at HP and really turned that business around and then came back to Dell, top go to market executive. One of the top in the industry that I know and now, of course at Automation Anywhere we're going to talk about. My first question to you is, a lot of changes have occurred since 1987. What has changed the most? Now we're talking diversity, we're talking all kinds of your different sales models. From your career looking back, what's changed the most? >> I think everything has changed and candidly for the better, Dave. You just led with one of the key areas in an area I'm deeply passionate about and that is diversity and inclusion and I think there's no stronger time, at least in our country's history where the inequalities that exist have been so exposed. So I view this as an opportunity, as I did at Dell to make a difference, lead from the front and make this a destination and a company whose culture really supports and drives diversity and inclusion. So I'd say that's one area, and I know it's very passionate for you as well. The others, it was a time before laptops, desktops. I think Ken Olsen once said, who would ever need a laptop in their home and boy, the world has changed. So I think some of the things though that haven't changed and this is why I'm so excited about Automation Anywhere. At the manual processes we have our workers doing and I think there is a real opportunity. I've lived through explosive growth at EMC, top company performing stock during the 90s, I get to see VMware firsthand. I've seen what's happened with ServiceNow and I believe this RPA space, as to you is in its infancy. It's seeing 30% compounded annual growth and we're just at the beginning and I think it's going to change the way people work and really lead to that digital transformation that so many of us have been talking about for the last decade. >> Yeah and you know kind of my position. Quick aside, I don't know if you saw the Netflix announcement this morning and I've been wondering as a small business, what can we do? What more can we do for inclusion and diversity? Netflix announced they're going to take 2% of their cash and put it into banks, financial institutions that support black causes and I just talked to our CFO. I said, look, why don't we take some of our cash, let's take 2% and stick it into banks, community banks. There's 30 million small businesses in the United States. If just 1% puts 10 grand in each, that's $3 billion that go into black community. So I'm going to start a mission and I just thought I'd share that 'cause I know it's a passion of yours. >> Yeah, and we all need to be in a position to provide equal opportunity for employment and that is reaching out into those communities and starting early on in creating the opportunities for advancement professionally, mentorship and just the path forward. And I'm excited to see what Netflix is doing. I'm sure you'll come up with the right answer for your company and I think all of us are searching, what's the right answer for our respective companies? >> Yeah, so now let's get into it. You're a month in and I want to talk about this project. I've learned a lot about not only RPA but about automation. I've just had a deep dive with your team and it really brought some things into focus. Guys, if you bring up the first slide, I want to get some thoughts on the table here. So this is a chart that sort of came into my focus with a friend of mine, Dave Moschello, who really big thinker on this stuff and he pointed out, this is data from the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics and the EU and it shows the lackluster productivity that's going on in the past decade. So you can see, we had the boost in the 80s and the 90s, we had this sort of productivity uptick from laptops but now, look what's happened since 2007. And the point that Moschello made on the right hand side is we have all these huge issues that we face, whether it's climate change, we have this massive debt, healthcare, an aging population, feeding everyone, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and his point was, there's no way we're going to be able to solve all these problems by throwing humans at the problem. So I've really begun to sort of think about this just in terms of machines and the roles that machines will play. I think overnight, Chris, we've gone from, wow, I'm afraid that machines are going to take my job to you can't operate if you're not digital. >> Yeah, well digital transformation is not a new term. I think it's meant something different each year for the last 10 years and I look at this as an opportunity. The World Economic Forum projected that IA and RPA will create 58 million new jobs. It's an astounding number. What COVID-19 has exposed is this work from home phenomenon that really exposes the risk of manual processes within the enterprise. So I think those two things combined is almost a perfect storm and I think what it'll do is accelerate the adoption of RPA and IPA. So something that might've taken years or decades to really be adopted in force, in this new normal, I think is going to be accelerated quite dramatically. >> So, the combination of your go to market execution, you managed complex sales motions before. Automation Anywhere obviously has some great product capabilities. Guys, I want to bring up the next slide and Chris, you might have seen this in some of the stuff that I wrote but this is data from ETR Enterprise technology research. They're a data partner of ours. Now it's clear that Automation Anywhere has the right product market fit and you can see on this chart, this is a methodology that we use. ETR goes out and they ask people, are you adopting a platform new? Are you increasing spending relative to last year? Are you flat, decreasing or replacing? And you can see here, there is zero churn in the Automation Anywhere base. And so obviously you got product market fit. Churn is the silent killer, obviously of SAS companies and so, you've picked a winner and I'm learning more about this. At first I thought the team office is quite large, I sized it. I actually think it's bigger than I originally thought. Chris, I thought this was going to be a winner-take-all type of market. I'm really rethinking that after, especially the deep dive I've had with your team in terms of how you guys go to market with an end-to-end sort of life cycle approach as opposed to sort of putting point products in. So I wonder if that narrative that I just laid out, resonates with you, is it sort of consistent with what you're seeing and then maybe some of the reasons why you joined Automation Anywhere? >> Yeah, I would say the most aggressive software growth that I've seen in the last decade or so, and two companies stand out for me. That's VMware and ServiceNow. They don't have a point product, they have a platform and that's what attracted me to Automation Anywhere is this platform approach. And Dave as you know, I've spent most of my career calling on the enterprise' strong relationships with those types of companies and they aren't looking to develop a point product solution and then cobble together lots of disparate islands of solutions. They're looking for a platform that can grow as they grow. They can extend from the back office to the front office but all centered around workforce, transformation, productivity and just as importantly, resiliency. And as we start to develop more and more capabilities that will be delivered through this platform approach, I think we're going to see explosive growth as the industry goes through its explosive growth. >> Well, I know your approach and your approach is to stay very close to customers. So as you were doing your due diligence on Automation Anywhere and as you enter your sort of first part of your 100-day journey here, I'm sure you've talked to a lot of customers. What are they telling you? What are the big takeaways right now that you're hearing? >> Yeah, so I think some of the data you pointed out with 4,000 customers in essence, zero churn, the opportunity to upsell those customers with more products and solutions clearly is there. New account acquisition has been a tremendous source of growth for the company in a strong professional services organization that actually is able to deliver the outcomes that our customers expect. From an enterprise perspective, I couldn't have come into a better situation with 4,000 customers, 50% of the fortune 500, 2 million bots deployed, those types of strategic relationships are going to be more and more critical as this company continues to accelerate its growth. Most of the RPA solutions really got in through the back office and candidly, really weren't even a component of an IT solution. Now, as you go to the front of the house, where you're looking at customer facing applications and worker productivity, these are CEO, CFO, COO and IT initiatives. So I really believe we're coming into our own, at the front of the house with senior executives that really want to create a better working environment for their employees and de-risk a lot of these manual processes that have existed for years. >> So I know why you chose Automation Anywhere. My question is, why did Automation Anywhere choose Chris Riley? I know your capabilities but obviously when somebody hires a executive like yourself, they say, "Hey, Chris, we want you to help us "get to the next level," but what does that mean? Are we talking about changes in the go to market? Are we talking about your ability to recruit and coach, to manage complex of sales motions? What is it that you want to bring to Automation Anywhere? >> I think it's all those, Dave. Having built a reputation throughout my 30 plus year career around a people-centric focus, a customer-centric focus and those two things kind of aren't interchangeable. When you look at customers, they put their faith and confidence in people and they put their faith and confidence in companies. And what I see here at Automation Anywhere is that the ability to kind of expand upon the great culture that the company already has but do it with someone whose role in a company at scale globally and can put a lot of the best practices and disciplines in place to do that 'cause it is difficult but also, how do we start to do larger, more complex deals and build relationships with the CIO, the CFO, the CEO? And I think a big reason why I'm here is, that experience in doing that, doing large complex multi-year opportunities but also being able to deliver upon the outcomes that we told our customers we could achieve and do that together with our customers and again we have a strong professional services organization and an incredible ecosystem of partners that have demonstrated year over year, the company's ability to actually deliver upon its promise. >> That was my next question to you, was the ecosystem. One of the big changes from when you started in this business, was it used to be just belly to belly, hardcore, direct sales, the importance and leverage that you get from a partner ecosystem. You point out VMware. In fact ServiceNow, it's interesting. When we first started covering ServiceNow, one of the things we said is we want to see as an indicator of success, the partner ecosystem evolve and then sure enough, it exploded with the SIs and all the kinds of developers. So maybe talk about AA's ecosystem, The Partner System. You obviously have a lot of experience there in your career, how do you see that as a leverage point? >> Yeah, it's huge. This market is far larger than we can cover with a direct sales organization and requires substantial services engagements that go well beyond the kind of professional services organization we want to build out organically in the company. So when you look at that, the company today has 1,900 partners. The global systems integrators are key, especially those with VPO type practices, the regional SIs and candidly, the regional VARs who've built out a strong service malpractice, a strong VMware practice and have the professional services capabilities to do some of these complex automation or automation type work that have also built the trust and confidence of their customers. So, in partnership with these types of companies, we believe we can expand our reach. We believe we can offer a more comprehensive outcome and solution to our customers and we, what I'm going to be looking at is, how do we enhance our channel programs to be the kind of company that the channel partners want to engage with, built upon the reputation of the company, the leadership position we have in the technology and also our willingness to go after this space together. >> So I got to go but last question is, what can you share with us about your 100-day plan? Where are you going to focus? >> On the people. There is a strong culture here, there's incredible sales talent and there's talent throughout the organization. I think Dave, you've seen for me over the years, a clarity of our mission, keep things simple and try and drive a repetitive process to deliver results. I'm very accountability focused. So I think what I'm going to look to assess is where the organization is today, how to get more out of the great talent we have, build stronger and deeper relationships with our customers and really scale and grow through our ecosystem of channel partners. >> Well, Chris, I'm super excited for you. A great hire by Automation Anywhere obviously got my attention. I think it'll get the industry's as well. Best of luck, and of course we'll be watching. >> Good, always great to see you, Dave, take care. >> Yeah, ditto, thanks so much for coming on and thank you for watching everybody. Keep it here because this month we're going to be really digging into the ETR data we've been reporting on that horse race between Automation Anywhere and UI Path. The ETR data is in the field and we'll be reporting on that. So look for that. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time. (gentle music)

(upbeat music) >> From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a Cube conversation. >> Hi everybody, this is Dave Vellante. And as you know, I've been running a CxO series in this COVID economy. And as we go into the post-isolation world, really want to focus and expand our scope and really look at startups. And of course, we're going to look at startups, let's follow the money. And I want to start with the investor. Mark Roberge is here. He's the managing director at Stage 2 capital. He's a professor at the Harvard Business School, former CRO over at HubSpot. Mark, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, you bet, Dave. Thanks for having me. >> So I love that, you know... looking at your career a little bit, on your LinkedIn and following some of your videos, I love the fact that you did, and now you teach and you're also applying it with Stage 2 Capital. Tell us a little bit more about both of your career and Stage 2. >> Yeah, I mean, a lot of it's a bit serendipitous, especially last 10 years, but I've always had this learn, do, teach framework in my, in mind as I go through the decades of my career, you know, like you're probably like 80% learning in your twenties, early thirties and you know, 20% doing. Then, you know, I think my thirties was like leading the HubSpot sales team, a lot of doing, a little bit of teaching, you know, kind of hopping into different schools, et cetera, and also doing a lot of, some writing. And now like, I'm teaching it. I think investing kind of falls into that too, you know, where you've got this amazing opportunity to meet, the next generation of, of extraordinary entrepreneurs and engage with them. So yeah, that, that has been my career. You know, Dave, I've been a, passionate entrepreneur since 22 and then, the last one I did was HubSpot and that led to just an opportunity to build out one of the first sales teams in a complete inside environment, which opened up the doors for a data driven mindset and all this innovation that led to a book that led to recruitment on HBS's standpoint, to like come and teach that stuff, which was such a humbling honor to pursue. And that led to me a meeting my co-founder, Jay Po, of Stage 2 Capital, who was a customer to essentially start the first VC fund, running back by sales and marketing leaders, which was his vision. But when he proposed it to me, addressed a pretty sizeable void, that I saw, in the entrepreneur ecosystem that I thought could make a substantial impact to the success rate of startups. >> Great, I want to talk a little bit about how you guys compete and what's different there, but you know, I've read some of your work, looked at some of your videos, and we can bring that into the conversation. But I think you've got some real forward-thinking for example, on the, you know, the best path to the upper right. The upper right, being that, that xy-axis on growth and adoption, you know, do you go for hyper-growth or do you go for adoption? How you align sales and marketing, how you compensate salespeople. I think you've got some, some leading-edge thinking on that, that I'd love for you to bring into the conversation, but let's start with Stage 2. I mean, how do you compete with the big guys? What's different about Stage 2 Capital? >> Yeah, I mean, first and foremost, we're a bunch of sales and marketing and execs. I mean, our backing is, a hundred plus CROs, VPs of marketing, CMOs from, from the public companies. I mean, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Oracle, Salesforce, SurveyMonkey, Lyft, Asana, I mean, just pick a unicorn, we probably have some representation from it. So that's, a big part of how we compete, is most of the time, when a rocket ship startup is about to build a sales team, one of our LPs gets a call. And because of that, we get a call, right. And, and so there's, we're just deep in, in helping... So first off, assess the potential and risks of a startup in their current, go to market design, and then really, you know, stepping in, not just with capital, but a lot of know-how in terms of, you know, how to best develop this go-to-market for their particular context. So that's a big part of our differentiation. I don't think we've ever lost a deal that we tried to get into, you know, for that reason, just because we come in at the right stage, that's right for our value prop. I'd say Dave, the biggest, sort of difference, in our investing theme. And this really comes out of like, post HubSpot. In addition to teaching the HBS, I did parachute into a different startup every quarter, for one day, where you can kind of like assess their go-to-market, looking for, like, what is the underlying consistency of those series A businesses that become unicorns versus those that flatline. And if I, you know, I've now written like 50 pages on it, which I, you know, we can, we can highlight to the crew, but the underlying cliffnotes is really, the avoidance of a premature focus on top line revenue growth, and an acute focus early on, on customer attention. And, I think like, for those of you, who run in that early stage venture community these days, and especially in Silicon Valley, there's this like, triple, triple, double, double notion of, like year one, triple revenue, year two, triple revenue, year three, double revenue, year four, double revenue, it's kind of evolved to be like the holy grail of what your objectives should be. And I do think like there is a fraction of companies that are ready for that and a large amount of them that, should they pursue that path, will lead to failure. And, and so, we take a heavy lens toward world-class customer retention as a prerequisite, to any sort of triple, triple, double, double blitzscaling type model. >> So, let me ask you a couple of questions there. So it sounds like your LPs are heavily, not only heavily and financially invested, but also are very active. I mean, is that a, is that a fears thing? How active are the LPs in reality? I mean, they're busy people. They're they're software operators. >> Yeah. >> Do they really get involved in businesses? >> Absolutely. I mean, half of our deals that we did in fund one came from the LPs. So we get half of our funnel, comes from LPs. Okay. So it's always like source-pick-win-support. That's like, what basically a VC does. And our LPs are involved in every piece of that. Any deal that we do, we'll bring in four or five of our LPs to help us with diligence, where they have particular expertise in. So we did an insuretech company in Q4, one of our LPs runs insurance practice at Workday. And this particular play he's selling it to big insurance companies. He was extremely helpful, to understand that domain. Post investment, we always bring in four or five LPs to go deeper than I can on a particular topic. So one of our plays is about to stand up in account based marketing, you know, capability. So we brought in the CMO, a former CMO at Rapid7 and the CMO at Unisys, both of which have, stood in, stood up like, account based marketing practices, much more deeply, than I could. You know of course, we take the time to get to know our LPs and understand both their skills, and experiences as well as their willingness to help, We have Jay Simons, who's the President of Atlassian. He doesn't have like hours every quarter, he's running a $50 billion company, right? So we have Brian Halligan, the CEO of HubSpot, right? He's running a $10 billion company now. So, we just get deal flow from them and maybe like an event once or twice a year, versus I would say like 10 to 20% of our LPs are like that. I would say 60% of them are active operators who are like, "You know what? I just miss the early days, and if I could be active with one or two companies a quarter, I would love that." And I would say like a quarter of them are like semi-retired and they're like, they're choosing between helping our company and being on the boat or the golf course. >> Is this just kind of a new model? Do you see having a different philosophy where you want to have a higher success rate? I mean, of course everybody wants to have a, you know, bat a thousand. >> Yeah. >> But I wonder if you could address that. >> Yeah. I don't think it, I'm not advocating slower growth, but just healthier growth. And it's just like an extra, it's really not different than sort of the blitzscaling oriented San Francisco VC, okay? So, you know, I would say when we were doing startups in the nineties, early 2000s before The Lean Startup, we would have this idea and build it in a room for a year and then sell it in parallel, basically sell it everywhere and Eric Ries and The Lean Startup changed all that. Like he introduced MVPs and pivots and agile development and we quickly moved to, a model of like, yeah, when you have this idea, it's not like... You're really learning, keep the team small, keep the burn low, pivot, pivot, pivot, stay agile and find product-market fit. And once you do that, scale. I would say even like, West Coast blitzscaling oriented VCs, I agree with that. My only take is... We're not being scientifically rigorous, on that transition point. Go ask like 10 VCs or 10 entrepreneurs, what's product-market fit, and you'll get 10 different answers. And you'll get answers like when you have lots of sales, I just, profoundly disagree with that. I think, revenue in sales has very little to do with product-market fit. That's like, that's like message-market fit. Like selling ice to Eskimos. If I can sell ice to Eskimos, it doesn't mean that product-market fit. The Eskimos didn't need the ice. It just means I was good at like pitching, right? You know, other folks talk about like, having a workable product in a big market. It's just too qualitative. Right? So, that's all I'm advocating is, that, I think almost all entrepreneurs and investors agree, there's this incubation, rapid learning stage. And then there's this thing called product-market fit, where we switch to rapid scale. And all I'm advocating is like more scientist science and rigor, to understanding some sequences that need to be checked off. And a little bit more science and rigor on what is the optimal pace of scale. Because when it comes to scale, like pretty much 50 out of 50 times, when I talk to a series A company, they have like 15 employees, two sales reps, they got to like 2 million in revenue. They raise an 8 million-dollar round in series A, and they hired 12 salespeople the next month. You know, and Dave, you and your brother, who runs a large sales team, can really understand how that's going to failure almost all the time. (Dave mumbles) >> Like it's just... >> Yeah it's a killer. >> To be able to like absorb 10 reps in a month, being a 50, it's just like... Who even does all those interviews? Who onboards them? Who manages them? How do we feed them with demand? Like these are some of the things I just think, warrant more data and science to drive the decisions on when and how fast to scale. >> Mark, what is the key indicator then, of product-market fit? Is it adoption? Is it renewal rates? >> Yeah. It's retention in my opinion. Right? So, so the, the very simple framework that I require is you're ready to scale when you have product-market and go to market-fit. And let's be, extremely precise, and rigorous on the definitions. So, product-market fit for me, the best metric is retention. You know, that essentially means someone not only purchased your offering, but experienced your offering. And, after that experience decided to repurchase. Whether they buy more from you or they renew or whatever it is. Now, the problem with it is, in many, like in the world we live inside's, it's like, the retention rate of the customers we acquire this quarter is not evident for a year. Right, and we don't have a year to learn. We don't have a year to wait and see. So what we have to do is come up with a leading indicator to customer retention. And that's something that I just hope we see more entrepreneurs talking about, in their product market fit journey. And more investors asking about, is what is your lead indicator to customer retention? Cause when that gets checked off, then I believe you have product-market fit, okay? So, there's some documentation on some unicorns that have flirted with this. I think Silicon Valley calls it the aha moment. That's great. Just like what. So like Slack, an example, like, the format I like to use for the lead indicator of customer retention is P percent of customers, do E event, in T time, okay? So, it basically boils it down to those three variables, P E T. So if we bring that to life and humanize it, 70% of the customers, we sign up, this is Slack, 70% of the customers who sign up, send 2000 team messages in 30 days, if that happens, we have product-market fit. I like that a lot more, than getting to a million in revenue or like having a workable product in a big market. Dropbox, 85% of customers, share one file in one hour. HubSpot, I know this was the case, 75% of customers, use five or more of the 25 features in the platform, within 60 days. Okay? P percent, do E event, in T time. So, if we can just format that, and look at that through customer cohorts, we often get visibility into, into true product market-fit within weeks, if not like a month or two. And it's scientifically, data-driven in terms of his foundation. >> Love it. And then of course, you can align sales compensation, you know, with that retention. You've talked a lot about that, in some of your work. I want to get into some of the things that stage two is doing. You invest in SaaS companies. If I understand it correctly, it's not necessarily early stage. You're looking for companies that have sort of achieved some degree of revenue and now need help. It needs some operational help and scaling. Is that correct? >> Yeah. Yeah. So it's a little bit broader in size, as any sort of like B2B software, any software company that's scaling through a sales team. I mean, look at our backers and look at my background. That's, that's what we have experience in. So not really any consumer plays. And yeah, I mean, we're not, we have a couple product LPs. We have a couple of CFO type LPs. We have a couple like talent HR LPs, but most of us are go-to-market. So we don't, you know, there's awesome seed funds out there that help people set up their product and engineering team and go from zero to one in terms of the MVP and find product-market fit. Right? We like to come in right after that. So it's usually like between the seed and the A, usually the revenue is between half a million and 1.5 million. And of course we put an extraordinary premium on customer retention, okay? Whereas I think most of our peers put an extraordinary premium on top line revenue growth. We put an extraordinary premium on retention. So if I find a $700,000 business that, you know, has whatever 50, 70 customers, you know, depending on their ticket size, it has like North of 90% local retention. That's super exciting. Even if they're only growing like 60%, it's super exciting. >> What's a typical size of investments. Do you typically take board seats or not? >> Yeah. We typically put in like between like seven hundred K, one and a half million, in the first check and then have, larger amounts for follow on. So on the A and the B. We try not to take board's seats to be honest with you, but instead the board observers. It's a little bit selfish in terms of our funds scale. Like the general counsel from other venture capitalists is of course, like, the board seat is there for proper governance in terms of like, having some control over expenditures and acquisition conversations, et cetera, or decisions. But a lot of people who have had experience with boards know that they're very like easy and time efficient when the company is going well. And there are a ton of work when the company is not going well. And it really hurts the scale, especially on a smaller fund like us. So we do like to have board observers seats, and we go to most of the board meetings so that our voice is heard. But as long as there's another fund in there that, has, world-class track record in terms of, holding proper governance at the board level, we prefer to defer to them on that. >> All right, so the COVID lock down, hit really in earnest in March, of course, we all saw the Sequoia memo, The Black Swan memo. You were, I think it HubSpot, when, you remember the Rest In Peace Good Times memo, came out very sort of negative, put up all over the industry, you know, stop spending. But there was some other good advice in there. I don't mean to sort of, go too hard on that, but, it was generally a negative sentiment. What was your advice to your portfolio companies, when COVID hit, what were you telling them? >> Yeah, I summarized this in our lead a blog article. We kicked off our blog, which is partially related to COVID in April, which has kind of summarize these tips. So yes, you are correct, Dave. I was running sales at HubSpot in '08 when we had last sort of major economic, destabilization. And I was freaking out, you know (laughs briefly) at the time we were still young, like 20, 30 reps and numbers to chase. And... I was, actually, after that year, looking back, we are very fortunate that we had a value prop that was very recession-proof. We were selling to the small business community, who at the time was cutting everything except new ways to generate sales. And we happen to have the answer to that and it happened to work, right? So it showed me that, there's different levels of being recession proof. And we accelerated the raise of our second fund for stage two with the anticipation that there would be a recession, which, you know, in the venture world, some of the best things you could do is close a fund and then go into a recession, because, there's more deals out there. The valuations are lower and it's much easier to understand, nice to have versus must have value props. So, the common theme I saw in talking to my peers who looked back in the '01 crisis, as well as the '08 crisis, a year later was not making a bolder decision to reorient their company in the current times. And usually on the go-to-market, that's two factors, the ICP who you're selling to, ideal customer profile and the CVP, what your message is, what's your customer value prop. And that was really, in addition to just stabilizing cash positions and putting some plans in there. That was the biggest thing we pushed our portfolio on was, almost like going through the exercise, like it's so hard as a human, to have put like nine months into a significant investment leading up to COVID and now the outcome of that investment is no longer relevant. And it's so hard to let that go. You know what I mean? >> Yeah. >> But you have to, you have to. And now it's everything from like, you spent two years learning how to sell to this one persona. And now that persona is like, gyms, retail and travel companies. Like you've got to let that go. (chuckle simultaneously) You know what I mean? Like, and, you know, it's just like... So that's really what we had to push folks on was just, you know, talking to founders and basically saying this weekend, get into a great headspace and like, pretend like you were parachuted into your company as a fresh CEO today. And look around and appreciate the world and what it is. What is this world? What are the buyers talking about? Which markets are hot, which markets are not, look at the assets that you have, look at your product, look at your staff, look at your partners, look at your customer base, and come up with a strategy from the ground up based on that. And forget about everything you've done in the last year. Right? And so, that's really what we pushed hard on. And in some cases, people just like jumped right on it. It was awesome. We had a residential real estate company that within two weeks, stood up a virtual open house module that sold like hotcakes. >> Yeah. >> That was fantastic execution. And we had other folks that we had to have like three meetings with to push them deep enough, to go more boldly. But that, was really the underlying pattern that I saw in past, recessions and something I pushed the portfolio on, is just being very bold on your pivots. >> Right? So I wanted to ask you how your portfolio companies are doing. I'm imagining you saw some looked at this opportunity as a tailwind. >> Yeah. >> You mentioned the virtual, open house, a saw that maybe were exposed, had, revenue exposure to hard-hit industries and others kind of in the middle. How are your portfolio companies doing? >> Yes, strong. I'm trying to figure out, like, of course I'm going to say that, but I'm trying to figure out like how to provide quant, to just demonstrate that. We were fortunate that we had no one, and this was just dumb luck. I mean, we had no one exclusively selling to like travel, or, restaurants or something. That's just bad luck if you were, and we're fortunate that we got a little lucky there, We put a big premium, obviously we had put a big premium on customer retention. And that, we always looked at that through our recession proof lens at all our investments. So I think that helped, but yeah, I mean, we've had, first off, we made one investment post COVID. That was the last investment on our first fund and that particular company, March, April, May, their results were 20% higher than any month in history. Those are the types of deals we're seeing now is like, you literally find some deals that are accelerating since COVID and you really just have to assess if it's permanent or temporary, but that one was exciting. We have a telemedicine company that's just like, really accelerating post COVID, again, luck, you know, in terms of just their alignment with the new world we're living in. And then, jeez! I mean, we've had, I think four term sheets, for markups in our portfolio since March. So I think that's a good sign. You know, we only made 11 investments and four of them, either have verbal or submitted term sheets on markups. So again, I feel like the portfolio is doing quite well, and I'm just trying to provide some quantitative measures. So it doesn't feel like a political answer. (Mark chuckles) >> Well, thank you for that, but now, how have you, or have you changed your sort of your thesis post COVID? Do you feel like your... >> Sure. >> Your approach was sort of geared towards, you know, this... >> Yeah. >> Post COVID environment? But what changes have you made. >> A little bit, like, I think in any bull market, generally speaking, there's just going to be a lot of like triple, triple, double, double blitzscaling, huge focus on top-line revenue growth. And in any down market, there's going to be a lot of focus on customer retention unit economics. Now we've always invested in the latter, so that doesn't change much. There's a couple of things that have changed. Number one, we do look for acceleration post COVID. Now, that obviously we were not, we weren't... That lens didn't exist pre-COVID, So in addition to like great retention, selling through a sales team, around the half million to a million revenue, we want to see acceleration since COVID and we'll do diligence to understand if that's a permanent, or a temporary advantage. I would say like... Markets like San Francisco, I think become more attractive in post COVID. There's just like, San Francisco has some magic happening there's some VC funds that avoid it, cause it's too expensive. There's some VC funds that only invest in San Francisco, because there's magic happening. We've always just been, you know... we have two portfolio companies there that have done well. Like we look at it and if it's too expensive, we have to avoid it. But we do agree that there's magic happening. I did look at a company last week. (chuckles inaudibly) So Dave, there are 300K in revenue, and their last valuation is 300 million. (both chuckle) >> Okay, so why is San Francisco more attractive, Mark? >> Well, I mean and those happened in Boston too. >> We looked at... (Mark speaks inaudibly) >> I thought you were going to tell me the valuations were down. (Dave speaks inaudibly) >> Here's the deal all right, sometimes they do, sometimes they don't and this is one, but in general, I think like they have come down. And honestly, the other thing that's happened is good entrepreneurs that weren't raising are now raising. Okay? So, a market like that I think becomes more attractive. The other thing that I think that happens is your sort of following strategies different. Okay so, there is some statistical evidence that, you know, obviously we're coming out of a bear market, a bullish market in, in both the public and the private equities. And there's been a lot of talk about valuations in the private sector is just outrageous. And so, you know, we're fortunate that we come in at this like post seed, pre-A, where it's not as impacted. It is, but not as or hasn't been, but because there's so many more multibillion-dollar funds that have to deploy 30 to 50 million per investment, there's a lot of heating up that's happened at that stage. Okay? And so pre COVID, we would have taken advantage of that by taking either all or some of our money off the table, in these following growth rounds. You know, as an example, we had a company that we made an investment with around 30 million evaluation and 18 months later, they had a term sheet for 500. So that's a pretty good return in 18 months. And you know, that's an expensive, you know, so that that's like, wow, you know, we probably, even though we're super bullish on the company, we may want to take off a 2X exposition... >> Yeah. >> And take advantage of the secondaries. And the other thing that happens here, as you pointed out, Dave is like, risk is not, it doesn't become de-risk with later rounds. Like these big billion dollar funds come in, they put pressure on very aggressive strategic moves that sometimes kills companies and completely outside of our control. So it's not that we're not bullish on the company, it's just that there's new sets of risks that are outside of the scope of our work. And so, so that that's probably like a less, a lesser opportunity post COVID and we have to think longer term and have more patient capital, as we navigate the next year or so of the economy. >> Yeah, so we've got to wrap, but I want to better understand the relationship between the public markets and you've seen the NASDAQ up, which is just unbelievable when you look at what's happening in main street, and the relationship between the public markets and the private markets, are you saying, they're sort of tracking, but not really identical. I mean, what's the relationship. >> Okay, there's a hundred, there's thousands of people that are better at that than me. Like the kind of like anecdotal thoughts that I, or the anecdotal narrative that I've heard in past recessions and actually saw too, was the private market, when the public market dropped, it took nine months roughly for the private market to correct. Okay, so there was a lag. And so there's, some arguments that, that would happen here, but this is just a weird situation, right? Of like the market, even though we're going through societal crazy uncertainty, turmoil and, and tremendous tragedy, the markets did drop, but they're pretty hot right now, specifically in tech. And so there's a number of schools of thoughts there that like some people claim that tech is like the utilities companies of the eighties, where it's just a necessity and it's always going to be there regardless of the economy. Some people argue that what's happened with COVID and the remote workplace have made, you know, accelerated the adoption of tech, the inevitable adoption, and others could argue that like, you know, the worst is still the come. >> Yeah. And of course, you've got The Fed injecting so much liquidity into the system, low interest rates, Mark, last question. Give me a pro tip for entrepreneurs. (Mark Sighs) >> I would say, like, we've talked a lot about, this methodology with, you know, customer retention, really focusing there, align everything there as opposed to top line revenue growth initially. I think that the extension I do at this point is, do your diligence on your investors, and what their thoughts are on your future growth plans to see if they're aligned. Cause that, that becomes like, I think a lot of entrepreneurs, when they dig into this work, they do want to operate around it. But that becomes that much harder when you have investors that think a different way. So I would just, you know, just always keep in mind that, you know, I know it's so hard to raise money, but you know, do the diligence on your investors to understand, what they'd like to see in the next two years and how it's aligned with your own vision. >> Mark is really great having you on. I'd love to have you back and as this thing progresses, and see how it all shakes out. It really a pleasure. Thanks for coming on. >> No, thanks, Dave. I appreciate you having me on. >> And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Vellante for The Cube. We'll see you next time. (music plays)

>> Announcer: From the Cube Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is The Cube Conversation. >> Everyone welcome to this special live stream here in The Cube Studios. I'm John Furrier, your host. We've got a great panel discussion here for one hour, sponsored by Lumina PR, not sponsored but organized by Lumina PR. An authentic conversation around professionals in the news media, and communication professionals, how they can work together. As we know, pitching stories to national media takes place in the backdrop in today's market, which is on full display. The Coronavirus, racial unrest in our country and a lot of new tech challenges from companies, their role in society with their technology and of course, an election all make for important stories to be developed and reported. And we got a great panel here and the purpose is to bridge the two worlds. People trying to get news out for their companies in a way that's relevant and important for audiences. I've got a great panelists here, Gerard Baker Editor at Large with the Wall Street Journal, Eric Savitz, Associate Editor with Barron's and Brenna Goth who's a Southwest Staff Correspondent with Bloomberg Publications. Thanks for joining me today, guys, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> So we're going to break this down, we got about an hour, we're going to probably do about 40 minutes. I'd love to get your thoughts in this power panel. And you guys are on the front lines decades of experience, seeing these waves of media evolve. And now more than ever, you can't believe what's happening. You're seeing the funding of journalism really challenging at an all time high. You have stories that are super important to audiences and society really changing and we need this more than ever to have more important stories to be told. So this is really a challenge. And so I want to get your thoughts on this first segment. The challenge is around collecting the data, doing the analysis, getting the stories out, prioritizing stories in this time. So I'd love to get your thoughts. We'll start with you, Brenna, what's your thoughts on this as you're out there in Arizona. Coronavirus on the worst is one of the states there. What are your challenges? >> I would say for me, one of the challenges of the past couple months is just the the sheer influx of different types of stories we've had and the amount of news coming out. So I think one of the challenging things is a lot of times we'll get into a bit of a routine covering one story. So early on maybe the Coronavirus, and then something else will come up. So I personally have been covering some of the Coronavirus news here in Arizona and in the Southwest, as well as some of the protests we've seen with the Black Lives Matter movement. And prioritizing that is pretty difficult. And so one thing that I I've been doing is I've noticed that a lot of my routine projects or things I've been working on earlier in the year are off the table, and I'll get back to them when I have time. But for now, I feel like I'm a little bit more on breaking news almost every day in a way that I wasn't before. >> Gerard, I want to get your thoughts on this. Wall Street Journal has been since I could remember when the web hit the scene early on very digital savvy. Reporting, it's obviously, awesome as well. As you have people in sheltering in place, both journalists and the people themselves and the companies, there's an important part of the digital component. How do you see that as an opportunity and a challenge at the same time because you want to get data out there, you want to be collecting and reporting those stories? How do you see that opportunity, given the challenge that people can't meet face to face? >> First of all, thank you very much for having me. I think as we've all discovered in all fields of endeavor in the last three months, it's been quite a revelation, how much we can do without using without access to the traditional office environment. I think one of the things that Coronavirus, this crisis will have done we all agree I think is that it will have fundamentally changed the way people work. There'll be a lot more people quite a bit more working from home. They'll be a lot more remote working. Generally, there'll be a lot less travel. So on the one hand, it's been eye opening. actually how relatively easy, I use that word carefully. But how we've managed, and I think it's true of all news organizations, how we've managed surprisingly well, I think, without actually being at work. At the Wall Street Journal, we have a big office, obviously in midtown Manhattan, as well as dozens of bureaus around the world. Nobody has really been in that office since the middle of March. And yet we've put out a complete Wall Street Journal product, everything from the print edition, obviously, through every aspect of digital media, the website, all of the apps, video, everything, audio, podcasts. We've been able to do pretty well everything that we could do when we were all working in the office. So I think that will be an important lesson and that will clearly induce some change, some long term changes, I think about the way we work. That said, I'd point to two particular challenges that I think we have not properly overcome. Or if you like that we have, the two impediments, that the crisis has produced for us. One is, as you said, the absence of face to face activity, the hive process, which I think is really important. I think that a lot of the best ideas, a lot of the best, the best stories are developed through conversations between people in an office which don't necessarily we can't necessarily replicate through the online experience through this kind of event or through the Zoom meetings that we've all been doing. I think that has inhibited to some extent, some of the more creative activity that we could have done. I think the second larger problem which we all must face with this is that being essentially locked up in our homes for more than three months, which most of us has been I think accentuates a problem that is already that has been a problem in journalism for a long time, which is that journalists tend to cluster in the major metropolitan areas. I think, a couple of years ago, I read a study which said, I think that more than three quarters of journalists work for major news organizations, print, digital TV, radio, whatever, live and work in one of four major metropolises in the US. That's the New York area, the Washington DC area, the San Francisco area and the LA area. And that tends to create a very narrow worldview, unfortunately, because not enough people either come from those areas, but from outside those areas or spend enough time talking to people from outside those areas. And I think the Coronavirus has accentuated that. And I think in terms of coverage, I'm here in New York. I've been in New York continuously for three and a half months now which is quite unusual, I usually travel a lot. And so my reporting, I write columns now, mainly, but obviously I talk to people too. But the reporting, the editing that we're doing here is inevitably influenced by the experience that we've had in New York, which has obviously been, frankly, devastating. New York has been devastated by Coronavirus in a way that no where else in the country has. And I think to some extent, that does, perhaps have undue influence on the coverage. We're all locked up. We're all mindful of our own health. We're all mindful of people that we know who've gone to hospital or have been very, very sick or where we are, we are heavily influenced by our own immediate environment. And I think that has been a problem if we had been, imagine if the journalists in the country, instead of being clustered in New York and LA and San Francisco had been sort of spread over Texas and Missouri and Florida, things like that. I think you'd have a very different overall accounting of this story over the last three months. So I think it's just, it's accentuated that phenomenon in journalism, which I think we're mindful of, and which we all need to do a better job of addressing. >> It's really interesting. And I want to come back to that point around, who you're collaborating with to get this, now we have virtual ground truth, I guess, how you collaborate. But decision making around stories is, you need an open mind. And if you have this, I guess, I'll call it groupthink or clustering is interesting, now we have digital and we have virtual, it opens up the aperture but we still have the groupthink. But I want to get Eric's take first on his work environment, 'cause I know you've lived on both sides of New York and San Francisco area, as well as you've worked out in the field for agencies, as well on the other side, on the storytelling side. How has this current news environment, journalism environment impacted your view and challenges and your opportunities that you're going after the news? >> Well, so there's there's a few elements here. So one, Barron's Of course, covers the world, looks at the world through a financial lens. We cover the stock market every day. The stock market is not the center of story, but it is an important element of what's been unfolding over the last few months and the markets have been incredibly volatile, we change the way that we approach the markets. Because everything, the big stories are macro stories, huge swings in stock prices, huge swings in the price of oil, dramatic moves in almost every financial security that you can imagine. And so there's a little bit of a struggle for us as we try and shift our daily coverage to be a little more focused on the macro stories as we're still trying to tell what's happening with individual stocks and companies, but these bigger stories have changed our approach. So even if you look at say the covers of our magazine over the last few months, typically, we would do a cover on a company or an investor, that sort of thing. And now they're all big, thematic stories, because the world has changed. And world is changing how it looks at the financial markets. I think one thing that that Gerard touched on is the inability to really leave your house. I'm sitting in my little home office here, where I've been working since March, and my inability to get out and talk to people in person to have some, some interface with the companies and people that I cover, makes it tougher. You get story ideas from those interactions. I think Gerard said some of it comes from your interactions with your colleagues. But some of that also just comes from your ability to interact with sources and that is really tougher to do. It's more formalistic if you do it online. It's just not the same to be on a Zoom call as to be sitting in a Starbucks with somebody and talking about what's going on. I think the other elements of this is that there's, we have a lot of attempts, trying new things trying to reach our readers. We'll do video sessions, we'll do all sorts of other things. And it's one more layer on top of everything else is that there's a lot of demands on the time for the people who are working in journalism right now. I would say one other thing I'll touch on, John, which is, you mentioned, I did use, I worked for public communications for a while, and I do feel their pain because the ability to do any normal PR pitching for new products, new services, the kinds of things that PR people do every day is really tough. It's just really hard to get anybody's attention for those things right now. And the world is focused on these very large problems. >> Well, we'll unpack the PR comms opportunities in the next section. But I want to to just come back to this topic teased out from Gerard and Brenna when you guys were getting out as well. This virtual ground truth, ultimately, at the end of the day, you got to get the stories, you got to report them, they got to be distributed. Obviously, the Wall Street Journal is operating well, by the way, I love the Q&A video chats and what they got going on over there. So the format's are evolving and doing a good job, people are running their business. But as journalists and reporters out there, you got to get the truth and the ground truth comes from interaction. So as you have an aperture with digital, there's also groupthink on, say, Twitter and these channels. So getting in touch with the audience to have those stories. How are you collecting the data? How are you reporting? Has anything changed or shifted that you can point to because ultimately, it's virtual. You still got to get the ground truth, you still got to get the stories. Any thoughts on this point? >> I think in a way what we're seeing is in writ large actually is a problem again, another problem that I think digital journalism or the digital product digital content, if you like, actually presents for us today, which is that it's often said, I think rightly, that one of the, as successful as a lot of digital journalism has been and thank you for what you said about the Wall Street Journal. And we have done a tremendous job and by the way, one of the things that's been a striking feature of this crisis has been the rapid growth in subscriptions that we've had at the Journal. I know other news organizations have too. But we've benefited particularly from a hunger for the quality news. And we've put on an enormous number subscriptions in the last three months. So we've been very fortunate in that respect. But one of the challenges that people always say, one of the one of the drawbacks that people always draw attention to about digital content is that there's a lack of, for want of a better words, serendipity about the experience. When you used to read a newspaper, print newspapers, when may be some of us are old enough to remember, we'd get a newspaper, we'd open it up, we'd look at the front page, we look inside, we'd look at what other sections they were. And we would find things, very large number of things that we weren't particularly, we weren't looking for, we weren't expecting to, we're looking for a story about such. With the digital experience, as we know, that's a much it's a much less serendipitous experience. So you tend to a lot of search, you're looking, you find things that you tend to be looking for, and you find fewer things that, you follow particular people on social media that you have a particular interest in, you follow particular topics and have RSS feeds or whatever else you're doing. And you follow things that, you tend to find things that you were looking for. You don't find many things you weren't. What I think that the virus, the being locked up at home, again, has had a similar effect. That we, again, some of the best stories that I think anybody comes across in life, but news organizations are able to do are those stories that you know that you come across when you might have been looking for something else. You might have been working on a story about a particular company with a particular view to doing one thing and you came across somebody else. And he or she may have told you something actually really quite different and quite interesting and it took you in a different direction. That is easier to do when you're talking to people face to face, when you're actually there, when you're calling, when you're tasked with looking at a topic in the realm. When you are again, sitting at home with your phone on your computer, you tend to be more narrowly so you tend to sort of operate in lanes. And I think that we haven't had the breadth probably of journalism that I think you would get. So that's a very important you talk about data. The data that we have is obviously, we've got access broadly to the same data that we would have, the same electronically delivered data that we would have if we'd been sitting in our office. The data that I think in some ways is more interesting is the non electronically delivered data that is again, the casual conversation, the observation that you might get from being in a particular place or being with someone. The stimuli that arise from being physically in a place that you just aren't getting. And I think that is an important driver of a lot of stories. And we're missing that. >> Well, Gerard, I just want to ask real quick before I go to Brenna on her her take on this. You mentioned the serendipity and taking the stories in certain directions from the interactions. But also there's trust involved. As you build that relationship, there's trust between the parties, and that takes you down that road. How do you develop trust as you are online now? Is there a methodology or technique? Because you want to get the stories out fast, it's a speed game. But there's also the development side of it where a trust equation needs to build. What's your thoughts on that piece? Because that's where the real deeper stories come from. >> So I wasn't sure if you're asking me or Gerard. >> Gerard if he wants can answer that is the trust piece. >> I'll let the others speak to that too. Yeah, it is probably harder to... Again, most probably most people, most stories, most investigative stories, most scoops, most exclusives tend to come from people you already trust, right? So you've developed a trust with them, and they've developed a trust with you. Perhaps more importantly, they know you're going to treat the story fairly and properly. And that tends to develop over time. And I don't think that's been particularly impaired by this process. You don't need to have a physical proximity with someone in order to be able to develop that trust. My sources, I generally speak to them on the phone 99% of the time anyway, and you can still do that from home. So I don't think that's quite... Obviously, again, there are many more benefits from being able to actually physically interact with someone. But I think the level of, trust takes a long time to develop, let's be honest, too, as well. And I think you develop that trust both by developing good sources. and again, as I said, with the sources understanding that you're going to do the story well. >> Brenna, speed game is out there, you got to get stories fast. How do you balance speed and getting the stories and doing some digging into it? What's your thoughts on all this? >> I would say, every week is looking different for me these days. A lot of times there are government announcements coming out, or there are numbers coming out or something that really does require a really quick story. And so what I've been trying to do is get those stories out as quick as possible with maybe sources I already have, or really just the facts on the ground I can get quickly. And then I think in these days, too, there is a ton of room for following up on things. And some news event will come out but it sparks another idea. And that's the time to that when I'm hearing from PR people or I'm hearing from people who care about the issue, right after that first event is really useful for me to hear who else is thinking about these things and maybe ways I can go beyond the first story for something that more in depth and adds more context and provides more value to our readers. >> Awesome. Well, guys, great commentary and insight there on the current situation. The next section is with the role of PR, because it's changing. I've heard the term earned media is a term that's been kicked around. Now we're all virtual, and we're all connected. The media is all virtual. It's all earned at this point. And that's not just a journalistic thing, there's storytelling. There's new voices emerging. You got these newsletter services, audiences are moving very quickly around trying to figure out what's real. So comms folks are trying to get out there and do their job and tell a story. And sometimes that story doesn't meet the cadence of say, news and/or reporting. So let's talk about that. Eric, you brought this up. You have been on both sides. You said you feel for the folks out there who are trying to do their job. How is the job changing? And what can they do now? >> The news cycle is so ferocious at the moment that it's very difficult to insert your weigh in on something that doesn't touch on the virus or the economy or social unrest or the volatility of the financial markets. So I think there's certain kinds of things that are probably best saved for another moment in time, If you're trying to launch new products or trying to announce new services, or those things are just tougher to do right now. I think that the most interesting questions right now are, If I'm a comms person, how can I make myself and my clients a resource to media who are trying to tell stories about these things, do it in a timely way, not overreach, not try insert myself into a story that really isn't a good fit? Now, every time one of these things happen, we got inboxes full of pitches for things that are only tangentially relevant and are probably not really that helpful, either to the reporter generally or to the client of the firm that is trying to pitch an idea. But I will say on the on this at the same time that I rely on my connections to people in corporate comms every single day to make connections with companies that I cover and need to talk to. And it's a moment when almost more than ever, I need immediacy of response, accurate information access to the right people at the companies who I'm trying to cover. But it does mean you need to be I think sharper or a little more pointed a little more your thinking about why am I pitching this person this story? Because the there's no time to waste. We are working 24 hours a day is what it feels like. You don't want to be wasting people's time. >> Well, you guys you guys represent big brands in media which is phenomenal. And anyone would love to have their company mentioned obviously, in a good way, that's their goal. But the word media relations means you relate to the media. If there's no media to relate to, the roles change, and there's not enough seats at the table, so to speak. So getting a clip on in the clip book that gets sent to management, look, "We're on Bloomberg." "Great, check." But is at it? So people, this is a department that needs to do more. Is there things that they can do, that isn't just chasing, getting on your franchises stories? Because it obviously would be great if we were all on Barron's Wall Street Journal, and Bloomberg, but they can't always get that. They still got to do more. They got to develop the relationships. >> John, one thing I would be conscious of here is that many of our publications, it's certainly true for journalists, true for us at Barron's and it's certainly true for Bloomberg. We're all multimedia publishers. We're doing lots of things. Barron's has television show on Fox. We have a video series. We have podcasts and newsletters, and daily live audio chats and all sorts of other stuff in addition to the magazine and the website. And so part of that is trying to figure out not just the right publication, but maybe there's an opportunity to do a very particular, maybe you'd be great fit for this thing, but not that thing. And having a real understanding of what are the moving parts. And then the other part, which is always the hardest part, in a way, is truly understanding not just I want to pitch to Bloomberg, but who do I want to pitch at Bloomberg. So I might have a great story for the Wall Street Journal and maybe Gerard would care but maybe it's really somebody you heard on the street who cares or somebody who's covering a particular company. So you have to navigate that, I think effectively. And even, more so now, because we're not sitting in a newsroom. I can't go yell over to somebody who's a few desks away and suggest they take a look at something. >> Do you think that the comm-- (talk over each other) Do you think the comms teams are savvy and literate in multimedia? Are they still stuck in the print ways or the group swing is they're used to what they're doing and haven't evolved? Is that something that you're seeing here? >> I think it varies. Some people will really get it. I think one of the things that that this comes back to in a sense is it's relationship driven. To Gerard's point, it's not so much about trusting people that I don't know, it's about I've been at this a long time, I know what people I know, who I trust, and they know the things I'm interested in and so that relationship is really important. It's a lot harder to try that with somebody new. And the other thing is, I think relevant here is something that we touched on earlier, which is the idiosyncratic element. The ability for me to go out and see new things is tougher. In the technology business, you could spend half your time just going to events, You could go to the conferences and trade shows and dinners and lunches and coffees all day long. And you would get a lot of good story ideas that way. And now you can't do any of that. >> There's no digital hallway. There are out there. It's called Twitter, I guess or-- >> Well, you're doing it from sitting in this very I'm still doing it from sitting in the same chair, having conversations, in some ways like that. But it's not nearly the same. >> Gerard, Brenna, what do you guys think about the comms opportunity, challenges, either whether it's directly or indirectly, things that they could do differently? Share your thoughts. Gerard, we'll start with you? >> Well, I would echo Eric's point as far as knowing who you're pitching to. And I would say that in, at least for the people I'm working with, some of our beats have changed because there are new issues to cover. Someone's taking more of a role covering virus coverage, someone's taking more of a role covering protests. And so I think knowing instead of casting a really wide net, I'm normally happy to try to direct pitches in the right direction. But I do have less time to do that now. So I think if someone can come to me and say, "I know you've been covering this, "this is how my content fits in with that." It'd grab my attention more and makes it easier for me. So I would say that that is one thing that as beats are shifting and people are taking on a little bit of new roles in our coverage, that that's something PR and marketing teams could definitely keep an eye on. >> I agree with all of that. And all everything everybody said. I'd say two very quick things. One, exactly as everybody said, really know who you are pitching to. It's partly just, it's going to be much more effective if you're pitching to the right person, the right story. But when I say that also make the extra effort to familiarize yourself with the work that that reporter or that editor has done. You cannot, I'm sorry to say, overestimate the vanity of reporters or editors or anybody. And so if you're pitching a story to a particular reporter, in a field, make sure you're familiar with what that person may have done and say to her, "I really thought you did a great job "on the reporting that you did on this." Or, "I read your really interesting piece about that," or "I listened to your podcast." It's a relatively easy thing to do that yields extraordinarily well. A, because it appeals to anybody's fantasy and we all have a little bit of that. But, B, it also suggests to the reporter or the editor or the person involved the PR person communications person pitching them, really knows this, has really done their work and has really actually takes this seriously. And instead of just calling, the number of emails I get, and I'm sure it's the same for the others too, or occasional calls out of the blue or LinkedIn messages. >> I love your work. I love your work. >> (voice cuts out) was technology. Well, I have a technology story for you. It's absolutely valueless. So that's the first thing, I would really emphasize that. The second thing I'd say is, especially on the specific relation to this crisis, this Coronavirus issue is it's a tricky balance to get right. On the one hand, make sure that what you're doing what you're pitching is not completely irrelevant right now. The last three months has not been a very good time to pitch a story about going out with a bunch of people to a crowded restaurant or whatever or something like that to do something. Clearly, we know that. At the same time, don't go to the other extreme and try and make every little thing you have seen every story you may have every product or service or idea that you're pitching don't make it the thing that suddenly is really important because of Coronavirus. I've seen too many of those too. People trying too hard to say, "In this time of crisis, "in this challenging time, what people really want to hear "about is "I don't know, "some new diaper "baby's diaper product that I'm developing or whatever." That's trying too hard. So there is something in the middle, which is, don't pitch the obviously irrelevant story that is just not going to get any attention through this process. >> So you're saying don't-- >> And at the same time, don't go too far in the other direction. And essentially, underestimate the reporter's intelligence 'cause that reporter can tell you, "I can see that you're trying too hard." >> So no shotgun approach, obviously, "Hey, I love your work." Okay, yeah. And then be sensitive to what you're working on not try to force an angle on you, if you're doing a story. Eric, I want to get your thoughts on the evolution of some of the prominent journalists that I've known and/or communication professionals that are taking roles in the big companies to be storytellers, or editors of large companies. I interviewed Andy Cunningham last year, who used to be With Cunningham Communications, and formerly of Apple, better in the tech space and NPR. She said, "Companies have to own their own story "and tell it and put it out there." I've seen journalists say on Facebook, "I'm working on a story of x." And then crowdsource a little inbound. Thoughts on this new role of corporations telling their own story, going direct to the consumers. >> I think to a certain extent, that's valuable. And in some ways, it's a little overrated. There are a lot of companies creating content on their websites, or they're creating their own podcasts or they're creating their own newsletter and those kinds of things. I'm not quite sure how much of that, what the consumption level is for some of those things. I think, to me, the more valuable element of telling your story is less about the form and function and it's more about being able to really tell people, explain to them why what they do matters and to whom it matters, understanding the audience that's going to want to hear your story. There are, to your point, there are quite a few journalists who have migrated to either corporate communications or being in house storytellers of one kind or another for large businesses. And there's certainly a need to figure out the right way to tell your story. I think in a funny way, this is a tougher moment for those things. Because the world is being driven by external events, by these huge global forces are what we're all focused on right now. And it makes it a lot tougher to try and steer your own story at this particular moment in time. And I think you do see it Gerard was talking about don't try and... You want to know what other people are doing. You do want to be aware of what others are writing about. But there's this tendency to want to say, "I saw you wrote a story about Peloton "and we too have a exercise story that you can, "something that's similar." >> (chuckles) A story similar to it. We have a dance video or something. People are trying to glam on to things and taking a few steps too far. But in terms of your original question, it's just tougher at the moment to control your story in that particular fashion, I think. >> Well, this brings up a good point. I want to get to Gerard's take on this because the Wall Street Journal obviously has been around for many, many decades. and it's institution in journalism. In the old days, if you weren't relevant enough to make the news, if you weren't the most important story that people cared about, the editors make that choice and you're on the front page or in a story editorially. And companies would say, "No, but I should be in there." And you'd say, "That's what advertising is for." And that's the way it seemed to work in the past. If you weren't relevant in the spirit of the decision making of important story or it needs to be communicated to the audience, there's ads for that. You can get a full page ad in the old days. Now with the new world, what's an ad, what's a story? You now have multiple omni-channels out there. So traditionally, you want to get the best, most important story that's about relevance. So companies might not have a relevant story and they're telling a boring story. There's no there, there, or they miss the story. How do you see this? 'Cause this is the blend, this is the gray area that I see. It's certainly a good story, depending on who you're talking to, the 10 people who like it. >> I think there's no question. We're in the news business, topicality matters. You're going to have a much better chance of getting your story, getting your product or service, whatever covered by the Wall Street Journal, Barron's or anywhere else for that matter, if it seems somehow news related, whether it's the virus or the unrest that we've been seeing, or it's to do with the economy. Clearly, you can have an effect. Newspapers, news organizations of all the three news organizations we represent don't just, are not just obviously completely obsessed with what happened this morning and what's going on right now. We are all digging into deeper stories, especially in the business field. Part of what we all do is actually try to get beyond the daily headlines. And so what's happening with the fortunes of a particular company. Obviously, they may be impacted by they're going to be impacted by the lockdown and Coronavirus. But they actually were doing some interesting things that they were developing over the long term, and we would like to look into that too. So again, there is a balance there. And I'm not going to pretend that if you have a really topical story about some new medical device or some new technology for dealing with this new world that we're all operating in, you're probably going to get more attention than you would if you don't have that. But I wouldn't also underestimate, the other thing is, as well as topicality, everybody's looking at the same time to be different, and every journalist wants to do something original and exclusive. And so they are looking for a good story that may be completely unrelated. In fact, I would also underestimate, I wouldn't underestimate either the desire of readers and viewers and listeners to actually have some deeper reported stories on subjects that are not directly in the news right now. So again, it's about striking the balance right. But I wouldn't say that, that there is not at all, I wouldn't say there is not a strong role for interesting stories that may not have anything to do what's going on with the news right now. >> Brenna, you want to add on your thoughts, you're in the front lines as well, Bloomberg, everyone wants to be on Bloomberg. There's Bloomberg radio. You guys got tons of media too, there's tons of stuff to do. How do they navigate? And how do you view the interactions with comms folks? >> It looks we're having a little bit of challenge with... Eric, your thoughts on comm professionals. The questions in the chats are everything's so fast paced, do you think it's less likely for reporters to respond to PR comms people who don't have interacted with you before? Or with people you haven't met before? >> It's an internal problem. I've seen data that talks about the ratio of comms people to reporters, and it's, I don't know, six or seven to one or something like that, and there are days when it feels like it's 70 to one. And so it is challenging to break through. And I think it's particularly challenging now because some of the tools you might have had, you might have said, "Can we grab coffee one day or something like that," trying to find ways to get in front of that person when you don't need them. It's a relationship business. I know this is a frustrating answer, but I think it's the right answer which is those relationships between media and comms people are most successful when they've been established over time. And so you're not getting... The spray and pray strategy doesn't really work. It's about, "Eric, I have a story that's perfect for you. "And here's why I think you you should talk to this guy." And if they really know me, there's a reasonable chance that I'll not only listen to them, but I'll at least take the call. You need to have that high degree of targeting. It is really hard to break through and people try everything. They try, the insincere version of the, "I read your story, it was great. "but here's another great story." Which maybe they read your story, maybe they didn't at least it was an attempt. Or, "if you like this company, you'll love that one." People try all these tricks to try and get get to you. I think the highest level of highest probability of success comes from the more information you have about not just what I covered yesterday, but what do I cover over time? What kinds of stories am I writing? What kinds of stories does the publication write? And also to keep the pitching tight, I was big believer when I was doing comms, you should be able to pitch stories in two sentences. And you'll know from that whether there's going to be connection or not, don't send me five or more pitches. Time is of the essence, keep it short and as targeted as possible. >> That's a good answer to Paul Bernardo's question in the chat, which is how do you do the pitch. Brenna, you're back. Can you hear us? No. Okay. We'll get back to her when she gets logged back in. Gerard, your thoughts on how to reach you. I've never met you before, if I'm a CEO or I'm a comms person, a company never heard of, how do I get your attention? If I can't have a coffee with you with COVID, how do I connect with you virtually? (talk over each other) >> Exactly as Eric said, it is about targeting, it's really about making sure you are. And again, it's, I hate to say this, but it's not that hard. If you are the comms person for a large or medium sized company or even a small company, and you've got a particular pitch you want to make, you're probably dealing in a particular field, a particular sector, business sector or whatever. Let's say it says not technology for change, let's say it's fast moving consumer goods or something like that. Bloomberg, Brenna is in an enormous organization with a huge number of journalist you deal and a great deal of specialism and quality with all kinds of sectors. The Wall Street Journal is a very large organization, we have 13, 1400 reporters, 13 to 1400 hundred journalist and staff, I should say. Barron's is a very large organization with especially a particularly strong field coverage, especially in certain sectors of business and finance. It's not that hard to find out A, who is the right person, actually the right person in those organizations who's been dealing with the story that you're trying to sell. Secondly, it's absolutely not hard to find out what they have written or broadcast or produced on in that general field in the course of the last, and again, as Eric says, going back not just over the last week or two, but over the last year or two, you can get a sense of their specialism and understand them. It's really not that hard. It's the work of an hour to go back and see who the right person is and to find out what they've done. And then to tailor the pitch that you're making to that person. And again, I say that partly, it's not purely about the vanity of the reporter, it's that the reporter will just be much more favorably inclined to deal with someone who clearly knows, frankly, not just what they're pitching, but what the journalist is doing and what he or she, in his or her daily activity is actually doing. Target it as narrowly as you can. And again, I would just echo what Eric and I think what Brenna was also saying earlier too that I'm really genuinely surprised at how many very broad pitches, again, I'm not directly in a relative role now. But I was the editor in chief of the Journal for almost six years. And even in that position, the number of extraordinarily broad pitches I get from people who clearly didn't really know who I was, who didn't know what I did, and in some cases, didn't even really know what Wall Street Journal was. If you can find that, if you actually believe that. It's not hard. It's not that hard to do that. And you will have so much more success, if you are identifying the organization, the people, the types of stories that they're interested in, it really is not that difficult to do. >> Okay, I really appreciate, first of all, great insight there. I want to get some questions from the crowd so if you're going to chat, there was a little bit of a chat hiccup in there. So it should be fixed. We're going to go to the chat for some questions for this distinguished panel. Talk about the new coffee. There's a good question here. Have you noticed news fatigue, or reader seeking out news other than COVID? If so, what news stories have you been seeing trending? In other words, are people sick and tired of COVID? Or is it still on the front pages? Is that relevant? And if not COVID, what stories are important, do you think? >> Well, I could take a brief stab at that. I think it's not just COVID per se, for us, the volatility of the stock market, the uncertainties in the current economic environment, the impact on on joblessness, these massive shifts of perceptions on urban lifestyles. There's a million elements of this that go beyond the core, what's happening with the virus story. I do think as a whole, all those things, and then you combine that with the social unrest and Black Lives Matter. And then on top of that, the pending election in the fall. There's just not a lot of room left for other stuff. And I think I would look at it a little bit differently. It's not finding stories that don't talk on those things, it's finding ways for coverage of other things whether it's entertainment. Obviously, there's a huge impact on the entertainment business. There's a huge impact on sports. There's obviously a huge impact on travel and retail and restaurants and even things like religious life and schooling. I have the done parents of a college, was about to be a college sophomore, prays every day that she can go back to school in the fall. There are lots of elements to this. And it's pretty hard to imagine I would say to Gerard's point earlier, people are looking for good stories, they're always looking for good stories on any, but trying to find topics that don't touch on any of these big trends, there's not a lot of reasons to look for those. >> I agree. Let me just give you an example. I think Eric's exactly right. It's hard to break through. I'll just give you an example, when you asked that question, I just went straight to my Wall Street Journal app on my phone. And of course, like every organization, you can look at stories by sections and by interest and by topic and by popularity. And what are the three most popular stories right now on the Wall Street Journal app? I can tell you the first one is how exactly do you catch COVID-19? I think that's been around since for about a month. The second story is cases accelerate across the United States. And the third story is New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, tell travelers from areas with virus rates to self isolate. So look, I think anecdotally, there is a sense of COVID fatigue. Well, we're all slightly tired of it. And certainly, we were probably all getting tired, or rather distressed by those terrible cases and when we've seen them really accelerate back in March and April and these awful stories of people getting sick and dying. I was COVID fatigued. But I just have to say all of the evidence we have from our data, in terms of as I said earlier, the interest in the story, the demand for what we're doing, the growth in subscriptions that we've had, and just as I said, little things like that, that I can point you at any one time, I can guarantee you that our among our top 10 most read stories, at least half of them will be COVID-19. >> I think it's safe to say general interest in that outcome of progression of that is super critical. And I think this brings up the tech angle, which we can get into a minute. But just stick with some of these questions I just want to just keep these questions flowing while we have a couple more minutes left here. In these very challenging times for journalism, do byline articles have more power to grab the editors attention in the pitching process? >> Well, I think I assume what the questioner is asking when he said byline articles is contributed. >> Yes. >> Contributed content. Barron's doesn't run a lot of contributing content that way in a very limited way. When I worked at Forbes, we used to run tons of it. I'm not a big believer that that's necessarily a great way to generate a lot of attention. You might get published in some publication, if you can get yourself onto the op ed page of The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times, more power to you. But I think in most cases-- >> It's the exception not the rule Exception not the rule so to speak, on the big one. >> Yeah. >> Well, this brings up the whole point about certainly on SiliconANGLE, our property, where I'm co founder and chief, we basically debate over and get so many pitches, "hey, I want to write for you, here's a contributed article." And it's essentially an advertisement. Come on, really, it's not really relevant. In some case we (talk over each other) analysts come in and and done that. But this brings up the question, we're seeing these newsletters like sub stack and these services really are funding direct journalism. So it's an interesting. if you're good enough to write Gerard, what's your take on this, you've seen this, you have a bit of experience in this. >> I think, fundamental problem here is that is people like the idea of doing by lines or contributed content, but often don't have enough to say. You can't just do, turn your marketing brochure into a piece of an 800 word with the content that that's going to be compelling or really attract any attention. I think there's a place for it, if you truly have something important to say, and if you really have something new to say, and it's not thinly disguised marketing material. Yeah, you can find a way to do that. I'm not sure I would over-rotate on that as an approach. >> No, I just briefly, again, I completely agree. At the Journal we just don't ever publish those pieces. As Eric says, you're always, everyone is always welcome to try and pitch to the op ed pages of the Journal. They're not generally going to I don't answer for them, I don't make those decisions. But I've never seen a marketing pitch run as an op ed effectively. I just think you have to know again, who you're aiming at. I'm sure it's true for Bloomberg, Barron's and the Journal, most other major news organizations are not really going to consider that. There might be organizations, there might be magazines, digital and print magazines. There might be certain trade publications that would consider that. Again, at the Journal and I'm sure most of the large news organizations, we have very strict rules about what we can publish. And how and who can get published. And it's essentially journal editorials, that journal news staff who can publish stories we don't really take byline, outside contribution. >> Given that your time is so valuable, guys, what's the biggest, best practice to get your attention? Eric, you mentioned keeping things tight and crisp. Are there certain techniques to get your attention? >> Well I'll mention just a couple of quick things. Email is better than most other channels, despite the volume. Patience is required as a result because of the volume. People do try and crawl over the transom, hit you up on LinkedIn, DM you on Twitter, there's a lot of things that people try and do. I think a very tightly crafted, highly personalized email with the right subject line is probably still the most effective way, unless it's somebody you actually, there are people who know me who know they have the right to pick up the phone and call me if they really think they have... That's a relationship that's built over time. The one thing on this I would add which I think came up a little bit before thinking about it is, you have to engage in retail PR, not not wholesale PR. The idea that you're going to spam a list of 100 people and think that that's really going to be a successful approach, it's not unless you're just making an announcement, and if you're issuing your earnings release, or you've announced a large acquisition or those things, fine, then I need to get the information. But simply sending around a very wide list is not a good strategy, in most cases, I would say probably for anyone. >> We got Brenna back, can you hear me? She's back, okay. >> I can hear you, I'm back. >> Well, let's go back to you, we missed you. Thanks for coming back in. We had a glitch on our end but appreciate it, bandwidth internet is for... Virtual is always a challenge to do live, but thank you. The trend we're just going through is how do I pitch to you? What's the best practice? How do I get your attention? Do bylines lines work? Actually, Bloomberg doesn't do that very often either as well as like the Journal. but your thoughts on folks out there who are really trying to figure out how to do a good job, how to get your attention, how to augment your role and responsibilities. What's your thoughts? >> I would say, going back to what we said a little bit before about really knowing who you're pitching to. If you know something that I've written recently that you can reference, that gets my attention. But I would also encourage people to try to think about different ways that they can be part of a story if they are looking to be mentioned in one of our articles. And what I mean by that is, maybe you are launching new products or you have a new initiative, but think about other ways that your companies relate to what's going on right now. So for instance, one thing that I'm really interested in is just the the changing nature of work in the office place itself. So maybe you know of something that's going on at a company, unlimited vacation for the first time or sabbaticals are being offered to working parents who have nowhere to send their children, or something that's unique about the current moment that we're living in. And I think that those make really good interviews. So it might not be us featuring your product or featuring exactly what your company does, but it still makes you part of the conversation. And I think it's still, it's probably valuable to the company as well to get that mention, and people may be looking into what you guys do. So I would say that something else we are really interested in right now is really looking at who we're quoting and the diversity of our sources. So that's something else I would put a plug in for PR people to be keeping an eye on, is if you're always putting up your same CEO who is maybe of a certain demographic, but you have other people in your company who you can give the opportunity to talk with the media. I'm really interested in making sure I'm using a diverse list of sources and I'm not just always calling the same person. So if you can identify people who maybe even aren't experienced with it, but they're willing to give it a try, I think that now's a really good moment to be able to get new voices in there. >> Rather than the speed dial person you go to for that vertical or that story, building out those sources. >> Exactly. >> Great, that's great insight, Everyone, great insights. And thank you for your time on this awesome panel. Love to do it again. This has been super informative. I love some of the engagement out there. And again, I think we can do more of these and get the word out. I'd like to end the panel on an uplifting note for young aspiring journalists coming out of school. Honestly, journalism programs are evolving. The landscape is changing. We're seeing a sea change. As younger generation comes out of college and master's programs in journalism, we need to tell the most important stories. Could you each take a minute to give your advice to folks either going in and coming out of school, what to be prepared for, how they can make an impact? Brenna, we'll start with you, Gerard and Eric. >> That's a big question. I would say one thing that has been been encouraging about everything going on right now as I have seen an increased hunger for information and an increased hunger for accurate information. So I do think it can obviously be disheartening to look at the furloughs and the layoffs and everything that is going on around the country. But at the same time, I think we have been able to see really big impacts from the people that are doing reporting on protests and police brutality and on responses to the virus. And so I think for young journalists, definitely take a look at the people who are doing work that you think is making a difference. And be inspired by that to keep pushing even though the market might be a little bit difficult for a while. >> I'd say two things. One, again, echoing what Brenna said, identify people that you follow or you admire or you think are making a real contribution in the field and maybe directly interact with them. I think all of us, whoever we are, always like to hear from young journalists and budding journalists. And again, similar advice to giving to the advice that we were giving about PR pitches. If you know what that person has been doing, and then contact them and follow them. And I know I've been contacted by a number of young journalists like that. The other thing I'd say is and this is more of a plea than a piece of advice. But I do think it will work in the long run, be prepared to go against the grain. I fear that too much journalism today is of the same piece. There is not a lot of intellectual diversity in what we're seeing There's a tendency to follow the herd. Goes back a little bit to what I was saying right at the opening about the fact that too many journalists, quite frankly, are clustered in the major metropolitan areas in this country and around the world. Have something distinctive and a bit different to say. I'm not suggesting you offer some crazy theory or a set of observations about the world but be prepared to... To me, the reason I went into journalism was because I was always a bit skeptical about whenever I saw something in any media, which especially one which seemed to have a huge amount of support and was repeated in all places, I always asked myself, "Is that really true? "Is that actually right? "Maybe there's an alternative to that." And that's going to make you stand out as a journalist, that's going to give you a distinctiveness. It's quite hard to do in some respects right now, because standing out from the crowd can get you into trouble. And I'm not suggesting that people should do that. Have a record of original storytelling, of reporting, of doing things perhaps that not, because look, candidly, there are probably right now in this country, 100,00 budding putative journalists who would like to go out and write about, report on Black Lives Matter and the reports on the problems of racial inequality in this country and the protests and all of that kind of stuff. The problem there is there are already 100,000 of those people who want to do that in addition to probably the 100,000 journalists who are already doing it. Find something else, find something different. have something distinctive to offer so that when attention moves on from these big stories, whether it's COVID or race or politics or the election or Donald Trump or whatever. Have something else to offer that is quite distinctive and where you have actually managed to carve out for yourself a real record as having an independent voice. >> Brenna and Gerard, great insight. Eric, take us home close us out. >> Sure. I'd say a couple things. So one is as a new, as a young journalist, I think first of all, having a variety of tools in your toolkit is super valuable. So be able to write long and write short, be able to do audio, blogs, podcast, video. If you can shoot photos and the more skills that you have, a following on social media. You want to have all of the tools in your toolkit because it is challenging to get a job and so you want to be able to be flexible enough to fill all those roles. And the truth is that a modern journalist is finding the need to do all of that. When I first started at Barron's many, many years ago, we did one thing, we did a weekly magazine. You'd have two weeks to write a story. It was very comfortable. And that's just not the way the world works anymore. So that's one element. And the other thing, I think Gerard is right. You really want to have a certain expertise if possible that makes you stand out. And the contradiction is, but you also want to have the flexibility to do lots of different stories. You want to get (voice cuts out) hold. But if you have some expertise, that is hard to find, that's really valuable. When Barron's hires we're always looking for people who have, can write well but also really understand the financial markets. And it can be challenging for us sometimes to find those people. And so I think there's, you need to go short and long. It's a barbell strategy. Have expertise, but also be flexible in both your approach and the things you're willing to cover. >> Great insight. Folks, thanks for the great commentary, great chats for the folks watching, really appreciate your valuable time. Be original, go against the grain, be skeptical, and just do a good job. I think there's a lot of opportunity. And I think the world's changing. Thanks for your time. And I hope the comms folks enjoyed the conversation. Thank you for joining us, everyone. Appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> I'm John Furrier here in the Cube for this Cube Talk was one hour power panel. Awesome conversation. Stay in chat if you want to ask more questions. We'll come back and look at those chats later. But thank you for watching. Have a nice day. (instrumental music)

>>from the Cube Studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. >>This is a cube conversation. >>Hi, everybody. Dave Vellante here with the Cube. And we're getting ready for the verdict. A big data conference. 2020. The conference has gone virtual, and this is our digital presentation of the conference. I'm here with Colin Mahoney. Who's the general manager of Vertical? How you doing, Colin? >>Great day. Great to see you. >>Hey, let's set it up. What should we expect? That BBC 2020 get people excited? >>Yeah. So look, I mean, it's it's part of the times. We made the decision to go Virtual way made that decision a little bit earlier, and now we know it was absolutely the right thing to do. And as much as we love getting everybody together and the community around vertical being together first and look at the bright side, we've got the opportunity to hear bring the critical big data conference virtual to a lot of people in the comfort of whatever they are right now. That's exciting, But we're still gonna have great presentations. Speakers true to form, way don't really allow any marketing into the critical big data conference. It's all presentations given by either our engineering team for our customers on how you can actually take advantage and use the father. Then, I think, on years past it's been a few years since we've done it, but we got great agenda. The team is doing an incredible job, as we were to virtual as you could imagine. It's never easy to pull off one of these events, and it's certainly not easy to do change course a few weeks before they get virtual. But everybody's doing a great job of customers, have been so supportive and you're going to help. And like I said, the good news is our reach is going through the roof in terms of the numbers and the number of people that actually participate. So it's gonna be fun. It's It's all about data. It's not just about the data itself. We all know that may be boring. If you're just talking about is really about what you can do with data, how you can take advantage of some of the incredible things that our customers are hearing with data to change the world for the better and no type of it. Now, I think we all understand how critically important that it's >>That's awesome. Colin and I understand from talking books the vertical team that registrations are are going to the roof. So Goto find vertical BDC 2020. Just Google it. You'll find it. Sign up, um, And then give us the last word. >>Yeah. Come, come, come see it. And you know what? It's going to be on demand as well, Which is one of the benefits of, uh, you know, vertical going virtual for the big data conference. But come and learn. Come learn about data. Come to see the community we hear from our customers directly and enjoy. Have fun. We can forward to seeing you there. Thanks, Dave. >>Yeah, awesome. And then, you know that's the thing to the Cube Will be. There will be streaming ah of interviews all throughout the next several weeks and months, so check it out. Thanks for watching everybody. We'll see you at the verdict of Big Data Conference. 2020. Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

>> from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California It is a cute conversation >> lover on Welcome to this cube conversation here in Palo Alto, California. The Cube Studio. I'm John for the co host of the Cube Weird Sylvan shop. Who's the head of solution Architecture and open systems securing Esti win of right of other cloud to point out like capabilities. Very successful. 20 plus years. Operation Civil was the one of the first folks are coming over to the US to expand their operation from Europe into New York. Now here in Silicon Valley. Welcome to the Cube conversation. Thank you. So instituting trivia. You were part of the original team of three to move to the U. S. From Switzerland. You guys had phenomenal success in Europe. You've come to the U. S. Having phenomenal success in the US Now you moving west out here to California on that team, you're opening things up at the market. >> It's been a chance, Mikey. Things can presented themselves step by step, and I jumped on the trains and it's been a good right. >> Awesome. You guys have had great success. We interviewed your CEO a variety of your top people. One of the things that's interesting story is that you guys have been around for a long time. Been there, done that, riding this next next wave of digital transformation. What we call a cloud two point. Oh, but really is about enterprise. Full cloud scale, securing it. You have a lot of organic growth with customers, great word of mouth. So that's not a lot of big marketing budgets, riel. Real success there. You guys now are in the US doing the same thing here. What's been the key to success for open systems wide such good customers? Why the success formula is it you guys are on the right wave. What is it? The product? All the above. What's the What's the secret formula? >> So multiple things I say. And we started as a privately owned company like broad banks to, um, to the Internet email into one back in the nineties. And, um, yeah, we started to grow organically, as he said were by mouth, and Indiana is we put heavy focus on operations, so we wanted to make our customers happy and successful, and, um, yeah, that's how we got there like it was slow organic growth. But we always kind of kept the core and we tried to be unconventional, tried to do things differently than others do. And that's what brought us to where we are today and now capabilities Being here in the Valley, um, opens up a lot of more doors. >> It's got a nice office and we would see I saw the video so props for that. Congratulations. But the real to me, the meat on the bone and story is, is that and I've been really ranting on this whole SD win is changing. SD Win used to be around for a long, long time. It's been known industries known market. It's got a total addressable market, but really, what has really talks to is the the cloud. The cloud is a wide area network. Why do we never used to be locked down? He had the old way permitted based security. Now everything is a wide area. That multi cloud in hybrid club. This is essentially networking. It's a networking paradigms. It's not lately rocket science technically, but the cloud 2.0 shift is about, you know, data. It's about applications, different architectures you have everything kind of coming together, which creates a security problem, an opportunity for new people to come in. That's what you guys? One of them. This is the big wave. What? It explain the new s t win with, you know, the old way and the new way. What is the what? What should people know about the new S D win marketplace? >> Yeah. So let me start. Where do Owen has come from and how digital transformation has impacted that. So typically corporate wider networks were centered around the Clear Data Center where all applications were hosted, storage and everything and all traffic was back holding to the data center. Typically, one single provider that Broady, Mpls links on dhe. It was all good. You had a central location where you could manage it. You had always ability security stack was there. So you had full control. Now new requirements from natural transformation broad as users are on the road, they're on their phones ipads on the in, restaurants in ah, hotels, Starbucks. Wherever we have applications moved to the cloud. So their access directly You wanna have or be as close as possible Unify Communications. I OT It's all things deposed. Different requirements now in the network and the traditional architecture didn't were wasn't able to respond to that. It's just that the links they were filled up. You couldn't invest enough thio blow up your Nampula slings to handle the band with You lost visibility because users were under road. You lost control, and that's where new architectures had to be found. That's where Ston step them and say, Hey, look now we're not centered around the headquarter anymore were sent around where the applications are, your scent around, where the data is, and we need to find means to connected a data as quickly as possible. And so you can use the Internet. Internet has become a commodity. It's become more performance more stable, so we can leverage that we can route traffic according to our policies. We can include the cloud, and that's where Ston actually benefits from the clown. As much as the club benefits from SD went because they go hand in hand and that's also what we really drive to say, Hey, look, now the cloud can be directly brought into your network, no matter where, where data and where applications. >> Yeah, and this is the thing. You know, Although you've been critical of S t when I still see it as the path of the future because it's networking. And the end of the day networking is networking. You moving packets from point A to point B and you're moving somebody story you moving from point A to store the point C. It's hard. And you brought this up about Mpls. It's hard to, like rip and replace You can't just do a wholesale change on the network has the networks are running businesses. So this is where the trick is, in my opinion. So I want to get your thoughts on how companies were dealing with this because, I mean, if you want to move, change something in the network, it takes a huge task. How did you guys discover this new opportunity? How did you implement it? What was the and how should customers think about not disrupting their operations at the same time bringing in the new capabilities of this SD win two point? Oh, >> yeah, that's it's a perfect sweet spot, because in the end is, um, nobody starts at a green field. If you could start with a green field. It's easy. You just take on the new technology and you're happy. But, um, customers that we look up large enterprises, they have a brownfield. They haven't existing that work. They have business critical applications running 24 7 And if you look at what options large enterprises have to implement and manage a nasty when is typically three approaches, they either do it themselves, meaning they need a major investment in on boarding people having the talent validating technology and making the project work already. Look at a conventional managers provider. In the end, that is just the same as doing yourself. It's just done by somebody else, and you have the the challenge that those providers typically, um, have a lot of portfolio that they manage. And they do not have enough expertise in Nasty Wen. And so you just end up with the same problems and a lot of service, Janey. So even then you do not get the expertise that you need. >> I think what's interesting about what you guys have done? I want to get your reaction to this is that the manage service piece of it makes it easier to get in without a lot of tinkering with existing infrastructure. Exact. And that's been one of that tail winds for you guys and success wise. Talk about that dynamic of why they managed service is a good approach because you put your toe in the water, so to speak, and you can kind of get involved, get as much as you need to go and go further. Talk about that dynamic and why that's important. >> Yeah, technology Jane is very quickly. So you need people that are able to manage that and open systems as a pure play provider. We build purposely build our platform for us, he went. So we integrated feature sets. We we know how to monitor it, how to configure it, how to manage it. Lifecycle management, technology, risk technology management. All this is purposely purposely built into it, so we strongly believe that to be successful, you need people that are experts in what they do to help you so that you and your I t people can focus in enabling the business. And that's kind of our sweet spot where we don't say we have experts. Our experts operating the network for you as a customer and therefore our experts are your experts. And that's kind of where we believe that a manage service on the right way ends up in Yeah, the best customer. >> And I think the human capital pieces interesting people can level up faster when you when you're not just deploying here. Here's the software load. It is the collaborations important. They're good. They're all right. While you're on this topic, I want to get your thoughts. Since you're an expert, we've been really evaluating this cloud 2.0, for lack of a better description. Cloud 2.0, implying that the cloud 1.0 was Amazon miss on The success of Amazon Web service is really shows Dev Ops in Action Agility The Lean startup Although all that stuff we read reading about for the past 10 plus years great compute storage at scale, amazing use of data like you, said Greenfield. Why not use the cloud? Great. Now all the talk about hybrid cloud even going back to 2013 We were of'em world at that time start 10th year their hybrid cloud was just introduced. Now it's mainstream now multi cloud is around the corner. This teases out cloud 2.0, Enterprise Cloud Enterprise Scale Enterprise Security Cloud Security monitoring 2.0, is observe ability. Got Cooper All these new things air coming on. This is the new clout to point out what is your definition of cloud two point? Oh, if you had to describe it to a customer or a friend, >> it is really ah, some of hybrid cloud or multi cloud, as you want to name it, because in the end, probably nobody can say I just select one cloud, and that's going to make me successful because in the end, cloud is it's not everywhere, as we kind of used to believe in the beginning, but in the end, it's somebody else's computer in a somebody else's data center. So the cloud is you selectively pick the location where you want to for your cloud instances and asked if Cloud Service providers opened up more locations that are closer to your users in the or data you actually can leverage more possibilities. So what we see emerging now is that while for a long time everything has moved to the cloud, the cloud is again coming back to us at the sietch. So a lot of compute stuff is done close to where data is generated. Um, it's where the users are. I mean, Data's generated with with us. Yeah, phones and touch and feel and vision and everything. So we can leverage these technologies to really compute closer to the data. But everything controlled out of central cloud instances. >> So this brings up a good point. You essentially kind of agreeing with cloud one detto being moved to the cloud. But now you mentioned something that's really interesting around cloud to point out, which is moving having cloud, certainly public clouds. Great. But now moving technology to the edge edge being a data center edge being, you know, industrial I ot other things wind farms, whatever users running around remotely you mentioned. So the edges now becomes a critical component of this cloud. Two point. Oh, okay. So I gotta ask the question, How does the networking and what's the complexity? And I'm just imagining massive complexity from this. What are some of the complexities and challenges and opportunities will arise out of this new dynamic of club two point. Oh, >> So the traditional approaches does just don't work anymore. So we need new ways to not only on the networking side, but obviously also the security side. So we need to make sure that not on Lee the network follows in the footsteps of the business of what it needs. But actually, the network can drive business innovation and that the network is ready to handle those new leaps and technologies. And that's what we see is kind of being able to tightly integrate whatever pops up, being able to quickly connect to a sass provider, quickly integrate a new cloud location into your network and have the strong security posture there. Directly integrated is what you need because if you always have to think about weight, if I add this, it's gonna break something else, and I have to. To change is here. Then you lose all the speed that your business needs. >> I mean, the ripple effect of it's like throwing a stone in the lake and seeing the ripple effect with cloud to point. You mentioned a few of them. Network and Security won't get to that in a second, but doesn't change every aspect of computing categories. Backup monitoring. I mean all the sectors that were traditional siloed on premise that moves with the cloud are now being disrupted again for the third time. Yeah, you agree with that? >> It's true. And I mean your club 0.1 point. Oh, you say a lot of things will be seen his lift and shift and that still works like there is a lot of work loads where it's not worth it to re factor everything. But then, for your core applications, the business where the business makes money, you want a leverage, the latest instead of technologies to really drive, drive your business there. >> I got to get your take on this because you're the head of architecture solutions at Open Systems. Um, is a marketing tagline that I saw that you guys promote, which I live. I want to get your thoughts on. It says, Stop treating your network like a network little marketing. I love it, but it's kind of like stop trying your network like a network implying that the networks changing may be inadequate. Antiquated needs to modernize. I'm kind of feeling the vibe there on that. What do you mean by that? Slow Stop treating your network like a network. What's what's the purpose >> behind that? But yeah, in the end, it to be a little flaw provoking. But I mean, even est even in its pure forms, where you have a softer controller that steers your traffic along different path. Already. For me, as an engineer, I'm gonna lose my mind because I want to know where routing is going. I want deterministic. Lee defined my policy, so I always have things under control. But now it's a softer agent that takes care. Furred takes care of it for me so that already I lose control in favor off. Yeah, more capabilities. And I think that's cloud just kind of accelerate. >> So you guys really put security kind of in between the network and application? Is that the way you're thinking about it? It used to be Network was at the bottom. You built the application, had security. Now you're thinking differently. Explain that the the architectural thinking around this because this is a modern approach you guys were taking, and I want to get this on the record. Applications have serving users and machines network delivers packets, and then you're saying security's wrapping up between them explain. >> So when we go back again to the traditional model Central Data Center, you had a security stack full rack of appliances that the care of your security was easy to manage. Now, if you wanna go ask you when connect every brand side to the Internet, you cannot replicate such an infrastructure to every branch. Location just doesn't skill. So what do you do? Why do you say I cannot benefit of this where I use new methods? And that's where we say we integrate security directly into our networking stack. So to be able to not rely on the service training but have everything compiled into one platform and be able to leverage that data is passing through our network. You've eyes. But then why not apply the same security functions that we used to do in our headquarter directly at the edge and therefore every branch benefits of the same security posture that I typically were traditionally only had in my data center? >> You guys so but also weighing as a strategic infrastructure critical infrastructure opponent. I would agree with that. That's obvious, but as we get into hybrid cloud and multi cloud infrastructures of service support. Seamless integration is critical. This has become a topic, will certainly be talking about for the rest of the year Of'em world and reinvented other conferences like Marcel that night as well. This is the big challenge for customers. Do I invest in Azure A. W as Google in another cloud? Who knows how many clouds coming be another cloud potentially around the corner? I don't want to fork my development team. I want to do one of the great different code bases. This has become kind of like the challenge. How do you see this playing out? Because again, the applications want to run on the best cloud possible. I'm a big believer in that. I think that the cloud should dictate the AP should dictate which cloud runs. That's why I'm a believer in the single cloud for the workload, not a single cloud for all workloads. So your thoughts, >> I think, from an application point of view. As you say, the application guys have to determine more cloud is best for them, I think from a networking point of view, as a network architect, we need to we can't work against this but enable them and be able to find ways that the network can seamlessly connect to whatever cloud the business wants to use. And there's plenty of opportunity to do that today and to integrate or partner with other providers that actually have partnered with dozens of cloud providers. And as we now can architect, we have solutions to directly bring you as a customer within milliseconds, to each cloud, premise is a huge advantage. It takes a few clicks in a portal. You have a new clouds instance up and running, and now you're connected. And the good thing is, we have different ways to do that. Either. We spin up our virtual instance virtual esti one appliance in cloud environments so we can leverage the Internet to go. They're still all secured, all encrypted, ordering me again. Use different cloud connect interconnections to access the clouds. Depending on the business requirements, >> you guys have been very successful. A lot of comfort from financial service is the U. N. With NGOs, variety of industries. So I want to get your thoughts on this. I've been we've been covering the Department of Defense is joining and Chet I joint and the presentation of defense initiative where the debate was soul single purpose Cloud. Now the reality is and we've covered this on silicon angle that D O D is going multi cloud as an organization because they're gonna have Microsoft Cloud for collaboration and other contracts. They're gonna win $8,000,000,000. So that a Friday cloud opportunities, but for the particular workload for the military, they have unique requirements. Their workload has chosen one cloud. That was the controversy. Want to get your thoughts on this? Should the workloads dictate the cloud? And is that okay? And certainly multi cloud is preferred Narada instances. But is it okay to have a single cloud for a workload? >> Yeah, again, from if the business is okay with that, that's fine from our side of you. We see a lot of lot of business that have global presence, so they're spread across the globe. So for them, it's beneficial to done distribute workloads again across different regions, and it could still be the same provider, but across different regions. And then already, question is How do you now we're out traffic between those workloads? Do we? Do you love right? Your esteem and infrastructure or do you actually use, for example, the backbone that the cloud provider provides you in case of Microsoft? They guarantee you the traffic between regions stay in their backbone. So gifts, asshole, new opportunities to leverage large providers. Backbone. >> And this is an interesting nuance point because multi cloud doesn't have to be. That's workload. Spreading the workload across three different clouds. It's this workload works on saving Amazon. This workload works on Azure. This workload works on another cloud that's multi cloud from a reality standpoint today, so that implies that most every country will be multi cloud for sure. But workloads might have a single cloud for either the routing and the transit security with the data stored. And that's okay, too. >> Yeah, yeah, and keep in mind, Cloud is not only infrastructure or platform is the service. It's also software as a service. So as soon as we have sales forests, work day office 3 65 dropbox or box, then we are multiplied. >> So basically the clouds are fighting it out by the applications that they support and the infrastructure behind. Exactly. All right, well, what's next for you? You're on the road. You guys doing a lot of customer activity. What's the coolest thing that you're seeing in the customer base from open system standpoint that you like to share with the audience? >> Um, so again, it's just cool to see that customers realized that there's plenty of opportunities. And just to see how we go through that evolution with our customers, were they initially or little concerned? But then eventually we see that actually, the network change drives new business project and customers air happy that they launched or collaborate with us. That's what that's what makes me happy and makes me and a continuing down that path >> and securing it is a key. Yeah, he wins in this market Having security? >> Absolutely. Yeah, Sylvia saying mind and not wake up at 2 a.m. Full sweat, because here >> we'll manage. Service is a preferred for my people like to consume and procure product in So congratulations and congressional on your Silicon Valley office looking for chatting more. I'm John for here in the keep studios for cute conversation. Thanks for watching

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> Hi, and welcome to a special presentation of CUBE Conversation. I'm Stu Miniman and we're here in our Boston-area studio, happy to welcome to the program first-time guest Brian Kelly, who's the Co-founder and CEO of CLoudGenera. Brian, thanks so much for joining me. >> Stu, thank you so much for having us here. >> All right, first of all Brian, we always love. We get you know a co-founder on the program, you got to bring us back to kind of the why. You know, why was CLoudGenera formed? We've had a chance to dig into it but CLoudGenera, there's cloud in the name, there's generation. Tell me about the company, the name, and a little bit about your background. >> Be glad to. So like most great companies, our company was born of the market's necessity. We saw trend happening as many businesses we're shifting the way they manage their IT and the trend took the form of this buzzword cloud. And so you know CLoudGenera as a company absolutely helps businesses figure out their most efficient path towards leveraging cloud technologies. But our value proposition is actually greater than that. Our business exists to help companies determine the best IT services to support the needs of their organization. >> Great. Well luckily cloud's simple. Enterprise IT, we just have a button we press, and everything works awesome. I think the reality is though, nobody ever gets rid of anything. Changing applications is really tough and it's a really complicated and super fast changing market out there. So maybe, drill in just a tiny bit and explain what it is that you do and why that's a little bit different than some of the other things happening in the marketplace. >> Sure. Well the big easy button does exist, when you push it nothing happens. Maybe it makes a funny sound. As the name would suggest, CLoudGenera specializes in the formation of clouds and to the point that you made, this is not simple, this is not easy. Cloud is not a target state. Unlike virtualization, which was a target state, cloud is really an operating model. And also as you highlighted, there's so much variability and complexity associated with cloud. Am i talking about infrastructure? Am i talking about platforms? Am i talking about software as a service? Cloud for us can be any of those things. It can be you managing your infrastructure. Can be somebody else managing your infrastructure, all the way up through your apps. And so what our business aims to do is to demystify all the variability and complexity associated with making cloud decisions. Really it's about helping people figure out where to place their workloads and what we commonly see is that the migration does not generate success unless you've considered how to optimize your workloads in advance of selecting a new execution venue. So as a business our software, our technology, helps customers to determine how do I optimize my workloads, regardless of whether or not I'm going to move them. And ultimately, how do I get the best value for my spend at IT services as I'm contemplating cloud as a model for hosting my apps? >> Yeah, so every vendor I talk to out there, if I'm a cloud platform vendor or if I'm an infrastructure vendor, they all have these tools that say hey, here's how the experience is going to be on our platform. Maybe it compares against a couple of things out there but you're not pushing hardware, you're not pushing platforms. Explain how you fit into kind of the ecosystem and you're not just, when you say cloud it's it's not just public cloud, it's you know, talk a little bit about the spectrum of things that you support. >> Okay, be happy to. So first, what I would say is that when you look at a vendor strategy, their strategy is to drive you to adopt their technologies, their solutions. And so any of the tools that they're bringing to market, any of the services that they're bringing to market, are biased towards the outcome that they're trying to achieve. This was actually when I say CLoudGenera was born of the market's necessity, the market really needed a solution that was agnostic and unbiased to the outcome. Something that would be so bold is to recommend not doing anything if that was the best option available to your business. That's really what makes CLoudGenera special. We are the best place to go in the market to get that unbiased agnostic viewpoint that's tailored to your needs as an organization and guides you to the right vendors and the right solutions. >> Yeah. It's interesting you think about like there's consulting companies that would get involved and send a bunch of people and help you through your journey. We talked about there's been lots of tools out that have poked at this but there's a big elephant in the room and it's a little tough to kind of figure out where to start. So I just want to, talk a little bit about kind of the breadth and depth of what you do. How do you keep up with all of these things? I mean, while we were talking I'm pretty sure Amazon released one or two new features. And the next time Intel comes out with a spin, you've got a billion SKUs that you have to update. So how does this impact you and how do you help keep up with it? >> So Stu, this is really what creates the longevity and value proposition for my business. The market is changing at breakneck speed. To your point, the major providers both in data center as well as in cloud have probably released a half a dozen new services for the market to contemplate just in our conversation. So CLoudGenera addresses this in a couple of different ways. But all of it born in automation and intelligence. And so we have a cloud research function as a part of our platform that is continually ingesting the data around what the market can offer. So this could be services you could consume from public cloud providers like the Microsoft Azure, the Amazon EC2, the Google Compute as an example, but we're not an infrastructure play. We actually move up and down the stack. So if you want to look at platform as a service solution like Cloud Foundry as an example, you're moving towards no SQL, as an example, for managing data. Do I do that is infrastructure? Do I do it as a platform, as a service? Right, what level of service is available in the market? Our automation, our intelligence, gathering that market data is the big value for our customers because through that automation we give them something that have avoids their need to spend a lot of money on consultants or to spend a lot of time internally trying to assess what the market can offer. And then most importantly once you have that data, how do you turn it into insights? How do you take that data and make it actionable for your business based upon your needs and the requirements of your workloads? So that that's a big part of our secret sauce. A big part of our IP. We stay current with the market so that you don't have to. And what's interesting about our business is that we don't just do point in time comparisons. In fact, we sit on historical data and trends, both how you can modernize in your data center and how you can leverage cloud services and that data set is over four years large, I like to say, not four years old. And so in that way we can even predict where the market is headed so if you're if you're leveraging us or doing this manual as opposed to leveraging our automated methods, we've got the recipe of how to make good decisions and really it is staying current on the market. That's the only way that that you can address it. Love to touch on another aspect of the question you asked, which is consultancies. If there's one thing that we're disrupting in the market, it is the ability to do this analysis at scale. Many of our clients tell us that it's cost prohibitive to hire an army of consultants to come in and assess their current capabilities and then attempt to map that to what the market can offer. If you're using a manual method powered by labor, you're likely going to have an answer that reflects the market ninety days ago, 180 days ago. CLoudGenera gives you the power at your fingertips to get those sort of insights immediately. And when I talk about disruption, it's really doing in minutes what normally took months. it's also a fraction of the cost, Both productivity and labor as well as the true costs if you're leveraging consultants to do this sort of analysis. and so in that way we can scale to servinG customers that are as large and as complicated as the Global Five. We can also scale far and wide to serve many customers in the market at the same time. Again, it's because we're using algorithms. We're using data science. We're not trying to solve this problem with labor. >> Yeah, I love that and you talked about, it's not just about the platform, you're looking at what we've said for years. Customers need to look at their data, they need to look at their applications, and that's where you need to start. I'd like you to talk a little bit about your users because you know, talked to so many companies, it's like oh, they've tried either building their own in-house solution or going to a service provider or going to a public cloud and they get one or two apps. Some critical one or some real important or some cool new one and then they're like okay, I've got hundreds or thousands of other apps and trying to figure out how they do that, you got to use some intelligence. You need to use some, you know, it needs to be driven by software. It can't be some big process that I'd have some consultancy or a thing like that. Do you have some customer examples you can bring us through or talk to how that typically works? >> Yeah, absolutely. I'll share a few patterns that we see in the market. One pattern and it doesn't have a bias towards a particular industry vertical or a particular size of customer. But there's an illusion out there in the market that you'll be able to lift and shift your workload from your data center to Amazon's data center, as an example, and then magically that's going to take care of all your problems. Amazon's going to manage your mess for less. Well, the harsh reality that customers are finding is that while Amazon, as an example, might be an excellent provider of IT services for your business, if you're not optimizing your workload to leverage that provider, you're not going to get the benefits that you'd hope. And so one trend we see commonly in the industry and it's a mistake we hope folks make, whether they leverage our service or they solve this problem some other way, is you know please don't try to do the lift and shift. In fact, another big trend we see in the industry of companies that have gone that route is they do what we like to call repatriation. Where they made the full-fledged push into migrating their workloads to a new venue and ultimately to figure out that the lift and shift was not successful for them. And the larger the client, the more pain they've experienced because the more money they're spending on IT and the harder that gets. >> Just to poke at that a tiny bit and I know we don't have a lot of time to dig into it but it's if you lift and shift and that's the step one of doing, I need to break something apart, I want to refactor some pieces, and eventually know I'll get there. But is that okay and are there paths to get there? Or are you saying hey, you want to sort those pieces out first before you get to the cloud? >> There's some use cases where lift and shift absolutely has a benefit, absolutely has a value. If you're dedicating IT capacity and it's dedicated towards something that's used sporadically, well just the usage model alone, you could potentially get a benefit out of a lift and shift. You're getting the benefit of the optimization just by being able to leverage the elasticity of cloud. But beyond some of those low hanging fruit use cases, we actually see this as a detriment to many company's success. I like to use the analogy of a moving company. The last thing you want to do is pack the box, pick up the box, move the box, and then move it three or four times before you actually get to the destination. That's what lift and shift is really doing. You just pick up what you had in your data center, you put it in somebody else's data center, and now you're in a foreign land and you're going to try to break that thing apart and re-engineer it there. That's actually going to be a lot harder in practice than what we've seen as more of a better option, which is optimized where you are. If you're if your target state for the next innovation is to get to containers, figure out how to containerize before you make the migration as an example. If your endgame is to move from a database on infrastructure to a platform as-a-service, well optimized that databases deployment, optimize that workload before you attempt to transition it to the path. So I would say nine times out of ten, you're probably going to want to treat an application workload before you attempt to move it someplace else. Otherwise, you're just going to be lifting and carrying that box several times. >> Yeah, it unfortunately reminds me of anybody that's moved and you know, you move someplace and three to five years later you run across that box and you're like why did I even move this to my environment. I've outgrown it, I don't need it. I could have either gotten rid of it or done something else with it. Last piece of the technology I want to cover for today is we've talked a bunch about the public cloud, you do a lot with service providers and with the in-house data center stuff. Maybe talk a little bit as to what you cover. Public clouds, there's a few really big ones but there's so many service providers. What do you engage with? What do you cover there and in the data center there's just, I can't imagine how many options there are. What's the scope of what you cover? >> So this might be a little controversial for some folks because if you read the the trade rags, cloud is the answer. Whatever cloud may be, moving to cloud is the answer. Our philosophy as a company is that public cloud is not the only game in town, nor will it be the only game in town in the future. We believe in companies investing in technology to get the best value for their spend. And as a result there's a continuum of options that we see existing far into the future and those include regional data center providers. Frequently we see them being value-added because they can offer a level of service that's not yet been implemented in public cloud. Who's going to manage the stuff that an Azure doesn't manage, as an example. These regional providers, these service providers, many of whom are evolving to do managed services and other people's data centers, not just their own, are going to play a key role in this next wave of technology. And so again, these regional providers, we see them being very important for delivering the service level that customers expect. There's also and this is a very prominent topic right now, there's concerns about data privacy and data sovereignty. While the hyper scalars have done a great job of building a global footprint, they still have gaps. And so if companies are concerned about GDPR in Europe, as an example. If they're concerned about PIPEDA up in Canada, as an example. These regional service providers have the compliance capabilities, they have the protection already in place to not just deliver a high service level but also to deliver a solution that can be lower risk for your business. And so that's really where we see service providers fitting in the market and we see customers having the right mix of public cloud and service provider powered infrastructure. As well as for large companies, they may still have the buying power, and they may still have the level of expertise in house, so like my Fortune 50 clientele but you could even take it down probably to the Fortune 500. Where it's more cost-effective for them to still operate in their data center. Today, because we're a data-driven company and we live in the data and the insights it provides, still the majority of the workloads, either for service level security or if you're a large company, the economics to run IT are still better suited in data center. We don't know that it's always going to be the majority in your data center. We see this evolving as the public cloud providers continue to mature, over the last few years they've matured greatly. But again, we see a continuum of options for customers to consider. We think those options will get smaller but we still think you're going to have a purpose to consider in your data center, in a regional service provider, as well as considering a hyper scalar for your needs. >> All right. Brian, last thing. Need to get speeds and feeds on CLoudGenera. How many employees you have, how many customers you have. Can talk anything about the funding? And tell us about this looking south. >> The Silicon South. Well, let me start there. One of the things we're very proud about is being a company that's headquartered here on the East Coast and specifically in the South. That said, we're already a global company. We have customers around the world. There's well over a thousand subscribers of our cloud assist technology, which is where you can both model future uses of technology as well as load in your existing inventories and analyze your business at scale. What I would share again about the Silicon South is that we're one of these cool companies that is helping the southeast kind of rise up as a technology center. Not one of the normal places that folks think of as innovation hubs but very much in the Carolinas in particular, we have a market that's on the rise with very smart data scientists, very smart developers, and very strong business leaders. And so that's one of the things we are very proud of as a company. There are 22 employees in CLoudGenera today. As I mentioned, we have a global footprint in terms of customers. I gave you a stat just around our cloud assist product. One of the cool things about us is that we serve both the consumer, so that would be the enterprise that's trying to figure out what to do with their technology investments. We also serve their suppliers. We will not bias ourselves so they can't bias the output of our software but what they can do is leverage our software to guide their customers decisions. In fact, our relationship with Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are relationships where they know sometimes our software will recommend an outcome that they can't monetize but they still choose to work with us and they still choose to recommend us and in some cases, leverage us for their clients to make sure their clients are getting the best value for their spent. >> Well, Brian Kelly, Charlotte North Carolina based CLoudGenera. Appreciate you joining. Thanks so much for sharing with us some of the nuance and complexity that you're trying to help enterprises glean through. We'll be back. Check out lots more coverage at theCUBE.net. So many shows where companies are trying to sort through this very complicated space. So be sure to check out theCUBE.net for all the videos. Wikibon.com where we're digging through with our analysis on our team. I'm Stu Miniman, thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Speaker: From the SiliconANGLE Media Office in Boston, Massachusetts, it's TheCube. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and this is a special Cube conversation here in our Boston area studio. Happy to welcome to the program Bobby Allen, who's the chief technology officer and chief evangelist at CloudGenera. Bobby thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu, thanks for having us. >> Alright so Bobby we had a great conversation with your CEO Brian Kelly talking about CloudGenera, helping customers if, in my own words I'll say, there's this great mess of the cloud and service providers and data centers and things are changing all the time. And here's a great tool to help people understand this. Now, I've had people asking me for years, it's like "Hey, I've got my app, "or I'm building a new app, where do I do this?" And I've always said well, there are certain things that are really easy. If it's going to be up for a really short period of time, and it's something there, it's like you're not going to spend the time to rack and stack and build and do this. hey, Cloud was great for that. And on the other end of the spectrum now, the public clouds might disagree, but if I have something that's just like it's going to be cooking along and it's not changing and it's there, the rent versus buy analogy once again goes towards kind of doing it in a hosted or my own data center. But there's a whole lot of stuff in the middle, That is, well, it depends. There's there's this uncertainty in the world and that's where you live, so bring us in a little bit as to some of the thinking as to how CloudGenera helps and where let's get into it. >> That's a great question Stu. So, we feel like the market is actually changed, in the sense that information is coming faster and faster, there's more and more information that people are inundated and honestly overwhelmed by. And so when people ask us for more information, we typically tell them you don't need more information in our opinion, you really want to move from information to clarity to insight, "What should I actually do?" And so to go back to the real estate analogy you talked about, I think people think of cloud as a house. Cloud is at least a neighborhood if not a state, and you need to figure out where should I live within that state or that neighborhood. So, let's take AWS for example. AWS is a vendor that has many, many, many services, but also different flavors of how you can run things. So before people would look at CloudGenera as a company that can compare different execution venues. Do I want to run this in Amazon or Azure or Google? Still we increasingly get people that want to understand which flavor of Amazon should I do? Do I do the multi-tenant, do I do the dedicated, do I do the VMware cloud on AWS? And those are all valid choices for us. And so for us, we don't really care where a customer wants to evaluate. Let's define what you need and map that to the relevant or interesting options in the marketplace, and then take the guesswork out of it so you have some data-driven decision making. >> Yeah, I love that because I have been covering Amazon for many years, and boy I go to the show and it was like "Alright, I thought I got my arms around Aurora and now there's the serverless based Aurora, and there's 17 different database options inside of Amazon so, oh boy," and then, right. Let's not even talk about all the compute instances. I think it's more complicated to pick a compute instance in the public cloud than it is if I was going to put something in my own rack these days. >> Bobby: Yes, yes it is. >> So, but that being said I want to for a second before we talk about the public cloud, talk to your viewpoint, how are you helping customers in kind of the service provider to data center world. And because that's a complicated and very I have to say fragmented space. >> It is. >> How does CloudGenera help there? >> So CloudGenera deals with the consumers, so ones who actually want to benefit from the technology themselves, but also from the service provider side. So if you're Joe's Cloud Shack, or regional cloud provider or Vmware service provider, anyone who is offering technology services, you may want to know number one, how do you compare with the large hyperscale providers, and then number two, how can you showcase your valued proposition next to those. So maybe Amazon and Azure and Google are on the top of peoples' minds, but how do your services compare to those? So in our platform you can actually show a Joe's Cloud Shack next to an Amazon next to something like a Synergy or SimpliVity. So options inside and outside the data center that you thought about and then ones that you didn't can all be kind of presented in a fair way, so you take the guesswork out of how they compare to each other. >> Yeah, it's interesting. One of the big raging debates we've had out there is, "Oh I wish I had a cloud concierge." And it's like well, it's not a utility, and therefore, I could stand up something in my data center or I could put a Paz in my environment or there's so many layers in the stack and so much nuance that it's the paradox of choice I think that most people have. So, maybe walk us through a customer. When do they tend to come to you, what are some of those patterns, and what are the things that really help get accelerated when they use a platform like yours? >> So, some of the things that people think about are they have workloads that they want to move maybe they want to exit a data center, or what really happens commonly is there's a new leader in town. New CIO comes in, "We're going to have a cloud-first strategy." And we're not opposed to that. The biggest principle for us is do you understand why you're doing, and whether this is the right time, the when? Because if you don't do the right thing at the right time for the right reason there's a hole in your strategy. And so what we look at is, okay what is it that you're trying to move or change or transform, What are the things that are interesting to you or strategic, and then let's look at putting those things together. Now when you define what you need, you shouldn't define what you need in terms of where you're going, right. I don't decide my venue based on the airline I want to get on, I decide I need to be in Vegas for this conference at this time, and then I see the airline that can get me there on time for the best price, hopefully. And we take that same approach when it comes to helping customers. Let's talk about what you need in a vendor agnostic way that's divorced from the options in the market. Because your needs are not impacted by Amazon or Azure or HPE or Dell. And so then, after we define your expectations and your requirements let's map those to the things that you're curious about, or that your leadership says are strategic, and then let's make sure that we understand what we call the concept of logical equivalence. The spirit of your requirement may be called x in one provider and y in a different one, are they really the same as a tomato to-mah-to, or are they really two different types of, excuse me, services or entities altogether? So let's, let's evaluate then, how well your needs are met by these different vendors. Is it just a semantics issue or are these really two different things? Yes, they're both different types of block storage but the requirements are different. The latency is different, the redundancy is different, the pricing is certainly different. How close are these things to meeting the spirit of what you asked for? And the other parts too that I'll just offer that we see a lot is people are concerned overly about cost. How much does it cost? And we feel like the problem is not a problem of cost, it's a problem of value. People go to look for cost calculators but really what they need are value calculators, right? I take a Porsche and an F-150. An F-150 is a bigger vehicle but the Porsche is more expensive for a reason. There's a different experience than just space. And so the reality is people don't mind paying more if they know what they're paying for. Transparency is really the key. >> On that cost piece though, how much of the total equation do you look at? So I think about, my data center there's everything like the power, space, and all those pieces, if I go to a service provider, if it's my stuff, if I still have to manage it, versus some of the operational expenses. How much of kind of the, I hate to say total cost, but how much of that spread do you look at? >> We try to be pretty comprehensive, Stu. So, if you go to a public provider for example you're not paying for power but you're paying for a certainly hourly charge typically on an (mumbling) basis that accommodates a lot of the things that I'll say are platform or hypervisor and below. Now where I think a lot of the other people that are in this space maybe fall short, and our opinion is that they don't look at things above the hypervisor. If I move a workload to an AWS, they may have some great services I can take advantage of. The labor and the licensing and the other considerations that we consider to be carryover costs are things that I still need to accommodate. If I put a workload in Amazon, someone still needs to patch the OS, maybe manage the database, maybe audit security. Those are things that have labor and licensing and software considerations that we try to look at. So we try to be as comprehensive as possible, but we also look at SLA, we also look at security, so you may need to bring another manage services or consulting or software packages to fill those other gaps, so we try to be as holistic and comprehensive as possible. >> What other kind of patterns and data do you bring for CloudGenera? So thinking things either from a vertical standpoint or kind of size of company. I just think there's been certain movements in virtualization and containers and the like where there's been kind of that data and how do I understand what's going to make sense for me, so. Does CloudGenera get into any of that? >> We do get into some of that. So we try again not to force anything down someone's throat. We try to look at where you are, but also understand that there are some patterns. So for example, when we talk about different industry verticals it's very aligned to security and compliance for example. So we know that there are certain providers that are interesting but not ready for primetime because they don't have HIPAA, high tech, high trust, things that are typically relevant for the healthcare industry, so we're very quickly able to say this is something that may not be right for you just yet. Or if you have certain regional concerns, maybe you're looking at GDPR in Europe, you're looking at IRAP in Australia, we can, again, typically guide them to, this provider has some very interesting services but they don't have the security or the SLA that you need. So we try to do that to kind of whittle it down. The other thing that we're seeing though, Stu, is that honestly, many enterprises are biting off more than they can chew. They try to do too much at once, and so some of the things that we talked about, even off camera, is I would ask the question "Does the industry have a POT problem? "Are we trying to do too much at once?" And when I say POT I'm using that to represent the acronym of, to me, three pieces that we need to break this down to. Number one is parity, number two is optimization, and then number three is transformation. Many enterprises in our opinion are trying to eat an elephant with a spoon. They have no idea how to get there and they really don't understand what is too much in terms of the cost, and so when they're evaluating how much they can handle, how much change is too much, in terms of people, process, and technology, the thing to us is, what does parity look like? And that may mean a lift and shift in some cases, it may not, but you at least have to define what success looks like if you take what you're doing in your data center and move that somewhere else. But then, the middle ground is optimization. How do I take the spirit of what I'm doing, move it to that venue and then kind of clean it up or optimize it a little bit, and then once I'm there and I can evaluate the unintended consequences of change, what are the things that I didn't think about? The impacts to my people, the retraining, the other software package I need to put in place for monitoring and management, and so forth. Once I have a handle on that, then I can finally move from optimization to transformation, but that's not, that's not glamorous. That's not interesting. People don't want to talk about that. They want to go whole hog and change everything all at once and we get into trouble doing that. >> Bobby you've given me flashbacks. I worked in the storage industry for a decade, and migrations, you still kind of wake up in the middle of the night, screaming a little bit because it's always challenging, there's always all of those things to work through. You think you've gone through all of your checklists and then, oh wait, something didn't work. Database migrations, big discussion going on there. From Wikibon David Floyer has just been like, it's so many horror stories. People get there but it's, if you don't have to, maybe you don't want to, but there's so many reasons why you want to, so, I guess I want to highlight, we're not telling people not to change, and moving faster and getting on board, some modernization's a good thing, everywhere. You've got a virtualization environment, there's lots you can do today that we couldn't do two or four years ago. So, how do we get over this POT problem then? >> I think part of it is, so again going back to the moving analogy, if I'm going to move, Stu, it would be foolish for me to move without getting an estimate. And there are times when an estimate should be able to come in my house and tell me "It's actually better for you to sell that piano "than to try to move it, 'cause it's not worth it." I would want someone, if I were CIO in an enterprise today, to tell me, "Don't waste your time focusing on this, "this is really where you need to focus your time "because this is going to be the Pareto principle "that saves you the time and the money." The reality is bringing someone who's benefited from the land mines and the pitfalls, so in our opinion, bringing whether that's an SI, consultancy, a data service company like CloudGenera that's benefited from a lot of the things we've seen in the industry, don't hit things on your own that other people have stumbled on, right? Benefit from others' mistakes to allow you to take a look at the whole thing. So the challenge that I think we're having, Stu, is that we're proficient in talking about these things, there aren't enough use cases in terms of mature of cloud transformations to really look back at anecdotal data this comprehensive. We're still figuring a lot of this stuff out, and I know people don't want to hear that, but that's my opinion. >> So, Bobby, is there some place when I'm filling out these forms that I put in here's the skill set my team has, and a little alarm goes off and says, "Hey, time to do some retraining, some reskilling, "maybe bringing on some new people "to handle some of these new areas." How do you handle that side of it? >> I think part of it is honestly, and this may sound a little trite, I think people that are willing to raise their hand and say that we need some help or that "We don't have this all figured out," or that "There are some things that we need to bring in "a little bit of help to help us get that estimate "before we look to move everything," that's really the skill set you want to have. People that are not saying, "I'm the (mumbles) "juggernaut of everything cloud," because those people don't exist yet in my opinion. There are people that have pockets of expertise in things that they have really deep knowledge about, but we need to mix that with, I think, a healthy appreciation for the fact that there's still a lot of things that we're learning about together. The other part of that, Stu, is it's a community and it's a network. You may know storage migrations, I may know database migrations, let's put our heads together about how we can work together as an enterprise and make sure that we minimize impact to the users, because at the end of the day, that's really the challenge, is not to do a cool project, it's to deliver value to the business, and that's what I think we're loosing sight of with all this cool technology sometimes. >> Alright, so Bobby you've got over a thousand people using the tool. What are some of the big areas that people are like, "Oh wow, this is the stuff that's saving me "either lots of time, lots of money, saving my business, "and heck if I'm running the show, keeps my job"? >> I think storage is a big one. So people are oftentimes unaware that there are so many different ways that you can run storage in a given provider. So Amazon for example has four to six different ways you can just run block storage in their particular multi-tenant cloud, and people aren't aware of that. So there's a case that we did for a major bank. We showed them that a terabyte of storage in Amazon can run from 300 dollars up to 26 thousand dollars depending on the level or performance that you want to hit. Egress is another one, so what does the network behavior look like in those applications? Because people often will estimate the resources but not the traffic. What are the estimates to have a level of parity around security. So I don't have HIPAA compliance or SOP compliance in this particular provider. What is it going to take me to get to that level of parity that I need to have, because if I save money, Stu, but I have to spend all that on my lawyer because my data got accessed, then I've still got a problem, I've just kind of moved that down the road. So lots of things out there that I believe we're hiding in plain sight. Again, information is out there that we just don't have the filters to find. What I would say is a lot of people think that cloud is a commodity, we're not there yet. There're providers to this day, I can't give any names to protect the innocent, but the same service is literally triple in one provider what it costs in another one for almost exactly the same service. And there're examples like that that have been out there for years, we just can't see them. >> So, Bobby, last question, if somebody wanted to get started with CloudGenera, is there like a trial version, or how would somebody get involved? >> Yeah, so a couple things that are really interesting. So there's a try now button on our website that lets you kind of answer a few questions and actually get a sample mini-assessment, download a sample report, and actually see the type of analysis that we provide, number one. Number two, CloudGenera is a software company but also a services company. If you want to purchase the software, great, and we actually have trials that we can set up for you to do that. We also do what we call proofs of value. If you want to engage our team to come in and do five to ten applications to see how those might look with our analysis, and then they go at scale and look at your whole CMDB. We want to make sure we're meeting the needs of the business and not trying to boil the ocean if they're not ready for that yet. >> Bobby Allen, CTO and chief evangelist to CloudGenerate, thanks so much for joining me. So much happening in the cloud world. Be sure to check out thecube.net for all of our coverage, as well as wikibon.com for all the research. Thanks for watching theCUBE, I'm Stu Miniman.

(uplifting music) >> Hi I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another great CUBE conversation. We're here in our Palo Alto studios with Fortinet's Anthony Giandomenico, Anthony welcome. >> Welcome, it's great to be here. >> So or otherwise known as Tony G. So in theCUBE conversations Tony, we want to talk about interesting and relevant things. Well here's an interesting and relevant thing that just happened: Fortinet has put forward their quarterly Threats report. What is it? What's in it? >> Really, it's something we do on a quarterly basis, and it's really geared towards the IP security profession, so we go to from the CSO all the way down to the security operator. And what we're looking at is billions of events that are being observed in real time, you know production environments around the world and what we're hoping to do is look at different types of trends that are specific to application exploits, malware, and botnets and hopefully then provide some recommendations back to those IP security professionals. >> Now Tony, malware's been around for a while, some of the bots are a little bit new, but certainly there's some real new things that are on the horizon like IoT and we've heard recently that there's been some challenge with some of these IoT devices. Is it the threat getting more or less intense according to the report? >> Yeah, definitely it's getting more sophisticated, specifically with these IoT devices. What we're seeing as an example with the Reaper and Hajime, always had a hard time actually pronouncing that so I think it's "Hajime". They're actually starting to attack multiple vulnerabilities so instead of just going after one vulnerability, they have multiple vulnerabilities that is inside their malicious code, and then they have the ability to automate the exploitation of those vulnerabilities depending on what the IoT devices are. Now, they're also becoming a lot more resilient. And what I mean by that is some of the actual botnets like Hajime is able to communicate via P2P to each other. What they kind of creates is a decentralized command and control infrastructure. And then lastly, they're becoming much more agile as well, they have this Lua engine, which enables them to quickly update their code so, giving an example, let's say there's a new vulnerability out there. They can quickly swap out or add the additional exploit before that vulnerability, propagate that out to all of the IoT devices that are part of the botnet, and then they can swarm in on that new vulnerability. >> So Fortinet's Fortiguard Labs is one of the leading researchers in this area, especially internet, enterprise security. What is your recommendations that people do about the increasing intensity of the IoT threats? >> But I think we need to start, at least thinking about fighting these automation attacks or worm attacks with our own swarm-like defenses. And what I mean by that is having a seamless integration and automation across your entire security fabric. Now, there's a lot that actually kind of goes into that, but your technology controls need to start talking to each other, and then you can start automating and taking some action really based on whatever threat happens to be in your environment. Now, it's easier said than done, but if you can do that, you can start automating the continual resistance or resiliency of you being able to actually defend against those automated attack. >> So let's change gears a little bit. Willie Sutton, I think it was Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber was famous for saying, when someone asked him "Why do you rob banks?" he said "That's where the money is." >> All of the money (laughing) >> Crypto-jacking. What's going on with as BitCoin becomes a bigger feature of the whole landscape, what's happening with crypto-jackers, what is it, how does it work, why should we be concerned about it? >> Well definitely cryptocurrency is becoming more and more popular these days and the bad guys are definitely taking advantage of that. So when we talk about what is crypto-jacking, so it's really it's sharing, or secretly using, the CPU resources to be able to mine for cryptocurrencies. Now, traditionally you used to have to put some type of application on your machine to be able to mine for cryptocurrencies. Nowadays, all the bad guys really have to do is install a little java script in your browser and away they go. And the only way that you're going to know that your machine may be part of this mining, is it may become super slow and you may be savvy enough to say "Well, maybe look at the CPU." And you look at it and it's pegged at 100%. So that's one of the ways that you can determine that your computer is part of crypto mining. Now in the Q4 report what we've seen is a huge update in crypto mining malware, and it's interesting because it's very intertwined with the rise and fall of the BitCoin price. So as we saw the BitCoin price go up, the crypto mining malware went up, and as it actually dropped off so did the activity. The other thing that we actually ended up seeing is actually in the Darknet. There's a bit of a shift where the bad guys used to only accept payment in BitCoin. Now they're looking at accepting other forms of actual cryptocurrency and that also holds true for ransomware. So if you have an infected with ransomware, it's quite possible that they're going to demand that ransom in something other than BitCoin. >> Interesting, so, in fact we had a great previous group conversation with another really esteemed Fortinet guest, and we talked a little bit about this. So one of the prescriptions is businesses have to be careful about the degree to which they think about doing a lot of transactions in cryptocurrencies. But they probably want to have a little bit of reserves just in case. But what should a business do? What should someone do to mediate some of the challenges associated with crypto-jacking? >> Yeah, I think one of the first things, it's probably self-explanatory to most us that are actually in the cyber field, but having good user awareness training program that actually includes keeping up with the latest and greatest tactics, techniques, and the actual threats that the bad guys are doing out there. Now the other obvious thing would probably be just make sure that your security solutions are able to detect the crypto mining URLs and malware. And I would also say>> now I'm not condoning that you actually pay the ransom>> however, it's happened many times where they've paid, I think there were some companies that actually paid over a million dollars in BitCoin, it may actually be an option and if you have that in your incident response plan, and what you want to do sometimes>> and we've seen organizations actively go ahead and do this>> is they'll buy some BitCoin, kind of keep it on hand so if they do have to pay, it streamlines an entire process. Because ransomware, the actual ransom now, you may not be able to pay in BitCoin. You probably have to keep abreast of what are the actually trends in paying up for your ransom because you may have to have other cryptocurrencies on hand as well. >> So, make sure your security's up to date, then you can track these particular and specific resources that tend to do this, have a little bit on reserve, but make sure that you are also tracking which of the currencies are most being used. So, there are other exploits, as you said earlier. Now we see people when someone's not working by doing peer to peer type stuff. The bad guys are constantly innovative, some would argue that they're more inventive than the good guys because they got less risk to worry about. What other threats is the report starting to highlight, that people need to start thinking about? >> So in this Q4 report what we did is we added in the top exploit kit. And I think we'll probably continue to do that over the-- >> What's an exploit kit? >> Exploit kit is something, it's a very nice little kind of GUI that allows you to really just kind of point and click, has multiple exploits in there, and it's usually browser based so it's going to be able to compromise usually a vulnerability within the browser, or some of the actual browser plugins, things of that nature, and the one that we had in the Q4 report was the Sundown exploit kit. Now, it was interesting because we didn't necessarily see that one on the top, it might've been top of its game maybe 2014, 2015, but it actually rose in early December to actually kind of be number one for Q4. And it's unique because it does leverage steganography, meaning it's able to hide its malicious code or its harvested information inside image files. So we'll continue to track that, we don't know sure why it actually kind of rose up in the beginning of December but we'll just actually continue to track it on time. >> So you've already mentioned ransomware but let's return to it because that's at the top of people's minds, we pay lawyers when they come after us with sometimes what looks like ransom. But what is happening, what's the point in ransomware, what's the report on they like? >> Well, what you see is the actual growth and volume and sophistication has really been common amongst all the reports that we have actually put out to date, but not a lot has really changed. In Q4, what we did have Locky was the number one malware, or ransomware variant along with Global Imposter. Now, it's still the same delivery mechanisms, so you still got the social engineering, it's being delivered through fishing email, but then it's expanding out to let's say compromised websites, malvertising, as well as earlier on last year, we saw where it was being able to propagate from vulnerability to vulnerability so it had this worm-like spreading capability. That's all really been the same and not a lot has really sort of changed. The thing that has changed actually is the fact that they're up in the ante a little bit to be able to hopefully increase their chances of you actually falling for that actual scam, is they're making the subject of that scam a little bit more top-of-mind. As an example, the subject may be cryptocurrency because you're more likely to figure out what's going on there, you'll be more likely to download that file or click that link if the subject is something around cryptocurrency because it is top-of-mind today. >> Interestingly enough, I, this morning received an email saying, "You could win some free cryptocurrency." And I said "And you can go into the trash can." (Tony laughing) So what should people do about it? I just threw something away, but what should people generally do to protect their organization from things like ransomware? >> I do get that a lot, I get that question a lot. The first thing I say, if you're trying to protect against ransomware, you follow the same things that you were doing with some of the other threats because I don't think ransomware is that unique when it comes to the protection. The uniqueness is really an impact, because certain threats they'll actually go and steal data and whatnot but when's the last time you heard of a business going out of business or losing money because some data was stolen? Not very often, it seems to be continued as business as usual, but ransomware, locking your files, it could actually bring the business down. So what you want to do is be able to minimize the impact of that actual ransomware so having a good offline backup strategy, so good backup and recovery strategy, making sure you go through those table top exercises really to make sure that when you do have to recover, you know exactly how long it's going to take and it's very efficient and very streamlined. >> Practice, practice, practice. >> Yup, and don't rely on online backups, shadow copy backups because those things are probably going to be encrypted as well. >> Yup, alright so that's all we have time for today Tony. So, Anthony Giandomenico from-- >> Tony G! (laughing) >> Tony G, who's a senior security strategist researcher at the Fortinet Fortiguard Labs. Thanks very much for this CUBE conversation. >> It was great to be here. >> Peter Burris, once again, we'll see you at the next CUBE Conversation. (uplifting music)

(Upbeat orchestra music) >> Hi, it's Peter Burris with Cube Conversation. We're here with Anthony Giandomenico who's a senior security strategist and researcher at FortiGuard Labs. Tony G! >> Thanks for having me today, Peter! >> Good to see you again! So, Tony G, you spend a lot of time talking to a lot of users, a lot of other professionals, you're doing a lot of research on issues. Give us a quick snapshot. What's the state of security today? >> Well I think there's a lot of things happening right now, I think in the cyberworld. One, a lot of us already know is we have a huge skill shortage. We just don't have enough folks to be able to defend our cyber assets. And, I think the other thing is, you look at some of the mid-tier organizations, maybe a thousand users or so, they don't have those skilled resources, and what happens is they end up relying on different types of technology to help fill that skills gap, and that's good, but what they need to also make sure is that they have an over-arching good solid security program that takes into consideration, technology controls, so you're buying these specific products, but also, what are the processes and what are the actual kind of people that are involved. And are you actually combining all of those to encompass a solid, good, cyber security program? >> Yeah, a bad guy who watches a ransomware attack on a mid-size company, may be a little disappointed that they are not able to get 10 million dollars, but they'll be pretty happy with a million or 500 thousand dollars. That's a good day's work for these guys. >> It's low-hanging fruit, Peter, right? It's much easier, and I think that's the sweet spot for the bad guys, right, because if you go too high, sometimes it's too much effort. You go too low, you're not really getting much. But in the middle, you're getting a decent amount, and a lot of times, they don't have that strong, cyber security program. Now, I always tell a lot of my customers in that sweet spot, forget about protecting and monitoring everything. It's not going to happen. You will fail 100% of the time. However, if you focus on what are the key assets, what are those five, six business critical processes, understand the assets that those processes ride over, focus on protecting those. Everything else is ancillary because this is all that really matters to the business. The other thing I would say, Peter, and I think that this is a mindset change. If I'm a security professional and I'm responsible for protecting my cyber assets, and if I'm being measured on whether there's a breech in my network or not, so if there is a breech I fail, that has to go away. Because you will fail every single time. That's not the way you should be measured. You should be measured on, hey, we quickly identified, something in the network, isolated it, we mitigated it, we got everything back up and running, and we're back up and running as normal, minimized the actual damage. That's how I should be graded on. >> So, it's an important point, Tony G, so what we're saying is, that the real metrics associated with this should be the degree to which you can mitigate problems, not whether or not you're 100% clear of everything, because the bad guys are going to find their way at some point in time. >> They got enough time to do it and you don't. So, like if you can quickly identify when they are in the network, isolate it, minimize the damage, and get your business processes back up and running, that's a win! >> One of the things you mentioned, you mentioned for your cyber security, or your cyber assets, which by itself is not an easy thing necessarily to measure. It's hard to say that this cyber asset's worth that, and that cyber asset's worth that, but we do have to make some effort to understand the risks associated with cyber where it's an opportunity cost or whether it's replacement cost or whatever else it might be. But it also suggests historically we invest in assets we appreciate the value of those assets. Should security be regarded as an asset, should cyber security be regarded as part of the asset base of the business? What do you think? >> Absolutely, you definitely as a consumer or as someone who is interested in looking at an actual business, I think that's a key asset to make sure that your information is being protected. And, honestly, I don't think it always is. We have these regulations that are tied to making sure for example, if you're storing customer credit cards, there's PCI, and there's all these other now HIPPA regulations, and all that type of stuff, but those regulations still don't seem to be enough, and I think the minute you can turn >> You mean it's not enough and it appears that enterprise has generally continued to under invest in their cyber security assets. Is that kind of what you mean? >> Yeah, I still think it's a check-box. >> Okay, I am compliant, okay, that's enough. I betcha, there are companies out there, they'll put a certain money aside knowing that they're going to get breached, and use that money to be able to pay for their breach or whatever else they have to do to meet those regulations, instead of investing into the actual technology to fortify their environment a lot better. >> Well, at wikibon-- we are doing research on related type things all the time, we're just fascinated by the idea that if a business is going after greater flexibility and agility, a crucial element of that has to be, do you have a cyber security profile that allows you to take advantage of those opportunities, that allows you to connect with those partners, that allows you to set up more intimated relations with a big customer. And it just seems as though that something has to become an explicit feature of the conversation about what are strategic assets. >> Yeah, I totally agree. That kind of stirs up something in my head about cyber insurance. I think a lot of companies are also moving towards, well, let me just buy some kind of cyber insurance. And, in the beginning they would go ahead and buy those things, but what they would quickly find out, is that they wouldn't be able to reap the money on an actual breach, because they were out of compliance because they didn't have the good cyber security program they were supposed to have. >> Yeah, the insurance company always finds a way to not pay. Let's talk now about this notion of great agility. We talked about the role that cyber security could play in businesses as they transform the digital world. We've seen a lot of developers starting to enter into cloud-native, cloud-development, new ways of integrating, that requires a mindset shift in the development world about what constitutes security. Now everybody knows, we're not just talking about perimeter, we're talking about something different. What is it that we are talking about? Are we talking about how security is going to move with the data? Are the securities going to be embedded in the API? What do developers have to do differently or how do they have to think differently to make sure that they are building stuff that makes the business more secure? >> Well, before you even start talking about the cloud, or anything else, we still have an issue when we're building our applications, developers still, I don't think are up to speed enough on tracking good, secure coding. I think we're still playing catch-up to that. Now, what you just said, think about where we're at now, we're not even sort of there, now you're going to expand that out into the cloud, it's only going to amplify the actual problem, so there's going to be a lot of challenges that we're going to have to face. We talked about this off-line before, is where's your data going to be? It's going to be everywhere. How are you going to be able to secure that particular data? I think that's going to be a lot of challenges that face ahead of us. We have to figure out how to deal with it. >> The last thing I want to talk about, Tony G, is a lot of the applications that folks are going to be building, a lot of things the developers are going to be building, are things that increasingly provide or bring a degree 6of automation to bear. hink about it, if you've got bad cyber security, you may not know when you've been breached or when you've been hacked or when you've been compromised. You definitely don't want to find out because you've got some automation thing going on that's spinning out of control and doing everything wrong because of a security breach. What's the relationship between increasing automation and the need for more focus and attention on cyber security? >> Usually when I talk about automation, I'm talking about how the bad guys are leveraging automation. Now, I'll give you a little bit of an example here, in our FortiGuard Labs, I think last quarter, I think it was over a million exploits or at least exploit attempts that we were thwarting in one minute. The volume of the attacks are so large these days, and it's really coming from the cyber crime ecosystem. The human cannot actually deal with handling dealing with all those different threats out there, so they need to figure out a way to fight automation with automation. And that's really the key. I had mentioned this earlier on before, is you have to make sure that your technology controls are talking to each other so that they can actually take some automated action. As far as you're concerned as a security operator working in a sock, no matter how good you are, the process for you to identify something, analyze it and take action on it, it's going to be a couple hours sometimes. Sometimes it's a little bit faster, but usually it's a couple hours. It's way too late by then because that threat could spread all over the place. You need those machines to make some of those actual decisions for you, and that's where you start to hear a lot about, and all these buzz-words about artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data analytics. We're really diving into now and trying to figure out how can the machines help us make these automated decisions for us. >> But as you increase the amount of automation, you dramatically expand the threat surface for the number of things that could suddenly be compromised and be taken over as a bad actor. They themselves are more connected. It just amplifies the whole problem. >> Yeah, it gets more complicated, so a system that's more complex, is less secure. >> More vulnerable, sir. >> Yeah, more vulnerable. Absolutely. >> Alright, so once again, Tony G, thanks for being here. We've been speaking on Cube Conversation with Anthony Giandomenico who's with the FortiGuard Labs. He's a security analyst and researcher. Thank you very much for being here. >> Thanks! Thanks for having me. (Techno music)

(uplifting music) >> Hi I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another great CUBE conversation. We're here in our Palo Alto studios with Fortinet's Anthony Giandomenico, Anthony welcome. >> Welcome, it's great to be here. >> So or otherwise known as Tony G. So in theCUBE conversations Tony, we want to talk about interesting and relevant things. Well here's an interesting and relevant thing that just happened: Fortinet has put forward their quarterly Threats report. What is it? What's in it? >> Really, it's something we do on a quarterly basis, and it's really geared towards the IP security profession, so we go to from the CSO all the way down to the security operator. And what we're looking at is billions of events that are being observed in real time, you know production environments around the world and what we're hoping to do is look at different types of trends that are specific to application exploits, malware, and botnets and hopefully then provide some recommendations back to those IP security professionals. >> Now Tony, malware's been around for a while, some of the bots are a little bit new, but certainly there's some real new things that are on the horizon like IoT and we've heard recently that there's been some challenge with some of these IoT devices. Is it the threat getting more or less intense according to the report? >> Yeah, definitely it's getting more sophisticated, specifically with these IoT devices. What we're seeing as an example with the Reaper and Hajime, always had a hard time actually pronouncing that so I think it's "Hajime". They're actually starting to attack multiple vulnerabilities so instead of just going after one vulnerability, they have multiple vulnerabilities that is inside their malicious code, and then they have the ability to automate the exploitation of those vulnerabilities depending on what the IoT devices are. Now, they're also becoming a lot more resilient. And what I mean by that is some of the actual botnets like Hajime is able to communicate via P2P to each other. What they kind of creates is a decentralized command and control infrastructure. And then lastly, they're becoming much more agile as well, they have this Lua engine, which enables them to quickly update their code so, giving an example, let's say there's a new vulnerability out there. They can quickly swap out or add the additional exploit before that vulnerability, propagate that out to all of the IoT devices that are part of the botnet, and then they can swarm in on that new vulnerability. >> So Fortinet's Fortiguard Labs is one of the leading researchers in this area, especially internet, enterprise security. What is your recommendations that people do about the increasing intensity of the IoT threats? >> But I think we need to start, at least thinking about fighting these automation attacks or worm attacks with our own swarm-like defenses. And what I mean by that is having a seamless integration and automation across your entire security fabric. Now, there's a lot that actually kind of goes into that, but your technology controls need to start talking to each other, and then you can start automating and taking some action really based on whatever threat happens to be in your environment. Now, it's easier said than done, but if you can do that, you can start automating the continual resistance or resiliency of you being able to actually defend against those automated attack. >> So let's change gears a little bit. Willie Sutton, I think it was Willie Sutton, the famous bank robber was famous for saying, when someone asked him "Why do you rob banks?" he said "That's where the money is." >> All of the money (laughing) >> Crypto-jacking. What's going on with as BitCoin becomes a bigger feature of the whole landscape, what's happening with crypto-jackers, what is it, how does it work, why should we be concerned about it? >> Well definitely cryptocurrency is becoming more and more popular these days and the bad guys are definitely taking advantage of that. So when we talk about what is crypto-jacking, so it's really it's sharing, or secretly using, the CPU resources to be able to mine for cryptocurrencies. Now, traditionally you used to have to put some type of application on your machine to be able to mine for cryptocurrencies. Nowadays, all the bad guys really have to do is install a little java script in your browser and away they go. And the only way that you're going to know that your machine may be part of this mining, is it may become super slow and you may be savvy enough to say "Well, maybe look at the CPU." And you look at it and it's pegged at 100%. So that's one of the ways that you can determine that your computer is part of crypto mining. Now in the Q4 report what we've seen is a huge update in crypto mining malware, and it's interesting because it's very intertwined with the rise and fall of the BitCoin price. So as we saw the BitCoin price go up, the crypto mining malware went up, and as it actually dropped off so did the activity. The other thing that we actually ended up seeing is actually in the Darknet. There's a bit of a shift where the bad guys used to only accept payment in BitCoin. Now they're looking at accepting other forms of actual cryptocurrency and that also holds true for ransomware. So if you have an infected with ransomware, it's quite possible that they're going to demand that ransom in something other than BitCoin. >> Interesting, so, in fact we had a great previous group conversation with another really esteemed Fortinet guest, and we talked a little bit about this. So one of the prescriptions is businesses have to be careful about the degree to which they think about doing a lot of transactions in cryptocurrencies. But they probably want to have a little bit of reserves just in case. But what should a business do? What should someone do to mediate some of the challenges associated with crypto-jacking? >> Yeah, I think one of the first things, it's probably self-explanatory to most us that are actually in the cyber field, but having good user awareness training program that actually includes keeping up with the latest and greatest tactics, techniques, and the actual threats that the bad guys are doing out there. Now the other obvious thing would probably be just make sure that your security solutions are able to detect the crypto mining URLs and malware. And I would also say- now I'm not condoning that you actually pay the ransom- however, it's happened many times where they've paid, I think there were some companies that actually paid over a million dollars in BitCoin, it may actually be an option and if you have that in your incident response plan, and what you want to do sometimes- and we've seen organizations actively go ahead and do this- is they'll buy some BitCoin, kind of keep it on hand so if they do have to pay, it streamlines an entire process. Because ransomware, the actual ransom now, you may not be able to pay in BitCoin. You probably have to keep abreast of what are the actually trends in paying up for your ransom because you may have to have other cryptocurrencies on hand as well. >> So, make sure your security's up to date, then you can track these particular and specific resources that tend to do this, have a little bit on reserve, but make sure that you are also tracking which of the currencies are most being used. So, there are other exploits, as you said earlier. Now we see people when someone's not working by doing peer to peer type stuff. The bad guys are constantly innovative, some would argue that they're more inventive than the good guys because they got less risk to worry about. What other threats is the report starting to highlight, that people need to start thinking about? >> So in this Q4 report what we did is we added in the top exploit kit. And I think we'll probably continue to do that over the-- >> What's an exploit kit? >> Exploit kit is something, it's a very nice little kind of GUI that allows you to really just kind of point and click, has multiple exploits in there, and it's usually browser based so it's going to be able to compromise usually a vulnerability within the browser, or some of the actual browser plugins, things of that nature, and the one that we had in the Q4 report was the Sundown exploit kit. Now, it was interesting because we didn't necessarily see that one on the top, it might've been top of its game maybe 2014, 2015, but it actually rose in early December to actually kind of be number one for Q4. And it's unique because it does leverage steganography, meaning it's able to hide its malicious code or its harvested information inside image files. So we'll continue to track that, we don't know sure why it actually kind of rose up in the beginning of December but we'll just actually continue to track it on time. >> So you've already mentioned ransomware but let's return to it because that's at the top of people's minds, we pay lawyers when they come after us with sometimes what looks like ransom. But what is happening, what's the point in ransomware, what's the report on they like? >> Well, what you see is the actual growth and volume and sophistication has really been common amongst all the reports that we have actually put out to date, but not a lot has really changed. In Q4, what we did have Locky was the number one malware, or ransomware variant along with Global Imposter. Now, it's still the same delivery mechanisms, so you still got the social engineering, it's being delivered through fishing email, but then it's expanding out to let's say compromised websites, malvertising, as well as earlier on last year, we saw where it was being able to propagate from vulnerability to vulnerability so it had this worm-like spreading capability. That's all really been the same and not a lot has really sort of changed. The thing that has changed actually is the fact that they're up in the ante a little bit to be able to hopefully increase their chances of you actually falling for that actual scam, is they're making the subject of that scam a little bit more top-of-mind. As an example, the subject may be cryptocurrency because you're more likely to figure out what's going on there, you'll be more likely to download that file or click that link if the subject is something around cryptocurrency because it is top-of-mind today. >> Interestingly enough, I, this morning received an email saying, "You could win some free cryptocurrency." And I said "And you can go into the trash can." (Tony laughing) So what should people do about it? I just threw something away, but what should people generally do to protect their organization from things like ransomware? >> I do get that a lot, I get that question a lot. The first thing I say, if you're trying to protect against ransomware, you follow the same things that you were doing with some of the other threats because I don't think ransomware is that unique when it comes to the protection. The uniqueness is really an impact, because certain threats they'll actually go and steal data and whatnot but when's the last time you heard of a business going out of business or losing money because some data was stolen? Not very often, it seems to be continued as business as usual, but ransomware, locking your files, it could actually bring the business down. So what you want to do is be able to minimize the impact of that actual ransomware so having a good offline backup strategy, so good backup and recovery strategy, making sure you go through those table top exercises really to make sure that when you do have to recover, you know exactly how long it's going to take and it's very efficient and very streamlined. >> Practice, practice, practice. >> Yup, and don't rely on online backups, shadow copy backups because those things are probably going to be encrypted as well. >> Yup, alright so that's all we have time for today Tony. So, Anthony Giandomenico from-- >> Tony G! (laughing) >> Tony G, who's a senior security strategist researcher at the Fortinet Fortiguard Labs. Thanks very much for this Cube conversation. >> It was great to be here. >> Peter Burris, once again, we'll see you at the next Cube Conversation. (uplifting music)

(fast-paced instrumental music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to the special CUBE conversation, here at theCUBE Studio in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier, Co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and host of theCUBE for our special CMO signal series we're launching. Really talkin' to the top thought leaders in marketing, in the industry, really pushing the envelope on a lot of experimentation. And Robson Grieve, Chief Marketing Officer of New Relic, is here. Welcome to this CUBE conversation. >> Thank you, excited to be with you. >> So, New Relic is a very progressive company. You have a founder who's very dynamic, writes code, takes sabbaticals, creates product, he's a musician, is prolific. That kind of sets the tone for your company, and you guys are also state of the art DevOps company. >> Robson: Yes. >> So, pressure's on to be a progressive marketer, you guys are doing that. >> Yeah, I think some of the great things about that DevOps culture are process wise it allows us to experiment with different ways of working. And we've obviously talked a little bit about Agile and the way a different way of thinking about how you actually do the work can change the way you output the kind of things you're willing to make, the way the teams work together. And the degree to which you can integrate marketing and sales, really, around shorter time frames, faster cycle times. And so, we have a great culture around that. We also have a really great culture around experimentation. I think that's one of the biggest things that Lou talks a lot about is, let's try things, let's look for experiments, let's see where we can find something unexpected that could be a big success, and let's not be afraid for something to go wrong. If you can do that, then you have way higher odds of finding the Geo TenX. >> And you guys are also in the analytics, you also look at the signal, so you're very data driven, and I'll give you a prop for that, give you a plug. (Robson laughing) New Relic, a very data driven company. But today we're seeing a Seed Changer, a revolution in the tech industry. Seeing signals like cryptocurrency, blockchain, everyone's goin' crazy for this. They see disruption in that. You've got AI and a bunch of other things, so, and you got the Cloud computing revolution, so all of this is causing a lot of horizontally, scalable change, which is breaking down the silos of existing systems. >> Yeah. >> But, you can't just throw systems away. You have systems in marketing. So, how are you dealing with that dynamic, because we're seeing people going, hey, I just can't throw away my systems, but I got to really be innovative and agile to the real-time nature of the internet now, while having all those analytics available. >> Yeah. >> How do you tackle that, that issue? >> Yeah, there's a couple ways to think about analytics. Number one is, what do you need to know in real-time to make sure things are working and that your systems are up and running and operating effectively? And that runs through everything from upfront in web experiences and trial experiences, that kind of thing. Through to how our leads and customers progressing through a funnel, as they get passed around the various parts of a company. But then the second approach we take to data is, after all that's happened, how can we look backwards on it and what patterns emerge when you look at it over the scale of longer period of time. And so, that's the approach today. You're right, you can't just everything and throw it out and start over again, 'cause some startups stop by with a really cool idea. But, you have to be aggressive about experimentation. I think that's the, back to that big idea that we talked about experimentation. We are trying out a lot of different things all the time. Looking for things that could be really successful. Of course, Intercom is one that we started to experiment with a little bit for in product communications and we've expanded over time as we found it more and more useful. And, so that's not, we haven't taken and just ripped something else out of it, made some giant bet on something brand new. We've tried it, we've gotten to know it, and then we found ways to apply that. We're doing that with a number of different technologies right now. >> Yeah, you're in a very powerful position, you're Chief Marketing Officer, which has to look over a lot of things now, and certainly with IT and Cloud. You're essentially in the middle of the fabric of the organization. Plus, people are knockin' on your door to sell you stuff. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> So, what is-- >> That's happened. (laughing) >> It happens all the time, he's got the big budget. >> What are they saying to you? Who's knockin' on your door, right now? Who's peppering you. Who's tryin' to get on your calendar? Who's bombarding you? Where are you saying, Hey, I'm done with that, or Hey, I'm lookin' for more of that. How do you deal with that tension, 'cause I'm sure it must be heavy. >> Yeah, I think there is definitely a lot of optionality in the market, for sure. I think there's a new wave of martech vendors. Many of whom are sitting right in between sales ops and marketing ops. That's a layer we're really interested in. Systems that can help us better understand the behavior of sale's reps, and how they're using things that we're making, and then systems that you can better understand, indications of prospect intent. >> So, funnel and pipeline, or those kinds of things? >> Yeah, we think about it more from the context of authentic engagement. And so, we don't want to apply too much of a-- >> Structure to it. >> Structure, a sales structure to it. We want to try to follow the customer's intent through the process, 'cause the best prospect is someone who is authentically engaged in trying to find a solution to their problem. And so, if we can avail ourselves to people in a thoughtful, and creative, and authentic way, when they need us, when they're trying to solve that problem, then I think that they can become much more successful prospects. >> I love your angle on agile marketing. I think that's table steaks, not that you got to behave that way, and I'd love to get your thoughts, I'll get your thoughts later on the management style and how you make that happen. But, you mentioned engagement, this is now the new Holy Grail. There's a lot of data behind it, and it could be hidden data, it could be data decentralized all over the place. This is the hottest topic. How do you view engagement as a CMO, and the impact to the organization? What are you lookin' for, what's the key premise for your thesis of getting engagement? >> It's really the number one, two, and three topic we're talking about right now, and we think about it on the content side. How do we get ourselves really producing a constant stream of content that has value to people? That either helps them solve a problem right now, or helps them think about an architectural issue in a different way. We're trying to invest more and more technical resources in people who can produce things that are relevant to all the different kinds of users that we have. DevOps people, SREs, our traditional developer customers. We want to go deep and be super relevant at a content level for them. But then once they start to spend time with us, we want to then have a progressive way to pull them deeper and deeper into our community. And so, the things that we can do, something's in digital for that, but then often there's a pop off line, and we do a lot of workshops, a lot of education. >> Face-to-face? >> Face-to-face, where we're in communities, we look at a map at the start of the year and say, where do we have big user communities, and then we drop events into those places where we take our educators and our product experts and get customers to share with each other. And that becomes a really great platform to put them together and have them help each other, as well as learn more about what our product does. >> So, it sounds like you're blending digital with face-to-face? >> Robson: Yeah, absolutely. >> That's a key part of your strategy? >> Key part is to make sure that we're getting time and attention from the people who are making decisions, and what technologies they're going to buy, but also that we're really investing time in the people who are using it in their everyday lives to do their job better. That's a really-- >> Give some examples of outcomes that you've seen successful from that force. That's a really unique, well unique is pretty obvious if you think about it, but some people think digital is the Holy Grail, let's go digital, let's lower cost. But, face-to-face can be expensive, but you're blending it. What's the formula and what are some of the successes that you've seen as a result. >> Yeah, we tend to try to create events that are good for a very specific audience. So, if you think about a targeting formula that you would use in digital that will make digital really efficient, that same idea works really well for an event. So, if you got a user community that's really good at doing one thing with your product and you feel like if they knew a few more things that they could get better. Then we help them really advance to the next level, and so we run certification programs, where we'll pull together a group of confident users and help them get to the next level. And things like that allow us to make a really targeted event that allows us to reach out to a group and move them to a higher level of competency. To have competency focus is a big deal. Can we help you get better at your job? But then communities, is the other big one. Can we help you connect with people who are doing the same things? Solving the same kinds of problems and are interested in the same topics as you are. >> It sounds like the discovery path of the user, the journey, your potential. >> Yeah, it's important to us for sure. >> And content sounds like it's important too. >> It helps with your engagement. How you dealing with the content? Is that all on your properties? How about off property measurement? How do you get engagement for off property? >> Yeah, we're experimenting a lot in that area, of off property. I think we've had tons of success inside our own website and our blogs, and those kinds of-- >> You guys do pop out a lot of content, so it's content rich. >> Yes, we definitely have a lot, we hopefully, our attitude is, we want to turn our company inside out, so we want to take all of our experts-- >> Explain that, that's important topic, so, you guys are opening up what? >> We have got customer support people, we have technical sales, and technical support engineers, we've got marketing people who are thought leaders in Cloud and other architecture topics. We really want to take all the expertise that they've got and we want to share it with our community. >> John: How do you do that, through forums, through their Twitter handles? >> Through all of the above, really. Through their Twitter handles, through content that they write and produce through videos, through a podcast series that we run. We're really trying to expand as much as possible, but then inside our user help community, anytime somebody solves a problem for one customer, we want to add it to that-- >> Sounds like open-source, software. (laughing) >> From a knowledge perspective, that's really an important idea for us. >> Yeah, that's awesome. You worry about the risk. I like the idea of just opening it up. You're creating building blocks of knowledge, like code. It's almost like an open-source software, but no, it's open knowledge. >> We think if we can help people get really successful at the work they're trying to do, that it's going to do great things for us as a brand. >> What's the rules of the road, because obviously you might have some hay makers out there. Some employee goes rogue, or you guys just trusting everyone, just go out and just do it. >> Well, it's constant effort to distribute publishing rights and allow people to take more and more ownership of it, and to maintain some editorial controls, because I think quality is a big thing. It's probably a bigger concern for us then somebody going rogue. At some level, if that happens to you, you can't stop it. >> So, is this a new initiative or is it progression? >> It's been ongoing for awhile. It's progression of an effort we started probably 18 months ago, and it's a wonderful way for an engineering team, and a product management team, and a marketing team to get together around a really unified mission as well. So our content project is just one of those things that I think really pulls us together inside the company in a really fun way as well. >> It's interesting, you seeing more and more what social peers want to talk to each other and not the marketing guy, and say, Hey, get the Kool-Aid, I like the product, I want to talk to someone to solve my problem. >> Want to have a real conversation about it, and I think that's our job, is to not think of it as marketing, but to think of it as just facilitating a real conversation about how our product works for somebody. >> I'd love to talk about leadership as the Chief Marketer for New Relic in the culture that you're in, which is very cool to be in on the front-end, in the front lines doing cool things. What do you do? How do you manage yourself, how do you manage your time? What do you do, how do you organize the troops, how do you motivate them? What's your management style for this marketing in the modern era? >> I think, number one, we're trying to create an organization that is full of opportunities for people, so it's something that we've done. I've been there for about two and a half years, and we've really looked hard for people who have tons of potential and finding great things to work on. On new projects, and then let them try out ideas that they've got. So, if they can own an idea, give it a shot, and even if it doesn't work, they'll learn a bunch from the process of trying. >> What are the craziest ideas you've heard from some of your staff? (laughing) >> Oh boy, you know a lot of them involve video. There's always a great idea for a video that's risky. And we've made-- >> So the Burger King one with Net Neutrality going around the web is the funniest video I've seen all week. >> Robson: Yeah, yeah. >> Could be risky, could be also a double-edged sword, right? >> Yeah, video is one of those places where you have to check yourself a little bit, 'cause it could be a great idea, and so sometimes you have to actually make it and look at it, and say, would we publish this or not? And, yeah, so that's definitely the place to be. >> So common sense is kind of like your. >> Yeah, you start with common sense, for sure. And, I think we want to be a part of it being culturally responsible in Silicon Valley right now, is really making sure that we're attentive to making sure that we're putting in the right kind of workplace environment for people. And so, our content and the way we go to market has to reflect that as well, so there's a bunch of filters that you put on it, but you have to take risks and try to make things, and if they work great, and if they don't then the cost of that is less than. The cost of failure is so low in some of these things, so you just have to try. >> Well, you know, we're into video here at theCUBE. I have to ask you, do you see video more and more in the marketing mix and if so, how does that compare to old methods? We've seen the media business change and journalism, certainly on the analyst community. Who reads white papers? Maybe the do, maybe they don't. Or, how do they engage? What content formally do you see as state of the art engagement? Is is video, is it a mix, how do you view that? >> It's a mix, really. I think video's really powerful. And it can be great to tree topics and short form in a really powerful way. I think we can stretch it out a little bit in terms of how to and teaching and education also. But, there are times when other things like a white paper are still relevant. >> Yeah, they got to do their homework and get ready for the big test. >> Yes. >> How to install. (laughing) >> Exactly, yeah. >> Okay, big surprises for you in the industry, if you could look back and talk to yourself a few years ago and say, Wow, I didn't know that was going to happen, or I kind of knew this was going to be a trend we would be on. Where is the tailwinds, where's the headwinds in the industry as a marketer to be innovated, to be on the cutting edge, to deliver the value you need to do for your customers and for the company? >> Yeah, I think there's a bunch of great tailwinds organizationally and in the approach to work. And you talked about Agile. I think it's been a great thing to see people jump in and try to work in a different way. That's created tons of scale for a department like ours, where we're tryin' to go to more countries, and more places constantly. Having a better way to work, where we waste less effort, where we find problems and fix things way faster, has given us the chance to build leverage. And I think that's just that integration of engineering, attitudes, with marketing processes has been a, is an awesome thing. Everybody in our marketing department, or at least a lot of people have read the DevOps handbook, and we've got a lot of readers, so the devotes of that thought process that don't suit an engineering jobs. >> DevOps, Ethos, I think is going to be looked at as one of those things, that's a moment in history that has changed so much. I was just at Sundance Film Festival, and DevOps, Ethos is going to filmmaking. >> Robson: Yeah. >> And artistry with a craft and how that waterfall for the Elite Studios is opening up an amateur market in the Indy, so their Agile filmmakers and artists now doing cool stuff. So, it's going to happen. And of course, we love the infrastructures code. We'll talk about that all day long We love DevOps. (Robson laughing) So I got to ask you the marketing question. It will be a theme of my program of the CMO is, if I say marketing is code, infrastructure is code, enabled a lot of automation, some abstracted a way horizontally scaled, and new opportunities, created a lot of leverage, a lot of value, infrastructures code, created the Cloud. Is there a marketing as code Ethos, and what would that look like? If I would say, apply DevOps to marketing. If you could look at that, and you could say, magic wand. Give me some DevOps marketing, marketing as code. What would you have automated in a way that would be available to you? What would the APIs look like? What's your vision for that? >> What about the APIs, that's a good question. >> John: I don't think they exist yet, but we're fantasizing about it. (laughing) >> Yeah, I think the things that tend to slow marketing departments down really are old school, things like approvals. And how hard it is to get humans to agree on things that should be really easy. So, if the first thing you-- >> Provisioning an order. (laughing) >> The first thing you could do is just automate that system of agreeing that something's ready to go and send it out that I think you'd create so much efficiency in side marketing departments all over the world. Now that involves having a really great, and API's a great thought in that, because the expectations have to get matched up of what's being communicated on both sides, so we can have a channel on which to agree on something. That to me is-- >> Analytics are probably huge too. You want to have instant analytics. I don't care which database it came from. >> Yes, exactly. And that's the sense of DevOps and can use. But then you got some feedback on, did it work, was it the right thing to do, should we do more of it, should we fix it in some specific way? Yeah, I think that's-- >> I think that's an interesting angle, and the face-to-face thing that I find really interesting, because what you're doing is creating that face-to-face resource, that value is so intimate, and it's the best engagement data you can get is face-to-face. >> Yeah, I think it also allows us to build relationships to the point where we are getting invited into slack channels to help companies in real-time sometimes. I think there's a real-- >> So humanizing the company and the employees is critical. >> Yeah. >> You can't just be digital. >> Yes, it's a big deal. >> Awesome. Robson, thank so much for coming on theCUBE. The special CMO series. Is there a DevOps, can we automate away, what's going to automate, where's the value going to be in marketing? Super exciting, again, martech. Some are sayin' it's changing rapidly with the Cloud, AI, and all these awesome new technologies. What's going to change, that's what we're going to be exploring here on the CMO CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat instrumental music)

(lively music) >> Hello, and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto studios of theCUBE, I am John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media and also the co-host of theCUBE. We are here with Blake Morgan, who is the futurist, author, speaker, around the concept of customer experience, and has a great new book out called, More is More. Blake, Welcome to theCUBE Conversation. >> Thank you John. >> Thanks for coming in. So I love that it is a hard cover book, the book is great, it feels good, the pages, it's a really good read, but it's got a lot of meaty topics in there. So let's just jump in, what's the motivation for the book? Why the book? Why More is More? >> So I have been in the contact center space for over 10 years and basically everyone under the sun is a customer and we all know what it feels like to have a bad customer experience. Have you had a bad customer experience ever? >> John: Oh yes. >> Yeah, right. >> So there is no shortage of work to be done in this space. I think now it's a great time to be in customer experience because there is more awareness about what it actually means. So, I wrote the book to basically provide some kind of definition and to really help people understand, What is customer experience?. Is it customer service? No, it's not. So what does it mean? How can businesses improve customer experience and what do they need to know to get started? >> How about the evolution? Because you know digital has really changed the game. You are seeing cloud computing, machine learning, AI techniques, bots certainly. I mean Twitter came out over ten years ago. I remember when Comcast Cares came out, you know that was a revolution. It was this one guy who decided to be on Twitter. We saw that beginning of that, that trend, where you can now serve and touch folks with customer service and experience, but then again, the blinds between customer experience and customer experience is blurring. Now those multiple channels, do you send them a Snapchat? Do you Instagram? All kinds of new things are emerging, so how do you define, as a frame, the customer experience in this new context? >> Yeah, you're right, there are so many channels. It's really overwhelming for a lot of businesses. So I think it is important to really cut out the noise to think about, Who are you as a business?, and Who is your customer?. What does your customer need? And I really encourage businesses to make their life harder to make it easier on the customer, because in so many situations, companies make it easier on themselves and make it harder on their customers. For example, say you do tweet a company, they might tell you, Hey, now you need to call us and repeat yourself or Now you need to send us an email. Well that's not easy for me as the customer. So it's really all about making customers' lives easier and better. That's the name of the game. >> So what was the findings in the book, when you did the research for the book, what was the core problem that companies are facing? Was it understanding customer experience? Was it the re imagining of customer experience? Was it just a strategic imperative? What was the problem that you uncovered that was the core to this new customer experience equation? >> So a lot of people equate customer experience with customer service and that's a big problem because for most companies, customer service is a cost center. It's not a revenue generating arm of the business. It's not exciting, it's not a money maker, it's not marketing or sales, and so that is really what people think of, when they think of customer experience. But the book is based on this DO MORE framework and DO MORE is basically represents as an acronym. Each piece of the six piece framework represents a different piece of where customer experience lives. So the first D is design something special. The second, I'm not going to read you every, I'm not going to bore you every single word, but the second is about loving your employees, so that is a part of it too. So culture, modernizing with technology, obsessing over your customers, having a culture of customer centricity and embracing innovation and disruption. So these are all varying pieces of DO MORE, which really helps companies understand, it's not simply something that sits in the contact center. For example, let's say you've got your laptop here, and you love your laptop, but your experience of the laptop is not only shaped by, say you have to contact the call center, it is also shaped by how that laptop was built and how about those people who built the laptop. Were they fighting at work with each other? Did they like their jobs? Did they like their boss? Honestly, that's going to impact your experience. >> Yeah, was it a sweat shop. >> Was it a sweat shop? There you go. >> I mean there's all kind of issues about social good too kind of comes into it with that. >> It actually does, I write a lot about social good in my book and some really great CEOs today get that social good is important, like the CEO of Patagonia or Marc Benioff. I mean you can just rattle off so many examples of stuff that he's doing, whether it is equal pay for woman, or his huge house in Hawaii where he's housed monks, to help them when one of the monks had cancer actually. Salesforce is constantly doing good for it's employees and for the community at large. >> Take me through your view on how executives should think about customer experience with all the digital transformation, because a lot of business models are shifting, you are seeing mobile apps, changing the financial services market, because now the app is the teller. So you have three kinds of companies out there, you've got the customer service oriented company, like a Zappos, or you've got a tech company like Google, but they are all about product innovation. Then you've got companies like Apple and others, that are like the big brand and culture personalities, so you've got these three different kind of companies as an example, each one might have a different view on customer experience. How do you tie, how does an executive figure out how to match the more into their DNA? >> That's a fantastic question. I think it's important to have somebody accountable to it, whether it's a Chief Customer Officer or your CMO, because the CEO is ultimately responsible, however, the CEO has their hand in so many things, it's not scalable for them to be so involved on a granular level, on customer centric metrics and so on and so forth throughout the organization. So I would encourage a company to actually hire somebody who is accountable, who creates even tiger teams across the organization with these customer centric metrics in mind, so everybody is working together and they know their job, no matter if they are HR or finance or marketing or customer service, that their metrics, their performance metrics, are tied back to the customer satisfaction. >> I know you do a lot of talks and you do a lot of speeches out there and events, what's the common question that you get? I mean what are people really struggling with or what are they interested in, what are some of the things that you are hearing when you are out on the road giving talks? >> I think it's hard to actually put some of these practices, I think it's actually hard to put some of these ideas into practice. For example, I recently gave a talk at a large technology company down here in San Jose and I presented some pretty wild ideas about actually the energy for influencing change. So how do we keep that high level of stamina with our employees when it's just quite hard to sometimes even keep up. I remember I gave this speech, I talked about a lot of very eccentric ideas about self-management, like when you are a worker you need to take care of yourself because the corporation is never going to give you a pass to let's say, rest, or do what you need to do to feel good, to be good at work. I noticed some of the people in the audience were all texting each other and afterwards someone came up to me and said, you know we are all texting each other because you say these things and the speech was purchased by the leader of the company, however, when it comes to actually working here, that is not really the vibe here, that's not the culture. So I think that a lot of, even the best companies today, still struggle every single day with some of these ideas, because when you DO MORE, when you work harder than others, it's tiring, it can take it's toll on employees. So how do you keep people fresh? >> So fatigue is a huge issue. >> Fatigue, yes. It is an issue. >> So how do they solve that? Because again, that is an experience and the employees itself represent brands. >> Yeah. >> So what are some of the solutions for that? >> Yeah so it's normal that people in these big companies feel fatigued when they are working harder for the customer, but it is really important for people to just manage themselves because no one is going to give you permission to take ten minutes to go for a walk, take ten minutes to go meditate, so it's really about management providing the room for employees to breathe and also modeling it as an example, if leaders just worked 24/7, it's all about the grind, the grind, the grind, that's not a healthy culture, so they need to push their people, but also give them some kind of safety that they can take care of themselves as well. >> So talk about the book target. Who is the ideal candidate for the book? Who are you writing the book for? What do you hope to accomplish for the reader and the outcome? >> So I write for Forbes and Harvard Business Review and Hemispheres Magazine, I have a lot of different types of readers because customer experience really affects everybody in business. So it could be the CMO, it could be the Chief Customer Officer, it could be the CEO, in fact the CEO of 1-800-Flowers wrote the foreword for my book, Chris McCann. So this book is really relevant for a wide variety of people who are interested in making their company more competitive. >> That's a great point, so let's trill down on that, customer experience just doesn't end in a department, we've seen this in IT, information technology, it's a department that becomes now pervasive with cloud computing, you see social media out there, so customer experience has multiple touch points, hence the broad appeal, how should someone think about being the customer experience champion? Because you always have the champions that kind of drives the change, so you've got change agents and you have kind of to me, the pre-existing management in place, what's the human role in this? Because remember, you have machines out there, you have bots, and all those machine learning technology out there, it's important that the human piece is integral to this, right? I mean what's your view on the role of the person? >> Yeah I'm not anti-technology, I'm not anti-bot, I am excited about the Amazon Go cashier-less stores, Amazon Go stores, but I do feel that technology can help us without totally replacing us. I think that we need thoughtful people in charge of these technologies to lead us, to make smart decisions, but you can't just let the technology go. I think that can be really scary. We've definitely seen so many TV shows about this, you can't blink without seeing another TV show about robots taking over the world. >> So it's a concern. What's the biggest thing you've learned from the book? What was the key learnings for you, personally, when you wrote this book? >> Well, writing a book, there is a lot of learning. I actually had my daughter, I was pregnant while I wrote this book and so I think for me to be totally candid, it was a lesson in patience and working through that period for me being pregnant. So I was like giving birth to the book and an actual baby. To be totally truthful, that was my learning. >> You got a lot more than the book. >> Blake: Laughing >> Well, congratulations, how old is the baby? >> She's sixteen months. >> Congratulations, awesome. >> Thank you. >> Well thanks for coming in and sharing about More is More, Blake Morgan, futurist author on the customer experience, More is More, it's theCUBE Conversation and really an impactful thought because customer experience transcends not just a department, it really is a mindset, it's about culture, it's about a lot of things, and it's certainly in the digital revolution, it's really going to be fundamental. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. >> Blake: Thanks so much. >> Appreciate it. I am John Furrier here in the Palo Alto studios for CUBE Conversation, thanks for watching. (lively music)

(uptempo orchestral music) >> Hello and welcome to a special exclusive conversation here in the studios of Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, your co-host and theCube co-founder of Silicon Angle Media. We have exclusive, breaking launch here from a Cube alumni Al Burgio, who's the founder and CEO of Fusechain, a hot start up going after the blockchain, a little bit of open source. This is a launch. This is new information coming out. You still (indistinct talking) for the first time talking about your project again Cube alumni. Welcome to the theCube conversation. >> Thank you for having me John. >> You're the founder and CEO of Fusechain. >> That's correct. >> So you're just in Miami, 5000 people at these blockchain conferences which are exploded the biggest wave. Crypto and Blockchain in tandem are creating a very attractive and intoxicating market. It's the biggest wave we've seen in all the alpha entrepreneurs going out there. Some scammers too are trying to get into this market. We've documented that on theCube. But it's the biggest wave we've seen in a long time. You're out there. Talk about what is Fusechain? What's the story? Gives us the update. >> Sure. So Fusechain is a blockchain technology company, really founded to support a new open source project that is also coming out of stealth mode called the digital bits project. It's focused on disrupting the coalition loyalty industry. What we refer to as let's say one dot of loyalty in rewards. We feel that that market is ripe for disruption. A lot of frictions, others I'm happy to talk about in that space and we feel that blockchain in a decentralized model with the right partners and coalition could change the game. >> So you've got a T-shirt for us. I appreciate it called digital bits. New open source project. What I like about what you're doing, first of all you got a great track record. You have a ton of start ups you've done in the past and again great exits and you always have a good eye for where there's disruption and certainly crypto is dislocating industries, not just disrupting. Radically changing the makeup so before I dig into that. I want to get into digital bit. It's a little bit open source. So you have an open source project combined with what you guys do, so it sounds like you're what Red Hat was for Linux. You're for digital bits, is that? >> That's right so we are. So Fusechain is focused on building applications that are interoperable with that blockchain to support enterprises which is merchants, retailers, hotels so forth that would be working with the digital bits project. And so we feel that there is an opportunity to monetize that building let's say SAS type models around these applications and supporting and helping make digital events very successful. >> So it's interesting, I was observing when I was in New York last fall and I walked into a funds conversation with a bunch of guys. And people were trying to grop where the action was and I raised my hand and said, you can tell a good deal by the ones that are going to take down and incumbent industry, not just the player. You're taking a similar approach which I like about what your deal is. What is it about your approach and what is the target and how are you going to attack that? >> Sure, sure. First and foremost, really focused on blockchain and what was important for us characteristics wise and we felt that it needed to rapid transaction in terms of nature. Seconds as opposed to blocks, let's say every 10 minutes like a bitcoin for example. Because we are focused ultimately let's say on the consumer space. So we first and foremost on how our approach to developing this protocol and supporting the digital bits project. From there it was what industry did we feel would be best suited for this and this is how we gravitate into the loyalty industry. There is already a learned behavior in loyalty. People look at points as let's say a form of currency. They know how to go join one earn and what have you. It's like human mining, if you will and so we wanted to fit let's blockchain technology loyalty as opposed to fitting loyalty into blockchain. The other thing that I liked in terms of us going in this direction was really looking at. There was a lot of different ICOs, blockchain projects out there and so forth. We're the first to market with this. We're the first to market with that, but what's the incumbent doing in corporate America? Let's say, they're probably sitting and waiting and there's nothing preventing them copycatting and doing the same when there's enough of an established market. What I liked about loyalty more specifically the coalition models. We didn't feel that with a decentralized model. Putting into the market a decentralized model that they could replicate that the same way, It's like if you look at Netflix and what they did to Blockbuster. Blockbuster could not pivot quite the same way. We feel that loyalty dot one, specifically the coalition programs, will have a challenges in adopting blockchain in a similar manner. And so we feel that for that reason what we're up to here with this plain venture it's going to be highly disruptive. >> Let's get to the business model after we talk a little bit about the actual tech and the products. So you have digit bits and I notice you guys have a trade mark on that going on. But it's going to be open source. So what is digital bits? Is that the coin? Is it a utility token? How does it work? What are you actually doing? >> So digital bits is the name of the open source project. It's the name of the blockchain protocol. It will be the name of the cryptocurrency, so all the name of that cryptocurrency to that blockchain once it's put in circulation. And the project itself, we will ultimately see that spun into a foundation so it's the name of all of the above in terms of what digital bits is. Fusechain is a contributor to that project and we obviously like what it stands for. We're building parallel management platforms and so forth. Others are free to do this as well and have begun to do so. That will help make that project successful. >> So in other words, it creates a code from digital bits and apply it but you're going to be a token in the project. >> Yeah, if you think of, use Red Hat as an example. So there was open source project out there, various Linux type projects back in the day and big enterprises wanted to take advantage of that. But who was going to support them doing that? So Red Hat obviously established a very successful market in doing that so in a similar manner. We want to support digital bits in a very big way. We're building applications that businesses are going to need so they don't have to go build them themselves, and it will bring those markets. >> Who are you targeting? You're targeting existing businesses that have loyalty. You're trying to take that business away from them. Isn't that new? What the-- >> So coalition loyalty industry is fairly well established. >> John: What does that mean coalition? >> Coalition is multi merchant so in the United States, a brand known as Punti, that happens to be owned by American Express, but you can go to Macy's earn Punti, ExxonMobil and so forth. Canada is very big market for this as well so you have air miles, major grocery chains. >> John: They're always expiring, I hate these programs. >> Well that's the other issue with them. So there's tremendous friction and frustration now with these programs that exists. We're looking to disrupt that as well and provide-- >> So how do they work with you? Give an example of the use case that (indistinct talking). >> Ultimately we feel that, from a coalition standpoint often times the merchant is paying a reoccurring fee to support that program. So let's say big grocery store or hotel or what have you and in order for the privilege of their customers to be able to earn let's say, while shopping online at their store or in that facility just for the privilege of their users to be able to earn, the merchant is having to pay the operator that program, before the consumer has done anything with those points and so it's a big cost to them and we basically just to quantify, it can be as much of an 80% savings verses what the merchant would have to pay the support. One dot to support this decentralized blockchain base solution. >> So you guys are a decentralized application or are you a decentralized platform or you an infrastructure protocol? How do you categorically define yourself? >> So digital bits is definitely an infrastructure protocol but focus specifically on loyalty rewards and so just to, it's really opened in that sense that various businesses can join and support this. In a number of different ways whether it's pre-existing products, platforms that they have. They want it to be inoperable or they simply want their users to be able to now earn this form of loyalty. And we have in the coming weeks, you'll see announcements from other brands, some let's say blue chipish and others up and coming early stage companies with doing loyalty in a different way, joining the digital bits project to take advantage of the tokenize economy. >> I like this Red Hat to Linux in metaphor because I think no one's actually seen that yet happen. I see a lot of (indistinct talking) happen certainly the (indistinct talking) a decentralized apps or de-apps as they are called is huge growth market. We see a big tsunami coming with de-apps, decentralized applications. So will I be writing decentralized apps on your platform infrastructure? Is that they're doing? How are they implementing in your mind the Fusechain and the digital bits? >> So I mean there's basic examples of the products in market already, let's say multi-coin wallets. If they wanted to list digital bits as another cryptocurrency that their app supports then they can support the project in that way. So there's a number of different ways that the developers are established. >> I can build my own wall. I could integrate it into a pre-existing coin wallet. So you're pretty flexible, you're agnostic on how to gets done. >> Exactly, exactly. And this is why ultimately digital bits will be spun into a foundation. >> It will establish some policies around this so it's not completely naked but some governance. >> It's always tricky, you got to be careful. >> Well, governance from the standpoint of I'm looking at it from the perspective of how merchants, the terms by which they would disseminate digital bits to their consumers. >> So some lightweight governance. Is it hardcore governance or lightweight? >> No, I would say lightweight. So it's making sure that there's no bad actors at least at the time of-- >> (indistinct talking) a non-profit apart of the Fusechain? >> No, no, non-profit. >> Okay, okay so let's get into some of your journey. I see entrepreneurial journeys are happening all the time. A lot of people are jumping into the ICO and our crypto blockchain as a start. A lot of my alpha friends are doing it. It's just like wow. This is a big trend. It's disruptive. >> Al: Oh highly. >> Where there's disruption, you're going to have entrepreneurs but also scammers. We'll get that in a second but talk about your journey. ICO, you got to get formed. Get a little form, it could be expensive. We've documented theCube with Goodwin, a law firm in the valley that's doing a lot of ICOs. It could be expensive. There's tax consequences so how are you looking as an entrepreneur? You have opportunity recognition, check. Now you got to put it together. Utility token, are you raising money, are you doing the ICO? Can you give us some details? >> So it's utility token. We are raising money Fusechain initially is focused on raising capital, let's call it the old fashioned way. So Fusechain itself is taking in equity investment not involving any cryptocurrency. >> So no token sales on that simply. >> Is to date but a digital bits itself will be partaking and raising capital for the project. >> With Fusechain's ICO or their own ICO? >> No, no, it will be the digital bits projects. >> So will the ICO go through Fusechain or will go through digital bits? >> It will go through digital bits. >> Okay so you got a utility so that involves a token sales. So you're going to do a private, that's equity for Fusechain and then a token sale for digital bits. >> Al: Correct. >> Okay, that's nice-- >> Call it the pre-presale in advance of it actually being widely disseminated. >> What is the utility of the platform because that's the how we test? >> Yeah, yeah so we're keeping it really simple to start. We feel that we'll be able to demonstrate other utilities with this project, but similar to other projects out there if you're familiar with Ripple and Stellar and so forth. Some basic utility, you need to have some of the coin to be able to send coin. And so we're keeping it relatively simple from that perspective. There's security benefits. >> So the utility you're going after at launch is token sharing. >> Correct. >> Okay, and the activity is loyalty based for the merchants? >> Yes, and consumers so ultimately, digital bits stands for all these sort things I've just mentioned integrated together in this decentralized model really focused on giving back to users. So first and foremost, users being consumers that use these programs and the merchants that have historically supported these types of programs. In addition to that, digital bits is also focused on giving back to society. More specifically aligning itself with charitable organization worldwide that the project itself will be able to give back to. >> You're the (indistinct talking) guy. Your last (indistinct talking) you successfully sold it and exit pairing and networking. One big global network now. So I want to get your perspectives on entrepreneurs and how you've been traveling. We tried to get you last week here on theCube to talk about you're project and getting out there now but you've seen a lot of the events you're out in the field, you're own in the trenches. What's the landscape like in crypto and blockchain? Can you offer any observations? Good, bad and ugly, what's it take? >> I was for example recently last week I attended the North American Bitcoin Blockchain conference down in Miami, nearly 5000 people. Tremendous buzz, great pedigree among speakers. Both domestic speakers worldwide and people I would say from all walks of life. A lot of people are interested in either in the space or very interested in the space and I don't have the numbers in terms what the attendance was last year at that conference. But I wouldn't be surprised if it's 10x-- >> Are these new in tech? Are they tech gurus? What's the makeup and profile of folks in here? >> Overstock.com CEO. One of the keynote speakers of this and obviously a very well established company heavy in blockchain with their subsidiary t0 as well as some of the up and comers. Great pedigree, more specifically associated with the blockchain space but really supporting a lot of these events and being great evangelists for all things blockchain. >> So I get your perspective again. You see many ways of innovation, we're talking before we came on camera. I've been saying and when we talk privately in the valley here and in other places that this is like a dot com bubble, but it's accelerated. Everyone's getting their surf boards and jumping on those big waves. Some think there will be a crash. I think they'll be a probably a reset. There's just too much action happening and again the dot com bubble. Everything actually happens. >> Al: Yeah. >> So a little anecdote there but the point is there's some scammers. >> Al: Yes. >> There's some bubble activity. How are you sorting through that noise? What should people look through? Because when people are like, "Well I'm skeptical. "You're riding a hype wave right now. "What's the real deal?" >> The reality is with anything super exciting, there's always scammers. You have to take traditional stocks. There's always the penny stock scammers let's say and so this is not necessarily something exclusive to blockchain tokens or what have you. We see this in the traditional capital market systems and equities that are out there today. I'd say that this is very much mid 90s internet in terms of equivalent. The benefit of blockchain is that the internet exists so social network and Facebook. The ability to get news out there, widely disseminated, The internet existed. That infrastructure is helping to support the rapid growth trend that we're seeing with blockchain. So I would say that it is a bigger phenomenon than the internet was in the 90, by virtue the internet now existing. >> I got to ask you so one of the things I always is that there's no value being created. It's really a mirage right? So this thing about blockchain is there's a lot of value creation opportunities. As an entrepreneur, you get to see that and certainly see it from the Fusechain and digital bits. If someone said to, "Al, this thing is a bunch of hype. "Where's the value?" Where's the value? Why is crypto and blockchain attracting all these entrepreneurs? Why is it so intoxicating? Why is it attracting all walks of life? What's the value creation opportunity? >> Put cryptocurrencies aside for a moment and just focus on blockchain as a technology and really what it stands for. It is truly revolutionary. This is something with capability to have distributed ledgers solving the double spend issue. All of these things that historically could not be done with the internet or other forms of technology. And so it's very powerful in terms of its applications in areas of let's say even supply chain and how businesses can have this trusted collaborative platform or technology where you don't have to trust any centralized corporation, other institution or what have you, and it just works. So that is the technology itself is highly powerful and it's already evident that it's touching a number of different industries. So outside of the cryptocurrencies, let's say craze. Blockchain is definitely here. It's here to stay and it's just going to continue-- >> That's a fundamental infrastructure shift. >> Absolutely. >> Alright, so let me give you the little snarky comment that get on Facebook all the time. "Ah John crypto, this blockchain. "Have you seen a distributed database before, lol?" That's some snarky comments. So the naysayers will be like, "It's just a distributed database ledger." And then some people will be like, "I just don't see the business case. "Why do people actually need blockchain?" What's your take on those two points? >> I think that, that's a great way to look at it. Can you solve that problem with just using regular database? And probably often times the answer is yes, so blockchain shouldn't necessarily be used for everything, but there is certain things that historically, and again-- >> (indistinct talking) is one. >> Exactly, yeah. >> (indistinct talking) attracts. >> Absolutely, and so there's a number of industries where having it be blockchain based is definitely better than dealing with distributed databases. >> I've been commenting. I'm pro-blockchain as you know. Pretty bias, people know that. However what I say to folks is look, there's a dynamic going on here that's revolutionary at the infrastructure level. I think that's true. That will play out and then I think immutability and then the decentralized nature of apps. It will be a whole another genre of software development whether it's media (indistinct talking) to software. But ultimately it's these communities, if you look at in the media business. I was just at Sundance. There's new artist coming on that have their own audiences. >> Al: Right. >> So those are crushing the elites. So you have a revolution where the common person or group of people could get together in an unstructured way, a decentralized way to take on elite or huge industry incombantants or industries themselves. That's a phenomenon. That's kind of nuance. >> Al: Absolutely. >> It's real. >> It's absolutely real. Think of open source traditionally. You needed your employer to sponsor you. Hey if work for you, can I spend 10% of my time on a open source project? The open source project itself never really had a mechanism to provide support form of remuneration. Now by tokenising and so forth these native currencies an idea can provide a potential for reward and we're seeing that happen, and so it no different than any other great idea. 90 plus % of start ups don't necessarily make it. 90 plus % of blockchain ideas may not make it but the reality is, a community with a great idea can kick off a project on their own and stand the test of time. >> Well Red Hat became popular from Linux which was a second tier citizen in an open source. Now it's tier one also open source is running things so I got to ask you a final question on the business model. How are you guys planning on making money? Is it from support in the open source projects specifically, more services on the coin side. Is it managing the coins? Do you have visibility yet into that model? >> Yes, so I would say yes to what you just said. So Fusechain will create shareholder value in a few different ways. One, obviously being one of the first supporters to the digital bit project. We obviously want to see that project wildly successful, coin appreciation and the asset appreciation that potential could occur there will create shareholder value for Fusechain. In addition to that, Fusechain is building applications that will be SAS like in model. We'll be able to derive a reoccurring revenue. (indistinct talking) models but we'll derive reoccurring revenues. >> For the ecosystem of saving the digital bits actually it evolves. >> Right, merchants, you can go build softwares yourself or here's a subscription based platform that you can use and we'll provide support as well. >> Having fun? >> I'm having a blast. It's the 90s all over again. >> It the twinkle of the eye. I got to say, it's super intoxicating. I'll take hit of that blockchain in next segment with you. Appreciate it, it's really awesome. Blockchain and crypto, really amazing revolution. We're doing our part to unpack it, analyze it and also look at the good deals out there. This is SiliconANGLE theCube here in Palo Alto. I'm John Furrier. Special exclusive to you conversation with Fusechain coming out, talking about their project for the first time digital bits with Al Burgio, the founder and CEO. Thanks for watching. (uptempo orchestral music)